ranting

6: The political spectrum

11 Mar 2026

The left-right political spectrum is full of problems. It can represent economic policy, social policy, foreign policy, immigration policy, or really whatever you want. The two-dimensional political compass doesn't do all that much to fix that problem. But that's a question for another time. I want to talk about the economic spectrum, particularly where the center is. What is centrist policy? Give me an example of a centrist politician.

Macron, president of France? Okay, well let's look at his economic policy. He raised the retirement age, proposed cutting corporate taxes, and is on his seventh right-wing prime minister. He's a capitalist through and through, maybe a liberal capitalist, but a capitalist, and economically he has a lot more in common with the right than the left.

It seems to me that centrists are much closer to the center-right than the center-left. Rob Jetten, the new center-left liberal prime minister of the Netherlands, chose to endorse the right-liberal Cotrim de Figueiredo over the center-left social-democratic Seguro in the Portuguese presidential election this year. So there's quite a rift between the center and the center-left.

I think this rift is where the political "center" should be set. Socialism to the left and capitalism to the right. The reason so few political parties are self-described as "center to center-left" is that mixing capitalism with socialism is awkward. Yes, Jetten's D66 carries this label on Wikipedia, but as of now, it's fundamentally a capitalist party with very socially liberal tendencies. Economic policy is the most important part of political positioning -- once a capitalist, always a capitalist. And Jetten is a capitalist.

This positioning of the political center can explain some of what we've seen in world politics. The Democratic Party in the US is an unstable coalition between right-socialists, left-capitalists, and some right-capitalists that don't want to eradicate gay people, which is why they've been so unstable and unable to get anything done at the national level. They're 3 parties in one. The Canadian Liberals are positioned similarly, but have mostly coalesced around Carney's center-left-capitalism. The NDP absorbs the relatively weak socialist electorate in Canada, while the Conservatives on the right are struggling to hold onto their more moderate members.

This also clarifies the truth that the whole world is really right-wing. Two-party systems around the world have historically included hardline capitalists and liberals that have occasionally incorporated elements of socialism into their programs, and this establishment just freaks out any time a real left-wing leader is elected. Allende, Chávez, Mamdani, and so on. Socialism can be popular. The system just suppresses it, and people don't like the (very true) idea that your government can use your money better than you can. #rantover

5: I don't like gifts; why you shouldn't either

25 Dec 2025

I don't really like gifts. I don't like getting them because they're almost never quite what I want, and more often than not they end up sitting on a shelf untouched, or the digital equivalent. And I don't like giving them for the same reason.

Now, I hear you say, gift-giving isn't just about the value of the thing, it's about the thought that you put into the gift. It's a statement of friendship, or love, or respect. It's about the shared happiness between the giver and the receiver. And you're right, on paper. But I find that nobody is consistently very good at giving gifts, and collectively, we've gotten around this by getting really good at pretending that we enjoy what people get us.

Well, you ask, what should gift-giving look like? And what about the Christmas spirit? If there are no gifts, where does the jolly, festive energy come from? Okay, okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves, one at a time please. I don't want to abolish all gifts, but they need to be much more special than they are now. Only when an idea has the time and place to form in your mind can a good gift be produced -- one that comes from spending time with someone, understanding them, and figuring out what would make them a little more whole. That's what should come out of a good gift. I fear that creating designated gift-giving days makes this impossible, because the gift-finding process is unpredictable, and it happens at a different rate for everyone.

We have created a culture that schedules something which should only be spontaneous, that commercializes something which should only be personal, and that places stress on something which should never be stressful.

So what, indeed, about the Christmas sprit? You might not agree with me on this one, but for me, it was never really about the gifts. It's about the tree, the snow, the music, and the happy feeling of being off from school and spending quality time with loved ones. In a sense, that's the real gift. That's the kind of gift I like to give. And I think that without the pressure of buying or making a bunch of shit by a given deadline, the holidays can be even more jolly. #rantover

4: On Not Just Bikes, and what makes a city great

24 Sep 2025

Adapted from a Discord rant on the same subject.

It's been about a month since I moved to Montréal now, and in my daily doomscrolling a few days ago I found Not Just Bikes's video on the city. I'd already had mixed feelings about Jason, but I thought maybe he'd prove himself to be a bit more open-minded. The thumbnail, after all, shows a beautiful picture of Rue Sainte-Catherine with "seriously impressive" in his classic orange caption.

I had known Jason to be a well-meaning guy who left Canada for the Netherlands, and since then had developed some resentment for North American urban planning, which is, I had supposed, reasonable. I expected him to trash on Montréal's suburbs and the Décarie freeway and the boulevards downtown, while giving an overall nuanced and hopeful view on how quickly the city was improving, because in my view, that's what Montréal is: a diverse and unique city still recovering from the car-centric policy of the 1960s. I really like it here, with reservations.

But unfortunately after about a third of the video had passed, I started to realize how much I had overestimated Jason. He spends the remaining 35 minutes, out of 51, essentially trashing on Montréal, which I will be referring to as Montreal from now on because typing accents is hard and a lot of work. It's honestly awful to watch if you don't already have a preconceived hatred of the city. I'll go through a few of his complaints now.

He yaps for several minutes about how the Plateau-Mont-Royal, a neighborhood "everyone told him to go to," is inconsistent in its urbanist qualities. He gives the example of Sherbrooke metro station, a few minutes from various pedestrianized and redesigned streets he praises. He fails to note, however, that you won't find any other intersections in the Plateau that look like this.

He says he can't properly appreciate the old city, his favorite part of town, because you have to cross a highway to get there. But he fails to note that said highway is covered from Guy to Saint-André, essentially all of downtown, with a brief (4-block) open-cut interruption around Saint-Laurent. He claims that Montreal has the worst downtown in all of Canada, which is insane, but it kind of makes sense when you watch the footage in the background -- it's mostly cherry-picked from large intersections on boulevards like René-Lévesque, which admittedly do deserve the hate. He complains about the land use around Namur station, which is also garbage, but he fails to note that Montreal is a historically industrial city and that Namur is at the edge of a region that's been warehouses and parking lots for decades. He frames it all as a policy failure, when in reality, it has been nobody's intention ever to live there.

Probably the worst part about this video is Jason's repeated claim that most urbanist content is "wrong" about Montreal because they don't have a "holistic" view of the city. My guy, you can't say you have a holistic view of my hometown because you found the one shitty intersection in the Plateau. I'd consider taking him seriously if he mentioned culture or history once, but he doesn't. I'll say that again. He doesn't mention culture a single fucking time, probably because Dutch culture is colonialism and sprinkles on bread. If Jason started talking about culture in his videos he'd have to admit that every city is different and special in certain ways that can't necessarily be ranked above others, which goes against the thesis of his channel, "European cities are unilaterally better than North American cities."

All of this to say, Jason from Not Just Bikes knows a lot about urban planning, but he's a bad guy. I don't blame him for moving to Europe in search of a more pleasant place to live in, but I don't trust him to judge cities as a whole, because it's clear he doesn't value the right things. His videos put street design over actual people, history, and perhaps most importantly, progress. He's taught himself to hate North America so passionately that all he can do is make well-produced videos about how much he hates North America and how hating North America is the only correct opinion. Once you notice it you can't unnotice it. Every mention of North America on his channel is filled with an off-putting rage that screams "I bet he has a really good relationship with his parents."

A little bonus detail to make you mad: if you sort comments on the video by newest first, the most recent one is from over a year ago, as of today. On a video with 1.9 million views, that has to be suspicious. I suspect he's restricting comments to review only. Is he both irrationally hateful towards his home country and insecure about it? Gee, who could have guessed? #rantover

3: I don't think I'll like progressives in 50 years very much

12 Aug 2025

The emergence of "clanker" and "wireback" and other robot slurs is honestly pretty funny, but it makes you think. How different is this from any other slur, really? It's mostly the left calling out AI as a threat to humanity now, but given the ideals of progressivism, will that remain the case? Will the wokes of the 2070s argue for, say, rather than civil rights or gay rights, robot rights? It might be the logical continuation. I like being a progressive, but my kind can be pretty stupid sometimes, as can everyone, and I hate to admit that I could see "us" allowing bots into our lives, shutting my generation out, and going off to live with our AI romantic partners.

Maybe this viewpoint is kind of selfish. What I'm essentially saying is, "MY generation of progressives is correct and all others are wrong!" And that's questionable, like, I'm taking credit for being part of a progressive movement that's trying to bring us to a world that accepts all races and sexualities, and then I'm abandoning the values behind those goals when the question becomes about robots. Where do the morals stand here? Do I have to be consistent to be moral or can I claim that the morals agree with me? Does that make any sense? Fuck, this is confusing.

I actually don't think progressivism and conservatism are very different. Everyone has a tolerance for change that runs out at some point in their life, and the two are just points on the spectrum. Apparently my change juice is already running out at age 17. What the fuck does that mean? I just hope I'm not the problem.

It's often thrown around these days that "people have no principles anymore", but hasn't that been the case for a while? Picking sides on social issues has always been about following one person's idea over another. Most progressives have nothing to hold onto, besides their remaining change juice, as culture gets shaken up. This is why I'm worried about the clankers and the future of progressivism. I can clearly see a future generation of wokes protesting anti-robot sentiment just as the wokes of the 1960s did with anti-gay sentiment. But that's not to say conservatives are any better. By default, no one has any principles. #rantover

2: Growing up is just figuring out who you want to be like

6 Aug 2025

I've talked to a good few adults in the past few months. And a lot of them really seem like they have a handle on life. But I can assure you they don't, because I don't, and I see way fucking more of myself in most adults than I want to. Growing up is a lot more disappointing than you expect. Time passes and you'll turn 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 28, 40, 60, and you'll never get older if you don't let yourself change. So how do people change? I think, for everyone except a few extremely capable and inventive people, it's just by copying others, which is kind of sad and also very beautiful at the same time. Our world is a tower of minds with no floor in sight. #rantsomewhatover

1: The Japanese language is a disaster

5 Aug 2025

Okay, first of all, Japanese is the only language I know of that has three, arguably four, alphabets. What the fuck? I get having a native alphabet and then a foreign one that came in because of an invasion or just to ease translation, but really, Japanese? Four? Two of them are just different flavors of each other and you have to learn twice as many letters. "Oh, but the loanwords," Korean has loanwords (too many) and they can work with one fucking alphabet. It's actually even better in Korean because the loanwords tend to use the aspirated consonants and the "eu" vowel more often so you can spot them quickly. "Oh, but katakana is for emphasis," how fucking extra do you have to be. Italics and exclamation marks exist for a reason. And it gets worse. A few hiragana look like their respective katakana, but some look totally different, some look like a different hiragana, some katakana look like kanji, like ni, ro, and ka. Sure it might not cause problems in everyday reading and writing, but it's infuriating. They had all the shapes in the world and ended up inconsistently copying themselves.

Let's look a little more closely at those alphabets, maybe there's something to them? Hell no, it's almost half as confusing as English. It's all fun and games until you want to make a long vowel, which is different in hiragana and katakana, and even in hiragana it's different depending on the vowel, and it uses two kana for one syllable which is really sneaky. Or until you want to write "nyo", which is clearly one syllable but you have to write "ni" and then a fucking mini kana for "yo". You can't make this shit up. And it's so much worse in katakana. Try writing "JR" in actual Japanese. It takes 6 characters and the first one is "si" with a cute little diacritic. Now listen here and say "JR" very slowly -- okay, I'll help you, "jei-a-ru", and tell me where the fuck you see "si". Mind you, this is the national railway company of Japan and it takes the brain power of a fully loaded aircraft carrier just to spell it out in Japan's own alphabet. And people complain about French??? Not to mention katakana is really fucking ugly. "New York" in katakana is a horrible mess of horizontal lines that are slightly out of alignment with each other, it looks like someone actually tried to make a stick figure out of sticks, but sideways. (It actually does! Check it out on Google Translate!)

And if you can get past kana, try kanji. I can excuse Chinese using Chinese characters; after all, they invented them, and it's their only non-Latin writing system. Neither of those are true for Japanese. If even China tried to get rid of them, which they did, when the fuck is Japan going to get around to that because it's really not good. Some kanji are one syllable which just feels like you've been cheated because you could have written the same sound in 18 fewer strokes. Some are two, some are three, and I'm pretty sure some are four. At least it's better than tones. And now that we're talking pronunciation we can finally come to the absolute worst part of the Japanese language, the shitshow that ensues when you try to pronounce any kanji ever. You probably did it wrong because there's an on'yomi and a kun'yomi for that bitch and it's a whole ordeal to figure out which one you're supposed to be using, and don't even get me started on names because too many goddamn genius parents decided to build a 20-piece alphabet-linking puzzle that you have to solve to pronounce their poor little son's name. America should have made this shit illegal after the war. They have a fucking syllabary (a garbage one, but a syllabary nonetheless) and yet they refuse to dump their weird-ass 2 million year old clingy girlfriend. Just get rid of kanji and spell your shit normally like Korean. #rantover