Well, that's silly, all Signal chats are secret; it's not like group chats are public.
"The group's chat description identifies itself as a 'clandestine' group and new members are warned to 'remember the first rule of Fight Club.'"
... Well, then.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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It is no secret that PP was buddy buddy with the FrEeDuMb rally, so why should this be a surprise?
Must be hard simply being a fiscal conservative in the Conservative party right now seeing the social conservatives botching all the good publicity the party could possibly have had left.
There is no such thing as a "Fiscal Conservative". They all hold the same values, the smart ones just know not to say it out loud.
While there may be a nicer way to say it, I'm bothered by the downvotes you're getting. Fiscal conservatism is the motivated reasoning that bridges or abstracts values and logical steps people often cannot even consciously admit to themselves.
It's like how moralizing homelessness and feelings of disgust toward them protect oneself from the fear of becoming homeless, by manufacturing a distinction.
Nobody doesn't believe in spending money wisely and sustainably.
I've called myself a fiscal conservative, and I have a lengthy comment in my history about it. I'm not finding a link.
Most of the proposals by people who call themselves fiscal conservatives don't want to spend money now, and don't want to think of spending money later. This doesn't solve the current issues and does nothing to prevent those issues from recurring in the future. They also seem to think that policing and incarceration are free, and that poor people have no interest in eating or shelter, which means they obviously won't break the law to achieve those goals. They also ignore that a good education for everyone, not just their kids, is one of the best predictors for a financially successful future (and that financially successful people are less of a financial burden to society), and that hungry kids don't learn as well. In spite of that, they don't want to pay for public education. They also don't want to pay for school lunch programs in spite of all the studies showing that wherever they are implemented they provide a net economic benefit of at least 6 to 1.
The only conclusion I can come to is that most people who call themselves fiscal conservatives don't want to spend money, not even wisely, and fail to recognize that the costs will still be there - you just get to choose whether you want to spend it on education and social services or policing and prisons.
Wish I could upvote this multiple times. It is consistently a pay now or pay later equation. Often spending money to avoid a problem costs you less than paying for the fallout later.
The bedrock of their economic calculus is a disbelief that they could ever possibly net profit by spending on other people. As I said in the last paragraph of this comment, it is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.
You're weighing the cost of fixing a problem now vs later, and they're clinging to the idea that because they're not the victims of that problem (currently nor in their own optimistic projections), it would be best to simply never solve it at all. But talking about cost to (an intentionally vague) us is generally more acceptable (and compelling) to a liberal society than its counterpart -- dehumanizing whomever currently pays it.
I never thought of it that way before. Yeah, it's not like democrats believe money should be pissed away, but conservatives will tell you that spending money on things like human rights is "pissing it away". Gross.
I classify myself as Fiscally Conservative.
However, I follow that up very quickly with the fact that investing in health, education, science, and affordable housing is net profit and any true fiscal conservative would want to direct as much of our money as needed into these programs, because penny for penny the returns on such investments are huge
A homeless person ending up in a hospital bed or dying costs us substantially more money than housing them, and once they get treated, fed, upskilled, and a roof over their head they very often proceed to turn into another taxpaying citizen which in turn converts red numbers into green numbers.
Anyone who just looks at the numbers can clearly see its basically just free money for taxpayers, you'd have to either be a complete idiot to not invest in it... or purposefully hateful and want people to suffer
I assume most "conservative" people are the latter, they genuinely cant wrap their head around the fact that making marginalized groups suffer costs taxpayers a lot of money
Police cost money, city cleanup costs money, hospitals and doctors cost money, handling corpses costs money, and of course you lose all the opportunity cost of -1 fellow taxpayer.
"Conservatives" tend to just not grok the fact that a large chunk of homeless people could easily be more taxpayers, but they just would rather demonize them and spend more money hurting them, thinking somehow that will magically make the issue go away, and ignore the fact it makes it worse, its so dumb.
Same goes for things like allowing abortion, at its core abortion rights inherently save such enormous magnitudes of money long term, and net profit. Forcing mothers to conceive doesnt fuckin help anyone and instead just costs us huge amounts of money, all just to inflict suffering on others. It's hateful and petty and extremely wasteful.
Same goes for trans rights, the most cost effective and safest way to treat trans folks is just provide them with medical intervention to align their body with their gender. It's by far the most cost effective solution, but for some fuckin reason "conservatives" would rather people suffer than save money
"Conservatives" straight up would rather spend billions of dollars hurting people than actually save money. Very stupid, and I hate how when I talk about actually being truly fiscally conservative, I get associated with such idiots.
A homeless person ending up in a hospital bed or dying costs us substantially more money than housing them
Same goes for things like allowing abortion, at its core abortion rights inherently save such enormous magnitudes of money long term,
Same goes for trans rights, the most cost effective and safest way to treat trans folks is just provide them with medical intervention to align their body with their gender.
To me Conservatism is literally lack of empathy. These are all arguments to convince someone without empathy to accidentally do the right thing.
Do you need a fiscal reason to support e.g. trans rights or housing as a human right? If not, then why even consider yourself a fiscal conservative?
In my experience, people with empathy who identify as 'Fiscally Conservative' just want the government to be efficient. That's great. Everyone wants the government to be efficient. Leftists want the government to be efficient too.
Edit: a sibling comment said it well I think:
Nobody doesn’t believe in spending money wisely and sustainably.
If you're truly conservative then you'd also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.
These are all arguments to convince someone without empathy to accidentally do the right thing.
Well thats the thing, fiscal conservatism is effectively the trolley problem zoomed out to the size of an entire country.
At its core, we dont have infinite money and it is a zero sum game.
Fiscal Conservativism should be the process of balancing out to figure out "we only have finite money, how do we maximize our yield spending it to save as many people as possible"
So, yes, you have to discard emotion and indeed accept that you just cant save everyone. There's starving kids in africa and etc etc, you don't have infinite money and cant save em all.
So you gotta assess which investments give you the best bang for your buck, and theres tonnes of really really good ones that for very little money produce extremely good yields on people saved per dollar.
If you’re truly conservative then you’d also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.
Only a short sighted conservative believes that. Once you zoom out you have to accept the market simply cannot be unregulated, it always naturally becomes regulated.
The question is, who gets to regulate it. Do you want to place protections now to prevent bad actors from gaining control, or plug your ears and pretend it'll never happen.
Captured markets are largely inevitable, all you can do is put protections in place to slow it down for as many decades as possible.
That's still just fiscal responsibility (which also gets used as a code phrase, but that's hard to escape entirely). Given that "fiscal conservative" is an established term widely understood to represent a certain specific set of beliefs and principles, I don't know why you'd want to identify with that term based on something else that only matches the general, apolitical meaning of the label and in an incredibly generic manner that offers no real distinction from anything else.
It kind of plays right into the the doublespeak that right-leaning movements love so much -- and this is exactly why they do. It's to trick people into believing they are aligned and and then represent that alignment to others. You make them look good.
Before going too far down a moralizing path, I think it's also worth pointing out that empathy is an individually developed skill, but one whose value is ultimately based on higher order reasoning and rooted in amoral pragmatism/evolutionary biology. It is not actually an ability to distinguish good from bad.
Empathy and selfishness could be considered contrasting drives, and the former is more valuable than the latter only in so far as it involves broader understanding and perspective. Both are ultimately emotional biases. Just like selfish people are liable to justify exploiting others, empathetic people are liable to justify unfair or even destructive levels of self-sacrifice.
So there's no moral distinction between being "tricked" into accidentally doing the ~~right~~ social thing and having empathy that helps find the same answer independently. Empathy can as easily be tricked into causing great harm through short-sightedness or failure to recognize the true cost of alleviating whatever pain is currently perceived.
For example: is adopting a large volume of war refugees the good action if it leads to public backlash that ultimately brings fascism to power and then starts a bigger war? It looks like that's a consequence we're only going to avert narrowly and by a considerable amount of luck. So far I'm still glad we did -- but boy are we cutting it close. (And to be clear I realize that for the sake of my point I'm simplifying away other factors that could have reduced the political cost and had more to do with selfishness than empathy.)
If you're truly conservative then you'd also support a deregulated free market that allows extreme wealth disparity.
That sounds more like mercantilism to me.
In my experience, people with empathy who identify as ‘Fiscally Conservative’ just want the government to be efficient.
Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life past the point of getting good returns on it, when the point is no longer saving money, but improving life just for the sake of improving life.
Fiscal Conservative should be "spend money only when it saves money"
It's just that a lot of so called "conservative" people cannot wrap their head around the super crazy concept of an investment where, as wild as it sounds, spending money to improve quality of life genuinely yields paybacks down the line at a really good rate
The problem is a huge amount of current folks have been heavily indoctrinated into the us vs them mentality that being Conservative and Liberal are mutually exclusive.
The reality is... its not, you can simultaneously want the government to invest money wisely while also being pro human choice, and the cool part is the science and numbers even indicate these two are the same thing.
The whole "us vs them" mentality is the entire reason so many conservative folks think you have to be anti-liberal, because they inherently as well think its mutually exclusive, so they fundamentally cannot understand how spending money saves money
Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.
Actual left, true left, is when you start spending money at the cost of efficiency to further improve quality of life…
On that point, you're falling for right-wing propaganda. The extreme ends of any spectrum have some pretty asinine views held by profoundly stupid radicalized people; absolute collectivism gets just as ugly and destructive as absolute individualism. Neither represents "true" anything. Heck, even centrism has no pure form, because there is no middle, no single point that marks the right balance for all contexts.
I do agree that we have a big problem with false dichotomies and pseudo-absolutism being used to divide us. The real "them" puts great effort into minimizing and misrepresenting the values and interests that are actually widely shared. And even they would be one of us if better raised or rehabilitated away from the wealth that has captured and corrupted them into such extreme individualism.
Breaking down that assumption is step 1 to fixing things, you have to abandon the concept to fully realize that truly being actually fiscally conservative is synonymous with being pro human rights, pro abortion, pro lgbtq, pro immigration, pro science, pro education, pro healthcare.
In general sure. But you make it sound like there are never hard choices nor compromises to be made. Sometimes we genuinely cannot afford to do right by someone or something. When it comes to new problems, the frontiers of medicine and science, etc. we very often don't know what is economically efficient or even viable. But I think that's a little off topic. I don't think anyone is honestly confused by sometimes needing to spend money to save money.
Individualists love the idea of spending money to either save or make money, which is why they like starting businesses, investing, building passive income, building self-sustaining non-financial supports (a personal favorite), and any grift ready to unburden them of the means to exercise that greed to which it appeals. They just can't be up front about what it is they really don't understand: spending money on other people (without a direct personal connection). It is their concept of society itself that is limited/constrained in scope, and that has nothing to do with money.
any true fiscal conservative would want to direct as much of our money as needed into these programs
You simply aren't a fiscal conservative. All your points are directly against fiscal conservatism.
From the wiki, which sums it up nicely:
In American political theory, fiscal conservatism or economic conservatism is a political and economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility with an ideological basis in capitalism, individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire economics. Fiscal conservatives advocate tax cuts, reduced government spending, free markets, deregulation, privatization, free trade, and minimal government debt. Fiscal conservatism follows the same philosophical outlook as classical liberalism. This concept is derived from economic liberalism.
fiscal responsibility
Thats the important part
Who would you say is more fiscally conservative, a person who wisely invests their money in the future, or a person who wastes it all on bricks to throw at their neighbours windows.
The latter is what current "Conservative" parties are.
Fiscal Conservativism is about wisely investing your money and avoiding wasting it on stupid shit.
Conservative parties rely on "lalala I cant hear you" tactics. Theyre the sort of person who gets a small weird lump and ignores it and then 15 years later die to cancer they could've gotten treated a decade ago.
Thats not fiscally conservative, thats just being fucking stupid. Sometimes you do need to spend money on basic human needs because it net benefits everyone, even on pure paper number balancing.
Im conservative in the "hey we can save a lot of money if we do x/y/z" sort of way, like a person who clips out a bunch of coupons and ends up getting 90% off on their groceries.
Thats also being conservative, you are conserving your resources wisely by allocating them in ways that pay back well.
And turns out... those ways coincidentally are pro human rights.
No, it's not the important part. Everyone believes in financial responsibility. Literally every coherent ideology. The only people who don't are those who are outright stealing from the public purse, kleptocrats and the like. The important part is how financial conservatives go about their ideas of financial responsibility.
Nope.
A Conservative is a Conservative, and voting for a bigot makes one a bigot. If you actually believed a word of that salad you would vote Liberal, and if you had any sense you would give the NDP or Greens a vote instead.
you would vote Liberal
I do, because despite its name our liberal party is conservative lol
The NDP are Liberal, the Liberals are Conservative, and the Conservatives are fucking batshit insane fascists.
And that for me friends is a wrap. You have summed it up beautifully. For me. High five.
You identify with the term fiscal conservative, but in practice, everything you advocate is straight up liberal. It proves the point that the term is meaningless. Everyone wants to spend efficiently, it’s just the priorities that distinguish conservative from liberal.
I hold that liberal goes beyond that, starting to spend extra money and tax extra when the returns are no longer as good and instead it's less about literally saving money and more about quality of life
Fiscal conservative is "once the returns aren't as good, stop there"
Whereas liberal goes "nah even if the returns start to suck, it's better to further tax to even further help people purely for ethical reasons"
Liberal mindset is ethics > money
Fiscal conservative is money > ethics
Current "conservative" policy though is power > inflicting suffering > money > ethics
Which I respect and I'd love to get us towards, but tbh we gotta convince people to get past step 1 first of realizing spending money to actively hurt people, surprisingly, isn't a good fiscal policy (which somehow genuinely confuses so many people, it's crazy)
We are still at the stage where too many people think that spending money inflicting active harm is genuinely a good idea and a good use of taxpayer dollars
They think paying cops to go around kicking indigenous teens in the head is truly a solid Fiscal policy. Truly.
They think paying money to fund bombs being dropped on children is good Fiscal policy.
They think paying money to poison our water, destroy our ecosystems, and pollute the oceans is good Fiscal Policy
Getting past that part is step one
Literally just convincing these people to stop stabbing themselves is step 1.
Maybe later we can talk about convincing them to help others after we get them to stop hurting others...
No one is more passionate about fiscal conservatism than greedy fuckers are passionate about greed. And they are outnumbered 100-to-1. Fiscal conservatism is functionally fictional.
It must be even harder pretending the CPC was ever about fiscal anything. The Overton window moves and dictates how much quiet part gets said out loud, but human nature does not change.
We're all going to have to grapple with the fact that in very unfortunate ways we are America-lite. A red wave might push social conservatism back in the closet, but we must not forget that a full 30% of us still went mask off after watching where those values lead -- twice. That's a problem that's going to require active collective leadership across Canada for the foreseeable future.
This is one reason we need to get rid of FPTP. It makes it harder for the extremes to gain a foothold. It would also lead to enough "teams" having a say that working together would be necessary to get anything done, which would be a novel state in North America.
This just keeps getting better and better. Keep an eye out for attack ads against Carney, because it's likely they'll be projecting whatever other crimes and big no-nos they've been doing themselves.
I heard there was one about him being an advisor to Trudeau, so why would you trust him to make anything different happen?
Well, he was also in charge of the Bank of Canada for most of the time that Stephen Harper was the PM, and I have a suspicion the governor of the Bank of Canada did some advising to the PM during those years, so you'd think they would be okay with him, right?
he was also in charge of the Bank of Canada for most of the time that Stephen Harper was the PM
Harper also invited Carney to become minister of finance (which Carney declined).
The conservatives don't have a lot of honest ways to attack Carney
As an American, nip this shit quick you don't want to be the next country to suffer from conservative brain rot.
Fuck that shit eater Polievre.
This candidate will be the one in the Cabinet, if Poilievre becomes PM, who would accidentally text sensitive info to CBC's Ian Hanomansing accidentally.
Right wing media and far-right influencers should be hunted down like rabid feral pigs and dealt with. Find one near you!
Good thing none of them have security clearances so they can't leak names, addresses and locations of intelligence assets to their Facebook wall.
For I moment I thought PP was involved in the group and I had a heart palpitation. I'll take a con candidate too!