It had been so, so long since I had seen the Boing Boing jackhammerer-in-pigtails icon – this time on Instagram – that I really had to stop for a moment and sort of re-set. What was I seeing? Boing Boing, one of the OG link-list blogs of pre-social-media internet fell way off my radar so long ago, had never really gone anywhere. And here they were with a link to yet another interesting, engaging, and thought-provoking bit of online ether. On their own website even.
Here is John Oliver’s mesmersing rapid-fire takedown of the horrible UK Conservative government’s gut-wrenching mismanagement of one of the most well-known and influential countries in what we here in Canada call ‘the West’, Great Britain.
40% of the country’s local government spending is now gone thanks to these heartless fuckers, and 800,000 people in Britain have had to be treated for nutrition-related issues. Please do watch the clip in the link.
This is a cautionary tale for the rest of us here in Canada, especially in the province of Ontario as we see the Conservative Ford government underfund, sell off and tear down public-owned social institution after public-owned institution to his developer friends, while our health care system and social safety net goes down the toilet. Have you been to the ER in recent years? That’s Ford.
Federally, the Canadian Conservative party is leading in the polls, and I’m sure their own developer friends and morally corrupt bedfellows can’t wait to get a piece of that sweet, sweet, fire-sale, public-owned pie, and drive the rest of us even further into income disparity and flat-salaried, nutjob-fuelled poverty. Thanks, convoy. Thanks, meme factories. Thanks, billionaire social media. Thanks echo-chamber “it’s not us, it’s just math!” ‘algorithms’. Thanks Google and Meta for refusing to provide access to our own news outlets, while lying to each of us, one at a time, that it is the government who is preventing that access.
Sorry, I digress! Don’t mind me! Watch John Oliver.

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