Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Across the continent, including our neighbors to the North, demoralization hasn’t come from a specific war or its aftermath, but from an endless cost-of-living crisis, a widespread drug abuse and mental health epidemic, the collapse of institutional trust, and a society fractured by corrupt politics, technology, and isolation. Culturally, many have given up hope that life will ever get better. The middle class is eroding quickly, and younger generations know they will struggle to afford what their parents took for granted. Worst of all, a majority no longer believes in a divine power and therefore no longer recognizes the spark of divinity within their fellow citizen.

It doesn’t take a global war for a country to lose hope. Debt, despair, disconnection and and a culture that has given up on anything beyond material comfort, hedonistic pleasure, and psychological ease all work just as well.

Such hopelessness allows a familiar idea to creep back into the public consciousness: If life becomes unbearable, isn’t death a form of dignity? Is it not merciful to help someone end their suffering?

In Canada, the legalization of euthanasia — Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), as proponents prefer to frame it — began as a way to provide a dignified end for the terminally ill. It has since expanded to include the chronically ill, the disabled, and the mentally ill. Proposals are already on the table to extend MAiD to “mature” minors and to allow individuals to file advance requests for euthanasia before any diagnosable physical or mental disease even exists. There’s even debate in Quebec about legalizing MAiD for babies with “severe deformities.”

Some see this as a slippery slope. Others believe each step is justified. Advocates frame every expansion as empathy, but empathy has a way of morphing into efficiency when the state becomes overwhelmed and citizens become too tired to recognize the moral quagmire facing them. How did we get here?

In a word, incrementalism.

As the word suggests, incrementalism is the act of small steps towards a broader goal. One where you push just so far, step back and wait for normalization, then push further.

When a society believes the system cannot or will not take care of them, and that life itself is becoming economically impossible, something like Canada’s MAiD functions like a pressure valve for a failing state. And when people lose touch with the idea that life is sacrosanct and God-given, it becomes easier to accept the notion that we can end it at any time. Without the divine, euthanasia becomes a rational and efficient way to deal with a resource that has outlived its utility.

A clarification: Nazi Germany’s euthanasia program was involuntary and explicitly rooted in eugenic theory. Canada’s MAiD, or even Holland’s euthanasia program, is not. At least not yet.

But these societies all normalized state-provided death systemically… step-by-step. None of these populations woke up one morning and chose death as social policy. They slid toward it. Ultimately, that is the cautionary tale.

Collectively, we tell ourselves we will never repeat history’s darkest chapters. But it’s easier to recognize the return of monsters in swastikas and jackboots than it is to see the danger of policy proposals and academic papers that mistake killing for kindness. That is not progress — it’s a rebrand. Worse, it’s not just killing people, but the very essence that made us different from the monsters of history.

tim wrote: Thu Dec 11, 2025 10:43 am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/202 ... er-taiwan/

China would destroy US military in fight over Taiwan, top secret document warns

Beijing’s hypersonic missiles ‘could sink US aircraft carriers within minutes’

China would defeat the US military in a war over Taiwan, according to a top-secret US government assessment.

US reliance on costly, sophisticated weapons leaves it exposed to China’s ability to mass-produce cheaper systems in overwhelming numbers, the highly classified “Overmatch Brief” warns.

A national security official under Joe Biden who reviewed the document is said to have turned pale on realising Beijing had “redundancy after redundancy” for “every trick we had up our sleeve”, The New York Times reported.

Losing Taiwan, the US’s key bulwark against Chinese power in the western Pacific, would deliver a severe strategic and symbolic blow to Washington.

The country’s most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford – recently sent to the Caribbean for Donald Trump’s crackdown on drug traffickers – is often destroyed in the wargames outlined in the brief.