Flowersignup
No bio...
User ID: 3556
Flowersignup
4mo ago
Of course former precedent does matter but changes matter too.
Think of it like this, let's say a parent has a 10 year old who suddenly starts muttering to themselves about killing you in your sleep. And they keep doing it over and over, and they sometimes brandish a knife and say they're gonna stab you. And they started stabbing animals outside.
You could go "Haha well, they've never killed me before when they were younger so it won't happen now" and sleep soundly, or you could go "Huh they've never threatened me before, I should probably get them checked out and get medical help".
I assume you would choose the second one. I assume you understand why a change in their rhetoric and behavior is meaningful. The parent that chooses the first one gets stabbed at night and is "surprised" despite being told that it would happen.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1. Whether that is because he himself has changed, a difference in advisors/staff, or a change in the Republican party around him I do not know.
But what we do know is that things have changed quite a bit, and he is now calling for Canada to be made into a state. A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
I'm not aware of any time during the first administration that Trump talked about taking over Canada or Greenland, especially not so consistently. So what makes it different is exactly that, he's now saying he wants to.
Now whether or not he can do it is a different question from whether or not he wants to do it. I think the chance of a Canada annexation is unlikely. But he has signaled consistently (along with his aides saying he is serious) so the motive seems real.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
"Oh the Urbanity" a Canadian YouTuber just put out a video titled "Donald Trump is 100% serious about annexing Canada" where I think he puts forward a really convincing argument for the title argument, and for why it needs to be taken seriously.
I won't force you to watch the video but here it is, I'll give you his 13 points for it and explain them.
1: "Repeated preoccupation"
This isn't just a "one off brain fart" like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, he's been consistent about it over and over again. From Trump himself "So when I say they should be a state, I mean that, I really mean that"
2: "Aides say he's serious."
Includes a tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff to take him at face value and sources to CNN reporting other aides say similar, take his claims seriously.
3: "Canada says he's serious"
Some of the politicians in Canada believe that Trump is very serious about this threat too.
4: "Questioned our border"
He's talked about believing the Canadian/US border to be illegitimate (Something he also points out is that Trump has not done the same with Mexico) and that this is the rhetoric used before trying to take over another country.
5: "Loves big real estate deals."
Trump is narcissistic and loves to put his names on things and claim big accomplishments. "Is there any bigger real estate deal than doubling the land mass of the USA?"
6: "Fits into his world view"
Urbanity believes Trump has a view of great powers dominating over their local spheres of influence
7: "Threatened other countries"
He's talked about this with other countries like Panama and Greenland, showing the expansionist mindset. Along with the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.
8: "Consider his influences"
People that Trump likes are Pat Buchanan (who has talked about taking Canada and Greenland before) and McKinley (Trump's favorite president) who annexed multiple territories.
9: "Admires Vladimir Putin"
Trump has shown a lot of respect to Putin before and often victim blames Ukraine for being invaded.
10: "Pretexts like Drug Cartels"
They're trying to claim that Canada has been taken over by drug cartels and they need to wage a war to take it back from harming the country. It sounds like the Bush administration talking about WMDs.
11: "Spins Canada as abuser"
They talk about things like Doug Ford putting a tax on electricity exports as an "act of war" by Canada, and treat retaliatory tariffs as unprovoked aggression.
12: "Information Bubble"
Trump lives in an information bubble where the main sources he listens to are the ones that feed from him like Fox News. His ideas about Canada wanting to be taken over from Fox News talking about "Maple MAGA" likely reinforce his desire even more.
13: "No Personal Morals"
Urbanity views Trump as a man who has scammed people before with various business projects, shitcoins and the like. There's little reason to expect he wouldn't disregard the sovereignty of other nations.
While he doesn't mention this, I personally think another major point to consider is that Trump is not consistent on what he wants from Canada. One day he says it's the trade deficit, next day he says its drugs, then the next day its immigrants, the next day he says nothing can be done at all and he just wants the state. It sounds like excuses just being made up based off how he feels that day.
Urbanity goes on to argue that even if the threat isn't likely, it is no reason to take it as less serious. The main thing being that Trump is enacting a trade war, which is still causing serious harm to the Canadian economy and their people.
Like if a mafiaso moved in next door and started joking about killing you. Even if the chance was low, it's understandable to take their words seriously. "Threats don't have to be higher than a 50% chance to take them seriously"
He draws a corollary to Ukraine where there was a lot of disbelief and doubt about Russia invading in 2022, until as we're all aware, it happened. "But they did it"
All in all I think this is very convincing that Trump really does want to annex Canada and that we as a society should be taking that possibility seriously. And as Urbanity also points out, even if it's unpopular now, Trump's followers and the Republican party have been shown to be rather flexible at following his lead against their prior beliefs. They might be against him in 2025, but what about 2026 or 2027 when they've had years of Fox News and Trump speeches repeating the stories of Canadian Cartels and "Acts of War"?
So for discussion, there's a few questions.
Do you think Trump has serious intentions to annex Canada? Is it right of him or wrong of him to do this? If he does ramp up rhetoric (or efforts) to annex or invade, would you wish for the Republicans to oppose him or continue to support him as duly elected president? And how likely is it that Trump will transform from his rhetoric to serious action (beyond the trade wars)?
Flowersignup
4mo ago
We've run this experiment and it didn't work.
Have we? I've not seen any experiment where they take a city without day shelters for their homeless and then put funding into day shelters and see what happens.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
Do you earnestly believe that everyone in a night shelter who goes to a library or mall during the day due to lack of a day shelter being available are so deeply unwell they need forced hospitalization?
It seems to me the first step should be "make a day shelter available" and then the second step for stragglers who are too unwell to use it is the mental institutions.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
That might be the intent, I don't know. But the result seems to be, as we can see in those threads, "oh shit where do I go? Oh the library or the mall".
It seems the lack of day shelters just turns other things into day shelters.
and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming.
I kinda have to disagree with this and for the fundamental reason that the US is still pretty much the leading economic and military power in the world, and even through Covid we made a stronger recovery than most other nations. Clearly whatever we are doing is working pretty well. I don't know exactly what or why but we seem blessed by something.
Shaking up the etch-and-sketch to start all over is something I would employ for a shitty economy like Argentina (as Milei has rightfully done), while preferring general status quo with surgical tools for the big dogs like America. It's possible that eliminating the DOE is part of the surgery, but the lackadaisical approach so far to cutting government (the firing and then rehiring of nuclear experts or bird flu scientists, etc) and making changes (like the backlash over labeling Jackie Robinson or that military officer DEI, something easily avoidable if they just had a pair of eyes go over the list first) doesn't leave me confident about any individual decision they make.
It doesn't even seem to be a shoot first and ask questions later policy, it seems to be a "shoot first and correct the things with immediate and visible consequences or backlash" policy.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
But then what do we do? We either have a place to go (day shelters, library, etc) or put them in jail. But the US already has really high incarceration rates to the point even the "soft on crime" states look pretty extreme compared to a lot of the rest of the world. Maybe some of this is explained by a difference in definitions (and I definitely think we should discount some of the countries like Russia and China since they might even be faking data) but it's hard to imagine there's much categorical flummery available within the question of "is a person locked up against their will by the government?", especially compared to western peers so I'm not sure how effective just keep locking up even more is going to work out for us.
At the very least it seems there's a deeper issue to be addressing in why the US seems to have way more visible homeless than Taiwan or Japan or New Zealand or the UK.
Total amount of money isn't very useful if it's being spent on things that aren't effective. It's a similar issue to what we see with drug rehab, all the money going to the Christian centers whose cure is "find God" or the reiki ones or the horseback riding ones or the chicken processing plant one not only doesn't help, it likely hurts compared to the more evidence backed solution of medication.
I imagine if a bunch of the money currently spent on "homelessness" just went to day shelters or (even better for a pretty large amount of homeless) just having temporary housing/apartments available, we'd have all the people in those instead of heading off to their local library.
Paradoxically, this happens in part because we don't spend enough on homeless shelters. People don't realize this but a lot of shelters are closed during the day and will literally kick out the people using them and tell them to come back that night.
This presents an obvious issue, if the shelters are where you're supposed to go when you're homeless but they're not open, where are the homeless using them supposed to go? Some places have daytime shelters but as illustrated by this thread often the answer is just "go to the library". Some others (across multiple threads, you can find quite a few discussing where to go when the shelters close) include heading out to the woods, the mall, a movie theater, setting up a tent, coffee shops, a university/community college, even a storage unit or go do their day job (something like 40% of homeless have a job and that number is rising).
Now maybe if we do get plentiful and reliable day shelters where homeless can go, there will still be some shitty stragglers at the libraries and parks and buses. There probably would be a few at least and we can figure out how to get them away then but until the option of daytime shelters is at least available we can't be expecting anything else. They have to exist somewhere and they're gonna choose a place that is open to the public, air condition and feels safe.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
Them is a pronoun used to refer to a prior named person and/or group. I know people are used to conspiracy "Them" usage as some vague Illuminati Jewish Conspiracy, but it's also just normal English.
The biggest issue is framing your conclusions as our conclusions. We need to investigate. We should discard him. No. This is a discussion, not a petition. Please don’t speak for everyone.
My thoughts on what people should do when seeing misinformation doesn't mean others have to follow it. I think we should call the police about a break-in but that doesn't mean a person has to if they got robbed.
I think I found some potential timestamp fraud in government we should be looking at.
No one is working 120 hours a week.
That leaves 7 hours a day (yes including weekends) for anything else that isn't working so they wouldn't be getting good enough sleep, they're not showering, they're not messaging their families, and all the fun Doomscrolling on social media Musk seems to have time for. And if they are spending lots of time not doing work while working (like other office jobs) then they should be revising down to reflect that they're counting their shower times and twitter scroll times. I don't get to claim I did 50 hours of work because every morning I get up, poop, brush my teeth and shower and commute taking up roughly an hour and the time I spend driving back and getting gas and other parts of life. (Edit: Also for musk specifically, what about all the other jobs he's supposed to be doing? Are we supposed to believe this man never sleeps?)
80 hours? Definitely possible.
100? Really pushing it.
120 for a sustained period? That's a lie. They're either lying or are doing other things while claiming they work which is also a lie. And either they're actually clocking in 120 (in which case that's a really strong sign of timestamp fraud) or he's lying about their hours worked to everyone else.
Why bring this up? Well Musk keeps lying, about a lot of things. They famously lied about the amount of money they cut forcing them to delete it.
He lied about social security by implying that all the people on numident were falsely receiving benefits
BBC verify did a debunking of the Gaza condom claims, he mislead people about FEMA spending being spent on migrant housing (they administered over funding from a separate program and none was using from normal FEMA funds), etc etc.
And in general the way I think about liars is these two points
1: We need to ask "why are they lying?". Why claim you're working 120 hours a day when it's obviously not true? Why mislead people on social security fraud or FEMA spending? Why lie?
It could be that they were trying to do something properly, could not find actual good evidence but wanted to save face. It could be that they have an ulterior motive. It could be that they're genuinely incompetent with what they are doing. But there is a reason and understanding that is important.
2: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. When a known liar keeps making misleading or false claims, it's on us to stop taking the things they say at face value. Fool us again, shame on us. Whenever Musk makes a claim about fraud or waste or hours spent working, we should discard him as a tainted source. It's not to say he can't be telling the truth about something, but this water spout is corrupted and we should draw from the clean river of truth somewhere else. He can bring the receipts if he wants to be believed.
Edit: To be clear here the possibility here is.
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He's just straight up lying in general
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They do work a whole lot but they're including things like showering and brushing teeth and other morning/night activities in their time which is not normal and highly misleading.
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They're seriously truthful and they're working off less than 7 hours of sleep every day of the week for months not doing basic human things like showering, brushing their teeth, cleaning up their trash, or taking breaks ever. Or maybe they fit that in by only doing 6 and a half hours of sleep perpetually instead. Either way they are superhumans but disgusting ones.
Most likely it's just the first
I'm highly sceptical that a slow, cautious, and careful approach would serve Musk's goals better. The road to success passes through many mistakes, so might as well get through them as fast as possible
And this is where the difference between a private business like SpaceX or Tesla and a democratic government comes in. A mistake in Tesla? "Oh well guys just wait for the cars a bit longer". A mistake in SpaceX? "Let's try another Starship"
A mistake in government? It can literally kill, it can have dangerous long term ramifications on both the lives of the citizens and the future of the country as a whole. And people will get pissed off way more. If you think customers can be angry about delays, wait till you see what happens if social security ever does get fucked with. Even with the relatively minimal and irrelevant cuts he's already been doing he's slowly racking up more enemies and pushback already, and not just from the Democrats, like even the Vatican was speaking up about some of it.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
The journalistic / expert class brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware. Elon doesn't have time to do the enormous amount of checking that is required in this environment to verify every claim. Perhaps he could hire someone, which would probably be a good idea, but doesn't seem like how he operates.
The "it's ok to do it because I think other people are doing it" argument is a rather weak one. I wouldn't accept "mom he hit me first" from my kids, and I don't think it any better for grown adults to be employing as an excuse for their own bad behavior.
You don't have to verify every claim, you can also just not make claims that you haven't put any effort into checking yet. You could discount claims that you see online as unproven until proven otherwise instead of believing everything you see.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
So one of the older members of the Tories, Graham Stuart, has publically declared "We have to consider the possibility that President Trump is a Russian asset.". While these accusations have certainly been made more before, I don't think I've seen it so straightforward from parties that are traditionally allies for the Republicans. Graham isn't the only Tory seeming to turn either, Robert Jenrick (who once said if he was American he would vote for Trump and went to his inauguration) and Nigel Farage are two other examples of traditional conservative allies in the UK who have been increasingly critical of Trump's stance on Russia, although not as far as Graham Stuart has gone.
Which got me thinking, let's set aside all these accusations themselves and look at what I think is a better question.
If I was a secretly Russia aligned president who had been elected while hiding those views, who knew that I could not just take blatantly pro-Russia stances but I could perhaps slowly nudge public opinion of my supporters to be more friendly towards them and less friendly to Ukraine while taking pro Russian action under cover, what kind of things would I be doing and saying?
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Main thing, I'd slowly start to split and incite America's international allies. A stable West is one of the main things that Russia is scared of the most. Destabilize NATO, NORAD, ANZUS, etc.
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I'd have some underlings talk about how Russia shares conservative values eventually taking this discussion to the big stage and mentioning one or two things we can get along with. Play up the similarities we have with Russian culture while attacking the culture of other western democracies.
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I'd continually frame it as a waste of money, claim Ukraine has been committing fraud and focus on total values instead of the main thing that has been given of outdated weapons and technology. Argue that it's just so much money that it's in the US's best interest to stop funding because they're using it on other things anyway.
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I'd hide it all under a veil of trying to end the war. I'd direct blame towards the Ukrainians saying they aren't willing to compromise and that they don't want to end the assault on them, say that they aren't trying hard enough to stop being from conquered and killed. Instead of asking who is killing the Ukrainians going off to fight (Russian forces), I'd instead center it on Ukrainian leaders being responsible for the deaths.
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I'd slowly ramp up the discourse more and more, trying to make each step seem natural and more of a reaction from the previous. Picking an early fight gives me cover for picking the next one which gives me cover for the next and so on.
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I'd start a trade war with allies using classic protectionist rhetoric (an easy cover to deploy) while ramping down sanctions and trade restrictions on the Russian markets. Slowly putting American business connections back into Russia and away from western allies.
None of these on their own is necessarily a sign of pro Russian beliefs or actions, the point after all is to make for plausible deniability. Anything I do will be under reasons (protectionist rhetoric, "preventing fraud with the aid", etc) that ostensibly aren't pro Russia, as I slowly ramped up public opinion to turn on the west and view them as enemies.
The ambiguity and slow ramping is the point, make the callouts start from the radicals to give the appearance that accusations are always baseless and train people to ignore them from historic allies and partners. Make anyone who says this seem crazy by acting unpredictability and everyonce in a while lurching back to Ukraine when the heat turns up, but never going back fully. Slowly cranking more and more to Russia.
So for discussion what sorts of things would you do if you were a secret Russian operative in the White House trying to stay disguised? How would you try to manipulate American opinions over time while not being too blatantly obvious about it that you don't have built in deniability?
And then the point of the exercise, how does that differ with what we're seeing now? Do these actions line up like Stuart says and we should be considering the possibility, or do they not match and it's just alarmism from the Tories?
This is a profoundly embarrassing action IMO regardless of whether or not he's secretly pro Russian (as many internet accusations are saying) or if he's just being reactionary about Zelenskyy.
And that's because US foreign policy decisions seemingly being driven not by wider strategic objectives or alliances but by the personal feelings and sentiments of a president upset about if you wear a suit or only say thank you X amount of times and not Y is a terrible way to go about any sort of long term planning. This of all things seemingly being the excuse to pull such a major trigger, an argument that happened in public is just saddening. He's been building it up to a while but what a lame reasoning to finally start turning.
Even if it's not the actual reason, such a strong appearance is just another point in the slowly growing "Don't trust the US to not change on an impulse" concern for business and international decisionmaking. Risk is one thing, instability is another and these types of actions like "Oh we're definitely doing tariffs for real guys nope never mind oh wait we are nope never mind" or "oh he didn't say thank you enough, ok pulling out of support" and other back and forth unpredictable actions do add up.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
I think the most disturbing type of argument around Ukraine is the one that pretends to be doing it "for their own good". Like "Why don't you want peace, why don't you want peace? Why do you want your people to die?" to the victims of a dictator invading their home, bombing their cities, kidnapping their children and stealing their land. If they aren't settling for your offer it's probably because they don't think your offer is good enough to actually protect them. They're in desperation, if an offer was convincing they would take it. So why not?
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They've been promised security before, they gave up their nukes for it. They sign a deal that Russia won't punch them in the face, Russia violates it twice and if they don't want to just sign another without a stronger third party guarantee, it's not because they don't want peace. It's because they know Russia can't be trusted.
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They don't think American investments means much, before the war there was that joke rule of "no two countries with a McDonald's have ever been at war" which was essentially emblematic of this concept. That international business interests for peace were simply too strong for a country to overcome, and yet the war happened anyway.
If someone doesn't want to support Ukraine fine, there's lots of other bad stuff we ignore and don't help out with. But those people spreading this idea that "they must want to be invaded and die so not helping them is actually the best help", I just find that really sickening.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
I'm gonna give the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't a native speaker because conversion in this context would never be used "changing a person's feelings about how open they can be" and more about "changing them from being straight to being gay" like we see in conversion therapy trying to do the opposite and "cure homosexuality" and make people straight.
Most people here in the US (and I assume most of the native English speakers) understand that because conversion therapy has been practiced by religious groups against homosexuality for years. Now the end result has been suppression (because they fail) but no one says "You're trying to convert X!" when they mean being more accepting.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
If your standard of evidence for something being widespread is "I saw it on Twitter" you do you I guess.
I assume by being on TheMotte you are aware of concepts like lizardman constant, the Chinese robber fallacy and nutpicking.
Yes out of 3.8 million teachers I'm sure some of them are nutjobs in completely insane and weird ways. The question isn't if you can't find a few instances of teachers doing something insane, but if it's common enough to be worth worrying about.
Even if just .001% of teachers do something, you still get 38 who try it. Which is say don't use a single newsworthy instance to try to argue something happens often.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
i don't see why you get to singlehandedly set parameters for what counts as evidence.
There is a difference between trying to accept people for what they are and trying to convert them. For your religious example, allowing prayer vs forcing prayer.
The standards of evidence for a school trying to religiously convert children does not include "We don't stop teachers and kids from praying before class on their own"
Really? Is that what happened with abortion?
Yes that massively shifted the abortion conversation both when it happened and for a very long after. You can even see the remnants of how the ruling pushed it into a states rights where Trump won on a platform promising no nationwide bans.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
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"Hatching eggs" is a trans thing, not a sexuality thing as the original comment is about and what my reply is for.
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I've not seen that much but even if there are a few teachers who do so, as there are apparently 3.8 million public school teachers in the US a few examples would not be much proof of a common issue by itself. Likewise you can find examples of teachers dating students or heck, things like this case of a superintendent trying to mandate a prayer video. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oklahoma-officials-religious-department-schools-classroom-lawsuit/. It's not that they aren't problems of teachers pushing LGBT identification or dating kids or mandating prayer videos (they seem to exist given the articles on it) but if it's a few hundred/thousand people out of 3.8 million it's not much at all. I don't know the exact amounts so I'm open for evidence that suggests it's a decently large percentage.
Flowersignup
5mo ago
The CDC says a quarter of high schoolers are LGBT, a dramatic increase from what it used to be. Acceptance (and celebration) of LGBT students has resulted in more of them. That is what happens when things are accepted and celebrated in societies. Why would it not? Why do you think LGBT is a special case? In what sense have those students not been converted?
How is that "conversion"? A student being more open about their feelings is not the same as a student having previously been fully straight and having turned into bi or gay.
And as you yourself say "Why would it not?". Of course they are not a special case, we would expect at least some amount of an increase in behavior when it becomes destigmatized. But I would never refer to that as conversion, rather that's just more openness. Maybe this is just a disagreement about the wording, I take "conversion" to be more along the lines of "trying to change their actual feelings" rather than "changing their willingness to be open".
Now conversion could be happening alongside it, boosting the numbers up. But that's not evidence for it occuring.
New thing that might possibly hurt the conservatives even more is the recent Breitbart interview by Danielle Smith (premier of Alberta).
In it she says
Notice that it's "on pause" for why people are pointing this out as a failure and
So at a time when Trump is upsetting Canadians so much that it's pushing for a resurgence in support for the liberals, the CPC's public strategy seems to be digging the grave even deeper. Meanwhile the liberal party has done a fantastic taking the sails out of Pierre's campaign by replacing Trudeau and cutting the carbon tax.
There's a very high chance that the conservatives have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here and it's almost entirely thanks to Donald Trump and his aggressive rhetoric and trade wars on Canada, and a strong showing by the Liberals to capitalize on this effectively.
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