Canada didn't take a stance of "attacking China is racist" over the past few years when the past few administrations have increasingly become China hawks and drew Canada into things like the Huawei fight.
Trump on the other hand has shown himself to have a disdainful attitude towards the very countries he'd presumably be creating a unified bloc with for ?? reasons that no one can agree with.
All anyone wants is greater integration with America. If anything, part of Canada's weakness here is from becoming too complacent and relying on that. It was already going to happen if the US was bringing back manufacturing. The only impediment to more of that is Trump.
Imagining them deploying Dean Withers to Pied Piper Gen Z into a war in Ukraine has already made my morning brighter.
I think it's just a demographic thing. The Democrats especially have become even more dominated by the over-educated and, frankly, the feminine side of the party. The disdain for Rogan made no sense strategically, he was already reflexively left-wing on many things. The hall monitor/schoolmarm contingent simply couldn't help loathing the fact that this blue-collar rube had such a large audience without their gatekeeping. So they wrecked it. As they'll wreck the next thing.
These people might find it hard to pivot from "bro" being a pejorative to having those same bros fighting for their freedoms.
But hey, maybe the educational/gender polarization isn't as bad in Europe.
Well, that's the first time I've been accused of being an optimist about human nature.
I have more trust in people's cowardice and self-interest I think.
As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy. Pay Andrew Tate $20m and drop all charges and he’ll tell the zoomers to die for whatever you want.
It won't seem "fun and adventurous" because we have vast amounts of media on what's going on and the videos on /r/combatfootage certainly don't look fun. Nothing cool about getting hit by a drone piloted by some autistic Russia far away and having to give yourself the coup de grace.
It won't be what their friends tell them is cool because the martial and patriarchal values of 1914 have been worn down (I wonder how the reactionary misogyny of people like Tate would play with a modern white feather movement) and men are vastly less likely to be raised in them, and people listen to Andrew Tate because he offers vicarious empowerment. Him telling people to go kill others (when he himself wouldn't) actually defeats his purpose.
Russia is more unconstrained than most Western states and it not only allowed a lot of people to flee, its general tactic is to cultivate apathy in large parts of the citizenry.
Yes, there's nowhere to hide from the modern state so you may get a gun shoved in your hand and sent to war. But happy about it? Meh.
Tanista
9mo ago
Transpeople have power because they nestled into a coalition that pushes the interests of all agreeable minorities that then supported them for ideological reasons.
That's something different that groups large enough to get benefits purely for vote-buying reasons.
Tanista
9mo ago
and that his affinity for Putin is because he looks like someone who is winning.
I think a lot of things are just Trump treating Putin how he'd want to be treated.
The refusal to do things like speak too negatively about Putin, going back to his first term, makes more sense if you think of it as Trump knowing talking about him that way would wreck any deal and not wanting to close off doors with a fellow tough guy. As he sees it anyway.
He doesn't care about Ukraine or Zelensky and thinks, offered a quick deal to get out of it all, Putin would move on it as he would.
Tanista
9mo ago
That can be turned back.
What may be decisive is that he may have demoralized the Democrats or at least their donor base on this issue. There've been a few post-mortems on just why immigration has to be one of the sacred values of the Democratic party and whether it's what even Latinos want. If it ceases to be a sacred value then someone might just decide to do "common sense immigration reform".
Then again, Republicans had some soul-searching on immigration after Romney too and then did the mother of all reversions. It's only been a couple of months. It's not particularly far-fetched that Trump wears out his welcome with the electorate and the next Democratic administration acts in a more sensible but pro-immigration manner because the President isn't a doddering old man who can't keep the administration on the right side of political tradeoffs.
Tanista
9mo ago
I'm not even sure what youre referring to tbh. Maybe I'm just totally desensitized (it's been a decsde since "it's current_year"). But it is indeed retarded to take Trudeau being Trudeau (in a way that imposes no costs unlike the Ukraine war) into an economic war when he'll bend on actual policy. Send Vance to give a speech.
If that's what Trump is thinking then he's retarded too -- while the actual gross balance going south is not that large compared to other partners, it's primarily inputs to a wide cross-section of American industry.
I legitimately suspect someone from the Zeihan school of thought convinced him that he could exploit the weaknesses in the confederation to maybe cause Alberta to secede and end Canada.
It explains/fits with a few things. The lack of clear criteria to end the tariffs, his inability to shut the fuck up about the 51st state thing (like a kid whose just heard of a cool new idea and can't wait to share it with everyone) and his general desire to expand territory.
If he could meaningfully change the borders of the US he is going down in history.
That may be his thought process, but it's retarded.
Trudeau is who he is because that's (apparently) what plays for Canadians. His domestic policy is as a theater kid lib with delusions of "punching above our weight" in international relations. When it comes to actual relations with America he plays ball with Trump or Biden because everyone understands the reality that Canada is the junior party.
There was no Zelenskyy/Hunter Biden issue. Trudeau just is a lib why would he agree with Trump politically? It's one thing to say one should not personally wrong Trump (already crazy, given his nature) but another to say no one can differ on policy. And if being a lib is an issue what of Starmer?
This isn't some Vance dressing down via speech.
It's retarded to even care about Canadian domestic politics in the first place given that it's irrelevant to its fundamentally subordinate position to the US. It may be annoying for Trumpists to see pretty theater kid Trudeau on the Daily Show being fellated by whoever has that now (even that more or less stopped as his popularity dropped) or to see libs whine about going to Canada but none of that matters. Nobody actually goes to Canada because America is richer and better, and when the US says "jump" (like "arrest a Huawei exec and hurt relations with China") Canada jumps.
But, if you do care, it's retarded because Trudeau was already a dead man walking. The only thing standing in the way of the CPC sweeping him and his party into the dustbin is Trump himself.
There's nothing "easy" about dealing with this sort of retardation.
Like, I think the case that this is just fundamentally predatory - targeting a nation that is both inherently dependent on the US and has actively made itself moreso due to bad policy - is actually a much more sensible one. If this is actually his thinking...yikes.
Can the genie of idpol be put back into the bottle? It seems not as it preys on the base instincts of the masses of prefering preferential accomodations
Here's the problem: Jews are a very small minority. Anti-semitism being of central concern in the Western mind is not like preferences for the Indian lower castes or black Americans, it's a product of ideology and/or elite power.
One doesn't have to do this for democratic reasons and one could argue it's not even good for Jews to do this.
Fealty would make more sense. It seems that a lot of this is driven by basically projecting domestic cultural battles and petty resentments and weird fixations out into international politics.
Trudeau already negotiated a deal with Trump last time around.
And then Trump shows back up treating Trudeau as a domestic partisan enemy because ??
Like, I don't think this is a "both sides" thing: Trudeau/the Liberals would probably love to head this off again but nobody is sure what's going on with Trump (who chose to be obnoxious even by Trump standards) which cause a backlash within the population any leader would have to be wary about meeting head on.
Like, the perception of hesitation alone has caused the only blip in what should otherwise have been a cakewalk for the CPC into power.
Tanista
9mo ago
If we can manage to elect somebody who's not a total moron (so yeah, probably boned) I think it can be OK -- the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls.
Canada has no culture...except when Americans say it. Nationalism is finally a thing again and it must get its due.
Yes, as I said it's people who inherited an empire but never cultivated the attitudes to keep it or rather, they actively consider them gauche and outdated and beneath them.
It's especially very odd to see the sorts of people who read the room enough to know that they should mock Fukuyama or call Western hegemony racist in practice act as if supremacy is a birthright that cannot be challenged (so then why not do whatever you like?).
Actual imperialists at least know that sometimes you have to put the boot to people's necks.
Tanista
9mo ago
Will Europe, Canada & HispanAmerican nations seek opportunistic short-term deals elsewhere, instead of operating within America's umbrella ? China has a lot of money to throw around. Canada could solve its housing problem if it formally allowed Chinese nationals to park money here.
What? China was blamed for the housing crisis before the influx of Indians made them the new target, precisely because Chinese nationals were doing exactly this. In hindsight, maybe the Harper status quo wasn't the worst thing.
Besides that, Canada simply cannot escape America's orbit. It's so tied in economically, geographically and culturally. Even junior partners in a superpower dyad get to keep vassal states and spheres.
Other nations may be free but it would take a serious collapse in the US to allow Canada to secede entirely to join a true adversary.
The more religious you and your community already are. For many it isn't as big a burden as it once universally was.
Eh, you can become overly focused on the culture war and recent events. I think this is missing the huge impact of Iraq in discrediting the very notion of that empire on the Republican side.
The republicans were in power, recently, and they entangled Americans in a costly boondoggle based on lies they justified on the same sorts of lines people are now hearing about Ukraine; a bunch of moralistic appeals and (what appear to them to be) phantom threats about how the whole spider-web will collapse and America will be imperiled if people don't fork over their money and sons.
All of the necons and atlanticists fled to the Democratic party when they were defeated by Trump. The sorting is in part a result of the broken consensus which is a result of Republican failures.
Also, I think that Vance's critique about Europe lacking free speech is overrated. It is true that Europe has some issues. But the US has even bigger issues. During covid pandemic it was twitter and other social networks censured correct scientific information, apparently due to the pressure from the White House.
The US has to have a diffuse and informal public-private alliance on censorship because the First Amendment blocks the most direct route for the government. As we can see now, those companies can adjust if circumstances change while laws are writ in ink.
It doesn't really say much about European virtue that they don't have as strong a version of this system given that a) they can just censor speech directly and b) they don't have the same density of indigenous social media sites.
We have not moved past this. WEIRD Americans speak of Karma, of what comes around goes around, of 'garbage people getting what's coming'. It's been noted that the SJW brigade seems not to forgive; transgressions contaminate you, your works, your associates... forever. I don't know any SJWs so I have to take the motte's word for it.
Counter-point: Dan Harmon committed sexual harassment, a real no-no sin, and gave a fairly heartfelt apology and was apparently forgiven and is now back to work. So it's not impossible.
I think part of the problem is more that SJW ethics are almost tailor-made for exploitation by narcissists and other bitter/status-seeking people disinclined towards forgiveness in the first place (and cancellation disproportionately affects people with enough status to become visible and thus provide an incentive to continually pick at), so it's hard to come up with a simple principle that accounts for all cases because someone can always defect and there are reasons to deny status even if one personally forgives.
And I suppose we see it more controversially with the post-religious right, hanging a sword of damocles over the heads of converts from all sorts of degenerate behavior.
A lot of this is likely because this is very online: converts are essentially acting as influencers, which gives good reason to gatekeep the usual positive reinforcement that comes with forgiveness.
If I see an aging instathot in a burqa I'm willing to accept she's a Muslim now (it's frowned upon to question that sort of thing without good reason), but there are good reasons to deny her prestige for wearing it. She clawed her way back to neutral, she's not a moral exemplar.
The fact that the allies came was uplifting, but it was all the more uplifting because it was not an expectation/obligation-
It was an obligation. The ancestor of Theoden, granted the lands of Rohan after defending Gondor (being a pragmatist and understanding that Gondor's fall would doom all men) swore an oath of everlasting friendship and support in God's name.
As the fate of Gollum and the Army of the Dead shows, oaths are a big deal. The obligation doesn't disappear because Theoden cannot reasonably be expected to save Gondor.
It seems to take vastly more agency to me to make the hard choice in favor of honor and its obligations rather than yield to what's inevitable or sensible, as Saruman does.
After all, if they only showed up because of a piece of paper despite the apathy or neglect, they would practically be slaves to their forefathers' whims.
The estate of the father passes to the son, but that includes his obligations. Far from making them slaves, upholding the oath is what upholds their freedom and his very right to rule.
Same reason I find it hard to believe how much CANZUK cope is going around right now. It's just not the same populations anymore.
The problem is obvious: Trump cannot be trusted on anything, even his motives. This is not some separate issue from the OP's question.
How do you guarantee that, ten minutes after you leave, Trump will not be on Truth Social laying out the entire meeting and putting you in the worst light possible?
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