johnfabian
2mo ago
Personally I mentally separate the West and BC. When people talk about "the West" they are not talking about Coquitlam.
johnfabian
6mo ago
I would be hesitant to overexplain this as some grand global struggle; I think this is 90% personality politics and the rest is just the cherry on the top. Trudeau seems to be a very bad man-manager: he's had Freeland, as his #2, eat shit for him on a number of different files. For the past two weeks his office has been leaking stories to various newspapers undermining her. He told her on Friday via zoom that she was going to be replaced as Finance Minister, but oh, before you go, on Monday can you deliver our fall economic statement (that we've delayed for two months)? Oh yes, it shows we have a $60+ billion deficit and we've totally blown past the "fiscal guardrails" we had promised. But once that's done and you've humiliated yourself for me one more time we'll shuffle you to a less-visible cabinet position and maybe you won't lose your seat in the next election in what is supposed to be a safe Liberal seat.
Freeland predictably told him to go fuck yourself. Her public letter announcing her resignation (while also admitting she was getting fired) was pretty scathing as far as these things go. To do it on the day you were supposed to give the long-delayed economic update for the country was as pretty direct a knife to the guts as you can do as Finance Minister. I don't think Trudeau will make it to February.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I assume you mean "do they have any reason to [react negatively]", to which the answer is very much yes. The North American economy is very integrated by nature of its geography; Pennsylvania is a lot closer to Ontario than it is to Oregon, Nova Scotia is much more enmeshed with Maine than British Columbia. When American and Canadian firms search for raw materials or markets or services they have previously looked regionally because the regulatory and economic circumstances allowed them to essentially ignore borders. This is going to play out in a million different ways; every Canadian and American firm sources goods, materials, or services from some other company on the other side of the border, and now the economic rationale for that has changed dramatically - with an accompanying uncertainty whether it will ever change back.
Mexico's relationship to Canada and the US is different in that the flows of individual goods and services tend to be unidirectional rather than hopelessly entangled. But Mexican trade with the US and Canada isn't just peppers and tomatoes. There's a lot of industry in Mexico (the #1 export of Mexico to both the US and Canada are cars; their biggest import from both is industrial components).
johnfabian
2mo ago
Loved loved season 1. Season 2 was a mess. I'm willing to extend it some measure of grace because there was a long series of disruptions behind the scenes (writer's strike, actor's strike, power struggles). But if it continues in the way of season 2 I'm going to drop it quickly.
Yeah, I had a similar experience to you going back home last month and finding out the old hairdressing place I went to as a kid is now all Indians. And the grocery store I went to as a kid is all Indians. Etc. etc. I live in a very diverse part of Toronto so it's not like I'm easily shocked or whatever. Hell, even in my neighbourhood we're a lot different than three years ago, because the Filipinos and Chinese and African immigrants have been shunted out by Indians too. My brother-in-law who lived in Toronto for a decade was very surprised when he came back this year, and remarked how Toronto feels so much less diverse now that Indians are forming a new pseudo-majority in many neighbourhoods or employment sectors.
In my personal life I engage with a lot of well-off Torontonians, the type who have historically been among the most pro-Liberal (capital L) and pro-immigration. They have up until recently been insulated from the effects of immigration while benefiting enormously from higher property values and depressed wages. It's finally creeping up on them too: it's car thefts and the fact that their kids (like high-school, university age) can't get jobs. There are no typical student jobs left anymore. McDonalds? Grocery store? Retail? Forget it. There are a dozen people from Punjab for every Canadian kid, and they will put up with a lot more shit. These well-off Canadians are finally starting to realize they've created a country that is hostile to their children.
johnfabian
9mo ago
The whole "oh the Germans just didn't have any plans for all the prisoners they were going take" is something I might believe from someone who knows literally nothing about WWII, but if you have any sort of passing interest you know about things like the Commissar Order, the Einsatzgruppen, the Barbarossa Decree, Generalplan Ost etc. If you have slightly more interest you would know about army- or unit-specific examples like the Severity Order.
The Germans absolutely had a plan for the millions of captives they were going to take. That plan was death.
johnfabian
6mo ago
Someone like MLK would fit much better as a Civ leader - he's much more obviously a political leader, and he fits a similar tradition in Civ games of giving prominent leaders of social movements a spot as Civ leaders (most notably Gandhi).
Culture War nexuses
This isn't exactly some thought-out post, more just a culture war observation. Every now and then there happens an event that feels like a CW "nexus" where it is the intersection of like five different hot topics in one moment. I had this thought while walking yesterday and wondered if someone else had any other examples. Here's two of mine:
A couple of weeks ago in Toronto a group of Indian immigrants, presumably in a gang of some sort, robbed a government-owned liquor store. They pulled a knife on an off-duty cop there. When they left, they were pursued by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and regional cops. In a rented van the thieves went the wrong way down the 401, the busiest highway in the world; the OPP stopped pursuit and told the regional cops to do the same, but they continued to follow. The getaway van hit a car going the opposite way. The other car's inhabitants was also a family of Indian immigrants: new parents, a baby, and their newly-arrived grandparents (via family reunification presumably). The getaway driver, the grandparents, and the baby were killed. The getaway driver was out on bail on weapon's charges, had a suspended license, and was under court order not to drive.
If you've been paying attention to any political issues in Canada you can see how this neatly ties together a bunch of hot topics into one incident. I have another:
In late 2022 a cement mixer in Berlin hit a female cyclist. The driver got out of his truck to check on the cyclist and was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless refugee. An ambulance arrived to transport the critically injured woman to the hospital, but on the way was stopped by climate protestors who had glued themselves to the road. The cyclist died but the truck driver survived.
johnfabian
11mo ago
After reflecting on this for an hour, I have collected my thoughts. Obviously this is bad. I don't think people are going to jump immediately to start making nail bombs, but Trump getting killed or dying under conspiracy-able circumstances were what I always feared as a tipping point to some kind of actual level of civil conflict in the US. The shooter has achieved maybe the second-worst possibility after killing Trump in trying to kill him and failing.
Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win. I think it's sort of a shame because there clearly is a genuine phenomenon there that it touches on, just the nature of it makes it so prone to abuse I suppose it was inevitably going to become useless.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I think the most simple answer is that it is pure innumeracy, and numbers like 20%, 50%, 80%, etc. are just proxies for "a few", "some", "a lot" etc and there's only a tenuous grasp as to whether or how this translates to material reality
johnfabian
7mo ago
There were a spate of these kind of terror attacks in Europe in the mid-2010s. ISIS-inspired, invariably; some 2nd generation disaffected Arab rents a U-Haul and drives it into a crowd on some holiday. The first one was the Nice truck attack in 2016; there were a bunch of copycats and as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
There are a couple of other similar cases elsewhere; here in Toronto in 2018 an incel hired a van and killed a bunch of people with it.
Terror attacks very much seem to follow specific trends, and it seems to take certain people to think of novel ways to go about it. No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it. Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack. I'm not sure why this is, but it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
johnfabian
4mo ago
In particular, Hitler said he despised Jews because of their penchant for Marxism. It is true that Marxist leadership, in Germany and elsewhere, was populated disproportionately by Jews -- but if you want a litmus test for likely Marxists, current or former member of the Communist party is a pretty good one, and yet there was no effort by the Nazis to exterminate them.
I would quibble with this. Between the Commissar Order and Barbarossa Decree, great latitude was afforded to German soldiers to kill the political elements of the Soviet state. Certainly the default approach to any captured Soviet political agent was summary execution. General guidelines for troop conduct, as well as orders circulated by corps and army commanders, all emphasized that the goal of the war was the destruction of the Soviet state and the eradication of Bolshevik influence. Furthermore, the degree to which Nazi propaganda conflated communists and Jews meant that in practice they were often viewed as one and the same and treated accordingly.
Within Germany and other occupied countries, having been a former member of the communist party was plenty enough to secure your arrest, and very frequently your execution. (Ironically, during the Great Terror, it was also very bad to be a former KDP member if you were living in the Soviet Union.)
johnfabian
4mo ago
Of course the problem is the creative team knows to say they have a plan even if they don't. There's been a long history of people assuring the public they have a plan for their films/tv/book series and then... not.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Those saccharine smiles in the audience, that praise him as being an American hero, smiling as they stab him in the back. Ugly.
It's not stabbing Grandpa in the back to take away his car keys. It might feel like a betrayal, but it's for the best.
johnfabian
7mo ago
I think it kind of smacks of desperation to take a politician changing her twitter profile as some kind of great paradigm shift. This reaction alone makes me think we have not yet reached "peak woke."
Aren't lots of high-profile people leaving twitter anyways? It might be more of a prelude to her jumping ship off the platform than anything else.
johnfabian
1yr ago
In the course of a week /r/neoliberal has flipped from smugly poo-pooing anyone questioning the mental fitness of Biden to accepting that he needs to be replaced immediately. Given that the subreddit for better or for worse captures the demographic of who runs the Democratic Party, I think that's a telling sign itself.
There can be few things in life as crushing as getting what you really wanted. Well this was what they wanted.
johnfabian
9mo ago
It would be wrong to break down the way Canadian politics operates with respect to immigration as a conservative/liberal split. It is more coherently a young vs old dynamic, and somewhat even more pointedly people who own property vs people who don't.
Up until very recently there was a very strong national pro-immigration consensus across pretty much the entire political spectrum and all demographics, with the one exception being a fringe national party (People's Party). Canada was by a decent margin the most welcoming country to new immigrants and perceptions of the immigration system in general were strongly favourable. This was I think in part a reflection that the system itself was well-designed: priority to well-off, educated immigrants who spoke either national language.
The capital "I" immigration rate has gone up, but people don't really have a problem with this. More concerning to Canadians has been the growth in other types of migrants: international students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers/refugees. It's these categories that have driven the massive increases in population. For example in 2023 the breakdown was 477k new immigrants (i.e., foreign nationals offered permanent residence) and ~ 1.3 million "temporary" residents.
While the federal Liberals have certainly enabled and to a large part driven the abuse of these other flows of migration, they have not been the only bad actors. Provincial conservative-run governments have absolutely followed them in this race to rebuild Punjab in Canada. Together they have in the course of about two years absolutely destroyed the national consensus on immigration.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I've been reading Richard Gwyn's two-part biography of Sir John A recently and it's interesting to see how many direct parallels there are. Confederation was essentially premised on economic rationales in order for the British North American colonies to be able to compete against American tariffs, and much of the post-Confederation work of Macdonald was to try and cobble together a semblance of national identity and acquire the rest of British North America as a way to forestall American annexation. We've been in tough times before. The problem is I don't know if there's any politician of that caliber around today. The people who would be that kind of leader generally aren't in politics to begin with.
johnfabian
9mo ago
I think that's slightly underrating Trump's competency as a candidate. He's obviously a very polarizing figure, but also a very energizing one, or at least he was.
But that was 8 years ago now. The man is 78. People should have seen the writing on the wall. His mental decline was shielded in part by his nature, in part by his rabid fanbase, and in part by the fact that Joe Biden was doing a more visible and advanced version of the same.
johnfabian
1yr ago
As with a lot of situations where people talk about "LGBT" these days, I think 99% of this is about the T and maybe 1% about the LGB.
The shift towards acceptance of gay people is very broad across society. It's not just young people, not just progressives, not just the nonreligious, but just about everybody. Yes there are evangelicals and online weirdos who still freak out about gay people but they're the minority. I don't think there is going to be a substantial backlash to gays and lesbians. Maybe with respect to some of the more gauche and outwardly freakish gay men, but that's the 1%.
I think what it boils down to, and similar to what you're getting at, is people just don't like freaks. They don't care much about labels; they don't understand them anyways. But freaks make them uncomfortable. They don't want to be around freaks. They don't want their kids seeing freaks. They don't want to turn on the television and watch freaks. And the freaks are overwhelmingly concentrated in the T part of LGBT.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Does this mean it would be bigger than Texas? How many Canadas fit into Texas?
johnfabian
1yr ago
A short post about Metrolinx, Ontario's incompetent transit authority
I enjoy talking about public transit. Not just because I advocate for it to be better, but also because I think it sits at the nexus of a number of problems in the Anglosphere: crushing regulatory barriers, unwieldy bureaucracy, land use and housing, GHG emissions, and the declining state capacity to envision and build projects that better the lives of its citizens. As has been discussed much before, the Anglosphere has a problem separate from other western countries with respect to its construction costs, and this is particularly egregious for transit. Similar projects to those accomplished in Spain or Norway or Italy are - when attempted in Canada, the UK, or the US - considerably more expensive (often 10x more, per km), take longer to build, and when finished have inferior performance. If you live in the Anglosphere and are barely aware of local issues you can probably think of a few local examples off the top of your head.
The Eglinton Crosstown is a classic example. Originally intended to open in time for Toronto's hosting of the 2015 Pan Am games, this light rail line was subsequently cancelled, revived, and redesigned before construction eventually began, with a greatly inflated budget. The project's completion date had previously been announced as 2020, then '21, then '22... in September 2023 a news conference was called by Metrolinx to announce they had no update for when it might be operational. Ostensibly it will be this year, but no one would bet on it. There is presumably some fault with the construction (informed speculation points to leakage and erosion in some of the stations near the intersection with the Yonge-University subway line) that is not being publicly announced due to legal wranglings with the P3 contractor. All in all it's a gross failure, and a pathetic one.
Which made it all the more unbelievable that Metrolinx decided to launch a PR campaign mocking those who complained about delays. Sometimes you get a glimpse of someone's personality by some action they take that seems to reveal in a moment all you need to know about them, and I get the feeling based on the public reaction this substantially hardened people's opinions. Now I know some people who have worked in or with Metrolinx, and I was aware of their general incompetence, their paralyzing bureaucratic approach, their malaise of indecision. I was not aware they were so contemptuous of the public. This 30 second advertisement and its accompanying campaign cost $2.25 million and was immediately pulled due to the response (all told, one of their more on-target projects).
But the real reason I wrote this is so I can share the amazing parody of the Metrolinx ad campaign that perfectly captures the passive-aggressive sanctimony.
johnfabian
7mo ago
It looks like turnout was the major factor. Trump more or less repeated his 2020 performance whereas Harris is down 15 million from Biden's numbers. There's been some coalition shuffling but I can't imagine it changed things all that much for Trump; I would presume he alienated and attracted in roughly even numbers. But it's hard not to look at Harris's results and see anything besides a deeply uninspiring campaign and candidate. Democratic voters simply did not turn out; not just in swing states but across the board.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Neo-nazis frequently allude to "Hitler's peace offers"; vague claims that Hitler offered various enticements to the western allies after the fall of Poland, and later the UK after the defeat of France, to end this senseless and destructive conflict so the Aryan races could work together to defeat the communist menace.
There's a kernel of truth: Hitler wasn't particularly interested in fighting the UK, which he saw as a potential racial ally, and twice Hitler made mentions of peace offers to the Reichstag (in October 1939, and again in July 1940). There were no specifics described, nor did the western allies ever enter into peace negotiations, so any claims about specific terms (neo-nazis will claim Hitler offered to decamp from all of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, for example) are nonsense. Nor did Germany ever seek to initiate peace talks either.
There was about a week in May-June 1940 where Lord Halifax brought up the notion of seeking a negotiated peace via mediation by Italy, but the Cabinet was decided against it. They thought that no terms Germany would offer would offer them a better situation than continuing to fight; in any case it was pointless to make agreements with Hitler because he had violated every international agreement he had ever signed.
I'm just a manly man looking for a super-masculine place to do the highest-T activity possible: whinging about what people are saying on twitter
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