johnfabian
3mo ago
It's a pretty big gamble to think you can get all of them when even one can kill 50+ million Americans.
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
10mo 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.
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
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).
johnfabian
4mo 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
Personally I mentally separate the West and BC. When people talk about "the West" they are not talking about Coquitlam.
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
8mo 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
3mo 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.
johnfabian
8mo 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
5mo 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
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
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 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
10mo 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
4mo 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
8mo 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
7mo ago
I guess it depends on how invested you are in American hegemony. Which if you are a westerner, or especially a non-American westerner, might seem like a silly thing to be rooting for. But you might not realize how good you have it.
If the US lets China take Taiwan, then much of south-east Asia probably reorients politically. The Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. fall out of American orbit and into the Chinese sphere; on the other hand, India might seek a formal American military alliance. International waters are no longer guaranteed by the US Navy, and the costs of cross-oceanic bulk cargo increase massively. Major economic disturbances ripple out as markets realign; international computing and mineral markets take years to recover. South Korea and Japan become nuclear states in a matter of weeks or months; Japan rips up its constitution immediately. Australia prepares to be the bulwark of southeast Asia.
johnfabian
5mo ago
it's not even that ludicrous - Bohemia actually sent an offer to the Ottomans to become a vassal of theirs (Utraquism of course being closer in spirit to Sunni Islam than Catholicism) just before they got crushed at White Mountain.
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.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Does this mean it would be bigger than Texas? How many Canadas fit into Texas?
johnfabian
7mo ago
I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.
And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.
johnfabian
8mo ago
Are you talking about analysis of historical accounts? Because this is the bread and butter of history as a social science. This is a very big subject but I can give you a simple outline. This is the kind of stuff that would be covered in a classic "History of the Roman Republic" first-year university class. You get assigned a reading and in the tutorial sections you would ask questions like:
- What is the author's purpose?
- What "side" is the author on?
- What is the social background of the author?
- When did the author write this?
- What might cause him to portray events this way?
- Was he present at these events, or is he hearing this second-hand? If so, who were his sources?
- Is there any information he might be leaving out?
- Are there things which seem exaggerated, or maybe false?
- How would the author have known about this specific detail?
- Does this text match what we know from archaeological evidence?
- Does this text agree with other things written about this event? If not, why might that be?
- Do you think this text would be flattering to the author's patron?
- Does the author seem to care strictly about accuracy, or are there other elements he prioritizes?
etc. etc. Basic textual analysis. Use what you know about the period and the situation and the author to expand upon what is written and try to think about all the different influences that might have transformed the narrative from what happened in reality to how it reads on the page.
If you want to read history books that go into this kind of stuff, the ideal subjects are periods where there are limited historical sources: I used classical Rome as an example and it's a great one. Historians in these books will often tell you very directly how they are analyzing accounts and what inferences they are making from them and the other historical evidence available to them.
If you're going to be pedantic, I would point out that there absolutely was a place called Czechoslovakia when Germans were expelled from it.
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