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This is a pile of steaming garbage ai slop (made by ChatGPT specifically, it's so blindingly obvious) tweeted by a foreigner who also has no connection to Canada or the USA.
Needless to say I shouldn't have to waste any effort debunking this because it's just a heap of garbage.
Edit: If you want even more confirmation, the URL at the bottom of the image is fake. Fabricated. Made up. Lies. Deception. Falsehood.
The "attack on the French language" thing is particularly transparently dishonest from Carney. Trump's devastating alpha strike on Quebecois identity is... not requiring US streaming services to promote French-Canadian content.
Didn't the US identify bilingual-labelling laws as a non-tariff barrier that they wanted removed?
The NYT article on the topic did not mention this. It calls out the laws promoting Canadian online content, and says, "A person with direct knowledge of the talks said that the American side was flexible on this point, and did not make any asks regarding the French language explicitly. A Canadian counterpart said that, even if that were the case, the topic was still being debated until the last minute before the talks broke down on Friday."
So, maybe? Maybe not? I would think that if NYT had solid confirmation that the US went after bilingual labeling laws, they would have included it. Of course, that article is also a snapshot in time concerning the information they had at that moment.
I think one of the problems here is that the US side isn't talking about the talks that broke down, and doesn't see why they might need to. In particular, nobody is pushing back on the claim by Carney that there was a last-minute bait-and-switch from the US side, with various media outlets (admittedly probably all relying on the same anonymous source) saying that this was because Commerce Secretary Lutnick took over the reins from USTR Greer.
Based on Trump's MO going back to his real estate days, I think we can assume that there was a bait-and-switch from the US side - it is less clear whether or not it was a planned dick move as part of "tough" negotiating tactics or whether it was unintentional chaos as a result of divisions within the administration. But all we have to go by in terms of what the bait-and-switch was about is Carney's talking points (which I assume are selective and biased, because politics) and various pro-Canadian poasters amplifying them. Trump could say (or could get his people to say) that of course the US doesn't have a problem with Quebec preserving its language and culture and try to play divide-and-rule with Quebec the way is (ineptly) trying to do with Alberta, but he didn't.
This round of talks began with a unilateral escalation by the US (the various proclamations of 20th July) and the only intelligible demand the US has made on substance is that Canada reverse the retaliatory measure they put in place after the previous unilateral escalation from the US side, including steel and aluminium tariffs which the US said were not negotiable and other tariffs which were announced as a threat to force Canada to address a non-existent fentanyl problem and then TACOed.
So the US does not have a public negotiating position here. And if the bait-and-switch theory is correct, they haven't communicated a stable non-public negotiating position to the Canadians either.* It might be the case that normalcy could be restored if the Canadians agreed to end the retaliatory measures and accept the steel and aluminium tariffs, but we don't know and Carney has now said that he doesn't either. As far as I can see based on Trump and his supporters' social media posts, the actual MAGA theory of the case is that the correct process is that Trump commands and Carney obeys, and that the real problem is Canadian insistence on LARPing as a sovereign state.
* The actual US negotiating position in this case needs to be non-public because the Trump administration is abusing emergency powers to impose the tariffs. Everyone on both sides of the border knows that the legally colourable US-law justifications for the tariffs in the official White House proclamations have little or nothing to do with the real reasons they are being imposed, but can't say so.
He has essentially said this on Truth Social
Ordinarily, it would be easy to believe that the American government just doesn't care that much about bilingualism beyond seeing it as annoyance that is nonetheless a red line for Canada. It's the sort of thing a Canadian PM looking to win in Quebec would emphasize.
But people in Canada believe it (or, at least, prefer to trust Carney) because it's easy to fit into a narrative of divide and conquer in light of Trump's annexation comments and his escalation of tariffs and unreliability.
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The image being made with ChatGPT has no relation to the veracity of the claims in it. Indeed it's a point in its favor: LLMs are smarter than Trump, and Trump posts a lot of AI slop (such as his map-painting exercises) and outright falsehoods (eg about Canadian unemployment or oil stats) anyway. If it were just a compilation of his own claims, it'd be worse.
The whole “Trump is an idiot” argument is tired at this point. Someone cannot achieve what he has achieved being an idiot. He might be wrong. He certainly isn’t a rationalist or careful when it comes to what he says. But thinking someone who has accomplished about 1000x whatever your life has accomplished is an idiot is laughable.
Just because a lot of people haven’t achieved what Trump has (… is there some reason why I should want to?) doesn’t mean ordinary people haven’t achieved things Trump is clearly incompetent at. If money was all I cared about, I’d do gay pornography and let every man have a go at my asshole or enter into organized crime. Because I’m actually a Bible believing Catholic though, my spiritual wealth I’d wager is far greater than his will be in the afterlife.
I haven’t checked but I imagine porn actually doesn’t pay that well
According to Ron White, gay people get 5x the amount of money. Take that for whatever it’s worth.
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Respectfully, I call cope. What is it Trump has achieved that normal people wouldn’t want? Becoming President? Large family? Extreme wealth? Fame? You may not want these things but they are among the most common fantasies in the world.
This is a moral judgment masquerading as a value neutral. You think you’re better than Trump because you think he’s going to hell.
Would it be nice to have a billion dollars? Yes. Would I be living all that differently than how I currently am? Not really. All money does for my desire is fuel more of the same. I would think anyone with common sense would get the impression that people who aren’t putting in work to obtain riches would constitute good evidence that their drive to obtain it obviously isn’t that great (i.e. money isn’t what’s primarily driving them). The proposition isn’t that more money isn’t nice, it’s that money isn’t everything; and it’s very difficult for those who have it to understand how anyone could ever be satisfied without it, when they’ve invested all their psychological resources into thinking that’s what makes them happy. Case in point in my own life, my mother came from a rich family and I was spoiled rotten when I was a kid. It still didn’t make me happy.
As I’ve said before. Most people don’t envy fame and fortune. They envy the lives they imagine these people lead. It’s not actually like that. As a matter of fact from my ontology of the world, yes; I am more accomplished than Trump is as a practitioner of the faith. It’s 100% my moral judgment; and the fact that it’s prejudicial doesn’t mean it isn’t also accurate. A person may not buy my theology and that’s fine with me. From my vantage point they’ll get what’s coming to them in the end all the same. It doesn’t make a difference to me. I want to get to Heaven for what I want out life, not so I can enjoy the thought of Trump going to Hell. In that’s sense I’m every bit as selfish about my own interests as Trump is with his. I don’t care one bit if he believes what I do or not. If the fruits of this world outweigh the ones awaiting him on Judgment Day are more important to him, great; then we can both be winners.
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Why? Biden could become a President (indeed, beat Trump at a debate!) while in early stages of dementia, so it wouldn't be far-fetched for Trump to achieve more than Biden while being an idiot. And what has he even achieved, except winning the vote, installing his loyalists (often profoundly inept, like Kash Patel or RFK Jr. or Linda McMahon or… then again, your may refuse to acknowledge their ineptitude too) and doing random intense costly actions he can afford because the US is rich and powerful? And as regards winning the vote, the task seems easy enough: just be an unprecedentedly faithful representative of the immense mass of stupid and malicious people underserved by previous candidates, just shitpost more, be a bigger and louder primate. It's not like American democracy demands any kind of moral or intellectual achievement of their leaders. It's vibes, spite, boredom, hubris, petty sadism…
I understand how acknowledging such mechanics behind your political culture might be hard.
Yeah yeah, money talks bullshit walks, reality is that which pays. This is not a philosophy for human beings.
Pandemic era Biden didn't come across as demented. He came across of someone who was still compus mentis when fully awake, but who was too physically frail for the demands of executive leadership (or indeed running an in-person campaign, which he fortunately didn't need to do in 2020 because of the pandemic). This is consistent with what staffers have said about the administration, which is that Biden was lucid for 4-6 hours a day and able to use those hours to prevent a power vacuum appearing that could be filled by someone else.
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Biden won via the democratic establishment carrying him to victory. Trump engaged in a hostile takeover. They are not the same.
Biden had no staying power; Trump clearly did.
Re money talks — yeah it’s exactly a philosophy for human beings. Person A accomplished a lot. Person B hasn’t. Person B tries to tear down A to make themselves seem more important. Well, the proof is in the eating of the pudding.
No, pragmatism is a philosophy for economic agents with status anxiety. You're status-anxious to the point you don't even accept any notion of "intelligence" or "correctness" per se, only of success, which supersedes every other dimension. In your logic Idi Amin or Hou Jing must have been highly intelligent, because they achieved victory against far greater odds than Trump. To say nothing of people who had succeeded within largely or entirely non-cognitive fields, or just via being scum in public – Mike Tyson, Tupac Shakur, Kenneth Copeland, and other illustrious Americans. That is "intelligence" of the pudding-eating people, too. Money is intelligence, charisma is intelligence, sexual prowess is intelligence, nepotism is intelligence. Everything is intelligence except intelligence.
The reality is that the peaks of elected political power in the United States are not terribly contested, cognitively speaking. It's not a corporate world with knife fights between execs, and especially not the heavily competitive world of linear employees. Perhaps high-ranking escorts have more g-loaded competition because they need to appeal to paying customers and not the average American voter. As of mid-2020s, it's a human capital wasteland to which you need not a SAT pass but an invite from some pimp donor. The high and mighty "establishment" that crumbled before Trump is made of sexually deviant dysgenic freaks, confused old people with imaginary friends, self-professed hereditary shabbos goys (and those are Grand Elders of the Party, like Schumer and Pelosi)… Does this not strike you as comical? It is not Trump's intellectual achievement that his last challenger from the Establishment was an unlikeable woman with dirty laundry, nominated at the last moment by a spiteful senile old husk, who ran on an unintelligible gibberish platform about "brat" or whatever because nobody had a clue of what to do with her (and even so, she got plenty of votes, just because people voted for the party and against Trump – the bar is on the ground). Crowing about "staying power" contrasted to Biden is hilarious when I see Biden's defense like «Biden was lucid for 4-6 hours a day and able to use those hours to prevent a power vacuum appearing». Did it take a lot of intelligence to just smile and dunk on these squalid creatures before an audience that is starved for ownership and desperately yearns to finally be loyal to some strongman? This is below the level of hereditary monarchies, and close to the level of late USSR.
You don't have any object-level defense for Trump's idiocy. Take, for instance, his insistent bullshitting about "windmills" in China, which is of course the #1 consumer of wind turbines by a light year, not just the biggest producer. There is a cogent argument against subsidies for renewables in the US in particular, but instead Trump consistently spreads very stupid and checkable lies about this issue. Just why? One "charitable" explanation I see is that he simply hates them for a petty personal reason, which is not just "not a rationalist" but outright childish silliness. Another is that he correctly believes his supporters to be natural slaves that need simple slogans and will make excuses for any extent of his dishonesty. The same logic is true of his opponents who now lie about datacenter water use. Trump, of course, lies so much about so many random things that these strategic explanations fail. It's not a grand strategy, it's simply what he does by nature, and what the competition he is in allows. His strategic actions are discussed well enough and I don't expect us to have much common ground here.
Generally, smart people try to lie plausibly and avoid spelling out outright falsehoods, because in the circles where smart people compete, that produces an exploitable weakness if not legal liability. But this is not the world of American big politics. You don't need to be smart to get into the NBA Hall of Fame, nor to be a POTUS, nor to be top 0.1% on OnlyFans. There are other… merits.
Let’s reduce your long post to its merits: intelligence is weakly correlated with success. Thus, success is not an accurate marker of intelligence.
Allegedly smart people who write long posts on the internet love to separate intelligence from success presumably because they have no success but their self worth is tied up in being smart. Putting down “dumb” people who’ve accomplished a great deal is par for the course. But of course most people want success. So why isn’t our poster on the internet successful? They will tell you X, Y, Z (maybe they aren’t anxious about their status). Instead, I think it is a defense mechanism to shield the reality (ie they couldn’t figure out a way to succeed and thus really aren’t all that smart) from their image (ie they are really smart and it’s all of the dumb status strivers who make life difficult for the smart ones).
Yes, this is trivially true across different dimensions of success, regardless of how you want to rationalize your support of Trump.
Did you think you're cooking here?
People can compete on anything, there are countless hierarchies of prestige, aptitude and competence. It is possible to leverage intelligence for greater success in a cognitively less demanding field, and it's correlated with other beneficial qualities, so elite performers, swindlers, sex workers, athletes are usually smarter than their mediocre peers, on top of domain-specific excellence. This, however, is not strictly necessary, so you get people like Yao Ming who are just very blessed on the most relevant dimension of endowment. This is most purely expressed in simple sports like sprinting and weight lifting. In fact, a strictly subhuman creature (a dog, a horse or a clanker) can outperform the best humans there.
But intelligence is extremely correlated with success in cognitively demanding fields. Hence, for example, results of SMPY, and I would never insist that some STEM luminary is "dumb actually" – even if he does say or do stupid things or at least things I disagree with; he may have particular reasons for bias, ignorance or feigning them, or I could just be wrong.
Big politics in the US is not a cognitively demanding field, so your argument is nonsensical. For an outgroup example, Gavin Newsom is a highly successful politician, perhaps a future President, does well in podcasts, and he's generally an accomplished man with an Instagram-perfect upper class White family, with a rich dad, just like Trump. His SAT was 960, which is slightly below the median (he can cope about medical reasons but it's bullshit), he has zero interesting thoughts and there's no evidence he's good at administering his domain. In other words, it's possible to be in the top 0.001% of success while being in the bottom 53% of the population intellectually. This is all obvious. This is, in fact, the promise of American dream (or Middle Eastern dream). You don't have to be a genius to succeed. You don't need truth, or knowledge, or any authentic superiority, you just need to grind and hustle and have "chutzpah". Then again, a rug merchant or a pimp, though a simple creature, is acutely aware of human status signals. He understands that the literati may look down on him, so he develops this kind of retarded doctrine about "success" in general.
Trump has no remarkable successes outside big politics. He's a shitty businessman and a so-so entertainer, roughly Vince McMahon tier. His political views are primitive, his object level knowledge of the world is patchy at best, he's incurious, he's repetitive. We have zero evidence to suspect that he's intelligent. It's just this circular insistence that Americans voted for him so he is "successful" so he's "not an idiot", and then you walk in circles like a smug blind pony. Your model doesn't require intelligence to exist at all, as a variable, and you don't believe truth or reality even matter, they are all downstream of "material success". In your book, Perelman is dumber than Trump because he didn't rally retards to elect him and then use this to enrich his corrupt son-in-law. Perelman doesn't even have a son-in-law, what schmuck. Any illiterate Patel with a highway motel mogs him.
I dont particularly like Trump (he is weak) but wresting control of a major political party is actually really successful and demands real intelligence contra your claims.
Yao Ming is irrelevant.
Your Perelman example is bunk because I would say he actually is successful.
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Why is your model of the world like that? What is there to «figure out» in success? It's not a puzzle or a math problem. There are many smart people who are lazy or too autistic to socialize or work in person without pain and therefore they don't become elected officials or other types of popular (most «successful») people.
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The reason I reject this premise is because it implicitly plays into well known failure states of logical thinking. It’s the same reasoning that allows idiots to say things like “Well if you’re an economist and understand the economy so well, why ain’t ya’ rich; HUH?” That’s not how that works. Just because a referee understands the rules of the NBA doesn’t make them an NBA superstar. Or it’s like saying, “If Karl Marx was so smart why aren’t his followers using the materialist conception of history to predict the stock market?”
People want success on their own terms and not everybody is after the same thing. I have the background knowledge certainly to work in occupations that come close to doubling my current annual salary. I’ve spent decades close to people in infosec, I have personally met and went to dinners when I was younger and sat directly at the table and participated (more of a tag along thing than anything else) with people you can currently find in DefCon videos, RSA Conference talks, one who was in the NSA and who’s wife works at the FBI headquarters in Quantico, one of them who’s a veteran software engineer who’s made single paychecks big enough to retire himself for the rest of his life, and others who are still published authors to this day (I remember being at my father’s job when I was younger after said famous public intellectual’s new book just dropped while he was casually working right there in the office next to him, in cases of cardboard boxes and we were encouraged to take one); and I personally stay on top of new developments in the space. So then why don’t I pursue past leads I still have lying around? Desire. I don’t want that as much as I want other things in life. If I had a family to support maybe I would be on that kind of grind. But I personally don’t need a lot to be happy.
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Bulverism is a logical fallacy where you assume an opponent's argument is false and explain why they hold that view instead of actually proving why the argument is wrong.
Particularly useful for shutting down criticism of "successful" people because there are countless avenues one can measure success by and find the critic wanting.
It’s the “they just hate us cause they anus” defense. You see it all the time in debates where when a person can’t refute your argument, they instead attack your credibility. Yeah well I’m not a climate scientist either but I can still tell you it was hot and dry yesterday.
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He was also never that smart or studious when his brain was at full power either.
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Respectfully disagreed. I am surrounded IRL by people who reject exactly those simple messages, and whose lives are downward spirals of empty talk, self-delusion, and the rejection of all measurable metrics in favor of declaring as profoundly ethical their bad habits, self-destructive behavior and perpetual failures at even their own stated goals, and who excuse their lies, their parasitic existences and their proselytizing to this complex of self-defeat with words very similar to yours - that human beings needn't accomplish or even do anything to be valuable, and that all those who in fact do things and accomplish things are surely immoral and deserve contempt.
There are probably unhealthy extremes either way, but maxims like
actually form a very healthy philosophy for humans under most circumstances.
There are measurable metrics of intelligence, such as IQ and SAT. There are measurable metrics of academic and scientific accomplishment, such as GPA and h-index. There are measurable metrics of managerial performance, such as the KPIs used by the Chinese Communist Party to promote officials, or quarterly returns of a corporation. There are measurable metrics for all kinds of things, but Trump's measurable success is that he could get enough Americans to vote for him twice. The assertion that this metric is a proxy of intelligence is ill-supported. What you try to argue is just slavish worship of power, not some "healthy philosophy".
I'm not saying anything about Trump at all. I'm strictly discussing the maxims you described as unfit for humans, and how I consider them superior to the one actually espoused by many humans.
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Would it be more charitable to grant that he has "animal cunning"?
I do jest, but so far you seem to not know what intellectual virtue, exactly, has led Trump to success, only assuming that there must be something.
In particular one can point out that Dase didn't say Trump has always been a moron, only that his 80+ old self is more stupid than LLMs. Most of Trump's self-achieved success has been before that. A rock with the correct words on it can be elected president in a system where power is sufficiently diffused.
Less charitably, there are many factors that can cause one person to be in a better position to achieve things, compounding to a 1000x advantage (measured how?), and intelligence is just one. It doesn't seem laughable that a 100 IQ boor with generational wealth and business connections in USA had achieved 1000x more than a hypothetical provincial well-read 120 IQ Russian twice his younger.
It does seem laughable that a 100 IQ boor with generational wealth could basically be the most important person in the world for over a decade. There are tons of idiots born into money and connections. None have leveraged it like Trump. That suggests he isn’t a 100 IQ boob.
And the broader point is that when one person has had that level of success, his detractors better have similar level of success before they call him stupid. It’s like the idiots calling Musk dumb.
Most important in the world is credit to US, not to any particular president. Most important in the country? Many kings had accomplished that without any effort simply by being heirs to a stable hereditary monarchy.
You seem to ascribe some additional moral protection to intelligence that you don't afford other virtues. So when someone is successful, it must have been intelligence? No, there are plenty of other factors, including, yes, sheer dumb being the right-shaped person at the right place in the right time.
I'll continue to call a king naked when he is naked instead of cringing from it in some performative show of humility, "well he's king, so he must have some good reason behind this, or he wouldn't be king!". Your way is just not being able to point out things about anyone famous for any reason because no one here is that famous.
You must realize there is a marked difference between being born the heir to the throne and accomplishing what Trump accomplished?
And of course there are other virtues, etc. I’m just saying you don’t get the top of the top by being an idiot.
A lot of your argument's weight hinges on obscuring "what Trump has accomplished" behind vague superlatives like "getting to the top of the top".
For the record, I don't agree that POTUS is such a height of power as you imply, either. As I said, its power is mostly the power of the US, which Trump can't take credit for. Any random tinpot dictator in a shithole country, who rules for life and at whose word countless detractors go to prison or disappear, is more "the top of the top" than Trump. I grant that you don't get there by being an idiot. You also don't get to any of the numerous unelected posts between which the power of the US government is diffused by being an idiot.
Getting to the post of POTUS while LLMs are smarter than you (this is Dase, "LLMs are smarter than X" is not the same as calling X retarded as far as I can tell of him) is not something that requires outstanding intellect. It requires mostly other things, and if you're literally a clinical idiot then it's unlikely you have those things, and most of the time a president is not going to be stupid. But it's not a requirement.
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Yet the image is still chock full of falsehoods. I wonder why you never addressed that point?
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