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I genuinely don't understand the right-winger position here. What's so funny?
I asked before, and the answers were something to the effect that Canadian citizens, in their personal capacity, are much too smug online and look down on Americans as uncivilized boors, which is unbearable since Canada is a small dog and America is a Big Lion, so the Lion's gotta do what it does. This is simply childish. But fine, I can acknowledge childishness. What I don't get is why you go out of your way to misconstrue the Canadian perception here. Do you really have no theory of mind for other people believing that their nation ought to be treated with dignity by foreigners at least on the official level? Is this an extreme case of Hottentot morality?
And no, their internal issues (like ethnic relations or immigration policies) are not a carte blanche for you, outsiders to treat their state with contempt and expect them to join in on the fun. Try to think about this by analogy: do you feel that any nation is entitled to offer you unequal treaties and expect them be signed, just because you have fat people in Walmart/fentanyl problem/school shootings/BLM/wokes or whatever you believe is problematic and shameful? This is a pretty asinine approach, right? OK, now consider that people in other countries have a similar philosophy. This is called patriotism.
Speaking of their perception, this is how Trump's terms look up there. This is rubbing it in, I can half-believe it was written to be indignantly rejected because he just hates Canada for some reason, maybe precisely because he's a boor and feels status anxiety. But seeing his supporters' takes, I'm not sure it wasn't done with sincere cluelessness.
Then again, the median position now seems to be even simpler: "we can afford to rape them so why the hell not". The stuff about "not a real country" is, of course, veeeery Russia-Ukraine too. But people mostly don't believe their nations ought to have a "real locus", a telos, or anything like this, they just want sovereignty, respect, and the ability to make deals in their self-interest.
Nations can choose whether they are real or not. Unreasonable external hostility is one way to forge a nation. Ukraine is more real now than it was in 2021, which was more real than in 2013, which was more real than in 2003 or 1989 – even in the Russian eyes. Maybe Canada will earn its reality too, reality it traded away a generation ago by signing what became NAFTA, assuming it's worth nothing since no unreasonable hostility is forthcoming. John Turner foresaw this exact outcome that @Shakes celebrates today. Canadians remember Turner-Mulroney debates for a genteel dunk on a relatively minor domestic mishap by Turner. Maybe they'll remember his lines in this one too.
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 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.
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.
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).
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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