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If the United States invaded Canada out of the blue one day what would happen? Would they even shoot back? If Canada invoked Article V would the UK or France threaten nuclear war?
I don’t really have a model for this, and yet it could easily happen.
I actually really wonder if the US military would even obey a Trump order to invade Canada. I kind of doubt it. If the military did obey the order, then the US would win the war in about one day. I think that the UK and France would raise complains and likely would leave NATO and try to form a new NATO-without-the-US, but they would not use military force to try to stop the invasion, not that they could even if they wanted to. They would not seriously risk nuclear war for Canada's sake.
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I am sure that the US could take the cities, the Canadian forces would likely not be keen on urban warfare.
However, the recent track record of the US with regard to occupying and holding large territorial states has not exactly been great, recently. Now, unlike Afghanistan, Canada does not have a population growth well beyond replenishment, but on the other side it is also 15x bigger. Even if only a few percent of Canadians are willing to engage in asymmetric warfare, these will likely have the support of a large fraction of their population. Nor do I expect that the US will succeed in othering the Canadians enough to commit large scale atrocities which might eventually terrorize the Canadians.
But then again, the hypothetical is rather absurd in the first place.
Not only could they take them, I'd be personally be willing to make substantial concessions if they'd be prepared to keep Toronto and the rest of Southern Ontario -- a strict border at the 49th parallel would make Canada a much better place.
Tough luck. We’re annexing everything except Quebec, leaving the separatists as last stewards of the real Canada.
My deal gets you Victoria as well -- Portland with less rain, and an average age of about 80, what's not to like?
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Spitballing some factors for a completely ridiculous hypothetical that is never going to happen, but is funny to think about.
Remember how important it was for Ukrainian will in putting up organized resistance to have Zelensky making big decisions, appearing in videos, rallying folks? How the Russians wanted to claim that he had fled, because that would make it seem more like a fait accompli, but they could just counter that by videos of him? Canada will have no PM for the next couple months. There is no face of the government. No voice to rally around. No one clearly in charge of making the big decisions. The next couple months are sort of a unique opportunity. Ideally after Trudeau has been out long enough that the conversation has moved on enough that it's basically impossible for him to slip back into the leadership role by default, but not delayed so long that narratives have formed around potential replacements to the point that people have positive thoughts along the lines of, "Our sacred political process is selecting a new leader, and we need to support the outcome of the process." You need them to still be sort of scrambling a bit to have any vision of where the country could go. The countervailing factor is that Trump is just now regaining power in the US. He has enough on his plate just asserting his control over the bureaucracy and hasn't had time in office to make the necessary preparations to exploit this moment. ....but assuming he somehow could....
Presumably, the military has someone who is effectively in control, but how many people know who that person is? On paper, it's King Charles. Lol. On paper, that authority is delegated to the Governor General of Canada. Just look at her. "An Inuk leader from Nunavik in Quebec, Simon is the first aboriginal person to hold the office," says Wikipedia. Closer to reality, one would point at the Minister of National Defense or perhaps the Chief of the Defense Staff. Again, for the latter, she's career military, but kinda just look at her? Also take note, Wiki says, "Marie Annabelle Jennie Carignan was born in 1968, and grew up in Asbestos, Quebec, in a French-speaking household."
So, I'm thinking a couple things. First, plan real hard for a targeted killing of the Minister of National Defense. Sparks massive confusion within the apparatus as to who is in charge. Let them see if they want to make one of the two women the face of their defense. Second, figure out the right moment to back-channel comms to Quebecois leadership (even explicitly loop in the Quebecoise Chief of the National Defense Staff), pretty much right at the moment of the surprise invasion. Let them know that you will not be entering Quebec and that if Quebec would like to remain an independent nation, you will absolutely support them. Be extremely open if they give you any positive signs, especially if they request additional French-speaking territories nearby; concede them immediately.
You can occupy Toronto/Ottawa within 24 hours, almost guaranteed. Use cyber and other means if necessary to kill CBC/CTV. It's debatable whether trying to turn the lights out on their internet will do more harm than good. If you can rely on Elon enough just to kill any tweets promoting or displaying violent resistance, you might be okay. Each province has unique reasons for disliking the rule of Toronto/Ottawa; leverage province-specific expertise to tailor your propaganda specifically to those grievances, promising that much of their provincial control over local matters will be preserved. Frankly, what the northern territories think doesn't matter. They're probably also unlikely to be the ones who are going to be engaging in significant asymmetric warfare.
Who will have the will to fight? Who will have the means to organize? What leadership would they organize around, and what paltry military assets would they have to leverage, anyway? Cruise missiles in the middle of the night, upon initiation of hostilities, can almost certainly take out many of their most concerning assets. What other countries would even want to come to their aid, much less have the means to provide it across the oceans in a remotely timely fashion? The world would be utterly shocked, because this is, indeed, a ridiculous hypothetical and America Just Does Not Do This. They would be crippled, worrying more about what this means for NATO, Pax Americana, and their own regional security situation than they would be able to project power and aid Canadian resistance.
There might be pockets of asymmetric warfare; there always will be. The question is what percent and where, whether you can reduce the spread of information about isolated attacks (plausible, given how sparsely populated much of Canada is). Cities are always the major concern, so probably the biggest questions will be extremely localized in certain cities. This is where armchair hypothesizing probably has to end and genuine, very specific intelligence has to come into play.
The grunts in the Canadian military are actually pretty good, and our whole tactical model has been based on autonomous small-unit ops for like a hundred years -- if you assassinated the whole DND you would probably increase effectiveness if anything.
Now would definitely be the time though; you'd need to turn some folks and set up a Vichy thing probably -- maybe Max Bernier is interested in being King of Canada?
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Toronto/Ottawa and Montreal losing their current ability to dictate policy to the rest of the country would make Canada a much better place. Now, currently the cities are divided due to mismanagement, so that’s why the rest-of-Canada party has a shot, but that’s not always (or generally) true.
Post national and imperial are the same thing.
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Waiting until the Canadian gun confiscation finished would make it much easier, and also be a hilarious lesson. Right now they can still keep their rifles but aren't allowed to take them to the range, and the process of rounding up door kickers to seize them is only just starting.
You'd have to wonder how willing Canadian gun owners would really be to defend True North Strong and Free from the Americans.
I think you'd be surprised. A lot of the Canadian gun owners I know are serious patriots and former military. They'd be about two "America's hat" jokes away from suicide bombing Trumpenreich troop convoys, even if they'd Gaddafi Trudeau afterwards as well.
The enemy of my enemy is only my enemy's enemy, as they say.
True, I do imagine enough of them would be really patriotic, even if they feel their own country dumps on them enough as is.
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You misunderstand. Canada isn't a monolith and the consent of the governed is very unequally distributed; Canadian politics are what US politics would be if NYC and DC were the only politically-relevant areas (and now you know why they're so obsessed with more proportional representation- it's 100% a "civilize the colonies" power grab).
The people most likely to [want to] fight American annexation are also the people who vote [for the party] to ban the guns; the places where people own guns more frequently are much more likely to see American control as an improvement in their political situation (because, objectively, it would be).
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Wait, Canadians aren't allowed to take their guns to the range? I asked Perplexity and it said Canadians could go to the range. I assume the LLM is cucked but not totally off base. What is it missing?
New ban on basically all semi rifles, owners can store them until confiscation is arranged due to the unprecedented scale of the ban; they tried to rely on "voluntary" turn-ins like with previous smaller bans, but it didn't work.
Handgun sales were banned already, I'm not sure if they moved on confiscation there yet.
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They recently issued an Order in Council (kind of like a Presidential regulatory change; no legislation required) 'prohibiting' virtually every mag-fed semi-auto rifle.
'Prohibited' doesn't quite mean like it sounds, because they haven't found the money/balls to actually do anything about it (and indeed have an official 'amnesty' kicking the can down the road to late 2025) -- but yes, as of right now most semi-auto rifles are not supposed to leave one's house.
Enforcement is pretty non-existent, and OICs are just as easy to reverse as they are to write -- so this will very likely be cancelled within days of the election -- but at the moment the situation is in some ways (officially) even worse than the UK.
That sounds like it summarizes to California gun control, where outside of major cities it’s widely ignored and no one does anything about it.
Even moreso, since it was done (mostly, the handgun stuff was actually legislated and will take longer to roll back; we can still legally use those though, just not buy/sell) in such an easily reversible way and it is now obvious that (barring anything super-weird) there will be a right-wing landslide federally at some point this year.
I shouldn't understate it -- most ranges are pretty fuddly and would probably tell you to cut it out if one were seen taking banned guns there. The cops are quite disinterested in enforcement (particularly anything looking like doorknocking) but you never can tell when you will draw some sort of keener -- so given the short projected lifespan of the semi ban most people are playing it pretty cool.
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The US doesn’t want to or need to annex Canada. Anything America wants from Canada it can get by asking, pretty much, or at most by threatening trade upon which the Canadian economy relies, utterly.
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It really, really couldn’t easily happen.
Politically, it’s completely bizarre. Not even in the Overton window until Trump opened his mouth. There is zero reason for Congress to authorize an invasion, and zero process for secretly preparing one as a fait accompli.
It’s slightly more plausible that an unhinged President could approve special forces raids or even airstrikes. The military is much more ready to enact something like that on short notice. It’s still incredibly stupid, pointless, and not going to happen over a tweet.
Arguably the best defense any Canadian has against annexation is the balance of the Senate.
Any establishment party in Canada is plausibly closer to the American Democratic Party than the Republican Party. An annexation / accession to US statehood would, in turn, credibly provide an enduring- even generational- advantage in the Senate to the Democratic Party, with all the relevant implications this has for annual budget passing on reconciliation (bare majority) grounds.
This may not be what happens, but absent actual credible expectation that such an annexation wouldn't be against their political interests, this would be a strong bargaining friction against such an effort, since even the success could be politically catastrophic against the principle agents.
Especially since the current situation of an eastern-dominated Canada... isn't bad from an American point of view?
Republicans may not like/share values with the Liberals, but the nature of city-centric polies only caring about two-three zones of interests is that it's far more willing to trade away other interests- especially distant resources- as concessions to their primary trade partners, i.e. Americans. This provides leverage for better deals regarding some interests than you would if they were higher in their own polities' interest list.
An example would be the Canadian dairy system. Very few economists consider it a good deal for the Canadian consumer, but it exists because it's politically powerful. Because it is politically powerful, though, Americans can use credible demands against it to provide for other concessions to walk back those demands, i.e. the Canadian dairy system is subsidized not only formally, but via other concessions.
This wouldn't happen if you broke apart the system willing to provide those sort of concessions for niche-but-politically-dominant interests.
Even setting aside any moral objections to partitioning one's neighbors- and involuntary partion is bad, m'kay?- there are a number of downsides that make it not-obviously-preferable even in an amaoral self-interest state.
Add to that your moral objections, and...
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I don’t see it happening now, but if Canada continues to suffer economic and political decline, I could see a Ukraine/Russia scenario in 10-40 years where certain provinces start trying to break off and join the United States, and that eventually leading to a war of annexation. Especially if the US continues down the authoritarian/militaristic path it’s been drifting along on for the last 4 decades.
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some hindu extremists cooperating with basque separatists based in Canada could carry out a terror attack on the US. they could flee back to Quebec then Quebec could shield them from extradition providing a justification for US military to enter Canada.
That sounds like something out of a contemporary version of Crusader Kings.
Crusader Kings meets Infinite Jest, indeed (please, someone make this mod)
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No it can't. The military would refuse Trump's orders. Then Trump would be impeached, convicted, removed, and jailed.
While I agree that action against Canada is laughable...that isn’t why.
When has the GOP actually sanctioned Trump for anything? The closest they got was when his supporters were literally occupying their offices, but all’s well that ends well, and there was more hay to be made complaining about Democrat show trials.
If Trump pulled something like this—and he won’t—there’s your model. Deny that he did it. Deny that he said anything about it. Deny that it was illegal at all. Also, they totally deserved it.
I mean, if you think the Republicans are going to happily bow down and let Trump invade Canada, you might need to log off and talk to some actual Republicans. They are not evil cartoon monsters with horns. They are real people who mostly want what's best for the world (just like Democrats do).
Trump can barely even cajole the party into doing basic things that he wants, like electing a Speaker of the House. They're not going to let him invade Canada.
No, I’m not saying they’d let him do it. I’m saying they wouldn’t punish him for having done it.
For what it’s worth, my actual Republican Senator is Ted Cruz, whose tolerance for Trump is infamous. Ironically, he’s also Canadian…
Sorry. I shouldn’t have let myself get carried away on conditionals. We agree that Trump taking any military action against Canada is outrageously unlikely.
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Defense contractors in DFW(especially in, as I suspect, the further suburbs of DFW) know lots of republicans, and the constitution explicitly exempts absorbing parts of Canada from the normal congressional process.
Honestly, if we invaded Canada, I wouldn't be surprised if Congress was extremely leery about granting them statehood and they remained a territory for some time.
Which would be a very imperial move, vibes-wise.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become George I.
It took all of fifty years after American Independence before we tried that the first time around.
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Assuming there was a strong party or ethnicity within Canada that was pro-Union, it would look pretty similar to reconstruction.
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I think you're confusing the Constitution with the Articles of Confederation.
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