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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   32021 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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The US-Canada trade war is off on off on off! Retaliatory 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum that is. The rest are still on.

"This cannot continue," Trump wrote. "The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World," he added.

“And your brilliant anthem, 'O Canada,' will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!"

Even if Canada agreed to become a US state, Congress wouldn’t go for it because it would permanently cede every national election to the Democratic Party. Surely someone has told Trump!? Disregarding statehood as the {only way to stop this}, I’m guessing steel factories take longer than 4 years to build. An agent of chaos indeed!

So, what is the off ramp? The US annexes Canada and changes its name to Canada? Border state republicans take away Trump’s toys tariffs until he can play nicely? Global depression? Or the continuation of flip flopping tariffs to placate boredom?

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/trump-raises-canadian-steel-aluminum-tariffs-to-50percent-in-retaliation-for-ontario-energy-duties.html

My (nominally) fellow Canadians' response to this is possibly the stupidest thing I've seen them do in recent years. Clearly the 51th state ribs are a joke, but in the case they were not and there was a clear intent to annex then the answer is not to act defiant. Canada has no power, no military, no economic leverage on America.

If I were named Canada's Trump wrangler, I'd call him up and have frank negociations on what he really wants (as opposed to the excuse to give him the power to do it, Fentanyl). What he wants and expects tariffs to do is reshoring, right? Canada can help! Canada could offer to match US tariffs on China; we've been having a tense relationship with China in recent years anyway, and it would increase the market for american manufactured goods. If necessary get some Canadian companies to sweeten the pot by promising some investments or partnerships with the US.

Trump's actions have not been mere ribbing. Trump also brought up something much more fundamental. He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation. Also:

One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.

Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.

Mr. Trump was interested in doing just that, Mr. Lutnick said. He wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand. He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario. And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

And, sure, it's Trump, the main reason he's saying these things is because it makes this kind of news. He's probably not going to do any of that, and annexation seems implausible.

If I were named Canada's Trump wrangler, I'd call him up and have frank negociations on what he really wants (as opposed to the excuse to give him the power to do it, Fentanyl). What he wants and expects tariffs to do is reshoring, right? Canada can help! Canada could offer to match US tariffs on China; we've been having a tense relationship with China in recent years anyway, and it would increase the market for american manufactured goods.

They have done this, it's part of how they got the initial set of tariff delays, but Trump has not been clear about what he wants or how Canada could actually accomplish it!

I'd call him up and have frank negociations on what he really wants

That's exactly what Trudeau tried to do when he visited Mar-a-Lago. But a big part of what Trump really wants is fealty from his imperial vassals. Reshoring, unity against China, unity against Europe/whoever doesn't matter as much as personal loyalty to him. Trudeau has been far too opposed to Trump before to credibly demonstrate loyalty now, and I doubt that he even tried.

Another big part of what Trump really wants is to come away from the whole exchange with "a good deal." He knows he can get a better "deal" by holding a constant and ever-changing threat of tariffs over everyone. He doesn't care about the cross-border companies trying to figure out if they'll be able to pay their truck drivers next month, as long as in some way Trump can say the other side caved to his demands.

Now Carney has a tough balancing act. If he doesn't appease Canadian anti-Americanism, he'll quickly be out of a job. But he can't do that and give Trump the victory that he wants. In normal negotiations, there'd be room to say one thing publicly and do something else privately, but I don't think private acquiescence would be enough for Trump.

In normal negotiations, there'd be room to say one thing publicly and do something else privately

Of course, the trick about Trump is that he doesn't negotiate privately. This results in the entire nation (as a collection of individual political actors), and to a point the whole democratic world, forced to share the butthurt in equal measure rather than it be absorbed by the politicians like it's "supposed to" be.

Which is partially where "but muh rudeness" comes from.

If he doesn't appease Canadian anti-Americanism, he'll quickly be out of a job. But he can't do that and give Trump the victory that he wants.

Perhaps it's a lose-lose situation for him either way: the tariffs he's imposed are more extensive (and far more destructive to Canada) than Trump's, and the only tariffs he could impose (i.e. upon China) only benefit those who won't be voting for him.

They do have some economic leverage, and a little bit of military leverage (we get actually a LOT of mileage out of NORAD and a little out of intel collaboration), but a decent chunk of it is "nice-to-haves" and/or inertia. But yeah, acting offended is silly. It's a classic Trump power move, and the winning response is to be firm and quiet.

But it does still seem so misguided albeit predictable that we're feuding with them instead of, you know, teaming up against China. IIRC they've even expressed willingness to go along with it, which is why I think this is more Trump being his typical correct-vibes but terrible-execution self.

And never have a felt more acutely the tension between political aesthetics and the mechanical and economic functioning of the real world.

The real horror is realizing that this is true of everyone and everything now. I'd like to blame social media, but fake it until you make it is older.

This. This has always been the way. The Cathedral has had more experience with utilizing it for its ends, and thus it seemed like a smoother operation, but in the actual bones of the thing it's no different from what's happening now. What's happening now just has more rough edges because the people doing it and the direction it's going don't have those decades of experience and entrenched institutional support.

Setting aside Benjamin's socialism

I'm a bit curious - does any right-winger/believer in free markets ever use the term "proletarian"? I've only seen it from Marxists.

I do personally, but I'm not a professional ideologue or anything like that. I think it's a useful categorization.

Right wingers might talk about ‘proles’ to refer to underclass types, but not ‘proletarian’.

Personally I think Trump is trolling you. He isn’t really serious about Canada as the 51st state. He knows it pisses you Canucks off (in part because it points out how provincial you are and in part because Canada defines itself as ‘not America’).

Trump thinks Canada has been ripping off the US so he is trying to engage in a bit off a game of chicken to make the relationship more equitable in his mind. Will it work? Who knows.

Note the latest skirmish wasn’t started by Trump but clearly a result of his rhetoric—yet I think Canada lost the exchange. Canadians may be better off simply laughing about the 51st state rhetoric instead of claiming they are being annexed. That’s what you do when someone is trolling you.

"Trump is trolling" is just a lowbrow gloss on "Trump is playing 4D Chess". It's never 4D Chess. Not with anyone, but especially not with Trump. It's just cope for the reality that Trump is an impulsive idiot.

Canadians may be better off simply laughing about the 51st state rhetoric instead of claiming they are being annexed.

That was more or less the response back in December when Trump first brought it up. Trump's subsequent behavior points more towards trolling in the classic form.

The effect is similar to trolling because it's not going to happen and hasn't got a warm reaction even among Trump voters.

I don't think it is true trolling though.

If it somehow became a popular policy, would Trump drop it, as if it had all just been a joke to him all along? I somewhat doubt that.

Honestly, if Canada was 110% on board with Trudeau as our leader? Trump would drop it immediately. He hates Trudeau for being sanctimonious and a huge example of the “respectable” politicians that talk down to him and consider him a threat to democracy.

but no one can provide a coherent explanation as to why

I don’t know if they teach about “manifest destiny” in Canadian public schools, but did you ever wonder why the US never went ‘up’ like it did West?

Let’s face it, nobody would ever in a million years make Canada it’s own faction in Civilization games. Really, the logical thing would have been for the United States to annex Canada in the 60s when the British Empire was falling apart. No strong, self-respecting America would allow an independent Canada to exist, just as no strong self-respecting Russia would allow an independent Ukraine to exist. Any coherent nationalist ideology demands the annexation of contiguous homoethnic and co-linguistic territory.

Yep. I have plenty of reasons to hate trump but wanting to annex canada isn't one of them. The actual process by which he is attempting to impose sovereignty is just a complete failure though, and in fact is doing more to bolster canadian seperatism than ever before.

A smarter operator woould have gone with divide-and-conquering, treating the various canadian provinces as being separate entities and levying tarriffs on a province- y province level to negotiate with their premiers specifically, bypassing the canadian national government. The only way forwardis to convince people that they're Albertans, ontarioans, new brunswickans, etc. before they're canadian, so that eventually they might see it in the best interest of their province to leave canada and join the united states.

It wouldn't happen during trump's presidency though, and I'm pretty sure he's old and jaded enough to no longer have long-term goals.

We are taught about it as one of the reasons for the War of 1812, when the US tried and failed to conquer what would become Canada.

Rather the opposite, North America has too few countries. Quebec should be independent, California should be independent, The south should be independent as a minimum. Giant states are hard to keep together and don't work well. There is too little cohesion, decisions are made too far from the ground and the interests are too different.

There used to be a British colony, it split in 1776, then fought a war against itself in 1812 and then split again in the 1860s. The current state is that American politics is a mess with people living in completely different realities.

Am I missing the joke here?

The ACT article joke has a "no DLC" qualifier, but Canada is not in a DLC, but rather in a full expansion. It meets the criterion.

That distinction doesn't really exist anymore. Look on the Steam store page, Gathering Storm is under the DLC section.

Steam doesn't distinguish between expansions and DLC, but I take that to be a limitation of the Steam storefront. Firaxis in producing and selling content for Civ VI clearly distinguish between expansions and DLC packs. The store page for Gathering Storm reads, "In Gathering Storm, the second expansion to Civilization VI, the world around you is more alive than ever before." By contrast, the store page for Vietnam and Kublai Khan describe it as a "content pack".

The US was rather close to getting Newfoundland in 1948.

Civilization 6 has Canada as a faction. Released 2019

WHAT!?

I knew the franchise had gone downhill, but I didn’t know it had gotten this bad. Apologies to Canada I guess.

The have Australia as well, IIRC.

Setting aside Benjamin's socialism, it seems to me that the important aspect of this definition is the dislocation of politics from materiality, and its fusion with aesthetics.

What is Trump's focus on curtailing immigration if not extremely material?

The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

Is this an example of the introduction of aesthetics into political life? How about this? I'm pretty sure I could provide additional examples, but let's start with these two.

Setting aside Benjamin's socialism, it seems to me that the important aspect of this definition is the dislocation of politics from materiality, and its fusion with aesthetics.

Could you lay out a general case for what the "dislocation of politics from materiality and its fusion with aesthetics" means? My understanding would be that politics stops being about concrete facts and rational analysis, and instead becomes about nebulous, likely irrational beliefs. Would that be accurate?

Put another way: Trump just says shit that he thinks will sound good, and then the ideological apparatus that's grown up around him rushes to rationalize and actualize it, even when that makes no fucking sense.

It seems to me that this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters, and assert that the reason you are noticing it is some combination of less-polished execution and a more acute situation.

I understand that my claim here is isomorphic to a low-effort dismissal, but that is not my intention. To the extent that this is an accurate description of a real problem, the problem did not even remotely stop with Trump, and it certainly will not end with him.

this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters

Trump represents a difference in kind. Whether he is a fascist is the sort of question that generates more heat than light and so is not a terribly interesting question, but certainly his actions and rhetoric toward a US ally and fellow Liberal democracy are totally illogical, nonsensical, amoral, and speak to a man who has an extremely inaccurate model of the world and/or thought processes that are not coherent. This is not an alike thing to e.g. Having a snappy propaganda-esque poster of yourself made as per your counterexamples. Previous presidents/administrations have been anchored in reality (and morality) in a way that Trump et al are not. Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.

I know that you see Trump as your last, best hope against woke and progressivism, and so you use your intellectual horsepower and debate techniques honed here in themotte to carry water for him. But there is no intellectual basis for trumpism, and your attempts to create one is nothing more than sanewashing. Tracingwoodgrains had the right of this: as true as it is that Harris was a soulless avatar of The Machine, Trump was unworthy of defeating that machine.

I know that you will never agree that Trump is a piece of shit, if for no other reason than you see it as bad tactics. But I would hope that, at least, when you are alone with your thoughts, you might idly wish that your philosophy had a better spokesman.

Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.

I mean, at the very least he hasn't yet brought about the Handmaid's Tale-style dystopia his presidency was supposedly going to usher in , so I think there's some way to go before declaring all his opponents' fears vindicated.

Let me try to cut right to the chase. I can confirm much of what you say here.

Yes, I do wish that my philosophy had a better spokesman. Certainly. I'm concerned about how Trump's behavior has seemingly become more erratic since his first term. I wouldn't say I'm "alarmed" yet, but I am concerned. I don't in any way support his aggressive rhetoric towards Canada. Maybe he's going senile, maybe this is just what he always would have been like in the absence of guardrails, I don't know. It's not ideal.

But nonetheless my support for him remains. The anti-woke vote is always the correct vote, full stop. That's basically the long and short of it. I mean, these people literally can't help themselves. They can't stop themselves from hating white people. They're running around with their hair on fire about the collapse of the rules-based global order and yet they still manage to find the time to get their jabs in at white people. Any action which decreases the cultural and institutional power of these people is ipso facto correct, even if it's risky.

So, yes, I'd prefer a more competent figure at the helm. But if Trump's the best anti-woke option we've got then so be it.

I mean, these people literally can't help themselves.

I had a brief look at that article and honestly couldn't help thinking there's something weird about calling a country independent while also implying it's unconditionally entitled to international aid to keep hundreds of thousands of its own citizens dying from AIDS.

Yeah, if this were the peak of the Cold War, an antagonistic nation would probably spurn Western aid.

Heck, if you swapped the name of the President in the headline, you could even argue that we "punished South Africa for independence" during Apartheid. Now, granted, the main consequences of the embargoes on South Africa were things like "Israel is one of the only countries they can trade with" and "there's basically no foreign-made shows on TV besides The Sweeney," and possibly not things like "AIDS will ravage the population."

Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared

Over the last decade, the prediction/warning/whatever I've most frequently heard about a Donald Trump presidency has been that he is a white supremacist KKK neo-Nazi with concrete plans to transform the United States into a white ethnostate (optionally also a Christian theocracy), which necessitates rounding up anyone who isn't white, cisgender, heterosexual or Christian and herding them into concentration camps. I literally don't think there was a single day in 2016 in which I didn't see or hear the "Trump = Hitler" comparison at least once. A distant second was "Trump is a Russian asset".

After four years of Trump in the Oval Office, this accusation became increasingly untenable, so his critics abruptly changed course and started accusing him of being a crypto-fascist with no respect for democratic institutions. In this regard, his critics are on much firmer ground (I've been saying for a decade that Trump has far more in common with Orbán or Berlusconi than with old Adolf), so this pivot made a lot of sense.* What doesn't make sense is that his critics are now pretending that this was the only class of accusations they'd ever been levelling at him. (The "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see" thing still gets periodically trotted out, courtesy of slow learners who haven't yet gotten the message that we're no longer at war with Eurasia.)

This is the same kind of blatant goalpost-moving and historical revisionism Scott complained about when grading his Trump predictions. Throughout the run-up to the 2016 election, all I heard was a never-ending stream of "Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to round up all the Muslims, Trump is going to kill all the Latinos, Trump is going to round up all the gays and trans people, Trump is going to turn America into Gilead". After four years of nothing even remotely like this transpiring, the people who had made these predictions just cited a bunch of other random bad shit Trump and his supporters did (e.g. January 6th) and turned around and said "see? We warned you!"

It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared. Show me the concentration camps, then we can talk. At least have the humility to acknowledge that careless accusations of genocidal ambition on Trump's part have only helped him: when facing more reasonable accusations of taking a cavalier approach to the rule of law and democratic institutions, Trump can quite reasonably defend himself by pointing out that his critics were crying wolf when they accused him of being Hitler, so why wouldn't they be crying wolf now?

I know when you said that he's showing himself to be "everything" his opponents feared, you were speaking figuratively, and you don't think that literally every criticism/accusation/whatever levelled against Donald Trump was well-founded. But I feel like there's some kind of Pareto distribution, where 80% of attacks/criticisms/warnings about Trump took the form "Trump is a genocidal white supremacist" (optionally also a Christian fundamentalist, heteronormative etc.), then "Trump is a Russian asset", then "Trump is a fascist with no respect for democratic institutions". I think honesty and humility behooves people to acknowledge that 80% of their predictions failed to come to pass. When 80% of your accusations/predictions fail to come to pass (90% if you include all the utterly baseless accusations of Russian collusion), I don't think you deserve a prognostication medal because some of the remaining 10% were accurate.

*Google Trends shows the precise point at which "Trump is going to turn America into Gilead" stopped being The Narrative, in favour of "Trump is a fascist authoritarian". The obvious objection to this interpretation of the data is that most of the searches for The Handmaid's Tale pertained to the novel's television adaptation (which, incredibly, is still running); the even more obvious rebuttal to that objection is that the only reason the television series even exists is because of hysterical scaremongering about the alleged parallels between the novel and Trump's America.

Yes, and Obama is a Kenyan Muslim communist with a fake birth certificate, a trans wife, and also he's probably the antichrist. Weak men are superweapons.

This is a class of objection that is very popular among Trump's supporters, as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible), and it also neatly elides any discussion of what Trump has actually said and done. "see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is. I personally have nothing to apologise for on that front, as I never engaged in such hysteria.

Trump is unlike Hitler in many ways. One of those ways is that, unlike Trump, Hitler had a theory. He 'knew' what had caused the ills of Germany, and acted accordingly. Trump, on the other hand, is just a thoughtless man with no moral center. His greatest achievement in this term so far has been to remove the safety rails that kept him from fucking anything up too badly in his first term. From here we are in uncharted territory. It is impossible to know what Trump is going to do next, he spouts so much bullshit that not even his strongest advocates can predict him. But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.

With all that said, I don't entirely disagree with the thrust of your post. The reason that a man like Donald Trump appealed to so many is that progressives overplayed their hand. I feel no need to let those who pushed woke to this point off the hook. But if they have to own that, then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.

Weak men are superweapons.

When your prior comment says

Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.

I'm not sure how one could interpret this other than that you're full-throatedly defending the weakest of the weakmen.

Sure, if that's the hill you want to die on I'll cop that that was an overbroad statement. It is pretty common for Trump's supporters to demand maximal charity for every dumbshit retarded thing he says ('oh, that's not what he really means') while offering absolutely zero leeway for rhetoric or hyperbole in the statements his opponents.

I am pretty sick of being expected to give Trump orders of magnitude more charity than he or his supporters would ever give to me.

Weak men are superweapons.

Transparent false equivalence. Ostensibly respectable left-leaning newspapers of record spent years milking the "Trump = Hitler" comparisons for all they were worth. Russiagate was a nonsensical conspiracy theory elevated to the status of a federal inquiry. I'll grant that a lot of people who should have known better gave the birth certificate theory more credence than it deserved, but the only people I've seen claiming that Michelle Obama has a penis are extremely online far-right weirdos. If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.

as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible)

Of course it's not realistic to expect everyone who dislikes Trump never to act histrionic or retarded. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to request mainstream, ostensibly neutral institutions to dial down the hysteria a smidge.

"see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is.

Why not? Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.

But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.

Agreed.

then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.

I don't have to own anything. I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way, I've personally attended at least one protest against a policy he enacted, and even if I had been eligible to vote for him in 2016, 2020 or 2024 (neither being a US citizen nor residing in the US), I wouldn't have.

If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.

Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".

Fair enough, anyone who claimed that Trump was literally a Hitler 2.0 hell bent on a new holocaust went too far. Anyone who stopped short of that, including those who merely accused him of being a 'danger to democracy' has, I think, been vindicated. There were plenty of contemporaneous articles which evaluated Trump as a menace without descending into hysteria.

Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.

but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole. 'Ha! you thought he was a wannabe mass murderer, but in fact he is just a wannabe imperialist and warmonger'. Wow, great point. This is definitely where the nexus of the conversation should be.

I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way

Fair enough. Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.

Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.

As someone who voted for Hillary in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Kamala in 2024, I second what Folamh3 responded about this apparent arguments-as-soldiers worldview. But I also want to add on that, we can combine the last 2 paragraphs of that comment to see that, from a purely selfish, power-hungry perspective, this sort of thinking is counterproductive. There's no shortage of very good, very well-supported, and very non-partisan reasons why Trump is and would be a terrible POTUS. Yet much of the messaging against him was so filled with hyperbole that even in 2016, calling Trump "Giga-Hitler" or whatever was considered cliche. Things have tended to escalate since.

And this has resulted largely in the discrediting of the people and organizations that kept up this hyperbole. When someone keeps demonstrating that they want to send a message in order to accomplish a certain goal instead of wanting to describe reality accurately (which, at a minimum, requires taking a highly skeptical view of one's own biases and welcoming criticism and feedback from people who disagree with you vehemently), then other people notice and lower their credibility accordingly. I believe it was a commenter here that described it as something like "Media keeps pressing the 'attack Trump/hurt own credibility' button" or something like that, and that's what I've been seeing play out over and over again over the past decade. And it's resulted in people seeking out and even creating alternative sources of information and commentary that mainstream news outlets used to be the primary sources for. Arguably, Musk's purchase of Twitter was also an effect. And this has tended to help Trump. And not just Trump, but also people who actually are the types of genocidal fascists that his critics make him out as.

Which, IMHO, has always been the biggest danger to this whole Trump thing that's been going on the past decade. Again, as far back as 2016, I recall reading someone, maybe on SlateStarCodex, saying that they're not afraid of Trump, they're afraid of who might come after Trump. Now, I'm somewhat afraid of Trump, but not that much more than any other Republican POTUS, but I'm definitely more afraid of what could rise up from the farther, even more extreme right wing due to much of the left having so completely discredited its ability to criticize such people.

I think the only way to gain back credibility is to demonstrate that there are very powerful, very influential internal controls that engage in self-reflection and self-criticism of one's own side, in a way that attempts at getting at the truth, especially if the truth helps one's opponents and hurts one's friends. Unfortunately, I've seen a dearth of such things over the past decade, though it's not zero.

I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson.

Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".

but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole.

No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.

I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.

Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.

I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.

I also recall much hay being made of Trump being a terrible racist. Even here in Germany. The next-biggest accusation was him being an Idiot, which always seemed extremely shaky. An idiot millionaire who manages to become POTUS? And in third place was a vague notion of "Orange Man Extremely, Uniquely and Urgently Bad" without further explanation.

An attempt at synthesis of your point and FC's (plus some others, like Zvi's notion of the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster): Governments in the 90s (or whenever) were Right. SJ governments were Wrong. Trump and Musk seem to be Not Even Wrong.

At greater length: there used to be coherence-producing mechanisms in society that kept everybody on the same page and kept policy making sense. Then when SJ nucleated, it hijacked nearly all those mechanisms and put false stuff into them, leading to obvious falsehoods being promulgated (and multiplying due to the principle of explosion) and policies that didn't work. The Trumpian reaction to SJ realised that it could not restore neutrality in those mechanisms (because SJ did too good a job of installing political commissariats in them) and it was excluded from the Overton Window those mechanisms had produced, so it took a sledgehammer to their credibility and turned much of the right-wing against them. However, it failed to build new coherence-producing mechanisms to replace them*, leaving much of its base and apparently also Trump/Musk without any way of identifying and co-ordinating on truth and on rational planning; they're just saying things. And, well, a government that's working with no map at all is going to do worse at a large number of things than one with a map that loosely resembles but does not match the territory.

Of course, a little buffoonery until Trumpism can sort itself out wouldn't be the end of the world... except that we have a certain drooling dragon at the door watching our every move, which means it might actually be the end of the world as we know it. Oh, well, I live in Bendigo and have most of my prep done**; "I'm clear. Are you?"

@FCfromSSC, thoughts?

*There are rightist intellectuals capable of identifying truth, and there now is an alt-media apparatus capable of dispensing it. The problem is that one isn't plugged into the other - not in the USA, at least, although we seem to be doing a lot better in Oz (the UAP is showing some signs of Trumpian brain rot, but it's not even our biggest alt-right party, so I'm not very worried). A lot of us were counting on Musk and Vance to be lynchpins, but Musk appears to have gone nuts and I haven't heard much about Vance in all this.

**There's a reasonable amount that's best left to "when the war starts" because it's got downsides and/or a use-by date plus isn't panic-buying bait.

Good post, my only concern is that it goes too far in an attempt to make order out of chaos. Trump isn't flying blind because the sensemaking institutions he inherited are so corrupted as to be worthless. He is flying blind because he is an unrigorous vibes-based thinker. I too hoped that Elon would form some sort of intellectual foundation for this administration, but as you note, he has gone off the deep end. Vance is a clever guy, but he is also a suckup. I don't think he has it in him to actually stand up to Trump, and I think he knows that even if he does Trump will just burn him.

Trump isn't flying blind because the sensemaking institutions he inherited are so corrupted as to be worthless. He is flying blind because he is an unrigorous vibes-based thinker.

Scott, "Planet-Sized Nutshell":

There is an extraordinarily useful pattern of refactored agency in which you view humans as basically actors playing roles determined by their incentives. Anyone who strays even slightly from their role is outcompeted and replaced by an understudy who will do better.

In a sense it's both. The reason Trump is that way is because he's Trump. Why is Trump POTUS, though, rather than losing the Republican nomination back in 2016? Well, because all the sensemaking institutions said "Don't nominate Trump" and the Republican base treated that as an endorsement. "Be a huckster" was no longer a losing strategy to get the Republican nomination, because the Republican base no longer trusted the institutions that normally filtered out hucksters, because those institutions by then also filtered out anyone loyal to the Red Tribe; indeed, the base went so far as to anti-trust the institutions and deliberately do the opposite of what they said.

Well, as they say, reversed stupidity isn't intelligence.

It's just, it's probably not going to be stupid in the exact same way as the existing stupidity that it's trying to reverse. And a plurality of voters might see that as a good enough option to try out compared to the existing stupidity. This is roughly how I perceive most Trump supporters, especially the subgroup that was behind the shift of, I think, literally every single one of the 50 states shifting towards Trump in the 2024 election compared to the 2020 one.

The problem is that there was no Good Populist. Something like the Trump base has been around for a while - but somehow, every candidate that appealed to them had big problems, ones that they should care about even by their own values. And this extends even beyond just american populists: populism is the secret political weapon that the likes of Orban can stay in power by fulfilling. Noone ever uses this tactic for good or even neutral ends. Noone decent ever gives populists what they want, you may at best string them along with empty promises and even thats kind of sus.

I dont see how you could have an explanation for the above, that doesnt change the meaning of "Dont you wish you had a better spokesman" into something unrecognisable.

Surely someone has told Trump!?

Why would anyone tell him?

Border state republicans take away Trump’s toys tariffs until he can play nicely?

It'll only take four in the Senate, three in the House, to end this nonsense. But after Jan 6, Republican politicians have accepted that the base will support Trump no matter what. They certainly won't turn against him over mere talk of a recession, and if the defectors can avert a recession, they'll have nothing to blame Trump for.

Big chunks of the Republican base voted trump for some combination of tax cuts, social conservatism, immigration restriction, and peace in foreignstan, while hoping he wouldn’t do tariffs. Republican congresscritters can easily get away with taking this particular toy from him and endorsing the rest of his agenda.

Trump has a way of dragging the party/base towards him.

I've seen some right wing figures who in no way expected a tariff war with Canada falling somewhere between joking about it now (a coward's way to not take a position) and going "well, maybe we should let him cook and see" or uncritically repeating his statements about the trade imbalance.

I think it's the attention gap: the average American doesn't think about Canada enough to immediately jump on this. If they start feeling the pain themselves (especially if the EU and China are also implementing their own tariffs), that may change and there may be some pullback.

As of the last time I checked the news, back down to 25% again after Ford backed off on the export tax.

For the trolling enthusiasts and Art-of-the-Deal readers out there: At what point am I allowed to take his rhetoric on Canada seriously? What baffles me is how the hell he could want it in the first place. It's got so many problems... But with that latest post from him, I kind of believe he actually does want it.

Personally, I'd rather see a Mexico takeover. It would be a lot more satisfying to make it a zero-to-hero country, maybe go in and strangle the cartels to death and ensure good elections with no corruption, and watch it bloom. Maybe it would get even better than Spain!

It seems to have worked to stop the counter tariff, actually. I wonder how long this dance will continue.

It's not a bad negotiation tactic to stake an initial position that you don't really want so you can give it up later. Trump's problem is that everyone knows he does this, so he has to go to even further extremes and repeatedly insist on them to draw the other side's estimate of what he really wants closer to his side.

The old chestnut is that we should take Trump seriously but not literally, and I think with Canada that's true. The global left for decades has talked about the American Empire and Trump has said, well, why not? That doesn't need to mean formal statehood but it does need to include personal deference to the emperor.

There are surprisingly reasonable arguments that the US should take steps to break up and annex parts of Canada (or at least intervene with their domestic policies of mass immigration that are undermining stability) to sustain continental hegemony:

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/the-canadian-question

Ty for the link, interesting read.

He's a real estate guy, Canada is a lot of real estate. You could connect Alaska to lower 48 instead of the separation that currently exists.

I am Canadian. I'm neutral to mildly positive on an American take-over, only because our gdp per capita and median wages are abysmally low compared to the USA. Healthcare is...eh, I've tried to crunch the numbers on cost vs time, and end of the day I still think ours is slightly better for my situation. Took me 3 months to get a hernia surgery, and a relative in the states 3 days - but it was $3k for them. Mine was "free". But man, i am an outlier, people here hate america now, moreso than ever before

But man, i am an outlier, people here hate america now, moreso than ever before

I think it was mostly a LARP before, except for a few people deeply invested in a sort of left-wing anti-Americanism.

Now? It'll be interesting to see what happens after Trump is gone because Canada needs the US but the loathing may linger.

Again I think the rhetoric by Trump is peak trolling. He is pointing out Canada’s smallness (they would simply be a 51st state — on par with Wyoming) and picking at Canadian’s reflexive anti Americanness. And the Canadians are falling for it hook line and sinker. Now is the trolling good? I don’t know.

My opinion as an American: it would make more sense to break Canada up into 3 pieces. Let Quebec go free or be a territory of France if it wants. Let Vancouver and the surrounding area be an autonomous city state. The rest should become part of the US, because "the rest" (so the prairie provinces and the maritimes) really has a lot in common with the US, and it's just an unnecessary hassle having a border.

A Vancouver city state would just turn into a Chinese province in North America.

It's only 20% Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Metro_Vancouver#Ethnic_diversity

So basically, North Night City. At least they’d have the Island as a counterbalance, but still.

This is also close to my opinion as someone unfortunate enough to share a government of, but not an opinion with, Toronto boomers.

There are 4 major nations in Canada: Quebec, Toronto-Montreal, Maritimes (incl. Newfoundland), West.

Those are the zones of concern- the “states”, if you will. And if Toronto boomers break the country into pieces prosecuting this stupid little war of theirs, this is what you’ll likely be negotiating with. In fact, you already are, but most people aren’t aware of that yet.

The US is already an empire of 11 countries, much as Canada is already an empire/post-national state of 4 or 5 countries. If Canada loses the West to the US, it’ll be the end of Canada, and it might be the end of the US as you know it as well.

The best outcome for the both of us is that the West separates from Canada, adopts the USD directly, and becomes a new nation. Then we can threaten to peel off your northern states once the Ds get elected again. Eastern grievances are not Western grievances.

If Canada loses the West to the US, it’ll be the end of Canada, and it might be the end of the US as you know it as well.

Why would it be the end of either country? Let alone both.

Because we'd be a neutral alternative to both, allowing us to peel off free/red states should the US be rewarded with a real tyrant of a D sometime. Canada (as in, Toronto to Montreal) is a dead end for anyone not living in those areas and, much like how FCfromSSC talks about a national divorce for the US, the divide (and emnity) East vs. West is very strong here too.

interesting. can i ask, how long have you been canadian? fewer than 5 years? are you perhaps of a subcontinental persuasion?

This is kind of funny - does my writing style sound Indian? Or is it the fact that I don't have much national pride after the country spent the last decade trying to stamp it out?

I am very white, born and raised in 'Berta. Family history Acadia/Australia/Wales/USA mix

On the American side, I can see a case to be made for "stronger together" generally, but I feel like if Trump were serious about this, he's going the wrong way: winning hearts and minds would be the first step to doing so.

On the other hand, there are relatively few (peaceful) examples of nations unifying successfully. Notionally the EU seems to intend to do that, with discrete steps taken, but hasn't agreed to form, say, a single army together yet. The US Constitutional Convention maybe counts as an example, and IMO proves the point that we are stronger united as 50 states, but if you were trying to do it today, I can't imagine getting Texas, Florida, California, and New York to agree both to throw in their lot together and to let DC be in charge of them.

What I want most of all, is something like the EU - total trade union (so no customs at all), and free movement. If we ended up with that, I would build Donald a statue

Hey, thanks to Trump you might finally get a customs union within Canada.

Totally, if anything this might actually create political capital to build some pipelines, get rid of internal trade barriers, etc.

It's a real mind fuck to want Trump to lose but not to lose so soon that everyone goes back to business as usual.

I think that would have been possible as a goal six months ago. Less so, today. Although that would probably require more harmonization of national security and immigration concerns, I think compromises could have been worked out.

total trade union (so no customs at all)

*customs union

I think Trump would be happy with Finlandising Canada to some degree, like Greenland the saber rattling is always accompanied with national security allusions and they have been a bit too conciliatory to the Chinese for the comfort of a US that's so obviously pivoting to face east (well, west, but you get my point).

...what does Finlandising mean in this instance? During the actual Finlandisation, Finland was neutral, while Canada is right now in a military alliance with the US. A Finland that was in a military alliance with Soviet Union wouldn't be Finlandised, it would have been an outright part of the Soviet block.

Here I mean giving up the ability to have a foreign policy to a foreign power. But this works too, I think the US would be fine with a Canada that has a formal commitment to neutrality.

I think the US would be fine with a Canada that has a formal commitment to neutrality.

Do you really? I’m curious about your reasoning because that seems far from obvious to me. With the status quo, even with a fairly dysfunctional Canada, the US gets a lot of value out of NORAD and, to a lesser but still meaningful extent, Canadian participation in the Five Eyes. There’s certainly room for improvement (e.g. Canada needs to be far more wary of foreign influence/espionage in its government, and needs to change its immigration policy before it becomes a source of illegal immigrants and smugglers like Mexico is) but a truly neutral Canada would seem to be strictly worse for the US.

It's not the best outcome for the US, but I think it's acceptable. I don't think Americans care as much about Canadian contribution to their alliance as they do, say, the UK. Territorial security is a lot more important.

NORAD is somewhat valuable, but I think the US would trade it for a border that doesn't let fentanyl or infiltrators pass and a convincing guarantee that China will never be able to threaten the US from the North.

I'll gladly concede that annexation is a better outcome (and the optimal outcome probably Canada being a US puppet state) but neither seems very likely, Trump saber rattling aside.

Interesting -- I do see your point. I think the status quo of Canadian relations/border control would have to get a lot worse before I'd see neutrality as an upgrade, but that's not impossible. The fundamental problem is that it's hard for me to imagine a neutral Canada as more or even equally resilient to Chinese infiltration/influence than a status-quo Canada, such that "a convincing guarantee that China will never be able to threaten the US from the North" is basically impossible unless Canada is in a military alliance with the US (i.e., NORAD). I can't really imagine a scenario where a neutral Canada doesn't become a diplomatic and intelligence battleground between the US and China (as well as Russia and India, among others).

Annexing Canada outright would probably be desirable in an abstract sense but is entirely unrealistic; a much-more-subservient or "puppet" Canada would definitely be good for the US though. Especially given their sometimes very strange foreign policy choices (too deferential to China when the US is their open enemy, weirdly hostile to India when the US is trying to bring them into alignment -- as an aside I think the bad relationship with India is an ironic consequence of importing such an enormous number of poorly-assimilated Indian immigrants, they are importing grievances and political fractiousness along with them). If, as you said in your previous comment, Canada essentially gave up its foreign policy to US control then that would be a great outcome for the US, although of course that seems very unlikely.

I do wonder if Trump is aiming for that sort of outcome, albeit in his particular incompetent and clumsy manner. Perhaps he thinks he can bring the Canadian government to heel and force them into a subservient position internationally, or force them to take action on their immigration/border control fiasco... but trying to do this through an "all stick, no carrot" approach seems like a terrible idea. Not least because he's making the Canadian conservative party less popular through association, and if they get another liberal government (which is only even on the table because of the backlash against Trump spilling into a backlash against the Canadian right, prior to this diplomatic clusterfuck the conservatives were pretty much locked in to win, afaik) it will make pretty much every US goal harder to achieve.

ensure good elections with no corruption

Let's show we can do that north of the Rio Grande first.

American corruption is a lot different from Mexican corruption.

Amazing what you can achieve when your political assassins can afford scope rings and have more training than getting kicked off a high school shooting club.

I joke, but with lists like that it must take some balls to be a Mexican politician.

I agree Mexico is the much tastier target. In my personal assessment, Mexico is more culturally compatible with the US than Canada. The US could sort out the corruption and drugs, Mexico would get a massive infusion of cash. I’d gladly support a 10 trillion dollar buyout of Mexico, and it will come with a canal, so what’s not to love?

As to your question of Trumps seriousness for acquiring Canada… he appears to be quite serious. However, approximately no one else in the US body or government holds that position including other Republicans (as evidenced by that line in his speech getting notably no applause)… and as ever, I feel obliged to apologize for the shameful treatment of your country, assuming you are Canadian.

I agree Mexico is the much tastier target. In my personal assessment, Mexico is more culturally compatible with the US than Canada.

That's an... interesting proposition. To start, how do you expect the language integration to work out? Just have dual national languages? National languages on the state level? How do you feel about Spanish slowly (or not so slowly) creeping north, possibly displacing English in the southwestern states within a few decades?

Language is extremely important for the national consciousness. And unfortunately, both the old stock and the new citizens don't exactly have a great history/culture of bilingualism. The number of people being actually fully fluent in both languages is currently extremely low (when compared to existing countries with multiple national languages).

My prediction is you'd have independence movements solely based on language, and quickly.

The number of people being actually fully fluent in both languages is currently extremely low (when compared to existing countries with multiple national languages).

Is this true? Perhaps my perspective is skewed by living in San Diego, which is roughly one-third Latino and is deeply integrated with Mexican and Mexican-American culture. I personally know dozens of people who are fully fluent (in the sense of being able to competently converse about a wide range of topics) in both Spanish and English. When it comes to second-generation Latinos in most parts of the country, or at least in the Southwest, my perception is that bilingual fluency is actually very high. Sure, a given individual would probably struggle to write a novel or interpret a dense legal document full of technical jargon, but that’s true of a great many monolingual English speakers as well.

(And in fact in some cases, native Spanish-speaking Latinos may actually be more conversant with the formal grammatical structure of written English than they are with written Spanish, since they learned Spanish as a spoken language growing up, but didn’t receive any formal education in it since they attend English-speaking American public schools.)

Is this true? Perhaps my perspective is skewed by living in San Diego

Probably, it's the location I would expect to look the best in that respect.

I personally know dozens of people who are fully fluent (in the sense of being able to competently converse about a wide range of topics) in both Spanish and English. When it comes to second-generation Latinos in most parts of the country, or at least in the Southwest, my perception is that bilingual fluency is actually very high.

In my experience, many of those people actually can't e.g. do their standard white-collar job in their second language. If you want to have a country with dual national languages (as opposed to making Mexico an imperial possession as someone suggested below), you need a lot of people who can do that well, since a lot of national/federal institutions need to be run in both languages.

At least you would need those people, traditionally. A lot of that might shortly be superfluous, since language models work well across languages and federal institutions might be a thing of the past!

But just imagine being in the Army, and working alongside an integrated Mexican auxiliary battalion - or integrating US special forces into a Mexican-led theater. You'd really want at least everybody above O-2 being bilingual. Messing around with interpreters under fire is pretty much unacceptable.

The answer here is empire; Mexico wouldn't make sense integrated into the US, but would as a semi-autonomous imperial possession. For different reasons, so would Canada (probably multiple parts). The problem is I believe the US would be very bad at actual empire (as opposed to what is often called the American empire), so I don't support this.

The US could sort out the corruption and drugs,

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh citation very much needed.

It comes with a canal

Which canal is that?

It’s a nominal canal - see Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor project.

i would guess cozetcoalcos - salina cruz. it is 200km - so not that much for modern building. Suez is 193.

Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission for 1899–1901 pp. 69–70:

The Tehuantepec summit is in the neighborhood of 700 feet above tide water. It is, moreover, a broad summit which cannot be materially lowered by any excavation of practicable dimensions. It is doubtful whether a water supply can be found for a summit level. It would require 20 locks of an average lift of nearly 35 feet on each side of the summit. The cost of these locks alone, on the basis of the estimates considered in another chapter of this report, would be about $200,000,000, while the canal would probably at least double this estimate. Attractive as the Tehuantepec route is from its geographical location, it must be discarded as impracticable for a canal.

That's 400 M$ for the Tehuantepec route, versus 190 M$ for the Nicaragua route and 180 M$ for the Panama route (pages 261–262). (To convert to 2025 dollars, multiply by 37—so, 15 G$ vs. 7.0 G$ and 6.7 G$.)

Sure, but unlike the Suez, there's mountains/hills in Tehuantepec. Hundreds of feet of elevation difference, a canal would need many dozens of locks, maybe hundreds.

I can see a high capacity rail line, but digging a canal to rival the one in Panama is madness - especially as long as the one in Panama exists, and acts as economic competition.

Transshipment costs are so massive relative to extra ocean-miles these days that I can't imagine a short rail line ever making sense. Hell, the existing canal is fairly marginal iirc.

Reminds me, I wonder if anyone has a breakdown on how east/West Coast imports from china reach the middle of the country.

Edit: well I'll be damned, Maersk at least tried it for 5 months last year during the throughput restrictions. Rail link from Balboa to Manzanillo.
So it's not as crazy an idea as I thought. But still not currently viable even in the worse case situation for canal capacity.

I can see a high capacity rail line

You'd need pretty serious port infrastructure at either end for this -- there are ports there now so it's probably feasible, but I'll bet it would be expensive if you were going to handle significant volume.

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