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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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A hacker hacked NYU (both some of their internal databases and their public website) to show that NYU is still practicing affirmative action in spite of the supreme court ruling that was supposed to end the practice:

https://nypost.com/2025/03/22/us-news/nyus-website-seemingly-hacked-and-replaced-by-apparent-test-scores-racial-epithet/

What would be the way for the courts to actually make sure this ruling gets enforced? Would some sort of federal commission like the ones that were put in place to monitor black voting rights in the south work?

Racial gaps in test scores weren’t banned by the Supreme Court at all.

allegedly the hacker has some kind of anime meme account on twitter: https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1903559150023344354

The NYU hacker working to save western civilization appears to be a young gentleman called @bestniggy who follows me For most of my life that sentence would have surprised me but now it seems almost normal

A hacked website can just as easily display false data as real data. It seems real from a common sense angle but the court system can't just take "Well this random guy on the internet who edited the webpage says it's legit" so realistically someone has to try to sue for discrimination and get it to the courts so they can subpoena things properly.

For what it's worth, NYU isn't claiming the data are fabricated, instead so far focusing on the illegality of the action.

Though I suppose they have a team of lawyers advising them very closely to say the minimum necessary.

They jump some large datasets as well. It's entirely possible they faked it all (or at least the parts to show discrimination) but the amount of data leaked makes me think it isn't fake.

The way the courts prevent this is by requiring you to make your case even before you reach the discovery phase. They do not do this for discrimination in the other direction.

A brief primer on the forthcoming Canadian federal election

I say brief in an attempt by myself to keep this short. The newly sworn-in Mark Carney has asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and call an election for April 28. This was as an anticipated reaction to the recent swings in polling so it's not exactly a surprise, but it's still short notice and parties are rushing to fill out their candidates and get their campaign in action.

The big story in all of this is the massive collapse in Conservative polling support, which is what prompted the election call as the Liberals hope to capitalize. The Liberals have been in power for ten years now, and were up until Justin Trudeau's resignation in December seemingly cooked. The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide. Now, as the election kicks off, polls suggest something between a comfortable Liberal minority to a majority government. What happened?

For general context: Canada has four major political parties, three national (progressive NDP, centrist Liberals, centre-right Conservatives) and one regional (Bloc Québecois). There are also two minor parties, the environmental Greens and libertarian/populist People's Party. Canadians are in general not partisan: it's very natural for support to shift between parties, and your average Canadian will have voted for 3 different federal parties by the time they hit middle age. What's unprecedented is the degree of the swing in support towards the Liberals, not that it never happens; in 2015 Justin Trudeau entered the 5 week election campaign thoroughly in third place but ended up winning a majority.

I think there's three major factors, and they are all individuals rather than larger undercurrents. The first is obviously Donald Trump. Never has one man done more for Canadian pride and unity. Canada of course is heavily intertwined economically and culturally with the United States, and the actions of the Man Down South has put everything in a bit of a frenzy. For once we are actually seeing meaningful progress towards dismantling inter-Canadian trade barriers, to building new nationwide infrastructure, and indulging in a bit of national pride which has been treated as rather disdainful the past decade. It also goes without saying that Trump's antics are repulsive to most Canadians, and you could not do worse as an advertisement for conservatism to Canadians. It does not help that there's a very fringe and annoying portion of MAGA Canadians, or that the federal Conservatives have done an agonizingly slow job of voicing meaningful denunciations to Trump's tariffs and annexation threats. (By comparison: Doug Ford whipped about quick and used the bully pulpit very effectively, and won his Progressive Conservatives another majority in Ontario).

Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, is the second factor. To put it simply: he is not an inspiring candidate to most Canadians. He has spent the past two decades in Parliament (he has never worked outside of politics; he became an MP more or less immediately after graduating university) as the attack dog, and he has kept up that spirit as party leader. He has incessantly and somewhat annoyingly been fixated on Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax for the past few years, ever eager to get in a dig. The problem: Justin Trudeau is gone, and so is the consumer carbon tax (Carney axed it on his first day as PM). Poilievre was never a popular individual, but up against an even less popular leader in Trudeau and his generally maleffective ministry Canadians would have grumblingly voted for him. Now suddenly he is very much the dog who caught the car. The things he has been harping about for years are gone, and he has not shifted his message an iota since the start of Trump's upheavals. The old tricks are simply not working anymore. I think if the previous Conservative leader Erin O'Toole were still leading things they would still have a comfortable lead. He was much more palatable to the average Canadian and far less vulnerable to the changing of the winds. Poilievre's combative nature has put them in a real bind because even if they win the most seats it's hard to imagine them forming government: the things I hear from insiders suggest people just hate working with him, and he's done his best to piss off all the other parties.

And that is particularly damaging because of the third factor, Mark Carney. He might be the most qualified individual to have ever become Canadian Prime Minister; he was appointed to lead the Bank of Canada during the Great Recession under the previous Conservative government, and was subsequently the first non-Briton to head the Bank of England. In a time where there are suddenly great questions about the economic future of the country, he is exactly the type of person voters look to. (Whether he will lead the country effectively remains to be seen.) I've often said that in times of turmoil even the most dysfunctional of democracies will pick boring bankers as leaders, but I was imagining this to be the case in 2029: I really did not see this polling turnaround coming. I think everyone misjudged Trump's capacity for havoc. Poilievre's partisan nature and lack of experience are very stark in comparison to Carney who at least so far is setting a more centrist sort of tone in his messaging and is soliciting notable from both the Conservatives and NDP to run for the Liberals in this election.

The only other thing to add is the real loser in all this might be the NDP. They had helped prop up the Liberals for the past few years and for the last two were generally polling ahead of them. But now the tent is collapsing and all their support is shifting to the Liberals instead. I very much dislike their leader Jagmeet Singh and will not be sad to see him go, but it looks likely that the NDP will lose official party status. It's a long long fall from where they were ten years ago, when they entered the 2015 campaign looking likely to form their first government.

My personal opinions are as follows: part of me wants to see the Liberals win a majority because it would be very funny, and I quite strongly dislike Poilievre and would find it simply embarrassing if a man like that were the leader of my country. We've been through ten years of Trudeau making a mockery of us and do not need any more nonsense. The other half of me finds it a bit galling that the Liberals might escape ten years of misrule and divisive politics without punishment. They are for better or for worse the natural ruling party of Canada (and the one I am most closely aligned with, ideologically) and that means they are the experts at shifting with the public, but it means they also can get arrogant and complacent and that begets all kinds of nonsense and corruption. So I guess I'm hoping for a small Liberal minority that chides the Liberals and forces them to do a better job.

How much of it is due to conservatives/trump vs just dumpstering trudeau working very well?

Coming on the heels of the Biden-Harris switch, I really didn't expect a Trudeau-Carney switch to do much better (and the election hasn't happened yet so I guess I shouldn't speak too soon). Basically nobody knew who Carney was before he ran. He did really well in his election but partly because no other candidate was really given the time of day. Whether it was the media or the party, he was essentially chosen before the voting.

But Canadian politics is not American politics, and here we are. For all that Trump seems to dislike Poilievre, a lot of Canadians see Poilievre as Trump-lite, so the more Trump acts out against Canada, the worse the Conservatives are going to do.

Harris was a weak candidate, though, between being Californian and her race/sex being the things that got her the candidacy.

She was, which was made worse by the way they switched. But she had name recognition and more of a political record than Carney does.

New thing that might possibly hurt the conservatives even more is the recent Breitbart interview by Danielle Smith (premier of Alberta).

In it she says

So I would hope that we could put things on pause is what I’ve told administration officials. Let’s just put things on pause so we can get through an election,”

Notice that it's "on pause" for why people are pointing this out as a failure and

but I would say, on balance, the perspective that Pierre would bring would be very much in sync with, I think…the new direction in America,”

So at a time when Trump is upsetting Canadians so much that it's pushing for a resurgence in support for the liberals, the CPC's public strategy seems to be digging the grave even deeper. Meanwhile the liberal party has done a fantastic taking the sails out of Pierre's campaign by replacing Trudeau and cutting the carbon tax.

There's a very high chance that the conservatives have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here and it's almost entirely thanks to Donald Trump and his aggressive rhetoric and trade wars on Canada, and a strong showing by the Liberals to capitalize on this effectively.

Meanwhile the liberal party has done a fantastic taking the sails out of Pierre's campaign by replacing Trudeau and cutting the carbon tax.

They have not cut the carbon tax when producing goods, only when consuming them. So the price of gas will drop a bit (and as the US shows, this is important enough for them to draw down their strategic reserves for) but that's about it.

All the Liberal party has to do for Easterners is be "their guy" (and being a fresh face doesn't hurt) if they perceive they're under some kind of threat. Only if they're not will they consider voting for what is, from the Eastern perspective, a foreigner.

Also,

the CPC's public strategy

Danielle Smith is not CPC nor federal, nor is her provincial party named the same way. Canadian politics work a little differently.

Danielle Smith is not CPC nor federal, nor is her provincial party named the same way. Canadian politics work a little differently.

I mean, if you're concerned with Canadian unity, it's arguably more alarming that the premier of Alberta is doing this.

PP will understandably be tossed out if he should lose this election and the CPC will likely overcorrect. Any tensions with Smith or the (continued) perception of diverging interests between Alberta and other provinces can't be erased or fixed so easily.

Yeah you're right she's UCP, but they're working in tangent with the CPC. After all her whole interview was about supporting Pierre.

After all her whole interview was about supporting Pierre.

It would be easier for AB to get policy goals accomplished were its people represented in the Federal government, something they haven't been for a long, long time now. Liberals don't listen to anyone outside of Toronto, and it shows.

But I don't think there's a future for Reform parties in this country and yet another CPC loss/Eastern aggression + economic cataclysm might start convincing people of that.

Eastern aggression What do you mean by that?

I think they're referring to the general disdain at the root of Liberal decisions. I can't point to any explicitly discriminatory laws, but the differences in impact are pretty clear.

  • COVID vaccines were distributed to the provinces proportional to (total) population. The Federal government is responsible for providing healthcare to Treaty Indians, while Provincial governments are responsible for providing healthcare to the rest of their residents. The feds assigned a larger-than-proportional number of the doses to go to them (which is probably appropriate given the risk factors) from their province's stock, and as a result non-Native Manitobans got worse access than non-Native Ontarians due to that province's larger Native population.
  • They wanted to increase affordability, so they cut the carbon tax for some home heating. Specifically, for home heating oil which is (almost) exclusively used in the East, while the West uses natural gas. When asked about it, a Liberal MP said that Westerners should elect more Liberals if they want to benefit from the government. This is the clearest example IMO. (Saskatchewan decided that it wanted that tax exemption too, so it stopped collecting/paying the carbon tax on all home heating. I just checked and haven't seen any news about it since then, so it sounds like it worked.)
  • Equalization payments are above 100% of "equal" because the Liberals maintained a Harper-era law that reduced equalization amounts (at the time. Then circumstances changed and the formula gives a different result). Instead of the "have" provinces mostly in the West bringing the "have-not" provinces up to their own level of economic prosperity and services, they're forced to push them above their own levels by a few billion dollars.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but Liberal+BQ is the most probably governing coalition, and liberals might win an outright majority?

We don't really do the Euro-style coalition thing. A minority government has to scare up enough votes from the other parties to pass any given piece of legislation (or any non-confidence motion that the other parties might be able to force). But it isn't as formal, and in practical terms, it isn't necessarily the same party all the time. In this case, for a long time Singh and the NDP could mostly be counted on to support the Trudeau Liberals and several of the thousand cuts they died of took the form of Singh withdrawing that support.

No, Liberals + BQ would actually be a huge sea change in Canadian politics. The Bloc Québécois are effectively in a cordon sanitaire. The national parties are not supposed to vote with them, and any legislation which could only pass through their support is withdrawn instead.

I would actually expect a joint caretaker-ish Liberal-Conservative government over cooperation with the Bloc.

Though if the Liberals are that close to a majority, the NDP support is probably enough to form a government.

No? The Bloc has voted with and propped up minority governments before many many times. The PPC is being kept out.

I don't think they have. At least, they never voted for legislation where their votes were the difference between success and failure. Possibly they've not voted for a non-confidence in a minority government, which I suppose counts. But the governing parties don't cut deals to ensure their vote in such situations, the way they do with other parties.

They came close in 2008-2009, potentially Lib-NDP-Bloc. But that government never actually formed, the Conservatives stayed as minority government.

If you have an example, I'd be happy to see it.

A Liberal + BQ government is not meaningfully distinguishable from a Liberal majority.

The big potential difference is on immigration. The Bloc (besides the PPC) is the only federal party that is immigration-skeptic.

[O'Toole] was much more palatable to the average Canadian and far less vulnerable to the changing of the winds.

Lol, lmao even. That flip-flopping is part of what cost them the election in '21- on the right flank, it's worth noting.

So I guess I'm hoping for a small Liberal minority that chides the Liberals and forces them to do a better job.

The last 6 years suggests this will not happen.

The only other thing to add is the real loser in all this might be the NDP.

Yeah, polarization (an American cultural import) means the Western Socialists are no longer viable. The Bloc is the same way when the people of Quebec get scared the rest of the country's going to take away their toys, which is why the Liberals are doing that well in the polls in the first place.

The other half of me finds it a bit galling that the Liberals might escape ten years of misrule and divisive politics without punishment. They are for better or for worse the natural ruling party of Canada

Upper Canada, its interest party, and those who voted it in have done nothing but destroy the future of this country and its culture without consequence, and I hope the trade war they (and it is exclusively they) are insisting we wage destroys it forever. Fortunately, the manner in which they will wage it has a higher likelihood of doing that.

One thing that annoys me a lot is that I don’t even think Poilievre was slow to denounce the tariffs or other Trump policies (I recall seeing articles about him denouncing them the day they were announced) - I feel like the internet (generously aided by what was probably an advertising blitz for Carney) decided to ignore it.

One thing that happens in Canadian politics is that as a conservative, you do not have any of the leeway granted to a LPC or NDP candidate. Most donations to the LPC are close to the donation limit, and they facilitate the largest transfer of wealth out of the middle class? Well obviously the CPC is the party of neo-feudalism and big business. LPC candidate literally raised from birth to be prime minister with a multi-million trust fund while the CPC candidate was adopted and raised by a middle class family? Clearly the CPC candidate is the elitist.

It’s really frustrating how little people seem to react to the facts on their own. Someone who votes for Carney because he doesn’t care for Poilievre is infinitely more palatable to me than someone who votes for Carney because Poilievre is secretly in the pocket of big business.

One thing that happens in Canadian politics is that as a Reformer, you do not have any of the leeway granted to a Big City Interest candidate

Don't think I have to say anything more than that, really. There are no checks and balances to prevent them from screwing up the rest of the country like there are in the US, which is why this divide is permanent in a way it really isn't there. It's the same problem all one-party states suffer from.

It’s really frustrating how little people seem to react to the facts on their own.

At this point I don't think there's any compromise.

Canada is hardly a one-party state. Sure, the Liberals have been in charge for almost ten years, but before that the Conservatives were similarly in charge for almost ten years.

But I agree that Canada just doesn't have the same checks and balances as the US, either for offices or for individuals. The only thing keeping a PM from being in office for life is that eventually something bad will happen that they'll have to take the blame for. I do wonder how much that's uniquely Canadian vs just being a feature of parliamentary systems.

I do wonder how much that's uniquely Canadian vs just being a feature of parliamentary systems.

Uniquely Canadian is an oxymoron. Also, this is a design feature of Parliamentary systems.

Canada is hardly a one-party state.

Canada in 2006 was not as harshly divided urban/rural as it is now. The ultimate problem is that one specific hyper-urbanized area is able to dominate Canadian politics to the detriment of everyone else, so if it votes as a bloc (and it does far more often than not) for any variety of reasons there aren't any moderating factors (no law, no bill of rights[1], no separation of powers) to slow them down.

Actually, that's another design feature of Parliamentary systems, since the entire reason that system exists is to let London do exactly that to the rest of England. You don't vote for an MP and who they are is irrelevant (again by design- wouldn't want individual members being accountable to the public or anything); you vote for a party and that's it.

[1] Before you say "but the Charter", I will remind you of Section 1, which exists to nullify the entire thing and make it more of a polite suggestion than anything that can be used to defend oneself against government overreach.

Could you elaborate on this ? Do you mean the GTA ?

25% of Canada's population lives inside of Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal. Ofc they get to decide regional and national outcomes.

  • Greater Toronto controls Ontario.
  • Greater Montreal controls Quebec
  • BC / Vancouver are wild cards
  • Greater Montreal + Greater Toronto control national politics because they have more people than all the remaining provinces combined (Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland)

For all intents and purposes, the nation of Canada is one consequential urban corridor containing 50% of its population (Quebec City -> Toronto). The remaining Russia sized mass doesn't get a say, because it is the minority. That is how it should be. For comparison, the Boston - NYC - Philly - Baltimore - DC corridor only contains 14% of Americans.

the nation of Canada is one consequential urban corridor containing 50% of its population (Quebec City -> Toronto)

Which is why it should be its own country. They have very little in common with those outside there and everything they do is destructive to those outside of it.

That is how it should be.

The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide

There was a period of time where the polling was showing that the Bloc Quebecois was going to be the second-largest party and therefore the Opposition, which would have been even funnier than this Liberal comeback.

They have been official opposition before, after their first election in the 90s, which is kinda crazy to think about. As much as Republicans and Democrats accuse the other of destroying democracy/America, neither actually has the literal stated objective of leaving the country.

I think you nailed the tale of three personalities on this change in the winds in Canada. The intra-west vibe shift toward the right has clearly happened in Canada, perhaps more than other places, but it is being parsed through our electoral system with unusual results. The Liberal Party is a non-ideological chimera which is optimized fully for power. This is why, for example, they have the slack to enable constant corruption. Trudeau capitalized on a woke vibe shift back in 2015 and lurched the party to the left and now its lurching back to the right. Canada's other parties are ideological and this puts them at a huge relative disadvantage. The NDP are controlled by unions and woke college students and so can't pivot from leftism in any way. The Conservatives contain multitudes but their leadership keeps them solidly center-right out of fear of the electorate. This gives the Liberals room to maneuver and their natural governing status allows them to attract high-quality candidates who just want competently run centrist globalism. Add their extremely efficient distribution of voters and constant pandering to Quebec and you have a recipe for success.

And kudos to Mark Carney who saw all of this months ago. Everyone thought whoever took over for the Liberals was just taking Trudeau's bullet for him, but Carney saw that the hatred for Trudeau masked ambivalence about Poilievre. And now we're probably headed for a Liberal majority.

The specifics of my view of all of this is similar to yours, except I'm a conservative so it blackpills me (even more) about the country. My top issues are immigration, DEI, crime, and housing prices and the Liberal failure on those files is so complete that a rational people would electorally annihilate whosoever did it to them forever. Carney's ideas on these files are either non-existent or the same the previous government. As ever in Canada, the boomer cohorts will sail merrily on with a little anti-Americanism and economic and social mediocrity until the end of time.

The one bit of solace I take from this is the Liberals have moved sharply right virtually ensuring a more conservative country going forward. The NDP have been obliterated and I think its an open question whether the party continues to live on. What I'm really opening for is that we may get an Overton expansion to the right, a CPC re-absorption of the PPC, and open calls for very low levels of immigration and the end of DEI/affirmative action. Anything that puts those ideas into the mainstream is a win.

In terms of first-world government competence (from a right-wing perspective), I rate Trudeau's Liberals as delivering 3/10. Nothing cataclysmic happened but on virtually every file things got worse, often much worse. I am confident that Carney's Liberals will be more like 6/10. They'll steer the ship capably toward a destination that is okay, not great. I am already lamenting that we wont get a confident and high-agency conservative government with a large majority to reverse the damage liberalism has wrought.

The NDP have been obliterated and I think its an open question whether the party continues to live on.

The NDP has lost official party status before and been just fine. Hell, there was even talk that the Liberals were close to collapse after coming in 3rd to the NDP in 2011, only for the Liberals to take everything in 2015. Singh is done, but then again, it's 36 days until the election, and 36 days ago everyone was sure the Conservatives would have the next government.

My top issues are immigration, DEI, crime, and housing prices and the Liberal failure on those files is so complete that a rational people would electorally annihilate whosoever did it to them forever. Carney's ideas on these files are either non-existent or the same the previous government.

My top issues are basically identical to yours, but wouldn't it be fair to levy this criticism at Poilievre as well? From what I can tell, Poilievre is as wishy washy as Carney. Really, only Bernier is serious about tackling immigration, although I wonder if people can pressure Carney to get tough on immigration.

A close reading of statements and actions tells me that Carney is much more bullish on immigration than Poilievre. Carney appointed the founder of the century initiative as an advisor and is inheriting much of the same team as his predecessor. The current immigration targets which Carney has said nothing about are 395,000 falling to 365,000 per year.

Poilievre has been cagey but clearly wants numbers down. He has said good things about Harper’s system which was 200,000-250,000 per year and he has also said the number of immigrants will not be greater than the number of housing completions the year before. We are on track for housing completions to fall well below 200,000 in the next few years.

So there is daylight there, but I agree the Overton window has not moved sufficiently far towards the correct number which is less than 100,000 indefinitely.

How will this likely play with the western Canada/rest of the country tensions?

Danielle Smith, premier of Alberta, had a meeting with Carney last week that went terribly and ended with her issuing a number of demands which certainly wont be met by Ottawa. I'm not sure my mental model of Alberta - Ottawa relations. Carney will almost certainly represent a lowering of the heat relative to Trudeau, but Albertans were about to confidently have their champion and that is now ripped away from them. When a people who see themselves as victims have their hopes dashed is when they are most dangerous (see Blacks after Civil Rights).

and ended with her issuing a number of demands which certainly wont be met by Ottawa

It wouldn't have mattered what she said

Carney will almost certainly represent a lowering of the heat relative to Trudeau

lol, no

but Albertans were about to confidently have their champion and that is now ripped away from them. When a people who see themselves as victims have their hopes dashed is when they are most dangerous

One can only hope.

What I'm really opening for is that we may get an Overton expansion to the right, a CPC re-absorption of the PPC, and open calls for very low levels of immigration and the end of DEI/affirmative action. Anything that puts those ideas into the mainstream is a win.

If there's anything that's going to happen in that regard, it's going to be provincially.

I am already lamenting that we wont get a confident and high-agency Western government with a large majority to reverse the damage Big City Easternism has wrought.

What distinguishes Big City Easternism from standard progressivism in your view?

All of the nastiness of American progressivism, none of the checks and balances that keep it mostly talk.

I guess you could add regional looting which is enabled by our system and which the U.S. doesn't have.

The US doesn't maintain a public list of have and have-not states, but I'd venture that most members of Congress see it as their sacred duty to get as much money as possible redirected from the rest of the country to their state, and preferably to their district. The US is just better at hiding the fact that the regional looting has any costs to anyone.

A third year Skadden associate sent out a firm-wide - including overseas offices in Europe and Asia - email with her "conditional" resignation, where she laid out her terms not to quit. The terms were basically to fight Trump better. She also posted the email on her LinkedIn.

A few hours later, she could no longer access her firm email - it appears Skadden accepted her resignation. She is now making news appearances talking about #resisting in the face of authoritarianism. It's unclear how many firms want a corporate associate that desires to "fight" so badly - in the few firms interested in disrupting client work for challenging the administration, social justice is reserved for the litigators.

Ultimately, all BigLaw is soulless, putting profits over justice. It's about dealwork and defense, not upholding the law itself - that's more plaintiff-side work that very few BigLaw firms can swing litigating. Not many clients wants to hire a law firm that paints a target on their back, not when NGOs and civil rights firms exist - there are more appropriate "mechanisms" in the legal world to fight these fights, and those mechanisms are in play. It is not the duty, nor the skill set, of BigLaw.

I admire her confidence that the world-wide firm would care about a junior leveraged finance associate's opinion regarding the rule of law in the United States. Posting an internal email on her LinkedIn also feels concerning from a disclosure perspective - associates have been fired for filming tiktoks in their offices before because of the risk of showing client materials.

She has previously circulated an anonymous statement "signed" by BigLaw associates listing their firm name and class year, because she believed it would pressure BigLaw firms into Doing Something.

It seems that statement culture is no longer a tool of the culture war - firms don't really seem to care. Being willing to resign is a step in the right direction, I think, although I wonder if she really thought she would be considered so valuable to the firm that they would meet her conditions. She seems to truly believe that she Accomplished Something, and I wonder if that's a residual impact of the COVID corporate social justice era, in which empowering employees to Defend The Current Thing took off.

I'm waiting to see if she's going to try to file a workplace retaliation claim or anything crazy for Skadden accepting her resignation, because that kind of feels like the vibe of things. Realistically, I know that this is going to be like when random tech workers quit over how their employers "handled" Palestine - it will be swept under the rug and forgotten about.

I really would have to know more about her to figure out what her motivations are. One possible motivation that no-one else seems to have mentioned is that she simply just actually believes that we are headed for a fascist dictatorship that will take away women's rights and so on.

In the course of the last few years I have seen several very smart friends of mine become rabid Trump-haters who genuinely, not in a virtue signalling way, but genuinely are worried that Trump is taking the country towards dictatorship and that there are plausible mechanisms by which Trump could create such a dictatorship. These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.

I myself have some worries about Trump and dictatorship and so on, which I have expressed here before, but not to the level of these friends of mine. I think that Trump would absolutely love to be a dictator, I just see no plausible path by which he or any other politician could accomplish this. Any major steps that Trump took towards dictatorship would literally cause a civil war. For example, California wouldn't sit around letting it happen, it would secede from the Union. I don't know, maybe I am overestimating the left's willingness to resist, but in any case I just can't imagine any plausible path to dictatorship as long as the politically non-apathetic Americans are split about evenly 50-50 between the left and the right. This isn't like Russia, where basically 80% of people supported Putin in the early 2000s, which gave him an opportunity to consolidate a dictatorship while backed by a huge fraction of the population.

Some of my smart friends, however, very much disagree with this.

Anyway, my point is that it's perfectly possible that this woman just genuinely feels like she has to do something, anything. Do I think that's the most likely explanation? No, but it's a possible one.

A sufficiently well-practiced performance will be indistinguishable from genuine belief. TDS, from what I observe in Germany, is entirely performative if only because Germans have very little to fear from Trump yet still ape the same kind of condemnatory panic that leftist Americans adopt. Overstating the danger is a form of virtue signalling analogous to claiming that video games cause satanism, or similarly absurd claims. It's considered good form among humans to exaggerate the danger posed by one's enemies in order to rally around a common friend/enemy distinction.

These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.

To state that they are willingly indoctrinated is probably more accurate. Also, the likely reason you never see them acting deranged in real life is that they never reveal that side of themselves to you.

These are well-read, sharp people who do not normally display any sort of cognitive derangement or hysteria.

People want that. They want their life to have some deeper meaning. Spending your life making line go up, not that satisfying. There's the infamous Orwell quote about nazism:

He wrote, "Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people 'I offer you a good time,' Hitler has said to them, 'I offer you struggle, danger, and death,' and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet."

Accepting the psyops that we are headed for a titanic struggle for freedom is perhaps an attempt to find meaning in a world that increasingly doesn't need people.

But this woman is surely bright enough to realize that this stunt won't actually do anything? Ca cest coullion.

For example, California wouldn't sit around letting it happen, it would secede from the Union.

You're way overestimating liberal capacity to resist-in-practice. California in particular(and the west coast more broadly) relies on being part of the broader US in order to avoid local state failure. Now that doesn't mean blue states need reds more than vice versa. But it means blue states(or at least, the kind that could spearhead resistance) are more dependent on the rest of the union than red ones.

But this woman is surely bright enough to realize that this stunt won't actually do anything? Ca cest coullion.

Why is everyone so confident in Skadden's HR? When I was graduating some really talented people did make it into the top biglaw firms, but so did quite a few mediocrities. 2nd/3rd year is right around washout time for those people to go to firm #2 at a bump down where again they washout before taking a federal job where they do nothing for GS-14 salary till the end of time.

Young people in genera suck right now in the legal field. I am in an adjacent field and feel it. Friends in biglaw complain about it all the time.

Standards were already out of fashion at law schools, and went off a cliff with covid. There is no appetite at the schools to bring them back

The backstory here is that Skadden/Weiss and others already their competitor biglaw firms whispering to their clients (and trying to recruit their partners) on the grounds that no one wants a law firm in the White House's crosshairs.

They had no choice but to folds, because the rest of biglaw not only wouldn't back them in a fight against the admin, but would actively use it to carve up their business. No honor among thieves etc....

My suspicion when I first saw this story was that she was likely going to quit anyway (as reality set in over the years that big law was less about girlbossing around in a cUtE business outfit being a feminist champion and white savior, and more about grinding hundreds of hours a month reviewing documents and addressing Word comments), so she figured she'd go out in a blaze of glory to satiate her TDS, earn good-girl points, and get glazed for being Stunning and Brave by male simps, fellow white female progressives, and the Persons of Color she so pedestalizes.

Comments from a Reddit account that's supposedly hers have done little to dissuade me from that initial suspicion. For example:

Yup - I did not intend to quit yesterday, or this month, or whatever, but I was likely to leave this year anyway and always have planned to do so and take a big pay cut and that's where my finances were. As the admin started moving, it became clearer to me that timeline was going to need to accelerate, so while I was really hoping to finish the quarter and stay through an asylum hearing I was supervising next month at the very least, this is not the same degree of sacrifice as it would be for many other people. That's one of the many things I'm alluding to when I admit this isn't something everyone (or even most people) can do. I'm also white, I have the credentials, I have supportive parents who cannot pay my LOANS but can provide immediate financial assistance, have literally the tightest knit and most supportive and aligned set of friends on the planet, don't have kids, etc etc etc. This is a sacrifice, but it is not the same as it is for many people. Someone (maybe many people, maybe they're mostly at PW right now) needed to do it, but everyone does not. Other people will make sacrifices that are tenable to them.

Bolding mine. its_all_so_tiresome.jpg

And no kids, you don't say.

While checking her privilege, she for some reason neglected to mention that as a non-ugly young woman, she has the privilege of capriciously quitting her job and burning bridges because she can always Meet Someone to subsidize her lifestyle, if she doesn't have such a someone on tap or on deck already. Daniel Tosh: "Being an ugly woman is likely being a man; you're going to have to work." Additionally, as a jobless daughter, she'd get more parental support than she would if she were a jobless son.

Not that burning big law bridges is all that fatal for progressive lawyers, because there's always a universe of non-profits, NGO, and government positions she can monkey-branch to after she's Had Her Fun doing press tours, writing op-eds, snagging a book deal. Plus, there could always be a big law firm or two out there looking to #Resist and take a stand against Orange Man (like the big law version of McKinsey doubling down on DEI), unlike those evil and cowardly pale stale males at Skadden and Paul Weiss who bent the knee. Even if not, she'll have tons of Allies within big law firms who'll push to hire her if she so chooses to run it back at big law. Progressive women have plot armor.

This was obvious as soon as the story broke. Only an idiot would think her job at Skadden Arps could survive this, and Skadden Arps don’t hire idiots. My guesses as to motive were:

  1. She thinks that Perkins Coie or Williams & Connolly will hire her over this. Unlikely
  2. She is looking to jump to public interest work.
  3. She is trying to give her fiancé a social license to stay soulsold in their left-wing social circles.

Stay soulsold? What's that?

I think they mean "Her fiancé gets a license to keep selling his soul to big corporations for money while they retain their virtue in their social circles." But personally I doubt this. Most top lawyers run in elite blue-tribe social circles where "selling one's soul" to corporations is not really frowned upon to begin with.

It's more than that; it's almost a requirement, especially for men who want a family in a HCOL blue city. A male educator dedicating his career to helping marginalized youth, no matter his ideological bona fides and other good qualities, is going to have a much harder time finding a wife than even an entirely apolitical and unexceptional corporate guy.

It's widely understood that corporate jobs are just jobs, and you can't be blamed for getting yours. One of the most rabidly woke people I know on social media is a (Asian, female, bisexual) lawyer whose day job is quite literally union busting.

(I don't care about the actual choice of career, just the hypocrisy.)

Having sold your soul to BigCorp, I imagine. Though I haven’t heard the term before.

I was halfway through the comment before I looked up at the username. He strikes again.

How do you know this?

I took this opportunity to do some media bias comparisons on how this story is being reported. There's a combination of editorializing, credulous repetition of claims without explicitly editorializing, and some neutral reporting (Kudos to Global Legal Post which was the best on this). I found no Right-leaning sources reporting on this story. This is typical of news that has partisan slant: most of the bias shows up in what stories get reported, not how they're reported.

GroundNews summary and news source comparison: Skadden Associate Resigns Over Big Law's Tepid Response to Trump Pressure

Business Insider, considered "leans Left", quotes the associate extensively without skepticism, but doesn't editorialize in the article itself:

She asked her colleagues to sign an open letter from law firm associates condemning Trump's "all-out attack aimed at dismantling rule-of-law norms."

Law.com, considered Center, editorializes a bit:

Rachel Cohen, the third-year finance associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who'd been one of the rare voices in Big Law to attach her name to criticism of firms' quiescence in the face of an unprecedented assault from the Trump administration, had a sharp reaction to the deal Paul, Weiss, Rifkin, Wharton & Garrison negotiated with the president on Thursday.

And Above the Law unabashedly editorializes:

One brave Biglaw associate has quite frankly had enough of this, and she’s once again sounding off — not just before her firm, but before the entire legal profession — to make clear just how important it is not to bow down before the Trump administration.

Other sources I found through Web search:

  1. Mother Jones (Left)
  2. Global Legal Post) (appears Center and quite helpfully includes context like Democrat-leaning Paul Weiss)
  3. PBS (Lean Left according to GroundNews) has an interview with the associate. The summary uses the phrase "latest in a series" and the interviewer doesn't challenge wild statements like I think that my concern is that the coup that is ongoing will be done.
  4. New Republic (Left)
  5. AOL (Lean Left)

It's all over the fake news if you google it, though it wouldn't have hurt for OP to throw in some links

Crazy that a firm with 4000 employees allowed a junior to send out a firm-wide email, everywhere I’ve worked heavily restricts that kind of thing to very senior management and the internal comms team.

I don’t think she really expected to stay, which is why she only did so after she’d already decided she was leaving, and decided to basically quit spectacularly in a way that she hoped would shame her boss into fighting Trump. I’m kinda assuming her end goal is to leverage her “do something” screed into a sinecure at a legal NGO fighting for liberal causes. She was probably job hunting before this in that sector and hoped that the fame she got for resisting would get her noticed.

Could have been worse. Could have started a "Reply all" chain. It took my company a surprisingly long amount if time to figure out how to stop those.

And it can get worse yet.

Fun blast from the past. Haven't thought about that since I read it at the time. :)

That is fantastic. My funniest personal experience with a "reply all" cascade was the time it happened at a very buttoned-down corporation and not one but several people employed dank memes in their (futile, counter-productive) "Stop replying all, you fools!" replies to all.

Yeah, I love reply-all storms. I get why email admins hate them, but as I'm not an email admin I get to just enjoy the hilarity of people begging everyone to stop/sending memes.

I mean, this couillon was a lawyer, I wonder how many of those other 4000 employees are? Maybe the legion of secretaries, paralegals, etc can't send out firm-wide emails unless they're, like head of HR and lawyers have the privilege regardless of how junior.

Regardless, this employee was highly stupid. There's probably about 100 people behind her waiting for her job, and she's probably 1% better than the next one. That's not worth putting up with employees who cause drama, regardless of if you agree with it or not. I wonder if this will further feed legal affirmative action for conservatives.

I think she genuinely believed that a large number of the other young lawyers at the firm felt likewise but were afraid to say anything, that the whole thing was a coordination problem, and that if she got the ball rolling others would follow suit and that while losing one associate is no big deal losing double digit percentages would be. And who knows, 10 years ago when SJWism was riding high maybe the company would have dithered for a few days instead of firing her immediately and during that time others would have been emboldened to join.

I think the lower appetite of others to join is obviously a big deal, but the main issue is the decreased willingness of companies to bend the knee. They fired her quickly giving no time for others to join and no sign of weakness or uncertainty that would encourage them to do so. Mozilla buckled like a belt under employee pressure and that really kicked off the SJW movement of corporate pressure. This is a signal, though a small one, that those days are over. Mozilla booting Eich was a signal to others, they will capitulate to young employees throwing a temper tantrum so go throw one. This will hopefully be taken as the opposite signal, if you throw a tantrum you will get fired and put a big "Don't Hire Me" sign around your neck.

The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do and B) People who will cite this incident as proof of hate forever regardless of what you do, should not be reasoned with. But so many institutions were convinced that if they gave the sharks a few drops of blood, they'd be sated, and the institution spared. So they resorted to emboldening cancel warriors with insane stuff like a company firing employees of ten years because their kid said the n-word on the internet, or school principals expelling children because a one-sided video with no context made them seem guilty.

Why did it take so long for anyone to just try not listening to them?? The standard response was to only ever give the crazy people exactly what they want and hope it goes away.

The simplest explanation, though not necessarily the correct one, is just that many large corporations have huge numbers of people who genuinely hold progressive political views, including on the higher levels where they can make policy. In other words, it's not that they bent the knee to the crowd, it's that they agreed with the crowd.

Many prominent tech industry people, for example, grew up in progressive households and held/hold a mix of libertarian and progressive views. It's only very recently, once the woke really well and truly overstepped their bounds, that some of them began to change their minds. I think some people might overestimate the degree to which these shifts are just staged for mass consumption. For example, the simplest though not necessarily correct explanation for why Musk went from a somewhat Democrat-leaning moderate to a full-on Trumpist over the course of the last few years is that he genuinely changed his mind.

What makes these explanations not necessarily correct, would you say?

I do agree with this take, though, I think there's examples of legacy-corpo family heirs who are both stupid-rich and very progressive.

The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do

After a decade of Twitter mobs exploding at the main character du jour, we know how it plays out now. But in 2014, thousands of people suddenly coming out of the woodwork demanding that you fire employee X was a relatively new experience, and one they were obviously struggling to grapple with: there was an obvious fear that failing to capitulate could gut their brand reputation and share value. After a decade of these blow-ups, companies have started to cotton on to the fact that these mobs are ultimately impotent. The mobs can kick up a stink on Twitter, they can get journalists who use Twitter to publish sympathetic articles damning the company - but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large (except Bud Light, as noted by @FCfromSSC below - and even then, that wasn't a case of "one of this company's employees said something dubiously offensive in their private life, therefore we're boycotting the entire company").

but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large.

Bud Light.

Mea culpa.

Here's your boycott.

Can you put this information into some sort of context?

More comments

They thought that the wind was going to be blowing in this direction permanently, and that they had better get on the Revolution’s good side by joining up early. And to be fair, a lot of people on this site also thought that the Revolution had won and this was the new permanent state of affairs.

Full court press from all sides -- the media, regulatory bodies like the EEoC, their own lawyers (listening to left-wing legal academics) -- plus infiltration into the executive ranks (that is, many of them weren't bending the knee but doing what they wanted to do anyway)

Also the employment market for tech people is probably worse today than at any time since immediately after the financial crisis, so companies have more leeway to take actions employees disapprove of.

I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list.

How could Trump do that? I can't think of a stick to use, and the only carrot I can think of is being hired as outside counsel, but any firm worth hiring as outside counsel presumably already has every former appellate clerk they can get.

He needs to boil the frog more slowly than that - particularly when going after the legal profession.

Once it is obvious that Trump wants to make the legal profession his bitches, the Supreme Court goes from a 6-3 Republican majority to a 7-2 not wanting to be Trump’s bitch majority. (Thomas and Alito dissenting). He either needs to have more hacks on the Court or be in a position to ignore it before this happens.

Trump is not good at appointing hacks. His appointees are Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and ACB.

Hot on the heels of Google's image generation/editing release, xAI has quietly released their own image editing functionality. Of course it's dogshit, and every image is covered in crunchy tokenizer artifacts, but at least it doesn't ban anime.

What's interesting is that OpenAI, Meta, and xAI have all been sitting on this functionality since last year, and they just sat around and let Google beat them to the punch, and xAI's public release isn't improved at all from what they teased months ago. Yet after Google dropped their model, xAI is going public only a week later.

It seems like the big AI companies are deathly terrified of releasing anything new at all, and are happy to just sit around for months or even years on shiny new tech, waiting for someone else to do it first. I remember reading that Google had internally achieved something akin to ChatGPT and just did nothing with it. Then once it comes out it's a race to the bottom in the safety and censorship lane while pushing incremental improvements. At least right now most of the cutting edge is happening out in the open, being published by researchers, so nobody is able to build a moat or a big lead technically, so the players are left chasing percentage points on the margins.

Anyways here's to the deluge of next-gen image (and possibly other multimodal) models about to be unleashed on the world. It's about time.

Edit:

I'm pleased to say that the anime ban on gemini has been lifted, I just tested it today.

It seems like the big AI companies are deathly terrified of releasing anything new at all, and are happy to just sit around for months or even years on shiny new tech, waiting for someone else to do it first.

Surprised you didn't mention Sora here. The Sora demo reel blew everyone's minds ... but then OpenAI sat on it for months, and by the time they actually released a small user version of it, there were viable video generation alternatives out there. As much as it annoys me, though, I don't entirely blame them. Releasing an insufficiently-safecrippled video generator might be a company-ending mistake in today's culture, and that part isn't their fault.

As a member of the grubby gross masses who Cannot Be Trusted with AI tech, I've been pretty heartened that, thus far, all you need to do to finally get access to these tools has been to wait a year for them to hit open source. Then you'll just need to ignore the NEW shiny thing that you Can't Be Trusted with. (It's like with videogames - playing everything a year behind, when it's on sale or free - and patched - is so much cheaper than buying every new game at release...)

You are noticing that none of these companies want to race. The whole competition to build Sand God is largely kayfabe. Western AI scene is not really a market, it's a highly inefficient cartel (with massive state connections too), which builds up enormous capacity but drags its feet on products because none of them ultimately believe their business models are sustainable in the case of rapid commoditization. This is why DeepSeek was such a disruption: not only was it absurdly cheap (current estimates put their annual operations cost at like $200M), not only were they Chinese, but they dared to actively work to bring the costs of frontier capabilities to zero, make it logistically mundane, in alignment with Liang Wenfeng's personal aesthetic and nationalist preferences.

I think R1's release has sped up every Western frontier lab by 20-50% simply by denying them this warm feeling that they can feed the user base some slop about hidden wonder weapons in their basements, release incremental updates bit by bit, and focus on sales. Now we are beginning to see a bit more of their actual (still disappointingly low, not a single one of these companies could have plausibly made R1 on that cluster I think) power level.

It seems like the big AI companies are deathly terrified of releasing anything new at all, and are happy to just sit around for months or even years on shiny new tech, waiting for someone else to do it first. I remember reading that Google had internally achieved something akin to ChatGPT and just did nothing with it. Then once it comes out it's a race to the bottom in the safety and censorship lane while pushing incremental improvements. At least right now most of the cutting edge is happening out in the open, being published by researchers, so nobody is able to build a moat or a big lead technically, so the players are left chasing percentage points on the margins.

Is this really accurate? Because OpenAI's o1 was only fully released in early December of last year, just over 3 months ago. Google's advanced image generation capability was just released this month. Are they not considered Big AI Companies? The speed of AI advancement is actually very fast, and I don't see good evidence that companies are deathly afraid of releasing anything new. Perhaps the reason why xAI didn't release what they teased months ago is because they failed to improve on its functionality in a way that makes for a good product?

Also, what do you mean by "it's a race to the bottom in the safety and censorship lane"? If you mean they are becoming less censored, then that's true. Grok is largely uncensored, both OpenAI and Anthropic are making their flagship LLMs less censored, and you can turn off Gemini's safety filters in Google's AI Studio.

I don't see good evidence that companies are deathly afraid of releasing anything new.

Here's when the ai labs told the public they had advanced image editing and generation.

Perhaps the reason why xAI didn't release what they teased months ago is because they failed to improve on its functionality in a way that makes for a good product?

If you're going to release some half baked slop anyways, better to do it when it's still fresh and novel, rather than when it's old, boring, and second rate.

you can turn off Gemini's safety filters in Google's AI Studio.

Doesn't Didn't apply to the anime ban.

Indeed, the tweets and paper from OpenAI and Meta are evidence that they had image generation capabilities, but not whether their capabilities in practice were cool and shiny or more of the same. xAI claimed they had image editing in December, but according to you[1], it sucked then, and it still sucks now in the public release. That's more evidence that they had something interesting in December, and wanted to take their time to improve and productionize it, but was forced to release it now because Google released theirs. If it sucked then and it sucks now, they never had anything cool and shiny to hold back.

Doesn't Didn't apply to the anime ban.

Yup, I just tested it too. When "doesn't" becomes "didn't", I think that's a point in favor for models becoming less censored than the other way around.

[1]: It's not a dig at you, by the way, I didn't follow the xAI developments back then so I'll take your word for it.

"Oh the Urbanity" a Canadian YouTuber just put out a video titled "Donald Trump is 100% serious about annexing Canada" where I think he puts forward a really convincing argument for the title argument, and for why it needs to be taken seriously.

I won't force you to watch the video but here it is, I'll give you his 13 points for it and explain them.

1: "Repeated preoccupation"

This isn't just a "one off brain fart" like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, he's been consistent about it over and over again. From Trump himself "So when I say they should be a state, I mean that, I really mean that"

2: "Aides say he's serious."

Includes a tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff to take him at face value and sources to CNN reporting other aides say similar, take his claims seriously.

3: "Canada says he's serious"

Some of the politicians in Canada believe that Trump is very serious about this threat too.

4: "Questioned our border"

He's talked about believing the Canadian/US border to be illegitimate (Something he also points out is that Trump has not done the same with Mexico) and that this is the rhetoric used before trying to take over another country.

5: "Loves big real estate deals."

Trump is narcissistic and loves to put his names on things and claim big accomplishments. "Is there any bigger real estate deal than doubling the land mass of the USA?"

6: "Fits into his world view"

Urbanity believes Trump has a view of great powers dominating over their local spheres of influence

7: "Threatened other countries"

He's talked about this with other countries like Panama and Greenland, showing the expansionist mindset. Along with the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.

8: "Consider his influences"

People that Trump likes are Pat Buchanan (who has talked about taking Canada and Greenland before) and McKinley (Trump's favorite president) who annexed multiple territories.

9: "Admires Vladimir Putin"

Trump has shown a lot of respect to Putin before and often victim blames Ukraine for being invaded.

10: "Pretexts like Drug Cartels"

They're trying to claim that Canada has been taken over by drug cartels and they need to wage a war to take it back from harming the country. It sounds like the Bush administration talking about WMDs.

11: "Spins Canada as abuser"

They talk about things like Doug Ford putting a tax on electricity exports as an "act of war" by Canada, and treat retaliatory tariffs as unprovoked aggression.

12: "Information Bubble"

Trump lives in an information bubble where the main sources he listens to are the ones that feed from him like Fox News. His ideas about Canada wanting to be taken over from Fox News talking about "Maple MAGA" likely reinforce his desire even more.

13: "No Personal Morals"

Urbanity views Trump as a man who has scammed people before with various business projects, shitcoins and the like. There's little reason to expect he wouldn't disregard the sovereignty of other nations.

While he doesn't mention this, I personally think another major point to consider is that Trump is not consistent on what he wants from Canada. One day he says it's the trade deficit, next day he says its drugs, then the next day its immigrants, the next day he says nothing can be done at all and he just wants the state. It sounds like excuses just being made up based off how he feels that day.

Urbanity goes on to argue that even if the threat isn't likely, it is no reason to take it as less serious. The main thing being that Trump is enacting a trade war, which is still causing serious harm to the Canadian economy and their people.

Like if a mafiaso moved in next door and started joking about killing you. Even if the chance was low, it's understandable to take their words seriously. "Threats don't have to be higher than a 50% chance to take them seriously"

He draws a corollary to Ukraine where there was a lot of disbelief and doubt about Russia invading in 2022, until as we're all aware, it happened. "But they did it"

All in all I think this is very convincing that Trump really does want to annex Canada and that we as a society should be taking that possibility seriously. And as Urbanity also points out, even if it's unpopular now, Trump's followers and the Republican party have been shown to be rather flexible at following his lead against their prior beliefs. They might be against him in 2025, but what about 2026 or 2027 when they've had years of Fox News and Trump speeches repeating the stories of Canadian Cartels and "Acts of War"?

So for discussion, there's a few questions.

Do you think Trump has serious intentions to annex Canada? Is it right of him or wrong of him to do this? If he does ramp up rhetoric (or efforts) to annex or invade, would you wish for the Republicans to oppose him or continue to support him as duly elected president? And how likely is it that Trump will transform from his rhetoric to serious action (beyond the trade wars)?

well why not? Canada is an uncountry, comprised of no one, & representing nothing.

Canadians do not even exist. There is no Canadian history and no Canadian culture. There is a Quebecois/First Nations history, and any annexation of Quebec/First Nations should be negotiated separately. But Canada is merely a term of geography in which nations reside, not a nation in itself. Not a controversial idea. The government proclaims it regularly, lest anyone look back farther than June 15th, 1964.

Maybe there was once a culture called Canada. But it's long dead now. Canada is now Terra Nullis. It's for no one and belongs to no one. So annexation is completely acceptable.

Whether it's the Ukrainians, Kurds, Taiwanese, Irish, Palestinians, or (Anglo) Canadians, denying the existence of a people seems like a guaranteed way to conjure one into being or rescuscitate one from the brink of extinction. Few remember or care today, but during the Revolution and the War of 1812 there was a bitter partisan struggle across the St. Lawrence frontier between Patriots and Loyalists that divided families, wiped the Iroquois off the map, and whose brutality shocked the British-born officers sent to take charge of the situation. I for one do not wish to needlessly invite conflict with such people when time was our ally in forging a peaceful economic and political union.

You -- like Putin -- seem to be under the impression that a countries right to exist is contingent on the worth of its culture as judged by you. You are wrong.

My position is that basically all international borders are accidents of history, but should be treated as sacrosanct, because having a pointless war is much worse than having a random border.

Also, most of your arguments could just as well applied to the US. I will spare you the stale jokes about US culture, but notice that the US -- while it labels itself a nation -- is just a federation of individual states. So why should not Canada annex Seattle instead?

But then again, you are likely just trolling.

I'm Old Stock born in Toronto with family in Brampton. Every single expression of whatever the name given to my culture is treated as the most heinous evil possible that must be 'dismantled' as quickly as possible. I am mostly in mourning.

Europe is divided along ethnic lines. Germany is where Germans live, France is where French people live, Poland is for the Poles.

And then there is civic nationalism and unnatural borders. Civic nationalism is the hellish melting pot of the US&A. Its borders do not matter because they're arbitrary. They happen to be what they are. But there are no Americans, really, to draw the borders around. And there are no Canadians either.

Unnatural borders are what we see in Africa and much of the third world. They are marks of colonialism. Straight lines on maps, drawn with a disregard for the people. Then, ethnic conflict is present, always.

There are only a few exceptions where unnaturally drawn borders hold despite differences in ethnicity. Singapore, Switzerland, UAE, etc. But these exceptions are of mutual economic and political benefit. They exist only in prosperity. Money holds them together.

But even here, why does Denmark have a say over Greenland? Ukraine over Donbass? Or Canada over Quebec? Outside the current legalistic status quo, I don't think they have a claim over those ethnically distinct regions.

Borders should be drawn around an ethnos. But there is no Canadian ethnicity. It's only a matter of time before that particular politico-economical assemblage dissolves or is subsumed by some other larger entity.

Europe is divided along ethnic lines. Germany is where Germans live

Look at a bunch of maps of Germany from 1914 to 1945, and you will notice that things are not quite as simple. Why is Austria its own thing, but Bavaria is not? These are all accidents of history. Culturally and ethnically, someone whose ancestors have been living in what is now Germany just across the Austrian border is certainly closer to Austrians than someone whose ancestors lived on a now German island in the North Sea.

France is where French people live

Except that Brittany and Corsica are kinda their own thing ethnically, and that is before we go to the oversea departments.

Unnatural borders are what we see in Africa and much of the third world. They are marks of colonialism. Straight lines on maps, drawn with a disregard for the people. Then, ethnic conflict is present, always.

A straight border just means that when the border was drawn, no stakeholder cared where exactly it ran, and yes, this generally was because they were colonizers and there were no pre-existing white communities.

The thing to understand is that for thousands of years, the borders between what would eventually become European ethnostates were redrawn every few decades in blood. The world did not suddenly spawn in 1945, with God drawing a neat line about the various ethnicities which He would grant statehood, carefully sorting every village to the correct side. Mostly it was the other way round, historically. Here is the border (e.g. the front line at armistice), and if you are not happy with the nationality this bestows upon you, you can just flee a few tens (or hundreds) of kilometers to a country more to your liking.

Straight borders in Africa are bad because they tend to split ethnic groups. However, I think ethnic conflicts would happen even if the colonizers had taken great care to respect ethnic boundaries. At the end of the day, every small ethnicity having a state the size of Lichtenstein is not stable. Land is a valuable resource, and conflicts about it were likely a human universal from the stone age till the recently.

North America is a bit special in that it was only thinly populated by steppe nomads (who murdered each other over territorial conflicts like everyone did). If Canada and the US had coexisted a thousand more years on a medieval tech level, I would guarantee that their border would look just as "natural" as in Europe.

But even here, why does Denmark have a say over Greenland? Ukraine over Donbass? Or Canada over Quebec? Outside the current legalistic status quo, I don't think they have a claim over those ethnically distinct regions.

The legalistic status quo is an excellent reason, because the alternative is historically a lot of bloodshed. Now, I am sympathetic to peoples right to self-determination, and if the Scots had voted for leaving the UK, I would be a-ok with it. Nor do I have a problem with colonies breaking away from their colonizers (even if they lack a distinct ethnicity, e.g. the 13 colonies the English lost in North America).

Culturally and ethnically, someone whose ancestors have been living in what is now Germany just across the Austrian border is certainly closer to Austrians than someone whose ancestors lived on a now German island in the North Sea.

Yes. If the Austrians see themselves as Austrians, they're Austrians and not Germans. But if in a hundred years these same Austrians give up their Austrianness, and start calling themselves German and the Germans go along with it, they'll be German. The cultural and ethnic minutiae will be best understood by their respective peoples. And the borders should be reflective of these attitudes.

Except that Brittany and Corsica are kinda their own thing ethnically, and that is before we go to the oversea departments.

Yes, these are minorities in France, much the same way there are Arab and African minorities in France. And there will be either separatism or assimilation. There will be tensions. If those ethnically distinct regions want independence, they should get independence.

Straight borders in Africa are bad because they tend to split ethnic groups. However, I think ethnic conflicts would happen even if the colonizers had taken great care to respect ethnic boundaries. At the end of the day, every small ethnicity having a state the size of Lichtenstein is not stable.

You are a colonialist. I fundamentally disagree with you. Even if you think small ethnicity-based states aren't "stable," forcing artificial borders upon a diverse people is much worse. But as a compromise, can we at least maybe not have very clearly multi-ethnic paper nations? The Québécois and the "Canadians" are nothing alike. Let them have their independence.

The legalistic status quo is an excellent reason, because the alternative is historically a lot of bloodshed.

The bloodshed occurs precisely because the borders aren't drawn along ethnic lines. The legalistic status quo suppresses ethnic realities.

I tend toward a soft colonialism just because I think it’s actually more peaceful and stable, while allowing for the development of land and resources that ethnic tribes might not be able to do.

It’s more peaceful because as I see it the “every tribe needs and deserves a state” is a cause of strife, rather than a prevention for that strife. Most ethnic groups are too small or weak to actually achieve independence. They assert a right the global elite tell them they have, but they actually can’t for geopolitical reasons. Palestinians will never have a state. They cannot take one any more than the Cherokee could in America. But the Cherokee who were sent to a reservation in 1840 or so live in relative peace and safety because they are not trying to assert a “right” they don’t have and frankly never did. Palestinians are still fighting, and committing war crimes while doing so, because they came to the same position in the post war world where everyone is entitled to an ethnostate. Who’s better off, Cherokee or Palestinians? And in some cases like Ukraine, they’re “independent” but their neighbors are much stronger than they are and thus they must go along mostly with that stronger neighbor because they can’t afford to get in a war they’d lose.

It’s more stable because it doesn’t have various tribes fighting over strips of land nearby for farming right, water rights, minerals, or strategic advantage. The border is drawn and that’s it.

It allows for development because the most advanced society tends to run the empire and thus have the technology and skill to extract resources and use the land efficiently. Britain knows how to run a mine. It’s rather doubtful that the Zulu can do the same. If some rich natural resources sit under Zulustan they’ll stay there because people who live in mud huts can’t run a mine like the British can.

It’s more peaceful because as I see it the “every tribe needs and deserves a state” is a cause of strife, rather than a prevention for that strife.

What strife, exactly? And between whom?

Shouldn't there logically be less conflict among ethnically homogeneous nations than in a multi-ethnic state (especially a colonial one)? It's the forcing of different ethnicities to exist within one arbitrary state that causes conflict. Each ethnicity being its own nation and political entity effectively solves this internal tension.

But you maintain that even with these ethnic tensions fully resolved, this plurality of newly independent nations would soon be launched into brutal conflict with each other. Because of what? Resources? Power struggles?

Resources can, and have always been, traded. Indigenous tribes trade just fine with each other. Why would these nations suddenly go to war any more than European nations have since 19th-century ethnic nationalism?

And conflict due to expansion beyond reasonable means doesn't make sense either, as the expanding nation would soon turn into the very multi-ethnic hodgepodge of a state with arbitrarily drawn borders we're trying to avoid.

Palestinians are still fighting, and committing war crimes while doing so, because they came to the same position in the post war world where everyone is entitled to an ethnostate.

Palestinians are fighting against Israeli colonialism. Israel is actively genociding Palestinians. They could've ☪☮e✡is✝-ed, even after the Zionists took Palestinian lands and established and ethnostate (good). But that wasn't enough for Israel. They couldn't stop. And expanded beyond. And it's too late to stop now. If Palestinians ever establish a functioning state, the Jews will be wiped from existence. But that's what you get for your colonialism.

Israel and Palestine deserve each other.

It’s more stable because it doesn’t have various tribes fighting over strips of land nearby for farming right, water rights, minerals, or strategic advantage. The border is drawn and that’s it.

Colonial, or otherwise arbitrary, borders lock ethnically diverse, hostile groups into zero-sum struggles within states. Ethnically homogeneous nations reduce these internal tensions. And external disputes can be handled through trade or treaties, as has been historically done. But colonial borders don't change as easily.

Britain knows how to run a mine. It’s rather doubtful that the Zulu can do the same. If some rich natural resources sit under Zulustan they’ll stay there because people who live in mud huts can’t run a mine like the British can

The Africans seemingly still live in mud huts despite all the benevolence of colonialism.

Israel and Palestine are a result of the rules based international order creating a perception of a “right to an ethnic homeland, and forcing both sides into internationally coerced “ceasefires” and land swaps that have kept the two from fighting the long war they’ve been in since 1948 to its conclusion. It’s not a natural phenomenon in the least. The reason we’re still watching this flare up about every decade is that it’s a war that isn’t being finished. If the war in 1948 had been fought until capitulation as wars were until we decided that we’d rather have a series of stalemates, then one way or another it wou be over. Either Palestinians would be conquered and living under the thumb of the Jews or the reverse, but whoever lost would understand and likely accept their fate, and would consider themselves an ethnic minority in a nation rather than continuing to attempt to force a state they don’t have the military ability to actually claim. We did the same in the American south. Once Georgia was burned and looted they understood that whether they liked it or not, they were part of the United States and would remain so.

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Why must every border in the world be drawn according to 19th century European nationalist principles? Multiethnic empires, religious caliphates, city-states, mercantile republics, and tribal confederations all existed long before the national revivals of Mitteleuropa and I do not see why they should be considered inherently less legitimate forms of political organization.

Ethnicity is the persistent factor in how people organize politically. Multi-ethnic post-racial societies can only exist when there's prosperity, religion, imperial might, or ideology to suppress the natural tendency toward ethnic self-determination. These external forces sustain the opportunistic state and its arbitrary borders.

There’s more sanity to some of these lines than people think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Geography

That’d be great but you Canada has to take Portland too

If they could take California that would also be pretty nice of them.

Canadians do not even exist

Every Canadian I know and seemingly a very large share of their population disagrees.

Yeah, this has probably been the best thing for Canadian nationalism is my lifetime.

After checking the transcript with a ctrl+f "arctic" . . .

. . . #14: oh and not for nothing but if the Transpolar Sea Route opens Canada will gain the second most geostrategically significant coastline on the planet.

You can't have a discussion about the US acquiring Greenland or Canadian territory without including the arctic opening to shipping. If it should come to pass that freighters can easily cross the arctic, it will be the most impactful event for trade since the Panama Canal.

I assess Trump higher than most so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a tertiary motivator for his wanting Greenland after resource wealth and Monroe Doctrine. I don't know how to place his posturing on Canada, but that's because I don't believe Canada in its current form will exist by 2100. As discontent with their governance rises, so does the probability of a serious secessionist movement. If Alberta votes to secede, they will be backed by the full weight of the American establishment, up to declaring war if necessary. It's too much land, money, and power. If one leads to another, if Saskatchewan and Manitoba want to join, if Quebec also secedes, then suddenly we might have two or three highly developed nations to our north. Smaller states, more dependent on the US, more money. Imagine Vancouver becoming a city-state, we'd pour money in, we'd guarantee their sovereignty. We get the right leader in and in a few decades maybe we have the American Singapore. Meanwhile, with Alberta and/or Saskatchewan and/or Manitoba in the union, we'll have borders carved on one side to the shores of the Northwest Territories and on the other to the shores of Hudson Bay.

Regardless of what is actually going on in Trump's mind with Greenland and Canada, serious actors have understood the significance of the TSR for a long time. Greenland, regardless of the ice melting, will be part of the US soon enough. Canada depends on too much to say with certainty, other than the certainty of the US supporting any border province that votes to secede.

if Quebec also secedes, then suddenly we might have two or three highly developed nations to our north

I mean, it's funny you call Quebec highly-developed, but anyway.

A secessionist movement there is going to have to be smart enough to consider Montreal a lost cause, or at least neutral ground (it is not a French city by voting pattern). Their failure to do this last time is the reason why Quebec is not today its own nation- too attached to the Provincial borders.

My read of the 'realities' is that Albertan/Saskatchewanian oil money being redistributed east is the main factor neutering Quebecois independence; one can expect that if the prairies vote to leave Quebec will too, sometime soon. That leaves BC, Ontario, and some tiny poor flyover, which is a recipe for further fragmentation.

Like if Texas secedes it doesn't necessarily trigger California secession.

As discontent with their governance rises, so does the probability of a serious secessionist movement.

It's worth noting that the polls (that show Upper and Lower Canada once again uniting to fuck up the rest of the country) show the West voting even harder for their regional interest party. Once the Alberta metro areas start seriously considering this, and extended trade war applied in sufficient quantities (on the Canadian side- tariffs are federal, and the LPC and its voters will gladly burn the nation down this way for ego reasons) will accomplish this, it's over.

If Alberta votes to secede, they will be backed by the full weight of the American establishment, up to declaring war if necessary.

The best ending for us at this point is that the West leaves Canada for good, and becomes part of a full free-trade economic union with the United States but still a nation in its own right. I don't think the Alberta public will accept outright joining the Union as a new State, at least at first; actually, I don't think BC, SK, or MB will either. This is for the same reason that some US territories outright reject Statehood. Ottawa and Toronto will be able to apply more pressure on the parts of Ontario that are not them so it'll take them longer and Atlantic Canada is utterly dependent on government handouts for survival so they'll never leave willingly. There are far more entrenched economic interests in the East compared to the West, and the ones that do exist out West are more heavily enmeshed with American interests.

And then there's the matter of who they'd be voting for in US elections with full Statehood, and the fact that being under American dominion means American institutions, and American institutions means American grievances, and American grievances are wrong and bad (witness how much damage they have done to the whole of Canada already!) so if we can limit the damage they do that's good.

The ultimate problem for AB right now is that it's landlocked, so it needs to be able to cut a path to the sea to sell its wares (the closest warm-water port is Kitimat and it would become a nation away should it leave the Dominion). Having no border between it and the states to its immediate South will help with this, but it'll still be at a disadvantage.

Imagine Vancouver becoming a city-state, we'd pour money in, we'd guarantee their sovereignty

Vancouver will only become a city state should the rest of the province seek a divorce. This isn't a hypothetical when you look at the election map: the current government has literally zero seats outside the GVRD and Island yet the interest party for those areas forms a majority government. Clear evidence of irreconcilable differences, much like the West is to (Upper and Lower) Canada as a whole.

Again, there are certain trade levers that can be pulled to make that happen; the US dropping its softwood import tariff conditional upon desired political realignment and ensuring northern reserves of natural gas are legal to extract would be one of them.

And then there's the matter of who they'd be voting for in US elections with full Statehood

Fossil fuel extraction pushes local politics towards the GOP in the US. There are few irreconcilable political differences between the parties but fossil fuels is the biggest.

As a true believer in Fifty-four Forty or Fight, and someone who looks at a map and thinks it's crazy that Cuba and Vancouver aren't American, I can only say that Manifest Destiny demands it.

The causus belli is the infiltration of Chinese and Indian influences, the same as would be the case for Mexico. The Monroe Doctrine must be kept alive, for it is the only foreign policy that has ever made sense for America.

and someone who looks at a map and thinks it's crazy that Cuba

Never understood why they didn't just annexed in the 50-s

I'm less serious about Trump invading Canada as I am about what happens 20 or 30 years down the line. I think Trump sincerely wants to annex Canada. I do not think many other Americans do, even his biggest sycophants. But this was simply something that was never considered as an option. Trump has all kinds of weird supporters among young people who take certain projects of his very seriously; who's to say that a few decades down the line annexing Canada doesn't have a solid chunk of support?

American attitudes toward annexing Canada have waxed and waned. Obviously there was 1812, but there were also major pro-annexation swings in the 1870s and 1890s. I think it is far from impossible to wonder whether it might grow in strength as a movement again.

It's not that hard to imagine that Trump is serious about this and would sincerely like to do it, but it will still never happen.

By way of comparison, I think he was serious about wanting to overturn the 2020 election results, but it didn't happen. To make something happen, you need to take the actions that lead to it occurring in the real world. Posting on Truth Social isn't adequate.

I’m not buying it simply because I don’t see anything to make me believe that he’s ramping up to start a war. No reporting of troop movements even on the Canadian side, no announcement of anything of that sort. It’s not something you can just do on a whim. Canada isn’t just going to roll over and become part of the USA. You need tanks and planes mobilized on the border.

You need tanks and planes mobilized on the border.

Something that a lot of people tend to forget is that there is no land border between Canada and the United States. Tanks aren't going to do the US much good here, and that's even if the average Canadian tank wasn't broken down.

Now sure, you can say "but the Western border", and it's true that isn't defensible in the slightest, but it also isn't really Canada, it's just a territorial possession. The people who live there will all say that too, by the way- they vote like it, those who opposed Canada violently in the past are venerated, etc. Just like Quebec, for that matter.

In truth, Canada is (as it was originally, back when it was called Upper Canada) defined as "the peoples who live in the area constrained by 2000km of vast, relatively impassable Ontario wilderness to the West (there is one road, and a lot of bridges along that road), the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to the South and East, and the French to the North (and they are similarly surrounded by water and wilderness)".

As far as the peoples unprotected by the natural barrier of the St. Lawrence go (where you can just drive across), the fact of the matter is there's nothing out there worth taking that the US doesn't already have. Halifax is strategically significant because there's a warm-water port there, and the Great Lakes ports are not (or at least, they aren't yet). Everywhere else is about as populated as the Territories are: PEI has less than 200,000 residents, and NS only has a million.

Thus, Canada is literally an ocean away from the US (in the absence of those bridges, which for all the faults of the Canadian military they will still have the capacity to destroy in open warfare with the US). And sure, while their tactical situation is completely untenable for other reasons- modern artillery has range sufficient to just sit on the US side of the border and dismantle Canadian industry completely unchallenged, something that wasn't possible in 1812- it's going to take the US long enough to actually get their military pieces into position for foreign military aid to arrive.

While it's likely that Canada would still lose extremely quickly due to a complete lack of will to prosecute a war against an ally offering better terms to its soldiers than the Canadian government ever would, the destruction of Canadian industry in that area would nullify Canada's value as an ally. This isn't a war that can be realistically won by the US primarily with a traditional exercise of military power.

Were I to attempt this I'd exploit the fact that the West is unwilling to fight a war the East gets itself into. Thus, I would target industry most commonly found in the East with a competitive advantage against American industry due to its dirt-cheap power, that being steel and aluminum production, and wait for counter-tariffs and a political split to get the West to the table. And I'd offer the most powerful Western province special treatment- a comparative exemption on tariffs to its strategic resource- to suggest that provinces willing to deal independently of the federal government may have other payoffs (and to further drive a wedge between the West and the East, for the East hates petrochemical development).

Which is probably why those things are happening.

Certainly trying to take Toronto by invading from the West along the North Shore would be silly. But forcing crossings of St. Lawrence River and the Niagara River is far easier than crossing an ocean (or even the Great Lakes). If the US for some reason decided to invade Canada, certainly it could head north and west from Maine and New York, and cross the St. Lawrence. The Niagara is a bottleneck and so harder, but I expect it would still be done, probably combined with true amphibious crossings over the lakes. And the St Clair, though that's also a bottleneck -- it might be a race to see who can get heavy units there faster.

But forcing crossings of St. Lawrence River and the Niagara River is far easier than crossing an ocean

Again, calling these "rivers" is a bit of misnomer. This isn't the Rio Grande where you can more or less just walk across- it's at least half a mile across (miles in some areas), and it's not fordable. It doesn't freeze in the winter any more either, so that's out too.

If you want to invade you need a green-water navy (to get your transports from the Eastern seaboard through the open water, down the mouth of the Seaway), and only then can you start ferrying gear across. This is not a trivial problem- in fact, I argue that the relative difficulty of crossing this body of water until the mid-20th century is the main reason the Canadian identity exists distinct from the American one in the first place.

(This is, of course, ignoring the fact that this would probably all be done by air; the US can drop more tanks out of C-5s in a day than the Canadians have in their history ever fielded.)

All the major objectives would be seized within a week of an American attack, even with no preparation. For example Fort Drum holds the 10th Mountain Division, which alone is more combat capable than all of the Canadian Armed Forces combined even if they weren't spread out. It takes Ottawa on day 2.

The biggest defence of Canada is that a large proportion of Americans likes us quite a bit, and an attempt to actually violently seize us would more likely result in an American Civil War then a straight-forward invasion.

While I appreciate the post summarizing the arguments, I think that with a little tweaking it could be a copypasta that we could use whenever Trump is talking about anything. Most of it isn't Canada-specific, and I actually started laughing a little during the Buchanan/McKinley/Putin portion. At that point I thought it was a copypasta and I had been successfully trolled into reading the little list.

the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.

Thst point at least is rather weak. If the US military hasn't kept an up to date plan for military action to secure the Panama Canal for a very long time now, I'll eat several of my hats.

All of the points are rather weak: "He likes big real estate deals?" (and therefore, we must assume that he wants to annex every other nation on Earth, since what could be a bigger real estate deal that the US taking over everyone!) "Canada says he's serious" (and if we know anything about the Canadian elite, it's that they're honor-bound not to take cheap shots at a person not well-liked by their populace)

This is all so, so tiresome. Nothing presented rises above vague platitudes that, if we accept as true, would allow us to preemptively accuse Trump of any nefarious schemes our minds can imagine, with no need to worry about the messy process of determining if they represent reality or not. Anyone convinced by this had, quite frankly, already made up their mind, and were looking for any rhetorical cover to justify themselves.

Of course he's serious. Trump loves Canada, and he thinks Canadians are great. He thinks they could be even better as part of the US, and they could help Make America Great Again. He thinks they are weak alone, and their current political and economic trajectory are unforunate, and if they continue as they are then Canada may become liability rather than an ally.

If Trump wants to annex you, that's a compliment, a huge compliment. But he's not going to send troops into Canada. He wants Canada to want to join the US. He sincerely does not understand why so many Canadians dislike the US. He thinks he's offering Canada a good deal, the best deal.

In the long run, I think he will be proven right, but he'll be gone before then.

It's because he's going about it in the worst way possible. He's basically insulting them, telling them their trade policies (that he renegotiated!) aren't fair, and that they're letting drugs and whatever else over the border, then trying to coerce them with economic warfare and veiled threats of invasion. This isn't some rogue country that happens to be next to us, but probably the closest of many close allies. If there's ever any chance at a union it's through even closer cooperation. The first order of business should be trying to get all tariffs and duties down to zero in both directions, and negotiating some kind of Schengen-style agreement to get rid of border controls.

It's because he's going about it in the worst way possible.

The people who feel the most insulted are also the ones who screwed up the country with their (and it has been exclusively their) idiotic economic policies. I have zero problem with the complete destruction of their culture and their political power, because they have had zero problems with destroying mine.

And I suspect that, should they win again (for the sole purpose of fighting this stupid trade war), that the Western provinces are going to get good enough at foreign diplomacy that this might occur regardless of what Ottawa wants. Alberta in particular has had some success in this and I think that's a bigger deal than others recognize.

The first order of business should be trying to get all tariffs and duties down to zero in both directions, and negotiating some kind of Schengen-style agreement to get rid of border controls.

Of course it should, but if we're going to do that, having some actual political lever to pull for economic policy will be useful. Hence the suggestion that Canada should join the European Union.

The people who feel the most insulted are also the ones who screwed up the country with their (and it has been exclusively their) idiotic economic policies

Simply wrong. Canadian nationalism has been the province of the right since being disowned by the woke left and their captain Trudeau for the last decade. I and many Canadians I know who are like me were sympathetic to the Trump administration and their goals before they took power and started showing their immense capacity for bullying and self-sabotage on the world stage. Ideological alignment is one thing, but question the sovereignty of my country and insult the flag that I served under and you’ve made yourself an enemy.

When I was an Ontarian I was a Doug Ford supporter and I think his comments represent this way of thinking best; there is no contradiction in this line of thinking and it has not even damaged him and his image as the strongest Canadian leader in the current trade war: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7449512

Canadian nationalism has been the province of the right since being disowned by the woke left and their captain Trudeau for the last decade

Post-nationalism is nationalism for Eastern Big City Canadians. Being interested in the whole country's growth rather than invested in holy crusade against it is indeed a "right-wing" thing though.

Ideological alignment is one thing, but question the sovereignty of my country and insult the flag that I served under and you’ve made yourself an enemy.

Your desire to get credit for putting your life on the line for people who hate you is understandable.

Hypothetically, if Canada did become the 51st state, would I be right in saying it would be the largest state in the union by landmass by quite a huge margin? Or am I too Mercator-projection pilled?

Seems like a terrible idea from a Republican standpoint: adding ~30 million new voters to your electorate, 80%+ of whom can be assumed to be reliable Democrat voters.

Also worth pointing out that in his first term, Trump became the first POTUS in decades not to start any new wars, so his track record is pretty respectable on that front at least. Unless we're talking about peaceful annexation, whatever that might look like.

Hypothetically, if Canada did become the 51st state, would I be right in saying it would be the largest state in the union by landmass by quite a huge margin? Or am I too Mercator-projection pilled?

LOL. By landmass, Canada is the second-largest country in the world, after Russia. It's not just bigger than any US state, it's bigger than the US.

Even by population, it would be the largest, just slightly higher than California.

Does this mean it would be bigger than Texas? How many Canadas fit into Texas?

Texas is already smaller than Alaska(Alaska notoriously has a bit of a complex about this), despite Texas being bigger than any country in Europe except Russia and Ukraine.

A quick Google suggests approximately 1/15.

If Canada joined the United States each province would probably be a separate state.

As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1. Whether that is because he himself has changed, a difference in advisors/staff, or a change in the Republican party around him I do not know.

But what we do know is that things have changed quite a bit, and he is now calling for Canada to be made into a state. A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.

As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1.

I think this proves too much. Just because Trump's second term is different from his first doesn't mean his past behaviour is of no use to us in predicting what he'll do next. If I said that I expected Trump to begin a massive campaign of carbon divestment starting in 2026, you said that nothing in his political career to date suggested that was likely to happen, I don't think you'd be very impressed if I countered with "well, Trump 2 is radically different from Trump 1".

I also notice that the argument directly contradicts point 5 of your post - why is Trump's past as a real estate developer of greater relevance to what he'll do next as POTUS than the last time he was POTUS?

A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.

How many times has he publicly floated the idea of annexing Canada since assuming office?

Of course former precedent does matter but changes matter too.

Think of it like this, let's say a parent has a 10 year old who suddenly starts muttering to themselves about killing you in your sleep. And they keep doing it over and over, and they sometimes brandish a knife and say they're gonna stab you. And they started stabbing animals outside.

You could go "Haha well, they've never killed me before when they were younger so it won't happen now" and sleep soundly, or you could go "Huh they've never threatened me before, I should probably get them checked out and get medical help".

I assume you would choose the second one. I assume you understand why a change in their rhetoric and behavior is meaningful. The parent that chooses the first one gets stabbed at night and is "surprised" despite being told that it would happen.

That's one way of looking at it, although I am way more interested in what you did to your kid to drive him patricidal. Another perspective is if you have ever been in a relationship that started getting serious, and your girlfriend starts talking about moving in with you. Some guys panic at the very suggestion, but that's silly. You only really need to start worrying when she begins redecorating your place.

Sure. But on the other hand, Trump has a propensity to verbalise every stray thought that crosses his mind unrivalled in politics domestic and foreign. He suffers from terminal logorrhea. It's hardly an original insight to say that he's a showman first and a politician second, and every good showman knows you can't just play the hits over and over again - you have to spice up your act with new material. Maybe he never discussed this in his first term, but there were lots of things he talked about doing during his first term (and beforehand) that he never got around to. Lots of the things he's done have been outrageous, but I don't think you've presented a very convincing case for why it's likely that invading the US's neighbour will be one of them.

But he is playing to ’a hit’ here. He’s repeated the 51st state line over and over and over again. A lot of his stray thoughts lately have concerned this subject or other potential annexations.

By "playing the hits", I mean repeating the same talking points he made during his first campaign and his first term.

I have always assumed that Canadian provinces and territories will come as states if they do.

The Canadian territories are too small in terms of population to be reasonable states. The three Canadian territories combined have only 130,000 people, despite their huge land area. That's significantly fewer than the least populous Canadian province's 180,000 people, and far fewer than the least populous US state's 590,000 people.

Yeah, the territories would probably have the same "no, you don't get to sit at the big kids' table" status as they do now within Canada, if not moreso. Might want to merge some of the Atlantic provinces too, making ten provinces into something like eight US states.

Seems like a terrible idea from a Republican standpoint: adding ~30 million new voters to your electorate, 80%+ of whom can be assumed to be reliable Democrat voters.

One solution might be to make a territory, not a state, so they wouldn't have the right to vote.

But I really don't think Trump is serious. At least, I don't think he's thought this through in detail, he just thinks it would look cool on the map and make him famous in history.

One solution might be to make a territory, not a state, so they wouldn't have the right to vote.

If this was the proposal, there's no way in hell it happens in a voluntary way, like Trump seems to want at least according to the video.

Not that I give much odds of that in any scenario, but especially that one.

Well yeah.. Puerto Rico and Guam also didn't exactly become territories in a "voluntary" way...

Canada is literally bigger than the US, so yes it would be the largest state in the union. It would also be the most populous, edging out California. And yes, it would definitely guarantee that the Democrats win every election for quite a while. Canada's major parties are a centrist party, a left-wing party, a radical left wing party, and a French separatist party. Also universal healthcare has supermajority support from both the left and right, so expect that to become the single most important issue facing the government.

Frankly, it would make more sense to turn Canada into five states than one big one (BC, Ontario, Quebec, Western, and Maritimes).

Frankly, it would make more sense to turn Canada into five states than one big one (BC, Ontario, Quebec, Western, and Maritimes).

Giving Democrats a good time in Senate elections too!

I'm against annexation, but I think we should have an open door policy to apply for voluntary association and incorporation. We should be open to becoming the United States of the world. No first world nation needs more sovereignty than Alabama has.

Leading with "COFAs for all who want it" would have been an interesting policy move, but I rather strongly suspect that Trump has poisoned the well on that front.

if Canada did become the 51st state, would I be right in saying it would be the largest state in the union by landmass by quite a huge margin?

Canada wouldn't just be bigger than any other state in the union- it would be bigger than all of them combined. Yes, including Alaska.

Canada is roughly 5x the size of the next largest state, Alaska. So, yeah, it's huge. And mostly empty. Unfortunately the people there (like in most of the rest of the world) are mostly leftists, so it would be a bad deal to incorporate it.

Your youtuber doesn't seem to have addressed the relevant question of 'what makes this time different than the last failed predictions of Trump the warmonger?'

This list of supporting arguments is not new. Most of them applied to the previous Trump term as well. Setting aside the selection and framing biases in them, why should predictions that Trump is going to invade countries now supposed to be treated more credibly than previous predictions that Trump was going to invade countries? Particularly since one of the greatest points of diplomatic contention between Trump, the Europeans, and even the Trudeau government, has been a lack of interest in military expenditures?

I'm not aware of any time during the first administration that Trump talked about taking over Canada or Greenland, especially not so consistently. So what makes it different is exactly that, he's now saying he wants to.

Now whether or not he can do it is a different question from whether or not he wants to do it. I think the chance of a Canada annexation is unlikely. But he has signaled consistently (along with his aides saying he is serious) so the motive seems real.

Do We Live In the Dankest Timeline?

Or

Is the United States Going to (Re)Join the British Commonwealth?

(Probably not, but this is funny.)

Earlier this month, @hydroacetylene gave a flattering compliment about how if he ever lucked into power, he'd consider me for an advisor. However, I deferred at the time and now must formally defer in favor of another Motte poster, who has a geopolitical creativity I would never have thought of despite dropping their hints in ways that only most perfidious minds of Albion could make appear unserious at the time.

Specifically-

If I had a nickel for every time someone had proposed expanding the British Commonwealth as a way to address a geopolitical question...

@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?

Because according to Trump... Sounds Good!

More seriously(?), emerging reporting of the hour(s) is that Trump has pre-empted (via his Truth Social, no less) a planned-but-not-yet-extended invitation by the British government to bring the US into a voluntary association agreement with the Commonwealth of Nations, aka the British Commonwealth, aka the post-British empire talking club.

As a geopolitical unit, the British Commonwealth... isn't? The wiki page summarizes obligations as-

Member states have no legal obligations to one another, though some have institutional links to other Commonwealth nations. Commonwealth citizenship affords benefits in some member countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, and Commonwealth countries are represented to one another by high commissions rather than embassies. The Commonwealth Charter defines their shared values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law,[12] as promoted by the quadrennial Commonwealth Games.

A no-obligation talking club isn't the worst thing in international politics. It offers a channel to communicate, nice summit opportunities, and engagement opportunities. Not much, but not nothing either.

So... why now?

The Independent speculates-

Having America joining the Commonwealth, even as an associate member, could be a way for Charles to smooth over tensions between Washington, London and Ottawa that have erupted over Trump’s frequently-stated desire to make Canada — a Commonwealth founding member and one of the 15 nations that still counts the King as head of state — the 51st American state rather than the fully independent nation it has been since the 1982 Canadian constitution removed the country’s vestigial legal dependence on the British parliament.

Would Commonwealth-association defuse the trade war? Probably not.

But it will be a heck of a funny if the British government tries to run with this opportunity(?) of a generation.

It will also be funny to watch how European (social) media covers this story, if it goes anywhere. A significant policy effort by the Europeans of late has been to try and get the current Labour government more and more involved with EU projects vis-a-vis US engagements. This is... not necessarily a reversal, but at the same time anything that lets the UK play the US of the EU (or vice versa) complicates efforts at reversing British disentanglement from the EU that followed Brexit.

Plus, the memes will be funny.

I imagine some British foreign policy experts (cough @FiveHourMarathon cough) have an interesting weekend ahead of them from this Trump tweet-leak.

@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?

我们有办法

This reminds me more of a PJ O'Rourke column from the early 1980s where he proposed that Reagan was a bad president, but would make a great King.

It's interesting to consider a Commonwealth that includes the USA, because the USA would naturally begin to dominate it. From the Commonwealth Games to economic deals, the club goes from being primarily "Former British Possessions" to primarily "America and Friends." This could be the Atlanticist vision of Brexit. Or it might be scuttled by Trump's mercurial nature.

Do we get to play in the commonwealth games?

Sure, if you like losing to us.

Only if you adopt cricket.

There are a surprising number of cricket fields in the couple American metro areas I frequent. Not a ton, but people are clearly investing in them. I suspect a good chunk of the players are South Asians on H1B visas or their relations, but I don't see a problem with trying to evangelize a sport.

There's a cricket field(and professional team) in Grand Prairie, in the metroplex I live in. It's pretty near the notoriously Indian neighborhoods(but much cheaper) and promotional materials for it I've seen are full of Indians.

I would guess upwards of 95% of people who play cricket in America on a regular or semi-regular basis are of South Asian descent. In very big cities there will be a few expats from the UK / Australia / NZ / South Africa, and maybe some expats and immigrants from the former colonies in the Caribbean, but that’s it.

I worked parks once upon a time. We had plenty of basketball courts and baseball and soccer fields, along with picnic shelters, but we also had a single cricket oval at one of the bigger parks. Since I was clearing trash cans on the weekends, I saw who was using it, and it was always all Indians.

My large corporate employer has as cricket interest group who get together to play at a local field. There are two English players, one from Granada, and the rest are entirely Indian.

A few big Indian tech tycoons / execs are trying to promote cricket in the US.

We're working on this!

(and this baseball fan finds T-20 cricket immense fun)

I still have no idea why any Republican would want to make Canada the 51st state and thus add tens of millions of people who tend to lean significantly further left than the GOP to the US electorate.

Because Trump said it.

The key would be to "eat" Canada bit by bit, taking over its most right-wing parts, accelerating the collapse of the rest of it and its associated right-wing turn, rinse-wash-repeat until you've gotten the whole thing.

First, Canadian politics aren't American politics. Lots of people support the status quo no matter what the status quo actually is. Supporting Canadian single-payer healthcare doesn't mean they'd want single-payer across all 51 states.

Second, Trump hardly has any love for the GOP anyway. The Grand Old Party (especially as represented by the last pre-Trump candidate, Romney) was the old elite, the ones who talked about things like family values, the moral majority and the dignity of the presidency. Trump himself is the new elite, and now a lot of Trump's administration are disaffected former Democrats. Low income/low education voters were reliably Democrats for decades, and now every election they swing more for Trump. He doesn't care about classic Republican values, so why would he care if Canadians don't either?

Third, union would be by far the most significant political event in either country in generations. Consider how for awhile everyone in the UK was identified as Leave or Remain. A hundred times more than that, union between the US and Canada would itself redefine political identity in both countries.

But even if it doesn't and it's just a clean mapping, I think it's at least as likely for the Bernie Left to join the NDP as it is for the NDP, Liberals and Democrats to all sing kumbaya and join together. (Decent chance Quebec bails completely, so we don't have to worry about the Bloc.) That could mean Republicans/Conservatives get an advantage for awhile, but a lot depends on the exact electoral structure of the new country. Just given physical size it seems likely for each province to be a separate state, but then whither Canadian identity? Does Canada maintain a Scotland-esque autonomous regional government?

but then whither Canadian identity?

What Canadian identity? This is a post-national country.

This is a post-national country.

Same can be said about the US.

British Empire in a funny hat? Never seen 'em.

Yeah, more like “wither Canadian identity”, am I right?

They would have to end democracy to achieve the conquest (just imagine the protests...), and therefore the opinion of canadians would not matter at all

Being term-limited and on his last term, Trump is unmoved by the electoral concerns of other, future Republicans. What he cares about at this point is legacy, and integrating the second largest country on earth, becoming the largest country on earth in the process, is pretty legacy-setting.

I'm not fully convinced, but that's an interesting theory. Trump does seem to really love size, he constantly uses the word "big" and he likes big buildings and so on. Although to be fair, who doesn't? A USA that includes Canada and Greenland would look gigantic on the map, and Trump would then be sure to have gone down as one of the most significant US Presidents of all time. Even more than he already is, I mean. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the map would look even better if the US also expanded all the way down to the Panama Canal. There would be something aesthetically satisfying about one country's color painted over the entirety of North America. But then, if the US absorbs not only Canada, but also Mexico and Central America, well US politics would become completely unrecognizable.

I'm far from convinced he seriously thinks of doing it, but I don't think changes in the electorate have anything to do with it; he's not going to be judged by an election anymore, but by the history books.

Not if they were merely territories with no voting power

Heh.

In GURPS Cyberworld, published in 1993, following a pandemic in 1997 the US is ruled by a dictator, who rules through executive orders, under a Provisional Government established in 2024 (there are still elections but it's a "managed democracy"), and has incorporated Mexico as six new states, with the lower-class Mexicans not free to travel to the old US.

And there are VR Cyberdecks (of course) but Steve Jackson Games failed to foresee social media.

If we look at Shadowrun another cyberpunk game from 1989, they do have the United Canadian and American States or UCAS which is basically the North Eastern part of America and Canada merged together. It has Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan as states.

Then the Confederation of American States in the South and a bunch of Native American nations in between after the resurgence of magic and several pandemics and volcanos erupting.

Mexico has been taken over by a conglomerate which is both simultaneously Aztecs gone back to sacrificing people on pyramids and a merging of the drug cartels.

Tir Tairngire, the Elf Supremacist dictatorship, is my personal favorite Shadowrun nation.

(I don't actually game, I just like to read the sourcebooks for the world-building.)

The Tirs (Tairngire and na Nog) are fun! I ran a game where my players woke up with their menories wiped and had to piece together they had completed a run for the Elves in Tairngire which went down a storm.

Shadowrun is one of my all time top RPGs and settings.

So like 95% of Canada by land mass is already, then. Nothing would change for most of the country if this occurred.

About (aboot?) 40%, but what's half an order of magnitude between friends.

The 40% of Canada that doesn't live in Toronto has virtually no political power, and this has been true for the past 150 years.

The controlling empire being American rather than [Upper] Canadian would change relatively little.

Besides being a big move of the goalposts, you seem to have some weird-ass misconceptions about both Canadian demographics and Canadian politics. Toronto is about 17% of the population, not anywhere near 60%. That's not quite as weird as thinking the Territories are 95% of the land mass, but it still seems to be massively skewing your perspective. Things are certainly weighted heavily toward the East but it's nowhere close to all-powerful.

More comments

He's already said Canada would be the 51st state. I agree true empire would be the best if the US could administer it, but sadly, I think we can't.

So we have oceania almost ready. Waiting for Eurasia now.

The most significant thing that would change is that the ~200,000 Americans in the UK could vote in UK elections.

Fascinating! Do you know if they skew left or right?

Expats are usually high income, so they'd probably skew Tory for tax cuts.

The only American expat in the UK I know is my cousin, who married an English woman and moved to England. He’s a very standard-issue #Resist liberal stoner, as is his wife, although they clearly make good money, given the area in England where they were able to buy a home.

I’m guessing in the American sense they’d be Dems but some might be attracted to Tory since that is more posh

Wait, that was real? Learn something new every day.

"Make America Great Britain Again"

I'm pretty sure I've seen that on a meme (complete with the not-yet-deceased queen) back in 2016. Life imitates art.

There were "make Hong Kong Great Britain Again" signs during the Hong Kong protests.

I am generally supportive of peaceful, voluntary political union, and have occasionally mused on the topic myself. I could see some trouble selling Americans on it with an actual monarch as it's head, though.

I did think it was interesting when The Queen died that everyone so quickly agreed that Charles would head the Commonwealth (apparently agreed upon in advance by the heads of state), since the position is officially non-hereditary.

(apparently agreed upon in advance by the heads of state)

Isn't the british monarch the head of state of like 90% of the commonwealth?

The Commonwealth includes India and Pakistan, so no. The British monarch is head of state of approximately 150 million of the 2.4 billion citizens of the commonwealth.

It's a commonwealth of nations (that's its name...) not a commonwealth of individuals

My main problem with joining the commonwealth isn't that we'd have to accept a monarch, it's that we'd have to accept the wrong monarch. There are NAPOLEONS on US soil! And they've already served our country with distinction. Why should we settle for the inferior house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha ?

Some renewed life has also been breathed into the idea of a CANZUK confederation.

The leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has publicly endorsed CANZUK in a recent newspaper column.

Following the resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, four candidates have emerged to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, with two of the candidates [Carney and Baylis] resoundingly endorsing CANZUK during a televised leadership debate.

Ed Davey is famous for doing or saying anything to get on camera. The Lib Dens are currently irrelevant so any publicity is good publicity.


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