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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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A competent US President would intensify the divisions within Canada so the US could get Alberta to become a state.

The big difference with Alberta is that it is a much younger province where no one has any deep local roots. Everyone is from somewhere else. Albertans have strong connections to other provinces, whereas the average French Canadian in Quebec, even if he doesn't want Quebec to be independent, doesn't really think of himself as Canadian. They don't really care much or think much about the rest of the country.

What? How? More importantly, why? We haven’t wanted to upset the apple cart with a new state since the 50s, and I don’t see what Alberta has to make that change. Oil sands?

To get bigger to better compete with China.

I still don’t understand what Alberta offers that other places don’t. Given that we haven’t vacuumed up our various resource-rich territories or capital-rich allies, Alberta would have to be awfully special to change the calculus.

It doesn't need to offer anything that the US doesn't already have. We should be trying to get other rich English speaking places to join the US for reasons of economies of scale in defense.

Join us, say, in mutual defense organizations?

We’re already on excellent terms with occupied north Montana, as far as I know. I don’t see what you expect to get from adding states rather than mere allies. One of these things is much more expensive, economically and politically, than the other.

Or, to put it another way. If this is such a good idea, why didn’t we do it through most of the Cold War? Instead, we used proxy wars, supplied our allies, and provided the backbone to any strategic moves by the rival superpower. It worked out pretty well for us.

"Or, to put it another way. If this is such a good idea, why didn’t we do it through most of the Cold War?" We lacked the capacity. A huge reason the North didn't let the South leave and fought a civil war to keep them in the union is because everyone knew the US was much militarily stronger as one nation

So in the 1860s we had the capacity to fight half the country, presumably because "everyone knew" that it was for military solidarity. We clearly maintained said capacity up until WWI, since we were playing Manifest Destiny, closing the frontier, and forming new states. After a nice little break in which we snowballed to superpower status, we closed out the set with two final territories.

At which point did we lose the capacity to annex another state or five?

To get a rich and English speaking state, we would have had to attack the British Empire, which would not have been easy until after WW II, at which point doing so would have devastated the US brand name.

There really is a lot of oil up there -- if it comes to resource-wars this would be a logical target. (mind you the oil in Alberta is not much closer to Montana than Texas is)

Coal too! It's really a Mad-Max paradise. (although if you want water you probably should go to BC)

There's a good chance Alberta would be a Blue state in the American context, if that makes you any more supportive?

(It will never happen, but there's factions of Alberta that are mad enough at the Canadian feds to talk separatism from time to time -- since it would be landlocked they sometimes float statehood as a solution. But you're right that I see no reason the US would want them -- it's sort of like Texas-lite, and you already have the real thing!)

A lot of the "blueness" of it is due to Canada's baseline level of anti-americanism. By that I mean that there's one thing Canadians have in common from one coast to the next, is that feeling of inferiority with regards to americans, the idea that they are so close but not quite living in a Country That Actually Matters, that drive them to protectively act like they wouldn't want to be americans anyway, Canada is so much smarter you guys. Especially with regards to politics; if a move is seen as being uniquely american, the Canadian population will virtue-signal that they want their politicians to do the opposite. (Whether politicians actually will is not necessarily guaranteed since "opposite whatever the americans do, whaterver it is" is not a smart thoughtful heuristic for politics).

If that barrier is overcome and Alberta was an american state already, opinions would probably quite different.

There was a poll that ranked every province, state, and Washington D.C. by their level of support for Trump. Alberta, which had the highest support for Trump in Canada, had a lower level than Washington, D.C., which had the lowest level in the U.S. Every U.S. state is more pro-Trump than every Canadian province.

If this is the poll you're thinking of then not quite - Biden wins Alberta over Trump 68-32, which is comparable to the 66-31 2020 result in Vermont, but well short of the 92-5 margin in DC.

That is probably the one. Maybe I misremembered the D.C. result. I thought it was much more balanced. But I thought I compared the Canadian poll to an American poll at the time, but I doubt the poll for D.C. would have been off by that much. I guess it was that only D.C. was more pro-Biden and I remembered it as even D.C. was less pro-Biden.

Not particularly, haha.

At least they’re rat-free. I can say with confidence that’s not true here in Texas.

A competent US President would prefer to keep Canada stable, there is enough of instability on Souther border.

Economies of scale in military protection means the US benefits from adding rich, stable, culturally compatible states.

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