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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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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.