A bit of a broader, more general-purpose side-rant here. Apologies for picking on this article; not explicitly upset with this article, just using it as the example. So I've had this notion...
Exemplary
A bit of a broader, more general-purpose side-rant here. Apologies for picking on this article; not explicitly upset with this article, just using it as the example.
So I've had this notion floating around in my head since Trump took office (again).
I've watched, over and over, his blatant brazen "bow to me or face my wrath" bullshit, and I have been flat-out shocked that organization after organization, and country after country has fallen for this bullshit and caved in, abandoning principles and doing whatever they have to, to appease the boy-king.
And here's what has been obvious to me (and most "regular people") since Day 0, but which--apparently--has never become obvious to every leader on the planet.
--No, the US is not at war with Canada; the US is at war with the entire world ... and as long as Canada and Canadians keep thinking about this as attacks by the US on Canada ... until Canadians are every bit as shocked and up-in-arms when Trump attacks Venezuela, or Spain, or Cuba, or Mexico, or China, or even Iran, or whoever else the Infant-Tyrant professes to be upset with on any given day ... as long as everyone, everywhere continues to shut up and hold their breath, in the hope of not drawing His ire ... the US keeps winning what should have been an unwinnable war against the entire planet.
The day Trump announced tariffs on every single country on Earth ... every single country on Earth should have immediately gotten together and said "okay, fuck the US ... no one buys anything from the US, no one sells anything to the US, until the US either grows up, or dies of starvation ... we can go right back to disagreeing on everything else afterwards, but for this, we need to act in unison, put a hard stop to this behavior right now".
Mind you, I'm not saying "reciprocal tariffs". I'm saying 100% everything-sanctions. No scabs; no one crosses the picket line.
Tariffs would have lasted a month, then TACO, and then the subject would never have been raised again.
But instead of saying "that's unfair to the whole world", every leader of every country said "that's unfair to my country; let's talk about making a special exception for us, and then you can keep right on fucking over whoever else isn't smart enough to make a deal with you".
And lo and behold, the spoiled brat keeps getting his way. And I have come to realize that this is how Trump has gotten ahead his entire life ... by trusting in the inherent selfishness and greed and self-interest of everyone he's ever crossed swords with.
This is literally the global socio-economic equivalent of "first they came for the Communists".
Bad news. We export more food than we import. We might not get offseason fruit anymore. But an awful lot of other countries won't have enough grains. However, not having access to other consumer...
until the US either grows up, or dies of starvation
Bad news. We export more food than we import. We might not get offseason fruit anymore. But an awful lot of other countries won't have enough grains.
However, not having access to other consumer goods might make suburban america build guillotines. We're a country that will trample people for $50 off a crappy tv.
You know what we do import more than we export? Fertilizer. Farm machinery. Electronics for farm monitoring and analytics. Farm labor (in the form on undocumented immigrants.) That the USA exports...
You know what we do import more than we export? Fertilizer. Farm machinery. Electronics for farm monitoring and analytics. Farm labor (in the form on undocumented immigrants.) That the USA exports more food than it imports is unimportant in a global trade perspective if many of the inputs for farming become unavailable.
... ahem ... economic starvation. Yes, every other country on Earth would struggle ... and the US would struggle about as much as every other country put together. It wouldn't take long to utterly...
... ahem ... economic starvation.
Yes, every other country on Earth would struggle ... and the US would struggle about as much as every other country put together. It wouldn't take long to utterly destroy the US economy, in this day and age.
I agree, but when the best way to make someone else limp is by ripping my own arm off and throwing it under their feet to make them stumble, it's hard to find the motivation to do it, let alone...
I agree, but when the best way to make someone else limp is by ripping my own arm off and throwing it under their feet to make them stumble, it's hard to find the motivation to do it, let alone convince dozens and dozens of other countries to set aside their own rivalries to focus on this particular one. I don't know, I just can't see it happening, even though it feels so frustratingly obviously the least shitty action to take.
The US is the largest consumer market in the world. If trade stopped right now, countries would be staring down economic hardship at least as bad as the great recession, if not worse. How many...
every single country on Earth should have immediately gotten together and said "okay, fuck the US ... no one buys anything from the US, no one sells anything to the US, until the US either grows up, or dies of starvation ... we can go right back to disagreeing on everything else afterwards, but for this, we need to act in unison, put a hard stop to this behavior right now".
The US is the largest consumer market in the world. If trade stopped right now, countries would be staring down economic hardship at least as bad as the great recession, if not worse. How many voters are actually willing to endure that hardship?
Resisting is a collective action problem. Many countries are resisting in large and small ways already. The false narrative of absolute capitulation is due to media capture and fatalism on social media. If anyone remembers the story about law firms bending the knee to the Trump administration, many firms actually refused and recently won in court, but their fight didn't receive much press.
...and 175 countries all agreeing to do something hard is also a flat-out physical impossibility (as evidenced by, eg, oil sanctions on Russia, or climate change) ... I realize this. My rant is...
...and 175 countries all agreeing to do something hard is also a flat-out physical impossibility (as evidenced by, eg, oil sanctions on Russia, or climate change) ... I realize this.
My rant is clearly an over-simplification of my frustration with what I see as widespread, instant capitulation and even pre-capitulation, when even a half-assed, semi-effective, kinda-sorta-mostly global hard-line refusal would (probably) have worked better than ever-more-inventive ways to appease.
And I do realize that global trade is changing, rapidly, thanks to Trump. US economic dominance is done, and will continue to crash even if Trump disappeared tomorrow.
Yup This article is preaching to this choir. The author seems impatient with the world, repeatedly citing examples that we're still playing ball No. No we're not. Mark Carney successfully...
Yup
This article is preaching to this choir. The author seems impatient with the world, repeatedly citing examples that we're still playing ball
We hang on to the hope that he wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly.
No. No we're not. Mark Carney successfully convinced the whole world. But what the author can't seem to understand is that in an abusive relationship, the victim partner is most likely to be murdered when they decide to leave. The victim partner needs time to form new alliances and gather resources while pretending things are fine.
Our collective imagination of war comes from the experiences of our countrymen in the trenches of the Western Front
As a well as the war of 1812. The fabric of our core identity, "NOT American", lies deeper and woven tighter than the zipper layer above.
What this means in practice is that we must mercilessly identify our own weaknesses
We're spending one trillion on defense and sovereign tech, he didn't hear?
world-class foreign intelligence service...defence industrial base
Carney's been very busy visiting all those countries not just for publicly available trade deals but for information as well. Talking to South Korea about car manufacturing, when obviously that kind of manufacturing capabilities also produces other kinds of machinery.
mandatory military service,
......
We need to consider a hardened land border.
Is the author serious. Nine thousand kilometers of land borders, not counting 30 minute scheduled ferry ride and ignoring the fact that 90% of our tiny population live in cities a couple hours drive, aka within drone and missile strike distance, to the United States. Fact that he didn't once mention our only real safeguard, that France and UK have nukes, is interesting. Rather than bankrupting ourselves building pre-ancient tech of walls, I would have respected this article more if he ended with "we need to build nukes now".
Patrick Lennox is a former RCMP intelligence manager and author
Okay, cop.
I end my comment by returning to my analogy about a battered spouse needing to be smart when making plans to leave a violent, hostile, pig-minded partner.
Edit: okay to be fair he's a lot more than just work for the RCMP, bio. But hey if this kind of "we need to do more" article gets him a new job within the trillion dollar defense spending, cool, good luck bro.
Can I poke around on that idea? One of the things that has struck me through all of this is how much ire it's caused in the "western world". But this behavior is suuuuuuper common from the US,...
Can I poke around on that idea? One of the things that has struck me through all of this is how much ire it's caused in the "western world". But this behavior is suuuuuuper common from the US, Europe, and China, just typically towards other countries. Like, it's ok if we do it to Benin or Indonesia or Colombia, but as soon as it's felt in Belgium or Canada or England it's a betrayal and shift in world order.
I'm not condoning what the United States is doing at all, and I think the US has been the most consistent, worst actor in this way for nearly a century. But I feel some sense of Schadenfreude when these traditionally colonialist countries decry the travesty done to them. I'm not sure if there is a better example of this than France. The cries for civility and justice when they've spent the last century fucking North Africa as hard as they can.
I guess it just feels like this weird club, where you can press horrible economic policy (a la USA v Cuba), you can overthrow governments (a la Gadaffi, Allende, or Maduro/Khameni), or carry out genocides (a la Gaza) with mild pushback. As long as you're one of the club there are no consequences or risks.
And to me, it turns this sentiment on its head. We're talking about national sovereignty. International civility. As Carney said a "rules-based world order". But all of those things seem to only apply to a handful of nations. I don't think what comes next is any better and I think things only go south for the US. But I do think, and this may be naive, but if I was from one of the countries from outside of that little club I'd be cheering this chaos on. Although probably not, because the violence seems to be hitting non-club members first.
My feeling is not aimed at Canada, as they don't have the colonial past or actions that many of the little club members do. I'd just love to hear what people think this idea.
I think Carney did acknowledge the hypocrisy that has been so deeply embedded in all of this "rules-based order" that's breaking down. These couple paras from that famous davos speech were pretty...
I think Carney did acknowledge the hypocrisy that has been so deeply embedded in all of this "rules-based order" that's breaking down. These couple paras from that famous davos speech were pretty damning, I thought:
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes."
A lot of the global north has been happy enough to turn a blind eye as long as the US used its military might to cow a lot of other, otherwise uppity, nations. Rules being for the poor is true at both the micro and macro level, unfortunately. A lot of what Trump does is just being blatant about what other leaders pretended not to do, but totally did actually do.
I recently posted an angry rant on another thread that got a lot of discussion going. I figured I should put a little more effort in explaining how I got to that point, but instead I decided this...
I recently posted an angry rant on another thread that got a lot of discussion going. I figured I should put a little more effort in explaining how I got to that point, but instead I decided this article did a better job explaining my feelings than I ever could.
A bit of a broader, more general-purpose side-rant here. Apologies for picking on this article; not explicitly upset with this article, just using it as the example.
So I've had this notion floating around in my head since Trump took office (again).
I've watched, over and over, his blatant brazen "bow to me or face my wrath" bullshit, and I have been flat-out shocked that organization after organization, and country after country has fallen for this bullshit and caved in, abandoning principles and doing whatever they have to, to appease the boy-king.
And here's what has been obvious to me (and most "regular people") since Day 0, but which--apparently--has never become obvious to every leader on the planet.
--No, the US is not at war with Canada; the US is at war with the entire world ... and as long as Canada and Canadians keep thinking about this as attacks by the US on Canada ... until Canadians are every bit as shocked and up-in-arms when Trump attacks Venezuela, or Spain, or Cuba, or Mexico, or China, or even Iran, or whoever else the Infant-Tyrant professes to be upset with on any given day ... as long as everyone, everywhere continues to shut up and hold their breath, in the hope of not drawing His ire ... the US keeps winning what should have been an unwinnable war against the entire planet.
The day Trump announced tariffs on every single country on Earth ... every single country on Earth should have immediately gotten together and said "okay, fuck the US ... no one buys anything from the US, no one sells anything to the US, until the US either grows up, or dies of starvation ... we can go right back to disagreeing on everything else afterwards, but for this, we need to act in unison, put a hard stop to this behavior right now".
Mind you, I'm not saying "reciprocal tariffs". I'm saying 100% everything-sanctions. No scabs; no one crosses the picket line.
Tariffs would have lasted a month, then TACO, and then the subject would never have been raised again.
But instead of saying "that's unfair to the whole world", every leader of every country said "that's unfair to my country; let's talk about making a special exception for us, and then you can keep right on fucking over whoever else isn't smart enough to make a deal with you".
And lo and behold, the spoiled brat keeps getting his way. And I have come to realize that this is how Trump has gotten ahead his entire life ... by trusting in the inherent selfishness and greed and self-interest of everyone he's ever crossed swords with.
This is literally the global socio-economic equivalent of "first they came for the Communists".
Bad news. We export more food than we import. We might not get offseason fruit anymore. But an awful lot of other countries won't have enough grains.
However, not having access to other consumer goods might make suburban america build guillotines. We're a country that will trample people for $50 off a crappy tv.
You know what we do import more than we export? Fertilizer. Farm machinery. Electronics for farm monitoring and analytics. Farm labor (in the form on undocumented immigrants.) That the USA exports more food than it imports is unimportant in a global trade perspective if many of the inputs for farming become unavailable.
... ahem ... economic starvation.
Yes, every other country on Earth would struggle ... and the US would struggle about as much as every other country put together. It wouldn't take long to utterly destroy the US economy, in this day and age.
I agree, but when the best way to make someone else limp is by ripping my own arm off and throwing it under their feet to make them stumble, it's hard to find the motivation to do it, let alone convince dozens and dozens of other countries to set aside their own rivalries to focus on this particular one. I don't know, I just can't see it happening, even though it feels so frustratingly obviously the least shitty action to take.
The US is the largest consumer market in the world. If trade stopped right now, countries would be staring down economic hardship at least as bad as the great recession, if not worse. How many voters are actually willing to endure that hardship?
Resisting is a collective action problem. Many countries are resisting in large and small ways already. The false narrative of absolute capitulation is due to media capture and fatalism on social media. If anyone remembers the story about law firms bending the knee to the Trump administration, many firms actually refused and recently won in court, but their fight didn't receive much press.
...and 175 countries all agreeing to do something hard is also a flat-out physical impossibility (as evidenced by, eg, oil sanctions on Russia, or climate change) ... I realize this.
My rant is clearly an over-simplification of my frustration with what I see as widespread, instant capitulation and even pre-capitulation, when even a half-assed, semi-effective, kinda-sorta-mostly global hard-line refusal would (probably) have worked better than ever-more-inventive ways to appease.
And I do realize that global trade is changing, rapidly, thanks to Trump. US economic dominance is done, and will continue to crash even if Trump disappeared tomorrow.
Ultimately, I guess ... it was just a rant.
I don't remember the story (stories?) about law firms, what happened there?
I appreciate the implicit suggestion that Israel is just an extension of the US.
This echoes Carney's Davos speech. Such insights as "nostalgia is not a strategy," and "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu."
Yup
This article is preaching to this choir. The author seems impatient with the world, repeatedly citing examples that we're still playing ball
No. No we're not. Mark Carney successfully convinced the whole world. But what the author can't seem to understand is that in an abusive relationship, the victim partner is most likely to be murdered when they decide to leave. The victim partner needs time to form new alliances and gather resources while pretending things are fine.
As a well as the war of 1812. The fabric of our core identity, "NOT American", lies deeper and woven tighter than the zipper layer above.
We're spending one trillion on defense and sovereign tech, he didn't hear?
Carney's been very busy visiting all those countries not just for publicly available trade deals but for information as well. Talking to South Korea about car manufacturing, when obviously that kind of manufacturing capabilities also produces other kinds of machinery.
......
Is the author serious. Nine thousand kilometers of land borders, not counting 30 minute scheduled ferry ride and ignoring the fact that 90% of our tiny population live in cities a couple hours drive, aka within drone and missile strike distance, to the United States. Fact that he didn't once mention our only real safeguard, that France and UK have nukes, is interesting. Rather than bankrupting ourselves building pre-ancient tech of walls, I would have respected this article more if he ended with "we need to build nukes now".
Okay, cop.
I end my comment by returning to my analogy about a battered spouse needing to be smart when making plans to leave a violent, hostile, pig-minded partner.
Edit: okay to be fair he's a lot more than just work for the RCMP, bio. But hey if this kind of "we need to do more" article gets him a new job within the trillion dollar defense spending, cool, good luck bro.
Can I poke around on that idea? One of the things that has struck me through all of this is how much ire it's caused in the "western world". But this behavior is suuuuuuper common from the US, Europe, and China, just typically towards other countries. Like, it's ok if we do it to Benin or Indonesia or Colombia, but as soon as it's felt in Belgium or Canada or England it's a betrayal and shift in world order.
I'm not condoning what the United States is doing at all, and I think the US has been the most consistent, worst actor in this way for nearly a century. But I feel some sense of Schadenfreude when these traditionally colonialist countries decry the travesty done to them. I'm not sure if there is a better example of this than France. The cries for civility and justice when they've spent the last century fucking North Africa as hard as they can.
I guess it just feels like this weird club, where you can press horrible economic policy (a la USA v Cuba), you can overthrow governments (a la Gadaffi, Allende, or Maduro/Khameni), or carry out genocides (a la Gaza) with mild pushback. As long as you're one of the club there are no consequences or risks.
And to me, it turns this sentiment on its head. We're talking about national sovereignty. International civility. As Carney said a "rules-based world order". But all of those things seem to only apply to a handful of nations. I don't think what comes next is any better and I think things only go south for the US. But I do think, and this may be naive, but if I was from one of the countries from outside of that little club I'd be cheering this chaos on. Although probably not, because the violence seems to be hitting non-club members first.
My feeling is not aimed at Canada, as they don't have the colonial past or actions that many of the little club members do. I'd just love to hear what people think this idea.
I think Carney did acknowledge the hypocrisy that has been so deeply embedded in all of this "rules-based order" that's breaking down. These couple paras from that famous davos speech were pretty damning, I thought:
A lot of the global north has been happy enough to turn a blind eye as long as the US used its military might to cow a lot of other, otherwise uppity, nations. Rules being for the poor is true at both the micro and macro level, unfortunately. A lot of what Trump does is just being blatant about what other leaders pretended not to do, but totally did actually do.
I recently posted an angry rant on another thread that got a lot of discussion going. I figured I should put a little more effort in explaining how I got to that point, but instead I decided this article did a better job explaining my feelings than I ever could.