Thanx ever so. I’m going through my gift links this month like a hot knife through butter.
…with either a spectacular ignorance or disregard for the last 125 yrs of history there. It’s utterly mind boggling, and every time they manage to surpass the stupidity and arrogance of the previous time.
Their selfishness and short-sightedness will do incredible damage that will extend far beyond their tenure.
It just boggles the mind that they all think he and his administration are making things better. They are delighted at his actions and celebrating a return to “common sense”.
I am truly baffled and saddened that I live in this time and space.
I’m glad we’re only four miles from Canada. We could walk to White Rock, BC at low tide.
I wrote the OP of this thread back in November with a great deal of sadness and fear about the new world order that ignorant American voters had wrought. I had no idea how much worse it would actually be than anyone could ever have imagined. It’s a combination of crazed far-right ideology and being completely immune to facts. They’re not living in factual reality, but in an Orwellian fabrication. It’s the very definition of insanity.
Just one random example illustrates what I mean, and it’s one that concerns me greatly because it threatens Canada’s economy, and indeed even the threat is already causing investors to pull their money out of Canada. Trump hasn’t even bothered to be consistent about the lies he uses to justify huge tariffs on Canadian imports.
First he said it was to curtail the flow of fentanyl from Canada, even though virtually all of it comes from Mexico. Then he said it was to curtail illegal immigration, even though almost all of that comes through the southern border. Then he said it was because the US runs a huge trade deficit with Canada and it’s “very unfair”, even though the actual figures show otherwise, and the two countries are tightly economically integrated to the benefit of both. How do you deal with someone so disconnected from reality?
Furthermore, it’s all illegal on two counts. The president has the authority to impose tariffs only in an emergency, which this certainly isn’t. Second, it’s a blatant violation of the Canada-US free trade agreement – an agreement that Trump negotiated himself in this first term and deemed “the greatest deal ever”!
You forgot the “Americans are tired of paying to protect Canada militarily” trope. I spotted this on a predominantly RWNJ board. The quoted poster is replying to a Canadian:
I’d actually like to know how the US is protecting Canada militarily, and I’d love to know how our federal government is spending money on social programs when those are administered by the provinces, but I’m not about to wade into that mess on that board.
The appropriate questions to ask idiots like that are (a) what exactly is the US doing to “protect” Canada, and (b) exactly how much is the US spending to do this? I mean, if we owe them compensation for this awesome service, how much do we owe? Let’s see an itemized list of all the things they’re supposedly doing for us and what it costs.
The problem is that you can’t reason with idiots. They have no interest in facts. And this is true not only of idiots on RWNJ message boards, but also true of the fascists that American voters put into actual power. For the first time in at least 150 years, Canada faces an actual economic and maybe even military threat, and it’s coming from fascist America. It’s them we need protection from!
It’s truly amazing how Trumpers are now pretending that they have always been concerned with how horribly Canada and Europe have been ripping us off, when it’s something they never once thought about before a couple weeks ago. Totally successful brainwashing.
‘The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.’
I’ve read this three times now; as if I’d find anything sane in it.
Why should Canadian tax dollars be spent on social programs that benefit Americans?
This dumbassery is typical of Magats, and then they wonder why they’re looked down upon.
In the conservative tradition of ‘Why is America’s oil under your sand?’
‘There are two kinds of money, America’s money, and America’s money that happens to be in your country socialist hell-hole at this moment.’
Very good questions, I must say, but like I said, I’m not going to head into that board and ask them. I surf the web and enjoy message boards (well, most of them) because it’s a pleasant pastime, not because I want to be outraged or get into a flamewar.
But you got me thinking. What other questions might be appropriate? For example, if the US protects Canada militarily, then why are there no US Army or Marine bases, no USAF airfields, no USN bases or naval air stations in Canada? There are in other countries, why not Canada? Why are there no US nuclear missile silos in Canada?
Admittedly, pre-1949, the USAF built and operated a USAF air base at Stephenville, Newfoundland, but they left in 1966, long after Newfoundland became a province in 1949. (Cite to Wikipedia.) Since then, there has been minimal US military presence on Canadian soil. Yes, there’s a few USAF personnel at NORAD in North Bay, Ontario (just as there are a few RCAF personnel at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado), and of course, joint military exercises, but what else?
Like I said, you got me thinking; thanks for that. But I’m still not willing to wade into that thread on that board. Still, the question remains, if there is effectively no US military presence in Canada, then how is the US protecting Canada?
I was thinking about this yesterday, watching yet another of his stupid comments about Canada. It just wearies me that we have to listen to this crap for the next four years (at least!), and actually have to take it seriously. I really wish we could just wash our hands of the US in one giant move, but we’d only be screwing ourselves. No matter how aggressively we move to reduce our dependence on the US, we’ll still be heavily tied to them for years to come, maybe decades.
But at this point, I’d fully support whatever we had to do to move us away from them. It will require billions in infrastructure improvements all across the country to do this, and that needs to be sustained, year over year, no matter which party becomes the government in any given election.
Because Canadians don’t count as people, and everything they have really belongs to America. “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine” is how the Right and especially Trump think. As far as they are concerned if they want something it’s rightfully theirs, and the people who presently have it are thieves and parasites who deserve death.
Yeah, these guys have forgotten something that political leaders in North America have know for hundreds of years: Our single biggest military defence is those goddamned big oceans separating us from the rest of the world. There’s never really been a time that anyone overseas could realistically plan to invade us, because the logistics of it were just insane.
Yes, this is one thing Americans typically fail to consider: we in Canada are protected by three oceans, one of which is inhospitable. We’d have a lot of warning, and a lot of time to figure out what to do and how to craft a response.
Even if Russia (say) was to invade over the North Pole, we’d have a warning from CFB Alert, NWT. Even then, the Russians would have to advance over 2000 miles before they got to a settlement that might, possibly, maybe, resupply them. Until then, they’d have to rely on their own resupply lines. In perpetual winter, except for the two months that allow plants to grow in the Arctic. And they’d still have 3000+ miles to go before they got anywhere strategic. As for invading via the Atlantic or Pacific—forget it. We’d have too much warning. It wouldn’t be D-Day.
As was so aptly stated by @Horatius , what protects us is our geography. That doesn’t mean that we can abandon or neglect our military forces, and frankly, I think that we ought to spend more on them. But Trump and Trumpists seem to think that it’ll be a walk in the park for Russians to land on Ellesmere Island, and from there march on Toronto. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.
Our geography defends us more than the US does.
Yep. If Canada were serious about defending ourselves from a serious non-US threat, we’d sink 90% of whatever budget we ended up having into the navy and air force. We’d have at best a nominal army, because the best place to kill the invaders would be over the oceans, well before they got close enough to land for an army to matter. If anyone ever did land significant army forces on our soil, we’d have pretty much already screwed up the war.
Fully agree. We need to get the politics out of defense funding. A naval helicopter contract was cancelled because the Liberals won the election in 1993, and they only cancelled that contract because the Conservatives entered into it. There were arguments in Parliament about acquiring the CF-18s during one of Trudeau Senior’s terms. The F-35 contract may be in jeopardy if the [insert party here] is elected. Forget party politics when it comes to national defense; let’s beef up our military, especially the RCAF and the RCN. Those, and our three oceans, will protect us.
Alternatively, the Russians can just hop across the Bering Strait, stage and supply with the assistance of their new American allies, and jump on Highway 1 bound for Whitehorse.
They also seem unaware of the contradiction introduced by the Orange Peril himself, wherein he simultaneously claims that the US is “unfairly” spending huge sums to protect Canada, and that we should let them take us over so they can protect us. Which is it? This is the kind of “protection” offered by 1930s era Chicago gangsters.
This is the crux of the matter.
And it doesn’t just apply to hard-core right-wingers. The average person doesn’t know where to go for accurate news any more. They don’t understand that just because they hear it on TV or read it on the web, that doesn’t make it a FACT. So they believe whatever sound bite they come across and don’t seek further to find out what is really happening.
“Cleaning up government waste! Yeah! I’m for that!!” That’s all they hear. And they don’t bother to read further to find out what that actually means!
I have discovered this phenomenon among people I’ve known for decades, people I thought were intelligent and discerning. Aaggh! I can’t even think about this without my stomach hurting…
Krugman covers it well today: