You know what? Fuck you.
Getting himself court-martialed by publicly stating he intends to disobey a presidential order isn’t gonna accomplish much towards that goal.
The fact that Google Maps has actually changed the name to Lake America in the US and Lake Ontario (Lake America) in the rest of the world outside Canada scares the fuck out me, personally. Utterly spineless kowtowing to a wannabe dictator’s whims.
How the GNIS Lake Ontario/Lake America name change in the U.S. will appear in Maps
Just what I would expect. Enjoy your country going into the toilet while you watch.
Here’s an open letter from Shael Risman. It expresses pretty much how I feel right now.
Yes it’s long. But I encourage you all to read it. Particularly Americans whose response to the anger in Canada is to simply blurt “Fuck you”.
After Trump’s 2nd election I had to take a break from the SDMB. Because I was too angry to post. It’s time for that again. I know… “this is not an airport, no need to announce your departure.”
Anyway, read the following. I’m not alone in feeling this way.
Shael Risman
AN OPEN LETTER FROM THIS CANADIAN TO OUR AMERICAN FRIENDS
You know by now that your president has declared Canada a greater threat to the United States than Russia or China.
As a Canadian, I don’t even find this shit funny anymore.
I know most Americans don’t believe it. I know a lot of you are every bit as horrified and embarrassed by this insanity as we are. And yes, much of the audience for this garbage is the knuckle-dragging MAGA crowd who will apparently believe that Canada is plotting the destruction of America if the right guy says it loudly enough.
Much of the audience, but not all of them.
There are smart, educated, otherwise reasonable Americans who have started buying pieces of this bullshit. Canada is ripping you off. Canada has been taking advantage of you. Canada doesn’t contribute anything. Canada needs America more than America needs Canada. Canada isn’t a real military partner. Canada is somehow the enemy.
And every single time one of those lies gets repeated — whether anyone actually believes it or not — something gets broken.
Because for 150 some-odd years, Canadians didn’t just tolerate America - we genuinely loved you.
We vacationed there. Worked there. Studied there. Bought your products. Watched your television. Cheered for your teams. Built businesses together. Defended a continent together. And when the world went to war, Canadians and Americans fought and died alongside one another.
That’s the part we find particularly unforgivable.
You can argue about tariffs and trade agreements and dairy and lumber and automobiles until we’re all blue in the face. But when you start belittling the military contributions and sacrifices of a country whose soldiers have stood beside yours — whose war dead are buried in some of the same foreign soil — you’ve crossed into something much uglier than politics.
From the beginning of this nightmare – probably as far back as 2015 - a lot of Canadians believed we could simply wait this out. Tiny Donny would eventually be gone and America would come to its senses. We’d shake our heads about those bizarre years and slowly get back to being neighbours, partners and friends.
I don’t think many of us believe that anymore. Mostly because we realize now that that ridiculous fraction of a human was never the real problem.
The real problem is that America elected him. Twice.
The problem is that millions of Americans continue to applaud this behaviour. That institutions, politicians and ordinary citizens who know better have repeatedly decided that accommodating it is easier than confronting it.
And that means Canada — and frankly much of the world — has learned something we cannot unlearn:
It can happen again. Whatever comes after Trump, that knowledge remains.
The next American president can promise stability and the next Congress can promise cooperation. The next ambassador can tell us that America values its allies again.
But we’ll know that four years later, everything could be ripped up again, and that fundamentally changes how countries behave. It changes where we trade, buy groceries, and travel. Where we invest and how we defend ourselves. And, most importantly, whom we trust.
And trust is a hell of a lot harder to rebuild than a trade agreement.
So no, I don’t think the Canada–U.S. relationship simply snaps back into place after the next election. I think repairing what has been damaged may take decades. Perhaps generations. And some of it may never come back.
That’s the real tragedy in all of this. I’ve said this a lot, but for most of my nearly 60 years on this planet America wasn’t simply the enormous country below us on the map. You were our closest neighbour, our biggest partner and, despite the occasional sibling squabble, our friend.
But friendship requires respect, and partnership requires reliability. And perhaps most of all, alliances require trust.
If America wants those things back, changing presidents won’t be enough. There will have to be a serious reckoning with the policies, the cruelty, the casual dishonesty and the basic lack of human decency that made this possible in the first place. What has happened to you is not a blip on a timeline. It has been a slow and steady decay that has culminated in the garbage fire before us now. And despite what you may want to think, this is not just happening to you. It’s happening to us all.
And because of that, the rest of the world isn’t waiting for the old America to come back anymore.
We’re learning how to live without it.
And that, old friend, may ultimately be the most lasting legacy of Donald Trump.
Hey, asshole, he chastises those who buy into the MAGA ideology, either from the start or eventually. So do I.
He doesn’t paint the entire nation as just shrugging over this horror. Jesus Christ, how can you post regularly on the board and paint with such a broad brush? Yeah, fuck off. I for one am sick of your sanctimony.
I’d say Risman has it right. Sadly, it will be a long time before anyone trusts us again.
Yes, but he is also describing that a little lie told a million different ways in a million different domains becomes a cultural truth.
I agree with Risman. It’s not just MAGA anymore: it’s also the reaction to this great betrayal. The more extreme insanities are still being laughed off, but some of the changes seem to be sticking.
I take no exception with anything he wrote. I consider us a shit hole with nukes. I wouldn’t trust the U.S. post-Trump, except perhaps four years at a time, if that can even be considered trust. And maybe not even then.
We are an untrustworthy, cruel, hateful bully of a nation. That’s our American exceptionalism. Pax Americana is done. The western alliance will never be the same. And my government, and all those who support it, are to blame.
Now I’m not pissed at you like @Stratocaster is, but I really don’t see this comment as anything different than what us Americans are doing-- watching the shit-show and shrugging.
One soldier getting flogged for suggesting he wouldn’t follow orders isn’t going to do anything. Neither is a march or another No Kings day. I’m in LA County. What can I personally do to “get rid” of the asshole? I’ve hated him since '92 when he destroyed Atlantic City.
I will vote in midterms, vote against all GOP and… well, that’s basically it. You’ll have to sit and wait for change like I am.
I really liked the letter you posted, though. I agree with it.
I’m just amazed that decades after it was made public that the United States has interfered with countries on every continent, election interference, coups, assassinations, etc, etc, etc, that anyone could think that threatening to invade Canada and make it, in some way, a part of the US isn’t exactly what America does.
I like that.
Henceforth the occupant of the White House will be known as President Uranus. Pronounced old school. So shall it be written so shall it be done.
What can we, as individuals, do? Exactly?
I misread this as “we are changing the name of South America to SOUTH AMERICA,” which is actually funnier. 
Oh, well, when I see those words, it’s a done deal! 
For as damaging as Trump has been … to even his staunchest opponents among America’s average workaday population (e.g. not politicians, activists, or journalists), domestically he has been much more embarrassing and annoying than damaging.
Yes more embarrassing and annoying than damaging even accounting for:
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The worst of ICE (which everyday Americans DID push back in Minneapolis)
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National Guard deployments in a few cities (standing around, few if any incidents)
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BS deportments and general targeting of select non-citizens for political purposes
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Mucking about with the federal workforce.
Almost all the rest of it (though I’m sure I’ve left out some actual life-affecting actions somewhere) is “mere speech”. I know, I know … but he hasn’t yet been able to speak into existence life-changing effects for 99.99% of workaday Americans (admittedly, it sucks out loud to be in that 0.001%).
Succinctly: far too few of us have had our lives impacted … and almost none of us will upend our lives for idealism alone. AND we’re truly, sincerely counting all of this to dry up and blow away on January 20, 2029. A temporary fever to be borne. For better or worse, it’s been as simple as that.
Editorial comment: I doubt other Western democracies would do markedly better in similar circumstances, but yeah … I can’t prove that. Just a supposition based on my priors concerning human nature. All the same, it should have never gotten to this point in the United States. But it did. Thankfully, the pendulum can be counted on to faithfully swing back. In time.
Yeah, no shit. And if i were Canadian, i would want nothing more to do with the US. We obviously can’t be trusted. The rest of our once-allies have come to the same conclusion, and there’s currently jostling to work out who the next defacto leader of the “Western nations” (what i sometimes refer to as “Christendom”) will be. I agree there’s no way the US will be trusted for a long time.
But you know what else? It’s even worse for those of us who live here. At least, for the solid majority who doesn’t buy into this stuff, and who fears who the secret police will come for next.
Get together with other individuals, and take collective action. Not on a weekend every couple of months, but daily. Maybe look at some of the Labour actions in France as a model.
Can you list some examples?
I was thinking of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow vests protests - Wikipedia), or Arab Spring (Arab Spring - Wikipedia). You have to get a lot of people doing something consistently.
I don’t think Americans are capable of this. We are too spread out, and more importantly the people who could really make the movement felt are too comfortable. We’re quite happy to march around for a while on a Saturday, but we’re not going to take any actions that involve a cost to our jobs.
I’m not doing anything, either. I’m avoiding travel to the US and buying goods from the US, and since millions of other Canadians are doing this it’s having an impact. But wearing my American hat, other than having written my representatives and voting, I haven’t done anything.
The “jobs” thing is because our health insurance is tied to our jobs. We can’t afford to not have health insurance. This system is by design by the way.