For those who are trying to ease the heightened fears and anger of us Canadians, I understand what you are doing. Brinkmanship is just a thing you’ve come to expect from your psychopath right-wing politicians. You see such behaviour so often, and for so long, it just doesn’t alarm you. You now feel that this is normal and everything always turns out fine. The country marches on.
This attitude offends us. Your president’s repeated and erratic destruction of our trade agreements offends us. His direct attacks on our country’s economic stability offends us. His constant obsession to annexing Canada offends us. Normalizing the domination of our country angers us. We do not need to be charitable to this fascist, nor to his bootlicking toadies who cheerfully tow the annexation line.
Even trying to mollify us into accepting these attacks as not threatening (but just part of a new normal relationship)… angers me. See, the rhetoric is awful, but the complacency from Americans in response to these attacks is OUTRIGHT DISGUSTING.
To sum up. Firstly; Canadians are angry, RIGHTEOUSLY angry. Secondly; Americans SHOULD BE ANGRY TOO… but they are not. This apathy angers us. Thirdly; the expectation that Canadians should share Americans apathy towards our own sovereignty… Is wild.
I believe the odds on American invasion are terrifyingly high, possibly as bad as 50-50, but even five percent is terrifying. If there was a five percent chance my drive to work tomorrow would result in a bad car crash, I wouldn’t get in the car.
To Americans, mah, no big deal, I guess, it’s not THEM at risk.
Just chiming in to say there are plenty of Americans who are angry about the threats being spewed out of the mouths of our idiot President. I agree with you that your anger is righteous and the apathy of some posters on this board infuriates many of us. Please don’t assume the American posters on here adopting this condescending “move along, nothing to see here” attitude represent all of us.
Add to this the shit-talking about us, like Vance’s “What has Canada ever done for us?!?”, like Canada wasn’t the place all those planes landed on 9/11. You know, the planes the Americans were too afraid of to let land in the US. No one knew if there were more terrorists on them, or what, but Canada didn’t even blink when the US needed our help.
That such contributions can be so casually forgotten, is infuriating.
I’m not looking forward to violent chaos. I’m having the possibility of such atrocities forced into my concerns.
All I, and most other Canadians, want is the promise of three things “Peace, order and good government”. Its enshrined into our Constitution Act of 1867 and it really reflects the attitudes of all of us.
My goal in the thread is to acknowledge that Trump is as bad as you say he is and correctly assess the probability of an invasion of Canada, as it is pertinent to the OP. If a more realistic understanding of the probability eases your fear, then that’s an agreeable side effect, but I am not making my arguments just to do that. Further, I share your anger at what Trump is saying (about Canada, yes, but also about… basically everything).
We had a president who started actual wars, W, who was and is widely regarded as an idiot and a war criminal. That was bad. I’m not sure “brinkmanship” wrt actual war is much of a thing among our RWNJ politicians. I do not hear them calling for war. Trump will say some threatening and antagonistic things–many of which are completely unacceptable–but he didn’t start wars in his first term and more or less ran as antiwar in the recent election.
Whose? Probably most Americans find the idea of invading objectionable and absurd, but I have not seen polls (I can pretty much guarantee you a low percentage of support). And there are Canadian RWNJs too who support Trump as well.
And many/most Americans.
No joke. Has anyone in this thread been charitable to Trump?
I don’t think anyone in this thread has done that, and I have not even seen Republican politicians do that. I have no doubt, however, that dickheads on Fox have said “mollifying” or “normalizing” things, since they do that about nearly 100% of what comes out of Trump’s mouth.
Who’s complacent about Canada specifically? Unless you assume Trump voters are that way, which is fair enough. But we are fighting our own cold civil war with these mutherfuckers right now.
Yes.
It’s safe to assume without polling that a certain percentage of Americans support Trump’s pig-mouthed rhetoric about Canada, and that many are apathetic about it and Trump in general, but many of us will not stop until fascism is defeated and are ready to die to do so. I am.
Modern insurgencies don’t fight back with guns. They fight back with bombing and sabotage. If you fight back with a rifle, you WILL die, and the odds of you taking an enemy soldier with you are very poor. Indeed, you will likely die before getting off a clean shot. Getting into a firefight with a professional and organized military is like deciding you’re going to get into a fight with an MMA champion. It’s dumb to fight someone at what they’re good at. If you needed to hurt an MMA champion, you wouldn’t fight them in the octagon, right? You’d do something else. Asymmetrical warfare is how the underdog wins.
Work with a network - hopefully one coordinated by a government in absentia - to destroy things that get blown up after the Canadian fighters aren’t around anymore, preferably in the USA, but there may be soft targets here.
I am right there with you. I am sick and tired of people trying to gaslight me into thinking everything will work out in the long run and we can trust in our system of checks and balances. We can’t anymore, our system is broken. We have fascists in charge of all three branches of government who will green light anything Dear Leader wants and a so-called “opposition party” who have no intention of opposing them.
I’ve been scared and angry ever since he was elected, with my mental health significantly declining as a result, and it’s only become worse since he took office and decided people like me should be deliberately targeted and have our rights and freedoms taken away. And the people in this thread and elsewhere who try to act like everything is fine are doing nothing but helping Trump succeed in his goals, even if they don’t intend to.
Not only has my mental health plummeted my physical health has also taken a bad turn.
Plus I am now living in a kind of suspended animation with no idea how to survive successfully.
Hang in there the best you can, that’s the best thing we can do. But if Trump tries to take away my VA disability income, which I expect him to do at some point because he hates veterans too, I really don’t know how I will survive either.
A lot of folks are going to have to move in with other folks, either in their family, or friends, or just other people who need cheaper digs, if the economy REALLY goes to hell. It’s going to become a common thing.
Given that you have made nearly 100 posts, almost 25% of the totality in this thread to date, I think it would be more accurate to say your goal in this thread is the Steve Bannon approach of “flooding the zone”.
I don’t know what kicked off this criticism, but it verges on a personal attack and has no place in the thread. Dial it back, and make posts that are on topic for the thread.
I agree with you that Mexico, Panama and Greenland are higher on the list of places more likely to see some type of military action than Canada.
HOWEVER, that in no way should be reason to dismiss the anger or concerns of our Canadian posters about what amounts to a disturbing change in the relationship between our countries. To have the leader of the US denigrate the leader of a close ally and spread lies about their country has to be deeply upsetting.
There have been several vocal posters in this thread and elsewhere on the boards telling them their concerns are grossly distorted and have little relationship to reality. That is at a minimum insulting, dismissive and condescending. I find this type of insensitive behavior to be very disappointing.
They’re more vocal about those places, but are they actually more likely to invade there, than Canada?
Ultimately, they’ll do a calculation on ease of invasion vs. expected profit. Canada actually comes out ahead on that, I think.
Mexico would be the hardest to invade. It has a far greater population than Canada, with a much larger military, and also heavily armed cartels who won’t take kindly to an invasion, either. The population is also spread out over a far greater area, so the US would have to hold a lot more land.
Panama and Greenland would be pretty easy to invade, compared to Canada.
But, Panama and Greenland would also be worth much less. Panama’s one great asset is the Canal, and it would be trivially easy to destroy that if it looked like Panama was about to be invaded. The US would own nothing more than a multi-year, multi-billion dollar repair job. And while Greenland may have lots of resource potential, it has almost no infrastructure to exploit those resources. Again, years and billions of dollars to get anything at all to start flowing.
But Canada? We have a robust resource extraction system, that’s literally already set up to ship 70-80% of our output to the US. And it’s wide-spread enough that it would be difficult to destroy all, or even most of it, and the repair jobs on the stuff that does get smashed would likely be far easier than the Panama Canal.
If the US gets serious about invading anyone, and considers the cost/benefits of an invasion, Canada likely tops the list there.
Yes, because the people are browner. Racier hatred is one of their core motivations, much more so than greed. A depopulated Mexico won’t make them money, but it’ll be a step towards the extermination of the “inferior races”. And very satisfying to them. Touring the dead cities of Mexico to gloat over the purification of the region could easily become a significant tourist draw for right wingers across the world.