The orange man likely shouldn’t have been broadcasting out that he’d sell sub-standard equipment to allies, because “maybe they won’t be our allies for long” then.

I know, if America wants to convince the rest of the western world that its arms are top notch, they should provide gear to Ukraine and allow Ukraine to use it without restriction – seeing those arms actually defeat the Russian arms, would be a convincing case that US arms are high quality. Cause right now, that conflict isn’t exactly a winning endorsement of being a US Ally, or buying US kit.

Instead, all we see is the states vulture-circling its client while handicapping their ability to defend themselves with seemingly sub standard weaponry. We see countries like India shifting to Russian arms deals, likely in part because of this sort of thing. Why buy American, if American arms are not allowed to be used against an aggressor nation? Why buy American, if owning those weapons means that Russia can still steamroll you due to America siding with Russia and salivating over your resources?

The current liberal government is far more conservative leaning than the previous one. They’re pushing very authoritarian bills, and effectively going along with much of the US’s ‘stuff’, while attempting to spin a pro-Canada message for public support – like the gov and our media lauding the push to diversify our energy supply by building small nuclear reactors… but glossing over that they require US-provided fuel to run (so we’re literally increasing reliance on US stuff, while the US is busy using that dependence to attack us economically). On the authoritarian bills, there’s stuff like making it so that law enforcement doesn’t need a warrant to get customer information from private companies, and making display of certain symbols/flags a crime. The folks I know who follow this stuff, basically agree that it’s all a bit tepid at the moment, but that it’s still better than it would’ve been under our ‘official’ conservative party, as those guys wanted to straight up do a DOGE-north (and likely still do).

I’d frame it as Canada is still moving along with the Tech-bro agenda from the US at present, though we’re less in to the Christian Nationalist / overtly racist stuff. For example, the coming budget is expected to have items related to OpenBanking/Digital Currencies, which are ideas primarily pushed by tech kleptocrats (there’re obvious reasons they fumble to name specific, quantifiable benefits of those systems for consumers – and it’s because the benefit is pretty much all for big tech).

The party that had a more progressive slant last time around, the NDP, got trounced – deservedly, as they hadn’t really put out anything to persuade voters, and essentially told people to vote liberal if it meant defeating the cons. Our green party, who were even more progressive in policies (and often had big, interesting policy ideas), committed suicide years ago due to their adherence to their party-negative approach to DEI – they literally elected a black lesbian jewish pro-palestinian lawyer lady as their leader, and she destroyed what little support the party had. Eg. she spent all the campaign finances trying to win a liberal-stronghold riding for herself in Toronto; she demanded full control of all social media accounts for the party, which she was given, but then she proceeded to go to news agencies and comment about how the party wasn’t publicly supporting her on social media… the media she controlled… because the party was racist. That sort of thing.

So, as to what they’re thinking, I don’t think they view the US as a potential threat to the same extent as the public. And I don’t think they’re progressive in the old sense of the world, but they’re still progressive relative to our southern neighbours. But I mean, that’s a really low bar at the moment.

Well, it means that profits earned by the Trump supporting business, will support Trump’s agenda, which includes annexing / doing harm to Canada. As it’s a US corp, it also likely means many of the high paying corporate backend jobs go south, removing high income earners from the tax pool. It’s amazing to me that the gov is whining at Canadians about productivity, and grandstanding with ‘elbows up’ rhetoric, but they greenlight sending jobs to the states.

And if it’s taking a more active role in supporting Trump, given that its such a large market slice, they could manipulate prices to gouge Canadians / do harm to Canada in a more direct fashion.

So Trump’d seen the ad three days prior to his supposed late night melt down. And he’s again making large, market disruptive comments on a Friday, which will likely get toned down by Monday/Tuesday.

This just smells like more market manipulation on behalf of wealthy backers that want to fleece people further.

As a foreigner/westerner, I don’t get why Iran would do this at this point. There are western powers in that region that don’t comply with international treaties related to Nuclear weapons/capabilities. Israel being the obvious one, where “no ones totally sure” how many nukes or what capabilities they have. The west also seems to use the IAEA to help it find good targets/sort out logistics for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, be they civilian/compliant with international norms or not.

They’ve been screwed fairly regularly when trying to comply / align with the IAEA and various political agreements on development. I don’t see why they don’t just go strengthen ties with Russia, NK and China, and say “screw you” to the traditional USA-oriented international rules. Not even the USA bothers to follow those rules anymore.

True, and Israel’s hunt for german nazi’s in foreign jurisdictions sets some precedent in handling that sort of thing.

To me it seems naive to think that the disparity between the people of Gaza, and the people of Israel, is not dissimilar to the wealth inequality of the poor, and the rich. People seem to gloss over how modern western democracies generally got going – through violent revolutions with lots of dead rich people. And those movements were often seeded by essentially the middle class military, who the rich had paid to outfit with the intent that they’d carry out the upper class’s orders. People like Cromwell didn’t exactly wake up one day, and just happen to trip across a bunch of Cannons to point at the British royalty. Until there’d been that blunder from the nobility giving the military too much autonomy, coupled with the advent of Canons, the ability for regular peasants to rise up against the nobility and their goon squads was pretty fuckin limited. For such a revolutionary figure to emerge from a poor, downtrodden and financially bereft area such as Gaza, would just be highly improbable.

Like China hired gangs of thugs with bats to beat the shit out of Democratic advocates during the crack down in Hong Kong, and has taken out bounties on people living abroad who advocate too vocally for human rights in the region. You can’t realistically look at what went on there, in my view, and say that the people didn’t try really hard to maintain their civil liberties – but were beaten down quite explicitly by force and the sheer scale of resources available to the CCP. Yes, if there was some mass uprising all across the country they could spontaneously change their systems of governance – but that’s practically unheard of in real world countries of note in modern times. Taking a more realistic view of the situation doesn’t make it any better, in that things will most likely continue to suck for most people, but it at least sets more reasonable expectations.

Right, by that reasoning the people of Gaza are willingly allowing themselves to be genocided. They should just rise up and declare a democracy in the region.

Oh, wait, the real world doesn’t work like that.

Your phrasing of “allowing” implies that these guys are in power through some sort of legitimate electoral process. They’re both dictators, who claimed power through force and intimidation. There’s no “let” about it, nor any “say” in the situation from people at large.

Just because dictators demand to be called by western elected official terminology in translations to english media, doesn’t make them same animal. It’s propaganda meant to normalize their rule.

I can’t help but laugh at the note about small start ups lead by 19-20 YOs succeeding with millions of dollars by ‘partnering well’ and so on.

The success or failure of these AI companies seems almost entirely driven by the amount of Venture Capital thrown at them. A company like Perplexity, with practically zero product, having been formed less than 5 years ago, but being able to put up $35 billion in an offer to buy google chrome… I can’t help but suspect that a big part of it is google handing perplexity a pile of money via “Venture Capitalist” screens, to help offload Chrome to mitigate their regulatory monopoly problems. But whatever the details, them having that pile of money is sure as shit not a matter of having a good product / partnering with other industries well.

Thanks, I appreciate the help.

Anyone who speaks the language / can go through to that RTL site able to tell us the specifics of the poll done? Like what was used for a sample, confidence level, etc.

One thing I’ve seen in other areas are polls claiming broad support for right wing politics, based on internet polls that have huge bias / confidence issues – like in Canada, they claim Alberta’s suddenly separatist, based on online polls where they can’t verify the respondents were even in Alberta. Elevating that sort of non-poll to news-worthy story is likely a combination of click bait journalism and right-wing/US propaganda biased.

That’s true, until it isn’t. And given how far they’ve gone so far, there aren’t really that many people effectively opposing their course.

There are some nukes in the hands of the UK, and some in the hands of France. I don’t recall hearing any other NATO partner as having their own nukes.

Israel has more of a nuclear deterrent than a place like Canada or Spain. Turkey has a large army, but against nuclear armed aggressor countries that’s less of a deterrent. The NATO of yesteryear, was a united block with Article 5 basically meaning “If you’re part of NATO, you’re protected from nuclear armed aggressors due to the general principle of mutually assured destruction should shit hit the fan”. Now, it’s “Russia can attack anyone they want, and the USA will assist as best they can. The US will also pressure NATO countries to buy sub-standard weapons that cannot be used without US approval; this helps the US prevent its new ally, Russia, from losing any conflict”. Sorta like how there are US controlled nukes in some NATO countries, that they can’t use for their own defense without the US go-ahead.

And anyone that thinks Trump / the USA is gonna go against Russia, hasn’t been paying attention to all the Putin cock America’s been sucking lately.

At this point, why bother with NATO? The US is unlikely to take any action if its allies are attacked – hell, they’d prolly join in on attacking their own allies.

I dunno. Whenever I see ‘separatist’ type polls out of ‘alberta’, the captions are almost always “this poll was done online, and we can’t actually verify that it was people from alberta responding. We can’t offer a confidence level in the data because it’s not a valid sample”.

So how keen alberta actually is on ditching Canada is, to me at least, still really wobbly. Could easily just be US interests who own media pushing a message (with the support of Danielle, since she’s a US oil industry lobbyist).

You’re right, we likely won’t convince each other of the other’s view point, so not much point labouring over it in regards to Canada’s actions explicitly.

That said, back to the core point, I don’t think anything you’ve said changes my position that equating these two things cheapens the word Genocide.

To take a similar situation to clarify: Rape. Go back a decade or two, and Rape brought forward images of like, a guy hiding in a dark parking lot at night, jumping out and violently forcing himself on a woman. Or cases where the rapist broke into a single woman’s home and assaulted her. Now, in Canada for example, when a woman has an orgy with 5 guys, is recorded saying shit like “Get over here and fuck me you pussy”, and later decides she didn’t want to do that… it’s called rape. Or the Harvey situation, where women consenting to sex in exchange for power/privilege, is called rape. Advocacy groups make claims like over 50% of women have been raped, with the ‘broader’ understanding of the word. Even if some legal gits have structured arguments and bullshit so that the term ‘technically’ fits in the broader sense, people care a lot less now when someone like Trump is called a Rapist – the words been diluted to a point where its lost its power. If everyone’s a rapist, why be morally outraged?

Calling Canada’s actions over the course of more than a century a genocide does the same thing. Calling Canada’s actions a genocide, while dithering on whether Israel’s actions count, makes the term genocide far less impactful.

Some of the cultural differences that got impacted included slavery amongst FN, particularly out towards BC’s coast – where about 25% of some bands were slaves from other groups. Outlawing slavery was something done around the initial forming of the country – basically as BC joined and at the start of it all with John A. Do you maintain it’s wrong to call the practice of slavery savage, and that Canada should’ve allowed such traditions to persist? The old systems often also maintained a hereditary chief setup, with the leaders being fixed / based on blood – something that doesn’t exactly mesh with democratic principles, such as all people being created equal, and deserving equal respect. The implementation of that principle is admittedly a work in progress, and has been since the country was formed: women not gettin a say till much later is proof enough of that. But just because the country didn’t recognise women’s rights from its initial founding, doesn’t make the whole country misogynistic. But I digress – should we go back to explicitly preferencing people based solely on their blood lines? Or are we wearing rose-colored glasses and absolving all the potential wrongs/ills of the earlier culture, in favour of only the positive elements we want to highlight today, to make it a one sided story?

215 bodies over 150+ years is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the 60k+ deaths occurring in Israel in the past year. Like the total number estimated to have died at residential schools is 6000 over the 150 years. That’s one tenth the number compared to what’s gone on in Israel in the past year – that 6000, would need to be closer to 9 million to have the same sort of scale. There weren’t even 9 million people in the entire country of Canada until sometime after the 1920s.

There were definitely issues on this front, and there was a higher mortality rate amongst FN during the period, but for a time frame that goes back to “before phones / vaccines were common”, I honestly don’t think that’s so clear cut. School age kid mortality rates in general were around 1 in 250 back in the early 1900s - it wasn’t until fairly recently that the mortality rate dramatically improved, to like 1 in 4000, largely due to vaccines and advances in medicine. And old graves from 150+ years ago, or even from like 50+ years ago, not having headstones/markers isn’t that uncommon – I’ve no clue where my grandparents are buried, and I’m pretty sure they don’t still have headstones. There’s no specific reason to think that the bodies in old, unmarked graves weren’t treated with respect and dignity at the time of their passing, based on the customs of the time: or do you really think that old time priests who were super devout / wanting to spread the word of god, were doing disrespectful things to corpses of people they considered part of their flock, on a regular/systematic basis? That’d be one hell of a leap, and it’d need a lot more evidence to convince me. The level of dignity given to the dead in these two situations is very different, even if those missionaries at the time failed to follow the specific burial rights of the FN.

I looked up / read a bit more about the 60s scoop here - not sure if that’s a good source. One of the reasons development differed significantly between on reserve and off-reserve communities, I’d posit, is that non-reserve land allows for individual Canadians to ‘own’ the land. That ownership leads to development of that land, as you hope to pass it on to your kids. We see this sort of thing even today, with “leasehold” 99 year lease properties that are tied to FN groups being far less desirable / lower price than regular freehold properties. We also see it in the clear hesitation of many banks/FIs to lend to FN based on res properties/businesses, as there are no assurances that the band won’t just declare the land theirs and negate the security. As much of the development of industry is done by private sector, the government was ill-equipped to handle a huge number of under developed communities needing funds/infrastructure, and being wholly reliant on the gov for such things, without private sector interest. The lack of development on reserves translated to shit living conditions, with high mortality rates, particularly for kids. While we can look back and say it was wrong now, I’m not sure whether it would’ve been ‘better’ to leave the kids in those conditions to die / live in abject poverty, assuming that the government couldn’t instantaneously deploy infrastructure to those remote communities. Hell, our government can’t do anything of that sort even today. Realistically, one thing that’s missing from the discourse is “What should’ve been done better back then, given the real socio-economic situation of the time?”

I’d want a source for the RCMP comment, if you can? The history that I can see about it, does not align with your claim. I admit that the sources of that history could be biased though, so I wouldn’t refute your comment, but I won’t believe it either without some far more significant evidence. Like the RCMP site claims that the NWMP (precursor to the RCMP) first got started to basically defend FN from attacks by US Whiskey traders out west – seems a bit different than what you’re claiming, without a source… ? I mean, it’s basically the opposite, in that it was a response by Canada to try and defend/protect people in the west, specifically FN, with FN guides integrated into the force.

Does Canada’s history have issues? Sure. But it’s disingenuous to frame it entirely as a one sided thing, and to villainize one group while absolving the other. And in comparison to Israel’s actions in the past year, Canada has not, to my knowledge, ever done anything nearing that level of direct, pointed hostility / brutality. But by all means, prove me wrong – point me to the evidence that Canada rolled in to FN communities with the military, slaughtered everyone while laughing about it, and then dug mass graves to carelessly throw the dead babies in.

Equating what Canada did as part of its bumbling attempts at cultural integration to what Israel is doing today, or what Nazi germany did previously, is an inappropriate softening of the term Genocide. It cheapens and diminishes the moral insanity, the utter depravity, of what Israel is doing.

So … I live in the province that’s most impacted by this (BC), but not in a logging area. I gotta admit I’m not really sure how to think about this particular tariff area, despite all the media scare mongering over the years.

Like we hear about mills closing, and logs getting shipped 400km from small communities with closed mills, to get turned into pulp at big mills, generally for export to other countries. And those closures have been ongoing for like decades now, with a seemingly shrinking market presence north of the border despite our governments feigned attempts to take action, and all the free trade stuff that’s been in play. K.

We also hear about the high cost of construction, and have a serious housing problem – with the government saying they’re gonna try addressing that issue more in the next 5 or so years.

We’ll need lumber to make those houses. We can use lumber to make furniture for those houses. Hell, we can use lumber to make things like the towels/dishcloths that go into those houses. We use lumber for our ass paper in those houses. If the US doesn’t want to buy it as a result of them tariffing it to shit, why not sell it cheap to local manufacturers to supply local demand with local product?

One thing I’ve often heard, is that BC exports raw stuff down south, and then we end up buying back processed goods, which seems kinda wrong to me. If those manufacturing facilities are generally south of the border currently… it can’t be that difficult to get em setup up here. I mean, shit, with all those closed mills… repurpose them, and repurpose the people who were in that industry, to be slightly further down that supply chain… no?

The UN declared Canada a genocidal country because over a period of about 150 years there was a higher mortality rate amongst FN, and the government forceably sent them to school to learn to read/write, which ended up screwing up things like their oral tradition culture. Personally, I’d argue that was more a matter of cultural integration, with a misguided/mismanaged school system lead by a religious group – and that religious group was definitely keen on indoctrinating people into their faith, as religious groups are, but they’re at semi-arms length from the regular population/government. Graveyards where people were buried didn’t have headstones after 150 years, resulting in constant media spam about unmarked graves, with some less than brilliant idiots equating unmarked graves to mass graves even to this day. But still, Canada’s history is basically genocidal right up until 2020 at least, according to the UN.

But they can’t seem to figure out that Israel’s mass graves with bulldozers just piling in corpses, explicit targeting of journalists and people seeking aid/food, flattening of whole neighbourhoods, killing crazy amounts of civilians, forced starvation complete with dying babies, and with a population on the Israeli side that’s openly saying shit like “We gotta kill the babies otherwise they’ll grow up to be terrorists. They’re all cockroaches”… on this one, we’re not so sure.

Someone make it make sense.