HonoredMule

It's not too late for us all to do better. 😉

Given that so much of warfare is logistics, I'd think having a plane that costs half as much to buy and one third as much per hour of flight factors pretty heavily - including on that cost of training pilots. And I cannot imagine U.S. maintenance supply would come close to cost competitiveness vs having domestic manufacturing support that also spends defense money into our own economy.

Sure that probably wouldn't have tipped the balance a couple years ago - I mean, it didn't.

But here we are. At least we aren't already 40 planes into production.

Wab Kinew is First Nations, right? Not getting it does you credit. But people are going to expect it to mean something. It's probably best to clear the reeds by aiming for an intentional one.

People don't have to believe the misinformation they repeat, as long as they believe it justifies some action that will benefit them. For example, the more depleted the Colorado river basin gets, the more British Columbia will turn out to be full of terrorists and cartels, or its leaders plotting to disrupt the Frasier River, or whatever else... It's not like the details matter.

What matters is that the people in the place with the thing you want are evil now.

I don't rule out hostilities directed at Canadians on lemmy being something directly fomented by bots or including bot participation. But that's a rather low-value influence operation. I'd wager at least some is just a side effect of the vector that concerns me more: the faithful spreading a gospel aimed at Americans to manufacture American consent for something.

Oh yeah. In official public messaging and private dealings we need to appear friendly, welcoming, and beyond reproach from the perspective of international leaders and reasonable Americans. The objectives are: to avoid both escalation and giving the impression bullying us is a free action; and to slow-roll the impact on Canadians, buying time to adjust and build internal industry.

In reality, I think the friendship is already gone for good.

I also think/hope that our federal leadership secretly knows it. They have to at least know most Canadians do not want the previous status quo long term, even if it was freely offered.

Likewise thanks. And you do raise a good point with this:

whatever you choose, do it carefully with full knowledge that what your country looks like on the other side of the decision matters greatly to you and the world.

I do think that's something too few Canadians are considering. With all the patriotic rage brewing, there are a lot of calls for our various levels of leadership to lash out in any direction they can. People are getting mad at them for instead mostly sticking to a wiser path, focused on pressure rather than catharsis. You'll see our politicians in public speeches constantly reiterating how Canada and the U.S. are and should still be friends working to mutual benefit. I don't think anyone believes that, nor that we'd ever accept a return to status quo. That messaging is for the international community and American public, making clear that we are not the aggressors and will not rise to become such.

I see paths where the U.S. administration provokes an overreaction which weakens our footing on the high ground and creates a window for actions of a less purely economic nature. I've always expected the U.S. to eventually come after our resources wielding guns, not dollars, but this is way ahead of schedule even with the pressures of climate change. Dumpster is skipping long crucial steps propagandizing away the friendship to manufacture consent for war. That isn't going to work, but our actions here and now could jump-start that process of branding us hostiles.

As it stands, the trade war is a blessing for Canada's long-term outlook. It is validating the painful pace at which we've been recently growing our population, steeling our resolve to weather more pain for a nationally shared goal, and giving us the unity needed to dodge our own rightward descent, decouple from the U.S., diversify supply lines for critical assets (especially of military tech), and ultimately demonstrate that we are not a soft target even for the U.S. I only hope he stays the course and we hold our red lines. No deal is the best deal anyway.

And - assuming the CIA is really gutted and not being converted into a shadow organization - I like Canada's odds. At some point you might start thinking of your family in Canada as your in with a nation that still has a bright long-term economic outlook. 😉

I think her tone and decisions are demonstrating cooler heads addressing pragmatic concerns rather than satisfying a desire for catharsis.

The Teslas were a bad deal for which we overpaid. But they are functioning EVs with low operating costs. If we sold them, we'd be flooding the used market with a product already experiencing suppressed demand because of the brand association. So we'd take a bath on the price and still need to buy something to replace them.

The problem with government contracts is that a lot of them with U.S. suppliers have no cost-competitive alternatives. We'd end up paying exorbitantly more and as such a small province just don't have the capacity to absorb that along with supporting our own tariff-impacted workforce.

And the problem with extorting the NB Power customers in Maine is that they are poor communities that currently contribute to our struggling utility's bottom line. Threatening their energy security only sours relations with a friendly blue neighbor that would be forced to mobilize support and ultimately get them on Maine's own power grid. Long term we'd only be shrinking NB Power's consumer base and discouraging cooperation at a sub-national level. That kind of decoupling brings us closer to a position that can be branded as hostile with the sort of propaganda that manufactures consent for traditional warfare.

I'm hopeful that she'll find some ways to exert pressure that involve less self-harm, but happy to have supporting our own be the priority. Our national response and provincial cooperation on those pressure points does the most to weaken the U.S. administration specifically, and pivoting to new trade partners and building up our own value-added industries are the real path to success. Even nationally, showing up to the trade war is more a matter of showing strength, undermining the current U.S. administration, and leading other nations by example.

I don't think anyone (other than Conservatives) think "friendly, collaborative" politics are going to get anywhere with Dumpster's administration. I have my doubts that anyone actually expects to make a deal, or would think it worth the paper on which it's written if we did. But we need to constantly message that we hold the high ground - that we only ever operated in good faith. As long as Dumpster is unambiguously the only bad guy, this conflict will be limited to trade, foster international support for Canada, and establish the long-term partnerships that secure us against all manner of American interference.

The point isn't to win back the disingenuous nor the fools they've captured, but rather to head neutral people off at the high-traffic gateways to alt-right pipelines. The first thing cultists will try to do is isolate people from legitimate support systems, and in this case that means discrediting institutions by attributing malice to every action.

But they're going to say something bad no matter what is or isn't done, and aren't bound by the truth anyway. So I say play the numbers game and focus on the undecided, not the cultists. We won't know what impact it has until we try and then measure the results (like metrics on DNS lookups, from which we can probably estimate drops in Canadian traffic to those sites vs drops in Canadian traffic overall which would signify people switching to other DNS servers).

Censorship is a risky tool to be sure, but realistically the authoritarian risks are pretty far removed from Canada's political center, and we already do it for various reasons that the general public widely accepts. As long as we're staying within a good legal framework, to me it's only a question of results and specifically the result of keeping fascist movements marginalized and its members surrounded by rational people who were given the benefit of forewarning.

The type of people who understand and will use (collaboratively or otherwise) the tools available to proactively filter what information reaches them are going to generally fall into two categories:

• people who are not particularly susceptible to misinformation
• people already captured by misinformation (who will use such tools to help avoid cognitive dissonance, usually with block lists curated by their thought leaders)

I think the misinformation problem is, at it's root, a shortage of trust in institutions (fueled partly by actual failures, but more by deliberate attacks). As such, there is no systemic solution that people who most need it won't go to great lengths to circumvent. But combatting misinformation is a numbers game, and the largest number of vulnerable citizens are low-information voters who are not particularly radicalized but simply react to whatever reaches them with far too little skepticism.

For them, I think some simple, low level and easily circumvented internet filtering would do a world of good. Like just have our ISPs serve up DNS redirects to government-hosted pages proclaiming the site is blocked and detailing why, with links to things like private, non-partisan analysis as supporting evidence. Circumventing this is trivial, but the initial hurdle is good enough to redirect a sizeable amount of low-information, unmotivated users somewhere more productive or at least better moderated. It's also weak enough to minimize the inevitable complaints about censorship.

I don't like censorship myself, but I'm past believing we can maintain national security with none at all. People who are reasonably well-informed are finding their collective future just as threatened as the low-information voters inviting foreign influence through the back door.

Oh I'm so sorry Canada isn't even more dependent on U.S. business nor vulnerable to their monopsonistic* agendas. You know what is on the table? Leaving that sheet of paper blank.

All Canada needs is a good deal on sale of the resources they need. 25% tariffs just sweeten any deal with the rest of the free-trade-loving world despite higher transportation overhead. It seems the U.S. doesn't want to compete using their natural geographic advantage, but rather just find more ways to exploit and abuse its trading partners. And why? Because their oligarchs are getting too fat and hungry for even the most powerful nation in the world to feed. Their looming debt collapse is entirely a demise of their own making. The U.S. has always made helping to feed that beast a cost of doing business. But at some point the cost outweighs the benefit.

And I'm starting to think, with some amazement, that there isn't just a way to survive these dark times. There's actually a path forward that could see a brighter, fairer world in our own lifetimes. We just have to starve the beast back into submission. If the U.S. were to outright collapse into a failed, fractured state, the impact on world order would be utterly catastrophic. WW3 is what's on the table. But there is still a softer landing within reach. If we can manage the transition by limiting it to a manageable pace and building up other friendly military powers, America will have successfully surrendered all of its surplus power and influence to its allies.

As the entire free world pivots away from doing business with the U.S. and instead strengthens ties with each other, there will no longer be one oligarchy in a trench coat dictating the free world's relationship with capital. Americans still have time to start realizing how utterly fucked they will be in this new isolationist frontier, but good for us if they don't. Some day we may see free trade deals getting made that require the U.S. to compromise their economic values, and comply with other nations' standards for tax, IP, and labor law. We could see an end to nations competing via subsidy and tax break (to say nothing of labor exploitation) for private investments.

So let me be among the first to most warmly and joyously welcome Dumpster's team to take their ball and go home. They can keep their starving oligarchs too.

Is this crazy talk?

*(Oh the irony...my browser's American English spell check doesn't think monopsonistic is even a word.)

Some of the public are people like me. I stopped giving any money to Blizzard back when they made StarCraft (II?) require a Battle.NET account...or was it patching out already present offline LAN support? It was also hearing about shitty labor practices and workplace harassment at some point. My memory of why is pretty spotty, but the "don't give Blizzard money" part has stayed crystal clear for decades now. I genuinely don't remember why I first blacklisted EA games (might be commitment to DRM, might be just because they're such a shitty company), but it's on that list for life.

Heck, between 3rd-party DRM, loot boxes, and everything from "crunch time" development cycles to transphobia, I've been all but done with AAA gaming for several years. I could hardly be a gamer at all any more, if not for the rise of indie gaming, but that's not really my point right now.

The point is I remember the important, actionable bits. And I think most other Canadians will also retain their simple conclusions that won't need re-evaluation. After this, they'll have a solitary pedestal in their mind palace just to store one special conclusion from all of this:

Fuck the U.S.

And after floundering around for a bit, Canadians will find the indie trade they love; in a few years, they won't even miss AAA trading.

But it certainly is disingenuous to treat authoritarianism like a boolean property - rather than acknowledging (or far better, quantifying) the difference in degree to which taking or leveraging authority is chosen over other approaches to leadership.

I told an aggressively pushy door-to-door salesman to leave and and shut my door in his face. Am I a dictator now?

And why are your arguments framed entirely around entities that are not left and exist in a foreign political system that has no left at a party level, while drawing no connection to Canadian politics nor the Canadian political parties that are actually under discussion? That's a weird choice for a Canadian who isn't intellectually captured by American media or actually someone/thing of other origin working from a script.