This piece has no real audience, or any real purpose for being authored. Yes, I have a number of tech entries I’m working on and will release any day now. Yet after watching the events of the last few days¹, after a tiring year of nonsense coming from South of the border, this text spewed forth in a fit of ragespiration.

This is anger-powered. Apologies that it is stream-of-thought and is in need of significant truncation/editing, likely with many wording issues or typos.

The History of Our Relationship

Children of a Common Mother / Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity

I’m a proud Canadian 🇨🇦.

My North American ancestry goes back to at least the late 1700s² and features a large number of moves between the United States and Canada.

A great-grandfather was born in Oakley, Michigan. A great-grandmother was born in Milam, Texas, her parents coming from Ohio and Illinois, their parents coming from Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario and Nova Scotia. Every branch of my family tree shares a similar migration throughout the continent.

They all chased ambitions and adventures, returned to their family, followed a lover, or in extreme cases chose loyalty to mother Britain. Who knows, maybe fled from the law.

Go back further still and eventually all paths on my family tree lead to Scotland, Ireland and England³. My wife’s side goes back further still, bridging to the Ojibwa / Algonquin history via the Métis, also having migrated from the US to Canada. For loads of many-generational Canadians this path also goes back to France.

This was common on the continent⁴ outside of flare-ups like the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The countries have been deeply intertwined, sharing a common path. Canada remained more closely attached to Great Britain⁵, which meant that we followed British laws, customs and idioms, including the early abolishment of slavery and earlier involvement in the world wars, and of course lots of extraneous u’s, but we’ve largely tracked the same direction.

The descriptive heading atop this section — Children of a Common Mother / Brethren Dwelling Together in Unity — comes from the two sides of the Peace Arch found on the border between Blaine, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia.

None of this is to diminish the reality that both countries have changed significantly from those early years, and that many other peoples and countries have contributed to the fabric that these countries are today, but this foundation is why so often we are natural allies of America, the UK, Australia, Europe generally, and similar minded nations brought into the fold.

Longest Undefended Border / Basically Unified

The border was almost illusory a few decades ago. Often you would just get waved through on your trip to Cedar Point or Florida, at most asked a cursory question of your plans with minimal ID like a driver’s licence.

The US is obviously the larger partner in this pairing, so generally we ascribe everything to it⁶, but a lot of American accomplishments were shared American/Canadian creations, and vice versa. Canada has the culture it does largely because of the US, but the inverse is just as true.

You could go through the gamut of things we credit to the US but in which there is enormous Canadian influence: Music, movies, tech, food, or even the auto industry, and Canada has been a major contributor to all of it. Even the Manhattan project was a cooperative project where Canada played a significant role. Yes, we have been a nuclear-capable nation since the 1940s.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Brantford, Ontario. Thomas Edison’s father was from Nova Scotia, and the famous inventor got his first real job at 16 in the city of Stratford, Ontario where he worked as a full-time telegraph operator for a railway. You find these sorts of cross-border lives across the history of both great nations.

The first European “thanksgiving” in North America happened in Canada long before the pilgrim feast in New England, though many British Loyalists that fled North from the US during the American revolution brought some of their customs, particularly the signature menu items, that hugely influenced Canadian norms.

In every aspect of the shared histories of the two countries there are crossovers and intersections. Canada, as the much smaller partner, disappears in the shadow, but we’ve had an enormous impact on the trajectory of the United States⁷.

We have long boasted that we shared the longest undefended border on the planet, two peaceful, happily coexisting countries living in harmony for shared gain. The shared history and values, and I say that broadly, meant that there was seldom anything to gripe about. Every irritant was minor.

So Why Aren’t We One Country?

But that doesn’t mean we are one and same. There are some significant philosophical differences that guide the dominant behaviours in both countries, influencing laws and norms.

The US puts more of a (arguably superficial and selective) priority on individual rights, for instance, while Canada leans slightly more towards group rights. If you prioritize one you necessarily infringe upon the other. It is important to note that this is a subtle difference in many cases, but it prescribes how society at large works. It’s why many Canadian rights have the criteria “within reasonable limits”, while US rights are more absolute.

Yes, you can have loads of rights — and indeed, Canada actually falls higher than the US on freedom indexes, just as it does for press freedom and most similar measures — but the moment your rights impede on the health and wellbeing of others, there is a balance that must be found.

There is an old, oft misattributed saying that “your right to swing your arm end where my nose begins”. Some have used it to justify the right to perform any activity that doesn’t overtly and directly cause physical harm to others, while different groups have used it to argue that the conceptual “nose begins” limitation refers to negative influences on society at large. For instance during prohibition the “nose” was the negative influences of alcohol on wider society.

It’s a complex discussion, with an enormous range of nuance, and can be productively debated when participants are engaged in a good-faith, thoughtful discussion.

And it’s important to note that this isn’t even a left or right concept. Both sides are fully willing to extend one’s conceptual nose to prohibit behaviour they want stopped, while shrinking the nose when it’s behaviour they think isn’t the business of the state⁸.

For instance the right for someone to acquire an armoury in Canada is limited by the fact that the collective — the public — does not want to endure the risks inherent with a civilian having an armoury⁹. We also don’t have absolute freedom to say what we want¹⁰.

All for one and one for all. It’s a bit like an HOA¹¹: Annoying when it impedes on your own freedoms, but you love it when it stops your neighbours from engaging in thoughtless, antisocial behaviour.

Universal healthcare is a manifestation of this philosophy¹². Healthcare needs to be available and accessible¹³ to all Canadians because the health of the group is more important than priority, no-holds-barred blowouts for select individual¹⁴. The US healthcare system is built primarily in the service of the many, many middle-men and intermediaries that take their cut, leading to the most expensive¹⁵ healthcare on the planet, with some of the worst outcomes.

I do think that in general Canadians have more concern about other Canadians as a consequence of this fundamental philosophical difference.

And joining the US is spectacularly unpopular across Canada¹⁶. Even in Alberta, where the heaviest of US-funded psyops have been active for years, less than 1 in 5 has any interest in joining the US¹⁷. US residents are more likely to want their state to join Canada than the reverse, which should be pretty damning for the US exceptionalism “greatest nation on the planet” advocates.

The Canadian Malcontents / Traitors

And just in the interest of full disclosure, some Canadians have a legitimate reason to be unhappy with the way the country has gone over the past decade or two¹⁸, and we do have some subset of “invade us”, Trump-loving sorts, particularly among young men that beclown themselves in every online forum. This self-criticism section is just an effort to explain some of the grievances when you come across the “this place is a hellhole!” sort of commentary online.

I wrote about our broken immigration system previously, and this continues today with a laughably corrupt, zero-justification TFW/LMIA system. The issue has seen major improvements after an outrageous torrential flood, but still in-the-open abuse is tolerated if not encouraged, at the cost to all Canadians. Canada’s immigration system seemed to be in the service of migrants and not Canadians, which isn’t the premise we were sold. It is undergoing a reset, but is far from fixed.

Non-citizens get the soft touch by the criminal justice system time and time again. Literal rapists are given sentences that ensure there is no impact on their ability to become citizens or to bring their family here. To many if not most Canadians, these people should be on the first mode of transport out of the country, never to return. They harm productive, integrated immigration, and it serves absolutely no one but the criminal themselves to tolerate their behaviour. They make this country objectively worse, and we owe them nothing. Residency has been devalued to such a degree that non-citizens feel absolutely no risk that they’re throwing it all away being engaged in criminal adventures, ruining the rule of law and the high trust society that this country built over centuries.

Crime reports are filled with people being caught for crimes that they were out on bail for committing previously, out on bail during that crime as well, in our catch-and-release justice system where every single person knows they’re just going to return to the same crime patterns again. Police tell you to leave your keys near the door to ensure convenience for thieves. Car theft became an epidemic. At some point it’s just cosmic or intentional incompetence.

Housing prices and cost-of-living problems were exacerbated, and remain an incredible problem in this country, leading to an entire generation of young adults finding it difficult if not impossible to get a start on their careers, on their families, and so on. Many industries have limited options that operate as protected monopolies, overcharging Canadians and then offshoring any work they can to the developing world.

And of course there are ridiculous, embarrassing displays like this that have been forced upon Canadians. Toronto in particular — and to be clear I love the city — seems absolutely predisposed with flagellating the history of Canada while accomplishing astonishingly little. The city has embarrassing transit systems and infrastructure for its size, and succeeds despite its government, not because of it. City council focuses its efforts on virtue-signalling spectacles such as renaming public squares and streets. For instance, despite Canada’s inconsequential activity in the slave trade¹⁹, a major square was renamed from someone who wasn’t virtuous enough for modern tastes when he lived two-hundred plus years ago, in favour of a word from the language of a slave-trading tribe from Africa. It is astonishing how little Toronto has accomplished in decades, every major project taking an eternity and being the laziest, most thoughtless choice possible. But it achieves a lot of virtuous verbiage and meaningless gestures, so I guess there’s that.

When I brought the family downtown for a Blue Jays playoff game a few months back, Nathan Phillips Square had a number of people openly doing drugs²⁰ on the various benches around the square, including needle drugs, without a care in the world. City Hall was festooned with a giant banner declaring “English is a foreign language!”. Honestly, extremely embarrassing stuff given how many tourists visit the city.

We endure situations like this²¹ where everyone is caught in a quagmire of their own exaggerated-yet-virtuous tolerance for the insane. Just to be clear, I am 100% of the “live and let live” position, and people can be who they want and find their happiness²², but if there is no separation between severe mental illness, trolling, and someone expressing themselves, we might have gone a bit awry. There’s probably a medium somewhere where we aren’t demanding that everyone just pretend the bizarre and obscene is normal.

When I chose the header picture for this post, it was intended as a representation of the early European roots of the two countries, but I’m well aware that some subset of the population will consider it unfathomably “problematic” that it isn’t representative of modern demographics as we backport history and retcon a convenient demographic into the past, or that it doesn’t incorporate the aboriginal component of the founding of this nation given that I was specifically referring to the “settler” elements of our history.

And then there is the gun control issue. We do have gun crime issues, overwhelmingly courtesy of guns smuggled from the US²³. The government’s solution to this — to show some action and pretend to be solving the issue — is to hassle and harass legal gun owners, and massively expensive and dubious value plans like the gun buyback farce.

When the left and center pretend that none of these are legitimate positions that Canadians can hold, it leaves people with no out. Invariably some people will get pushed to extremes. On Reddit barely over a year ago, many of the Canada-oriented subs would ban you for bringing up or commenting on any of these things²⁴, and the result was that a bunch of subreddit refugees end up in new subs that invariably spiral into far-right content. It’s a predictable, obvious result of thinking you can silence issues from being concerns and they’ll just disappear.

There needs to be a rational solution to this insanity, finding a reality-based but considerate middle ground that doesn’t embrace the outright self-destruction idiocracy that we’ve seen occur in the US, while listening to all voices. Everything doesn’t have to be to such spastic extremes where the only alternative to extremists on one side is to veer to the extremes of the other. Simply trying to denounce all of these things as so-called right wing or make them unspeakable does absolutely no one any favours, and that sort of foolishness is exactly what paved the way for cons like Donald Trump to exploit.

There will always be the stupid, conspiratorial, and so on. Those people should not be pandered to, but we should address the low-hanging fruit grievances with rational, inclusive middle-grounds solutions.

What Would Make Canada Join The US?

There have been points in recent history where a tighter union between the countries seemed inevitable²⁵. Some sort of EU-style integration where each remained sovereign to uphold its individual philosophies, but with freedom of labour and passage, common markets, and so on. NAFTA cum USMCA was a quarter-measure towards that goal, although I suspect for the foreseeable future we’re going to be moving in the opposite direction and will naturally become estranged.

But let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way early, and I apologize if this offends anyone. The situation is such there is no way to word this more politely.

Donald Trump is a vile, deplorable piece of rotting shit. He is the embodiment of every horrible human trait, is a dangerous malignant narcissist, and for the theists reading he is quite literally the human embodiment of the deadly sins. He is a fantastically selfish, deluded, uneducated, foolish embarrassment to all humanity, but most critically is a massive shit-stain on the entire legacy and history of the United States, and all the great people that built that country into what rogue idiots like Trump and his crew of greaseball misfits²⁶ are demolishing daily.

If this incredibly stupid fool — and he is clearly an incredibly stupid man²⁷, and it is simply extraordinary if anyone is fooled into thinking otherwise — didn’t inherit wealth from his slumlord father, as one observer noted (apologies I cannot find where I read this perfect prediction) he’d be scamming tourists in Times Square with counterfeits.

This foolish simpleton lies with every utterance, and talks with great authority on topics where he is dangerously uninformed. I have jolted awake in the night, sweating about something I said decades ago that turned out to be wrong — literally haunted in my dreams by past misstatements — yet Donald Trump is rattling off an unending stream of gross mistruths and lies, which somehow his fans cast as trolling, or truth through some hilariously mangled redefinition of reality.

Trump’s broken, foolish brain sees the world as zero-sum, and if you find ways to hurt others that somehow benefits you. This isn’t how anything works in the real world, and in actual reality it is all going to turn out spectacularly poorly for Americans²⁸. No, you can’t steal-better-countries your way out of this.

This grotesque being has zero shame. Zero self-doubt, despite being a person who should be overwhelmed with self-doubt. There are very few humans that have lived in history that are more vile than that orange goblin and his constant diarrhea-spray of attention seeking nonsense. Oh no, Canada’s Prime Minister was uninvited from Trump’s pathetic, despot-and-lickspittle filled grift of a “Peace Board”. Christ.

That this barking clown was elected a single time indicts the US as broken. It led to questions of what went wrong with democracy that such an unsuitable candidate rose through the ranks and conned so many. And then this garbage was elected again.

After his first disastrous term where he did his best to do the worst but was restrained by the adults in the room, leading to an eventual attempt to quite literally throw away democracy for his own selfish aims, I was certain there was zero chance this trash could ever make inroads in politics again. Surely America learned that listening to a lying populists who has no clue how anything works and is primarily concerned with self-enrichment isn’t a winning move.

And then America voted for him again. Just amazingly sad stuff. What a fall from such heights for a nation that was the “city on a hill”.

Every American business leader that ran to kiss the ring, obsequiously playing along with the Trump con or praising his harebrained, idiotic policies²⁹, utterly disgraced themselves, and the stink of Trump’s overfilled diapers will stick to them for decades to come. You have embarrassed yourself. When foreign governments start shutting your companies out or censure you for garbage, American-exceptionalism ways, write your angry tweets telling everyone that you’re going to go cry to JD Vance or Musk or whoever, but that played out game is exhausted. If isolationism is what you enable, it is absolutely what you deserve.

There is an Instagram account that features a guy and I believe his sister talking to their MAGA parents, and honestly I hope for humanity that it’s all a rage-baiting act. The alternative is that their parents are just impossibly stupid, foolish, profoundly gullible people. They’re also terrible human beings.

I’m agnostic, but started life on a diet of Christianity and the Catholic Church, and it’s painfully apparent that the MAGA collective is, sorry to tell you, going to burn in the pits of eternal hell. These people are the embodiment of everything Christ spoke against, so it’s pretty shocking how often these vile, vile people hide behind a cross. Donald Trump is the closest form of the conceptual Antichrist alive today.

And to be clear, we have loads of this sort of goblin in Canada as well³⁰. Uninformed, foolish clowns who ply their noise on every comment board³¹. Occasionally they find themselves influence, such as the fool Kevin O’Leary. Jordan Peterson is of course Canadian and he leaned into his listeners a bit much, becoming, as Sam Harris would say, radicalized by his audience. He started in the limelight with an arguable position about inducements into pronoun schemes, but as time went on he has become more and more jihadist about a position to cater to his audience³².

So that’s a problem for Canada. We look at a country that voted this foolish clown in not once, but twice, and there is simply zero chance we can find a common ground.

Sure, the US could easily militarily conquer Canada³³ — like a one-day operation, tops — but that would not only turn the US into a universal pariah (outside of Russia, of course, where Putin would be laughing at his good fortune), it would guarantee the rapid collapse of the union, and the enormous loss of American life. It would massively accelerate what already seems inevitable.

Musk previously joked that Canada is not a “Real Country”, later excused as some sort of media reference, but really is it fair to say that the US is a “real country”? The divide between many of the red and the blue states is so fundamental and overwhelming that I just don’t see it enduring much longer. The “indivisible” quip sounds nice in a pledge, but in what confused interpretation of democracy are natural enemies forced to coexist and lord over each other? Texas has floated secession a number of times, including at the highest levels of government.

The US is going to keep flipping hard left³⁴, hard right, endlessly being manipulated and led by the plutocrats that run every platform and media group and can easily manipulate a foolish populace to whatever ends they want, to further and further extremes.

The Solution

The solution is clear.

The dissolution of the Un-united States, which honestly seems veering ever closer to civil war³⁵.

The West Coast — California, Oregon, Washington State —, New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, parts of Michigan, and maybe a couple of the better remaining states can join Canada. We will even give you full province-hood and a full vote! We can have a one-off citizen exchange where unhappy residents can move to the other, and then we can build a wall. We’ll make them pay for it too!

We will put the umbrella of universal healthcare over you, bring you back to a country that reveres education and science, and remove the pox that has been forced on your heads. We’ll stop the constant decline as terrible miscreants in low-density, welfare states force their ignorance and backwards beliefs upon you. You don’t have to be lorded over by terrible people with terrible beliefs.

The remainders can suck down their lard and eschew modern health science. They can roll-coal and renounce science and do grotesque spectacles in their “Did-These-People-Even-Read-The-Bible” prosperity evangelical mega churches, waiting out their days until they are pounded down into mush for the Soylent Green the sociopathic plutocrats demand. They can pretend global warming isn’t real — at least unless it’s on the topic of stealing Greenland, where suddenly global warming is very real and a national security threat — and cower from evil seed oils. They can guzzle down their healthy, 96oz “cane sugar” soft drinks.

Let’s do this thing. Get a deal done.

Footnotes

1. Now that all the lies are falling apart and the domestic situation is rapidly unravelling, Trump and his administration of Temu-Nazi criminals are looking for distractions, making them a perilous danger for the rest of the planet. By far the world’s most dangerous, nuclear-armed rogue nation ↩

2. This isn’t some boast begging for a one-upping, and many can trace back further still, all to be trumped by the non-European groups that had been here for thousands of years. Nor does being “old stock” make one more Canadian or American, but instead is pertinent to the notion that the two countries are essentially siblings ↩

3. Go back far enough and my ancestors were immigrants. Go back far enough in anyone’s ancestry and you will find immigrants everywhere on the planet.

   And I confess the inconsistency that I didn’t consider it being immigrants when my ancestors moved between Canada and the US and back again, which is something I will think on ↩

4. Obviously there were people settled in the Americas for thousands of years when Britain, France, Portugal and Spain came calling³⁶, and indeed first nations often straddled the borders we know today, and often migrated over the centuries. That is a different discussion, and if someone wants to argue that the current nations are illegitimate or not real based upon that, that’s for someone else’s essay ↩

5. And France, of course. France played an enormous part in the history of North America, and French norms and laws have significant influence on Quebec. When my children were younger I wanted to move the family to Quebec, but alas technical regulatory restrictions on my wife’s career prevented that ↩

6. So you end up with the Americans doing the tired “We are responsible for everything” act, culminating in the malignant narcissism of ahistorical, idiotic clowns like the Don. And of course Canada isn’t the only country that gets occluded by shade of such imagined exceptionalism. Countless world inventions end up being absorbed into the US where they become “American”. An iPhone is layers of inventions and subcomponents, many of which originated outside the US, yet to every American it is the blessed creation of America, bequeathed upon an ungrateful world.

   Einstein spent the bulk of his life in Europe, with great Europeans. The US rocket program was the result of largely Germans. And so on. ↩

7. In the modern era, Canada was often a complicit partner in basically laundering misdeeds. We would be the “good cops” that would use our benign, beloved reputation to push American initiatives. Sometimes in ways we probably shouldn’t have. A lot of American ventures could happen because Canada offered legitimacy ↩

8. Many leftists think that public drug use or intoxication isn’t a concern of the state. Many conservatives think drunk-driving laws are an intrusion into their personal freedoms. Many leftists think the state should enforce pronouns, while many on the right think the state should dictate what sex acts between consenting adults are legal in the privacy of a bedroom. The examples go on forever, and there is seldom consistency in how each side adopts this concept

   In many cases, and on both sides of the spectrum, people are looking for the state to protect them from being offended ↩

9. In the wake of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia, the perpetrators relegated to hunting rifles, every comment board was filled with proud Americans declaring that the problem is that the public at large wasn’t carrying guns, and if only there was the mythical Good Guy With A Gun, necessarily ignoring the armed police that were immediately on site. That in America this could never happen. It boggles the mind, but you could find such a sentiment everywhere.

   From the country with the most mass shootings on the planet, and by far the highest murder rate in the G7. Where an army of police were held at bay by a single guy shooting kids in a school. It’s the weird American exceptionalism distortion field at work and it often leaves me questioning if these people are just being ironically satirical, having constructed a whole multi-decade “stupid uneducated clown” social media history for the cause ↩

10. As with all norms, there are abuses. Canada’s shameful treatment of aboriginals is regretful, but some are now trying to exploit our hate laws to essentially codify debatable elements of the historic record as legally unquestionable and criminal. This is unlikely to ever be law, but a system will always see people pushing its bounds for their own agenda ↩

11. Always a fascinating paradox that HOAs and extremely tight rules on personal behaviour are most prolific in the most conservative parts of America.

    Also worth noting that many of the things an HOA polices in the US exist at the municipal level in Canada. ↩

12. Though Canada is not the exception here. Literally every developed, high-income country has universal healthcare outside the United States ↩

13. Canadian healthcare is very imperfect. Recently there was a man who tragically perished in an Edmonton hospital after going in for chest pains. Triage did a troponin test and ECG and saw no abnormalities so he was triaged to wait longer for limited resources, and died waiting. Health is entirely managed provincially, and the right-wing Alberta government³⁷ has been purposefully starving its systems of funds in efforts to get very uninformed fools to blame the Feds, to blame our system, something something “money sent to Ukraine”…, and so on.

    People die waiting in every country. The US has an enormous number of cases of people dying in the waiting room, quite aside from the countless others who died at home because they wouldn’t dare endure the enormous cost that a visit would levy.

    Canada has a significantly higher lifespan, and better outcomes for most medical issues, than the US. The moment healthcare is used by an America to denigrate Canada, it betrays that the conversation has veered from being reality based, and has moved to being rhetoric based ↩

14. My wife and I were in Italy some years back where we ended up befriending a mother/daughter from Texas. They were enjoyable company, but for some reason they decided to tell us all the problems with Canadian healthcare, a conversation we did not ask for, but they felt a passionate urge to talk about. Literally nothing they said had any association with reality, but this was the propaganda they were fed by the many pound-of-flesh extractors that want to make sure the American public stays uninformed and exploitable. Their absolute confidence in their understanding of a system that they had zero real knowledge of, but that we had spent our lives dealing with, was quite incredible ↩

15. A common distraction to keep Americans from demanding a better system is to pretend that everyone else is somehow subsidized by the US, and their better systems are only possible because of how terrible the US system is. This is a common Trump “zero sum” bit of nonsense where he claims that American prices are high because those prices are lower in other countries. Nothing on the planet works like this. ↩

16. Oddly the group that most supports joining the US — becoming the “51st” state — are recent migrants to Canada, presumably who ended up in Canada as their second choice. Which a) indicts our immigration system, betraying that we are not bringing in the right people, b) insert an image of the reaction Rust Cohle smoking meme. ↩

17. The tiny subset of ignorant, traitorous Albertans who think the US are the magic solution to their problems live in a world of delusion. Maybe they haven’t noticed, but the Keystone XL pipeline was cancelled by the US, and most US governments over the past two decades have been strongly opposed to Alberta’s oil sands. In all likelihood the response that is going to come after the disastrous Trump crime spree will be so extreme that if the province were somehow consumed into the US, it will not turn out well for Alberta’s oil-lovin’ minority.

    Knowing the sovereignty movement is dead in the water if it’s tied to joining the US, its spokespeople keep distancing themselves from US interference, but how farcical: A landlocked province with a country to the South that has done everything it can to kill your oil sands projects over most of recent history, and then becoming estranged with the only other options to export markets. LOL, comical stuff.

    Not to mention the whole “most of the province is covered by aboriginal treaties that basically make it impossible” issue. Other than that, good luck with the grift, traitorous trash ↩

18. Canada has problems, like every country on the planet. Our problems absolutely pale compared to the rubble-pile collapse of norms and society happening South of the border ↩

19. There was regrettably some, but it pales compared to anywhere else on the planet, and even in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans where slavery was common among many tribes. Somehow we’ve become hyper-focused on only the past deeds of particular people, and only within the framing of modern standards and virtues.

    Having an Islamist preach about Canada’s misdeeds on colonization or slavery, for instance, is serious irony, which any student of history understands, yet no one bats an eye at such staggering hypocrisy if the target is Canada’s history or accomplishments. The microscope of historic criticism seems remarkably selective at times ↩

20. Another footnote to be clear, but I’m actually for decriminalization of most drugs. But the “nose” in this case, referencing back the swinging of arms hitting noses, is that if you make it other people’s problem — for instance if you are engaged in your drug habits in public places, or just generally make your addiction everyone else’s problem — you have crossed a line and should see zero tolerance ↩

21. That situation became very personal to me as several of my children attended a high school where this person worked as a substitute. Their school was inundated with bomb threats and other noise. I do not blame this person for the sort of criminal that calls bombs threats into a school over something like this, and the reactionary online far-right torch mob was the infinitely-worse part of this situation, however this should not have gone on so long. It should have been nipped in the bud, pardon the expression ↩

22. Society had made a lot of progress in taking gender off the pedestal when suddenly everything was again forced to be an endless conversation about gender and people’s demands of the same ↩

23. Almost all smuggling comes from the US towards Canada, including guns, drugs, and people. Remember Trump’s outrageous fentanyl farce, where the foolish psychopath pretended he cared about America’s drug users? Yeah, he was basically declaring to Americans that he thinks you are incredibly stupid, and sadly for millions of Americans he is absolutely right ↩

24. As housing costs (both for sale and rent) exploded, completely decoupled from any rational financial basis — seemingly predicated on stuffing a dozen international students in your basement to make the mortgage — it would be an automatic ban on a number of subs to broach the highest-in-the-developed-world immigration level. Which is simply insane, and because of this loads of alternative, generally right wing subs appeared to fill the void ↩

25. And of course there is enormous integration already in place. NORAD, NATO, Five-Eyes, G7, integration across many standards and systems, and so on. Many much better, forward-looking US administrations in the past made this possible, which the Orange Menace is rapidly unwinding ↩

26. Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, Karoline Levitt…just atrocious trash in human form. Hearing these lying clowns disgracing themselves and carrying water for the toddler in chief should be so humiliating they resign in disgust. Even Trump’s woefully incompetent, ill-suited clown of an ambassador to Canada, Hoekstra, shames the history of the United States with every stupid utterance from his idiot face. Just garbage from top to bottom.

    There is a saying in tech that A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. In Trump’s case, it’s a Y hiring Z’s. When this debacle is done these clowns need to be exiled from all civil society. ↩

27. Donald Trump is the outcome of someone surrounded by supplicants obliged to glaze every stupid statement, idiotic observation, or personal “achievement” for decades on end. Basically the analog version of what is happening with loads of people using LLMs.

    Elon Musk is much the same, explaining why these two gravitate to each other. Musk has done some great corporate leadership things in the past, but his entire recent history has just been next-level racism, poor decisions (like the CyberJunk), and just hyper-concentrated cringe that is just hard to even have awareness of, much less watch.

    Never surround youself with Waylon Smithers types. ↩

28. Trump makes me think of a kid I knew in my small, industrial town while growing up. We all were casual friends and most activities involved bikes. A close friend’s bike went missing, and not long after the kid showed up with what was clearly that stolen bike with some blotches of paint and a ground off serial number for a laughable attempt at deniability. “Prove it”, the little-Trump announced, thinking they had wonderfully gamed the system and gained a bike for free.

    I do know they took a number of beatdowns in the subsequent years, and basically disappeared from any of the activities or social groups. Their incredibly foolish notion that if they could temporarily get away with something therefore it would be consequence free was not well thought out ↩

29. $2.3 trillion dollar deficit, the debt spiralling out of control. Confidence in the US government is evaporating as Trump sticks his tiny hands in the machination of the fed, and the USD as a reserve currency is evaporating. But sure, those big DOGE and tariff checks should be arriving any day now. Along with that great new health care plan!

    Americans have no idea how much their wealth and way of life relied upon being bankrolled by the rest of the world that decided on the USD as their currency of exchange. As this dissolves, and Trump has rapidly accelerated this process, things are going to get very real.

    The reality that the runway for bullshit and foolish schemes is coming to an end — the con could only run for so long before people noticed — is exactly why this administration is now in the “Steal countries” distraction phase ↩

30. Stopped at the grocery store to grab some ketchup yesterday and heard a man — an otherwise normal looking 30-ish man — loudly detailing to a uncomfortable looking woman that by all appearances seemed to be a hostage of a random encounter with someone she passingly knew — how Somalis were running a daycare fraud in Minnesota, and he saw on YouTube that they were all empty and there were no kids and…

    Look, there’s fraud that happens everywhere, and it’s an important matter for locals to discover and penalize. I literally could not care less what is happening with some group in some distant state in an entirely different country. That someone thought this was so culturally important that this important news needs to be relayed to some casual acquaintance…yeah…

    And just to be clear, this was right after Trump declared, in a menacing, vile threat, that Canada “Lives because of the United States”, and had just posted a map showing Canada with the American flag over it. Yeah, an existential threat from a deranged, dementia addled clown with a massive military and nuclear weapons is infinitely more pressing than some news about some social system nonsense ↩

31. Read the comments under any media story in Canada and you’d think we were an an ultra-far right country desperately looking to join, or be conquered by, the United States. Whether these are just prolific losers with nothing else to do in their miserable lives, or some massive psyops campaign by a foreign power, it is grossly unrepresentative of Canadians at large ↩

32. Being radicalized by one’s audience — and importantly this goes to polarizing positions based upon your fans and your critics — is not intellectually honest. There are a number of figures who started from a position of philosophical grounding where you can disagree with their position but can still respect their convictions, to turning into extremist caricatures as they are radicalized by the responses they get. I mentioned Sam Harris above because he’s a rare exception where he doesn’t lean into any audience, and it’s so remarkably rare. I can disagree with him on many things, but I still find his takes insightful and interesting

    This goes both ways. Audiences adopt a position that they have to agree with everything a figure says, or they hate them and disagree with them entirely. People who agree with someone on 9 out of 10 issues, often feel compelled to adopt the 10th position for some sort of internal consistency, but that just isn’t how anything works. It’s okay to disagree with some things and agree with others. ↩

33. A number of US figures have outright encouraged this, including various GOP member from backwards, methville states that sit at the bottom of every education metric. And of course there are the various pathetic hanger-ons like the festering human scab Steve Bannon, or the beta-cuck loser Andrew Tate, an accused rapist simp whose livelihood relies upon armies of insecure teenage boys who are too foolish to realize how much of a spectacular loser he is. These keyboard warrior idiots need to banned from every country worldwide ↩

34. But in that US “left” way where there are a lot of words and symbolic actions (the most diverse cabinet ever, with the most inclusive changes to language, and so on), everything is slow-walked, consensus-building is attempted with people for whom you will never find consensus, and in the end nothing was actually improved for anyone but it gave another inroad for the right to take the wheel and start tearing everything down again ↩

35. Gavin Newsom made a quip at Davos about global leaders being “Pathetic” for “Rolling over” for Trump. And, I mean, he’s right: During the first year of Trump’s crime spree, only Canada and China really stood up to the US, while Starmer, the EU, and others were basically enabling Trump’s rapist behaviours. But at the same time it’s pretty gross for a US governor to point the finger outside the US, demanding they contain your toddler ↩

36. Given recent news about Denmark, humorously the Vikings were most certainly the first Europeans in North America, creating and then abandoning a settlement in what is now Newfoundland ↩

37. Alberta, like all provinces, has its grievances with federation³⁸. The US has been running a separatism advocacy campaign in the province for years, and the provincial UCP literally meets with various GOP members in the US to further this aim. Joining the US is spectacularly unpopular across Canada at large, even in Alberta, and only 18% of Alberta — the anti-vax, anti-science, addicted to Twitter sorts that are sure the gay frogs are going to take their imaginary daughter’s trophy at the big swim meet — so instead the campaign has been for some sort of magical “independent yet also, somehow still Canadian” delusion to fool the easily fooled. It’s going to fail, but honestly, disgusting behaviour by our “ally” the US, and zero of these clowns must ever hoist the Canadian flag again. Some of them, such as Dennis Modry, should be charged with sedition and launched from a catapult into the US ↩

38. Overwhelmingly based on contradictory positions. For instance that Canada didn’t build a coast-to-coast pipeline system is a recurring grievance, when that is precisely what the reviled-in-the-West National Energy Program of the early 1980s aimed to do. Ultimately large American oil companies wage a massive psyops campaign to exploit some very foolish suckers into always believing the Canadian government’s primary role is to assist foreign oil companies in achieving higher profits. Money has an amazing ability to coerce a democracy against its own best interest, which is the greatest danger to the modern world ↩

See Also

• 10,000 Brainiacs - Canada's Immigration Flood

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