Update: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/trump-fires-top-us-general-cq-brown/index.html

The loyalty purge has begun; I wonder if our military leadership is smart enough to see where this is going?

I was thinking like this a few weeks ago but with more thought I think we are geographically too difficult to invade by force.

It’s unfortunately much the opposite; our geography makes us easy to divide and conquer through a combination of the Canadian Shield being difficult to develop on, and the Trans Canada highway being a single point of failure.

https://youtu.be/550EdfxN868

I know the video is about invading the US, but it covers the general strategy the US could easily use to prevent troop movements between the western and eastern parts of Canada.

The rest of the world would also have boots on the ground here to help us out.

The US Navy could easily blockade or destroy the entirety of Europe’s combined naval forces in a matter of days. Large-scale troop and equipment transport to bring reinforcement would be extremely unlikely to work, and Europe’s militaries know this.

Also I think the vast majority of Americans would just refuse the order to do it.

20 years ago, Ukrainians would never have entertained the idea that Russia would invade and annex them. Many families lived, and continue to live, across both countries. Pernicious propaganda combined with authoritarian rule eventually removed the risk of sufficiently organized opposition.

Will it take 20 years for the US oligarchy to do the same? It’s only been two months and we’ve gone from mutual cooperation to booing each other’s anthems in sports games and AI-generated pictures of geese smashing eagles.

Increased trade with China at the US’ expense will be the grain of truth buried in Trump’s lies about Canada being owned and run by China (it doesn’t need to be true, he just needs a fact he can grossly misinterpret, and often, not even that).

I wouldn’t underestimate just how thoroughly ignorant and upset many Americans are. A little push in the right direction and the promise of wealth, even if ill-gotten, might be all they need.

I wish I shared in the optimism, but I could easily see them invading, and treating this land as an exploitable frontier. Incentivizing millions of their own citizens to move to their new colony to develop it for their own personal enrichment would mean we could quickly find ourselves outnumbered and displaced.

Haven’t been able to read the article, even archive services are paywalled.

Good thing Trudeau banned most semi-automatic “assault style” firearms just in time for us to get annexed!

You’d think he’d put a pin in that shit given what we’re facing.

It’s actually the opposite; US shale oil is very high quality in terms of purity. The problem is that their refineries are built around the idea of processing lower quality crude because the by-product is used in manufacturing other goods.

Canada’s oil sands produces the crude they need to make money off that by-product.

https://youtu.be/_l1cj_AyR1E

Which is great for us, because it means export tariffs would have an outsized impact on their secondary petrochem product prices.

Good to see more of this out here. Harsh criticism of everyone that makes mistakes only serves to ensure that no one will ever change or take responsibility.

Quick, let’s give more money to megacorps and business our way out of it! That’ll fix it!

I signed it, but I don’t expect Doug Ford to have the sense to do what’s right for Ontario given what’s he’s already done so far.

Putin’s his master and handler. If the United States throws the high ground away and starts gobbling up neighbouring nations, it becomes that much easier to say “the West does it too”.

Building off this a bit, I think the reason why it bothers me so much isn’t just because it’s distracting, it also has this unintended toxic effect of tying the value of what someone’s saying directly to their appearance. It’s exhausting watching new generations of people re-equate truth and beauty again and again in ever more insidious and pervasive ways with new technology.

I want to like this person’s reporting, but I just can’t get over the urge to reach through the screen and push her out of the way so I can actually see what the fuck she’s talking about.

Seriously, I get that there’s tons of pressure to standout in visual platforms by highlighting yourself in your work, but I’d still like her content even if her face wasn’t constantly in it.

It wouldn’t surprise me if we found out that the problems Boeing is having aren’t unique to them.

“American fascism is entirely due to Russian operatives and trolls” is laughable because of how hard it glosses over the steps you have taken to ensure fascism in your own country.

I’m not American, and it’s not fascist thinking to point out the fact that Russia is literally running a fascist playbook to encourage aligned fascism globally.

Pointing that out isn’t meant to excuse the existence of fascists within the US; if anything, its about the idea that there are fascists to work with in every country, and they’re coordinating their efforts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Democracy_Union

The difference between the US and Russia is there are still people like the head of the FTC trying to curtail corporate power however they can. Russia only does it to enforce loyalty amongst its oligarchs.

This idea that Russia is both too weak to win a war against Ukraine but also strong enough to covertly topple the world’s foremost superpowers is honestly fascist thinking.

The too weak/strong argument is fallacious in this instance because the dimensions we’re comparing aren’t equivalent. A nation that heavily invests in intelligence and asymmetric warfare at the expense of conventional warfare capabilities will be strong in the former and weak in the latter. In Ukraine’s case, Russia thought they were strong in both and found out that they weren’t quite as capable as they had led themselves to believe. That’s why we’re seeing them ramp up the tactics as described in the article.

Once Trump pulls the plug on Ukraine’s funding and access to US intelligence systems, they’ll fall to Russia because they won’t have enough of either capability to win a war of attrition with a larger, richer state.

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False equivalence.

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Maybe a skill-testing question for account sign ups?

Unless you can generate a magnetic field around the planet sufficiently powerful enough to prevent solar radiation from blasting the atmosphere away, it wouldn’t change anything.

Mars needs a molten iron core or something like it to be terraformed for any meaningful length of time.