Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2025

Those brave, rare contrarians willing to risk everything by … criticizing Trump?

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray is deeply concerned that a free society seems unable to produce even a mild array of differing political opinions these days:

I was at a small independent bookstore today, the exact kind of place that’s supposed to curate a culture of argument and criticism. The prominently displayed books about politics and current events were Timothy Snyder’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, Jason Stanley’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, Anne Applebaum’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, and a bunch of other books by prominent journalists and professors about … okay, try to guess.

On the other side of that exchange, the books by public intellectuals offering a favorable or even neutral view of Trump and the Trump era were … not there? Maybe I just missed them. So every prominent figure moving to the cultural foreground from academia and “mainstream” journalism — every brave contrarian, every freethinking intellectual warrior rising against the prevailing fascist sentiment of the age to speak in his own voice as a free person — thinks and says the same things, the same ways, with the same evidence and the same framing and the same tone and in the same state of mind. They’re so free and brave and iconoclastic that they’re essentially identical, chanting in intellectual unison.

Forget Trump for a moment and answer this question in general: If you’re living through an era in which every prominent journalist and academic and artist says exactly the same fucking thing all the time, what kind of moment are you living in? Would you call people who all chant in unison the resistance?

Any engagement with these books reveals their emptiness. Snyder, Stanley, Applebaum, whatever: pick a book, then pick a page. See if it makes sense. Here, I spent a few nauseating minutes today with brave Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction to the paperback edition:

ICE is novel: It was created after 9/11, by the same law that created a bureau tasked with border protection: a “special force, created in an anti-democratic moment”.

I can’t calibrate the degree to which this person is a fool or a liar, but let’s go with both. The Border Patrol was created in 1924, and was itself the successor agency to a different organization that was created in 1904. You can read that history here. The post-9/11 organization that supposedly created this novel American institution merely reorganized a century-old American institution, making it not the least bit novel. Before ICE, we had INS. Yes, we had a border before 2003, and we policed it. This isn’t a novel concept at all, as it has operated in any form of practice.

You can go through that single amazing paragraph sentence by sentence and tear every last bit of it apart, at the lowest, simplest factual level. The argument isn’t wrong: all of it is wrong, every layer of fact and interpretation. This man is an absolutely enormous jackass. And he’s … important. An important public intellectual, you see.

April 3, 2025

1947 Newscast: Spies, Aliens, and Collapsing Empires! – W2W 18

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, India, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 2 Apr 2025

1947 is a pivotal year: The British Empire crumbles as India and Pakistan gain independence amidst violence and mass migration. Truman launches a Cold War against Soviet communism, while spies infiltrate governments worldwide. Nations sign treaties reshaping Europe; Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier, and rumours swirl of aliens crashing at Roswell. Join us for the headlines that reshaped history!
(more…)

March 31, 2025

QotD: The problem of defending the late Roman Empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As we move into the later Roman Empire, particularly after the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 AD), we start to see changes in the form of Roman forts. Two things had been happening of the course of the Crisis (and in some cases before it) which transformed the Roman frontier situation. First, Rome’s enemies had gotten quite a bit stronger: in the west, long exposure to Rome had led the various “barbarians” on the other side of the limes to both pick up elements of Roman military practice but also to form into larger and larger political units (in part in order to hold off Roman influence) which were more dangerous. In the east, the Parthian Empire had collapsed in 224 to be replaced by the far more capable and dangerous Sassanid Empire. At the same time, fifty years of civil war had left Rome itself economically and militarily weaker than it had been. Bigger threats combined with scarcer state resources enforced a more flexible approach to controlling the borders.

In particular, Roman forces could no longer be entirely sure they would possess escalation dominance in any given theater. Indeed, during the Crisis, with legions being peeled to fight endless internal wars between rival claimants had meant that major frontier problems might go under-resourced or even entirely unaddressed for years. While the reign of Diocletian (284-311) marked a return to Roman unity, quite a bit of damage had already been done and by the end of the third century we see changes in patterns of fortification that reflect that.

The changes seem fairly clearly to have been evolutionary, in part because many older legionary forts remained in use. Some of the first things we see are traditional “playing-card” forts but now with the neat rectangular shape disrupted by having the towers project out from the walls. The value of a projecting tower […] is that soldiers on the tower, because it projects outward, can direct missiles (arrows, javelins, slings, etc) down the length of the wall, engaging enemies who might be trying to scale the wall or breach it. Of course a fortress that is now being designed to resist enemies scaling or breaching large stone walls is no longer worried about a raid but rather being designed to potentially withstand a serious assault or even a siege. Defensive ditches also multiply in this period and increase in width, often exceeding 25ft in width and flat-bottomed; the design consideration here is probably not to stop a quick raid anymore but to create an obstacle to an enemy moving rams or towers (think back to our Assyrians!) close to the walls.

Over time, forts also tended to abandon the “playing-card” proportions and instead favor circular or square shapes (minimizing perimeter-to-defend for a given internal area). And while even the original Roman marching camps had been designed with a concern to make it hard for an enemy to fire missiles into the camp – using the trench to keep them out of range and keeping an interval (literally the intervallum, the “inside the wall”) between the vallum and the buildings so that any arrows or javelins sent over the walls would land in this empty space – later Roman fortresses intensify these measures; we even see fortresses like the one at Visegrád incorporate its internal structures into the walls themselves, a measure to make the troops within less vulnerable to missile fire in a siege; this style becomes increasingly common in the mid-fourth century. Finally, by the fifth century we start to see the sites of Roman forts changing too, especially in the western part of the empire, with forts moving from low-land positions along major roadways (for rapid response) to hilltop sites that were less convenient for movement but easier to defend (in the East, a lot of the focus shifts to key heavily fortified cities – essentially fortress cities – like Nisibis (modern Nusaybin), Amida, Singara and Dara.

In short, Roman forts in this late period are being designed with the ability to resist either serious assaults or prolonged sieges. This in part reflects a lack of confidence that the Romans could always count on being able to immediately force a field battle they could win; while Roman armies retained the edge through most of this period, the main field armies were increasingly concentrated around the emperors and so might be many days, weeks or even months away when an incursion occurred; local forces had to respond elastically to delay the incursion much longer than before until that army could arrive.

Now of course the downside to a focus like this on single-site defense (“point defense” in its most basic form) is that the enemy army is given much more freedom to move around the countryside and wreck things, where they would have been engaged in the older observe-channel-respond defense system much more quickly (Luttwak terms this “preclusive” defense, but it isn’t quite that preclusive; the frontier is never a hard border). But of course the entire reason you are doing this is that the shifting security situation means you can no longer be confident in winning the decisive engagement that the observe-channel-respond defense system is designed for; you need to delay longer to concentrate forces more significantly to get a favorable outcome. Single-site defenses can do this for reasons we’ve actually already discussed: because the army in the fort remains an active threat, the enemy cannot generally just bypass them without compromising their own logistics, either their supply lines or foraging ability. Consequently, while some forts can by bypassed, they cannot all be bypassed (a lesson, in fact, that the emperor Julian would fail to learn, leading to disaster for his army and his own death).

And so the enemy, while they can damage the immediate environment, cannot proceed out of the frontier zone (and into the true interior) without taking some of these forts, which in turn will slow them down long enough for a major field army to arrive and in theory offer battle on favorable terms.

While it is easy to discount these shifts as just part of the failure of the Roman Empire (and we’ll come back to this idea, often presented in the form of a misquotation of George S. Patton that “fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man” though what he actually said was merely that the Maginot line was such), they contributed meaningfully to the Roman ability to hold on to a vast empire in an increasingly more challenging security environment. At pretty much all stages of its development, Roman fortification on the frontiers was designed to allow the Romans to maintain their territorial control with an economy of force precisely because the Roman Empire could not afford to maintain overwhelming force everywhere on its vast perimeter. Rome wasn’t alone in deploying that kind of defensive philosophy; at any given point the northern frontier of China was guarded on much the same principles: the need to hold a frontier line with an economy of force because no state can afford to have overwhelming force everywhere. In both cases, the need for defense was motivated in no small [part] by the impossibility of further offensive; in the Roman case, further extension of the limes would simply create more territory to defend without actually creating more revenue with which to defend it (this is why the Roman acquisition of Dacia and much of Britain were likely ill-conceived, but then both operations were politically motivated in no small part) while in the Chinese case, the logistics of the steppe largely prohibited further expansion.

This Roman system, combining local single-site defenses (which included a proliferation of walled towns as the population centers of the western empire frantically rebuilt their walls) with concentrated mobile field armies really only began to fail after the Battle of Adrianople (378), where to be clear the fortification system worked fine, the error came from the emperor Valens’ stupid decision to attack before his co-emperor Gratian could arrive with reinforcements (Valens was eager to get all of the credit and so he takes all of the blame).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.

March 29, 2025

Carney, our unelected PM, announces the end of our generations-long bilateral relationship with the US

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As many folks on Twit-, er, I mean X have pointed out, Mark Carney is just a caretaker PM, not having ever been elected to the position, so it’s more than a bit breathtaking that he’s making announcements like this without any mandate from the voters:

Later, we get to vote on whether he made it to the podium

The last Liberal leader promised real change too. Apparently this one uses a different definition.

“It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Mark Carney said after a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust. But there will be no turning back.”

Uh, sir, you’re sounding kind of categorical —

“The next government — and all that follow — will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States,” Carney said.

So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is —

“Coming to terms with this sobering reality is the first step in taking necessary actions to defend our nation,” Carney said. “But it’s only the first step.”

In a career that now stretches back to before many of my readers were born, I’ve covered speeches like this before, of course. Maybe five. Well, two. No, strike that, this was new.

“Over the coming weeks, months, and years we must fundamentally reimagine our economy,” the rookie leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said.

Well, you know, “fundamentally” can mean a lot of things —

“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”

Oh, so you mean fundamentally.

In French, a language that fits this Savile Row man like a hand-carved barrel — it covers the essentials while leaving the odd splinter — Carney did a version of the Doug Ford thing where he asked for a strong mandate to undertake negotiations. Unlike Ford he put no real effort into selling it. Was he being overconfident? Not at all, he said, as every man ever has in response to that question. He still needs to “win every vote,” he insisted.

But it “would be better” to have a large mandate “to have a large, comprehensive negotiation, the most important in our life.” Here he didn’t pause, really, so much as consider the ramifications of what he was saying while the words were still coming out.

“Especially in my life. When I was born the Auto Pact was created.” Which sounds grandiose, sure, but to be fair I believe Carney, who was born in Fort Smith in 1965, was merely asserting correlation, not causality. “And now it’s over.”

Wait, what? The AUTO PACT is over? That’s like saying it’s time to shut the ski operation at Whistler down, if Whistler contributed 11.5% to Canada’s manufacturing GDP. “It’s very serious, this situation,” he concluded, mildly.

Later, some of the early reaction to Carney’s remarks seemed to me to skip too lightly over the plain meaning of the Prime Minister’s words. And yes, it feels odd to call him the Prime Minister. We haven’t yet had a vote on the matter, although I’m told one will be held shortly. But the people in the cabinet room were people Carney had appointed, and the Parliamentary Protective Service let them in, so I guess in a rough-and-ready way, he really is — Anyway. It’s possible Carney’s words meant nothing. Or that he’ll be forced to eat them later. Or that, it being election season, he’ll never get a chance to implement them. In the latter case, the Carney Tariff Scrum of March 2025 would become an item of wonk trivia, like Kim Campbell’s genuinely impressive government reorganization of 1993.

March 24, 2025

Canada could learn from the Finnish example

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

US President Donald Trump tossed several grenades into the still waters of Canadian defence platitudes and forcefully called attention to the clear fact that Canada has been a world-leader in defence freeloading since the late 1960s. In The Line, Tim Thurley suggests that Canada should look more closely at how Finland has maintained its sovereignty with a larger, militarily dominant, and unpredictable neighbour for more than a century:

Map of Finland (Suomen kartta) by Oona Räisänen. Boundaries, rivers, roads, and railroads are based on a 1996 CIA map, with revisions. (via Wikimedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_Finland-en.svg)

Canadians pretended we didn’t need to take defence seriously. We justified it with fantasies — the world wasn’t that dangerous, threats were distant, and America would rescue us if needed. That delusion is dead. U.S. Republicans and some Democrats don’t trust us to defend our own territory. Trump openly floated annexation and made clear that military protection now comes at a price — potentially statehood. Canadian military leaders now describe our closest ally as “unpredictable and potentially unreliable”. And even when America was a sure bet, our overreliance was reckless. Sovereignty requires self-defence; outsourcing it means surrendering power.

We should take cues from nations in similar situations, like Finland. Both of us border stronger powers, control vast, harsh landscapes, and hold valuable strategic resources. We’re internally stable, democratic, and potential targets.

We also share a key strength — one that could expand our military recruitment, onshore defence production, rebuild social trust, and bolster deterrence: a strong civilian firearms tradition.

We should be doing everything we can to make that tradition a bigger part of Canadian defence, and a larger part of our economy, too.

That may sound absurd to some Canadians. It shouldn’t. Finland is taking full advantage by attempting to expand shooting and military training for civilians both through private and public ranges and the voluntary National Defence Training Association. Finland is seeking to massively upgrade civilian range capacity by building 300 new ones and upgrading others to encourage civilian interest in firearms and national defence, and is doing so in partnership with civilian firearm owners and existing non-government institutions.

Multiple other states near Finland are investing in similar programs. Poland is even involving the education system. Firearm safety training and target practice for school children are part of a new defence education curriculum component, which includes conflict zone survival, cybersecurity, and first aid training. Poland’s aim is to help civilians manage conflict zones, but also to bolster military recruitment.

Lithuania and Estonia encourage civilian marksmanship as part of a society-wide comprehensive defence strategy. The Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, one of the small nation’s most recognizable institutions, is a voluntary government-sponsored organization intended to prepare civilians for resistance to an occupying power. It has 15,000 members in a population of 2.8 million. The Estonian Defence League trains mostly-unpaid civilian volunteers in guerrilla warfare. It has an 80 per cent approval rating in Estonia, where over one in every 100 men and women with ordinary jobs have joined to learn defence techniques, including mastering standard-issue military service rifles that they may keep at home, ready to fight on a moment’s notice.

These strategies are modern. These countries are no strangers to cutting-edge modern warfare, necessitated by a common border with an aggressive Russia. But technologies like drones are not a replacement for a trained and motivated citizenry, as the Ukraine conflict illustrates. Against a stronger and more aggressive neighbour, these societies deter and respond to aggression through organized, determined, and trained populations prepared to resist attackers in-depth — by putting a potential rifle behind every blade of grass.

Canada, meanwhile, is spending money to hurt our own capacity. It’s coming back to bite us. The Trudeau government misused civilian firearm ownership as a partisan political wedge and ignored the grave flaws of that strategy when they were pointed out, hundreds of times, by good-faith critics. Thousands of firearm models have been banned at massive and increasing expense since 2020 despite no evident public safety benefit. In the recently concluded party leadership race, Mark Carney pledged to spend billions of dollars confiscating them. Government policies eliminating significant portions of business revenue have maimed a firearm industry that historically contributed to our defence infrastructure. Civilian range numbers, which often do double-duty with police and even military use, plunged from roughly 1,400 to 891 in five years. Without civilians to maintain ranges for necessary exercises and qualification shoots, governments must assume the operating expenses, construct new ranges, or fly participants elsewhere to train.

February 28, 2025

Everyday Life in the Roman Empire – An Empire of Peoples

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 28 Aug 2024

The Roman Empire had a geographical logic, but was an endlessly diverse patchwork of linguistic, ethnic and religious groups. In this lecture, Sean Gabb describes the diversity:

Geographical Logic – 00:00:00
Linguistic Diversity – 00:06:57
Italy – 00:12:46
Greece – 00:17:23
Greeks and Romans – 00:21:01
Egypt – 00:28:24
Greeks, Romans, Egyptians – 00:33:00
North Africa – 00:37:27
The Jews – 00:41:20
Greeks, Romans, Jews – 00:44:10
Gaul – 00:50:36
Britain – 00:52:26
Greeks, Romans, Britons – 00:54:58
The East – 00:59:22
Bibliography – 01:01:20
(more…)

February 27, 2025

Reining in the ATF

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille on the ATF’s immediate future with FBI director Kash Patel as the newly appointed acting head of the bureau:

Kash Patel, 9th Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

… it’s impossible to credibly argue that the ATF doesn’t need a shakeup. After all, this is a federal agency that ran guns to criminal gangs in Mexico as part of a bizarre and failed “investigation”, manipulated mentally disabled people into participating in sting operations — and then arrested them, lost thousands of guns and gun parts, killed people over paperwork violations, and unilaterally reinterpreted laws to create new felonies out of thin air (which means more cause for sketchy investigations and stings). The federal police agency obsessively focused on firearms has long seemed determined to guarantee itself work by finding ever more things to police.

But what about putting the same person in charge of both the ATF and the FBI? How does that make sense?

Well, there’s a lot of overlap in the responsibilities of federal agencies. During the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning escapade in Mexico, it coordinated — badly — with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During its 2012 investigation of that fiasco, the Justice Department Inspector General “conducted interviews with more than 130 persons currently or previously employed by the Department, ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” on its way to identifying “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division”.

[…]

Done right, you wouldn’t need as many agents for the combined agency, and you would have lower overhead. But — and this is a big concern — done wrong, you’d end up with a supercharged federal enforcement agency with all the hostility to civil liberties its old components embodied when separate, but now with lots more clout.

When he took charge of the FBI, Patel became the leader of an agency that has long served as a sort of political police. Its abuses date back decades and never seem to go away, just to morph into new ways of targeting anybody who criticizes whoever is currently in power.

“The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the ‘war on domestic terrorism’, and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people,” John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, wrote in 2021.

That means there’s already a problem that needs to be addressed, or it could infect a combined agency rather than taking the sharp edges off the ATF.

Also troubling is that before his nomination to head the FBI, Patel made comments suggesting he wants to target his own political enemies. He’s backed off those threats, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee he’s committed to “a de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice”. But it’s worth watching what he does with his roles at the separate FBI and ATF before combining the two agencies into something more dangerous.

Or maybe the Trump administration won’t take the next step of formally integrating the ATF and the FBI. Self defense advocates have long called for ATF leadership that isn’t actively hostile to gun owners. If all Patel does is rein in the ATF so that Americans get a few years of relief from that agency’s abuses, that’s a victory itself. But eliminating a much-loathed federal agency would be even better.

February 17, 2025

The growing problem of “America’s hat”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, History, India, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carter’s latest post is excellent — but that’s his usual standard — but it’s of particular interest to inhabitants of what used to be the proud Dominion but who now live in a “post-national state” with “no core identity” as our outgoing prime minister so helpfully explained it:

Canada and the US have been frenemies for most of the last two hundred years. With the exception of some spats in the 19th century, they’ve fought on the same side in all major wars, and haven’t taken up arms against one another. At the same time, Canada has from the very beginning fiercely guarded its independence. Through the 1950s, this came from Canada’s self-conception as an outpost of sober, orderly British traditionalism, in stark contrast to the chaotic liberal revolutionaries across the border. Following the Liberal Party’s cultural revolution in the 1960s, Canada increasingly came to see itself as different from the US primarily in that it was more liberal, in the modern sense, than it’s Bible-thumping, gun-toting redneck cousins – which is to say more socialist, leftist, multicultural, gay-friendly, internationalist, feminist, and so forth. In fairness to Canada, the British government, having long-since fallen under the sway of the Labour party, had followed the same ideological trajectory, so Canada was really just taking its cue from Mother England as it always had. In further fairness to Canada, all of this has been aggressively pushed by Blue America, which has been running American culture (and therefore everyone else’s) until about five minutes ago.

Despite these differences, the US could always rely on Canada being a stable, competently run, prosperous, and happy neighbour – perhaps a bit on the prickly side, given the inferiority complex, but much less of a headache than the entropic narcostate to the south that keeps sending its masses of illiterate campesinos flooding over the banks of the Rio Grande. Canada might be annoying sometimes, but it didn’t cause problems. To the contrary, Canada and the US have maintained one the world’s most productive trading relationships for years: America gets Canadian oil, minerals, lumber, and Canada gets US dollars, technology, and culture.

Now, however, Canada has become a problem for America. Not yet, perhaps, the biggest problem – America has a very large number of extremely pressing problems – but a significant one nonetheless, with the potential to become quite acute in the near future.

The problem is that Canada has become a security threat.

[…]

The next security problem is the border, an issue which Trump has repeatedly stressed as a justification for tariffs. The 49th Parallel is famously the longest undefended border on the planet. It is much longer than the Southern border; there are no barbed wire border fences; most of the terrain is easily traversed – forest, lake, or prairie – in contrast to the punishing desert running across the US-Mexico border. Militarizing the US-Mexico border is already a huge, costly undertaking. Doing the same on the Canadian border would be vastly more challenging.

Canada’s extraordinarily lax immigration policy has, in recent years, led to a much higher encounter rate at border crossings with suspects on the terrorism watch list. These people come into Canada legally, part of the millions of immigrants Ottawa has been importing, every year, for the last few years. When you’re bringing in over one percent of your country’s population every single year, it is simply not possible to properly vet them, and it seems that Ottawa barely even bothers to try. Given that not every such person of interest will get stopped at the border, and that not every terrorist is on a watch list, one wonders how many enemies have already slipped across into the US by way of Canadian airports.

RCMP officers with their haul from a fentanyl superlab. Only one person was arrested.

The second border problem is fentanyl. Like the US, Canada has a raging opiod epidemic. We’ve got tent cities, zombies in the streets, needles in the parks, and this is not limited to the big cities – it spills out into the small towns, as well. Like Mexico, Canada has fentanyl laboratories. Precursor chemicals are imported from China by triads, turned into chemical weapons in Canadian labs, and then distributed within Canadian and American markets by predominantly Indian truckers. The occasional busts have turned up vast quantities of the stuff, but have resulted in very few arrests. The proceeds are then laundered through casinos or fake colleges, with the laundered cash then parked in Canadian real estate. There are estimates that the volume of fentanyl money flowing through Canada’s housing markets is significant enough to be a major factor (immigration is certainly the main factor) distorting real estate prices – keeping the housing bubble inflated, propping up Canada’s sagging economy, and pricing young Canadians out of any hope of owning a home or, for that matter, even renting an apartment without a roommate or three.

It’s generally understood, though essentially never acknowledged at official levels, that poisoning North America with opiods is deliberate Chinese policy, both as revenge for the Opium Wars of the 19th century, and as one element in their strategy of unrestricted warfare i.e. the covert but systematic weaponization of every point of contact – economic, industrial, cultural, etc. – between Chinese and Western societies. By allowing the fentanyl trade to continue, the Canadian government is complicit in an act of covert war being waged by a foreign power, one whose casualties include the Canadian government’s own population.

February 6, 2025

Trump tariff diary, day 5

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The attention shifted away from the BOM kicking the Little Potato around as BOM floated the idea of annexing the Gaza Strip (as Eastern New Jersey?) on social media. There goes at least 24 hours of media hysteria …

Justin Trudeau’s vision of Canada

As I’ve pointed out a few times, the situation didn’t blow up out of nowhere (we’re back to the Trump tariffs, not the Gaza Strip), as Trump had given ample warning that this was an important issue for him. However, as Roxanne Halverson points out, Trudeau’s government paid it not the slightest bit of attention until Trump forced them:

This means Ontario Premier Doug Ford who threatened to cancel a $100 million dollar Starlink contract with Elon Musk to provide high-speed internet to northern and rural Ontario communities because of Musk’s strong ties to Trump. And perhaps BC Premier David Eby shouldn’t have threatened to take alcohol products from “red states” in the US off the shelves of BC liquor stores. And perhaps Team Trudeau shouldn’t been trying to play the mouse that roared by threatening to slap retaliatory tariffs on American products coming into Canada, given that it means Canadians will pay more for products like fruits and vegetables that we simply can’t get here in the winter. And that goes for all the provincial premiers, with the exception of Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

And for all Canadians — particularly those who voted for Trudeau — who are so angry at Trump that they are blowing up the internet with memes, threatening never to vacation in the States, and booing the singing of the American anthem at hockey games — grow up and smarten up and rethink who your anger should be directed at.

Everyone needs to recognize the fact that Trump made it pretty clear about the tariffs when he was campaigning for the US presidency, after he won the presidency — but had yet been officially sworn in — and as soon as he entered the Oval Office. And yet everyone seemed so shocked when he did it — including Prime Minister Trudeau.

Trump also made it pretty clear what he was after — fix Canada’s porous border and fix the drug trafficking problem — and the fentanyl problem in particular. And thanks to the dithering of the Trudeau government — vacillating between “negotiating and diplomacy” and talking “tough”, as well as using the issue as a campaign tool, this is what it came to. Because, it would seem, Trump didn’t think his request was being taken seriously so he made it serious. One thing Trump recognizes is weakness, and it is something he is willing to take advantage of it. And in Canada he saw weakness — weak leadership and an weak economy. Another thing Trump is very good at, and that is rattling people and he did that in spades on Saturday — and by Sunday he got results.

For all the Canadians who are mad at Trump for starting these tariff wars, particularly those who voted for Trudeau. Remember this … if Canada had a strong economy that hadn’t been driven into the ground by ten years of Liberal economic, monetary, social engineering and “green” policies we wouldn’t be so vulnerable to Trump’s tariffs.

Trump didn’t halt the building of pipelines that could have taken our oil products to both eastern and western coasts to be shipped to markets overseas. This would have expanded markets for Canadian oil, meaning we wouldn’t be selling sell the bulk of it to the Americans at bargain prices. It wasn’t Trump who drove billions, if not trillions of dollars in investments out of the country by overtaxing businesses with ever increasing carbon taxes and various other in sundry operating costs, or stifling business growth with endless crippling green energy policies and regulations, or extinguishing any chance of expanding our natural gas production to sell to overseas markets by claiming “no business case” for it.

The business investment picture in Canada shows a clear decline dating almost exactly to the start of Trudeau’s time in office:

The Canadian government’s (and several provincial governments’) hostility to economic development and infrastructure expansion is clearly illustrated, I think.

February 5, 2025

Trump tariff diary, day 4

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Big Orange Meanie and the Little Potato had a phone call, after which the BOM announced a 30-day delay to the imposition of tariffs. In Canada, all of “peoplekind” were relieved to hear that they won’t have to give up their American-made binkies quite yet. Some appropriate snark from The Free Press:

It was actually a phone call between the BOM and the Little Potato, but we can imagine this is what it would have looked like in person.

Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum Speedy Gonzales’d her way to a deal with Trump yesterday, promising to deploy 10,000 Mexican troops to the border to stop the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs. In return, Trump agreed to pause his 25 percent tariff on goods coming from south of the border. Soon after, he struck a seemingly identical deal with Justin Trudeau, who said he’d appoint a “fentanyl czar” and promised to send 10,000 Canadian troops to the northern border. Who knew they even had that many?! Tariffs will still be levied against Chinese goods starting today, but Trump says he plans to talk with President Xi Jinping as soon as this week.

The FP isn’t wrong … the Canadian Army doesn’t have 10,000 spare troops just hanging around their barracks who could be sent to the border, so it’s much more likely to be a combination of Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, RCMP officers, provincial police (if the respective provinces are willing), and whatever the army can spare. (Trudeau refers only to “nearly 10,000 frontline personnel”, not “troops” as a lot of US reports state … that seems a lot more achievable.)

You may be wondering how the US President has such disruptive and antagonistic tools at his disposal. It’s yet another hangover from the Carter years, as Congress delegated these powers to the president in 1977:

Donald Trump as Napoleon the 47th.
Image generated by Grok.

The emerging on-off-on-off trade war between Canada and the United States has everyone asking “How should we fight?” — understandably enough — but we should not move too quickly beyond the question “How is this literal nonsense at all possible?” How did the U.S. Congress’s clearly specified constitutional power to regulate the country’s commerce with foreign nations fall into naked and unapologetic decrepitude? Why is every new American president now a Napoleon, and why isn’t this at all a political issue in the U.S.?

The American Constitution, it seems, has no political party apart from a handful of cranky, tireless libertarians like Gene Healy, Clyde W. Crews or Ilya Somin, who has a new article spitballing possible litigation approaches for Americans who lie in the path of the tariffs now being wishcasted into existence by Napoleon the 47th. Somin explains that President Donald Trump is using an openly contrived “national emergency” to invoke powers delegated to the White House by Congress in 1977, powers that are to be invoked only in the face of “unusual and extraordinary threats” to the Republic.

Since the president apparently has plenary power to define an emergency, and to do so without offering anything resembling a rational explanation, this act of Congress now appears to be less of a delegation and more of a surrender — a total abandonment of constitutional principle and the classical separation of powers. I pause to observe that the cheeks every Canadian should redden with slight shame at the spectacle of frivolous recourse to the law of emergencies causing obvious and sickening injury to the rule of law in the U.S. (Oh, no, that could never happen here!)

February 4, 2025

Trump tariff diary, days 2 and 3

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Posted to social media yesterday:

To celebrate Groundhog Day, Governor Trudeau wore commemorative Groundhog-themed socks. Governor Trudeau’s announced counter-tariffs seem to have made no difference to the Big Orange Meany, so the Great State of Canada proceeds with plans to annex Guam and American Samoa. China has indicated interest in purchasing Vancouver Island or leasing the naval base in Esquimault. The National Post‘s Tristin Hopper suggested “Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him”, but we’ve already done that.

Today’s tariff diary entry was going to be:

Reports indicate that the Mexican government is folding to Trumpian pressure. Governor Trudeau insists he won’t budge, regardless of the economic damage to Canadian consumers … what a hero! A few of us may lose our jobs, our businesses, and our economic futures, but he’s willing to take that risk. Update: Trudeau folded like the cheap suit he so resembles. Tariff war on hold for 30 days as Trudeau looks for a way to sign the terms of surrender without any blame attaching to him or his party … he’ll probably blame the provincial governments and the federal NDP (who’ll still support him in Parliament, regardless).

… But the “pause” in tariff enforcement may be enough to let Trudeau and the Liberals — with the active connivance of the bought-and-paid-for Canadian legacy media propagandists — portray this as a great national victory and attempt to turn it into votes for Liberal candidates in the next federal election. I’d love to be proven too cynical here, but the Liberal track record isn’t good.

February 3, 2025

Rational response to Trumpish provocations? Don’t be silly, we must run in circles with our hair on fire!

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

My first entry in the “Trump tariff diary” on social media perhaps takes the situation too flippantly:

President Trump trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state.

Trump tariff diary, day 1: Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada struck back at the Big Orange Meany by wearing particularly fashionable socks to his press conference. Ontario will remove all bottles of Jack Daniels from the government liquor monopoly distribution system. The American national anthem will be formally booed at all NHL games played in Canada from now on.

At the National Post, Tristin Hopper offers much more substantive and serious suggestions:

Order Ryan Reynolds to defame American directors until free trade is restored.

Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him.

Politely suggest that the U.S. may have confused us with China. Say that although both countries start with the letter C, China is the one seeking to destroy American hegemony via economic means, and we’re just an obsequious neighbour who sells them raw materials.

As a gesture of fealty to American continental supremacy, immediately adopt the U.S. Constitution as Canadian law. Uphold it about as loosely as our existing constitution so there’s no material change.

Volunteer an honour guard of Mounties to serve alongside the Secret Service. Force them to wear red serge if Trump asks.

Offer to pillory a Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago if the tariff threats stop, but don’t specify which one.

Put sugar in the crude oil so all the U.S. refineries seize up.

Instead of shutting off Canadian electricity exports, export too much electricity so that their toast burns and the coffee is too hot.

Send Trump a bentwood box filled with smoked salmon as a gesture of goodwill. When he opens it, it’s just filled with bees.

On a rather more serious note, PPC leader Maxime Bernier posted this on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter:

It’s important to understand that the 25% tariffs announced by President Trump today are NOT imposed on Canada — they will be paid by American consumers and businesses who buy goods imported from Canada. Tariffs are a tax, and Americans who will have to pay more or go without our products will be the first to suffer.

Of course, Canadian exporters of these goods will as a consequence lose clients, contracts and sales, and will be forced to cut down on production and lay off workers. Or they will lower their prices to keep market shares and will see their profits diminish.

Because 75% of our exports go south of the border, our economy will for sure be very negatively impacted by this.

The stupidest thing our government can do however to deal with this crisis is to impose the same kind of tariffs “dollar for dollar” against US imports.

The US economy is ten times bigger than ours, much less reliant on trade than ours, and much less dependent on our market than we are on theirs.

Not only would retaliatory tariffs have much less impact on American exporters, they would immediately impoverish Canadian consumers forced to pay more for imported goods, as well as destabilize Canadian businesses that need inputs from the US in their production processes. It would more than double the harm of the US tariffs to our economy.

Trade wars are bad for everyone, but they are much worse for a small country with fewer options. We simply cannot win a trade war with the US. It’s very unlikely that Trump will back down. All we will do is provoke a massive economic crisis in Canada, until we are forced to capitulate.

Another self-destructive thing to do would be to set up giant “pandemic-level” bailout plans to support everyone affected by this trade war. This will simply bankrupt our governments even more than they already are and make us even weaker.

So what should we do?

1. Double down on efforts to control our border, crack down on fentanyl dealers, deport all illegals, and impose a complete moratorium on immigration, to answer Trump’s immediate concerns about Canada.

2. Tell the US administration that we are ready to renegotiate North American free trade and put dairy supply management and other contentious issues on the table.

3. Wait and see to what extent Trump is willing to keep tariffs in place despite the harm it does to the US economy. Despite his pretenses that Americans don’t need our stuff, the reality is that on the contrary they have few other options for crucial resources like oil, lumber, uranium and other minerals, etc. He will stop acting like a bully when he sees that he can get more results by sitting down and negotiating.

3. To reduce our dependence on the US market, immediately implement an ambitious plan to tear down interprovincial trade barriers and help our impacted exporting industries find alternative markets in other countries.

4. Immediately implement a series of bold reforms to make our economy more productive, including: reduce corporate and personal taxes, abolish the capital gains tax, abolish all corporate subsidies, get rid of excessive regulation, remove impediments to the exploitation and export of natural resources, drastically cut government spending, mandate the Bank of Canada to stop printing money and start accumulating a gold reserve to prepare for the global monetary reset (which is likely part of Trump’s plan).

In short, instead of adopting a suicidal strategy to confront Trump, we must do what we should have done a long time ago to strengthen our economy and our bargaining position. The transition will be rough, but not as much as complete bankruptcy and disintegration.

My strong suspicion is that Trump’s extended tantrum directed at Canada is actually a way to provide pressure against other future tantrum targets … “if he’d do that to friendly neighbour Canada, what won’t he do to us?” An updated version of Voltaire’s quip that Britain needed to shoot an admiral every now and again pour encourager les autres.

Coyote Blog facepalms over Trump’s self-sabotage of the US economy:

Trump’s first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become. […] Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally. I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.

Seriously, this is beyond awful — and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real. Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US. No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers. I don’t have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade — that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation. But I will offer a few ironies:

  • After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods. That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
  • Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump’s base. No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
  • Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions. While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions. And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.

The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should. My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him. I have always said that I don’t think Trump is a particularly good business person — he has run business after business that has failed. But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.

January 31, 2025

Canada – sovereign nation or “post-national state” with “no core identity”?

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter retraces Canada’s history from British colony to self-governing Dominion to proud mover-and-shaker in the postwar world to whatever the heck it is today:

There is a map that shows up on social media from time to time, and it looks like this.

Sometimes it is followed by this one:

And then maybe this one:

What’s the point of these maps? Apart from noting the obvious, which is that Canada is sparsely populated, and much of the population is gathered in cities very close to the border with the United States, they raise important questions about the exercise of political power and its legitimacy, forms of governance, and, ultimately, sovereignty. By what methods did Canada come to be, and by what right does a small and relatively concentrated group of people, most of whom live down by the Great Lakes or along the St. Lawrence River, lay claim to almost ten million square kilometres of the Earth’s landmass?

It is easy to draw lines on maps. Anyone can do it. If you want those lines to represent some sort of generally accepted reality, two things must be true. First, the people inside the lines need to see those lines as legitimate, and be willing to take the necessary steps, up to and including the use of force, to assert them against outsiders. And second, enough outsiders of sufficient global importance also need to recognize those lines.

Any student of Canadian history knows that the borders of Canada are highly contingent. Rewind the tape of the past, and there are any number of moments where things could have turned out differently. In some scenarios, Canada ends up smaller than it currently is; in others, Canada ends up larger, perhaps substantially so. And in some alternative histories, Canada does not exist at all — or if it does, we’re all speaking French.

There’s nothing that is either sinister or celebratory in pointing this out. History is a bunch of stuff that happened, and in some cases, things might have turned out differently. But again, if you know your Canadian history, you know that the process by which Canada went from a French fur trading outpost to a collection of British mercantile colonies to a continent-spanning multinational federation and parliamentary democracy was made possible only through a rough admixture of ambition, cunning, scheming, coercion, violence, strong foreign support, and, between 1812 and 1814, war.

To get to the point: Canada’s sovereignty wasn’t something we just stumbled upon, nor is it something we were happily given. It was a thing we did. We did not do it alone, though; for most of the 19th century, the main ongoing threat to Canada’s sovereignty was the United States, while the ultimate guarantor of that sovereignty was Great Britain.

That dynamic shifted over the first half of the 20th century, when the British Empire went into decline, and the United States became the dominant world power. There was a short period after 1931, while British influence was ebbing and that of the Americans was flowing, in which Canada stood more or less independent and autonomous. This largely ended in 1940; Britain was on the ropes against Nazi Germany, Canada was in Hitler’s sights, and an increasingly anxious Franklin Roosevelt invited Mackenzie King down to Ogdensburg, New York, for a friendly chat about continental security.

I Spent Over 12 Hours on an Amtrak Train (on purpose)

Filed under: Cancon, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Not Just Bikes
Published 6 Oct 2024

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:24 Leaving New York
3:04 On the train
4:03 The views
4:38 Freight trains & delays
5:37 The train is so much more comfortable
7:09 The border crossing
8:17 The Canadian side
9:24 Should you take this train?
10:20 Comparisons to Europe & Japan
11:20 We need more high-speed rail
12:02 VIA Rail is bad … and getting worse
12:58 VIA Rail is expensive!
14:11 The new VIA Rail baggage policy 🤦‍♂️
15:49 Better train service is important!
17:14 Concluding thoughts
(more…)

January 26, 2025

Andrew Sullivan reluctantly welcomes Trump’s actions to undo Biden’s radical agenda

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I have to admit that I didn’t expect to see Andrew Sullivan saying nice things about Donald Trump, and I’m sure it caused him much personal distress to have to write this:

A quick image search turns up plenty of examples of Presidents proudly showing off freshly signed documents. Usually these will be laws passed by the legislators but sometimes (especially in January 2025) it’s rule-by-decree on steroids.

To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:

    [Biden] is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:

    enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination”. And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds.

It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination.

Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm.

Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show.

It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children.

Not only will the Trump EOs end the systemic racism in the federal government and its contractors, his people are also aware of attempts to foil color-blindness by their own woke bureaucrats, and will be vigilant. More importantly, the new administration will deploy the DOJ to restore equality of opportunity in the private sector. After so many major corporations have been openly bragging about their race and sex discrimination these past few years, they sure have been asking for it.

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