Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Batshit Delusional Canadian Conservatives

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On December 19, 2024

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I want to highlight some tweets, because they’re representational of a lot of what modern Canadian conservatives think:

Trump’s 51st state rhetoric regards Canada is serving a number of different functions, but beneath it all Trump understands the threat posed to the United States by the Laurentian Elite who run Canada, and their disgraced and soon to be replaced poster boy, Justin Trudeau.

Trump and his people are well aware of a number of growing threats to US interests happening with the neighbors. His talk of tariffs is merely a negotiating tool to force the Canadian government to start governing like adults.

An incredible amount of illegal migrants, terrorists, and highly dangerous drugs like Fentanyl are flowing into the US from the northern border, and Trudeau has done squat fuck all to stop it, and in many ways has encouraged it through his globalist immigration policies.

Canada is also moving into the Chinese sphere of influence and control. Let us not forget that CSIS confirmed ChiCom interference in Canadian politics back to Mulroney, and direct interference in the last two elections. Nothing has been done about that.

China is also buying land and resource access in Canada, which Trump, and every administration previous to his, rightly viewed as theirs, insofar as the historical precedent has been set by Canada and the US having an incredible trade relationship. Trump wants them out.

The discussion around tariffs was a component of the disagreements between Trudeau + Freeland last week which lead to her resignation as Deputy PM + Finance Minister. Trump is already orchestrating major Ws for Canada, and signaling to the government he means business…

…TL;dr – what Trump is doing is good for The United States and will ultimately be good for Canada. We will not become an official 51st state, but Canada will definitely improve if it heeds to Trump’s demands. The status quo is leading us to hell.

This is so insane it’s hard to even respond to, but let’s give it a shot.

Canada’s policy has been massively anti-Chinese all thru Trudeau’s reign. We have sanctions on China. We arrested a Huawei VP for the US, which previous government officials felt was insane. We are not friendly to China, and their influence ops are not particularly effective. Our intelligence services are working against Chinese influence but do nothing to stop American or Israeli influence.

America has 100X the influence that China has over Canada. Israel has a 100X the influence that China has over Canada. China is not even in the running.

Canada’s land and resources do not (or should not) belong to America. As Russia proved recently, if the resource is in your country, you can take it away any time you really want to. BA Canadian is saying that the US rightly owns our resources is beyond offensive.

There are only two countries in the world which are a threat to Canada: the US and Russia. Russia is a minor threat to some our northern island possessions, the US is an existential threat. There is only one country in the world which could invade and conquer Canada. We have one-tenth the population and an army which is a joke. We are no threat to the US at all, and if we moved to let Chinese military forces in (which we won’t) America would bomb or invade the hell out of us.

America, on the other hand, has a proven record of being run by deranged warmongers who will invade or otherwise destroy foreign countries. We are zero threat to the US, the US is a huge threat to us. It is a maxim of strategy that you plan based on other countries capabilities, not their intentions, because intentions can change.

No one who doesn’t want a nuclear deterrent is a Canadian patriot. It is the only way we can be safe from the implicit (or under Trump, nearly explicit) threat of American force.

It is true that the neoliberals who have run the country from Mulrooney on have been terrible for Canada. But they have been terrible exactly because they over-integrated us with America from the Free Trade and NAFTA deals on. The old Canadian economy, from about 1880 to 1990 or so was based on having a real manufacturing sector to balance the resource sector. When resource prices were high, we subsidized industry. When resource prices were low (and thus the dollar was low) our manufacturing became more competitive and we subsidized the resource industry and paid welfare to laid off resource workers. That mixed economy produced one of the best economies in the world for over a century.

But American style conservates in Canada seem to want to deepen our vassalage to America. Our interests are not the same as America’s in all cases and acting as if they are is delusional.

The last real Prime Minister of Canada was Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre. He was willing to tell the US to go to hell when necessary. During one trade dispute he actually closed the border to trade flow to the US.

No PM since then has been willing to give the middle finger to the US and they have made us weaker and more dependent on America. We used to not ship raw seafood or logs, for example—all primary processing was done in Canada.

Now, ever since the fall of Britain in WWII (they won the war and lost the peace) there’s no question we’ve been a vassal state, but there’s abject vassalge and there is dignified vassalage where you’re able to stand up for your own interests.

Too many American influenced Canadian conservatives have bought into ridiculous ideas. To think that Trump cares about the welfare of Canadians is so out to lunch that I can’t find words to describe it. It’s questionable if Trump cares about anything but Trump. He cares about America as an extension of himself. He sure as hell doesn’t care about any other country except perhaps Israel.

Trump wants things from Canada which he thinks will make America better off. That’s all. This isn’t a “tough love” situation where he’s trying to make us do the right thing because it’s good for us. It might work out that way in some parts, but it’s not his intention, it’s a result of him destroying the post-cold war international order which was terrible for Canada and Canadians and putting the boot to neoliberalism.

But Trump’s policies are intended to take industry away from America’s allies and bring them to the US, just as were Biden’s. He’s more brutal and honest about it, but Canada can’t afford to lose even more industry.

Get nukes, and run Canada for Canadians. Only a Canada with nukes can be a sovereign country, free from the implicit threat of invasion. Force the Americans to downsize their embassy and move it far from Parliament, and watch Americans like hawks so they don’t run a color revolution.

Both the neoliberals who run Canada now and the American-style conservatives who want to replace them are bad for Canada and any Candian who wants Trump to push Canada around is a traitor. Someone who wants to pucker up and kiss the boot that’s kicking him.

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Canadian Finance Minister Freeland Resigns

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On December 18, 2024

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This isn’t about all the high minding crap she said (lost the confidence of the PM, etc…) it’s an attempt to pressure Trudeau to resign, so the Liberals don’t have him as an albatross hung around their neck during the next election. The Liberals will still lose, I’d think, but they won’t get slaughtered, or that’s their hope.

Freeland has terrible politics. She’s the worst sort of neoliberal. She’s been Trudeau’s strong right hand, and done most of his dirty work. Given this is the case, I don’t think she’ll make a good candidate if she’s the new Liberal leader.

Trudeau may want to hang on, knowing he’ll lose the next election, with an eye to running again after four years of Conservative rule. It’s what his father did, and he may wish to emulate Pierre.

Pollievre, the Conservative leader, will probably be the next Prime Minister. He’s right wing of the modern American variety. Nativist, nasty, and stupid. About the only good thing I can say about him is that he’ll fight if Trump goes ahead with tariffs.

Trump’s threatening everyone with tariffs. The Euros, Chinese, Mexico, Canada and so on. The smart response would be for all of these nations to coordinate their response, rather than each midget fighting on their own. More on that in a later post.

How The Resource Squeeze Will Play Out

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On December 17, 2024

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Contrary to what many economists will claim, we’re going to move into a resource constrained era. This is a combination of climate change, environmental collapse and civilization decline.

Simply put, per capita, there’s going to be less stuff. As Gibson’s line runs, the future will be unevenly distributed. This will hit some places harder and sooner. Germany and Europe are in decline already. China is actually increasing production and availability of most products. The US is in decline, but actively cannibalizing its allies, especially Europe, but also Taiwan, so the stuff shortage will be slower and there may be short to medium term increase.

This is exacerbated in most countries by the insistence of elites that they need to grow their wealth and income in both absolute and relative terms. They must have more, and they must increase the percentage of their society’s wealth and income. So even as there is less to go around, they must have more. When they try to deal with problems like climate change they institute policies like older retirement ages, reduced pensions, lower welfare payments, cuts and privatization of healthcare and regressive carbon taxes. They don’t get rid of, say, mega-yachts and private jets, or tax the rich more and distribute to those in need.

This isn’t just a matter of greed. Capitalist elites are in a Red Queen’s race. If they fall behind other elites, those elites will buy them out (often whether they want to be bought out or not), and they will fall out of the true elite, those who control profit-making enterprises. They may still be wealthy, but they will lose their power and cease to be players.

So we’re caught in a situation where per-capita resources will go down even as elites take a higher share.

I’m sure you can understand what this means to you and those you know. Maneuvering around this means either being extremely valuable to elites, and irreplaceable, or finding ways to insulate yourself from their demands, which is difficult, since they have most of what you need and control the legal system and the violent enforcement mechanisms.

There will be a backlash. How successful it will be remains to be seen, but there is a point where people realize that risking their lives or even losing them is a better bet than remaining with the status quo. Food and water riots, “terrorism” and perhaps Mangioning elites will become a trend.

Plan for this, because it’s already started. You see it already in the vast numbers of homeless, the endless healthcare rationing, and the constant push to privatize and thus profitize ever bit of government which might make a profit if its put in hands which can squeeze.

If your having a good lifestyle doesn’t make some member of the elite richer than squeezing you into homelessness or denying you care, then you’re in the line to go on the butcher’s block.

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The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

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On December 16, 2024

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I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:

Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.

Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”

Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.

Understandable, venture capital in the 21st century has mostly created firms which profit from using as few workers as possible and San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, has gone to Hell. Andreessen’s filthy rich, and he has to see homeless people every day. If he felt guilt about being having way more money than he’ll ever need while other people go hungry and live without heat, cooling and a dry place to sleep, he’d feel guilty pretty damn often or would have to spend a lot of his two billion to feel good.

But that’s not the point I want to make.

It is fashionable to go on and on about taking care of family and friends, and that’s a good thing up to a point.

But only up to a point. Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.

This is… stupid. Society is other people. If other people are sick, we’re more likely to get sick. If other people are poor, they can’t pay for whatever products or services we produce. If people are homeless we find that distasteful and unpleasant to be around. Unhappy people, of course, are not as fun to be around as happy people.

And so on.

The better off everyone is in society, the better it is for you and me, unless we’re rich enough to live in a bubble, rarely seeing anyone but servants and our fellow rich. But even a billionaire will sometimes see a poor person, if only from their limo or looking down from a chopter, and they might feel some guilt. (If Andreessen does feel guilt, well, that’s mildly impressive in a pathetic sort of way. I doubt most billionaires do. But he’s repressing hard.)

And then one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is. Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the masters of the universe. Might just be a good idea to care about people Andreessen doesn’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day.

Or, I guess, we could have assassinations, bombings, riots and civilization collapse.

It really is one or the other. If oil company execs had cared about people they don’t know they wouldn’t have buried climate change and financed denialism. If insurance and pharma and hospital execs cared about people they don’t know, there’d have been no assassination because they’d be trying to make sure as many people as possible got the care they need instead of optimizing to make more money.

It might just be that only looking out after people you know and care about and not giving a damn about anyone else is not just morally right, but pragmatically right.

Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 15, 2024

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On December 15, 2024

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By Tony Wikrent

 

How Much Do I Need to Change My Face to Avoid Facial Recognition? 

[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 12-09-2024]

An aggregation of quotes from experts in the field. Here’s the most optimistic one: Even the best neural networks struggle with low-quality photos that lack information-rich pixels of the human face, especially when matching against a large list of potential identities. Thus the first step is to deny the algorithm those pixels by occluding the face. Cover the face in cases where that isn’t suspicious, e.g., wear a scarf in the wintertime, sun glasses on a bright day. Hats with wide brims are also a confound, as they can hide the forehead and hair, and cast a shadow on the face. Holding a hand over the face is also good for this. The second step is to look down while in motion so any camera in the vicinity will not capture a good frontal image of the face. Third, if one can move quickly, that might cause motion blur in the captured photo—consider jogging or riding a bike. My best practical advice for evasion: know where facial recognition is being deployed and simply avoid those areas. How long this advice remains useful though depends on how widespread the technology becomes in the coming years.”

 

Strategic Political Economy

The early American rejection of John Locke

[TW: I want to begin with this, because you will see echoes of the argument over masses versus elites in almost all the subsequent stories. USA is stumbling and faltering because so much of what we are taught and believe is based on lies. One of the biggest lies is that the founding of the republic was based on the ideas of John Locke. It is true that Locke’s ideas later came to predominate American political economy, but it was after a period of ideological combat. Unfortunately, the opponents of Locke lost.

[In the 1820s and 1830s, the Transcendentalist movement in USA, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman quite explicitly rejected the ideas of John Locke. Universalist minister Orestes Brownson, wrote in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839,

Locke was a great and good man, but his philosophy was defective… Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.

[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….

The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s soul, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive the storms of human passions.

But the disciple of Locke denies the reality of this light, he denies the teachings and the authority of the universal Reason…. It is folly, therefore, to repose confidence in the people, to entertain any respect for popular decisions. The disciple of Locke may compassionate the people, but he cannot trust them; he may patronize the masses, but he must scout universal suffrage, and labor to concentrate all power in the hands of those he looks upon as the enlightened and respectable few.

[Merriam-Webster offers this definition of “scout”: “to reject scornfully.”]

[ — The Transcendentalists – An Anthology, edited by Perry Miller. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1950, pp. 207-208. ]

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Open Thread

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On December 13, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (No Mangione/Syria.)

Hell Is What Humans Deserve

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On December 12, 2024

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I don’t know how to explain this to readers, but I’m going to try.

If you want to live in a good world or good society, certain types of behaviour have to be off the table and the response to them has to be harsh and overwhelming.

Understand the next statement: Anyone who will take what they want from someone else just because they are stronger is a threat to you.

The moment you say “none of my business” when someone abuses their power, you have created the conditions for Hell.

This is why certain behaviours have to be opposed. Genocide. Rape. Torture. Elites making the price of medicine a thousand times the cost.

Now, in the Middle East, Israel wants Greater Israel. They haven’t been shy about it. All of their neighbours and even some of their non-neighbours are in danger if Israel expands and grows more powerful. All of them are in danger if Israel eliminates the near enemies: Syria, Hezbollah and the Palestinians because they will then be able to turn their full power and attention (and that of America) on new enemies with lebensraum.

This is so obvious I shouldn’t have to state it.

And Israel is a threat to America, too. They control your politics (no, don’t even) and make your rulers do things that are evil and against American interests, and certainly against the interests of the vast majority of actual Americans. Yeah, they aren’t genociding you, but as millions are homeless you’re spending billions on helping Israel commit genocide.

Israeli cops teach American cops how to brutalize Americans the way they brutalize Palestinians. Everything American elites are willing to do Palestinians they are willing to do to you if they ever decide it’s in their best interest. If you think they have the least fellow feeling for you you are so stupid I’m surprised you can keep breathing.

Hell is hell because evil is tolerated or even admired and suckers who do good are despised. Heaven is heaven because evil is not tolerated and people who do good are admired and emulated.

Update: Israel is now 20 miles from the northern border to Lebanon in Syria. But Syria falling is no big deal, honest.

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Taking the Hit For Stopping Genocide

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On December 11, 2024

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I’ve noticed something interesting. Every time I write about what might be done to stop the Israeli genocide, actions which would require serious fighting, people say “well I understand whey they don’t want to do that because Israel will bomb the hell out of them.”

And that’s true (though not as true when it comes to Iran, which has plenty of effective AD.)

The issue here is that there’s a genocide going on. My estimate for casualties is over half a million, and other people are starting to make the same estimates. For the past two months Israel has basically let no food into Northern Gaza. The number at the end will probably be over a million dead.

So you’re either willing to do what it takes to stop it, or you aren’t. Both Hezbollah and Iran pulled their punches and let Israel set the tempo of engagement, choosing when and where to fight, instead of engaging it when Hamas still had a viable fighting force. Iran had the missile capacity to wreck Israel’s air defense and air bases. Instead they let their proxies fight alone, and that went very badly for them.

With the fall of Syria, well, it’s no longer possible to stop the genocide. Senior Iranian leadership told their juniors they were going to intervene, then didn’t.

At least half a million people are going to die because no one was willing to do what it took to stop it.

It’s unfair this was on Iran and Hezbollah. It’s an amazing indictment of every great power in the world, and the local Arab states that none of them did anything meaningful to stop a genocide and that many helped the genocide along.

As for Iran, they themselves have pointed out that one has to resist America and Israel wherever they attack, because the plan is to end up taking out Iran. Khameini, if he hasn’t already, needs to get his head out of his ass and build nukes. And if Russia and China want to keep Iran as part of their great alliance, they need to take action.

As for Hezbollah, well, they’re cut off from land resupply from Iran. Israel and America will get to them. Playing everything cautiously did not work.

America is falling, there is no question about that. But Empire’s rarely go quiet into the night. The Age of War and Revolution continues.

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