eyeroll

[sabotabby]

 Well, we get a "reprieve" from tariffs; wondering if I can now get a reprieve from Canadian nationalism. I feel as much of a swell of pride watching sportsball fans boo the American national anthem as anyone else*—I am human after all—but the ridiculousness of Buy Canadian when it's fruit and vegetables harvested by indentured migrant farm workers who are spat on when they walk through the streets of Leamington and denied medical care when they're dosed with pesticides is just too much for me. These are the people the current Liberal government is throwing under the bus when it reduces immigration; these are the people who the ascendant Conservatives will deport or force into concentration camps or whatever monstrous plan they fantasize about whilst wanking into their Ed-the-Socks.

The chaos is the point. I wish people would realize that. We have to fight the chaos, of course, but to do so we have to not panic every time the fascist does a fascism. And we have to do so with a critical eye, acknowledging that much of the current fascism in the US (Proud Boys, Jordan Peterson) is in fact a Canadian export.

* No seriously it was cool, you love to see it. What's odder is the silence in response to the Raptors themselves wearing Black History t-shirts, which fucking ruled.

Comments

[ioplokon]

I did actually think the plan to cancel StarLink contracts was good & tbh they probably should still do it for national security...

[redbird]

At this point, if it has Musk's fingerprints on it, it's a massive security risk. Assume that he'll give your information to Trump, yes, but also to China, and possibly Russia.

Also, one of the many weirdnesses of this weird time was reading news in the last few days, and thinking I agreed with Ford on, well, anything. Tariffs are stupid, but most of Canada blocking American alcohol is dramatic and amusing.

Personally and short-term, New England gets between 80 and 90 percent of our gasoline and heating oil from a refinery in New Brunswick. A few days ago, they announced a price increase on all heating oil because of the tariffs. I don't know whether they're sticking to it, waiting 30 days, or what.

[ioplokon]

That is bc Ford's grift requires the economy to be somewhat functional so he & his pals can skim. Organized vs disorganized crime, basically.

[dewline]

The cancellation should absolutely happen for national and human security reasons.

[frandroid]

It really sucks not to have access to reliable internet. I think they should keep the StarLink contract and give everyone a VPN subscription, or structure the deal so that all connections to StarLink have to go through a VPN set up by the government*. (Now this is a provincial deal--the deal should be expanded federally so that remote First Nations reserves can partake too.)

*: One might say "nooo I don't want the government to run my VPN!!", but considering that MOST VPNs are leaky, I would trust an arm-length government body than a VPN company which has incentives to lie about not selling/logging your info and then doing exactly that. Maybe create a law for Canadian ISPs to run VPNs according to legit standards with third-party practices review. I'm just spitballing here. But StarLink is not going away and it's great for lots of people.

[ioplokon]

I have thoughts, but I feel like the point of this post is not really to discuss satellite internet & didn't really expect my offhand comment to pull so much focus, so let's leave it there.

[sabotabby]

In my experience most people can't figure out how to use a VPN.

[yhlee]

...or find one that isn't full of deliberate or accidental security leaks. :]

[sabotabby]

Yeah. But that's typical Ford. He can't do the right thing for long.

[grimjim]

And just like that, Starlink is back on the table for a month.

[frandroid]

I mean it was a five-alarm fire threat, while Musk is messing illegally in the Treasury and absolute clowns are being nominated to secretary posts, and Project 2025 is looming. I don't think we over-reacted for nothing. We worked with the information we had.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I don't think we overreacted as such. But I can't abide flag-waving.

[gingeriana]

That's a whole range of very fair questions you are raising here! Which would have probably became the agenda if this tariff threat thing hadn't been put on hold. And maybe! they would be voiced later as this shit is definitely not over.
This is not my first rodeo with "Buy local, boycott country N", and it normally goes like this:
1) Hysterics, overemotions, patriotic rise over nothing
2) "Wait, what local products do we ACTUALLY HAVE?"
3) "Who are the people actually producing those? why so little and why the hell do they earn so little?"
Such questions would have been raised but someone made a deal and now we all are pretending to be the fentanyl capital of the world, i guess.

P.S.: "soviet socialist republic of canuckistan" is GOLD, i laughed aloud :)

[sabotabby]

I would hope we would get to 3 but even during the ketchup wars no one ever talked about who picked the tomatoes.

[smhwpf]

Talking of the Proud Boys, did you see that today they lost trademark ownership of their name and logo to an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington DC that they vandalised in 2020? They now can't sell merch with the name or logo on it without the church's permission.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/proud-boys-trademark-court-ruling-metropolitan-ame-black-church/

[sabotabby]

I did see! Awesome.

[grimjim]

Mister P-lie-whatever's rhetoric of sending soldiers to the Canadian border had me thinking about being on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, where people were shot for trying to get out.

There are far too many Vichy-adjacent types around for my comfort.

[sabotabby]

Yep.