The type of people who understand and will use (collaboratively or otherwise) the tools available to proactively filter what information reaches them are going to generally fall into two categories:

• people who are not particularly susceptible to misinformation
• people already captured by misinformation (who will use such tools to help avoid cognitive dissonance, usually with block lists curated by their thought leaders)

I think the misinformation problem is, at it’s root, a shortage of trust in institutions (fueled partly by actual failures, but more by deliberate attacks). As such, there is no systemic solution that people who most need it won’t go to great lengths to circumvent. But combatting misinformation is a numbers game, and the largest number of vulnerable citizens are low-information voters who are not particularly radicalized but simply react to whatever reaches them with far too little skepticism.

For them, I think some simple, low level and easily circumvented internet filtering would do a world of good. Like just have our ISPs serve up DNS redirects to government-hosted pages proclaiming the site is blocked and detailing why, with links to things like private, non-partisan analysis as supporting evidence. Circumventing this is trivial, but the initial hurdle is good enough to redirect a sizeable amount of low-information, unmotivated users somewhere more productive or at least better moderated. It’s also weak enough to minimize the inevitable complaints about censorship.

I don’t like censorship myself, but I’m past believing we can maintain national security with none at all. People who are reasonably well-informed are finding their collective future just as threatened as the low-information voters inviting foreign influence through the back door.

Oh I’m so sorry Canada isn’t even more dependent on U.S. business nor vulnerable to their monopsonistic* agendas. You know what is on the table? Leaving that sheet of paper blank.

All Canada needs is a good deal on sale of the resources they need. 25% tariffs just sweeten any deal with the rest of the free-trade-loving world despite higher transportation overhead. It seems the U.S. doesn’t want to compete using their natural geographic advantage, but rather just find more ways to exploit and abuse its trading partners. And why? Because their oligarchs are getting too fat and hungry for even the most powerful nation in the world to feed. Their looming debt collapse is entirely a demise of their own making. The U.S. has always made helping to feed that beast a cost of doing business. But at some point the cost outweighs the benefit.

And I’m starting to think, with some amazement, that there isn’t just a way to survive these dark times. There’s actually a path forward that could see a brighter, fairer world in our own lifetimes. We just have to starve the beast back into submission. If the U.S. were to outright collapse into a failed, fractured state, the impact on world order would be utterly catastrophic. WW3 is what’s on the table. But there is still a softer landing within reach. If we can manage the transition by limiting it to a manageable pace and building up other friendly military powers, America will have successfully surrendered all of its surplus power and influence to its allies.

As the entire free world pivots away from doing business with the U.S. and instead strengthens ties with each other, there will no longer be one oligarchy in a trench coat dictating the free world’s relationship with capital. Americans still have time to start realizing how utterly fucked they will be in this new isolationist frontier, but good for us if they don’t. Some day we may see free trade deals getting made that require the U.S. to compromise their economic values, and comply with other nations’ standards for tax, IP, and labor law. We could see an end to nations competing via subsidy and tax break (to say nothing of labor exploitation) for private investments.

So let me be among the first to most warmly and joyously welcome Dumpster’s team to take their ball and go home. They can keep their starving oligarchs too.

Is this crazy talk?

*(Oh the irony…my browser’s American English spell check doesn’t think monopsonistic is even a word.)

Some of the public are people like me. I stopped giving any money to Blizzard back when they made StarCraft (II?) require a Battle.NET account…or was it patching out already present offline LAN support? It was also hearing about shitty labor practices and workplace harassment at some point. My memory of why is pretty spotty, but the “don’t give Blizzard money” part has stayed crystal clear for decades now. I genuinely don’t remember why I first blacklisted EA games (might be commitment to DRM, might be just because they’re such a shitty company), but it’s on that list for life.

Heck, between 3rd-party DRM, loot boxes, and everything from “crunch time” development cycles to transphobia, I’ve been all but done with AAA gaming for several years. I could hardly be a gamer at all any more, if not for the rise of indie gaming, but that’s not really my point right now.

The point is I remember the important, actionable bits. And I think most other Canadians will also retain their simple conclusions that won’t need re-evaluation. After this, they’ll have a solitary pedestal in their mind palace just to store one special conclusion from all of this:

Fuck the U.S.

And after floundering around for a bit, Canadians will find the indie trade they love; in a few years, they won’t even miss AAA trading.

But it certainly is disingenuous to treat authoritarianism like a boolean property - rather than acknowledging (or far better, quantifying) the difference in degree to which taking or leveraging authority is chosen over other approaches to leadership.

I told an aggressively pushy door-to-door salesman to leave and and shut my door in his face. Am I a dictator now?

And why are your arguments framed entirely around entities that are not left and exist in a foreign political system that has no left at a party level, while drawing no connection to Canadian politics nor the Canadian political parties that are actually under discussion? That’s a weird choice for a Canadian who isn’t intellectually captured by American media or actually someone/thing of other origin working from a script.

What move, exactly, is bad?

I don’t see the harm in proactively speaking up for labor and making specific labor-supporting policy requests. Worst case scenario, the Liberals indeed haven’t changed and nothing comes of it. But it still cost nothing to ask, and the public display of optimistically framed outreach actually just puts Liberals on the spot and probably generates just a bit of political leverage.

I’ve created an account, but is there any point in having one? Signing a petition while logged in still requires manually filling in all the same information, and the account doesn’t even track those petitions signed.

It looks like the only thing that needs an account - or is even affected by having one - is creating your own petitions.

Is that starlink contract ripped up now? For good and for realsies this time? I get keeping it in limbo as a bargaining tool, but actually following through with it shouldn’t still be a serious option - even if the U.S. did a complete 180 today and started trying to walk it all back.

While true and I don’t want to financially support their goals, would we be doing that? As long as they’re subsidizing production, we’d effectively be exploiting their desire to corner the EV market.

I would however still not lift those tariffs if it puts us significantly at odds with EU-based nations.

It’s really remarkable how such a high percentage of the successful actors in America that I believe are actually good people, are Canadian.

And it’s one that will take too long to have any bearing on current challenges anyway.

That said, Dumpster’s moves are mostly ridiculous because he’s trying to speed run something that was coming eventually. He’s just skipping the rather slow but crucial propaganda step to manufacture consent, and trying to de-integrate our economies at self-immolating speed.

I think it might be a good idea to explore membership in the Schengen Area and/or European Free Trade Association, but full EU membership is more trouble than it’s worth and Eurozone membership (giving up our currency) carries serious drawbacks alongside benefits I wouldn’t expect to fully realize with our geographic separation.

We can and should be looking for better economic integration as part of our trade diversification. But we also need to preserve our own internal autonomy and power, and shouldn’t be expecting any meaningful protection from across the pond. I mean maybe fellow Commonwealth states will militarily support us, but not likely the EU, and definitely not within a decade. We’re not like Ukraine who sit between them and a hostile neighboring state, softening the latter without costing EU lives.

There are truly so many good ones. I’ve never before seen such extensive creativity in name calling. It’s something I go out of my way not to do with almost anyone else. But while I still try to keep things tame, it feels like I’m dishonoring myself and respectable Canadians any time I use Dumpster’s real name.

While Cadence will technically report to Alto, the consortium will maintain control over both building the line and running its trains.

The federal government will subsidize the consortium’s work but will have little control over how its money is used.

It sounds like the public role is “moneybags.” While Cadence is pretty much running the show, it’s quite unclear to me where actual ownership lies, though. In an article of this length, that’s a disturbing detail to find absent.