
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.)
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:
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.