I am tempted to say that if Canada had the GDP and military might of the United States and the United States were a smaller neighbor like Canada is today, then Canada may well have similarly degenerated into the same corporate ****fest we see today in the US.

If this is true, then the behavior of the USG has more to do with the corrupting influence of global capitalism than anything specific about our political system or cuture. But I would probably also want to argue that there are unique things about our country that have made us vulnerable to this. For starters our constitution is way too inflexible.

I probably can't get away without saying as well that we are too damn individualistic. I don't know if this has something to do with Protestantism or what, but at any rate there seems to be a disturbingly large number of people in this country who all too easily gravitate toward libertarianism. When you add our history of the slave trade of course this ideology gets really dark (no pun intended).

"All men are created equal" -noble slave owner

Alrighty then, looks like we have here everything we need to build a society. On your mark, get set, go!

(Are you a billionaire yet?)

Canada has never been as corporate as the United States. Having such a huge and sparsely populated country meant the government needed to step in to provide a lot of things that private companies might have provided in the United States for a profit (ed: by half assing them and begging for a bail out anyway).

Think USPS, but extended to newspapers, airlines, telecoms, and in many cases even venture capital.

Because of this difference in culture, it is very unlikely that Canada would have degraded as much as the United States. And despite some frankly oppressive American influence to reverse it, Canada's wealth and income inequality are relatively less than yours, even today.

The truth is, the US is ****ed up at least in part because it was originally founded as a tax dodge for slavers and IP thieves. And a tax dodge it remains.

IP thieves aside, the IP situation in general is pretty screwed up in the United States. The system is so totally abused by corporate whores, and also outright patent trolls.

The fact that we have to have organizations formed and backed by private citizens, like the FSF and the EFF, just to be able to do things like run software that actually works like it's supposed to and doesn't spy on us, is pretty sad.

Actually, this is a wonderful coincidence. We're talking about cultural differences between the US and Canada, and yesterday was the Canadian Thanksgiving.

Shall I tell you the story of the first Canadian Thanksgiving?

It was a national day of solemn celebration, where Canadians, at the height of the US Civil War, attended church and thanked God that they weren't Americans.

I'm not even joking. This is real. A few years later they made it a long weekend, and gradually added your harvest feast tradition and eventually it became a much less... er... spiteful kind of thanks. But originally? Yeah. They were so glad they weren't Americans that they made a national holiday out of it.

Needless to say, the US and Canada has always had a somewhat complicated relationship.

(Pronoun note: Given that my family was fighting on both sides of the Civil War at that time, and most likely not thanking God for anything, it felt strange to say "we".)

wtf

I am thankful to you for sharing this very fascinating trivia.

Well, it's useful to keep in mind that the US Civil War was one of the most horrifying wars in history. Besides the tragic fraternalism, and the hideous evil of the losing side and everything they represented, it introduced major weapons advances like rifled barrels and repeat fire, but did NOT initially introduce an appropriate change in tactics. In previous wars it was pretty unlikely that you'd hit someone, and even back when it was all peasants with clubs, casualties were still relatively light. The Civil War was a meat grinder. In many ways it presaged the horrors of WW1.

I wouldn't get too offended about it. At the time, most people were grateful they weren't American.

Not offended at all, just a little shocked.

At any rate, my ancestors were probably less American than yours. Aside from one ancestral line that was probably in Canada at the time, my ancestors were busy doing things in Europe, e.g. tending to goats in some small Romanian village.

Each time one of you ****ers tries to add some levity and comically allude to the way you go at each other in a ~debate~, the other person misses it entirely! You've both done it in the past couple days.

It's true. Reid has a tendency to assume I'm attacking him when I'm not. And I struggle with resisting the urge to escalate conflict for no good reason.

How long do you think it's going to be before Trump issues a threat to Canada and Europe for not putting America first?

Heh. It's all good, even if we get into flamewars sometimes, I still like our exchanges.

Any war that's not unconditionally started by Kim will cost the U.S. loads of international respect, tons of taxpayer dollars and will result in many dead. Well, they're only Koreans, but they're probably still people.

That's sarcasm in case you couldn't tell.

But to answer your question Jon, I think it's partly because corporate businesses have such an insanely outweighed influence on American politics that it creates a massively defeatist mindset. Americans can organize and sometimes it works, but every battle is an uphill battle against a slew of corporate talking points, dark money groups pushing propaganda through many avenues, funding think tanks who can directly influence the views of our representatives, elections so exorbitantly expensive nobody can compete without SuperPAC funding, and hysterical fearmongering against anything the wealthy don't like:



On top of that the various people who have been conned into various delusions about the structure of power, i.e. libertarian "power is only bad if it's by the government" beliefs. How can you fight that? You can't, especially not when basically the entire country's information source is a tap straight into the views of large, private enterprises. Which, since their goal is profit, means they run whatever stories get the most clicks, and that leads to a bunch of banal **** since people click on outrageous headlines, not depressing ones. And that's in concert with the largely neoliberal, classist perspective most people in media have.

People should bomb the TV stations, bomb corporate news servers and start writing and spreading their own journals. Not literally bomb, of course, but figuratively destroy the status quo.

Don't know, don't care. Bombing Canada would be like bombing Minnesota as far as most Americans are concerned.

Huh?

I would love to find the exact quote, but both the forum search function and Google's index of it are heroically broken.

Convenient.

You're an administrator, right? Send me a dump of the entire site and I'll find it.

Fill out the proper RFI on the Contact page and your request will be processed in the order received.

So real talk, there's a chance Trump is going to instigate a war with North Korea. "No different than all the other times" doesn't seem as valid a comment this time when the commander in chief is a rogue element with the highest IQ ever recorded and thinks he can solve complicated international relations by being a dumbass bully. Given that North Korea probably isn't going to instigate war (in which case though an attack would be supported by the rest of the world), we're looking at backlash from China and reluctance from NATO allies. Not to mention an international crisis costing Japanese and South Korean lives.

It should be noted that, while many seem to be laughing at the drama about Tillerson calling Trump a moron, less are talking about is the sort of tensions that led to it. From what I can tell, it's because Rex Tillerson, despite being, you know, a filthy rich oil CEO who has done God knows what varieties of evil things, is not ****ing insane and doesn't want to blow up North Korea and Iran. Of course Trump having his late-night stroke on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/914497947517227008

Other reporters claim:



Trump seems to think there isn't a diplomatic way out, and wants to aggravate Iran which will probably cause them to restart their nuclear development. So yeah, people should probably be a bit more panicked, especially if this guy resigns. It feels weird to say but having a billionaire oil crony high up is probably saving the world from war.

Saving the *US from war.

Getting rid of North Korea and the Iranian theocratic dictatorship will be great! Just don't expect any help.

If there's a way to do and get in a more liberal, democratic government with minimal losses to life then, sure, great. However given the U.S.'s track record of ****ing up wars and dragging them out forever at great costs, maybe it's not such a good idea.

Oh no, it will be a disaster. For them and for the US. Trillions of dollars, maybe millions of lives. Terrible idea. The only people who will benefit are Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

Man Trump supporters are butthurt about the new Wolfenstein game. It's like they think shooting nazis is a bad thing. :eyebrow:

Looks like we're out of the world cup.

An interesting piece is quoted in that Reddit thread from The Guardian, which basically explains that the United States is less competitive in soccer because the best players are too poor to play.

[quote=The Guardian] Economics work against the poor kids in American soccer. Lusson sees this every week as he moves between the teenage girls team he coaches in the wealthy San Francisco enclave of Pacific Heights, and the teams he manages in lower-income Hayward. One night, a few weeks ago, he listened as girls on the Pacific Heights team talked excitedly about applications to elite east coast colleges. The next day, in Hayward, nobody talked about college.

And yet he is amazed by the skill of his Hayward players, who he says would crush the Pacific Heights team in a match. These are the players who could be the future of American soccer, perhaps even rising as high as a national team. But he also knows that the Pacific Heights players will be the ones to play on their college teams and will be identified by US Soccer. They are the ones who will get a chance that the Hayward kids won’t. And this strikes Lusson as very wrong.

The other day, he went to watch a match between a team made up of mostly upper-income San Francisco-area college players against a group of players from poorer neighborhoods in the East Bay and Fresno three hours away. For a few minutes, the college players controlled the game until their untrained opponents deciphered their system, and then ripped it apart by half-time. In the second half, the East Bay-Fresno team trampled the San Francisco team

[/quote][INDENT]

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"I'm not offended by the game, I'm offended by the idea that I would be offended by it" - literally everybody in the alt right, apparently collectively deciding that nazis in a video game is an analogy for them.

Pretty sad that I'm actually impressed Bethesda is taking a hard anti-nazi stance though. Shame the game looks so effin boring.

That's more or less my prediction. I just read a few articles about Trump and trade deals. Trump is doing his best to **** up this country and the moron doesn't realize it. I have my reserves about how and why trade deals are constructed - i.e., in a way obviously biased towards enriching some people - but that doesn't mean international trade is bad, and it's not what's necessarily "kill" the jobs from Trump's mythical time America was "great". Regular old capitalism is doing just a fine job of that. But this guy - his NAFTA demands, pressuring South Korea when the windowlicker is trying to provoke Kim Jong Un, he's just pissing people off and making impossible demands because he bought the same **** he was selling.

This golden age America bull**** is going to get America knocked out of global trade at best or people killed at worst.

Fascist sympathies are rampant today, they're just encoded in seven layers of misunderstanding and bull****.

I'm surprised the US doesn't just buy players from other countries, like they do for almost every other sport.

Is single player FPS even capable of being good anymore?

You know, it's actually characterisic of fascism to idolize mythical, ethereal but importantly unreal golden ages, and to disavow ideology in favor of pure action. Trump's idiotic "get my way at all costs **** you" attitude pushing towards his stupid campaign goals is basically that. He has no coherent ideology and is working very hard to enact stupid-ass ideas.

That's how privilege works. People with lesser skills get stuff they don't earn by their position in society.

Turns out dog whistle racism was actually dog whistle nazism all along, who'd'a thunk it?

No but you should definitely order the Platinum Digital Deluxe Edition with the included Season Pass for $139.99, just in case it is good, and even if it isn't good, just in case the DLC is good.

And yet in other countries, where inequality exists, they somehow find a way to seek out the best players. It's the American system in which you find dumb barriers to entry, which apparently don't exist in more competitive countries (e.g., making people go to college just to participate in the sport on the national level, despite the fact that such MLS players won't have even spent much time playing soccer before age 22 (!), instead largely going through the motions by taking classes they will never use).

If you read through that Reddit thread you will learn that Clint Dempsey almost didn't even stick with soccer because he was too poor, and only kept going because the other parents paid his expenses.

Oh and don't forget the extra DLC that's not in the Season Pass, and to really enjoy the experience you'll need to buy a bunch of loot crates to unlock all of the on disc content, like the Mecha Hitler skin and the Roman salute emote. For your single player game.

So get this: Navarro tells Trump to back off of NAFTA a bit and focus on the Korea trade deal, which he thought was more likely to be renegotiable? Who knows, Navarro is also a protectionist idiot. But what does Trump do? Immediately announces Korus is a "horrible deal", "destroyed" the country and said he's going to destroy it.

In what world is that ever a smart negotiating tactic? That's a great tactic if your goal is to be an antagonistic *******, but terrible at the negotiating table. Trump exceeds any parodies about how completely incompetent and stupid he is.