At this point I just hope enough of our economy remains functioning so I can eat, and that the orange dumbass doesn't nuke someone and kick off the end of the world.

Makes me wonder why we, for instance, require absolutely healthy sane fit people to send to the the Olympics, a space station or the moon, but leading an entire country requires only extraordinary charisma and absolutely nothing else.

> Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_of_Nancy_Kerrigan

The thing is, in order to lead, you need people to follow. Otherwise you're not a leader, you're just some loudmouth.

So it makes some sense that leading a country means being the kind of person that people are willing to follow. It's the "only" and "absolutely nothing else" parts that are the problem.

So we need some mandatory check(up)s on extraordinary charismatic leading people who have the power to wreak havoc when they are making stupid desicions.

We (as a species) are not really getting better at that, aren't we?

Looks like you can be both. And a puppet at the same time.

Trump is logical outcome, not the cause. The hypocrisy that propped him up was not his. His morality was appealing to right wing people who have exact same morality.

Trump, Musk, Heritage Foundation, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Vance, Miller, Hegseth, congress republicans, evangelical christians, everyone who celebrated Sparta in here, wall street and billionaires, all the reactionary centrists forever defending right and scolding whoever opposes it.

So which specific ideas made you think "I'll vote for the rapist gameshow host?"

12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?

That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.

> That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.

Actually what happened was Hilary Clinton was an unlikable and a champion of neoliberal technocracy, with maybe a bit of frosting on top and a side of entitlement.

It's worth remembering that, while much of the HN crowd loves neoliberal technocracy, it's not working for a lot of folks, often in ways that the statistics-obsessed nerds are blind to.

It's a damning indictment of Democrats that they've lost to Trump, twice. You'd think with all their scary warnings about fascism, they wouldn't have rested on their laurels and catered to their base as much as they have.

That and she rubbed that in their faces when she did visit the Appalachians during the campaign.

The naked contempt of Appalachians that Clinton had, such that she thought herself royalty to lord over and receive coronation from.

That and she rubbed that in their faces when she did visit the Appalachians during the campaign.

I am proud to have denied her the crown and coronation.

> Hillary Clinton while pushing aggressively progressive ideas

This is a lie. Simple as that.

This is well beyond some basic excuse of 'bb-but look at the other choice', this is 'fuck them lets kick some shit out and fuck ya all' mentality when you run around in amok with chainsaw level of idiocy.

Keeping things as polite as possible of course, but not more.

The establishment Democrats are not exactly "aggressively progressive" by any reasonable standard. They shunned Bernie Sanders, who still isn't highly radical.

Take a look at this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:

> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,

>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.

>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.

>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.

Trump is a symptom, not the cause. But a lot of people really want you to focus on him, to deflect the blame from themselves hopefully return to their prior "self-serving neglect of popular welfare."

For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).

> For sure, but there's something to be said about nobody else being able to amass so much power with the right and losing to a saner candidate (Haley, Romney, basically anybody else).

I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but I think it goes back to him being a symptom. Trump has some personality defects, but those defects seemed to allow him to speak to real issues that prior political consensus wanted to ignore (e.g. questioning globalization and free trade orthodoxy, immigration). He got elected because he spoke to those things, but then that put his personality defects in power.

If the prior establishment had listened and addressed those issues, Trump would have never been viable. His existence as president is due to them arrogantly leaving those issues unaddressed.

Fact is Trumps leadership keeps causing great trouble and bullshit on a global scale. At the cost of lots of lives and freedom of human beings. History is on repeat once again.

Trump is a traitor to the United States. Society’s biggest failure was its inability to take off the sanewashing kid gloves and put him on trial for the big boy crimes he committed before it was too late.

He was caught on recorded phone calls committing election fraud.

He was caught stealing classified documents and refusing to give them back.

He was caught planning an insurrection and a coup. Even speaking of ending free elections should be illegal and shouldn’t be considered part of 1st amendment protected speech.

Republicans in congress have the power to end this today with articles of impeachment but are accomplices in the traitorous destruction of America.

He’s even a convicted felon and still got elected.

This version of democracy where corporations optimize the system for people voting against their own interests is not working. At this point it’s not even working for the corporations, who will find it much harder to make the green line go up without the stability of the past 70 years.

The only people left making a profit will be the mafia extraction economy Trump goons if we let this continue, just like the way it works in Russia.

Some of them, however, acknowledge it, accept and try to do their best to overcome it. Others don't.

Some examples: most Germans know and acknowledge the atrocities of Nazism; very few Japanese know of the Nanjing massacre. And how many Dutch know about the atrocities of the East Indian Company in Indonesia? How many Belgians know about the genocide in Congo? How many Portuguese know about the tragedy of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Canadians know about the cruelty against First Nations in their history and acknowledge it, few Americans do it. In parts of Latin America (e.g. Brazil), those atrocities keep happening even today. And no, we don't "supporting everything the US have done". From Vietnam to Iraq, we have lots of disagreements with American foreign policy.

This country is shaped by the escape of the loyalists, the war of 1812 and the 49th parallel. We are not Americans.

Canada's world reputation comes from the progressivism in the 60's and 70s, which has largely disappeared or failed (ecological science, multiculturalism). The undercurrent of canadian politics is just as neo-liberal as the US, and we differentiate ourselves on a facade of social progressivism. Canadians confuse their dont-rock-the-boat attitude with actual solutions to social problems. meanwhile they have similar political schisms as the US, just look at the Ford politial dynasty. Canadian niceness is mostly good PR.

A clear indicator is that Canada has consistently underfunded their military as a show of deference to our powerful neighbour. This is why all the bluster of Canadian politicians "taking a stand" against the US is theatre. The truth is in the state of our military and economic allegiances, which are mainly with China and the US, nothing nice about that.

This is a large, obvious, mistake.

It seems quite rational a response to the decisions taken by a larger neighboring nation’s state unexpectedly increasing hostility.

The geographic reality is that Canada derives substantial, permanent trade and defence advantages from our position as neighbours. Realignment towards China and Europe for emotional reasons squanders those advantages.

And how do you classify to responding to hostility with submission?

Besides, Canada isn't even being hostile. A divorce is very different from abuse or harassment.

It's all unnecessary and will just cause pain to end up where it started.

But didn't you get the order of events precisely wrong?

Isn't it America who threatened Canada (become a state of the US)? Isn't America who threatened Canada with extreme tariffs? Etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93China_relations

There is such a concept of carrot and stick. If the USA wants Canada to be a "good" (in the eyes of America) neighbour then for the love of God why don't they start using a carrot instead of the stick?

Don't fool yourself. The US of late has been making it perfectly clear that it's a threat to Canada regardless of what Canada does.

I think if America started at 0dark30 they would be done by lunch and home for supper.

If you think there's something about Canadians that would stop them from getting down, dirty, and vicious, then you don't know Canadians very well (and have never seen a Canadian hockey game).

Could they hold out alone over the long term? Probably not, but maybe. Smaller, less capable nations have pulled off such feats.

But also, they wouldn't be alone. They'd have quite a lot of support.

Because of its geography, Canada reaps huge benefits from proximity to and friendship with America. That cannot be replaced by China and Europe.

I think Carney is pursuing a strategy based on economic models that have diverged from reality in important ways.

If you read his recent WEF speech critically these contradictory ideas are readily apparent. He surfaces some of those tensions in the text but does not end up resolving them.

Can you expand on this?

Inflation, for example, is obviously not a scalar.

All models are approximations. As we reach the limits of these models we must extend them.

Carney learned the right lesson, though. As Europe has learned, elbows down is also a mistake. The right approach is elbows up as a unified response.

- tariffs on American goods - embargoes of American liquor - trade deals with China and other nations - travel to the US down substantially

Simply eliminating a lot of those domestic trade barriers would create more economic wealth than what Canada would lose by ending trade with the U.S. completely.

Of course in practice it won’t be that easy and the finances don’t usually materialize that easily, but the point is Canada has options for growth that are fully under its control.

Inter-provincial trade barriers for labor, especially licensed labor are also quite onerous. But it's still easier for a Quebecois tradesman to work in Ontario than it is for that same tradesman to work in the US.

I am in the start up community in Canada. I can tell you that after the first threat from Trump every federal program to help tech start ups immediately pivoted to Asia and the EU. Before he started yapping, we were connected to Canadian representatives in the US, meeting about markets and opportunities. Now all programs are directed at forming partnerships elsewhere.

It's certainly not guaranteed, but taking an aggressive defensive stance is the ONLY possible way to stop having your lunch money stolen.

It is divorce in anticipation of a bout of domestic violence.

You don't reason. You remove the victim from the hands of the aggressor.

It will cost a lot of money, and the Canadians will suffer greatly. But the alternative is to join America, which Canadians have stated don't want to.

The US has no interest in engaging in good faith negotiations.

> For my Canadian friends, I’m sorry you’re going through this.

I am, too.

But what is Canada supposed to do? The US has become a real threat to them. The only thing the US is offering is "submit to our every whim or we'll beat you". The only rational thing to do in that situation is to distance yourself as much as possible, no matter how much that may hurt. The worst thing you can do is to roll over and take it.

He never trashed the US, he simply stated the facts and how middle powers should respond. Not by isolating but by working together. He directly addresses how everyone is dependant on the great powers. When the great powers stop honouring the systems and structures that are in place then the 'old way' is gone. Which it is. Relying on US commitments to NORAD, NATO, Trade Agreements etc is useless.

As far as leverage goes, we will see. But we are not divorcing we are simply responding to the US giving up its global power. The negotiating table in Washington is not reliable. It's not theatre, its risk management.

Don't feel sorry for us we will prosper.

I rest my case.

If pushing ESG mandates, DEI initiatives, 'Stakeholder Capitalism' (over shareholder primacy), and top-down climate interventions isn't the platform of the modern elite Left, what is? The fact that they are wealthy hypocrites doesn't make them right-wing.

But if you prefer the term 'Technocratic Globalists,' fine. The point stands: Carney played to that room rather than the reality of the Canadian economy.

Stakeholder capitalism is basically saying 'we don't need to change the system to change things' or 'vote with your wallet', its keeping the status quo, _by definition_ right-wing politics.

DEI is trying to keep material conditions and systemic violence out of the discussion and individualize issues to make minorities participate/compete in the rat race, and avoid stuff like the BPP giving free meals to kids. It's like liberal feminist talking about 'empowerment' instead of 'emancipation'. It's less obviously about keeping the status quo, but it's still about keeping the system balanced, protecting capitalism. So not left wing.

> The fact that they are wealthy hypocrites doesn't make them right-wing

Wait until one of them get accused of sexual harassment/assault publicly, you'll see where those really comes from.

Also, calling this a bad move presumes that the US isn't going to fall much, much further than it is now, which is seeming quite plausible. When your dance partner is heading for a cliff, you need to stop dancing with them.

(voted for Poilievre btw).

Fuck off.

Horrible language, shame on you.

Extremely unlikely.

Davos is 95% elite echo chamber, virtue signaling, and complete bullshit, with only a rare 5% historical exception where the gathering actually resulted in binding, real-world consequences.

Anyone that thinks this speech will have any lasting impact is delusional.

Venezuela was an appetizer, Iran is next, Greenland the salad, but we all know China is the main course

He's right - sanctions on Russia for Ukraine is the most prominent example of this.

USA strategy has been to keep Russia and Germany separated. They fear that combo as a potential rival superpower.

The division of Europe from Russia is exactly what the Americans want.

Don't know how old you are but if you are 40+ you should remember the NATO-Russia Founding Act, in 2000 Putin said he didn't see NATO as an enemy.

So this is bullshit, it's a narrative post-hoc'd into existence to justify the imperialist ambitions of Russia under Putin.

Putin is smart enough to know that Russia is in no position to be an imperialist power.

The goal of keeping Russia and Europe (Germany) apart is not a secret. Please see Zbigniew Brzezinski.

And I'd like to point out that the Soviets kept Germany divided for a justifiable reason: 27 million Russians died at the hands of Germany's imperial ambitions.

And while we are on the subject of "bullshit", the war in Ukraine did NOT start in Feb 2022. It started long before that.

> And I'd like to point out that the Soviets kept Germany divided for a justifiable reason: 27 million Russians died at the hands of Germany's imperial ambitions.

And it lasted for generations, from 45-89, that's at least 2 generations of Germans who went through a divided nation. Has Germany been a problem to Russia afterwards? Doing what, buying petrol, and nat gas from them?

> And while we are on the subject of "bullshit", the war in Ukraine did NOT start in Feb 2022. It started long before that.

I never stated that, I live in Europe, the annexation of Crimea is very much in recent memory. The subjugation of Georgia previously as well.

Putin had support for decades to participate in Europe as a peer nation, even after Georgia in 2008. If Putin really wanted to be in NATO then why did he created an issue with Georgia becoming closer to the rest of Europe in 2003 transforming into a full blown invasion in 2008?

Why?

Given the fact that tRump has threatened Canada it would be justified on Canada's part to invite those military bases but it would definitely antagonize the Americans. Would that be wise?

We're talking Real-Politick here not "how it should be".

I just don't get why Russia sympathizers act like Ukraine must absolutely be some kind of DMZ or neutral state. It doesn't make sense. They can do what they want and it's not an excuse to invade their country.

Norway, a founding member of NATO, has always shared a border with Russia. Before Finland and Sweden joined NATO, they'd already developed operational compatibility with NATO going back decades. NATO encroachment was an issue only insofar as it took away local targets for Russian expansion.

Bring Russia into NATO.

Putin desired NATO membership because then, any hostilities with another NATO member would become an intra-alliance conflict that NATO couldn't deal with. When Greece and Turkey fought over Cyprus, they were both in NATO, so neither side could invoke article 5 for help. Russia in NATO wouldn't prevent Russian wars, it would neutralize NATO.