If there is one thing I can promise you, it’s that you don’t have to tell Canadians not to fall for it. Annexation is a non starter, there is literally no argument that could be given regardless of validity. The fact that any promises are obvious lies is wholly irrelevant.

I think what people don’t understand is how incredibly petty Canadians can be.

The Canadian population will accept things getting 25% worse for themselves personally if it means things get 5% worse for the people that inflicted it. With these terriffs, there is an asymmetry of effect… But there is also an asymmetry in the amount of pain that can be stomached by the populations as well.

If the two countries find themselves dragged into an “economic winter”, there is one population significantly more familiar and comfortable with the idea of riding out the winter.

I can imagine the typical household plumbis will vex future archaeologists

This but unironically

It’s always projection.

He’s not going to go

Admitting that someone you trusted and idolized lied to you, and then working against that former idol is hard. Heartbreaking, even… People will find themselves alienated by thir communities who still thinking it’s 7D-Chess. That is the consequences.

All or nothing ultimatums generally result in nothing.

That isn’t a conservative community, fyi

Accurately count the occurrence of the letters in a word of their choosing

No. It was a long winded way of saying “it’s not strictly necessary from a purely functional standpoint, but it is in reality because humans are mushy and irrational especially in groups”

No. But yes.

Like pretty much every social construct, it only really exists as far as people have faith in it. Money only has value because we blindly assume that the grocery store will accept them. Any agreement only has the value of the belief it will be honoured. Law only has meaning if we believe they’ll be applied.

In any coalition there will be participant members with disparate interests. Someone needs to speak for the whole to generate the faith that the collation really does have alignment (that the coalition truely exists). In turn there must be faith that constituent members really do support the direction-setter, at least in so far that they won’t leave the coalition given internal disagreement.

It’s the “U” in USA. Without a federal government, without a leader, it’s just the SA.

The USA was the de-facto leader of the Western world since about May 8, 1945. I think history will recall that reign ended Feb 28 2025. I’m not sure if it’ll be the EU body directly from here on out, or if it’ll directly be France or Germany who acts in the function of the leader of the free world.

Yeah. I understand the sentiment, but considering the conservative attempts (and limited successes) of creating tiered citizenship in Canada already… This a is real Pandora’s box that we’d be opening, which could actually hurt actual Canadians, to send a message to someone who couldn’t care less.

Happens to me ALL the time now. Started a few weeks ago

Not sure I’ve seen a better fit for the idiom “Cut off your nose to spite your face”.

May or may not be applicable to your case, but often applications need additional configuration to work with a reverse proxy. Usually setting from what IPs it will accept forward headers from (your reverse proxy) and what the original requested host was (externally requested domain, eg: yourservice.yourdomain.com)

If your new setup has resulted in changes to either of those things, the issue might be a now-incorrect config of your apps behind the reverse proxy.

Ok, so that’s the crux of it that I think was unclear in your original post.

Your initial post was read by me (and presumably others) as “NATO without the backing of the USA isn’t a meaningful defense group”

But I think what you’re saying is “ENTRY to NATO with the USA pulling the strings is an unrealistic goal”

Even if the USA were to leave NATO or refuse to participate, there still isn’t a better security guarantee than the remaining block being obligated to engage militarily in your defense, and the block still contains nuclear powers.

That’s got the same energy as a cop showing up to protest the term “ACAB”.

Don’t like hearing it? Fix it. And that doesn’t mean reposting shit to your echo chamber of choice. That doesn’t mean standing with a sign. If you haven’t lit something on fire you’re part of the problem just like all the “good cops”.

I don’t think it’s as benign as just trying to get a rise out of people.

It’s called “reconnaissance-in-force”. Basically you scout by starting a low-cost battle.

Him and Elon do it all the time, but in the political space. They say things as a “joke”, and then gauge the blowback. Then they decide if it’s a joke or not post hoc.

It’s always “a joke to own the libs” until it isn’t. You know those “jokes” about how if he gets elected, you’ll never have to vote again?