sailingbythelee

And thank you

I don't think NATO is in any danger. Trump has a very aggressive and bombastic style of negotiation. You saw this with NAFTA. Trump called it the worst agreement in the history of the world. But the USMCA is just NAFTA with a new acronym and now it's apparently the BEST trade agreement in the history if the world. Its the same with Trump and NATO. The Europeans are the worst freeloaders in the history of the universe...until they up their defense spending by half a percentage point to appease the Donald, and then NATO will be the best alliance ever. Typical bombastic bullshit.

Look at the result of the US election and tell me why you think it is beneficial to promulgate this simplistic colonizer/colonized, oppressor/oppressed narrative. It is no longer useful. Identity politics has become the new McCarthyism of the left. I am on the left, and I want us to extract our heads from our collective asses and start talking about things that matter to non-indoctrinated people.

When Germanic tribes invaded the Roman Empire because they were pushed West by the Mongols, were they the bad guys? When the Romans killed Germanic peoples to prevent them crossing the border, were the Romans the good guys? When illegal immigrants cross the US border in their literal millions to escape the poverty and oppression of central America, are they the bad guys? When the Anishnawbec tribes invaded the territory of the Sioux and expelled them because they were pushed West by the Algonquin, were they the bad guys? The Inuit killed the Dene who were encroaching on their territory because of starvation, were they the bad guys or were the Dene the bad guys? When Hannibal invaded Rome and killed thousands of Italians over several years and attempted to genocide Rome, was he the bad guy, or was Rome the bad guy when they subsequently invaded Carthage and ended the war once and for all? Who were more evil, the Arabs who bought Afrcian slaves, or the African tribes who kidnapped their own people and sold them to the Arabs? History is a series of actions and reactions, not a set of good guys and bad guys.

I'm listening to the CBC right now and the prevailing opinion I'm hearing is that the Democrats lost because Biden waited too long to step aside. Talk about learning all the wrong lessons.

Watch how the Liberal narrative will emphasize that. They want Trudeau to step aside, and if (when) they lose to the Cons they'll say it's because Trudeau wouldn't step aside. Or if he does step aside, he didn't step aside early enough.

Even if they are 100% First Nations, their ancestors were also colonizers. First Nations tribes warred and displaced one another regularly.

This is a lazy and simplistic worldview. Every single square mile of land has been colonized, conquered, re-conquered, and conquered again. In other words, every culture has been both colonizer and colonized. Human migration has been occurring since time immemorial, and human migration generally means displacing whomever was there before. It is often a chain reaction, where one migration causes another, causes another, ad infinitum throigh history. In the most dramatic situations we sometimes label it genocide, but usually it's more of a slow blending of cultures (and genes) over time.

I don't feel as bad as I thought I would. I've been an NDP voter all my life, so like most lefties I was shocked by Trump's win in 2016, horrified by his COVID bullshit, and appalled by his conspiracy theories and violent rhetoric in the 2024 campaign. Trump is so obviously horrible that I kept asking the same question: how could HALF of the US electorate support him? I just can't believe that HALF of America are fascist misogynistic white supremacists.

So, I started listening to alternative media. For example, I listened to Trump's interview with Joe Rogan (yes, the whole three+ hours). I listened to Bari Weiss's Honestly podcast, where she talks to disaffected progressives, and had a great debate between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro. And many others.

So far, this is what I've come up with:

1. The Democratic Party has abandoned the traditional working class, or at least the working class feels abandoned by the Democratic Party. The Dems have become "cultural elites" that too many average people just can't identify with at all. Trump may not be good for the working class, but at least he speaks to them and their concerns. This of course leads to a discussion about how the Dems would have a better relationship with labour if they hadn't fucked over Bernie Sanders.
2. The Democratic Party has become obsessed with identity politics, at the expense of real issues that matter to most people. Identity politics is pure poison that has become the leftist version of McCarthyism to a lot of people.
3. The Dems foreign policy is seen as weak by both the left and right. They fucked around on the Ukraine war to the point where Russia is now winning. And they lifted the sanctions on Iran that allowed it to fund Islamist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis and blow up the Middle East. And the left is pissed off that they don't speak out against Israel's aggressive policy toward the Palestinians. So, the Dems aren't pleasing anyone when it comes to foreign policy.
4. The Dems had a good issue with reproductive rights, but a lot of states are moving to protect reproductive rights on theor own (including ballot measures), which may have relieved some of the pressure on Trump.
5. People talk a lot about Trump being better for the economy. I'm not sure economists would agree, but that is a large part of the sentiment favouringTrump. Edit: 6. Immigration. How could I forget immigration. Illegal immigration really pisses off Americans, including and perhaps especially among legal immigrants. I'm not sure that immigrants love Trump's immigration position, but most of the country see the Dems as too ideologically compromised by identity politics to be able to do anything constructive on immigration.

You don't have to agree with those positions and I don't plan on defending them. This is just what I've picked up in trying to understand why so many people vote for Trump.

There are some important parallels and lessons here for the next Canadian election. Trudeau and the Liberals parallel the cultural elitism of the establishment Democrats. Singh appeals more to the identity politics culture warriors than he does to the working class. This is a big departure from the NDP's traditional roots in the labour movement. And Poilievre is Trump's mini-me. So, what can we do in Canada to avoid a repeat of the left's failure in the US election? Doubling down on identity politics and cultural elitism isn't going to go well.

Virtue signalling: the act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc.,

Virtue signalling is used by both left and right as a signifier of their political affiliation. You can recognize it by the fact that the signalled statement doesn't make any sense except as a political signifier. For example, people who say that Trump won the 2020 election when he obviously did not are either virtue signalling or are complete idiots.

The "United Nations pontifcate"...that's a great phrase I don't think I've seen before.

With respect to your comment, though, aren't we all hypocrites to some degree? We all talk a better game than we actually play, and that is not unique to the West. It is a part of human nature. In fact, you could say that hypocrisy is the first step towards aspirational improvement. I also disagree that the West expects perfection from the global south. Far from it. If that were true, we wouldn't give aid to anyone. It seems to me like you are virtue signalling without thinking through your claims.

I'm not sure what your point is. The argument is about whether there is a false equivalence between communism and fascism. You are veering way off topic into something I doubt you and I even disagree about. Yes, genocide is bad. Yes, authoritarianism is bad.

It wasn't me that brought up capitalism. We were talking about forms of government (fascism and communism) and then someone else said, WhAt AbOuT CaPiTaLiSM. That said, there is quite a bit of overlap in practice between economic and governmental systems. But I digress.

I agree with you that authoritarianism is bad. That was my central point, in fact. Comparing fascism and communism is not necessarily a "false equivalence" insofar as all of the major 20th century examples of both converged on authoritarianism.

As for oppression, I'm not going to argue that no one is oppressed in the West. But I will stand by my assertion that the scale and degree of oppression under Mao, Stalin, and Hitler (the largest 20th century examples of communism and fascism) is not comparable to what trans people may be experiencing in some Texas town.

As for indigenous people, yes, historically the scale of the original genocide is certainly comparable to the communist and fascist regimes of the 20th century. However, it is also important to remember that over 90% of the indigenous people died naturally of diseases they had no immune defense against. It was inevitable given the level of medical technology of the time, much like the plague in Europe. The starlight tours specifically are shameful but actually illegal for the police to do. Those are not state-sanctioned actions, unlike Stalin's pogroms or Hitler's concentration camps. A better example for your case would be the residential school system, which was both state-sanctioned and very oppressive.