We’re also underestimating how much Americans pay for insurance every month. It’s like a whole second rent. Which I guess we pay through higher taxation but then again, we don’t have to worry about setting up a gofundme if we get sick. Not to mention the secondary effects of this precarity: the whole premise of Breaking Bad for example doesn’t make sense in Canada.

The threat of tariffs is a cheap alternative to actual tariffs in terms of scaring businesses. So don’t believe him, or at least trust our government to hit back hard.

Note that he doesn’t have the authority to do what he says. His whole tariff scheme right now is framed as national security, but this escalation shit is not going to be forever covered under that excuse. It’s the US Congress that has the authority over tariffs and at some point (maybe after the next midterms) this point will be made in the us system.

That is, unless they completely break their democracy first. Goddamn yanks man.

In the West Bank there is no Hamas. So why is then Israel killing people, expanding colonies, destroying olive trees, stealing land, sheltering, aiding and abetting extremist settlers?

Between Carney and Poilievre there is no contest. However, it is important to say that from what we’ve seen, Carney’s policies will not fix the deep problems facing the country. There is nothing there about reducing wealth inequality via taxing the rich, nothing about non-market housing, nothing about ending the oil-and-car economy, nothing about Land Back. And yea, I know those are left wing policies and he’s a centrist but that’s exactly my point, what we actually need is ecosocialism.

I don’t know about “stabbing in the back”. One thing to remember is that PET was Québécois himself. He just happened to have a different vision for Québec than René Lévesque. I do lean towards the validity of the sovereignty arguments myself but I can’t not acknowledge that fédéralisme has deep roots in Québécois society just as well.

When you culture is so much about cOMpEtItiOn that you forget that sports are just a made up thing for witch we get to make whatever rules we like. Gender segregation in sports isn’t that eternal either.

If you’re that worried about different abilities competing, install a tiered system like the Special Olympics.

EDIT: Interesting read: https://daily.jstor.org/gender-incommensurability-in-sports/

What if the separation of competitions, “said to be a natural consequence of the differences between men and women,” is actually is “just a tool to create those differences”?

Good of him to put on the public record the 3.3 million customers from 2024. That way we will have a very clear baseline of comparison for 2025.

Drawing a line on a map and saying Jews go this side and Muslims go this side

Which isn’t want happened with the said countries

To be a bit more constructive than what I wrote in my previous comment: ethnicity was very often defined using religion in the Balkans:

• After the Greek war of independence, Christian former Ottoman subjects renamed themselves as “Greek”. At the Treaty of Lausanne, this went further and Christians in Anatolia were declared Greek and forced to move to Greece, whereas Mulsims in Greece were declared Turks and forced to move to Greece.
• During the “Struggle for Macedonia”, adherence to the Constantinople Patriarchate made someone Greek, adherence to the Sofia Exarchate made someone Bulgarian.
• Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats share the same language. At the origin, the difference was pretty much religious and maps neatly to Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic.

The only Balkan people that seem to have somehow miraculously overcome the religious fragmentation of ethnic identity are the Albanians.

not really. with those countries it was through warfare during the collapse of a larger national/nation like entitiy. Israel was a mixture of a gift from the british and a betrayal of palestinians to palestinians, backed by rich people buying land from landlords who didn’t give a shit. Then through the six day war, israel did their own warfare (supported by much more potent powers than the palestinian side), and grabbed everything they wanted, but gave it up during the ceasefire , ceding back to… Unfortunately for these poeple groups, they did not recieve the same support israel did during their territory bid/larger national/nation like entitiy’s collapse.

So? Each nationalism is different in its details. And it’s very obvious that Israel is also an offshoot of the Ottoman collapse, in the same way that Cyprus is, i.e, indirectly via the British. These details are irrelevant to my main point, which is that Jews (more specifically, those Jews who identify as “ethnically Jews”, for others it’s just their religion) also have national rights (no more, no less) than other ethnic groups.

And zionists have not done anything other extremist nationalists haven’t done in the region. Genocide? Ask the Armenians to tell you about the Turks and the Azeris. Colonization? Ask the Greeks what we did in Macedonia. Occupation? Ask the Turks what they did in Cyprus. Ethnic cleansing? Ask the Serbs, and the Croats before. Irridentism? Oh boy, welcome to Balkan. Deny the existence of another oppressed ethnic group? Ask the Macedonians about the Bulgarians and the Greeks. Apartheid? Well, OK, conceded. I guess this one is unique to them, nobody else managed to do this. But not for lack of trying, instead probably due to technological limitations: The Greeks tried it out a bit in Thrace for some decades and the Greek Cypriots tried to do it for a decade or so before the Turkish invasion, but the Israelis have taken it to another level. But this is all details.

My main argument stands: ethnic Jews have exactly the same(*) rights to national self determination as every other ethnic group in this part of the world. No more and no less. There is nothing cosmically special about Jews or their nationalism.

Which isn’t want happened with the said countries

I actually know my own family history, thank you very much.

(*) I.e., no more and no less.

To be clear: we are on the timeline where ethnic jews are claiming much much much more than what is their right. Zionism is out of hand, and that’s an understatement. The Israelis are acting out a genocidal mania that echoes the Armenian genocide at this point. This is not an argument to excuse Israel in anything. This is an argument against putting jewish nationalism, i.e., zionism, in some special evil place. In fact, I would argue the exact opposite: other balkan and near east nationalisms that now enjoy an aura of european respectability, like my Greek compatriots, need to be critically examined precisely through the lens of zionism: we are not that different in our shittiness than they are. If a Greek or a Turk declares themself an anti-zionist while clinging to Greek/Turkish national myths of taking back Constantinople or winning back the Ottoman Empire, well that says something about us too.

It’s literally how we got countries like Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Serbia, Croatia, etc. Christians on this side, Muslims on that one. Orthodox on this side, Catholics on that one. Even Belgium basically become a country when the Catholics decided to secede from the Dutch Protestants. Racist (for some definition of “racism” that includes religion), sure. Special to Zionism? No.

If the Serbians of 1990 (or the Greeks of 1920, etc etc) had a superpower behind them bankrolling their every war, supporting them diplomatically, protecting them at every turn the way the US does for Israel, the situation would like pretty much the same. Again, if you contextualize it in the Balkans/Near East, Zionism is really nothing special.

Obvious follow up question: if Canada becomes the 51st state, wouldn’t that remove the barriers that is keeping all that imaginary fentanyl out of the US?

Do journalists even have brains any more?

OK so hear me out: ever heard of a little thing called the Two State Solution? Well, one of those two states would be …Israel, right? So anyone championing the Two State Solution, kind of by definition is a Zionist.

Zionism has come to mean more than “the Jewish people have a right to a national state in the Holy Land”. It has come to mean apartheid, occupation, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, genocide even, and other such “wonderful” words. But, you know, there is also an original meaning of the word under all that garbage. Since Jews have lived in the Holy Land since forever, they have as much a right to national self-determination as do other people in the ME like, for example, the Druze, the Assyrians, the Palestinians, the Kurds, etc. Not more, of course, so they do not have a right to Jewish Supremacy, but also no less. There is nothing special about Jews compared to other ethnic groups. Not more rights, but also not fewer rights. Same as everyone else.

PS. Free Palestine. End the Apartheid and Occupation. Israeli war criminals at the Hague.

I do have to “Be civil and nice”, so I can’t actually respond to this drivel the way it deserves.

That’s the thing. I don’t decide he’s credible. The UN Special Rapporteur did.

And I mean, fuck Zenz, since engaging with this thread, I’ve actually learned more about Xinjiang than I wanted to. Here is a whole OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region Is this shady Zenz character cited? Yes (oh no!), in …2 footnotes among a total of 300 footnotes.

The claim that this one shady dude somehow is the mastermind (Emmanuel Goldstein much?) behind the entire set of Uighur allegations is fucking ridiculous. It’s like when antivaxxers or climate change deniers find the one off-colour source in some WHO or IPCC report and them latch on to that one to claim vast conspiracies.

Are Zenz’s opinions about lgbt people cited in UN HRC reports as reliable fact? No? So wtf are you talking about?

You’re right to point out my inconsistency when it comes to the two. Apologies.

So let me retract that and go back to this line: whoever Zenz is, the UN special rapporteur deemed him a credible enough source to include his work in a UN HRC report. The report has not been retracted. I’m not an expert on the sources, but I can in good faith assume that the UN HRC is a reasonable arbiter of reputability. This is the same standard as I use for other conflicts and controversial world events. I therefore accord this UN special rapporteur the same benefit of the doubt as his colleague, Francesca Albanese.

And just like I mistrust attacks on Albanese’s reputability when it comes to Palestine, I mistrust attacks on Obokata when it comes to Xinjiang.

And I’m going to leave it at that.

Someone else posted this Jacobin article that explains it: https://jacobin.com/2020/01/franc-zone-french-neocolonialism-africa

Fool me twice, shame on me. This is stupid and just prolongs uncertainty and economic instability. The Canadian government should make it public that the next round of retaliatory tariffs will have legislated locked-in minimum durations that will double with each re-imposition of US tariffs. Gun on the table, enough with childishness. Trump can troll his citizens all he likes (rather all they allow him to) but international relations are not a circus.

Mintpressnews are pro-Assad. I mean the same Assad who butchered Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians and who operated CIA dark sites after 9/11. That guy. What’s mind boggling is that you call that …anti-imperialism. That’s not anti-imperialism, it’s crude campism.

I have nothing to say about Zenz’s politics, that’s why I don’t. His politics are irrelevant with respect to the truth of what he alleges.

But to centre Zenz in this discourse is disingenuous. There are about 84,000 entries in the Xinjiang Victims Database. Those are the people to centre.

There is nothing to engage with. You presented NOTHING at the level of credibility as a UN report. Just opinion pieces, youtube videos, and random noise. Enjoy your day.