Agent 00Soul

None of my friends and family in the states expects another president until Trump dies. They believe that even another election will be a Putinesque sham that returns Trump to as many terms as he wants. They are resigned to this.

Did anyone ever read JD Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy? I never did, but it was actually popular with progressives and Guardianistas when it was first published for whatever reason.

I think this is one of the reasons why Trump wants more immigrants from Northern Europe. He thinks they are smarter and better educated overall.

Are they proposing to make Greenlanders into US citizens? I ask because in his last term, Trump said he wanted to remove Puerto Ricans from their current status as citizens. It is consistent with his belief that Nordic people are what the US wants and Hispanics are the ones it doesn’t. People who hate PC love that kind of thing but PC people consider it racist.

In both countries the states and provinces compete with one another with tax breaks for game publishers. For whatever reason Canada seems to have it spread over many provinces rather than only a few states (I think mostly Texas and California) that have really cultivated it. Canada also attracts employees because it generally has a higher standard of living and a political climate that attracts the sort of person who works in games, despite appalling housing situations in Vancouver and Toronto. The UK has the best schools for games and a thriving indie dev culture but can’t seem to sustain a proper industry.

It’s a sign of the times that the rise of populism has created a more right-wing group than banking magnates.

The UK is also a world leader in video games in terms of people talent. It’s just that they often have to move to Canada or the US to work. But when they do, they often run things.

That’s the goal. The two-year clock is ticking. If he can set enough of a precedent for a supine Congress that has abdicated its role by then, he’s won. The USA will at that point be what Viktor Orban calls an “illiberal democracy,” where elections are still held and enough of the system remains to keep it from looking like Putin’s Russia or Maduro’s Venezuela, but it isn’t the same as what has gone before, especially in cultural terms. Turkey is another example of this. I think Meloni would personally like Italy to be too but hasn’t gone as far. Who knows? Maybe more half of the US population will like it.

So are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I had no idea that losing the popular vote in 2016 and winning 51% in 2024 is a “resounding” anything. Surely the question is why is he getting away with everything he’s doing on such a slim margin. I’ve tried to help explain why.

It can never be underplayed. You can easily argue that the US Civil War never ended. And indeed you can probably say it began the second the US declared independence. The shooting part was 1861-65, but culturally it was always going on. Canadian views about the US are similarly baked in. They go back almost a century before Canada was even confederated into an independent country to the first US invasion of the territory. It’s possible that Canada was even unified in part as a reaction against and bulwark towards the US. The past may be a foreign country but it has a long and influential shadow.

I’d hardly call a 51% victory in the election and a current approval rate in the 40th percentile a huge margin but you are right, plenty of people are supporting this. As I said in a previous post, politics as usual hasn’t worked in the US for the average person in a generation and finally Joe & Jo Normal are willing to try another form of government. Plenty of media, both news and social, have been harping on about how great Hungary is, how Putin fights for ordinary Russians, etc, that there are plenty of international role models doing proof of concept. This is indeed democracy at work. Bush and Blair were more dishonest than Trump in this instance. People probably knew he was going to dismantle the system and release the dogs to end the US culture wars by shock and awe tactics. They seem to think that within a generation the majority of country, instead of the half now, will agree with them. It’s what the CCP thinks about Hong Kong, and ultimately Taiwan too. Culturally, the US has one party to represent it (Republicans) and one party that is there to try and stop them (Democrats). People vote for the Republicans because they believe in their project - it’s a positive vote. People vote Democrats to keep out Republicans - a negative vote. Positive usually can maintain the zeitgeist even when it loses elections. Negative is just random victories based on individual candidates. Maybe it’s not been like that forever, but in my lifetime it has. I personally never had any idea what the Dems stand for other than being pro-choice. There is therefore a general view that the Dems are corrupt at best, and an effete, effeminate, p-whipped, anti-American, Europhile 5th column at worst. That’s why the late Republican grandee Pat Buchanan referred to American conservatives as “the Real Americans.” Democrats to this day have no response because a lot of them indeed do not like the American values that the GOP and probably half the country represent. It’s such a powerful narrative that even now - when the GOP is falling in with actual Nazis, militias that kill Capitol Hill police, seig heiling plutocrats, etc - the Dems can’t get anyone to listen to them. You can’t deny either the fact that individual Americans love love love to score very public cultural victories against their opponents. Trump is really popular with young men, of all colours and ethnicities, precisely because he has freed them to go for the jugular against their cultural opponents for example. This conflict happens in all countries of course, but no where in the West is it as important, as culturally embedded, as it is in the USA where people define themselves by their cultural politics to a much greater extent than Europe, Canada, or down under. It’s like a perpetual Civil War and is ingrained into US culture.

I hear you. The CCP taking their dirty laundry here is another reminder of how you ultimately have to pick your battles with the country that makes most of the stuff we buy. They are even chasing Hong Kongers they don't like all the way to the UK and are acting with the impunity of the producer. Because they can. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/hong-kong-exiles-united-kingdom/682155/?gift=rC9jnbvALCE5JiLdXLUu6mCLAz2qO4r6WqcWOftiihg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Here's and article for you about that. The details leave even more red faces than usual. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/03/atlantic-group-chat-military-hegseth-vance-yemen/682166/?gift=rC9jnbvALCE5JiLdXLUu6s8RbaqUDeKIB3dmiqzonJI&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

That was Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary with a Crusader tattoo on his chest. In a world of MAGA true believers, there are going to be a lot of "hoaxes." It's basically anything that comes out of sources they, the Real Americans, hate - in this case journalists. This particular SNAFU was uncovered by The Atlantic Magazine I believe. Dating from 1857, The Atlantic is one of the USA's oldest and most venerable political magazines and has been hated by generations of Republicans who have simply written it off as an elitist, liberal, noblesse oblige, snob sheet (which is partially true - I don't think any of their writers were women, Jews, or People of Colour until well into my lifetime). The MAGA contingent don't even go that far - to everything The Atlantic writes is a lie designed to destabilise the Real Americans. The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, and CNN also fit in with this narrative. Basically 50% of Americans (them the aforementioned Real American MAGA people) feel they have been on the receiving end of a lifetime of disinformation and hoaxes and Trump's slash and burn is saving them. My question is how progressive and conservative Americans are ever going to manage to live together as one nation. Looks like both sides are dug in and are not going anywhere or are changing any minds. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good fight to have but I wonder what happens when it’s over. Or how it even ends at all.