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Monday’s Forum
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37 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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Phillips O’Brien:
Canada was being asked to commit suicide by the USA, and had no alternative but to reject that. And the Canadian government is right on the fundamentals. Any deal on the terms being offered would only have been followed up with greater demands later, demands that have one ending point: the ending of Canada as a sovereign nation.
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A little crystal ball gazing here. In the end, Canada will come out of this dispute with the USA more united, more powerful and with a greater sense of what it is as a country (and a people) than will the USA. The USA is the country that is weakening itself and will weaken itself further with this punitive action.
Canada is, in essence, willing to suffer some short term pain (and there very well might be pain) for the longer term payoff of national resilience.
Would that other states, particularly US allies, do the same. What we have seen over the last 18 months is that an unwillingness to suffer any short term discomfort on the part of US allies usually leads to greater discomfort down the road.
European states are the poster child for this. For almost all of 2025 there was what seemed to be a coordinated European response to flatter and appease Trump; to debase themselves in the hope that the US government will pity them so much that it might throw them some crumbs.
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Standing up to Trump is the only way to deal with him. Appeasing him only means he will come back soon and demand more. He is a criminal, and the more that he can steal, the more he will try to steal. It is not complicated.
So, hopefully US allies will learn from Canada (and China). Standing up to the USA now is the only way to deal with this rogue state. It might cause some short term pain—but it will be better for you in the end.
It has led European leaders to infantilize themselves, to agree to unequal trade deals, to not take the decisive steps needed to help Ukraine and build up a resilient (non-American dependent) defense plan.
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Phillips O’Brien:
Canada was being asked to commit suicide by the USA, and had no alternative but to reject that. And the Canadian government is right on the fundamentals. Any deal on the terms being offered would only have been followed up with greater demands later, demands that have one ending point: the ending of Canada as a sovereign nation.
…
A little crystal ball gazing here. In the end, Canada will come out of this dispute with the USA more united, more powerful and with a greater sense of what it is as a country (and a people) than will the USA. The USA is the country that is weakening itself and will weaken itself further with this punitive action.
Canada is, in essence, willing to suffer some short term pain (and there very well might be pain) for the longer term payoff of national resilience.
Would that other states, particularly US allies, do the same. What we have seen over the last 18 months is that an unwillingness to suffer any short term discomfort on the part of US allies usually leads to greater discomfort down the road.
European states are the poster child for this. For almost all of 2025 there was what seemed to be a coordinated European response to flatter and appease Trump; to debase themselves in the hope that the US government will pity them so much that it might throw them some crumbs.
…
Standing up to Trump is the only way to deal with him. Appeasing him only means he will come back soon and demand more. He is a criminal, and the more that he can steal, the more he will try to steal. It is not complicated.
So, hopefully US allies will learn from Canada (and China). Standing up to the USA now is the only way to deal with this rogue state. It might cause some short term pain—but it will be better for you in the end.
It has led European leaders to infantilize themselves, to agree to unequal trade deals, to not take the decisive steps needed to help Ukraine and build up a resilient (non-American dependent) defense plan.
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I was envious seeing Canadian Prime Minister Carney’s thoughtful and articulate responses to reporters questioning him on his refusal to go along with Trump’s extortionate (and unconstitutional) tariffs. Naturally, that elicited a Trump (Harp?) tweet about Canada wanting to be a US state. The opposite is true – and Carney made it clear that the Trump administration negotiates in bad faith, and simply cannot, and should not, be trusted. @golem8eight‘s linked piece notes that Canada has learned there is no point in kowtowing to Trump; the more you give him the more he demands. Sadly, America’s word and credibility have been rendered meaningless by the Narcissist in Chief.
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Unfortunately, the rest of the world is also watching this. And this is not a sudden revelation to the rest of the world: that the US can’t be trusted. Our allies in NATO have been experiencing this. Our Asia allies (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Phillipines, Australia) are seeing this. You can be sure that Claudia Sheinbaum is watching this closely.
And I hope that the American voters will wake up and see Trump for what he really is. They, of course, will be the last to wake up.
It is going to take at least a decade to recover from Trump.
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So, let me get this straight, the nation with the most powerful military in the world is calling in the US Treasury to “accomplish” what the military was not able to do (conquer Iran).
Admittedly it’s not that the most powerful military can’t, the American people will not authorize the obliteration of an entire civilization.( makes me yearn for the days of the JCPOA)
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Here is a piece on Natalie Harp, with a lot of background detail, that is very very different from all the other stuff you have read about her.
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From the link:
So here is the thing the wacky-commie-brother segment could never touch: both Harp children, as grown adults, are magnetized by bombastic dictatorial strongmen. Strip away the ideology and the psychology tells a single story. Natalie and Preston were quite likely raised by shitty, selfish, authoritarian parents. (As was I. Which is precisely why I recognize it.)
Seen through that lens, Natalie’s thirty-something devotion to Trump stops being a punchline and becomes something that makes me ache for the little girl she once was — the one who is still trying to save herself from the monsters who raised her by finding new monsters to reenact the old abuses upon her. In the simplest possible terms: Natalie loves Trump for the same reason Preston loves Ortega. These controlling, power-hungry, gaslighting assholes feel familiar. They feel like home.
And home, for the Harp children, was a homeschool in Southern California run by their white supremacist evangelical mother, Jill.
Their father, Robert, was the one who was often away — off deploying his stack of evangelical theology and ministry degrees to help corporations around the globe use Jesus as a lever for profit, which is to say, for doing roughly the opposite of everything the actual Jesus of the actual Bible ever actually taught. But the ideology was Jill’s ministry, and she was relentless about it. Preston has said so, on the record, on national television. Asked where his sister’s Trump infatuation was born, he didn’t reach for politics. He reached for their mother.
“My mom raised us with the idea that American exceptionalism was the correct way of looking at things,” he told CNN, “that the United States is the boss of the world, and that slavery was normal back then, so people weren’t bad because they had slaves.” He described a childhood steeped in a whitewashed history lifted straight from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University Press. Trump, he said, “is everything my mom taught us to respect.” His sister, he added, never broke out of “that delusion.”
Robert, by Preston’s account, was the parent who did break out — slowly, and late. The older he got, the more his social conscience drifted toward a gentler, more searching Christianity; toward, as Preston put it, trying to figure out how to actually live the way Jesus lived instead of collecting beliefs and judging strangers. And here is the detail that tells you everything about which parent Natalie was formed to please: Preston says he never once saw his sister look up to their father the way he did. As Robert grew more tender and more doubtful, Natalie’s bond with him frayed. She stayed fused to Jill. She stayed with the certainty of brutality. She stayed with the boss.
You cannot understand this family without understanding the system that manufactured its worldview, and that system has a name and an address.
Much more at the link of course.
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You cannot understand this family without understanding the system that manufactured its worldview,
Why so many right-wing Christians are MAGA, why so many MAGA are right wing Christians.
My brother married a right-wing Christian, now he is into all that stuff too – watching OAN for his news, etc.
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These two (the Harps) are just an example. I get the sense that the Trump administration (starting with Trump) is completely filled with “not normal”, mentally unhealthy human beings. In other words, a substantial percentage of the top few levels of the Executive branch are sociopaths. And we Americans are suffering for it.
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Definitions:
A sociopath is an informal, outdated term often used to describe someone who exhibits behaviors and traits associated with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) — a condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) characterized by a consistent disregard for rules, social norms, and the rights of others, along with a lack of empathy and often impulsivity without concern for consequences
Key Traits
People with sociopathic tendencies may:
• Show callousness and lack of remorse for harm caused to others
• Manipulate, deceive, or exploit others for personal gain
• Violate laws or social norms repeatedly
• Struggle to form genuine emotional connections or trust others
• Act aggressively or impulsively, sometimes leading to conflict or abuse
• Have a history of behavioral problems, criminal involvement, or substance misuse
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I think Iran’s Mad Mullahs operate on the Septimius Severus Principle.
Old Septimius had two sons, Caracalla and Geta. His advice to them was: be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn all others.
If there’s a power struggle at the top in Iran, it’s mostly behind the scenes. The rest seems evident.
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According to this substack piece, El Taco pretty much demanded Canada become a vassal state.
No country that’s not under military occupation would agree to such terms.
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Probably someone in the Commerce department complained about Canada’s requirements that most product labels appear in both English and French. American companies that export to Canada have been dealing with it just fine for years, but the administration is noted for fixing things that aren’t problems.
Wait until he tells Mexico that they have to drop Spanish-language labeling requirements…
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For the record, imported products sold in Mexico are NOT required to have a label in Spanish. Many do, but hey can be imported with the label in any language, so long as an additional label in Spanish is placed on the product, with the description, nutritional table, ingredients, manufacturer and importer info, plus any warnings it’s required by law to carry (like potential common allergens).
These additional labels usually have print so tiny as to be useless, but they comply with the law. You’ll mostly see them on products that sell low volumes, and products imported for a short period (like a supermarket offering German products for a limited time).
Products with higher sales that are imported regularly, do have their labeling in Spanish.
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I think if you want to sell your products in Canada your labels must include a French description and instructions. It makes good business sense since French is an official language whether it would be required or not. Much the same as printing descriptions and instructions in Spanish if selling south of the border (not just Mexico).
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another (Fox TV) Cabinet buffoon posted this:
Sean Duffy on Canada: “It’s a country that doesn’t have a military … they have record high euthanasia rates. And so to think that they’re gonna go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war with the US, I think it’s foolish on their part.”
And the cringe-o-meter soars ever upward, as Duffy is determined to gain some traction in the Dumbest Cabinet Member Competition standings.
ETA – of course Canada has a military, and has been a solid ally in WW2 and Iraq and Afghanistan.
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What ever happened to “filthy, maple-swilling hosers” as an insult?
(Also, Canada not only has a military, but they are responsible for defining a lot of the war crimes outlawed by the Geneva conventions by example. I think they probably have a special division working out new yet-to-be-declared war crimes)
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NPR published bits from interviews with three National Guard members deployed in DC.
They don’t know why they’re there, either.
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The Fixer court is allowing El Taco to demolish mail-in voting.
We’re screwed.
This is the kind of thing that makes it into the history books as “causes of the Second US Civil War.” I can almost hear Mike Duncan narrating this “Knowing his party would lose the midterm elections, and would likely face yet another impeachment, he decided to repress the vote instead.”
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