I’m guessing if you’re doing it for CSIS, you get some kind of waiver from a minister saying you can do certian illegal stuff, along with fake papers.

I mean, that’s how that kind of policy usually worked.

That said, how would you feel about a Canadian joining the North Korean or Russian militaries? You’d think there’d be some line where a person is too much of an enemy to also be a citizen.

It’s crazy we’re able to do this.

Trump could have done surprise gunboat diplomacy in 2017, taken Canada and vassilised Europe. Nobody was prepared to resist it in any way, shape or form. Instead, he took a Western elite deeply conditioned to always mindlessly trust the US, and he spent a decade gradually reconditioning them to distrust him and buckle down for hostile actions.

“We’re very lucky they’re so fucking stupid” - Anonymous Ukrainian soldier.

It’s interests are clearly to conquer the galaxy.

If you can invent alternate basic facts about what’s happening, so will I.

You live in the worldwide capital of Atlantic trade slavery and you believe China is more racist than you somehow?

Well, typical American, assumes everyone is also American, even literally on Canada@lemmy.ca with a user called CanadaPlus. Black slavery was never a major part of our economy.

Your ilk claims to be anti-American, but somehow you’re overwhelmingly American, mostly white and actual third world people think you’re goofs. Basically, go home yank, and take your conspiracy theories with you.

GDP in USD is a bad metric, try GDP PPP.

Most of what you wrote needs no debunking, but I will address this for anyone reading. That’s based on a goods basket of some kind, and usually meant to represent household spending (although if you’ve actually been to a poor country, you can see it still misses the mark of actual lifestyles).

For broader economic power, real dollars (or renminbi or pesos or whatever unit you like) is best. Because that’s what you actually trade with.

Deal/TACO.

All Iran has agreed to, as far as I can tell, is opening the strait for a couple weeks so long as the US stops fighting completely. So, white peace, and with the possibility they negotiate actual concessions from the US later on.

And also just fully makes things up, sometimes.

It’s not actually communicating, it’s just writing convincing text. Because that’s all we can train it to do.

I’m guessing it’s not lost on Vance. You don’t get that job by being a straight talker, though.

Hmm. Do you dislike video games as well (except for, like, Tetris, with no NPCs)?

Most people latch on to the familiarity of other human-seeming things. It doesn’t even have to be very good; computers have been fooling people some of the time since the 60’s, just by steering the conversation to leave room for doubt. The human imagination and our fixation on ourselves does the rest.

Or the uncanny valley voice at the drive-thru speaker saying “great choice!” to everything I order.

Interesting, so that’s started happening somewhere.

Beautiful. Thanks for compiling this.

From that, he does seem to have been getting a lot more agitated over the past week. We’ll see how that translates into actions.

No, a couple million well organised protestors and 60% passive support are revolution numbers. This is well beyond that.

If the army and police are on our side, why bother with demands? Nobody else matters.

China, weak:

It is an important 1/6, though, and they have tried to coerce policy changes with trade threats a bit. If you live here, you know we’ve gotten a few rounds of it.

Isolated, in the sense when they do something like that, other countries voluntarily going along with it isn’t even a question (the whole “only Han Chinese are people” thing kills earnest cooperation). Except maybe North Korea, although they ~only trade with China anyway.

Which dovetails into the next thing. Comecon was based in Europe, but if you’re not counting it as part of the historical West, I revise that to “the Eastern bloc did much more coercive trade policy than the West”. Since they didn’t trade freely with the greater world at all, it was strictly conditional and on a case-by-case basis.

Nobody in Yemen is democratic, and Ukraine is acting in it’s own interests.

Diplomats say France wants to lead the mission, exclude America and bring in India and perhaps China.

Its best option, [probably someone else] says, would be to redouble efforts to build the European pillar of NATO. Perhaps that would convince Mr Trump that allies are willing to take up more of the burden. More probably, it would at least start to prepare them for the daunting task of taking over NATO if Mr Trump abandons it.

New bloc goes brrrr.

Also, no thanks to this guy, who’s basically been supporting the complacency this whole time:

“I have spent the past five years telling people not to worry about Trump and NATO,” says one European diplomat in Washington, DC. “Now I am genuinely quite worried about Trump and NATO.”

Also a fun fact about CPTPP: it includes the UK.

I don’t really know why, they’re the only non-Pacific nation, but there you go, a way back from Brexit.

Wouldn’t Yemen be an imperial proxy of Iran, by any reasonable definition?

And sex negative feminists. As far as you can tell from listening to them, they’re earnestly feminist, even if they go about it in a way that seems messed up.

It seems like whenever two groups from opposite sides of the spectrum have agreed on something, at least this century, it tends to happen.