james_davis_nicoll | Today on The Current

Crossposts: http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4595992.html

Today on The Current

Diane Francis argues that it would be best for Canada to abandon our health care system, to adopt a native relations system even more brutal than the one we have, and embrace a sky-rocketing Gini Coefficient while inextricably tying ourselves to an unstable nation forever flirting with government shut-down and default.

On balance, I am against this. Their crazification factor outnumbers Canada more than two to one.

She also advocates policies known have contributed to gendercide in China.

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Anybody who looks at us and says "Yeah, I gotta get me some of that is so far gone you need to get an exorcist in because they are plainly a corpse being animated by a demonic possessor of some sort.

But..but...the US outnumbers us 10:1. If what we have is so great, why didn't they all move here? Clearly, theirs is better because there are more of them.

Mind, if population size is the answer, we should all be emigrating to China. Clearly they have managed the correct blend of fascism...er, communism...and capitalism. [/tongueincheek]

Edited 2013-09-30 16:27 (UTC)

I have no idea why Canadians look south and don't recoil in horror. We're ugly, and we're that particular kind of ugly that knows it and revels in it.

Robin Williams did a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" last week and had some flattering things to say about Canada to a Canadian fan; the line that stuck with me was, "You're like a really nice apartment on top of a meth lab."

-- Steve will say he thinks that's a bit of an overstatement.

Overstatement?

Some may argue that one. From both sides of the border.

Oh. Wow.

[flails about inarticulately]

It's very puzzling - I have many friends in the US, and they are all very nice people. I don't see how so many odd things can be widespread and common, considering how almost everyone I've met is so kind and considerate.

Answer one: third largest country in the world by population, which provides a lot of room for subgroups of self-sustaining oddity (and worse).

Answer two: the United States is full of cultural narratives and bits of cultural mythology that are at worst harmlessly eccentric on the personal level but which scale into "awful" when applied across the whole country. Libertarianism is an excellent example. It makes very little practical difference whether an individual person you know is a libertarian provided that they're not full-blown objectivists who apply those principles to every social interaction (which is exceptionally rare, even among libertarians). But application of the philosophy at scale quickly becomes toxic.

Basically, the US is full of ideas that don't scale to 320 million people and nonetheless have been scaled that way. Other countries sometimes do better because they lack those principles but, honestly, also sometimes do better because, despite having their own oddities, they've never had to scale those oddities to 320 million people and had them break down in the same way.

The US political apparatus has still not completely recovered from the legacy of the slave system and resentments left over from the US Civil War. Some of the bad effects are constitutionally locked in, giving some of the worst people in the world effective veto power over everything, regardless of national majority sentiment.

Yeah. What he said. If the readers are really interested. Which I strangely suspect they are not ...

Here's an illuminating article, mapping the districts whose representatives are driving the move for the shutdown and looming default:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html?currentPage=all&mobify=0

These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.

Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.

The current mechanics of Congress are such that this 18% of the country are able to manipulate the House Republicans as a whole, and, on that basis, shut down the entire government and threaten default. Basically, the Crazification Factor has been endowed with veto power.

"How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him."
- Pauline Kael

"I have no idea why Canadians look south and don't recoil in horror. We're ugly, and we're that particular kind of ugly that knows it and revels in it."

Actually, we do. We're just too polite to do it where you can see us.

I've been off LJ so long I briefly looked for a Like button.

"why didn't they all move here?"

Because it's too cold!

Couldn't you just invade us and make us South Canada?

As I recall from the Frantics, the Canadian Armed Forces are equipped with mud, which might be no match for actual weapons.

We will have to continue with our scheme to infiltrate your entertainment and gaming industries and bring you to a state of faux Canadian-ness. *

*Memo: If I ever write a story or book based on this idea, I'm claiming the title "Faux Canada" right now.

Dusting off some Twitter archives:

@Achilles1108 That's key to our World Domination plan; invade when US is overwhelmed with angioplasty patients. #Unstoppable
— aka Steve (@Anton_P_Nym) June 1, 2013

@Achilles1108 Our tanks have air conditioning. (Seriously, they do; had to install it for Afghanistan.)
— aka Steve (@Anton_P_Nym) June 1, 2013

-- Steve has fun with these themes on occasion.

We were asked to annex a Caribbean island. For reasons that seem opaque to me, we refused.

Possibly they feared that the number of people rushing to move to the warm part of Canada would sink the island.

Issues with adding another province? Issues with adding lots of ~~dark-skinned~~ poor people?

Edited 2013-09-30 18:06 (UTC)

Annexing Turks and Caicos Islands goes back to WWI. It kept popping up in the 80s and 90s as a pet project of a Conservative MP. There are close relations, and Canada has been sending law enforcement resources down to help with crime on the island.

The main issue is that the perceived benefits don't outweigh the costs, although there's been continuing studies on it over the years.

Yes. Exactly.

Canadians have an overinflated sense of their historical racial tolerance. Heck, some of them have an overinflated sense of their current racial tolerance.

Of course, Americans do too. It's yet another similarity between us.

The full story is here:

http://noelmaurer.typepad.com/aab/2011/08/disgraceful-canadian-initiative.html

It isn't the Turks and Caicos. That was talked about, but never really got serious. Unlike the Bahamas, which would have happened had their not been a disgraceful racial panic in Canada.

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Well, it has been nearly 200 years since the White House had its last touch-up...

-- Steve couldn't let this discussion go by without the obligatory "Canadian mentions the burning of Washington" comment.

Actually, I think the White House got a major make-over in the late 1940s and early 1950s when it was found to be largely structurally unsound.

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