The US has strategically used tariffs with great success over the last decades to get favorable pricing from Canada on everything from energy, softwood, potash, you name it. One item at a time, slowly, methodically they were able to bring down pricing. We have been giving the US extremely good prices, and now, because of Trump he has just flipped the board over and it’s time to restart.
America will be far worse off than before this started, and this has leveled off the playing field again with Canada.
As a Canadian I am thrilled.
Could you or someone explain this a bit further? You’re saying tariffs were used to bring down prices, but now tariffs are bringing prices back up again? What’s different this time?
Thanks for any help.
(I’m also thrilled for Canada, especially if it means shit in Donald lap.)
I always find this imagery amusing. David is touted as this weak shepherd boy who is nearly defenseless in the face of this giant opponent. In reality, you’ve got someone who has trained to sling rocks with deadly accuracy. He’s basically the bronze age equivalent of a sniper, bro can send a 2 inch projectile at mach jesus straight for your dome.
He was referring to Goliath from Gargoyles.
I find the average atheist seems to be more familiar with the messages of the Bible than many of these people who claim to spend their Sundays studying it.
Out of curiosity I went to one once, I am not Christian and I never believed in the Bible.
I don’t know if this how all churches do it but the one church I went to read the Bible in a manipulative way. Regardless of the book or its content, you cannot construct a narrative by selecting one or two verses from one book and another one or two verses from another book of the Bible. Sometimes the books aren’t even from the same testament.
Any book should be read in whole, and any verse has a context that explains it.
The same technique applied to anything be it a research paper or a comic will produce a false narrative.
The point is that whatever verses are picked out agrees with what the pulpit wants to believe. It makes their hate righteous.
I don’t know about other churches, but the Methodist Church I used to go to with my grandma never had a pastor out of the 2 I witnessed that did stuff like that. Maybe it depends on the region, but I’ve never heard of those type of manipulative strategies where I live, so I’d say I’m pretty lucky on that front. Closest I’ve probably heard of something like that in my area are the Mormons, but that’s a whole nother can of worms that I don’t wanna touch.
Regardless, that doesn’t sound right or like a very Christian thing to do. Even if the verses tell of similar things, context for those verses are real important, just like with any other readings (religious or otherwise).
It’s often been pointed out that Right Wing Media Literacy is poor.
We see this often when they root for villains or characters intentionally unsympathetic, like Bojack’s Dad, Homelander… heck Trump’s 2020 Re-Election team compared him to Thanos, saying he was “inevitable” and making gifs of him as Thanos snapping the DNC away.
So this isn’t anything new in theory, but it’s amazing that this “They’re rooting for the bad guys because they don’t know how media works” problem extends to the FUCKING BIBLE!
The Heroes of the Bible are intentionally meek a lot of the time, the point is that even when you aren’t powerful yourself, your dedication to your Faith and standing up for what’s right should be enough to make up for your shortcomings, for the Lord will lift your burden.
It’s why “Proud Christian” doesn’t make any sense, it’s a very Pro-Humility faith!
I’ve been saying it for a while, but a lot of the US so called Christian groups actually aren’t. I’m not really sure what they should be called. Pseudo Christian maybe?
Many of them could pretty accurately be called Mammonites.
American with christian characteristics?
Sure, their fundamentalist, militant beliefs are not rooted in any intelligent reading of their scripture, but, in my opinion, just like humans can not evolve out of our ancestry (humans are apes, are monkeys, are primates, are mammals, are chordates) movements cannot escape the roots of their religion. And they constitute a vast, but for it’s size relatively homogeneous, culturally distinct sect of Christianity. So let’s not create a “true scotsman” here, just because they don’t abide by your (or my) interpretation of their faith doesn’t mean they aren’t Christians, similar differences in belief exist in many religious sects in many different religions. And at least they violently “claim” to be Christians and will defend that position with vigor. Something apparent in all the big american sects that, from the outside, seeem to have little to nothing to do with the teachings in the New Testament. Like Mormonism.
Just like Christianity, Judaism and Islam are still abrahamic religions, those new american sects will always remain christian in their roots.
For this sect, Christian trappings have fused with the American Civil Religion, the Red Scare and the “Lost Cause”-myth. In this worldview, the defeat in a holy war (American Civil War) facilitated the struggle between evil, socialist, secular, globalist, minority-loving, weak liberalism and the good, pious, capitalist, nationalist, exceptionalist, (mostly white) red-blooded conservatism.
This might actually constitute a new kind of religion, but it is heavily blanketed in pseudo-christian trappings and lots of old-testament fire and brimstone. And this mind-virus relies on the widespread christian beliefs in the US to spread into new hosts. A lack of (objective, comparative) religious education with, at the same time, a deeply religious habitat is the fertile ground that allows this to spread. What you or me would interpret as a “correct” (or “less wrong”) christian faith, if followed culturally or blindly and without haven given it enough thought, actually aides in the spread of this militant, nationalistic, chauvinist movement that has infected the US and is (imho) at the root of Reaganism, the Tea-Party and the entire Maga-Movement. It has been mutating and getting more malignant for a while now and I honestly have no idea how this could ever be excised from the US.
Your take on it is interesting and probably quite close to the truth of it. Those sects are now part of the US identity for many and are there to stay despite their continuing mutations.
I mean, David literally had a thousand wives and concubines and he still had to go and fuck one of his best soldiers’ wives.
He got her pregnant and then orchestrated the guys desth to cover up his sin, the baby was cursed to die, and the second the baby died, he was just like, “Okay, cool, I’m over it” and he’s still considered the beloved of God.
The gist of the story is that people that are pointed to high places and have heroic unbelievable achievements can make horrible mistakes and still be forgiven by God as long as they repent.
Nobody is perfect, not the undefeatable giant Goliath, nor the beautifully-hearted musical genius hero warrior king David of Israel.
Anybody whose understanding of David stops at, He killed Goliath with a slingshot" doesn’t deserve any sort of authority when it comes to interpretation of the Bible.
My interpretations of the Bible are as useful as my interpretations of any other fantasy series. Just because something has a deeper meaning doesn’t mean it is useful, correct, or should be followed. Every episode of South Park ends with what lessons they learned. It’s also more up to date and in tune with the realities of the world around it. The reason people don’t worship South Park is because they haven’t been systematically brainwashed to do so.
How I know this: god told me so
I was cut, by the edge.
The Bible’s track of history is unique in that it doesn’t just show when the people written about did good, it also shows when they did bad. David was good, until he got into that affair with Bathsheba, and indirectly got her husband killed in battle. He was called out on that part by a prophet speaking in behalf of God, and the only reason he lived was that he repented, but he still lost their first child because of it.
Solomon was the king with a thousand wives. He asked God for smarts when presented with an option to ask for anything and be granted it, and he was granted that and more for thinking soiritually and not materially, but the he started getting into the whole wives and concubines thing. Another example of “started out good, but then got sucked into doing bad”, as he was given advance prophecy that Israel would be broken into pieces over this. Which happened when his son took over and made things worse.
This means that Canada defends the israelites, and therefore has God on their side.
he point is that even when you aren’t powerful yourself, your dedication to your Faith and standing up for what’s right should be enough to make up for your shortcomings, for the Lord will lift your burden.
Really? And here I thought it was just another awful story from an awful book that nobody bothers to read.
Please, tell me how the book of Job is all about being faithful to god, even during the worst times. And completely ignore the premise of the book, and the horrific things visited upon the man for simply being “god’s most faithful servant”. Oh wait, no that wasn’t enough. God had to murder his family and destroy his life because he made a bet with the literal devil. What a cool guy.
Your book is garbage and you should feel bad.
Must be weird thinking emperor palpatine was the good guy
This moron can’t even decide if his name is Jack or John.
This has very much the feeling of ‘they need us more than we need them’
I’m in the UK and some people voted for Brexit saying the same. Look how that turned out for us over the last five years.
I know this is sidetracking a bit, but i just wanted the chance to ask somebody who is actually from Great Britain, how is it there.? Without having to look for information online that could be propaganda as we don’t really know which information source is reliable or not. How are you guys holding up?
For starters: If someone has an ® behind their name it’s most likely a lie.
Bad, I’m lucky and live in a fairly afluent area of the south (but outside of London) but decades of conservative cuts have left our local government councils broke. My best friends moved to Europe because one of them worked in the arts and there’s not enough jobs to support them in just the UK. The new Labour government is an improvement but has shifted significantly to the right in their policies and feels like Conservative Light and is actively persecuting Trans and immigrant people through it’s policies to appeal to ex-conservatives. They’re starting to seek closer ties to Europe again but everything feels pretty hopeless.
Ask our Democrats how that’s working out.
Bit chilly today, otherwise fine.
Imports and exports have largely been the same before and after Brexit, with a dip as people figured out the bureaucratic mountains of paperwork involved that wasn’t needed before.
Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7851/CBP-7851.pdf
Section 3 for the graphs.
I dare say we’ve lost a lot of influence across Europe over it. We didn’t get any of the supposed “benefits”, but trade didn’t just drop off a cliff either. For all the bluster over the hardness of the Brexit we’d like, it mostly seems to be business as usual.
That’s not the universal view within the government, the OBR has estimated that imports/exports of goods and services are 15% lower than had the UK stayed in the EU although some research goes as high as 30% and some as low as 6%
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You got right to the problematic issue: “read”. Reading is hard. Reading a long text is harder. Reading a very long text with complex meanings and referring to things outside the historical context of most readers, is very hard.
I’ve read the Bible. Twice. I don’t think there is any action or concept by the current GOP where you won’t find a sentence in the Bible that is actually condemning this precise move. They don’t care, as they have never read it.
Oh, the irony…
Can these people read?
It has been my observation that the people who claim to be Christians the loudest and most fervently tend to be the ones least likely to have read the bible.
No, they tell aides to write whatever, and those in turn just ask chatgpt or similars for what to write.
If they read it, they would call the main character in part II “woke” and dismiss him as a “liberal.”
And he wasn’t even especially woke.
Yah, Canada is the bully…
not reading the bible is kind of essential to participate in this american prosperity gospel anti-poor pro-money religious bullshit.
Read? They won’t even touch it https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-inauguration-hand-bible-swearing-in/story?id=117897715
The resulting flames would have been too much if a giveaway
