There might be a big difference in how Canadian government deals with this and how western-european governments do. Sounds like far-right is hijacking the subject, where as here the far-right used to be pro-trump and pro-putin and now have to stay quiet in order to keep their voters from walking away.
Our government is being realistic (If you ask me) about changes in defense, but only the opposition is questioning things like the government being dependent on American cloud services and American financial systems. Nobody in the government seems serious about supporting EU initiatives over the status quo. That’s why I’m ‘happy’ these at least these warnings/updates are being released.
I read something like the travel (or air movements?) between us and Canada decreased 70%, so issueing some kind of warning/update wouldn’t make much sense anymore anyways
Yeah, the drop in travel and drop in spending on American stuff is sharp – not sure the specific %, but it’s definitely up there. What’s interesting is that it’s a “spontaneous” reaction from many Canadians, not so much a result of leadership. Like, yes, Trudeau made a speech or two that were fairly clear on the sentiments, but people’d already been booing at hockey games / cancelling trips etc before that. Sorta like our armed forces reserve applications going bonkers / crashing the website frequently due to volume, without any specific reason.
But these things are still driven by what seems like mass paranoia / potentially media trends, to some extent - especially as there’s been few ‘real’ controls/measures implemented. Canadian media is heavily skewed/oriented towards the USA, so we’ve seen a fairly constant blast of negative Trump/American perspectives. Social media makes it really easy to fan those xenophobic flames – like you’d just need a small batch of bots/agents upvoting/downvoting posts to shift the herds perspective on sites like reddit, as, if they catch posts ‘early’, that’d essentially allow control of which comments are visible, allowing for control of the discussion. The anti-american stuff feels a lot like a social media trend in this respect – like people ‘spontaneously’ recording themselves dumping buckets of ice water on their heads, or taking photos of ‘planking’, or some random dance move, or stealing stuff from public washrooms, etc. Those sorts of things were basically coordinated through algorithms on social media, moreso than people rationally/objectively deciding to do them. It’s not like people across the country woke up one day and all thought “I know how to support ALS research, I’ll film myself dumping a bucket of water on my head!”. It was a nonsensical behaviour pattern spurred on by oligarch controlled algorithms, demonstrating the power of those algorithms to manipulate the masses.
True. Probably the sentiment is based on real feelings of real people, but I see this easily could be used to by a foreign power to further push the divide. There’s reason to look out for that.
There might be a big difference in how Canadian government deals with this and how western-european governments do. Sounds like far-right is hijacking the subject, where as here the far-right used to be pro-trump and pro-putin and now have to stay quiet in order to keep their voters from walking away.
Our government is being realistic (If you ask me) about changes in defense, but only the opposition is questioning things like the government being dependent on American cloud services and American financial systems. Nobody in the government seems serious about supporting EU initiatives over the status quo. That’s why I’m ‘happy’ these at least these warnings/updates are being released.
I read something like the travel (or air movements?) between us and Canada decreased 70%, so issueing some kind of warning/update wouldn’t make much sense anymore anyways
Yeah, the drop in travel and drop in spending on American stuff is sharp – not sure the specific %, but it’s definitely up there. What’s interesting is that it’s a “spontaneous” reaction from many Canadians, not so much a result of leadership. Like, yes, Trudeau made a speech or two that were fairly clear on the sentiments, but people’d already been booing at hockey games / cancelling trips etc before that. Sorta like our armed forces reserve applications going bonkers / crashing the website frequently due to volume, without any specific reason.
But these things are still driven by what seems like mass paranoia / potentially media trends, to some extent - especially as there’s been few ‘real’ controls/measures implemented. Canadian media is heavily skewed/oriented towards the USA, so we’ve seen a fairly constant blast of negative Trump/American perspectives. Social media makes it really easy to fan those xenophobic flames – like you’d just need a small batch of bots/agents upvoting/downvoting posts to shift the herds perspective on sites like reddit, as, if they catch posts ‘early’, that’d essentially allow control of which comments are visible, allowing for control of the discussion. The anti-american stuff feels a lot like a social media trend in this respect – like people ‘spontaneously’ recording themselves dumping buckets of ice water on their heads, or taking photos of ‘planking’, or some random dance move, or stealing stuff from public washrooms, etc. Those sorts of things were basically coordinated through algorithms on social media, moreso than people rationally/objectively deciding to do them. It’s not like people across the country woke up one day and all thought “I know how to support ALS research, I’ll film myself dumping a bucket of water on my head!”. It was a nonsensical behaviour pattern spurred on by oligarch controlled algorithms, demonstrating the power of those algorithms to manipulate the masses.
True. Probably the sentiment is based on real feelings of real people, but I see this easily could be used to by a foreign power to further push the divide. There’s reason to look out for that.