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Joined 5 days ago
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Cake day: March 5th, 2025

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  • What a silly “analysis.”

    You could look to Italy, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands etc for examples of the Far right not only flourishing but running government in PR systems without a majority of the votes.

    The more you read about those or the AFD the more you’ll see how much of their rise has in large part been because of ineffective/unwieldy coalitions. (It’s worth reading about the contortions Germany is trying just to keep the AFD out of government.

    The notion that it is somehow inevitable that the Far Right will infect every mainstream party in a fptp system is ridiculous. (And why wouldn’t it happen with the Far Left, which presumably we would cheer?)

    Hell, you know why thr Far Right isn’t running France? Right, because Fptp enabled the Left, Centre and moderate Right to stop them.

    I get the appeal but goddamn, the more you read about how PR is actually playing out, the scarier it gets. Cherrypicking an example is the absolute worst way to make a point and a great way to demonstrate you don’t know what you are talking about.











  • I think you’re maybe misunderstanding the direction of the tarrifs costs?

    The tarrifs cost American importers regardless of our counter tarrifs. For an example, the article pointed to, Target which

    said it expected to raise prices within days, specifically mentioning Mexican strawberries, bananas and avocados

    Doesn’t matter what counter tarrifs Mexico puts in place, produce from Mexico will be more expensive in America. Counter tarrifs just make things more expensive in our own country and hopefully dissuade people from buying them.

    The markets aren’t roiling because of reduced access to Canadian markets, it’s that the stuff in their own products (like say, car parts made in Canada) overnight became 25% more expensive. (I would also be surprised if we tarrifed much in our shared industries like auto production as it’ll be hard enough to keep those factories here without making them even more expensive.)

    That’s not to say what we do is irrelevant, we should absolutely boycott and do whatever we can to make the markets worse but it’s good to do so with clear eyes.



  • I think it’s part of the tarrif strategy of aiming for highly substitutable goods. The goal is to inflict maximum pain on the states while minimizing harm to Canadians. So, banning American booze is an easy call because that’s super replaceable with a large number of alternatives, many of which are Canadian. There aren’t, as far as I know, a lot of great device alternatives that are widely adopted etc (I believe about 2/3rds of mobile devixes are Apple or Google) and I imagine the government is wary of throwing the doors wide open to Chinese devices.