“The US is an enemy of the free world, just look at this Lemmy thread!” (that we’re currently in)

There’s stops between free and enslaved. Seeing as we’re talking about not including the US, I think I’ll stand by it being freer.

They actually own a pretty small fraction of the total stuff.

I mean, obviously it’s grotesquely large proportionately, but they amount to <2000 individuals in a region of well over a billion.

Yeah, it’s not new. Eventually, this shit has to become so pressing and obvious people realise history isn’t over, and history isn’t over here, but the normalcy bias has proven strong beyond belief.

I really, really though it was going to come to a head after Trump lost his re-election. A thing did happen, but then everyone went back to worrying about paperwork.

I’m still waiting for someone to try haptic screens.

Ah, my bad. So many mountain ranges makes it hard to keep track of what flows where. I’m a little unclear on the bits I’ve been through many times, even.

Well, IIRC the rest of Washington is a militia-ridden red state, so maybe that’s even better. (Or am I thinking of Oregon?)

Imagine it’s year 9 of the Nine Years War and then they’re like “just joking, it’s the second Hundred Years War”.

You know, that actually makes me hopeful. It doesn’t make the speaker a peacenik (whatever that is), but when I’ve heard people saying it’s all just talk or politics or whatever I have to think they’re living in some kind of alternate reality.

Yeah, actually looks like it was critically panned, too. I do love a good dystopian speculative fiction, but maybe not the top of the watch list.

And hopefully Trump would care? Last time we blacked them out (by accident) all hell broke loose in just a day, but they don’t vote Republican.

Come to think of it, we could also cut off land access to Alaska. We’re going to wait for him to escalate this first, though.

After I sent this, I saw a clip about it. It looks like he did suggest it was all on April 2 in some interview. If he had it wrong, was deliberately being confusing or what is unclear, but it hardly matters.

We’ll see what happens then, basically. Either way, we should be getting the hell away from American dependence.

Uhh, this CBC story is from a couple hours ago: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-tariff-march-4-1.7469928

He was also talking about some kind of additional tariff on April 2nd. On the auto industry (that will be shut down if he follows through anyway), IIRC. That being said, as CBC noted elsewhere he himself is bad at keeping his threats straight.

Twice? Are you thinking of the first term thing?

The last time, it really looked like he panicked when the Dow (predictably, to everyone else) fell. If he blinks every time, yeah, it’s never going to actually happen, although I can’t see him deciding that actually he’s wrong about tariffs being awesome.

Do you have some examples?

(That is what I meant by giving them a symbol, maybe I worded it poorly)

Assuming their supply is related to the Colombia river system, yes. It looked like all of Washington was in the watershed in the map I saw.

How badly impacted they’d be by us messing with the upstream supply, I can’t say.

No, down-playing our own capabilities and playing up the red scare was always the primary method.

That’s what I said, isn’t it? I’ve yet to read “so we’ve got to double our production or you’re a peacenik” rather than just doomposting when it comes to what conclusions they draw, though.

already up 10x

If you’re measuring from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it looks like it actually is!

It’s 40% up just since November, which is also a huge jump.

Complacency is basically the whole vibe of everyone in the West and their top local quintile. I miss the old days when powerful dudes were supposed to know history.

Wasn’t Cold War scaremongering supposed to urge ever-higher levels of readiness? When I read one of these modern pieces the vibe I get is more like “abandon all hope, the only way to do things is the 2010 way, and without America we’re nothing”.

It helps that Russia’s own equipment is mostly scrap in Ukraine already.

I mean, they’re not “The General”, I guess.