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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • since 2015

    Honestly, I’d say that a lot of Trumpism’s stuff is more-or-less in line with the stuff that the John Birch Society has promoted, and that goes waaaaay back. I mean, Trump talking about annexing Canada/Panama/whatever, no — in fact, that’s one of the few cases that I think that they’d take a dead-opposite position on, since they’ve a horror of the North American Union. But there’s a lot of overlap outside that.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

    The John Birch Society from its start opposed collectivism as a “cancer” and by extension communism and big government.[29][30] JBS publications referred to the fight against Communism as a spiritual war against the devil.[25]: iv, 156–157  Allegations that so-called “Insiders” have conspired to control the United States through communism and world government are a recurring theme of JBS publications.[31] The organization and its founder, Robert W. Welch Jr., promoted Americanism as “the philosophical antithesis of Communism.”[32] It contended that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and argued that states’ rights should supersede those of the federal government.[33] Welch infused constitutionalist and classical liberal principles, in addition to his conspiracy theories, into the JBS’s ideology and rhetoric.[34] In 1983, Congressman Larry McDonald, then the society’s newly appointed chairman, characterized the JBS as belonging to the Old Right rather than the New Right.[35] The society opposes “one world government”, the United Nations (UN),[36] the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and other free trade agreements. It argues the U.S. Constitution has been devalued in favor of political and economic globalization. It has cited the existence of the former Security and Prosperity Partnership as evidence of a push towards a North American Union.[37][38] The JBS has sought immigration reduction.

    The JBS opposed the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.[16][39][40] It has campaigned for state nullification.[41][42] It opposes efforts to call an Article V convention to amend the U.S. Constitution,[43][44] and it has been influential at promoting opposition to it among Republican legislators.[45] The JBS also supports auditing and eventually dismantling the Federal Reserve System.[46][non-primary source needed] The JBS holds that the United States Constitution gives only Congress the ability to coin money, and does not permit it to delegate this power, or to transform the dollar into a fiat currency not backed by gold or silver.[non-primary source needed]


  • Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister on March 14, declaring “We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the US,” rejecting Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

    Carney won the Liberal leadership with 85.9% of the vote despite having no elected experience.

    In recent weeks, the Liberals have reversed a political freefall, sharply rebounding to such a degree that a previously expected Conservative majority in the next general election looks increasingly unlikely. The shift in the polls has been so dramatic that pollsters have struggled to find any historical precedent.

    A newly released poll from Abacus Data showed the Conservative support had shrunk to 38%, with 34% going to the incumbent Liberals.

    I don’t know what impact the Trump administration is having on the likelihood of conservatives having political power in the US in the future, but it sure isn’t having a positive effect on conservatives in Canada.


  • A survey of over 100,000 Germans revealed that 94% won’t buy a Tesla vehicle.

    Ehhh…

    So, normally, you want a random sample in polls, which is very unlikely to not be representative of the population as a whole. If they have 100k people, it very probably isn’t a random sample, because you only normally take something like 1k to 2k people for randomly-sampled polls; there’s a rapidly-declining value above that. If the sample set is self-selected rather than randomly-selected, you can get results that are pretty different from the population as a whole.

    fires up Google Translate

    While I can’t seem to get the survey page to load, the domain it’s on is apparently t-online.de; it sounds like it’s a reader survey, which won’t be random.