I didn't really want to keep spotlighting American domestic events as I had assumed that shit would calm down pretty quickly, but it appears that the Trump administration, including Musk, are determined to bring down the empire from the inside.
One of the most important lessons of ruling a country - and especially an empire - is to never, ever believe your own propaganda; and yet now we have neo-Nazi failsons disrupting parts of the imperial apparatus and causing general government mayhem because they actually seem to believe in libertarianism; that the state and the capitalists are somehow in opposition, rather than working in lockstep to maximise profit and boost American hegemony around the world.
I'm not so optimistic as to believe that a national collapse is FOUR DAYS AWAY, like those weird anti-China cranks often speculate - the US has at least a decade or two left even under these conditions. But consider the damage being inflicted in these past couple weeks, and extrapolate that over the next four years. Does any living American political figure possess the competency to halt - or even meaningfully slow - the already ongoing decline? And could they achieve power (or even be allowed to do so) after Trump's term is done?
I don’t understand why everyone seems to be buying Trump’s propaganda that Canada and Mexico are caving in, when it seems obvious that they’ve just successfully fobbed him off with bs promises that cost them very little
the Mexican border guard postings might as well be a domestic jobs program. that's not even a real concession, usually nations pay to get foreign militaries away from borderlands. I think Sheinbaum or her team really got one over on trump/rubio there. The Canadian deal is just "drugs are terrorism" policies to mask civil repression, which is something they were already doing. And the opportunity to create a new alphabet agency for "counterterrorism" is like Christmas day for feds of all nationalities.
Actually these "deals" are so cheap I feel trump has to be trying to come back for more in a month
I seem to recall a WTYP episode about the Train Maya, where the mexican guest-host talked about the Mexican Army having quite a lot of influence on Mexican politics, and that AMLO was kind of afraid of potentially getting couped by the army, which was why his reforms couldn't fundamentally touch the main points of corruption/sidedealing within the army. Some of that might have been cope that AMLO wasn't as radical as some people hoped for, but it was probably also true to an extent, particularly given that previous links between the Mexican army and the US.
I think it’s more that he doesn’t actually understand value at all, and was yelled at enough by corpos who were going to lose out from the tariffs that he backed down at the first offer from Mexico/Canada. These “deals” seem like deliberately bad negotiation openers, I bet they were not expecting him to just say yes lol
So Canada had already caved to the US, then pretended to put up resistance for a few days, then went back to doing their usual business. Still really dumb of the libs to have thought that they were every going to seriously defy the US though
This isn't "caving" to America, Canada is built on militarized repression of motility. This is a win for them, because they get to do something they already want (more cops to target migrants and Indigenous people under the guise of "security") and now they even get to say that this thing they already wanted is absolutely definitely worth the money and really quite a "cheap" tradeoff to stop big bad America's unreasonable tariffs.
Increased border security and larger military/police budgets is just standard operating procedure.