The following can all be true:

• The Democrats are a right wing neoliberal party.
• The Democrats are the most left-wing option that is realistically available to American voters.
• The Democrats can be pushed further left if American progressives work to do so.
• The Democrats - at the party level - will resist such a change, but that resistance can still be overcome.
• In the long term, massive structural overhauls and the downfall of capitalism are the only things that will save America and the world
• In the near term, voting consistly and enthusiastically for the least bad option can still protect vulnerable groups from harm and create changes that lay the groundwork for those structural overhauls.

I’m not surprised it’s being attacked. Conservatives and neoliberals alike are terrified of how successful a model it is. We should be doing Sasktel style companies nationwide, for everything where simply nationalizing it doesn’t make more sense. It’s proof that there are ways of keeping consumer prices down without getting into the politically fraught territory of price controls. We should all be pushing for more of Sasktel, everywhere.

They didn’t say it’s not defined, they said it’s not a valid name. Most languages don’t allow function names to start with a number, so 5 literally cannot be a function if that’s the case.

But that’s assuming this isn’t some really obscure language.

No, I’m not being optimistic. I’m being observant.

You can assume the worst behaviour of people like Trump without falling into defeatism. He doesn’t have superpowers. He lives in the same reality you and I do.

We know for a fact that major economic slowdowns such as the bond markets getting “yippy” (his word, remember?) will cause him to back off. There are things he’s not willing to break and he’s proven that.

And we know that despite all his rhetoric about ignoring courts, he never actually seems to follow through. The National Guard got redpployed to other cities. Abrego Garcia got brought back to the US. The shutdown ended before he could actually be tested on his threat to not hand out food stamps. He never actually defies the courts, when push comes to shove. Instead he relies on running ahead of them.

That’s still bad. It’s why new cities are being picked as targets for crackdowns, and they’re now trying to deport Abrego to a different country. No one is defending him here, or implying that he’s in any way respectful or subservient to the rule of law.

But he exists in reality. He’s not a demon or a god or a phantasm from another dimension. He operates within the rules of the same reality we inhabit. There are limits on what he can do, and if you’re paying attention you can start to piece together what those limits are.

That’s not optimism, that’s just knowing your enemy.

We already know what the other hypothetical loopholes are. None of them would offer him as much freedom to implement tariffs as the one he’s currently trying to use. That’s why he’s using it in the first place.

As for ignoring the courts, I think it’s really important to understand that:

1. Trump hasn’t actually followed through on that threat any of the times he’s made it so far… They’ve dragged their heels on a lot of things, but they’ve never actually managed to fully defy a court order yet. That’s why Abrego Garcia isn’t in El Salvador. If the Trump admin were actually confident they had the ability to flat out ignore the courts, that guy would still be rotting in Bukele’s black site.

2. This is very, very different from ordering ICE to bully immigrants. The Trump admin continuing to enforce a tariff that the courts had struck down would immediately crash the US bond market. Remember when bonds got a little “yippy” and Trump chickened the fuck out? This would be a thousand times worse. Because any tariffs collected by the admin would, eventually, have to be paid back once the rule of law prevails. Yes, I can already see you gearing up to say that the rule of law will never prevail, there won’t a 2028 election, etc, etc. I know all that, but international bond markets don’t. They are hidebound stuffy old institutions fully of neoliberals who expect norms and rule of law to prevail. Which means that the US putting itself in a situation where it will be forced to repay potentially trillions of dollars in illegally collected taxes (depending on how long the tariffs are illegally enforced for) will look an awful like a serious likelihood of a country going bankrupt or defaulting on its debts. That’s the sort of thing that sends bond markets spiralling. Liz Truss collapsed the UK bond market and her own prime ministership by doing far, far less.

I don’t think there’s going to be any movement on this until the two tariff related cases clear the US supreme court.

The F-35 deal is a major bargaining chip in our negotiations with the US, and those negotiations aren’t going to go anywhere until we know what we’re negotiating against. If the supreme court strikes down Trump’s ability to tariff under the IEEPA, that absolutely destroys his leverage. We know that his own party have already voted against his tariff agenda multiple times, so the only way he can do this is by going around Congress. If he loses that option, he’s suddenly playing with a completely empty hand, while we still hold all the same cards we did from the start.

I suspect that’s why this “Review” is taking so long. The government is going to want to have it say whatever backs up their position with the US, and right now they don’t yet know what that position will ultimately be. What we do know is that Saab’s eagerness to make a deal gives us more leverage because we can very credibly threaten Lockheed (who basically own the US government) with walking away. After all, 10,000 jobs and total ownership of the production pipeline is pretty tempting.

Call or write to your MP. Let them know how unpopular this is. Make reference to the disaster that similar laws have been in places like the UK.

No, we can’t start throwing out burden of proof when it suits us.

I’ve argued elsewhere in this thread that the solution is to obligate parents to provide vaccinations, just like they’re obligated to provide food, water, clothing, shelter, etc. This is the basic legal duty of care that all parents have towards their children, and it should extend to vaccines. This is both a logical application of existing law - rather than requiring new law - and incredibly simple to prove in court. If parents are obligated to vaccinate their kids, all a cop or social worker has to do is ask for the proof of vaccination. There’s no balance of proof to consider, and no knotty problems of untangling exactly how someone else’s kid got sick.

Completely agree. I said more in my own comment, but if you’re interested, here’s the relevant criminal code that backs up what you’re saying; https://www.criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/Failing_to_Provide_the_Necessaries_of_Life_(Offence)

To put it simply, pathogens are like roach infestations. You can do everything in your power to keep your apartment clean and tidy and bug free, but if your neighbour’s apartment is a spawning ground for the little shits, sooner or later they’re going to make their way in no matter what you do.

It takes everyone, working together, to make us all safe from deadly diseases. That’s how herd immunity works.

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I’m personally of the opinion that refusing to vaccinate your kids should not be a choice parents get to make. Just like how you can’t choose to starve your children, no matter how deeply and truly you believe that we can draw all our necessary sustenance from the air.

In Canada we have a legal concept called the “Duty of persons to provide necessaries.”

Here’s the relevant legal code:

215 (1) Every one is under a legal duty (a) as a parent, foster parent, guardian or head of a family, to provide necessaries of life for a child under the age of sixteen years;

https://www.criminalnotebook.ca/index.php/Failing_to_Provide_the_Necessaries_of_Life_(Offence)

I firmly believe that vaccinations should be deemed one of the “necessaries of life” under this article of the criminal code. Like food, water, clothing, shelter, etc. You shouldn’t have a choice in this matter. We shouldn’t even be talking about whether or not that choice harms someone else’s kid, because that’s actually beside the point. At a basic level, we as a society have already agreed that children’s right to be properly sheltered and cared for outweighs their parents rights to decide how they live. The idea that there should be an exception for vaccines - something that can mean the difference between life and death - is absolutely ridiculous.

This is the claim I responded to:

It is fully 100% confirmed that every single time you turn the plane on, your plane talks with Lockheed Martin in order to obtain permission to turn on.

That claim is, according to every source I have seen, entirely false. Humanspiral offered an article as a source to back up the claim, and I pulled out several quotes from the article that, rather than supporting the claim, directly refuted it. That’s what we’re discussing in this particular comment chain. Not whatever you’re bringing up.

Yikes. Definitely another good argument for switching to the Gripen, for sure.

You’re entirely misunderstanding what I’m saying. The F-35 is an air-to-air plane. In the same way the Gripen, The Eurofighter Typhoon, the F-16 and the F/A-18 are. They are all capable of filling both ground attack and air-to-air roles. And the F-35 fills an air-to-air role incredibly well - better than almost any other plane on Earth - because it has an almost unbeatable advantage over any other air-to-air platform; stealth.

Think of modern air-to-air combat as a sniper duel in the sky. The goal is to remain unobserved by your target while you line up a shot on them. By the time they detect the incoming missile, it’s already too late. And even if they defeat that missile with countermeasures, you haven’t given away your own position and can quickly relocate and fire again while remaining undetected. Eventually, you’ll get the kill. The person who fires first, wins.

You’re mistaking my correcting one common misunderstanding that gets spread about the F-35 for me somehow being a stalwart defender of the entire program. You can check my comment history and see that I’ve repeatedly expressed my feeling that we should kill the deal and get the Gripen instead.

But, as I’ve already laid out in replies to your other comments repeating the same claim, as well as several other comments I’ve made here, there is absolutely zero credible evidence that a “kill switch” exists, and a mountain of evidence for why it would be almost impossible to achieve such a thing without discovery, and for why no one would ever bother in the first place.

From your source:

DND spokesperson Kened Sadiku said no such switch existEd on the aircraft, but he did acknowledge that the U.S. was in charge of both software and hardware upgrades for the planes.

Emphasis mine. Countries can produce their own hardware replacements for the F-35; even without domestic manufacturing, we can source parts from any other country that has the F-35. The issue isn’t maintenance in the sense of keeping planes flying, it’s maintenance in the sense of keeping them relevant. And that’s a very real issue, and very real reason to consider shutting down the deal. But to call that a “kill switch” is to stretch the English language to absurdity.

Countries can make their own parts for the F-35. It’s firmware the US controls, not hardware.

You’ve hit the nail on the head here.

I don’t know what the right answer is on this one. On balance, I lean towards getting the Gripen as a stopgap and prioritizing access to those European sixth gen projects. Select the one that looks the best suited for our needs and go in hard on collaborating on it.

This is part of why I think the Gripen makes sense; we can build it here, which opens up the possibility of being able to build a sixth gen later, instead of having to wait in line for our order to ship. The F-35 gives us better capabilities now, but doesn’t solve the underlying problems down the road.

There is, I think, a version of events where we sign a deal with Saab to build Gripens in Canada to export to buyers like Ukraine, and then go ahead and take the F-35 order anyway. Most likely, we use this to extract concessions in other areas from the Americans, pointing at our new domestic fighter plane industry as a very credible threat to walk away from the F-35 deal. Then, if we’re smart about this, we continue to build up our ability to domestically produce fighter craft, with an eye on that sixth gen project. This would make a lot of sense in the context of Carney’s stated goal of making Canada a defence supplier to the EU, while still leaving us with an interim platform that can handle anything the Russians throw at us.

It’s not “stealthy” in the same way that am F-35 is, but it’s got a few tricks to minimize its overall emissions profile, mess with enemy detection systems, and generally be harder to pick up than, say, an F-16. I’m not suggesting that this is anything close to the level of stealth that an F-35 or F-22 offer, but it is an advantage over other 4th gen craft.