🇨🇦 Happy Canada Day 🇨🇦

World Cup Feedback

I’m not really into soccer. Billions of people are, obviously, and admittedly there are moments of incredible play that punctuate two incredibly boring hours of people slowly dribbling back and forth down the field. I say stuff like this knowing that many readers will strongly disagree, and that’s okay. I expect people to disagree with me on many things, and would have to reassess my beliefs if I was just pandering to a base or conforming with an expectation.

I mean, the most exciting part of the entire game are the 0-0 penalty kicks at the end. A sort of merciful “get it over with” finale. And yes, my country is still in the tournament, and that’s neat, but there’s no way I can stomach a whole game. If it’s close I’ll turn on the final five minutes, but still need to be engaged with some other activity. This seems to be the case for its biggest fans as well, spending the game as a social event of chants and flags and flares and smoke bombs and so on.

Writing this makes me realize it’s a lot like a sport I do enjoy: Formula 1 racing. The average F1 race is a tiny number of exciting bits of sportsmanship accentuating what is often an insanely boring race. I always have other activities like chess available during a race because otherwise it would be intolerable.

I’m sure I’d enjoy soccer more if I understood its internal strategy better, and some of my dislike is probably based in the school days when being forced to play soccer meant I would kick the ball as far as possible whenever it came near me just to avoid being a part of the play for longer than necessary.

I thought it was utter folly when Canada bid to be involved with the World Cup. These sorts of events are always far costlier than promised, and with fewer returns than heralded. They’re always a scam for corrupt organizations like FIFA or the IOC to enrich and celebrate themselves, and cities and nations keep getting baited into this nonsense. In the end taxpayers somehow always end up holding the bag, though at least in this iteration of the World Cup it has mostly just been slight retrofits on existing stadiums, with little novel spend1. Unlike the farcical “desperately try to buy credibility” WCs that preceded it, like the $220B Qatar or $14B Russian world cups.

One of the weirdest things of an event like this are the insecure residents who really desperately need foreigners to talk well about their country. I mean this in the kindest way, but I positively do not care what tourists think about Canada or Canadians2. That this sort of content does such numbers among the “please affirm us!” crowd has always been baffling. I mean, it’s weird that people travel somewhere and think their brief, incredibly limited exposure to a country puts them in an illustrious position of passing judgment or giving advice.

Though there is something utterly hilarious seeing far-right, isolationist Americans doing the “look how much the Euroscum loves our cities!” about visitors there. You know, the same NYC, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and so on that these people were holding as a post-apocalyptic wasteland a month earlier. Suddenly they’re desperately needing the adulation of their betters, celebrating the diverse, liberal places they held so poorly not long before.

USMCA

Absolutely no one expected the Trump crime spree to reaffirm USMCA at the checkpoint3, which happens to be Canada Day: They desperately need this trade agreement, but Trump has a tired, US-harming negotiating style that requires endless brinksmanship and theatrics. Which is precisely why the Canadian government has basically been hands-off.

Canada isn’t going to move an iota or to play ball with this nonsense, so I fully expect Chairman Trump to ramp up the rhetoric4.

Nonetheless, the American media’s take on these “negotiations” are amazing. For instance this Reuters article. To quote-

For now, the U.S. is holding formal negotiating rounds with Mexico only, leaving Canada to the side amid a long list of bilateral trade irritants ranging from Canada’s restricted dairy market to Canadian provinces pulling American liquor from store shelves.

Firstly, it’s humorous when these articles desperately try to portray the US as leaving Canada “to the side”, or putting the active voice only on America. Canada clearly has no interest in engaging with this group, and has chosen to go a different direction, while simultaneously waiting for the current regime to be ousted where we’ll see if sanity/competency returns. This is precisely why you constantly see these articles, clearly being issued to the press by the idiot kleptocracy.

“Please pander to us, Canada! Please!” - Greer and his crew of misfits. They’ve been issuing so many of these releases it has reached such transparent pathetic desperation.

Secondly, the “trade irritant” list is oddly one-sided. Did the author forget about the farcical “fentanyl tariffs”, which this regime invented because they clearly presume Americans must be catastrophically stupid and willing to fall for it. These idiots are still trying to foist these same lies on Americans. Seems like a bit of an irritant. How about the tariffs on Canadian autos and parts, steel, aluminum, and lumber? All of this is still in place, and is completely in defiance of USMCA, basically invalidating the entire thing and covering tens of billions of trade. Somehow didn’t make the list. Instead he lists a couple of tiny Canadian things.

When the “trade irritants” from the Canada side are limited to a pretty minor retaliation, and something explicitly negotiated into USMCA, and then you completely miss enormous problems caused by the American side, either your reporter is an imbecile, or they’re basically issuing propaganda that they happily reprint.

Canada is in a position of absolute strength, and we will not give in to garbage like Greer or his boss the self-dealing criminal rapist. This administration is pathetically desperate for some sort of extracted win after an endlessly calamity of disaster, now culminated in that pathetic farce “Great American State Fair”. It’s over for this foolish cabal.

Happy Canada Day!

Further, what is even the point of negotiating? Canada paid $6.2B for a bridge, and when it’s complete the US suddenly thinks it’s time to change the terms of the deal. Canada negotiates USMCA, giving up plenty in the process, and now they’re back looking to extract more while in utter defiance of the very trade deal this same predator called the best deal ever. Get fucked.

This is how Trump always operated. He long had a reputation for negotiating with the trades and vendors, and after they deliver on time and budget he suddenly changes the terms or simply refuses to pay. Because he’s an absolute scumbag, and is the sort of bad-faith garbage that everyone knows to avoid. It’s why he was relegated to dealing with Russian banks and managed to run every company in the ground, until somehow this criminal convinced a hundred million people to allow him to openly loot the government. Bizarre.

This way of operating earns some temporary wins as participants are caught out and need a temporary respite, but it is devastating to the long term. Once you’re a bad faith participant, no one has any reason to work you in the future. Which is exactly where the de-banked Donald “Six Time Bankrupt” Trump ended up, until he discovered he could grift millions of Americans that were simply unwilling to believe that someone would lie with every word that comes out of their mouth, shamelessly and unendingly.

On Capitalism

If you use any Meta properties in Canada, where the algorithm is basically far-right propaganda no matter how much you try to train it otherwise, it’s kind of hilarious seeing a subset of Americans going on about how great capitalism is compared to “communism”. To these uneducated rubes, the whole world is apparently “communist” except the US and Argentina.

Do these people really think the US is currently a capitalist country? I would argue that China is more capitalist than the US.

The US has become a stunningly corrupt plutocracy, and this is only accelerating now that the oligarchs are unabashedly buying elections. The megarich are buying up every communications platform and media group, turning them into 24/7 propaganda and disinformation venues.

Capitalist? Not even remotely.

Trump right now has a “golden share” in US Steel, and can personally veto anything the company does. The government has demanded ownership stakes in a number of other firms, like Tiktok, Intel, among others. As he has destroyed America’s financial order, his hail mary is demanding that nvidia give the government a cut of GPU sales to China – a protection racket, as that obese senile dipshit has always imagined himself a godfather – among a myriad of other insanely corrupt, half witted bits of nonsense.

A number of tech executives were enlisted in the military. Howard “Epstein Island” Nutlick, that disgusting greaseball creep, is now personally choosing winners and losers in the AI race.

International crossings are shut down at the behest of billionaire donors. The entire US industry operates as a massively subsidized military-industrial grift, where the US is withdrawing from European obligations and becoming isolationist, simultaneously with blowing up the military budget by an extra 50%.

Trade and tariffs all depend upon what emolument or kickback you give to Trump and his halfwit progeny. Trump has various useless and grossly unqualified family members carrying out negotiations on behalf of the US, well really on behalf of Trump, around the world.

Want tariff relief? Just green-light a tacky resort. All US trade now relies upon the personal enrichment of that dirty diddler and his charity-stealing family. This is one of the reasons Canada and the US haven’t come to terms, because that sort of grotesque, disgusting corruption simply isn’t in our DNA.

That…isn’t capitalism.

Even at the American corporation level, they all lined up to hand over disgusting bribes to earn the favour of the Chairman in trade issues. It is normalized that they all need to pay bribes into various foolish ventures of this clown show to avoid restrictions by this grifter cabal. Disgusting. The sort of stuff that in any functional country leads to people in prison.

The US went to war with Iran because of political contributions, and probably because of some bribery via his crypto scam along with a gift aircraft (one that he gets to take with him when he leaves office, which is why they call it a bridge aircraft…after almost a billion dollars of retrofits). A war that has been catastrophically lost by the US in every possible dimension, all to accomplish a worse outcome than was already in place before this foolish clown and his ChatGPT Department of War weakling drunkard demonstrated to the world how profoundly and completely stupid they are.

Pardons are openly being sold for bribes. No one even bothers refuting or disagreeing anymore. We all know it’s happening. Drug dealers, rapists, child predators…all being pardoned if they just pay a bribe to the grifter in chief.

And of course while the current regime is astonishing corrupt, the “capitalism” in place has long ensured that the rich have no real risk and can only possibly get richer, and will always be bailed out by taxpayers lest they have to sell the third mega-yacht. How about the bank or auto bailouts. Couldn’t let the rich lose, which is a recurring theme. Billionaires buy pet NFL teams and then get sucker second-tier cities to spend billions building a stadium for them, looting their education and road funds to ensure the ultrarich only get richer.

Privatize the wins and socialize the losses, with endless examples. Everything is enshittified with monopolies and private equity buying up everything and exploiting bankruptcy laws – sell all the property and making the business “rent it back”, loot the pensions5, etc – while coming out massively enriched. Every restaurant is serving up frozen Sysco trash and exploiting workers. And just to be clear, all of this is infecting Canada as well.

The US equities market is just so firmly detached from any semblance of reality, and the bizarre thing is that everyone knows it. No one even bothers trying to rationalize anymore, and now it’s basically just a shell game where everyone just gets away with anything they can get away with, for as long as they can. SPCX is an in the open $2T dollar scam and it’s just another day.

Right now there is a massive profit-taking by a few monopolists in the PC component market, and we’re in the hilarious situation of waiting for some Chinese makers to ramp up and destroy these greedy pigs that are running what normally would be an illegal price fixing cartel6. Just as Chinese open-weight AI models have become fundamentally important. Where we need to restrain the oligarchy via…a communist country. Plutocracy vs communism.

Look at some of the email exchanges between Epstein and his various contacts. These people were/are just incredibly stupid people, on the average, but the system is basically rigged such that even if you’re Trump-level stupid, you’ll still come out ahead in the long run if you are among the “can’t fail” crowd. I mean, Trump was particularly bad and actually managed to fail a number of times, but if society was just that human scum would have been living in an alley waiting for a Patrick Bateman to come along.

The US is far removed from capitalism, and has become a blatantly corrupt banana republic, absent any real laws or governance for your ruling class oligarchs. It pretends it’s capitalism, sure, but it is a grotesque abomination that only looks like capitalism if you squint and are fully willing to delude yourself.

When it’s held up by poorly informed fools to denigrate much better run countries, it’s just bizarre. And remarkably it’s usually the desperately poor – the US delusion of the temporarily embarrassed billionaire living off of credit in some wasteland methville backwater – who are doing this “hurrr communism!” screed, brainwashed into the simpleton belief that a country doing anything for its citizens is something they must fight. They’re loud idiots dutifully plying the script for the super-rich. It is unbelievably pathetic.

Capitalism is fantastic. It is the best economic structure for an economy. The US has shockingly little to do with capitalism. It has long been a plutocracy, but now it’s just a full on kleptocracy. Hopefully at some point it pulls back from the brink. But probably not, as the oligarchs are so firmly in control they easily amass armies of foolish dumbshits to parrot their idiotic “everything is communism!” spiels and to vote for corrupt, destructive garbage like Trump.

Footnotes

  1. While Toronto built some temporary expansions on BMO Field, it was kind of hilarious seeing all of social media filled with armchair engineers declaring how unsafe the structure was because it was a scaffold-based structure. And then they covered the scaffolding with cladding and suddenly the entire structure was safe, demonstrating that people only care about what they can see. This is not unlike Europeans yipping about North American wood framed homes: Do they really think our homes are falling down around us? Pretty much the only danger to a wood framed home is a tornado, hurricane, or explosive event, and I guarantee your homes would not do better. ↩

  2. Okay, that overstates it a bit. But my primary concern are the people that live here, and “perspectives of a foreigner” falls far behind. Like I don’t like drug users all zonked out at city hall, and while I might incant tourists to justify why they should be removed and such activity prohibited, really my primary concern are Canadians and Torontonians that have to endure that. ↩

  3. Which puts it on a 10-year expiry clock, with yearly “are you sure?” checkpoints. ↩

  4. Theoretically the US could leave the agreement with 6 months notice, but that require congress’s authority. Congress, despite being filled with Trump-lickspittle human faeces like Randy Fine, is starting to realize they are doomed with that bag of shit and simply would never go along with it. And just to be fully clear, everything the US has done, including relative to USMCA, has basically cemented China’s dominance. The US’ only hope was basically an alliance of like-minded nations, or at least who were like-minded nations, but instead these dumpster-tier idiots decided to attack every close ally instead. ↩

  5. Corporate raiders buying a firm and looting its pensions is almost “the good old days” now, given that almost no one actually even has such a benefit anymore. ↩

  6. Capitalism is not a free for all, and a fundamental requirement for capitalism to properly function is that there is strict oversight and governance of the market to avoid price fixing, monopolies, fraudulent behaviour, irrational exuberance7 that can precipitate calamitous collapse, and so on. Over many administrations this has been weakened, but this decline has massively accelerated under the current criminal cabal. The only governance now is that corporations need to suckle on Trump’s rotten balls, and if they do that they can get away with anything.

    What an absolute disgrace for everyone that so many spent so much time building the US into the leader in governance, where now it’s Noriega Panama-level corrupt. JD Vance is openly boasting that what once took down the presidency is now a nothing-burger, the grotesque levels of blatant corruption so overwhelming and in the open. Trump’s bribery rug-pull crypto fraud and billion dollar windfall barely even makes waves things have gotten so bad. ↩

  7. When Apple crossed the $1T mark, they pulled in an enormous $56B in profits. They have since doubled their profit (faster than their revenue growth), to $112B, and yet their market cap has grown 4.5x, to $4.5T. This sort of detached inflationary spiral is accelerating, because USD are basically imaginary now, with enormous unending debt spending and the money printer going brrrrr, and we’re all just waiting to see what happens when the music stops. Something something “Alabama richer than Ontario!”. ↩