I wound up deciding that my thoughts on the first thirty tweets of this needed to be revised into a fuller essay.

https://xcancel.com/martianwyrdlord/status/1891935865187991808

I have a lot of minor disagreements, but agree with a core claim that Canada is a security problem for the US.

I disagree with an apparently core claim that parallels with Ukraine in Russia's favor are necessarily strong, and that they imply that the US can easily collect Canada. The parallel's with Ukraine are not in Russia's favor, and imply challenges with collecting Canada, Mexico, or Russia. Which are similarly problematic failed states in the US sphere of influence.

It is better to give Canadians a little more rope to hang their government with, and wait to commit ourselves, for a situation where we know what the eff is going on with our own internal politics.

I have a problem with some of the language, but the key point about PRC influence is critical.

I have major issues with the Ukraine point, but that is not one where I have a completely informed position, and a completely calculated position.

'globalism' shaming, that also shames nationalism is I feel rather sus. I dislike folks who prefer transnationalism, international law, etc., or who are big into that stuff, but I also am allergic to any attempt to shame nationalism.

Nations are a local peace consensus, and force of arms to hold territory.

If Canadians will fight and die to hold that terrain, then they may be enough of a nation to refrain from fighting without a reason. Canada raping the US on security is a reason, but not as much of a reason as, say, Hamas and 10/7/2023. It is not as relatively strong a reason, and Canadians may not be as relatively weak as Hamas and Hezbollah are.

The tweets attach a lot of weight to the proposed parallels with Ukraine. I find those less than convincing.

The parallels are stronger with Russia and with Mexico. Both of those are around a third population to the US, as Ukraine was to Russia.

General rule of thumb is six to one advantage on invasion, and on needing to be prepped for occupation.

Canada is a tenth of population, but a) has produced competent native infantry b) we cannot be entirely confident in US military preparations.

Russia fucked itself with two misestimations. It misestimated itself, and misestimated the place it was trying to acquire. It is not clear that we can know either of those equivalents well.

Canada is a security problem. But, we do not know our own views well enough right now to make any sort of lasting commitment on a deliberate policy.

If acquiring Canada is a bad choice, that we lack the resolve for, there are tens of millions of serious opponents pretty close, that we would need to kill or make peace with eventually. That is maybe a sucking chest wound of an expense.

Both Mexico and Canada are bad gambles in that respect. Russia is a better gamble. Two cities killed, and we maybe then have a distant insurgency that we can possibly walk away from if we decide it was a bad idea.

I'm not saying that a special military operation to restore order to American Kievan Rus is a good idea. But, if we nuke Moscow and Saint Petersberg right off the bat, we may be welcomed as liberators, and at the same time limit the amount of insurgency that we would have any need to kill off.

martian wyrm lord uses some UK English spellings. Whatever the nationality, dude is much too ignorant of US internal politics to have any idea what the hell he is talking about.

US has serious internal security concerns, and needs to see how the DOGE firings and reorganization goes before it can take policy risks that might commit to long term troop deployments. We may need those troops for internal security, and close security.

I am personally of the opinion that on the military side, we cannot trust any preparations for any serious intervention on a near time scale. It is too early to hypothesize eight years of Vance, but maybe the American people could trust military leadership enough for major troop commitments around ten years from now. Biden et alia fucking us on the Afghanistan withdrawal has cost the officer corps a lot of good will.

On the intelligence, security, and diplomatic side, we absolutely cannot trust those bureaucracies, and are firing a bunch of people to try to restore trust and control. Proposing that these people are competent enough to carry their weight is a really big ask, and it is unclear that there is any case to be made in their favor. The IC ran McMullin in 2016, on Hillary's behalf, to peel off potential Trump voters. They are not apolitical, and their politics is hostile to Americans, which is to say it is aligned to academia.

The scholars in the non-mathematics fields have mostly culturally diverged from compatible with American mainstream culture. Many of them have become savage barbarians by taking ideas like critical theory seriously. They have exceeded their support for BLM in 2020 (which was wrong, and was hostile) with their support for 'anti-colonialism' in 2024, which is also incorrect, immoral, and relentlessly and inexorably hostile to the American people.

Taking their word for what they think should happen to them, the 'imperialist' universities should be 'decolonized'. The actual course of action, is instead to act towards the universities according to our own (American) national custom. Individuals who have committed crimes will be tried, and those guilty of capital crimes may be executed.

This security problem of the universities may not require force of arms, but it has drastically fucked our formal legal system, and our rule of law.

Mexico is an ongoing security problem, and Trump has taken some risks in trying to solve, that may already be a serious committment of force. Mexico related conflicts that are purely securing our own border may be a limit of our ability to act, we shall have to find out. We have uncertainties, how much of our government funding was applied by IC to creating US security problems, and how much of our domestic political opposition is funded by the cartels. The Democrats may still have enough freedom to act that they can roll the dice on civil war that they would lose.

To suppose that Trump is taking the proposed scope of policy risk in intervening in Canada has to be foreign ignorance.

US has a lot of internal uncertainties that would not be obvious to foreign devils, and also Trump seems to be serious about trying to mitigate the risks of longer term troop commitments.

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