I’d not been following the war that closely until the Kursk invasion. I strongly believed it to be the beginning of the end. It makes absolutely zero strategic sense. Zelensky himself has waffled on what the point of it is. At this point it seems to be just a terrorist attack/PR stunt aimed at harming Russian civilians. That’s not really a good use of your best troops if you want to win a war. As we can see with the collapse of the Ukrainian fronts, which Ukraine is still not doing much about. This just isn’t sustainable.

It matters to Canada because the US told them to care. I have absolutely no clue about the US. Presumably they spent a lot of money getting those judges appointed and don’t want to lose their investments?

For anyone else out of the loop: From what I gather, Mexico is currently trying to make it so that judges are elected, rather than appointed. Canada and the US are fussing about this and threating trade sanctions, claiming that electing judges will somehow harm Mexico’s democracy (as you might expect, the reasons I found were a bunch of FUD without much substance). Mexico wants them to mind their own fucking business.

I like to watch the TV series “Mayday: Air Crash Investigations”. The US dubs their version though, and I got curious one day. I watched the original and the US dub side by side of S3E06 “Mistaken Identity”, which was about the time that a US Aegis Cruiser shot down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf. As I suspected, the US version was censored.

It was very interesting which bits were censored. It was fairly obvious that they would want to cut any parts that humanised the Iranians. To my surprise, they didn’t cut the bits where the crew was praised for their actions. But the most interesting bit for me was that they cut a couple of interviews with the crew of the cruiser, where they talked about how terrified they were of the plane.

They absolutely do not want you to know that their great invincible navy spent half their time peeing in their pants when an airliner flew overhead.

I’m not Ukranian, but this deal sounds pretty frickin nice. I would like my country to accept these terms without a war with Russia.

Indigenous peoples are formally involved in the governance of unceded territories across Canada, including in densely populated areas.

Oh Canada. Your home and not native land. I do find it amazing that they implicitly admitted that we are not in control of our own land though, and actually came out and said that it would be very bad if we did.

I’ve read a whole lot of US history last year. I’ve never seen the country in this big of a public debacle before. They’ve usually been pretty good about making dissent quietly disappear. But they’re spinning so many plates right now, and the cracks in their “good guy” facade are just growing deeper and deeper. It really makes me wonder if this is what’s going to finally break their back. More and more people are waking up to the reality that they’ve lived their whole lives in the worst kind of propaganda. Something’s gotta give. I think Vietnam was the closest we’ve seen to this, and it was just one war. Now the US faces trying to start shit with China, fighting a proxy war with Russia, and somehow coming up with a way of demonising Palestine and Iran. Their propaganda machine is failing quite badly.