Judge Forced to Pause Trial Because DOJ Lawyers Are so Unprepared

[u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest]

https://newrepublic.com/post/192657/judge-military-trans-ban-trial-lawyers-incompetence

The DOJ attorneys arguing in support of Hegseth‘s transgender military ban hadn’t read any of the studies submitted to the court that allegedly supported it. It turns out that the studies don’t support the ban.

[u/DrNomblecronch]

I'm not telling you not to be upset with the way it's being handled down here, but this might be useful insight: even his most diehard supporters stateside are less than thrilled about the invasion talk. I can't say our politicians are handling it the way they should, but... one thing we learned from his first term is that pushing back on something he says is the surest way to get him to dig in his heels about it.

In other words, the reason you're not hearing more from the US directly opposing the idea of annexing Canada is that we're pretty sure his wandering attention span will make him drop the idea before long, whereas directly opposing it would make him cling to it and begin doing everything he could to make it happen. Most of his behavior is trying to follow through on years-old grudges and perceived slights.

And that's not a ringing endorsement for a leader, or by any means a reason you should be more kindly disposed towards this shitshow. Just that an actual annexation is not in the cards, to the extent that we are hoping he forgets and moves on, because if he made a serious effort to make it happen it would probably be the trigger for armed internal conflict.

tl;dr we are trying to distract him from this annexation talk by dangling shiny things in front of him, because we will collapse into civil war before we actually try and mobilize that, but unfortunately that is a very real possibility.

[u/ashkestar → u/DrNomblecronch]

You might understand why it isn’t comforting to hear ‘the best way we we can fight this is to do nothing and hope he gets distracted’ when we’re also hearing greatest hits between Americans internally like ‘if we protest at all he’ll take it as an excuse to impose martial law so we’d better do nothing instead’ and ‘if only the [whatever group] just hadn’t drawn so much attention to themselves by doing things then this wouldn’t have happened.’

I’m not saying to start an armed conflict. I’m just saying not doing things has not proven to be a particularly successful solution to any of the problems y’all are dealing with.

[u/Standing_Legweak → u/ashkestar]

It's pretty hypocritical for a country called the last bastion for democracy and the land of the free to not stand up against literal fascism. The Koreans rose up and impeached their president for less... and they were under martial law too...

[u/VendrediDisco → u/ashkestar]

Hear, hear.

/u/drnomblecronch, I have to ask, pray tell, what shiny keys dost thou speak of? Genuinely curious.

[u/DrNomblecronch → u/VendrediDisco]

Honestly, Trump being what he is means that the answer to that changes on the daily. By calling it “dangling shiny things,” I might have implied that the things distracting him are meaningless. They’re not, it’s just that the effort spent to push back on him is calculated, based on the knowledge that he will dig in his heels about it automatically.

Right now, fortunately, it seems to be the issue of Tesla’s plummeting value, based on his sales pitch on the WH lawn.

This is fortunate both because he can probably be stalled out for a long while grappling with the idea that there’s no actual way for him to force people to buy Teslas, but also because his last bugbear was deporting people for peacefully protesting.

Obviously, the latter issue is a serious one that needs to be fought against. But overtly fighting him on it also kept his focus on it. And the sad cold calculus of it is that a few individuals suffering his vindictiveness is better than him trying to mobilize troops.

One of this administration’s core tactics is distraction: flooding the news with enough awful things that you don’t focus on the things most important to them. Fortunately, the guy they have set up as supreme leader, whose whim is law and needs to approve anything they do, is extremely susceptible to this tactic himself. Telling him he can’t do something is the surest way to keep him focused on trying to do it instead of what would actually further his goals, so selectively pushing back on his own flood of awful overreaches is keeping him shuffling from one to the next without staying focused on one long enough to actually advance it.

To put it more simply: you’re not just seeing strong responses to internal issues and not his threats of invasion because the US only cares about its own concerns. Trying to mitigate the damage he does here is definitely part of it, but also, everyone knows how bad military action against an ally would be for everyone. As long as he’s focused on destroying one country, he won’t be focused on trying to destroy any others.

[u/VendrediDisco → u/DrNomblecronch]

Ah. I got what you were saying that it was a shiny distraction and didn't equate keys to meaningless things. Reading what you said last night, kind of gave me a moment of relief today. Folks in ON and Canada are frustrated that the recent envoy to speak with Howard Lutnick and co did not amount to a lot of answers for Canada about what's going on, and while I reflected on the broader picture of what has been happening in terms of our leadership race etc while all this has been happening....

Firstly, it's never good to disclose your objectives nor your strategy when (possibly tense) negotiations are ongoing, and based on the circumstances leading up to the meeting, inhad no expectation that it would result in any significant outcome. The US agreed to meet bc wildly claiming 50% tariffs on essential metals tanked the market again, so it was about internal damage control, not necessarily good faith.

Keeping the follow-up to respectful, vague, officially no comment information, it protects our interests. The matter of electricity export tax and the additional 25% tariffs were both withdrawn (fire out). Keeping it neutral offered no opportunity for spin to feed the GOP base.

But then I thought of all the times I had seen Trump this week seated beside world leaders who were not Canada's, obsessively rambling about annexing Canada and Greenland. But with nothing new nor spicy to say.. just obsessing. Just daring his guest to comment on it so that he could respond or double down (or no doubt use against them later for whatever new justification he's feeling. ... It irritated me a ton at the time, and it does appear to be his main go-to topic, which is still concerning...

But I appreciated that by starving the media, we are effectively starving Trump. And he's just there, in those awkward sessions, echoing into the void. I knew it from the de-escalation risk angle, but this brought me some extra peace on top.

I saw a newscast this week where Lawrence O'Donnel stated that plans were being drawn up by military personnel re engagement with the Panamanian military... Our leaders do take this threat seriously and allegedly both Republicans and Dems have made jokes to our Foreign Affairs minister regarding annexation... The GOP elected to avoid voting on repealing the national emergency declaration about fentanyl that's propping up the tariff war in the first place.

Scary times man. Thanks for responding. They are doing a lot to destroy your country as you know it right now, and I don't think they'll be satisfied if they succeed... So let's do what we can while we have the opportunity, it's going to be a long 46 months.

[u/Tardisgoesfast → u/ashkestar]

As an American, I agree.

[u/DrNomblecronch → u/ashkestar]

I can definitely see why I might have come across that way. What I meant wasn’t “we can’t do anything to stop him from doing this,” it was that overtly pushing back on him beating war drums like this has proven to be the surest way to make him commit to action instead of bluster.

“If we openly tell him he can’t do this, he will out of spite” is a very cold comfort when military action is the issue at hand, I completely agree. But right now, if he decided to commit to it, the confusion and instability here is such that he could actually take steps to that end, and all efforts against him would have to focus on damage control. There is still a solid chance, if by no means a certainty, that the rule of law can be re-asserted to the point where he literally could not follow through.

Either way, he will not be able to mobilize a significant attack on Canada: he simply cannot sell patriotic war fervor on a scale large enough to shift the majority of 330 million people to support it. The difference is in how much damage he will do if he tries. Right now, even though it would still fail, the results would be catastrophic, both inside and outside of America.

So, basically: not hearing more Americans fight back against his invasion talk doesn’t mean nothing is being done about it. It means that telling him that something is being done about it will make it harder to do anything about him at all. If he can be kept from doing something horrifically destructive (another something, anyway) by distracting him until he forgets the impulse and declaring after the fact that he decided of his own will not to, it means that he is also not focusing on the actual channels by which he could be prevented from even trying.

More cynically, the US is simply too big for an overt military coup to work the way he wants, but it would still cause havoc. Right now, there are still people who believe it could work, and would make an effort at it. Give him enough time to demonstrate what an awful job he does at non-military attempts, and those people will lose that confidence. He hasn’t made things bad enough here that he has lost that support. Give us a few months of dry-frying in his trade war, and we’ll get there. War can be beneficial for an economy, but it can’t save one that’s in open free fall. If nothing else, because it takes an initial investment that we simply will not be able to afford for much longer.

[u/DrNomblecronch → u/[deleted]]

No. No, we really do not. Being able to reliably predict a pattern of behavior is not, in any way, trust. If we trusted him, we would not be talking about the best ways to avoid setting him off like he was a bomb and we only know what half the wire colors mean.

More to the point: every effort is currently being made to "do something about it" via nonviolent means. This is not just because it's a real fuckin' dick move to assert that "nonviolent means are not enough" when it isn't you that will be committing to the violence, it's because violent means are always, always, a last resort, because they don't stop once the task they were started for is complete.

Right now, your government knows who to talk to in our government about this. What they're getting is bullshit, of course, but it is bullshit through approved channels and delivered in language. You have some way of anticipating what will happen next. If things turn to violent upheaval here, everyone in the world loses any way to know what will come out of America next. The role that America plays in the infrastructure of world resource distribution, which is still cranking along despite political upsets, abruptly faults.

The best case scenario if things turn to violence is that the highest death toll is limited to inside American borders, and we don't cause too much catastrophic damage when our tendrils extended into the rest of the world go into thrashing death throes. If you think that violence in America will have damage limited solely to America, you do not understand the "First World"'s expansive and intertwined role in global infrastructure.

So instead of demanding we "fix" the problem in the way that seems most efficient to you, how about you focus instead on the fact that some-fucking-how, Pegida Canada has tens of thousands of Canadian supporters, and there is a solid case to be made that it is only the American president making this specific kind of ass of himself that has put some of the brakes on your own even-increasing problems with far-right nascent fascists? Because I can tell you with absolute certainty that "we won't allow that kind of takeover to happen here, we have checks in our government to prevent that" is exactly what Americans were telling themselves up until November. If you think "Sandra Solomon is a loud blowhard who will never have any real power," I have got some pretty upsetting news for you about what most Americans thought of Trump in 2015.

If you think the solution here is easy and straightforward, you are not paying enough attention. Not to how it starts, not to how to stop it. I would really prefer if Canadians do not end up in a situation where they are genuinely making preparations for a potential civil war, like Americans are. And I can tell you right now that dangling a shiny "haha we're better than the idiot Americans" in front of people is gonna be one of the earliest moves in the nationalist playbook.

[u/DrNomblecronch → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I really do get that. It is difficult to keep a cool head when things are this dire, and I'm sorry for reading more hostility into your words than was actually there.

The best I've got right now is that yeah, there is a lot of bystander effect going on, because the vast majority of people commenting on it don't actually have the means to do much other than stand by until things get overtly worse. But, conversely, one of the things happening right now is an attempt to use his own volatility and tiny attention span against him. If he committed to something as wildly and grossly unpopular as a direct move against Canada or any other nation, it would definitely shift public opinion against him in a way that would see him removed. But it would also mean that all efforts would turn to controlling the damage that would cause, and the underlying problems that allowed him to come to power would not be fixed.

Pretending we still have a functioning system of government is an obvious and flimsy lie. Fortunately, fascism aggressively selects for idiocy, so it's a lie that he and his administration currently buy. That, in turn, means that they are not paying attention to the moves being made against them. As long as they believe they are in charge and unopposed, they are not looking at the steps being taken to pull down and disassemble the ladder they used to ascend to power, to ensure no one else can follow the same routes. If we don't do that, removing them from power will result in tremendous short-term chaos and a repeat of this exact sequence of bullshit a few years from now.

Will this approach work? That, I can't say. Odds are certainly not great, and it might still turn to something much worse for everyone as the necessary solution. But, as of right now, the odds are not impossible, either.

Where I think we land is; if he tries to invade Canada, every person posted with a gun pointed your way will need at least one more person covering them with a gun pointed back towards America to protect them from the sheer volume of shots coming from their "own side." And a military operation that starts out encircled by hostiles is not going to succeed. But while that's a little reassuring, we are still going hard on the idea that no guns will be pointed at all, and our hope in that possibility still has enough behind it to keep us going for a while longer.

[u/Maituliao78 → u/DrNomblecronch]

That guy in the Oval Office wants you guys to fear him and unfortunately, it seems the Americans are.