It is stupid. But the connection is that the Americans do international politics in an abusive way now. There is a very real possibility that their leader will see domestic bad number and foreign good number and throw a fit and look for something or someone to beat on. By all means, someone please tell him that looking at the numbers is stupid.

In particular, the Americans have been throwing endless tantrums Canada's way. This week we're "nasty people" because we refuse to become an ecnomimc vassal state. I'm sure we'll hear more tariff sabre rattling from the Americans soon.

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kylehotchkiss 13 hours ago | parent [-]

* American leadership. The president’s only understanding of our brotherly northern neighbor is South Park portrayals.

I haven’t even met a conservative who has ever had any sort of problem with Canada

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Waterluvian 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really need more Americans to understand that to the other 95% of the world you are a single entity. We don't get to do diplomacy or trade deals with the Democrats or the good Republicans or specific states. The tariffs and threats are American tariffs and American threats.

	▲	epistasis 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And the rest of the world has it's thumb on what's actually important: it doesn't really matter what conservatives believe, or liberals believe, or leftists believe, or even what the general US believes, when complete control of the government has been handed over to a single individual and his whims. Supposed values of conservatives don't matter at all when value #1 is to be obedient to the one person they want to put in charge of all branches of the US government. The US has emptied its warehouses of precision munitions to fight a war/non-war that nobody inside the US understands, wants, or could even explain in a half rational way. Yet it still happened! So the US is not behaving like a democracy in any functional sense any more. It's an autocracy, where the autocrat does what he wants, no matter what the rest of the nation wants.

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bryanlarsen 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's changing, surveys show American conservative opinions of Canada has been dropping rapidly.