Today's News: This time it's the Liberals saying Never Mind; plus doomscrolling the US crazy

So Heritage Foundation fascist Kevin Roberts didn't come to Toronto after all 

Maybe Carney cancelled him after his Cabinet ministers told him what a poor decision it was. 

Or maybe Trump told Roberts to pull back because who knows why. Or whatever.
But looking at the larger picture, this whole misjudgement has done some damage to Carney's leadership.
I thought one comment my son made today was perceptive: 

He reminded me that one crucial error Obama made when he got elected president in 2008 was to think his interpersonal skills and magnetic personality would let him work productively with Republicans even though the Repubs wouldn't work with any other Democrat.
It took years before Obama really understood how naive this was, that Repubs saw him as just another Dem politician.
Likewise, Carney also has to avoid thinking of himself as someone to whom the usual rules of politics do not apply.
Carney may not realize quite yet the extent to which Canadians, particularly progressive Canadians, have given him the benefit of the doubt over the last six months - because he was so much better than Poilievre and Singh was hopeless anyway, and we were all terribly afraid of Trump. We dearly wanted Carney to be that Big Daddy that Canada needed to save us. Carney is smart and brilliantly educated and had a stellar career; he has a great sense of humour and he was born in the west and he played hockey; he works harder than everyone else, and he knows and is respected by people around the world.
But this doesn't mean that Canadian conservatives (small-c or large-C) will respect him or work with him. It doesn't mean the progressive left will give him a pass when he takes a corporatist approach to development. It doesn't mean that Indigenous leaders will allow their hard-won authority to be threatened. And it doesn't mean that Carney will never miscalculate or make a mistake.

Carney cancels invite for Project 2025 mastermind, wants fascist takeover of Canada to be more of a surprise

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— The Beaverton (@thebeaverton.com) September 4, 2025 at 2:32 PM

So on top of normalizing this fascist Nazi, Carney gets to look like he isn’t important enough for this fascist Nazi. Carney is a bright one. #CdnPoli #Canada

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— Kris Morris (@krismorris.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 7:16 AM

And in the long term, this pointless pander has caused Liberals to lose their credibility to criticize Poilievre for the company he keeps - the Convoy, European fascists, etc

— Cathie from Canada🍁 (@cathiecanada.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 3:00 PM

Moving on, there's been a lot of crazy going on in the United States lately. As I was doomscrolling through it I found some good comments on that passing scene:

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I'll say.

A few days ago, Trump's own Himmler wannabe, Stephen Miller, said the only people protesting the National Guard occupying Washington DC are elderly white hippies. 

Of all the comments I have seen about that grotesque remark, I liked this one best:

The reason the “90-year-old hippie” (a quote from Stephen Miller, who can’t do math) women are the ones out in the street with signs is that they remember what it was like to live in the kind of world MAGA is dragging us back into. They fought like hell once before to get us out of it. They marched for their rights. The had national strikes for their rights. They were born into a world where they couldn’t own a bank account in their own name and abortion was outlawed. They fought. And, yes, maybe they DO want a nap, as Stephen “baby N*zi” Miller “joked.” And God knows they DESERVE one, after having to deal with men like him for 9 decades. But you know what? They’re putting on another pot of coffee, braving the blazing sun, and joining the fight, for YOU, their younger sisters. Because they’re not going back, and they don’t want you to have to, either. Respect them. (Then, and now.)

- Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

Read on Substack

Today, the US health secretary RFK Jr testified in Congress and it was exactly the shit-show you would expect from a vaccine-denier nut case. 

Some great comments:

 

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This whole thread absolutely gutted me - it is full of tragedies of the world before vaccines.

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My own vaccine story - this happened around 1955:  I will never forget my mother's terror when she saw my brother limping after he had had the flu. He turned out fine, it wasn't polio. But in our block a father had died from polio and one of his sons was disabled. 

And I still remember going down to the old arena with my dad and mother, sister and brother to get vaccinated, it was full of hundreds of crying children, and scared parents who were absolutely determined to save their children. 

The Salk vaccine was a miracle.

 

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On Wednesday, the United States blew up a Venezuelan boat, killing 11 people, because they said it was smuggling drugs.
What?
Lots of reaction to this one:

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All in all, I thought this comment thread really wraps up what we are experiencing now:

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And I think the crazy also relates to the "Illusory Truth effect"  - America has been listening to Fox News for 30 years and that's just too long:

The illusory truth effect (also known as the illusion of truth effect, validity effect, truth effect, or the reiteration effect) is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. This phenomenon was first identified in a 1977 study at Villanova University and Temple University.

When truth is assessed, people rely on whether the information is in line with their understanding or if it feels familiar. The first condition is logical, as people compare new information with what they already know to be true. Repetition makes statements easier to process relative to new, unrepeated statements, leading people to believe that the repeated conclusion is more truthful. The illusory truth effect has also been linked to hindsight bias, in which the recollection of confidence is skewed after the truth has been received.
In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that familiarity can overpower rationality and that repetitively hearing that a certain statement is wrong can paradoxically cause it to feel right.[4] Researchers observed the illusory truth effect's impact even on participants who knew the correct answer to begin with but were persuaded to believe otherwise through the repetition of a falsehood, to "processing fluency".

Finally, this story illustrates where all these lies will lead. I guess Florida made the mistake of actually passing a law because of the ridiculous "chemtrails" hysteria, with this result:
Atrios / Eschaton

Chemtrails
The dangers of indulging the fantasies of the crazies.

Since the state law went into effect, the Floridians who backed it have grown increasingly angry by seeing the skies just as marked by white trails as they were prior to the state law.
Here’s a smattering of irate posts on X in the two months since the state law went into effect:
— “Yes, the spraying has taken place every single day since the Ban was put in place!”
— “The invasion continues. Florida skies are under constant attack.”
— “DeSantis, why do you lie? Why do you say that you signed a Florida Bill getting rid of these hideous chemtrails, and it is all a fat big LIE?”
— “Welcome to Florida, the chemtrails state. Now we are being sprayed from 4 a.m. to 5 a.m., so by 10 a.m. the skies are cleared but you are breathing heavy metals. Thank you DeSantis.”
— “See how the chemicals are spreading out. Trees are dying, crops are barely growing. Why is our government doing this to us?”
By humoring Florida’s free-dumb coalition on chemtrails, state lawmakers have unleashed a tornado of disappointment upon themselves.

While not precisely the same, there is a lesson here about trying to give anti-immigration zealots something you can't give them. They don't want cuts to illegal immigration or even legal immigration.
They want you to send them all back again, and if you can't provide that, they won't be happy. They will vote for the people who they think might.
Stop negotiating with the imaginary Reasonable Republican in your head, imagining that surely this compromise will appeal to them, because it's very sensible. Reasonable Republicans don't exist, and they haven't agreed to your compromise.

Here in Canada, we may still have "reasonable" Conservatives, but they're an increasingly endangered species.