OODA, dammit

Habit is what you do when you have no time to think.  (Usually because it's what you would do anyway, but the stress version might just be because this is NOT what you usually do so your brain shorts out and provides an unconsidered behaviour.)

This is where the concept of "pressure" in a tactical situation comes from; you want to have the other side too busy to think, because if they're too busy to think, they're going to do something predictable, and if they're predictable you can plan and deploy a counter, sometimes before you start applying the pressure.

All this stuff about immigration?  Total bullshit.  Neither the president, nor Andrew Scheer, care about immigration.  They care about ethnic cleansing.  The tactical objective is to guarantee white supremacy[0] through a mix of deportation and vote suppression[1].  White supremacy is both a moral system and a loot-sharing mechanism.  Like any other such thing, it gets copies of itself into the future by convincing people that its rules benefit them, and like any other such system it's in competition with all the other possible systems to deliver material benefits.

(Note that the original conditions for white supremacy -- the great European colonial surge on the basis of sailcloth, flintlocks, cannon, and protestantism -- no longer apply, and the material benefits are now all marginal and structural; preferential hiring and wages and such.  Systems under that kind of stress generally become more extreme, to preserve the appearance of the conditions which created them and render them emotionally plausible.)

The current Western system is certain to collapse; climate change isn't going to leave anything standing.  This is not a distant concern.  (Scheer probably knows this.  Trump doesn't.)

So the strategic objective, the thing you do to establish your prefered social system, is what?  Well, presently, the American right are trying to legitimize chattel slavery and they're trying to legitimize genocide, because they've got a nightmare involving millions of Mexicans moving north to find some place they can survive the summer.  The best idea they've got is mass graves.  Pretty much pure Confederacy. (In oh so many ways.  Go read Grant's memoirs if you never have.  They're instructive.  And think about what it says about someone's competence if what they want is the Confederacy.)

Canada has three short-term structural problems -- our economy is too small for the amount of foreign capital trying to hide here; we've got a intractable structural political problem with getting off fossil carbon; wages have been too low for a generation -- and two massive long-term problems; agriculture is going to fail and none of our infrastructure is intended to function in the time of angry weather.

Our "immigration" problem, from the right, is being unable to complete the native genocide so it's harder than people would like to build pipelines and extract bitumen and create vast open-pit mines.  It's having too many people -- that is, visibly frequent -- who aren't easily sunburned, and it's having to acknowledge that the rules as we had them and mostly still have them presuppose a prescriptive culture norm which does not presently apply.  This aligns the Canadians who wish to see white supremacy continue (because they think it's right and they profit from it) with the American right, despite some significant cultural differences.  (Monarchy.  Different myths, notably the lack of a benevolent plantation owner.)

Our real immigration problem?  integrating incomers into the economy with full opportunity; there are very very good reasons why, when we're economically dependent on immigration, to want to get rid of white supremacy.  It makes the essential work of setting up a borders-of-propriety social system in which everyone willing to stay inside the social borders can have a full share something with a strong economic driver.  (Yes, this is hard; there's five thousand years of autocratic and aristocratic norms clogging up everybody's thinking.  Lester and Pierre could contemplate this because as individuals they didn't have meaningful personal insecurities about their competence; that didn't magically grant an understanding of how to do it, and the right hates it because it's an offense before god, pretty literally as they construct god.  It's hard work and we haven't done it especially well.)

When agriculture breaks, three things happen; food is short[2], so we're going to suddenly feel like fewer people is better, the existing economy craters past recovery, and Anglo NorAm starts to experience mass folk migrations.  (Who will likely still have access to motorized vehicles; "there are the first of a couple million dessicated Kansans at the Peace Bridge" values of folk migration.)

Traditional, Code-of-Hammurabi, aristocratic/imperial answer; kill or enslave.  If you lose the battle, settle them into presently unused farmland.

We're not going to be in a position to win the battle, and we're not going to have any farmland.  (We might have some intermittently productive pastoral grasslands.  Regular crops?  Not these thousand years.)

So we had better have a local food supply (no, I don't know what combination of greenhouses, vertical farming, and the unholy automated offspring of a grow op in a submarine is going to work, but if nothing works humans go extinct, so postulate some working approach), and we better have a local industrial base able to replicate the mechanism of that food supply in quantity at speed (with any luck we can do this fast enough that we don't get the folk migrations) without resort to fossil carbon, and we better have a deeply-ingrained habit of saying "you want to be Canadian? THESE ARE THE RULES" and then actually doing it, even though their deme has perverse personal customs like treating handegg, rather than hockey, as sacred rituals.  (I recommend to you all the custom of consider the hijab a variety of hat.)

If we want that for certain, we needed to be getting started around 1980.  If we want a shot at it, we need to get started now.

That's not saying we need to be oblivious to the tactical atrocities of the right; that's saying we need to emotionally accept that the options are mass death, probably to the point of human extinction (general agricultural failure is not something you can recover from afterwards) or a big conscious cultural shift into unknown territory so we can have the system that might work[3] in the no good, awful, wretched bad future we're getting.  And in which we're going to need an amazing amount of work done and a whole bunch of people to do it, because automation has very sharp limitations of known design.

We can get there; we can't get there with business as usual, this social hierarchy, or the rich staying rich.


[0] business-as-usual-to-sustain-prosperity, the Federal Liberal/Trudeau position, is a passive support of white supremacy and the ongoing passive genocide of First Nations.  It's preferable to active genocide but this should not be understood as a positive trait.

[1] Canada remains very, very white, and doesn't have much stress along this axis.  This should not be understood as evidence that we'd do better with it.

[2] lots and lots of people die; maybe everybody dies.  Maybe we get desperate warfare leading to the destruction of everything, or maybe we get people driving as far as they can looking for food.  Or maybe we managed to plan ahead and build enough alternative non-agricultural production.

[3] there can be no rich people in such a system; it might use market mechanisms, but the "I have a lot of money so I get what I want" version of a control system isn't effective and we're not going to have the margin to tolerate it.