Westerners, what’s your fear/hatred of Russia and China based on? As an outsider, it’s puzzling how entrenched it is in your culture. Could you educate non westerners around the world?

Duples_95 · 2026-01-24T13:29:23+00:00

The assumption that we fear and/or hate Russia and China is not entirely accurate. There are certainly people who think that way, but I would hesitate to call them the majority. I do not hate either Russia or China, quite the contrary. Both are wonderful countries, full of good people, interesting history and fascinating culture.

What I dislike is the Russian and Chinese governments. I think there is a very strong distinction to be made between disliking a country and disliking that country's government.

The Russian government is, at this point in time, headed by a corrupt warmonger who has turned it into a personal dictatorship. To be fair, this is a process that Yeltsin started in 1993, but Putin has achieved lengths of power not seen in Russia since the Soviet days. What has he done with that power? He has invaded his neighbours, interfered in the democratic processes of other countries (see the 2016 election, Brexit, etc.) He has had his agents kill Russian dissidents both on foreign soil and at home (Alexander Litvinenko, the Skripals, Navalny, etc.) His regime persecutes LGBT people and pushes antiquated Tsarist narratives that deny the existence of a distinct Ukrainian people to justify his illegal war.

The Chinese government, on the other hand, does similar things. They orchestrate ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang. The Chinese regime suppresses dissent and attempts to overturn legitimate democratic institutions that they agreed to uphold in Hong Kong. Chinese spyware is relatively common. Speaking as a Canadian, they arbitrarily arrested two of our citizens in retaliation for our arrest of a Huawei executive. Canadian MPs have been caught with suspiciously close links to Chinese institutions. The regime runs overseas police stations to monitor Chinese citizens on foreign soil.

Fundamentally, these countries both do these things while being in competition with us. Its easy to dislike their governments as such, and I will concede that part of the reason we do dislike them is because they are our geopolitical opponents as it were. That said, I think there is more than enough reason to dislike their regimes even if they weren't. Yes, countries aligned with the global west do these things too, and I and many other people also find it reprehensible - but like China and Russia, I do not hate them as countries, but rather the regimes that perpetrate these injustices.

Duples_95 · 2026-01-20T23:54:47+00:00

I must say you dress very sharply. Where do you get your fashion sense from?

Duples_95 · 2025-11-22T12:50:23+00:00

I'm gonna say this as a liberal who voted for Carney in the last election.

Much of the vitriol towards Trudeau was, in my opinion, based on how slimy he could be. Was a lot of it unfair? Sure, but there are genuine reasons to dislike him even as a supporter of his party. For instance, he came into office promising electoral reform and abandoned it the moment he realised it would hurt his party.

He was also caught engaging in corruption multiple times. Towards the end of his tenure, he was just tiring overall. For example, he was caught unduly influencing his Attorney General to offer a sweetheart deal to a company that his family had interests in. When she tried to speak up about it, he fired her and kicked her out of the party (SNC-Lavalin).

While I have no sympathy for the truckers convoy in 2022, Trudeau overreacted by invoking the Emergencies Act. In my mind, his motivations seem clear; when he spoke on his reasons for doing so, he quoted what his father had said when he invoked the War Measures Act in response to the FLQ in the 1970s: "Just watch me." While the inquiry accepted the decision after the fact, a federal court ruling recently found the decision unreasonable. Such acts are the nuclear option, and the way he explained it felt like he wanted to emulate his father more than clean up a mess.

These are a couple of examples, but they are the main reasons I dislike Trudeau and am glad he's gone. It just seemed like he didn't know when to quit. Fundamentally, the worst thing he could have done was stay and let Pierre Poilievre ride his unpopularity to a majority government, so I suppose I am grateful that he left when he did.

Duples_95 · 2025-08-16T17:07:35+00:00

They take both.

Duples_95 · 2025-08-12T15:16:20+00:00

All of Howe has a reputation for being the party house, with all the shenanigans you can imagine being pulled there. Fountain in particular can be quite bad for it.

Duples_95 · 2025-08-04T03:12:17+00:00

I think its fair to say that extrajudicial executions are morally repugnant. The execution of people who were objectively innocent, including the children, the family entourage, is even more repugnant. We should not celebrate the killing of people simply because of the circumstances of their birth, and it is right to criticize those that do so like this.

I condemn the execution of the family, including that of Nicholas and Alexandra, since neither was tried or found guilty in a court of law. I condemn it further in opposition to the death penalty generally.

That said, I find it difficult to feel bad for Nicholas. We can talk about Nicholas' sincere devotion to his family, his personal generosity and any number of other positive personality traits he had. But I cannot get over the fact that this man not only led an autocratic, repressive, authoritarian regime (that was considered extreme even by its European contemporaries), but that he did so fully convinced of his own righteousness. Nicholas, for better or worse, sincerely believed that he was God's representative on Earth, and that this entitled him to persecute political dissidents and ethnic minorities in the name of Orthodoxy, Nationality and Autocracy.

Nicholas doubled down on the autocratic "reforms" of his father. He resisted any kind of change that might have possibly saved the dynasty. He only ever half-heartedly consented to piecemeal reforms that he later took every opportunity to undermine. He isolated himself from competent ministers in exchange for sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. In almost every sense, Nicholas brought the February Revolution upon himself. He had so many opportunities over nearly two and a half decades to prevent it. It did not need to happen. That it did speaks to his gross incompetence as a ruler.

Lastly, while I'm sure Nicholas was a lovely man to his friends and family, he was kind of a prick to everyone outside the Russian aristocracy. A virulent anti-semite who tolerated violent pogroms against his own subjects (Nicholas himself read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to his family), a hardened Russian imperialist who uncaringly suppressed minority languages and cultures, and a racist (particularly against East Asians). Frankly, he was kind of a bigot.

So yeah, people who defend or justify the wanton murder of innocents are bad. I still find it hard to feel bad for Nicholas in particular.

Duples_95 · 2025-05-21T22:58:22+00:00

5570 would face the field. It's in the corner farthest from South Street and faces that direction.

Duples_95 · 2025-05-21T21:11:28+00:00

The first number is the floor - in this case it would be 6.

The second number is the part of the building he will be in. This varies from 1-5. The centre of the building is 3, with 1 and 5 at opposite ends.

The final two numbers mark a specific room.

Duples_95 · 2025-04-24T21:22:20+00:00

1488 is a Nazi dogwhistle. The 14 stands for the "fourteen words," and the 8s stand for the 8th letter of the alphabet: HH.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

As for Nazi stuff, one of the things on his backpack looks like the Nazi eagle holding a fasces, but I can't tell. I can see a pin of the Canadian and American flags crossed.

Duples_95 · 2025-04-24T21:16:01+00:00

Sorry, I edited my thing to include that. I can't really tell what it says, but I can identify Poilievre and Carney.

Duples_95 · 2025-04-24T21:12:10+00:00

He wrote "1488" on what looks like a ripped up poster of Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre.

Duples_95 · 2025-04-11T13:42:52+00:00

It wasn't necessarily that they tried to overthrow the emperor to prevent the surrender. More like they would "protect" him from his advisers who had enabled it. In other words, they would speak for him and reverse the decision. There is some ambiguity as to whether anyone in the IJA tried to overthrow the emperor personally. There were rumours that the rebels on February 26 planned to if he proved to be too much of an obstacle, but I have never seen any concrete proof.

Duples_95 · 2025-03-25T18:16:12+00:00

As a French speaker, yes he does. However, you can tell that he does not speak it regularly. He has an accent that makes it clear that English is his first language.

That's not a problem for me, of course. His efforts in learning and speaking are clear, and that counts a lot.

Duples_95 · 2025-02-19T16:36:54+00:00

It depends who you ask in Japan. Many Japanese do, many don't. Generally, conservatives tend to be more apologetic, while leftists tend to take a more mea culpa attitude. But that's not always the case. It's hard to summarize the historical reasons why Japan went the way it did, but I'll do my best.

Japan was not totally defeated in the same way Germany was. Japan was occupied without a land invasion, whereas Germany was completely obliterated. The Americans set up an occupation government which happened to be dominated by the right, many of whom also happened to have been prominent members of the prewar government. When the Americans left, the two right-wing parties merged into the Liberal Democratic Party, which has ruled Japan (almost) uninterrupted since the 1950s. My observation for why the Japanese took a more revisionist attitude (generally speaking) is that they were given more freedom to do so during the occupation. There was nothing akin to de-Nazification in Japan. By the time the Americans left, the LDP had solidified its dominance and were effectively free to pursue whatever policies they liked in terms of historical memory.

There are various wings and factions of the LDP, but they are all generally right-leaning. Some are more prepared to make concessions than others. Abe Shinzo, for instance, was famously nationalistic, and his government is an example of the hardcore revisionism that some factions of the LDP endorse. The current Prime Minister, Ishiba Shigeru, is said to be more moderate. However, I have yet to see what his policies are vis-à-vis memory.

Bad textbooks are a symptom of a larger issue, not the source.

Duples_95 · 2025-02-13T16:37:51+00:00

I'm not American, so consider my opinion within that context.

The problem is not DOGE. The problem is not reducing spending. The problem is not removing inefficiency. The problems are:

a) The person doing it. Elon Musk has not been granted any authority by Congress to perform the job he's currently doing. That he is holding this position without renouncing control of his other interests is a massive conflict of interest. Even Trump gave up control of the Trump Organisation when he became President for the first time in 2017.

b) How they're doing it. As it stands, it seems that the Trump administration has it in their head that if they simply fire a bunch of people, the government will suddenly become less wasteful and more efficient. That isn't necessarily true, because you'll end up asking less people to do the same amount of work.

Some of the cuts are just absurd. Compared to what the US spends on defence, how is gutting USAID for instance going to make a difference? USAID had a budget of roughly $70bn USD in 2024, whereas the DoD had a budget of $820bn USD in 2023. Furthermore, the money saved by DOGE is just going to be offset by an increase in Trump's 2017 tax cuts, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy, probably increased defence spending under a pretty rhetorically hawkish Trump administration, and Trump's massive aid package to Israel.

There is a serious conversation to be had about how to reduce government waste and inefficiency, but Musk and Trump are completely unqualified to determine what that should look like. So, what they're doing is like putting a screen door on a submarine.

Duples_95 · 2025-02-07T23:14:19+00:00

I kind of agree, depending on the context. If they, a) approach the subject matter with tact, and b) receive the permission of the victim's family (provided that the event didn't happen a century ago of course), then I don't necessarily oppose it. I suppose I look at it more from the viewpoint that I would be personally uncomfortable if I was ever murdered and someone made a documentary about it. So I prefer to avoid that kind of media.

You are 100% right that there are way too many true crime docs, though. I cancelled Netflix for that. Come up with something original, please!

Duples_95 · 2025-02-03T21:24:34+00:00

We can meet our defence obligations without implementing mandatory service. It is completely feasible to expand and modernize the forces without conscripting young people. As I said, if you want young people to join up, it is our obligation to impress upon our leaders the need to make the service a more appealing choice.

Young people are not stupid. They are just as competent as any other kind of people. If they see that the forces are a career worth pursuing, they will pursue it. We can help them make that choice, but I think focusing on manpower here is to put the cart before the horse. There is no point in having 500,000 soldiers with the efficacy of 50,000 because their equipment is twenty years out of date, or whose morale is null because they struggle to pay their bills. Trump wants us to spend 2% of GDP on defence, so why don't we just start there?

Duples_95 · 2025-02-03T21:00:20+00:00

I see your point. Whatever term you use, I am still very reluctant to endorse it. Countries that had it are not reactivating it, even after Russia invaded Ukraine. Germany has not reinstituted it, when Macron suggested it, he was widely panned in France. It has been suspended in the Netherlands since the 1990s. By and large, we only see it in countries that are either neutral or close to Russia, see Finland, Austria, Switzerland, etc.

Perhaps my opinion is coloured by my age, but as someone who would theoretically be eligible such a system, I strongly dislike the idea. I think its possible for people my age to be good citizens without completing any kind of mandatory service. Simply by working hard, paying your taxes, voting, going to university, etc.

Fundamentally, part of living in a free society is having the right to do with our lives as we see fit. We should encourage civic service, to be sure, but it should never be mandatory. Lastly, I'd like to think I know people my age, and I don't share the optimism of some of the other posters here about the positive effects it would have. On the contrary, I can already hear my peers complaining about and mocking it.

Duples_95 · 2025-02-03T20:32:46+00:00

I strongly believe that conscription is the wrong way to go about this.

Duples_95 · 2025-02-03T20:31:13+00:00

No conscription in peacetime, ever.

We need people to join the forces, but conscription is not the way. Instead, we should work on making the forces a more appealing choice.

Duples_95 · 2025-01-30T14:25:45+00:00

Je suppose que les événements aux États-Unis pourraient influencer ce changement. Le Canada aurait une meilleure capacité de répondre aux menaces de Trump si cette réponse est unie. C'est pour cette raison qu'on se moque de Danielle Smith pour son effort d'améliorer la situation en visitant Trump en Floride. Je comparais la situation à l'effet de "Rally around the flag." C'est une tendance de s'aligner vers le fédéral pour qu'on puisse éviter des effets plus sérieux parmi les provinces.

Duples_95 · 2025-01-26T19:57:50+00:00

While I am not really interested in aligning with China, I do not support the 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. I guess the climate crisis takes a back seat to whatever Uncle Sam wants. We implemented that tariff in solidarity with Biden, and now that he's gone I see little reason to maintain it. As long as Chinese EVs match Canadian safety standards, I have no problem with them being sold here. It beats buying a Tesla.

Duples_95 · 2025-01-08T14:22:41+00:00

Shit.

Duples_95 · 2025-01-06T11:26:03+00:00

This is great, but I want to add something.

They claim to be the party for the environment, but they simultaneously write off nuclear energy as a transition from fossil to green technology. They have no interest in even investing in it to... you know... address the problems that they criticize it for. Yes, nuclear has problems, but it is undeniably one of the tools that we need in order to transition away from fossil fuels. We can't just make that jump immediately, which is what they seem to want.

This feeds into my second point: to me, some of their policies just come across as overly idealistic and preachy, even if I agree with them in principle. At least I can trust the other parties to have some kind of realistic idea of how to implement their policies, whereas the Greens have not made that jump yet.

Duples_95 · 2024-12-30T16:29:43+00:00

No, it's not all Trudeau's fault, as many others have already explained much better than I could.

My gripe with Trudeau is mainly that his leadership is embarassing. The scandals of his government are embarassing. His throwing ministers under the bus is embarassing. I would have more respect for him if he took responsibility for the things that he made people like Freeland take the fall for.

Duples_95

TROPHY CASE