Emily (she/her)

It’s weird you think China is some kind of gotcha, because if the best the Canadian government could do in the unlikely future where “China is parked on [Australia’s] coastline” is a symbolic gesture that hurts its own citizens, I would rather you wouldn’t. So again, why do you expect us to damage our own economy for the sake of a symbolic gesture?

Trump does not understand or respect symbolic gestures in trade/deals, and you’re complaining that we won’t make one at our significant detriment. Considering you and Mexico are the biggest importers from the United States, well targeted retaliatory tariffs have a real chance of hurting the US and enacting change. We import 10 times fewer goods (20 times if you include Mexico) and have a 2:1 trade deficit, so we don’t have the power to significantly affect the US in the same way you do, and our treasury has made it pretty clear we’d probably be the only ones hurt by such a policy.

We have better, actually effective ways to enact change (i.e. threatening Pine Gap, AUKUS, etc). So why do you expect us to damage our own economy for the sake of a symbolic gesture?

It’s not our responsibility to damage our own economy for an empty symbolic gesture

We’re not retaliating with tariffs because nearly every mainstream economist has advised against it, including our own Treasury. Here’s the quote from Steven Kennedy, treasury head, at a Senate estimates hearing on 26 February:

For a medium-sized economy such as Australia, there is overwhelming evidence that the use of trade restrictions imposes costs on our consumers and businesses… If Australia were to impose tariffs, we would bear nearly all the cost, given our size and inability to affect the world prices of the goods we import.

We would be shooting ourselves in the foot for the sake of what would essentially amount to little more than a symbolic gesture. We have other, more effective cards beyond tariffs.

Again, it was a Washington Times article, not Post. The Washington Post was not linked because neither Trump nor Snopes cited them. Likewise, whether or not the “stuff on yahoo” that “seems like ai slop” to you doesn’t change whether it is AI authored (it isn’t, it was written by a human working at Snopes and posted to Snopes) nor whether it is accurate (it is). Trump did post the article with the image in question to his Truth Social account on March 9, 2025.

The discussion raised by people in this thread is not about the content of the linked Washington Times article, it is about the fact that the president of the United States is using iconography developed by the Nazis in the same manner as the Nazis. That said, to take the obvious bait you’ve set up, we’ve seen how ineffective both Russia and North Korea’s army are. They are clearly a poor model for a well run and organised army, regardless of their supposedly “masculine strength”. I also reject your claim that strength is a purely masculine trait. The US has had a (if begrudgingly) diverse military for as long as it has been a global superpower. Gay people, trans people, people of color, and more recently women have been contributing successfully to that strength for longer than you or I have been alive. Many of those groups are typically cast as non masculine, yet clearly display great strength.

I’m not going to be responding to you any further, I don’t really feel like you’re engaging in good faith.

It’s a Washington Times op, not the Washington Post. It is not an “ai slop yahoo article”, but Snopes article aggregated on Yahoo News.

Like you’re trying to attack the credibility of these criticisms while seemingly being completely unaware of who wrote them or who they’re responding to.

Context no longer seems to matter to them, so it shouldn’t to anyone else when discussing things like this. Pass it around.

Ignoring necessary context required to correctly understand or interpret even a direct quote while “pass[ing] it around” is extremely deceptive. Exhibit A. In context, it is extremely plausible that Trump was referring to the 2020 election as, by losing it and being eligible to run in 2024, he is now able to oversee the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

We shouldn’t spread something we know to be misinformation or deceptive. Context is important.

What about trans women who transitioned before puberty? What about cis or intersex women with elevated levels of testosterone? What about sports where it has been shown that after a long enough period of medical transition trans people have no significant advantage over their cis counterparts?

You appeal to science yet fail to cite a single source, so let me do it for you:

An individual’s sex does not determine their success or failure at any athletic event despite the high level of competition. This can be demonstrated when looking at not average outcomes, but the level of overlap among outcomes… While sex differences do develop following puberty, many of the sex differences are reduced, if not erased, over time by gender affirming hormone therapy.

Delegate John Dickinson asked a rhetorical question: “Will a virtuous and sensible people chuse villains or fools for their officers?”

Only for the United States, I still see “Gulf of Mexico” in Australia