So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: “Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you.” This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.

But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That’s what we’ve done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I’m Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That’s a weird way to punish America! It’s like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says “Ouch!”

And it’s indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.

But there’s a third possible response to tariffs, one that’s just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?

If you’re a technologist or an investor based in a country that’s repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America’s defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company’s shareholders mad.

  • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    Something not often discussed is the possibility that the UK and France might not have been capable of stopping Hitler through military force at that time.

    I mean even later even after building up a bit more, France got curb stomped and the UK barely got out of Dunkirk. And that happened while Germany was occupying Czechoslovakia and part of Poland which took significant military resources from fighting the UK and France. There’s a very real possibility that standing up to Hitler over Czechoslovakia would have gone even worse than standing up to Hitler over Poland. Sure the Soviets might have helped at that time, but their military wasn’t even capable of taking on Finland at that point.

    At any rate at the present time, the world needs to build up it’s military power before standing up to Trump. We’re saying it’s because we’re fulfilling NATO obligations (like Trump told us to!) or getting ready to fight Russia maybe. But military build up is happening but it’s not going to happen overnight.