Sweet Victory - Boring Political PostFollow

I'm actually happy to see this. Not just because Im sick of Stupid Monkey and his poo flinging antics, but because Canada needs more profitable natural resources.. Weed can only get you so far.

Don't forget the plethora of natural gas, hydro electricity, agriculture, evergrowing auto manufacturing sector (more cars are made in Ontario than Michigan dont you know?) also minerals, fish, and bunch of other stuff.

Is it a good thing, yes it is.

My only problem is that Mexico and Canada do tax us on some things as well im pretty sure. But we never tax them on other things do we? Not sure because i don't follow thisclosely enough. But i think i rememebr overhering some old argument that under NAFTA nobody should betaxing ANY trades between us no matter what, and that America has held up to out side, damn well, untill this fuc[b][/b]k up.

WHile Canada and Mexico have all but ignored it. Now i may be completely wrong and who know, like i said i don't follow this very well and i'm pretty sure imwrong anyways, just throwing out something i THINK i heard, haha oh boy.. i can see the flames already..

Ok, the US is basicly ******** that we (the US for me, so when i say we i mean the US because i am a resident here, sorry bhodi) can't get ground troops from Canada.

Thats stupid, to say it bluntly. We started this "War on Terrorism", and we did get help from Canada in quite a bit of our effort. But as soon as they pull ground support, we ***** and moan. Canada is doing plenty of other things to help though, Bhodi has already gone over them. They can still be a great aidto the effort and not combat directly.

We started it, it's OUR responsibility to finish it, even it we don't have the support we would like.

Well the phasing of it would explain alot. Guess it's time for me to go do some research later. For now i'm going to go get some food, then go research it and come back here.

So... hungry..

*edit* FUC[b][/b]K, time to go shopping.

Edited, Mon Aug 15 14:16:31 2005 by Leondol

Varrus, yes somebody attacked us and we faught back, like we should have.

Please let me clarify what i ment, we started the war in Iraq. Bush scared the population to justify going there. The same thing happned with wWrld War 1, scare the people into thinking they are in danger, and you can justify anything. The "problem" is that people think Canada is not helping us in Iraq, they helped us fight back when it was a legitimate "war". But We chose, wrongly so, to go to iraq, and they chose, justly so, to not send their own ground troops into our war.

A quick lesson Leondol, from me to you.

Ignore Varus.

You only look like a fool. He isnt serious in what he writes. You can argue till you are blue in the face and he will only disagree with you and call you a "pinko commie" because in the end he wants the attention and he wants to get a rise out of you.

Nothing is more pathetic and yawn inducing than watching someone get their sh[b][/b]it in a knot over Varus. Unless that person somehow feels they came out on the better end of the "argument", those types should drink a cup of bleach and save the forum a waste of space.

Good news for me?

Since interest rates have plunged in the last few years, home building has gone through the roof in my part of the country. Meanwhile, softwood lumber products (osb ply tji etc) have doubled and tripled in price.

During the lumber mill closings of the 80's most of our plywood producers shut down as well, making Canada the main supplier for ply and softwood products in the northwest. Imposing a tariff has encouraged mill production stateside in a small way, but financial institutions have been slow in coming around to loaning for expansion, due to the past losses in the lumber industry. Our increased ability to produce ply is still far behind the recent growth of the industry, and so Canadian import has only increased.

The prices of lumber have risen more from demand than tariff, but if the tariff drops will the price also drop? Or will companies see possible profit and maintain inflated prices?

Something else possibly disturbing for some, are the many hundreds of thousands of acres of newly planted softwoods stateside. Traveling throughout Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and W. Montana I've seen many farmers changing from annually harvested crops to fast growing cottonwood. Will they realize a huge loss in 15 years because they put their money on the tariff being maintained and a higher price for their lumber? Granted, many soft trees (red alder comes to mind) are nitrogen fixers and will greatly improve soil conditions for whatever crop is planted next so it's not a total loss... but still. A 20 year crop is a hard thing to recover from if a market drops significantly. Or maybe if Canada stops subsidising their end of the market, prices will increase overall.


I'm confused as to why you would bother ranting about this? It was an action in response to Canada subsidising their lagging lumber industry and enabling companies to blue light special their lumber on the US market at no loss to themselves. Old news


Take note that at the time Canada didn't declare the tariff to be unjust, but instead sought a reduced penalty.

Note that the tariffs weren't ever intended as permanent, but only as an economic response.

Why do you think that this was in enacted as a punishment for Canada not going into Iraq?

Due to the lovely media parade of 'mad cow' people around here are generally pissed at hearing of Bush slacking on the Canada beef ban and endangering their hamburgers.

On the lumber industry, the new plantings I have seen for softwoods are not replacing forest, but field. In areas such as the Willamette valley where due to a high water table and poor soil, the money maker has been grass seed. Grass -> cottonwood is a welcome change. In E. Washington it's spuds/onions to trees. It also is a way of lowering taxes in difficult years, as land zoned F2 over 5 acres has no property tax, only income tax from crops.

On the regrowth of cash forests, Alder reseeds itself and grows quickly enough to have dominance in a douglas fir planting for the first 10 years. Most logging outfits here also leave small stands of trees at the peaks of ridges for natural reseeding down the sides of the mountain. Wildlife here is plentiful to the point of overpopulation of cougar.

If the replantings were so genetically weak and succeptible, the timber industry would be in a world of hurt, suffering losses so often. Truth is, the only widespread damage to forests in Oregon in recent years was the japanese beetle that wiped out the national forests is central oregon 10 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin timber killed off in a single season. Loggers may often be redneck ********, but the ones that run the show are smart enough to protect their investments and manage a tree farm prudently.

*edit*
So has Canada ceased to supplement their softwood lumber industry, and now seek removal of the tariff? Or are they attempting to use NAFTA as a means to have their cake and eat it too?

Edited, Mon Aug 15 15:39:26 2005 by Mossholder

Probably have the cake and eat it to.

While I'm not particularly against you bashing Varrus, let me point out that this type of thing is exactly what drives many people *away* from the Left.

There's a topic at hand. Everyone argues the point via a false assumption (Bush put the tarrif in to punish Canada for not participating in the war). Note that until one poster pointed out the actual facts, not a single person questioned the premise. That's what I'm talking about. Make an assumption. Repeat it enough times. Many people will start to believe it. Shift the argument to the next thing (US government is "evil" for fighting a ruling against the tarriff), by building on the initial false assumption and just continuing to push push push...

This is what I'm talking about when I say "Liberal Rhetoric". This is what I'm talking about when I say that many of Liberal arguments are like a house of cards. You guys build up layer upon layer of argument, each based on assumptions, based on assumptions, and you come to so completely assume those assumptions *must be* correct, that it never even occurs to you to check to make sure.

And then. When someone finally does check, and does point out that the initial assumption is false, does anyone go "Gee! We were wrong about that, so this whole line of argument was wrong too..."? Nope. You just shift the "push" to something else.

So you can't keep blaming the US for the tarrif based on the war, so let's just shift to a vaguely stated assumption that they're headed to a military theocracy. No evidence of this of course, but that wont stop you from stating it.


At what point do you stop just shouting assumptions? At what point do you stop building arguments based on innuendo and rhetoric? Sheesh people! This is nuts...

Ok. Fair enough. Then lets say that I get annoyed with such rhetoric based arguments regardless of who's saying them.

But, my observation has been that Liberals do use that form of fallacy far more often then Conservatives. Don't believe me? Do this test:

Flip on some AM presets on your radio station. Set one to the local Conservative talk radio station, and another to the Liberal station (Air America if you've got it in your area). Flip between them sometimes. Ignore *what* they're talking about, and just pay attention to *how* they present the topic. Very consistently, you'll find the Liberal guys using a variety of ad hominum, rhetoric, and assumption based arguments. Very few facts get stated. Almost no logical argument at all. Just data and conclusions, with virtually nothing in between to show how they arrive there. Flip to the conservative guy talking about politics, and almost always it's about a logical analysis of the topic. Admittedly, you'll get the occasional nutjob on both sides, but the proportions are pretty skewed.


Sure. Maybe that's not the best way to test. But you can't just use local news, since no one can agree with "side" they're on. It seems to me that if someone's advertising their talk show as "conservative" or "liberal", that this is likely to be a good sample of not just the opinions, but *why* they hold those views. And the *why* just seems to be sketchy a lot more often from the Liberal side then the Conservative.


I see the same patterns here on this site whenever a political argument comes up. With notable exceptions (Varrus for example), most of the conservatives support their arguments with hard data, and logical argument based on that data. It's scary how often the "liberals" on this board will take an assumption they heard somewhere and that "sounds good", and run with it until someone finally digs out the facts that show their initial assumptions to be totally false. The sheer number of times I've seen someone post a totally off the wall conclusion based on a news article that didn't actually say what they thought it said (but was written in such a way as to make some people arrive at that conclusion) is staggerring.


Don't even get me started on how many times we've had threads in which people deliberately twisted simple semantics in order to imply a meaning not supported by the source they were using. And then attempting to argue that's not what they meant at all! It's astounding.

And the strawman arguments? More then I can count it seems. Heck. 90% of the anti-war argument from the Left is strawman. The entire Wilson/Plame thing is strawman from the get go. The "There were no WMD" is a strawman (we didn't go to war because Iraq possessed WMD, we went to war to prevent them from building them. If you read Bushs' statements in the 2003 SoTU speach, he's very clear on this). 90% of the Guantanamo argument is either strawman, or semantic rhetoric (How many headlines read something like "Guantanamo detainees tortured!" and when you actually read the article, they revealed that they were tortured *before* they arrived at Gitmo). I could go on all day listing off the bizarre and illogical arguments that pass for political discourse from the Left right now.


Am I arguing that conservtives never do the same? Of course not. But virtually every single argument I've heard from the Left in the past year has been based on incredibly illogical BS. Not just a bit illogical. Not just "gee. I don't really agree with the conclusion" type stuff. That I can accept. That's something that can be debated. But what I've been seeing is just blind assumptions passed on, based on not just bad logic, but blatant word twisting and out of context quoting, and in some cases just dreamed up or misplaced ideas. This thread is an example. All the anti-war folks jumping up and down condemning Bush for punishing Canada with a tarrif for not helping with the war. Sure. There was a tarrif, but it had *absolutely nothing to do with the Iraq war*. Where do you think the assumption came from? It's not true. It *can't* be true. No one researching the tarrif can possible have come to that conclusion. So... If there isn't a huge amount of this sort of rhetoric and innuendo going around, why is it that literally every single person in this thread simple assumed it was true. Someone stated it (don't feel like looking it up now). That person heard it from somewhere, right? Where was that? If you don't think this sort of misinformation is spread deliberately from the Liberal talking heads, you are horribly mistaken...