…This sordid tale adds further weighty credibility to the Canadian government’s public claim that there was Indian official involvement in the murder of Mr. Nijjar, a claim that the Indian government has strenuously denied. The Indian government response had a ring of protesting (way) too much. New Delhi then reacted by creating a freeze in diplomatic relations with Canada, expelling a large number of Canadian diplomats from India, suspending visa applications for a time, and suggesting Canada had failed to provide the Indian government with any material evidence of a supposed plot involving Mr. Nijjar.

In response to the unsealing of the US indictment, the Indian government has now pivoted to announce that it has created a “high level inquiry” into the matter. That is more of a concession than the Canadian government was able to obtain, but it also shifts the focus onto the higher plane of India-US relations….

Now I’m waiting for all the apologetic tweets from all the Canadian right-wingers who were so quick to take Trudeau to task for insulting poor Modi …guys? ….I’m waiting… (crickets)

We shouldn’t forget that PM Trudeau first sent Foreign Affairs minister to India weeks earlier to enlist their investigation cooperation & in quiet diplomatic way say unacceptable. India ignored the request (unsurprising in regard to current information) & abused PM & Canada. https://t.co/nZZ8xOn5BH

— Fiona Kenny (@fionakennyantiq) November 29, 2023

Worth remembering that prominent Canadian pundits echoed Modi’s talking point on this issue just a few weeks ago, motivated by their hatred of Trudeau and ignorance of India. https://t.co/lSckKFc3Xf pic.twitter.com/nA95MIxehE

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 30, 2023

And Poilievre keep stepping on rakes…

Poilievre’s very bad week last week, continues to be bad this week. He owes @JustinTrudeau an apology for saying in a presser about the India story to “come clean” as though Trudeau was hiding something and not being honest about this ⤵️ https://t.co/CMVkTFT4ls pic.twitter.com/TYJHYAjB3r

— Kathryn Mathias (@KathrynMathias1) November 29, 2023

And well, well, well…Trudeau was right about the Online News Act, too:

Well that’s weird…so many people on here told me this was impossible and that c-18 was going to be dead on arrival. Will be interesting to see if Google sets the Canadian parameters as their benchmark for other soon to be regulated markets like the UKhttps://t.co/oeaDot9ku4

— Supriya Dwivedi (@supriyadwivedi) November 29, 2023

🚨UPDATE Google & the Canadian gov’t have struck a deal just weeks before the #OnlineNewsAct is set to go into effect.

Google will pay “in the range of $100 million” annually to news companies, adjusted for inflation.

Here’s our take… 1/4https://t.co/2kdhiRYmBY https://t.co/fejcEHaDpI

— Center for Journalism & Liberty (@CJL4News) November 29, 2023

If Justin Trudeau finds himself celebrating a political comeback for the ages at some point in 2025, he’ll probably look back to this past week as the point where it began. It won’t show up yet in the polls, which still have Trudeau’s Liberals well behind Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada. But for the first time in a long time, Trudeau and his team have a fighting chance.

That’s because, on two separate occasions, Poilievre exposed a weakness in his otherwise formidable political armour that they could — and should — exploit. On Tuesday, Poilievre and his caucus decided to vote against a free trade deal between Ukraine and Canada on second reading because, it seems, the deal includes a line indicating mutual support for carbon pricing and the need to avoid so-called “carbon leakage.” …

Ukraine already has a carbon tax, though, and it’s been in place since 2011. More to the point, it will almost certainly have to increase that price on carbon if it wants to join the European Union…

This sort of allergic response to the very mention of carbon pricing might play well with Poilievre’s Prairie base, but it’s a much tougher sell for the more moderate central Canadian voters he needs to actually win an election. So, too, was his reflexive reaction to Wednesday’s fatal car crash at the U.S.-Canada border, and his subsequent refusal to back down after more facts came to light.

…Instead, he went on a meandering and mean-spirited tirade against a Canadian Press reporter who asked him about his comments, clearly channelling the same churlish energy he displayed in that now (in)famous video in the apple orchard. This was the Poilievre id on full display, stripped of the image makeover gurus and slick advertising campaigns. It was the Poilievre the Liberals ought to spend the next two years trying to draw out. And if Thursday’s press conference was any indication, it won’t be that difficult to do.

Yes, this latest confrontation with a journalist will surely delight his online army of angry young men. But as Postmedia columnist John Ivison noted, “He could lose this thing if he keeps behaving like this.”…

In his newest post Silver Bullets And Sudden Changes On Poilievre And What Matters Evan Scrimshaw says Liberal polls are improving but so what – because we can’t know which issues might  disappear and which might turn out to be critical two years from now.  But he notes that regardless of the issues, the CPC still has a serious problem on its hands:

Scrimshaw continues:

…Poilievre is making his life harder than it needs to be by refusing to do very basic shit. Poilievre has made two tactical decisions to double down in the last week that probably won’t end up mattering too much, but might. It’s not a good thing to piss the media off as a pure matter of self preservation, and it’s not a good thing to let the Government paint you as insufficiently committed to Ukraine. These things might not matter now when people are feeling a lot of pain, but if the government goes into 2025 with a few rate cuts and better economic sentiment, then it’s probably not gonna help to have thrown a petulant temper tantrum against a trade deal Ukraine supports.

We are all poisoned by social media at this point, but the rush to identify a silver bullet has to stop. Things can matter even if they don’t instantly reverse a Nanos poll, and Poilievre’s week was still a disaster. Anyone ignoring what Poilievre put on display last week ignores his greatest liability – and that liability will still exist even if you wish it away.

Moving on, here’s an interesting piece at Bug-Eyed and Shameless by Justin Ling The Cult Around the Corner Conspiracy movements are splitting off into smaller, local, more isolated units. Uh oh. where he observes this interesting phenomenon:

…some conspiracy theorists are hitting the road and heading for the country. Whether they’re converging on an empty field outside Ottawa, setting up a neo-Nazi training camp in Maine, taking over a city council in Washington, or seizing an empty school in Saskatchewan: These movements are looking to create their own communities. That might be bad news for the rest of us.

It’s an old story. A movement rises, rises, rises: And sharply plateaus. Its adherents, once convinced of their own universal appeal, suddenly find that their particular brand of politics, spiritualism, moralism, or paranoia is of limited interest to the rest of the world. Many blame some combination of the media, government, deep state, and/or the public’s innate stupidity.

At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes about Elon Musk’s Big Pivot and gives a succinct definition of those bizarre new belief systems now used by our multi-millionaire Internet Overlords to justify why they think they deserve to make so much money — they’re called effective altruism, modern rationalism, neoreactionarism, and effective accelerationism:

In 2009, a blogger, catgirl connoisseur, and Harry Potter fanfic writer named Eliezer Yudkowsky launched a site called LessWrong. It is ostensibly a place to argue about artificial intelligence, but through those arguments, several internet-native philosophies were born. The main one is modern rationalism, but other notable ones include the dark enlightenment, or neoreactionaryism, which is a type of anti-democractic techno-feudalism supported by folks like Steve Bannon. LessWrong also birthed the aforementioned effective altruism, the most famous supporter of which is crypto fail-king Sam Bankman-Fried. Elon Musk also now claims to be an effective altruist, but I don’t think he actually believes in anything. The main idea behind effective altruism is that long-term human happiness can be solved by maximizing capital.

Over the last decade, more and more effective altruists have inserted themselves in positions of power in Silicon Valley and, recently, a very small protest movement against this group has begun to spread, mainly as a meme. Which is effective accelerationism. Contrary to what you will be no doubt reading in the press in the coming weeks, these groups are not opposites in any way. The accelerationists want the same thing as the altruists, and also agree with them that AI superintelligences are coming and that capitalism is fucking sick. The accelerationists just want them to arrive as fast as possible and to smash society to bits in the process.

Oh, great. Another overlord heard from.