Canada Day has come and gone. It's back to bursting bubbles.
This blog is largely about bursting bubbles—sifting through paradigms to identify the premises they are based on. Next, those premises themselves are examined. The premises on which the paradigm is based are deconstructed to see if they hold water—a process I call deduction deconstruction. If they don't, the paradigms themselves are exposed as false—the bubble bursts. Here is an example:
A paradigm that justifies the need for increased defense spending is based on perceived threats to national security. Issues of national security are considered sacrosanct—inviolable, not negotiable. No one is more aware of this than Trump. He frames almost all of his policies as responses to national security threats: immigration, the need to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland, forcing Canada to strengthen its borders, the need to bomb Iran, and so on. This is also the justification for his demands that all NATO members increase their defense spending to 5% of their GDP. This argument is based on the premise that Russia poses a national security threat to NATO members. This conclusion—this deduction—is based on Russia's de facto invasion of Ukraine.
But if we deconstruct that deduction, we find that Russia would be impossibly overextended if it tried to invade another NATO country in the next ten years or so. The invoked Russia threat doesn't hold water. The possibility of China representing a military threat to national security is even less convincing. While China's economic development model does indeed pose a threat to US unipolar hegemony in the current world order, that should not be misconstrued as a military threat, and it cannot be properly addressed militarily.
Furthermore, why are national security issues considered more sacrosanct than the environmental crisis? Than the affordability crisis? Than the refugee crisis? Than the housing crisis? Are there not national, global, and environmental existential threats that are at least as great, if not greater, than the overstated military threats used to justify increased defense spending?
Thus, by sifting through the paradigm and deconstructing the deduction/premise that a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars increase in defense spending is necessary, it is revealed as bogus. That bubble bursts.
The following are replacement links to the now-broken links to my 2025 blog posts -broken after I shortened both the name of the blog itself and the corresponding URLs to my posts:
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