Flowersignup
No bio...
User ID: 3556
You can actually find plenty of conservative academics https://www.chronicle.com/article/actually-there-are-more-conservatives-on-the-faculty-than-you-think-study-finds https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2023/03/23/conservative_faculty_are_outliers_on_campus_today_110844.html
They're disproportionately left leaning but ~25% being conservative is still pretty meaningful and I simply think you have an absurd view of academia in general if you believe the literal Chinese communists, draconic anti gun and/or anti-male vote crowd would be more common. There might be some very particular fields at a few random colleges where that could be the case, I don't know every single college ever but overall it would be a hard sell to say that anywhere close to 25% of academia is hard open borders or wants whites exterminated.
Edit: You'd also be surprised how much you hear about universities are literally not true. Like that famous story of the professor who said a Chinese word that sounded like a slur being suspended, despite that literally not happening and him being found completely innocent in the internal investigation
After weeks of an internal investigation by USC’s Office for Equity, Equal Opportunity and Title IX (EEO-TIX), however, Patton was found to have acted appropriately, as Garrett announced to students and the rest of the Marshall School community in a September 25 email. The EEO-TIX found that “the concerns expressed by students were sincere,” the dean wrote, “but that Professor Patton’s actions did not violate the university’s policy. They have also communicated this to the professor and he allowed me to share their conclusion with you.
“To be clear, Professor Patton was never suspended nor did his status at Marshall change. He is currently teaching in Marshall’s EMBA program and he will continue his regular teaching schedule next semester.
What happened is that multiple students make a complaint, an investigation occurs (as it should, an investigation is how you find out if a complaint is legitimate or not), Patton willingly steps down from the one class it occured in during the investigation (and most likely to not have to deal with those students anymore), social media people just make up shit (like this inside higher Ed article claiming he was suspended in the title despite literally acknowledging he was not suspended in the body) a.nd they find him completely innocent and he is still teaching to this day.
You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance.
"You misunderstood, it's not DEI for conservatives, it's DEI for conservatives".
Also I skipped around that but you explicitly made it clear to understand that "diversity of thought" really just means conservatives which let's be honest really just means "people with similar idealogical views as Trump" and not say, an American capitalist and a Chinese style communist. If the only "diverse thought" is the thought the Leader agrees with, it doesn't sound like diverse thought to me.
Here's some "witches" you might not like but are broadly unpopular in American society, I guess we need to DEI these views too.
Open borders. Complete abolition of gender. Flat earthers. Men losing the right to vote. Forcibly seizing any and all guns in the US and executing anyone who tries to keep theirs. Mandatory abortions for whites.
If you don't consent to those witches then you're not really in favor of diverse thought. Or maybe idealogy DEI is just retarded.
I don't even understand how exactly viewpoint diversity is supposed to be done? Almost any topic you can think of has a litany of varied views available. Even within something like "pro-life vs pro-choice", does viewpoint diversity mean you need
1: A person who believes in abortion at all times
2: A person who believes in abortion before it can survive outside the womb on its own
3: A person who believes in abortion before it can survive outside the womb with support
4-~22: A person respectively setting their limit at each month.
23: A person who believes in no abortions except for X, Y, Z etc etc exceptions (like rape, severe disease, risk to the mother).
23-29+: A person who believes in any mixture of the exceptions like XY but not Z or YZ but not X.
Whatever number we're at now: A person who believes in no abortions no matter what.
And you might think that sounds silly, but do you think the person who believes "no abortions no matter what" feels properly represented by the "no abortions except if it's rape or risky to the mother or blah blah blah reasons"? No, they wouldn't. Does the person who thinks abortions in the later parts of the second trimester feel represented by the person who says only in the first month? No, they wouldn't.
You have to flatten out viewpoints and beliefs to get anything close to functional, leaving many different views unrepresented.
But even outside of that it's still insane. Some viewpoints are just stupid and wrong. Do we want an economics course to be forced to hire a literal Chinese Marxist to teach Xi Jingping Thought? A German history class to be required to be taught by a Holocaust denier? A biology class led by someone who thinks dinosaurs are a hoax and evolution is a lie?
There's no reason to have DEI for idiots. We shouldn't be censoring well made criticisms or ideas but tons of viewpoints simply don't belong in a serious educational establishment because they're stupid. We don't need viewpoint diversity on if the earth is flat.
Flowersignup
3mo ago
Quite a few possible explanations.
-
NPR fucked up and was talking to people who wouldn't realistically have knowledge of the plans.
-
The officials they used as sources were normally fine but they were making up shit for some reason. Maybe they weren't privy to the particular details or saying stuff on purpose to make trump look bad/make NPR look bad, hard to tell intent there. Hell it could have been said just because it appears some people within the Trump admin are taking advantage of insider knowledge for the stock market.
-
There was an internal plan to move against the ban and that got leaked before anything finalized. Perhaps the sources went to NPR precisely because they wanted to pressure against it.
The problem with anonymous sources being the standard is that it's really hard to tell the difference between a journalist fuck-up, the source being a lying piece of shit, or just internal plans that were decided against.
Flowersignup
3mo ago
Suppose that El Salvador decides he is rightfully imprisoned and doesn't feel like releasing him?
I don't see why that would happen, we have Art of the Deal 4Dchess Trump in charge now. He put an end to the war in Ukraine and Israel in the first day, certainly he can work out a great deal like by doing things like uh, let's see here ...not literally sending Bukele and El Salvador money to keep them locked up.
How far do you think the court can go to mandate foreign policy to effect his return? Economic sanctions? Military blockade? War?
In any rule following administration, they would receive a court order like this and a 9-0 ruling from the SC and make a good faith effort. Like say, the same thing of maybe not continuing to funnel El Salvador money for the explicit purpose of not returning them. The court isn't asking them to do sanctions or war.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
You seem to be missing the point entirely. If they can grab a person and send them off to a foreign prison for life without the system of due process afforded to US citizens to do things like prove they're a citizen in court, then they can grab a citizen and send them off to a foreign prison too because that citizen will simply not be granted the due process they're "supposed" to be owed. And once the citizen is out of the country and in a foreign nation, the government shrugs and says "well we can't do anything, they're elsewhere not here, we made a mistake sending a citizen but oh well"
And they're already making mistakes mixing up citizens with illegal immigrants
It violates the very concept of habeas corpus, a fundamental of modern legal systems. If we can just One Easy Trick around the basic structure of freedom and civil liberty in the country, then we have a major problem.
And it's not like it's a conspiracy theory the Trump admin plans this One Easy Trick on citizens, they literally say they're planning it.
IIRC the correlation between IQ and net worth (roughly proportional to what fraction of the world you rule) is like 0.4; I'd agree that's not very impressive, but if there's a single more significant factor I don't know what it is.
It definitely 100% helps to be intelligent, but net worth isn't really that proportional to the fraction of the world you rule, especially when you exclude the times where someone took power and then used that power to become wealthy. There's been plenty of idiots in powerful positions before (like most of Russian history), there are plenty of idiots in power today and there will be plenty of idiots in the future.
And that's just a special case of animals as a whole. Wild mammals are down to about 4% of mammal biomass now, and that's mostly due to deliberate conservation efforts rather than any remaining conflict. A bit more than a third of biomass is us, another several percent is our pets, and the majority is the animals we raise to eat.
Putting it down to just mammal biomass is misleading IMO, we make up 0.01% of total biomass and 2.5% of animal biomass. https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth
The majority of life on earth are plants, accounting for over 80% and including bacteria it goes up to 95% of life. These are not just dumb, they are (to the best of our knowledge) incapable of thought and yet not only dominate the planet but do so through such an extreme that we can not live without them.
Even the very animals we eat as food are thriving from the perspective of reproduction and evolution. Until humans are gone (or stop eating them for some reason), their survival is all but guaranteed. Happyness might be something we as thinking beings strive for, but not necessary from the biological perspective of spread spread spread. Our pets are very much the same way, they benefit drastically being under the wing of humanity.
An AI might not be in need of humans in the same way, especially as we begin to improve on autonomous movement but human conquest of Earth is not a great example to use IMO. The greatest and smartest intelligence ever will keep us around if we're seen as useful. They'd probably us keep around even if we aren't as long as we don't pose a threat.
once you get to super intelligence it’s theorized you also get recursive self-improvement.
I can definitely see how a super intelligence might be able to build an even better super intelligence, but it seems unlikely there wouldn't be some substantial diminishing returns at some point in the process. And if those happen when it's still within the relative grasp of humans, then conquest by them would be a lot more difficult, just like how smart humans don't actually seem to be ruling the world over dumb humans. That it too could replicate and do so near perfectly helps that (if it was 100 humans vs 100 smarter robots, the robots probably win) but it would have a ways to go to get past the "just nuke the server location lol" phase of losing against dedicated humans.
Flowersignup
3mo ago
PP might not be perfectly Trump aligned but in the question of who would be more accommodating of MAGA idealogy and Trump foreign policy, it's definitely him over Carney.
You said
Scott would characterize the Developer as having lied to the contractor about having the approval, but did they? The planning board did in fact approve the project after all. That the contractor beginning to pour without approval played a major part in the granting of approval is either of vital importance or completely irrelevant depending upon which side of the managerial versus working class divide you are sitting.
I think yes, they did lie. They made a guarantee that they knew had decently high chances of not being true and did not express this to the contractor. Even if we don't label it as lying, it is certainly misleading and it is done so intentionally as most people in good faith understand the contractor to mean "Is the project currently approved?" and playing tricky semantics doesn't absolve the developer of deceit. The developer could simply express the truth "It is not currently approved but I am confident in my ability to get it done and believe the chances would be all but guaranteed if we pour early" if they wished for honesty.
Literally just lying might work fine in business as long as you avoid legal troubles, the same way that stiffing contractors might end up working out perfectly fine if you're the bigger company but proper governing is a different beast entirely. Risk taking like that in real estate just means you might pay for a few fines if the zoning board says no, risk taking in government can mean tons of people lose their jobs, lose their homes, or even die depending on what you're taking a risk for.
And unlike with venues or contractors where there's plenty of fish in the sea so pissing them off isn't too bad, there is not another Canada or UK or EU to turn to. You can poke the bears a little especially with a country as powerful as ours but this is an iterative game and defecting is way less useful. Likewise there's a reason why his measures still have us at -8% from 6 months ago and Polymarket has been hovering around 50% chance of recession, people and the overall market want and need long-term reliability.
Edit: And not even to mention, what are we getting out of it? Even if we settle into a "win" for him on getting high tariffs implemented, there's plenty of strong evidence that it will hurt the economy, reduce downstream jobs that use those inputs, and make us poorer.
Edit2: Also here's a really great example of how this approach seems to be failing, Canada. Everything was lined up for a Conservative victory, it was basically taken as a given. PP would have been really Trump friendly. Instead he rallied the Canadians so hard that the odds have shifted massively and Carney will be elected not just as a liberal party pick, but an anti-Trump pick.
Politics is an iterative game, and defecting so hard with aggression towards Canada has most likely lost him in the long run. And there is no other Canada to turn to, he can't just run off like you could with contractors or venues or city zoning boards. Our closest and friendliest neighbor economically and geographically has been pushed away
what matters is that Trump believed they would, that he was the duly elected head of state, that imposing tariffs was within his legitimate authority, and that he had a majority in the legislature as well.
Limiting the presidency's power was an explicit goal of the founding fathers. They didn't want a system where we elected a single person in a single election to control everything. The entire basis that Trump is even implementing these tariffs under is arguably unconstitutional because the commerce clause explicitly says Congress is the one with the power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".
The entire point is that you don't just win an election and become the ruler, you have to compromise and negotiate with other representatives and obey the court. "Checks and balances" is so fundamental to our system that it's hard to believe so many people shocked Trump has limits haven't heard about it till now.
Even if we accept the argument that they can delegate this power to the executive for "unusual and extraordinary threat" scenarios as the The International Emergency Economic Powers Act wishes to do (which is very arguable on its own considering the constitution doesn't make provision for that), it's hard to see what threat is so unusual and extraordinary to demand a plan like this.
Especially since this threat is apparently "unusual and extraordinary" but also very open to constant delays and personal negotiations. It doesn't sound very pressing if the claimed solution can be delayed for months without any noticeable problems.
Edit: To be even more nitpicky
and that he had a majority in the legislature as well.
The system wasn't designed for party majority to = complete control either. You still have to get the different factions within them to agree. If Trump is unable to rally the Republican majorities in Congress to pass the bills he wants then that's his failing, not the system. "Mandate" is a word used to describe a political phenomenon, not some encoded thing. If Trump does not have the political influence to push Congress using the bully pulpit then he de facto does not have the mandate to do it.
Supporters should be asking themselves why Congress isn't passing Trumpian tariff bills (most likely answer, they have upcoming elections too where they will be accountable to their constituents), rather than complaining about the intentional distribution of power not creating a king out of the executive.
Flowersignup
3mo ago
Well I said high chance of him backing down a significant amount on it and just two days later, proven right https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316609?context=8#context
The de minimis exemption is still scheduled to end on May 2nd, but considering he already tried that in February only to reinstate it, and he then proceeded to delay again in March, https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/de-minimis-canada-mexico-trump-delay/741361/ I'm not holding out for this happening either. Maybe he gets to it and has it up for a few days before folding too but at this point who even knows.
Flowersignup
3mo ago
Well good news, not even that much later and it's already starting with talk of exempting large companies https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-hell-take-look-exempting-some-larger-us-companies-hit-especially-hard-tariffs
It's not some 100% guarantee thing. It's possible he goes through with it, but we also have his whole first term to look at where he also did the same exact thing of threatening tariffs on China only to pull back like what happened with Apple https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/apple-dodges-iphone-tariff-after-trump-confirms-china-trade-agreement.html
He had said over and over again there would be no exemptions only for the exemptions to come. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/26/trump-apple-tariff-waivers-1437284 https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/20/trump-apple-mac-pro-tariff-exemption/
Even if he doesn't drop the tariffs themselves on a technical level, history does suggest there will be meaningful levels of exemptions and workarounds. Most of his actions so far have been to bark really loud and then pull back.
Flowersignup
3mo ago
125% tariffs on all Chinese imports is "scaredy cat" behavior?
If he caves on China then sure, make fun of him all you want.
It doesn't seem like the market believes he will actually follow through given the rally back, and given he's caved multiple times already on other nations (including this recent one) it's a fair expectation when seeing a consistent pattern.
Trump seems to have a legitimate hard-on for tariffs going back decades (as some people point out even most of his 2016 announcement speech was about tariffs and thinking free trade is bad) but he also seems to be a scaredy cat who keeps backing down anytime it causes actual trouble. He's delayed stuff like what, 4-5 times already?
At some point the market is just going to stop reacting because they'll internalize the large majority of tariff threats end up fizzling out. High chance he backs down on China some too, or at least that they allow some obvious workaround like China > Vietnam > US or something.
Edit: And it's already starting https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-hell-take-look-exempting-some-larger-us-companies-hit-especially-hard-tariffs
Flowersignup
3mo ago
The american entertainment industry is a juggernaut, but that comes at the cost of making sanitized slop consumable by the maximum possible audience. On the liberal end of the table, no one is willing to make movies that really push the boundaries of sex and culture-norm violation (gay people holding hands is the tamest shit ever), and on the conservative end of the table we similarly don't have anyone willing to push the boundaries of violence and jingoism.
That's going to be the case for mainstream entertainment pretty much no matter what by definition of being "mainstream entertainment". They're not aiming to be that challenging, they're aiming to appeal to mass markets. Mainstream entertainment isn't going to stop being slop if China stops watching because the average American is still a slop consumer to begin with, yet alone the below average Americans that still have money to spend on the Netflix subscriptions and theater tickets. If anything a lot of modern mainstream media is arguably better compared to the slop of Dance Moms and Real Housewives and Kardashians and Honey BooBoo and shitty reality television from just a decade or two ago.
You want stuff that pushes boundaries you go to the smaller films that actually try to find niche audiences, not the Marvel Movies or Nostalgic Cash-in Remake Of Children's Franchise.
Plus, completely giving up on IP law is the first step in actually re-industrializing the united states. The whole point of IP law is to create monopolies, and monopolies are intrinsically inefficient-- so the western world's respect for IP law is a massive albatross around our neck. In a world without IP law the only thing we lose is the class of parasitic middlemen that can make a living on the bullshit legal fiction that ideas are an asset.
I'd certainly agree we go too far with respecting IP and copyright laws, like Mickey should definitely have been in the public domain way earlier than he was. But if you don't have any protection from copycats then that seems like an issue too. Why spend resources creating new things, especially the risky boundary pushing stuff you wish for, if people can just use any successful thing you make without permission, or at the very least compensation?
Without any protections it seems like success will be defined even more by name recognition and marketing skills rather than genuine creative talent.
I can't figure out to what extent Americans realize how off-putting their rhetoric is for people on the outside.
I don't think that matters to most people and tbf I don't think that matters to me too much, as long as it doesn't interfere in our ability to maintain an American dominated global landscape.
That doesn't mean American controlled and I doubt it will ever mean that. Any attempt to exert too much influence will whittle away the power we do have as people slowly but surely move to alternatives. It's like what happens with the UN in a sense, to have people at the table listening to you necessarily requires concessions else they just leave and you revert back to never having a table (the league of nations). Domination only works as a long term strategy with either tremendous unbreakable strength (maintaining this long term is really difficult as empires throughout history learned) or making others want to be there under your boot.
But I do believe America can be and desire for America to be the main central voice. And as long as we don't push people away too much, we can yell a little and issue some spankings.
Unfortunately Trump does not seem like the kind of person who can drive us into the sweetspot. Especially if things are as dire as he claims, waging trade war on the whole world at once would be especially idiotic. We can only do this sort of nonsense precisely because we dominate the world.
So the White House finally released some demands for lifting the tariffs and it just highlights the economic illiteracy behind their thinking even more. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/2025/04/cea-chairman-steve-miran-hudson-institute-event-remarks/
What the Trump admin seems to think is that other countries work like centralized command economies where he can demand a leader buy more from the US and have the country follow through, rather than individuals and businesses making their own personal purchasing decisions in aggregate.
Even if all trade barriers (including the nonsensical things he includes as trade barriers) are completely gone, there is no easy way for say, Australia to force their businesses to start buying more American made products. They're not a communist nation and unless we want our allies to turn that way, they can't reach down the hands of government and force private business to do so.
First, other countries can accept tariffs on their exports to the United States without retaliation, providing revenue to the U.S. Treasury to finance public goods provision. Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods.
Second, they can stop unfair and harmful trading practices by opening their markets and buying more from America;
Third, they can boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S., buying more U.S.-made goods, and taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here;
Fourth, they can invest in and install factories in America. They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country;
Fifth, they could simply write checks to Treasury that help us finance global public goods.
Ignoring the absolutely laughable "just give us free money" fifth demand and the "just don't fight back" first demand, the only thing that these countries can truly do without going into command economy mode is half of the 3rd demand, increasing defense spending.
It's like they expect the EU, UK, Australia, etc to essentially issue orders from the government forcing their wealthy investors and businessmen to spend their money and resources in the US. Now many of those richer nations might have wealthy investors who want to do so anyway, but what about the poorer nations like Lesotho or Vietnam with barely any capital? They can't suddenly flip around and start buying large amounts of US goods when they can barely even afford their poor lifestyles.
It also shows that good faith tariff negotiations are doomed from the start. They truly believe that trade deficits are being on the "losing end" of trade, and his view of them as centralized command economies slots into that neatly. In the same sense there's a weird attempt to tie in the US account deficits as some major loss, which also serves as evidence they view western economies less like open market economies and more as this weird form of centralized government command economy. Again these are individuals and businesses conducting the trade and any method you take to reduce this requires big government to interfere.
However, that view is at odds with reality. The United States has run current account deficits now for five decades, and these have widened precipitously in recent years, going from about 2% of GDP in the first Trump Administration to a high of nearly 4% of GDP in the Biden Administration2. And this has happened all while the dollar has appreciated, not depreciated!
They also just keep repeating this claim which we already know to be false.
It is important to note here that tariffs are not levied simply to collect revenues. For example, the President’s reciprocal tariffs are designed to address tariff and non-tariff barriers and other forms of cheating like currency manipulation, dumping, and subsidies to gain unfair advantage.
We already know that the reciprocal tariff formula has absolutely nothing to do with trade barriers and is simply the U.S. trade deficit with a country, divided by the value of the goods the U.S. imports from them. Not only that but as many point out, including conservative think tanks, it's not even done correctly.
If you are in a position of strength, it can distort the global economy in your favor. Companies may wish to domicile in your country (especially if you have low corporate income tax rates) in order to access your consumers and/or workforce.
Supply chains will become more intra-national, improving national security.
Only if they're consistent and high enough to be worth moving here and the other markets aren't also using high tariffs. You have to be extremely dominant that international corporations will choose you exclusively over the rest of the world combined and you need some way to assure them that it won't be undone anytime soon.
Just imagine a world where all countries want everything done on their own land and they all enact high tariffs. We'll just have a less efficient system where everyone tries to achieve autarky and then we'll wait for another Adam Smith to come around and tell us all that this is stupid and we should just trade with each other.
If you are in a position of strength, it is a useful foreign policy tool.
How so? The only argument I've seen for this is that you can use it to pressure other nations to do things you want. But the only way it would work as a negotiation tool is if you're willing to lower the tariffs in response, which undermines the first two arguments entirely.
If everyone else is doing tariffs except you, then the economy is already distorted; and implementing reciprocal tariffs may "un-distort" the global economy.
That can be true but in this particular case not very relevant because these tariff plans are not reciprocal despite the claims and also importantly it has the same issue where you should be dropping them if the other nation drops theirs which undermines the first two arguments again.
If you want to raise revenue and you don't fear a trade war, tariffs may have less of an impact on GDP as other methods of taxation (eg, income tax).
This contradicts the first two points again! Generally the more "effective" tariffs are at reducing imports, the less revenue they are capable of generating. And if there are things that absolutely must come from out of the country like crops we can't grow or minerals we don't have then you're just making those super expensive for your population for no reason, because they're not going to be done locally anyway.
It's really unconvincing that all the arguments for tariffs I see are so contradictory. It's "Hey we can have our cake and eat it too!". You can't use them as a negotiation tool that gets lowered, a consistent tool to reduce imports and build up local supply chains, and a reliable means of taxation all at the same time.
Sanctions are like extreme "reverse" tariffs; if Russia and Iran are any example energy-rich countries seem to weather sanctions well.
Russia has put in tons of work to bypass the sanctions and has constantly made it a major goal of theirs to get them lowered. If ending trade was so useful then we would expect countries to embrace the sanctions on them, a "Haha all you're doing is bolstering our local economy idiots" response, instead of trying to circumvent those restrictions.
The mad man has done it. He’s stopped listening to anyone who isn’t a complete sycophant or the market, and enacted a tariff policy more extreme than we would have seen under what most thought was the worst case scenario. The formula of “reciprocity” being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself, though you can read about it here. I don’t think this ship can correct course. The Trump movement has been selecting for loyalty to Trump above all else, and we’re seeing the results. As Vice President Vance said during his trip to Greenland, “we can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”
This is an even deeper issue than just Trump. Any leader be it government or business must be regularly exposed to views and information that upset them and they disagree with so they can maintain a hold on reality. And Trump has captured the conservative party and media so tightly that they essentially function as echo chambers for him.
In the first administration he had to deal with the regular Republicans who were hesitant to yield to his nonsense under the worry that he would be a fad. He lost the popular vote and didn't have a full grasp on the media yet. Mike Pence's refusal to play along with the fake electors is a perfect example of this.
But this isn't the first admin, you do not survive in a 2nd Trump government if you confront him too much. And Fox News, Trump's favorite source might as well be Trump News now. Trump will say something out there and unexpected and instead of being distracted with a new shiny toy like before, he gets reinforcement. His obsession with Canada as a state is being rewarded in his eyes when fox news tells him about Maple MAGA and how much the Canadians totally love his ideas. They'll run stories with Russian envoys saying how he prevented WW3 (No seriously, they did that), heaping lots of over the top praise on him.
He lives in a world that says everything he does is so amazing and so smart and all the people love him for it. Even the former Trump critics like Vance realized this, the Republican party is the party of Trump right now. It also makes me wonder where the GOP can go when Trump finally kicks the bucket, a lot of candidates who try to emulate the man aren't doing well electorally. The electoral magic exists in Trump himself, not an idealogy.
The author and his brother needn't worry anyway, Polymarket chance of recession is at almost 60% already and that's with the high levels of uncertainty that Trump might just fold. There'll be plenty of unemployment and moving in with parents to go around again if we go into recession territory.
Especially since as we tend to see with businesses from steel and sugar tariffs, all the downstream employment depending on those inputs gets way more fucked than jobs in the industry being protected get grow.
Flowersignup
4mo ago
Sure, they could be lying but if the tariffs were something they felt were beneficial it would be strange behavior to badmouth it.
I think it's really interesting just how much republicans have changed that there's a middle aged man having lots of children and sex outside of marriage and there's almost no response whatsoever from the right. Like the bible is pretty clear about it too as far as I'm aware
Is this a sign that the religious right is meaningfully dead for such an unabashed and open sinner to have clear and direct connections to the Republican president? Or is it a sign that the many of the religious are simply opportunists who wield religion as a weapon against outsiders as many atheists tend to claim?
More options
Context Copy link