Tiber727
1d ago
I already understand the reasoning, but the reasoning doesn't work.
Offshore production is massively cheaper. If Trump's tariffs make a product 10% more expensive to import but it would cost 50% more to make here, then making it here is still competitive suicide. Especially if they sell the product outside the U.S. and their product has to compete internationally with China.
My hobby is board games. Board games are already a product that barely makes a profit. A board game producer laid it out. Board games involve a lot of different custom pieces. Most factories aren't set up to handle that, but China is. The ones that are, wouldn't want to take the job unless they produced several thousand minimum, far greater than the board game is expected to sell. As this is a luxury good, if you raise the price people won't purchase it. Effectively, to even try to comply with Trump's plan would kill their business.
My message here is you don't get points for effort. A half-assed attempt is worse than doing nothing, and costs a lot of people their livelihood and doesn't even get you closer to the outcome intended.
Tiber727
1d ago
That was pretty much what McConnell was banking on after J6, and we all saw how that went.
Tiber727
2d ago
Maybe, maybe not. But in reality it went like this:
Trump: I know you don't want to do this, but I'm going to try to make you build in America.
Businesses: Even if I wanted to do this, it takes years to plan to build factories and millions of dollars. China has optimized their industrial pipelines for this. U.S. can't compete with that and we'd just lose money as Chinese products would be massively cheaper everywhere outside the U.S. if not in the U.S.
Trump: I'm making you pay more to import everything, effective immediately, until you build a factory that takes years to build.
Businesses: We're just going to pass the cost onto consumers and continue to import. This is still cheaper than onshoring and you'll be gone in 4 years max.
Trump: *surprised Pikachu*
Tiber727
2d ago
I want ads to be stupid because the goal of ads isn't to help me find products to make my life better. It's to find the best buttons to push to get me to open my wallet. That's why gambling sites want to hook compulsive gamblers. It's why they added temperature sensors to vending machines that raise the price on hot days. It's why companies want to profile users and create dynamic pricing without ever letting users notice that they raised the price on them.
I want to defang them from being able to play games or try to get me to impulse buy something I don't really need.
El-Sayed by my estimation appears to think that most Muslims are peaceful but because Israel and America bomb them some choose the path of revenge. We just need to break the cycle of violence and Jews and Muslims will happily co-exist.
In order words, he's a naive peacenik that sees the wrongs committed by Islam as the exception and the wrongs committed by Israel the norm.
Tiber727
4d ago
"I do not agree with the ad" does not mean the ad was incorrect or morally wrong.
That's exactly what it means. Short of feeding another person the exact line you expect them to say, "I disagree with this" is simple and straightforward language.
Tiber727
4d ago
Oh come now. I agree that his first response was not sufficient, but "I do not agree with the ad" is clear. "It could mean that it wasn't antisemitic enough" feels more like trying way to keep a dead play alive than a serious argument. His outrage at having to answer what he considers dumb questions annoyed me - he's smart enough to know how running for office works - but he did use clearer language.
Tiber727
4d ago
He apparently was asked a follow up yesterday and gave a clearer "I do not agree with the contents of that ad."
Tiber727
4d ago
Stevens is extremely pro-Israel. El-Sayed, as far as I can gather, is more sympathetic to Palestine. He gave a speech on the synagogue attack that condemned the violence but then blamed airstrikes in Lebanon for radicalizing him.
Tiber727
5d ago
To add more detail, Sayed responded to the ad with:
“This ad is not affiliated in any way with the Abdul for Senate campaign,” the statement read. “Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders. No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.”
Stevens did not consider this sufficient and demanded he condemn it. I could personally see this either way, as either sounding like you're disavowing it but not really, or maybe Sayed figured he already did and felt like Stevens was making him jump through hoops.
Tiber727
16d ago
Depends on A) who you're talking to and B) what you mean by "actually believe." I generally see three arguments from the left on sports, not always from the same people:
-
Athletic ability isn't fair anyway, so it doesn't matter if trans people compete.
-
Hormones reduce MTF athletic ability to the level of women
-
Let the sports bodies decide.
Only a subset of the pro-sports even bother to argue 1 and 2, but pretty much all of them use point 3. They will never concede the argument because they think 3 is the true neutral option given their deference to science (specifically the science that confirms what they want to believe). The other part is that I don't think the left is entirely wrong about the right wanting to criminalize being trans, in that there are is a spectrum of resistance from "I'll use pronouns but internally I think this is kinda silly" to "Hell yes I want to criminalize being trans." The left, in keeping with their tendency to catastrophize, just treats the end of the spectrum as the norm. In keeping with that, they are genuine in believing the salami-slicing argument.
Tiber727
17d ago
I think that left and right have become different personality type with different aesthetics. The left seems to genuinely find the characters in Hades hot. Someone suggested that bisexuals and fashion designer types actually gravitate towards androgynous features.
Tiber727
17d ago
I've argued with people on the sports thing many times. They believe sports is a salami-slicing strategy the right is using towards the end goal of criminalizing being trans. Thus they believe the appropriate response is to push back hard on the first slice and give the right no leverage. Well, that and to be precise, Dems have never claimed "protecting trans people/immigrants" is unimportant, just [insert scenario involving trans people] is unimportant.
Tiber727
17d ago
Teen lets you get away with a lot.
Here are some other monsters in the series. They've had plenty of monsters that are straight-up naked (with barbie doll anatomy). Succubi are often depicted wearing lingerie.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I'd compare it to voting third party on the logic that a third party could be viable if enough people were willing to vote third party. Whether it's true or not, you changing your stance doesn't make everyone else operate on that logic.
Tiber727
1mo ago
In Japan's case they had a period of self-imposed isolation, which was forcefully ended by the U.S. demonstrating how much they fucked themselves over militarily by refusing trade and technological advancement, and them scrambling to catch up.
Korea later similarly scrambled to catch up, but Japan had the lead and took over Korea in the run-up to WW2.
Tiber727
2mo ago
That's what I meant by spiciness. "Guy makes completely believable lies and is eventually caught" doesn't have that factor that makes it memorable or that you want to talk more about it. This caught attention because of the layers of absurdity and incompetence to the extent that if it wasn't because he was black then you have to wonder how it happened. Either way you choose to spin it a bunch of people besides Arday come out looking really bad and that's why this story has legs.
Spice leads to attention. I'm sure that if you did a full review of academia you could find quite a bit of misconduct, some of it similarly blatant. "Someone makes extremely outlandish claims, holds a prestigious job for years with seemingly no one checking, and multiple attempts to expose him lead to nothing or are actively quashed" is already a pretty spicy story, even in a world where Arday was white.
There's the whole meta left-vs-right debate about "Did Arday get away with it because of DEI?" vs "The right only cares because he's black and they can blame DEI/black people" but the right has the upper hand in this fight because as mentioned above this was a pretty unforced error by Cambridge and even if the left's argument is correct it doesn't change this takeaway. The left just looks like it's engaging in "Republicans pounce."
Tiber727
2mo ago
Generally, from what I've seen the steelman is, "If a woman wanted to abort for purely elective reasons she would have done so earlier in the pregnancy. These laws just make doctors fear that if they perform an abortion for medical reasons (the baby or mother is extremely unlikely to survive) they'll be put on trial."
Which is one of those things that sounds plausible but not sure how true it is.
Tiber727
3mo ago
I have asked a few palestine supporters how they think palenstine might treat the Jews if they were suddenly in charge
At the risk of trying to steelman a belief not my own, but I think they don't expect that to matter because I think they envision something where Palestine exists as a place no Jew should probably ever enter, but will never be strong enough to hurt Israel. And that they will be less willing to try to attack Israel if left alone.
Note that I don't agree that it'd work out that way, but this is my best guess at what they are thinking.
Tiber727
3mo ago
Trump himself has violated lots of norms, and arguably gotten away with crimes. I can't even say I'm that surprised that people have attempted to take his life, without any stochastic terrorism needed.
Saying "the left" did this is uselessly vague. Lacking examples and constraints, as said it's no different than saying that plenty of the left noticed that the right wants immigrants to die. This can be alternatively explained that a bunch of lefties in an echo chamber interpreted the right in the worst possible light.
Tiber727
3mo ago
Trump and Charlie Kirk are specific people, and reasons have been given to specifically respond with violence.
And yet, 99.99999% of the people who have responded to these supposed calls to violence have responded by protesting. I'm saying that if your dogwhistle is so subtle that it's functionally indistinguishable to a neutral observer from normal disagreement, then I consider it the same as not a dogwhistle. It's the same as how I don't really care about arguing how morally good a hypothetical person is who wants to carry out a crime but is so risk-averse that they spend forever waiting for an impossibly perfect opportunity and never actually do anything. When you leave hypothetical-land and enter reality, it's nearly impossible to identify such a person in an unbiased way outside of such a person admitting it themselves.
I don't trust a single person to fairly distinguish an actual dogwhistle from "anything I disagree with is a dogwhistle." I set the burden of proof closer to where multiple people from different ideological backgrounds can look at the behavior and agree that it's extremely suspicious.
Tiber727
3mo ago
They don't know every single individual member of the KKK, they're still casting mistrust into the void, it's just a smaller void.
I'd argue the defining point isn't just the makeup of the crowd, it's the nature of the accusation combined with the target. You gave the example of accusing a black man of being a rapist to the KKK. That's identifying a specific target, creating a reason to specifically respond with violence, and identifying someone likely to carry it out.
For contrast, if I tried to rile up people by saying illegal immigrants are gang members, people can reasonably infer that I have no specific knowledge, and that there are perfectly legal means to try and combat illegal immigration.
I argue that, for a subset of the media, bloggers etc, this was literally intended behavior. That they deliberately incited anger and hatred in the public with the hope that it would inspire literal violence against Trump.
Possible, but I guess I'd ask if you'd give equal credence to your enemy's accusations, for instance that the right is trying to incite violence against trans people.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, an ideal stochastic terrorist.
As above, I would expect this person to be taking actions more focused and likely to get the expected results than throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Are you actually unironically arguing that this hypothetical ideal stochastic terrorist has done nothing wrong because they avoided breaking the law? Or are you arguing that they don't exist and every single person inspiring violence in the real world is doing it accidentally (and that this makes it perfectly acceptable)?
I'm arguing that, could you reliably identify this person without falsely flagging people who sincerely disagree with you?
My contention is that you don't have to start somewhere. You first look at the situation and how it came to be, consider what you want to happen and if you can accomplish it, and consider the ramifications of doing it.
Trump did none of that. What Trump did is the equivalent of thinking you have a leaky roof, trying to fix it yourself with a half-assed understanding of roofing, and ending up with a torn-up roof. If you don't have the means to fix the roof, putting up a tarp is actually better.
If you don't understand what you're doing and why, it's not just a matter of not getting the economic shift you wanted. It's a matter of getting a completely different shift from rich to poorer.
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