georgioz
1d ago
I am not sure what you are babbling about. In fact I do agree with your statement before
I agree with Trump that it could sometimes be good to impose tariffs to get the other guy to back down on their trade barriers. I disagree that this is all that he has been doing. Trump seems to think that overall having some tariffs is better than having no tariffs (hence the 10% global tariff); free trade is not his goal.
Yes, tariffs are a tool that can be used for any number of foreign policy issues. Free trade by itself is not his goal and neither is it for any other country. EU promotes their climate policies, other countries promote their own interests as well. Where do you get this idea that free trade is some sort of ultimate goal?
georgioz
2d ago
One of the pet theories without any serious digging I have, is that these things may come in waves. From my observation some societies that were considered as most polite societies like Japan or Scandinavia or England were incredibly violent in the past, they were places where you could get your head chopped off for looking at somebody the wrong way. So people created social technology of politeness and elaborate social rituals in order to prevent such a situation from happening - getting challenged to duel or having your balls blown off are some serious incentives for good behavior. Until some new people come around who think that all this politeness and social norms are gay, weak and lame and that they should be able to do what they want. And the cycle repeats itself.
georgioz
2d ago
I agree with Trump that it could sometimes be good to impose tariffs to get the other guy to back down on their trade barrier
Why are you so hyperfocused on trade barriers, he may use them to save puppies or do some other type of good outside of this narrow trade stuff.
georgioz
3d ago
Oh, so tariffs are bad for target of tariffs. And maybe some nations with large economies that are not as exposed to international trade are to large extent immunized to impact of counter tariffs. It almost seems as if tariffs are quite a nice tool to threaten or even enact in order to bring the other side to the table and make some diplomatic concessions and maybe sometimes it is actually good to experience some pain in order to gain even more good. I'd say Trump would wholeheartedly agree.
georgioz
3d ago
Canada may not want to allow the US to hurt its maple syrup producers with impunity even if that helps other Canadians.
And USA may not want to allow Canada to hurt its lumber producers or car producers with impunity, even if it helps other Americans. It's the same logic, the only thing remaining is chicken-egg issue of who has the original blame, which in the end is not really that interesting.
Cooperate-cooperate is better for everyone
That is not the claim of anti-tariff people. Their claim is that tariffs damage local economy. Unless they have some savior complex where they enact tariffs in order to save poor people of country they are in trade war with? It does not make sense.
Also where is the limit, what is the end game? Free trade is not truly free and effective unless literally every single country on planet Earth including Iran, Russia and North Korea "cooperates" - and until such a time we need harsh regime of aggressive trade wars to the last man? There is a list of countries by tariff rate here - USA with 3.3% is among the best - better than Canada or Switzerland or Norway and much better than almost any African countries. Why focus on USA and not some other much more "unfree" country?
One thing that always interests me with these takes is why the other countries engage in counter tariffs. If tariff-free trade relations are such an amazing boon, why even engage in such a retaliation? If US wants to produce cheap aluminum and cars and timber and brandy then why did let's say Canada impose tariffs as some part of trade war? Are they not foolish for not taking nicely subsidized goods for cheap from USA and just produce something else?
I actually think the reasons were more prosaic. Trump wanted secure borders and more favorable trade relations with some additional things like increased defense spending as part of NATO pledge etc. Canada dug their heels and decided to go for trade war and insults back. It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent, but the dispute is a real one. Also let's not pretend that the same does not work the other way around as when EU representatives strongarm other countries like Hungary or post Brexit UK or Italy, when elections do not go the way powers that be like.
But in the end it is all besides the point. Canadians may learn the ancient truth of the strong do as they will and weak suffer what they must. USA is not Hungary or some random African nation. Good luck to Canada for next 3 years and potentially number of more years, if some MAGA candidate wins next elections.
Yep, many people view kindness and benevolence as stupidity and weakness bordering on entitlement to it. It reminds me an old joke about a businessman and a beggar:
Businessman sees a beggar and takes pity on him as he reminds him of his own turbulent past. So he gives him $100. The beggar is happy and thanks profusely. Next day the situation repeats and beggar is absolutely besides himself. This goes on for several days but then the businessman does not come anymore. After a month the businessman suddenly appears again with $100 bill in his hand and the beggar asks: Where were you last month? The businessman answers - Oh, I was on a vacation with my wife and my kids. The beggar then mutters: I guess it had to be a very nice vacation given all my money you spent.
georgioz
3d ago
Paradoxically president does have right to impose tariffs specifically for National Security reasons. Foreign power meddling in election campaigns counts as such a case as Russia gate showed us before.
typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.
I don't think it is about groveling. In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example. I am not even US citizen but I do think that other NATO members really held their noses too high, it was as if they were entitled to everything that USA provides either trade or security wise in exchange of mockery and disrespect. I think demanding respect was absolutely in order.
Paradoxically Euros or other western countries do not have problem groveling before Xi Jinping or Saudis or even before Iranian dictators. But suddenly they are too good to show some respect to USA just because they think they can farm internal US political dispute.
But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy.
That is true. And Trump is well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him. I think it is absolutely within bounds to require some restrain when it comes to hostile actions and posturing during negotiations. This is negotiation 101 be it nations, companies or individuals - especially if you hold all the cards.
Trump did the same with Zelensky in the past where he also misread the situation. Zelensky was in weak position and came literally to beg for money - but he could not help himself and overplayed his hand. So he got fucked and in turn he fucked his nation - he apparently did not realize that he needs to change his behavior under new administration. Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought his suit.
Now one can still criticize Trump for his style, but it seems to be working. He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan, he managed peace between Israel and Hamas, he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan, he presides over cooling of tensions between Cambodia and Thailand and he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo. It is not as if he is just a buffoon without results.
I have seen several debates regarding "increasing the power of the executive". The main dispute seems to be if president uses preexisting power due to circumstances or if he is usurping more unique powers outside of legal context. For instance president can achieve to increase budget for his executive and in practical sense he has more power, because he has more money under his control. On the other hand he did not create any unique legal power - he just utilized what he had before.
I heard similar argument regarding using National Guard even against wish of local governor. Of course it is not used often - e.g. when Eisenhower federalized local National Guard to force integration of segregated schools in 1957. If Trump used the same move that was not used for decades - is he increasing his power as it was quite rarely used, or is he just exercising power that was always available to him so there is no power increase going on?
US government has become more centralized and thus more prone to authoritarianism since George Washington himself during Whiskey Rebellion, through Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and Lochner era of utilizing Commerce Clause to gain more power and virtually every single president ever. The Cthulu always swam toward more centralized power in hands of a few. We may talk abut lawful breaches of decorum or this or that norm being ignored, but this is an old story and nowhere near what happened in the past like Habeas Corpus Suspension Act or dozens more examples throughout the history and for sure in the future.
First, nice summary I would sign under it if I could.
If you don't recognize any of these names, congratulations, you are winning at life, please avoid contaminating your brain by gaining awareness of their existence.
The issue is that these worlds collide from time to time. Hasan himself was touted as a response by Democrats to Gen Z male voter issue. Hasan or Destiny were for some Democrats an answer to their quest of finding their very own Joe Rogan or at least Charlie Kirk or some such. So unfortunately people will not be spared in the foreseeable future.
Yes, I did not investigate it thoroughly. I just googled another instance where Piker moved remote from the shock collar on some other occasion. It is not the same stream, but his dog is in the background all the time for hours on end. She is almost like another decoration and permanent fixture. Also he changed his story. First, he said that when he reaches outside of camera it is for his Zyn. Then he changed the story that yes, there is a remote for collar but it is only for vibration function etc.
In a sense he fed the whole controversy by himself as he just dug deeper and deeper hole for himself. Adding Taylor Lorenz into this whole mess only expands it further. It is actually quite funny - as I said, a simple story now has life of its own way beyond the original thing as it spawned other substories like "why Hasan changed his explanation" etc.
I know about this controversy much more than I should have, mostly by following Asmongold on this. At the end of it I think Hasan really used shock collar on his dog. I do not have "evidence" at this point as I really did not assemble all the clips, but I will throw it here:
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There is much more than just one video here. In true 4Chan manner, a host of clips surfaced where Hasan moved the remote around, where his dog reacted strangely when she left the designed place while the stream was muted etc.
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The dog really serves as a prop on his streams standing for hours in the same place.
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Hasan changed his story many times to the point of it being completely incomprehensive. It produced memes on its own
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He apparently had some bull breed in the past that he did not treat kindly. He used some sort of barbed collar and generally was not nice to it, e.g. pulling it by the tail etc.
At this point I do think that he used the shock collar and in general is probably not the most responsible dog owner. On its own it seems like a simple story, one I would not even comment on. But it has life of its own now, and is a stand-in for general information environment. Even with controversial Taylor Lorenz now being part of it. Of course it generated great number of memes and other content, including AI generated song and more.
If anything, tradwives are the shadow selves of egirls and thots: the two reciprocally determine each other within the same memetic system, and that system doesn't make a lot of sense beyond online porn.
I think in the memetic sense the tradwife is just LARP of an of 1950ies image of a wife - looking sexy while baking cookies and cleaning the house. It absolutely misses the point for surface level aesthetics. You could probably pay Aella or any other whore enough to wrap them in 50ies garb and have them bake you cookies or clean the floor before sucking your dick. In fact various maid or stepmom porn tropes are working with that theme.
Traditional wife in real sense is a wife who is virtuous, embodying female virtues of humility, nurturing, dignified in purity etc. It is absolutely okay for instance for traditional wife to go and work while caring for her sick husband. The actual virtues have almost no connection to the image provided by this new tradwife movement, which I'd characterize as some attempt of entrapment of men by wicked women just using different means. A horsehoe theory of certain strains of feminism and conservativism meeting at the same point if you will.
Productivity is another very sad word that is used in economics while having also colloquial meaning. Productivity is a simple economic concept meaning how much money you earned by selling products and services you produced, nothing more, nothing less. It has weird implications like for instance a janitor working for Goldman Sachs in one of their office buildings being more productive than a janitor in 3rd world country or even in government building as the former has higher wage and company he works for rakes in more revenue and profit. If you invented something amazing but made it free, your productivity did not increase. If million other people took your invention and used it to improve their bottom line, it is calculated independently. If you look at it, it is not as strange as it seems. In broad sense productivity per person is increased by using capital. In a sense living in a large city with sophisticated infrastructure enabling various network effects makes everybody more productive even if they moved there yesterday and did not contribute anything building that infrastructure.
But of course productivity also has colloquial meaning, which than translates to various value judgements talking about things like bullshit jobs, how government jobs are nonproductive or how it is unfair that two workers working with the same machine producing the same number of parts should be considered as similarly productive.
By the way there are many such "economics" words and concepts that have the same issue of being a technical term while also having normal colloquial meaning - even basic ones such as capital, savings, the act of saving, investment and many more. It also does not help that even economists or journalists are using these meanings interchangeably thus needlessly confusing the whole discussion.
georgioz
4d ago
In the "are we dating the same guy" case the old time equivalent is that enough people know each other, and talk to each other often enough, that someone will see your Jack out at a bar across town with some girl who isn't you and if they don't tell you they'll tell someone who will tell someone who will tell you.
I don't know. You can stand in the middle of some plaza and preach your thing - faith healing for COVID, hand out materials describing how Israel is controlling things etc. There may be thousands of people going around and you face no problem. As soon as you do it on Facebook, the situation turns. In fact this is what I am afraid of - that the norms from digital spaces will seep over to the meat world. Who prevents government to use drones and CCTV to process all the speech and video and then send police after you as if you committed your "offense" in digital world. Heck, with everybody having cell phones recording your speech it can easily turn that way without your awareness donglegate style.
georgioz
7d ago
When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go. For instance in the past would it be legal to make an advertisement in local news that next Tuesday there will be a meeting in a local club where anybody can discuss John Smith on the photo? Then you will have 20 people attending, drinking beer and talking shit about John. Is this something that you would consider as libel and prosecute local newspaper who printed such an advert? What if the advert was just printed paper that some person threw into mailboxes of the neighborhood? Is it some sort of punishable activity?
Now I understand that there is a difference in scale between digital and paper media, but I am still quite perplexed how quickly people bow to authoritarian powers if it is related to internet. For instance privacy of correspondence is a human right under article 12 of UN declaration of human rights. But apparently email and chat communication is arbitrarily not part of it. The same here - talking shit about somebody with friends in a pub is absolutely something that is normal human experience for millennia. But suddenly talking shit on the internet is some sort of punishable evil?
There is something that rubs me the wrong way, mostly that normalizing these heavy handed approaches may quickly turn from digital world to meat world.
Women simply do not inflict violence of the sort that actually physically harms someone, compared to men.
You do not find women often in the trenches of wars. But you will find them very often acting violently when the situation stabilizes and they have ability do do petty violence safely. Famously Mao's cultural revolution was heavily supported by women, who had at least 50% membership in Red Guards. They were amongst the most ferocious when it came to struggle sessions, parades - including parading with severed limbs of victims etc.
I'd say that women are much worse when it comes to controlling their violent impulses compared to men as they were never socialized for it, in fact they are often initiating physical violence such as slaps etc. The only mitigating factor is that they are weak. But if they are put in safe place of power such as owning slaves, they are perfectly capable of extreme cruelty and torture. The same goes for other natural experiments. For instance in countries where corporeal punishment of children in education is legal, female teachers have no compunction physically abusing their students. The whole schtick about fairer sex is a myth, I'd argue that men are more benevolent compared to women accounting for strength difference. If the situation turned and women were stronger than men, I do not think that men would have it nearly as good as women have it now under patriarchy.
And French never even justifies his theory that the justice system we have today is peak justice, he mentions Jim Crow and ignores the staggering level of black-on-white crime the US enjoys today.
There are black people like Jesse Lee Peterson who even say that blacks had it better under Jim Crow laws compared to what they have today. Especially when looking at crime, family dynamics, fertility and abortion, drug and alcohol abuse etc. The argument is not dissimilar to what is often heard from South Africa after fall of apartheid and impact on living situation of black majority.
He loved them and his criticism was ultimately aimed at trying to bring them to change their ways. The same cannot be said of Trump.
So you now see into his heart? In fact mocking rhetoric and satire is very effective in getting the message across at least to stop other people from doing what you consider as a bad or immoral behaviour. Mockery even related to flatulence or excrements was often used even in the Bible, e.g. in Kings where prophet Micaiah mockingly basically tells false prophet Zedekiah, that he gets his prophecies when he shits on the toilet - that his prophecies are farts and shit. As other said, Martin Luther himself was quite enamored with flatulence and excrement, often using it as a rhetorical device such as when he wrote that pope Paul III farts so loudly, that it is a wonder he did not tear his asshole. There are number of saints, theologians and martyrs, who were not afraid to use mockery of sin, satire or even literal shit jokes and similar rhetoric to spread the word of the Lord and save souls.
Anyways I get it that you may be some sort of pearl clutching Christian, who may be horrified with such a crass thing like a shit joke. You do you - but do not pretend that it represents the prevailing stance of other Christians. Which by the way may also go against the second commandment of taking the Lords name in vain in contrast with some random shit joke, as you present your own personal pet peeve as if you are speaking for all Christians. Nothing could be farther away from truth.
I read the article and I also watched the Fuentes/Carlson interview. And I actually have a different point of view. For instance here is Hanania
Setting the emotional appeal and Russel conjugations aside, I do not think these questions are out of bounds. Trump and Kirk have America First policy, which is also something that Groypers can get behind. They are on board with tariffs and hard stance of US foreign policies even against allies like Canada or Denmark or Mexico and other countries. It is absolutely logical to ask why should Israel have special place when under the same policy. It is not as if people like Kirk were "bullied" - it is that it is very hard to answer these questions and be consistent with America First messaging.
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