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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
I think it's broader than just Trump. American governance generally is a disaster zone, they do bizarre costly blunders like this all the time.
They opportunistically bomb and invade random Middle Eastern countries with made-up reasons, then flail around ineffectually, failing to achieve hazy and undefined campaign objectives.
They invented DEI (and export it), a low-level Cultural Revolution.
De facto drug liberalization/opiate abuse has inflicted vast harms on the US public. A rich and powerful country shouldn't have open air drug markets and crazy homeless people shooting up in public, making public transport a fearful and disturbing experience.
They spurred the development of China with globalization and investment, the strongest competing power to the USA.
Australian governance isn't much better. My country is addicted to bungling everything too, propping up a property ponzi scheme (our biggest city is second only to Hong Kong in unaffordability) and a massive NDIS grift. We're selling iron and coal to China, that's the steel they're building warfleets out of. The EU has successfully technologically sterilized the most dynamic continent in history and is somehow struggling to overcome Russia.
Trump is only an example of a highly dysfunctional political system, late-stage democracy. It should never happen in a properly-run country, you should get dignified, wise statesmen - not demented geriatrics, incoherent drunks, reality TV stars or whatever riff-raff. There's lots of excellence in the US but it doesn't seem to filter through into highly effective government institutions and sustained policy success.
I’ve been wondering for awhile how this happened. It seems our best, high quality people avoid politics as much as possible. Meanwhile some of the most cynical, power hungry sociopaths are getting elected. This doesn’t seem to be the pattern in early 20th century. What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?
It all started when Kennedy put on some make-up for his televised debate with Nixon (/s, sort of).
I think you might be falling prey to some sort of rose-tinted lens bias when looking into the past. Americans love to deify the founding fathers and other notable people in our national mythology, but there's not really too much evidence that they were not (and I don't say this lightly) giant pieces of shit - horrible, awful people. Especially for the most charismatic ones you can find accounts of them being duplicitous, deceitful, and all-around lacking in personal morals that betray their virtuous musings in various publications.
I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.
Coming back to the present, there's plenty of people who are now "doing something notable", but you're realizing that you have plenty of access to the information that they are not "being someone good". So something must have changed? No, my hypothesis is that notable people have always been giant pieces of shit: back to 1700AD Louis XIV, back to 750AD Charlemagne, back to 30BC Cleopatra, back to 1300BC Ramses I, etc.
I'm not sure how many people I speak for, but I've always dabbled with the thought of personally unseating my local congressperson. But there's nothing really remarkable about me as a person that people would want to rally around. I write well, I speak well, and I rise pretty quickly in whatever companies I happen to jump between. Because of that competence, I guess I would be an ideal bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy would have to exist.
I want to improve my community, but running for office seems to be even more performative than making sure to pick up litter at rush hour, rather than picking up litter for the sake of picking up litter.
The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not). Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
It's like trying to have a conversation across a language barrier. Woke history assumes that the phonemes " /ˈnɪɡə(ɹ)/" are always and forever a fighting-words-tier slur, because they are in standard contemporary American english...but doesn't bother to figure out whether or not the person they're talking to in fact speaking chinese or korean.
I think that some moral notions are close enough to being objective that only a genuine psychopath would seriously question them. For example, all else being equal, it is more moral to not torture people for fun than it is to torture people for fun. This was as true 2000 years ago as it is now.
That said, I agree that history is best when it is amoral. It is interesting to study the history of morality, but high-quality history does not base itself on moral arguments. It should be the study of what happened, not whether what happened is right or wrong.
Would an aztec have agreed? Would a mongol? An Iroquois? Any random european who went to a public breaking on the wheel?
It does not matter whether they would have agreed or not. Morality is not a democracy.
I think this gets a lot easier when you use virtue ethics. In general, humans have almost always been in favour of courage, wisdom, having an appropriate attitude to one's station in life, religious devotion, and generosity to whatever sized circle is considered appropriate (family, tribe, village, ..., species, universe). They have generally been against cowardice, selfishness, stupidity, arrogance, etc.
What changes between societies is how these things manifest and how they are weighted in the case of trade-offs.
(Sorry, this should really be a much longer and more detailed post but I didn't want to let the point escape).
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But wait, you said that "only genuine psychopaths" would question these ideas. Are you claiming that just about everyone was psychopathic back then?
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