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You might be right, but it sounds like so much special pleading.
Really? It didn't look like that to me. It looked like he couldn't function, and he was surrounded by liars who propped him up and did their best to hide and deny any lapses.
Biden should have been removed for reasons of mental incapacity, and he was forced to abandon his already-won primary nomination when he couldn't hide it any more. Trump isn't as bad as that guy, so recent in our memories, so why should I care now? Applying the standard to Trump is just another way to try to take him down, and not a genuine concern about the mental capacity of the executive.
If Wilson, Reagan, and Biden can finish their terms, I don't see why Trump should be any different, and I'm not willing to entertain talk of dementia as anything other than partisan sour grapes.
Biden should have been removed. I am just saying that even though he wasn't, it didn't seem to be so bad because people who actually made the policy on his behalf were reasonable. Not great but competent.
Maybe the same expectation was with Trump. It doesn't matter how crazy he is if the administration is reasonable. No one believed that absurd tariffs will get implemented etc. In a way, the problem is not with Trump but that he is surrounded by people who are not competent.
JD Vance is competent, but these people are chosen for loyalty
I can understand that some say nothing against Trump because of loyalty. But allowing tariffs destroying economy? That is borderline to treason against the USA. Most likely they are not competent and don't even understand that.
Is the economy that central to the American nation? I understand that market freedom has been an important component of our political strength, but at the same time, this feels like preparing for the last Cold War right as we are in the midst of a new one.
I think nothing is more important than economy. People talk about different values and in that sense we need more than economy, for example, democracy and pure air (ecology). But economy is a central thing that allows the country to thrive because everything is based on it. It is just that historically the growth was non-existent (0.01% per year) therefore not many past thinkers have mentioned it in the list of good values. We need to add this to the constitution of every country that achieving growth is very important.
I dunno, I think both left and right have been directionally-correct in that the economy is not the end-all-be-all of civilization. Plenty of societies in the past didn't give as much consideration to economic growth, yes, but they seemingly didn't really need it.
The way you wrote this post, I genuinely cannot tell if you are being sincere, because, at risk of mod intervention, it sounds like an alien value. If anything, I think it's the opposite: there are other values that allow us to have economic power, they are what lead to an economy and not strictly the other way around.
We are at this point, and you are concerned, because some of the very values that enable the economy are themselves weakened and endangered.
To be honest, it could be that some people have so different world view from others that it is indeed completely alien.
For me I cannot reconcile the idea that “societies didn't really need economic growth in the past”.
All societies wanted more, at all times. Obviously, some people are happy to be monks, live life in rejection of worldly pleasures and engage only in reading, talking about philosophy and commenting in online forums (he-he). I can understand them. But majority want more things, not less. It was never that they didn't need it, they simply couldn't have it.
Monks are a terrible example. Medieval monasteries were communes of second+ sons of aristocrats who, while technically rejecting personal wealth and living in relative privation for their social class, commanded vast wealth through said communes.
Wealth made possible in large part through their ownership of land-bound slaves, aka serfs. Which are the only social class that really matters when talking of the economy of past societies - any praise of the benefits of pre-industrial agricultural society that ignores the part where 90%+ of people were taxed-to-death subsistence farmers and/or slaves (don't forget the chances for death by violence being vastly higher than the 20th century including both WWs) is a comically rose-tinted view.
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