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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4023 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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with food and gas and general prices increasing from war/tariffs/etc other choices, I'm not sure "no one cares"

"With crime increasing from rape/jaywalking/etc".

No one cares about tariffs or "corruption", but the war is a disaster.

Even if you don't think the average normie is smart enough to directly link the tariff nonsense to increasing prices, a stagnant economy, and businesses struggling more, those effects are still noticed. For example 1,700 workers at this Goodyear plant just noticed the effects of tariffs. When tariffs took down the long lasting family business sawmill in Roper, NC I'm sure the owner and his employees and customers noticed. On their own a few sufferings here and there won't be noticed, but it's not on their own. Small businesses around the country have been struggling by this unconstitutional theft of their money.

Even some of the bigger businesses have been struggling to weather the costs. They raised prices, lowered reinvestment spending, or cut profit margins (dissuading future investment), etc etc.

People do still care about the tariffs, even if they’re less visible than gas prices. Businesses in particular.

War can be swept under the rug if it's won quickly and decisively, and it can't thought of as a war to the general public. Like the military operation to get Maduro out of power, that worked well, nobody thought if it as a lightning quick war.

The pentagon better get winning then. Personally I think that even genocide in Iran will be better for Trump than quagmire.

He should have just knocked out all the power plants and oil refineries and escalated as needed, if he was going to wipe out the IRGC leaders anyway. No half measures for a large decentralized military like Iran. A sizable ground troop force should have been mobilized.

High gas prices could be tolerated in the short term, even for the remainder of Trump's term if the long term benefit was the permanent neutralization of a hostile enemy state. It could have been spun as win that way.

Instead, we have this constant barrage of threats to do what should have already been done. The remnants of the IRGC see this as political weakness and are going to wait Trump out like Carter and get a better reparations/nuclear deal from whoever is the next democrat president. At the very least they will wait until November to see if the midterms are indicating weakness in the future.

Yeah, but that's why this one is a disaster. No one was too upset about the earlier engagement with Iran that supposedly obliterated their nuclear program, but here they've stepped in it, and it doesn't look like they have a plan to get out.

This is what your country's parties only offering up two midwit incompetents to choose from gets you. Anyone who had studied Iran would have known that they would grab the world economy by the balls by blocking the Strait.

I think there was always at least a small chance that Iran would have collapsed, war is unpredictable. But it was marketed by Bibi to Trump as a near-sure thing, and possibly implied that Israel would tidy up any loose ends quietly.

Now Trump is stuck and I don't see any Israeli military support for this war Bibi marketed as an easy win. Somewhere, a lot of people are pointing fingers at each other to avoid being a scapegoat for this debacle.

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