Goodguy
10d ago
If he had killed 200,000 over 18 hours he would not have faced half as much opprobrium.
I think he would have faced more. 200,000 in 18 hours is a WW2-scale or third world-scale mass killing, and not only would it be impossible to hide it, given modern communications technology, but also it would be impossible to make a widely accepted argument that this is a proportional response to 10/7. With 50,000 over 18 months, on the other hand, it is possible to make a widely accepted (though of course, very controversial) argument that it is a proportional response to 10/7, given Hamas hiding among civilians and so on.
Goodguy
10d ago
Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it
The fact that this essay starts with the phrase "Democracy died on 2020-11-04", which is almost comically inaccurate, as Trump's election makes clear, makes me dubious about the author's skills as a political observer.
Goodguy
10d ago
What evidence is there that this man is a gang member or has committed any crimes other than entering the country illegally?
I haven't been taking my opinions on the tariffs from talking heads. It just seems evident to me from first principles that the tariffs are more likely to hurt me than help me. I can't think of any way in which they could possibly help me. I don't want to work in manufacturing and I don't care about increasing US national security from its current level of "almost completely impregnable" to "so ridiculously impregnable that it's hard to imagine it being much more impregnable, barring the invention of effective anti-nuke defenses".
Goodguy
11d ago
I'm not sure that @newintown is saying that if you don't care, you're a bad person. At least, that's not how I read it. To me it seems that he is pointing out why he cares.
Goodguy
11d ago
The thing is, to me it seems that high tariffs are obviously bad for me, in a way that many of Trump's other policies are not obviously bad for me. I'd prefer to keep buying cheaper products, as opposed to more expensive products. I have no desire to go work in manufacturing. And I care almost nothing at all about the US becoming self-sufficient in national security-related products because as far as I am concerned, the oceans and the nukes are all we need to keep the US safe from any major threat.
Given that tariffs offer me nothing that I value, and only seem to offer me bad things, of course I go criticize them online. It's not some general attempt to bash Trump on my part, it's a specific criticism of a specific Trump policy that I would really prefer he dropped.
Goodguy
12d ago
Well, I have no desire for the US to get into a war with China so from my perspective, if that is the idea of the military restructuring then yes, Trump bad.
More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 billion to about $1 trillion. Source.
In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.
Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired, but I generally assumed that this was just rhetoric, red meat for his typically military-loving base. Perhaps he actually believes it.
So what we have is that Trump is 1) raising taxes on Americans (through tariffs) and then 2) spending part of the new taxes on the military.
What is the point of it? Playing to the base? A jobs program? Trump actually thinks that the Democrats wrecked the military and it needs to be fixed? He wants to militarily confront Iran, China, etc. even harder than the US already is?
This policy does not come by surprise, of course. Trump has long talked about how we need to invest more in the military. It somewhat contrasts with his "America first, other countries should pay more" type of rhetoric. The latter rhetoric holds that our satellite countries... or, to use the polite diplomatic language that the US foreign policy establishment honed during the Cold War, our "allies"... should spend more on their militaries, that we are being ripped off by subsidizing their defense. But now Trump also wants to rip off the US taxpayer by spending more on our military. For what purpose? Who knows.
Mr. Trump, I think that I am getting tired of "winning". I want to have cheaper housing, more money, and so on. I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.
Goodguy
14d ago
Aren't we in a time when it's hard to tell the difference between the Trump administration's actual, real, policies and AI-generated slop? These days actual politicians, too, use LLMs.
Goodguy
14d ago
It probably was not written by ChatGPT, in my opinion. Maybe some other LLM. But it shows none of the usual signs of a non-very-specifically-prompted ChatGPT's output. ChatGPT, by default, writes like an annoying, overly eager-to-please teacher's pet high school student. It's a style that is very easy to spot once one is used to it.
Also, why would anyone need to establish an alt here? After all, this isn't Reddit, where unless you have a certain amount of karma, you literally are unable to post.
Goodguy
16d ago
Vance might be the bridge to a new generation of right-wing politicians who grew up on highly online alt-right and dissident right culture, not on traditional American conservatism. Whoever becomes the most prominent Republican figure after Trump probably will not be a Trump impersonator, since generally speaking trying to impersonate another successful person in an attempt to acquire their level of charisma is counterproductive - the very attempt to be inauthentic makes one less charismatic unless one is a spectacularly talented actor, and probably most politicians are good actors but they are not that good. Politicians with the charisma level of a Bill Clinton, Obama, or Trump do not grow on trees, but they do come along every once in a while. The Republicans would probably do well to keep having actually competitive primaries so that the best talent can rise to the top, instead of trying to shoe-horn in some kind of Trump version 2. Trump is one-of-a-kind in so many ways that realistically, there will never be another one. All the Republicans can really do is have a fair primary process so that they can give themselves the best odds of finding someone who isn't Trump, but has Trump-level charisma.
Goodguy
16d ago
Does the math work? Average apartment rent in the US is $1750 / month, so $21000 / year. Some quick Googling shows that in the US, the average factory worker salary is about $35000 and average construction worker salary is about $40000. In reality it's probably significantly less since I am guessing that the available figures don't include many illegal aliens' wages and under-the-table arrangements.
So unless something changes to either increase the salaries or make housing cheaper, we seem to on average have a situation where as a blue-collar worker you'd be paying half of your salary in rent. Add on other vital spending like food and health insurance, and pretty soon you have a situation where there isn't much money left over to do anything besides just survive.
Granted, deporting illegal aliens would likely drive up blue collar wages, but it could also lead to increases in prices on things like food so the benefits are not completely straightforward. Let's say that deporting illegal aliens does substantially increase blue collar wages. Even then, unless the government does something to lower housing costs, it still seems that the situation would be pretty dicey for the average blue collar worker. And Trump, as far as I know, barely talks about housing. He and his administration do not seem to give the issue of housing affordability much attention at all. Yet it is probably the single biggest economic expense for most Americans, and the supply is not matching the demand.
Goodguy
16d ago
It's hard to tell what Hanania actually believes, since he is a troll, an unabashed X grifter who is happy to post controversy bait, and to me at least he sometimes comes off as a sociopath. That said, he has been very consistent in supporting free market principles above almost everything else. To me, he seems untrustworthy, and I probably wouldn't trust him with anything important to me, but he does seem to genuinely be a principled free market supporter, so it does not surprise me that he views Trump's tariffs with horror. Free markets and free trade might be one of the few things that Richard Hanania genuinely believes in.
If Trump crashes the economy, the Republicans will lose heavily in the midterm elections in 2026 and will also lose heavily in the general elections in 2028. This isn't Venezuela. The Republicans only have 2-4 years to show that they know what they are doing with the economy. If they actually seriously damage the economy, they will lose power hard and Trumpism as a brand will sustain serious damage even among those who currently support it. Hanania seems to overestimate the degree to which voters being stupid and uninformed could sustain unsuccessful politicians in power. Sure, the overwhelming majority of American voters on both the left and the right are stupid and uninformed. And sure, voters in all democracies seem to have a remarkable level of tolerance for clearly failed government policies and politicians. However, one thing that voters usually do not forgive is economic problems. You do not have to be smart or pay much attention to politics to notice a major economic downturn. If the economy blows up, Trumpism will be done as a political force for the next several years unless the Democrats manifest a level of dysfunction and miscalibrated messaging that eclipses even their recent pathetic performances. Are the Democrats capable of fumbling the ball so hard? Yes, they are. I have never before in my life seen the Democrats be as disorganized, pathetic, incapable of communicating with the average person, captured by insane ideological purity spirals, detached from reality, and happy to sit in their mansions and make money instead of actually going out and winning elections as they have been these last few years.
I don't see how Trump's tariffs are going to make things economically better for the average American. It's literally a tax hike. Yes, there are also some tax cuts supposedly in the works, but I'll believe them if and when I see them. Part of what made America great back in the 1950s wasn't just that you could go easily get a job as a factory worker, it was also that your job as a factory worker would be enough for you to afford housing. Bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if it happens, will not magically create the demand for the sorts of relatively low-skilled positions that existed decades ago. Modern manufacturing is a lot more technological than it used to be. And tariff increases will not magically make landlords and home owners offer their properties to renters or buyers for cheap. What good would it be if you can suddenly get a factory job, but all the housing is still expensive? Trump's administration barely even talks about the housing crisis. When it comes to economics, they seem to be laser-focused on tariffs and on some small cosmetic efficiency improvements such as what DOGE is doing. But realistically, DOGE isn't going to substantially cut the federal budget. I don't believe that the Republicans have either the courage or the political will or the desire to touch any real big spending, such as the military budget. And even the military budget is less than a fifth of the federal budget. Meanwhile, they're laying off a bunch of government workers, thus causing many of those people to enter the private workforce and add more competition to everyone else who is trying to get a job in the private sector. Which could theoretically be beneficial if the resulting federal savings get passed back to the taxpayer... but again, I'll believe that if and when I see it, and in any case, even if the savings did get passed back to the taxpayer, it would take some time for the results to manifest themselves.
Goodguy
17d ago
Everyone who thought it was ok to torture people purely for fun certainly was. The ones who believed that it had to be done to appease the gods at least have an excuse. But anyone back then who was doing it purely because they enjoyed it was psychopathic by my standards.
Goodguy
17d ago
It does not matter whether they would have agreed or not. Morality is not a democracy.
Goodguy
17d ago
The problem is that the proles seem to be voting for stupid forms of economic nationalism. Realistically, Trump's tariffs are not going to do much to help the proles. What would help the proles a lot more are things like mass housing construction and cheaper healthcare, which are barely even parts of Trump's program.
I sympathize with people's desire for economic nationalism, but there are probably much more effective ways of doing it than whatever Trump is doing. It's unfortunate that the Democrats and progressives threw away their cachet with the working class by turning into snobby, wimpy elitist scolds and that as a result, there is currently basically no serious and influential political movement that is based around doing economic nationalism in an actually effective way. Right now, Americans more or less just have the choice between the Democrat mainstream, on the one hand, which delivers occasional wins to the working class but is also firmly committed to neoliberalism... and Trumpist economics, on the other, which promises economic nationalism but increasingly seems batshit crazy to me when I look at the actual implementation details.
Goodguy
17d ago
I think that many of us thought that he was just saying it to get swing state votes and that he wouldn't actually do it. After all, he has a long track record of saying that he will do things and then not doing those things. Oops. I forgot that he also has a track record of, sometimes, saying that he will do something and then going ahead and actually doing it.
Goodguy
17d ago
The "we" is doing a lot of work there. Maybe in some ways the country as a whole would benefit from a recession, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't benefit from one. And if Trump causes one, then despite despising the Democrats I might be compelled to put aside my objections to the Democrats' many many insanities and vote for them in 2026 on the principle that yeah, the Democrats care more about violent criminals than they care about me, but even in Democrat cities the chance of being the victim of a violent crime is pretty low, whereas the chance of being poor if the Republicans destroy the economy is relatively high.
Goodguy
17d ago
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.
Actually only about 16 million Americans served in WW2, out of a total population of about 132 million. So the fraction of able-bodied adult male Americans who served in WW2 is probably about 50%, unless you count working in military-related factories as serving.
Also, about 60% of the Americans who served were drafted, so really less than 25% of able-bodied male Americans served willingly. Of course, that is still enormous compared to the fraction of today's able-bodied population that serves in the military willingly.
That said, in modern war having tens of millions of soldiers would probably be more of a hindrance than a help, given how highly technological it is compared to WW2 standards.
Goodguy
17d ago
But China is basically our factory. I don't see the benefit of devastating one's own factory.
There is this argument that by decoupling from China we can re-shore American manufacturing. However, as long as steps are not taken to address the housing crisis, no realistic increase in American manufacturing jobs will bring substantial quality of life improvements to Americans. The jobs that became available as a result of decoupling from China would, I think, simply not pay enough for that. Correct me if I'm wrong of course. And the Trump administration seems to be doing nothing to tackle the housing crisis. As far as I know, housing is not even a major part of their messaging.
Goodguy
17d ago
My heuristic for figuring out whether DOGE is actually motivated by getting rid of waste involves seeing whether they are willing to cut military spending. Republicans tend to love the military for all sorts of reasons, and are usually very happy to spend a lot of tax money on it, so DOGE being willing to touch the military budget will go a long way to telling us whether or not they actually care about efficiency. My guess is, no.
Politeness is nice. However, people sometimes make life-and-death decisions based on their political beliefs. If you deliberately teach people to ignore reality for the sake of politeness, some of them will literally die as a result. Having beliefs such as, "that run-down neighborhood which seems to be full of surly loiterers is actually made up of misunderstood people who have hearts of gold", or "the police are extremely dangerous, so it is safer to take your chances with street criminals", or "society would actually be safer if we drastically reduced the size of the police force", or "when this violent paramilitary group says that they are fighting for the benefit of humanity, they are being honest - so I should go join them" is not just an abstract thing. These are all examples where holding inaccurate views of reality can literally cause you or others to die. Teaching someone polite but inaccurate political and social views can be like teaching someone inaccurate things about chainsaw or firearm safety.
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