VoltairesViceroy
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
Guam is a huge strategic asset that China basically had to develop a custom missile for so it could potentially hit it in any Taiwan invasion. Google "Guam Killer".
Source on any of this? Saying the CIA is funding ISIS to sabotage America in the name of decolonization, done through USAID and migrant caravans for the nefarious goal of the subversion of MAGA sounds like a QAnon schizopost that got put through a blender one too many times.
Edit: As always, Hanania says it better than I could.
Yeah, there's a very decent change he simply drops dead of natural causes at some point in the next 4 years. Given that many of his most ardent supporters are conspiracy-mongers, there's a good chance they'll say his death was "organized by the deep state" or something like that, actuarial tables be damned. A lot of it will depend on the optics: if he just randomly dies in his sleep with minimal warning like Scalia did, conspiracies will fly. If instead his illness is known beforehand, then there will be less of that.
The problem is that as a strongman, he'll want to avoid mentioning any illnesses if possible. He couldn't get away without mentioning he had COVID, but he could plausibly sweep other chronic issues under the rug if they don't impact his physical appearance. Thankfully, Trump is a buffoon who hires people who gladly leak things as a matter of palace intrigue, so there's a decent chance that any long-term illnesses will be known, I hope.
Its absurdly hard for me to believe that this woman is 'trapped' in a marriage with Kanye in any real sense. My current most likely hypothesis is they both have some kind of exhibitionism kink that Kanye is rich enough to indulge on the largest platforms around, which is gross in that including the public into that is really violating everyone elses' interest in maintaining certain standards of decency.
And in those cases, acting embarrassed or humiliated is oftentimes literally part of the kink.
Yeah, this is my take too. It's a way clearer explanation than both people risking their reputations for basically nothing.
A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government.
This very much seems like a win-win for right-wing populists, Trump, and Musk. They all broadly hate the government, so trashing its credibility provides fodder for them to say "Look! See how bad it is!" antics. People will state the obvious that it's particularly bad now because they're trashing it, but they'll just say "Legacy Media lies!" and ignore it.
Which disincentivizes buying American. America deindustrializes and you end up with well payed service workers
This part is correct...
who are chronically broke.
This part isn't. Real incomes are up. If they're broke, it's their own fault for not managing their money. I also haven't seen any evidence that significantly more people are "broke" as you say. The meme recently was that Americans collectively thought the economy was doing poorly, but most individually said they were doing just fine.
A strong dollar doesn't particularly impact insurance or real estate.
You replied to this, but your reply was not pertinent to how a strong dollar specifically directly impacts insurance or real estate, at least to e.g. the degree that NIMBYs blocking housing construction affects real estate prices.
I'm not perceiving the predictions of doom to come from "the most histrionic leftists", but rather "the most histrionic economists
Please post some examples. There are plenty of bad economists out there writing for progressive think tanks or leftist op-ed sections, but they're already widely reviled by the Right, so they don't serve as good examples.
I want to see economists who are regarded as at least somewhat neutral who are clearly saying that this will be an economic catastrophe, and not just "bad" to some degree. Preferably in an article of some sort, not just Twitter shitposts.
E.g. Noah Smith is probably most left-leaning econ guy I follow, and his article states unequivocally that the tariffs will be bad, but in terms of how bad exactly, he posts an image where the long-run effects are all in the single digits, mostly in the low single digits. This is bad obviously, but hardly cataclysmic.
So what are the bad results we should expect?
Price increases on goods most exposed to the tariffs + less economic growth than we'd have in an alternative reality where the tariffs don't happen. As far as I know, this is the consensus of most economists.
Strong agree with all of this. Trump is a vibesmaxxer-in-chief, being far more concerned with how he appears on cable news than any objective measurement of the impact of his presidency. There's a very good chance that some symbolic concessions could delay, reduce, or even cancel the tariffs altogether. None of that is guaranteed, but there's a good chance.
Your first paragraph is an egregious strawman of mainstream (Keynesian) economics. It's also not a particularly accurate view of Austrian economics either. Are you saying Austrians would be in favor of tariffs? It's not really clear from what you wrote, but that would be a very strange Austrian indeed.
This seems like you're setting up a situation where "if I don't see utter economic catastrophe as predicted by the most histrionic leftists as a result of these tariffs, it'll prove once again that economists, the establishment, and anyone else who disagrees with me is wrong, and my vibes are always right".
The tariffs aren't actually that big by historical standards. Compare them with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that exacerbated the Great Depression. These tariffs are starting from a low historical baseline, are only hitting the top 3 trade partners instead of everyone, have carveouts (like Canadian energy), will probably be subject to delays (e.g. Trump delaying with Mexico due to their symbolic concessions), etc. Further, the US economy is relatively autarkic with its trade as a percent of GDP being surprisingly low compared to almost any other nation. Then there's the factor of the long-run growth rate being almost monotonically positive in the US, which would offset any decline due to trade wars and would mean that any losses would probably have to be observed from "less growth" rather than "negative growth". Moreover, the hits from tariffs, while some are immediate, largely come from long-term effects of certain industries being less profitable.
I don't think tariffs are always bad, and this isn't a particularly heterodox position in Economics especially with obvious modern examples like China. But I would prefer them to have a clear purpose -- the Chinese and maybe Mexican tariffs make sense to some extent, but the tariff against Canada seems like a pointless own-goal.
The most incoherent part of these tariffs is the 25% against Canada. Here's a list of US trade partners by volume including deficits. Why are they getting a harsher treatment than China? The vast majority of illegal immigration + drugs comes from the southern border, not the north. So what the heck is the play here? The only thing I can think of is that Trump genuinely believes he can bully Canada into accepting annexation... which, I mean, I already thought Trump was a total buffoon, but this is 2-3 standard deviations beyond the idiocy he normally does.
If he disliked trade deficits, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to tariff Canada given our trade with them is relatively equal. Why not slap a country like Vietnam first? Why tariff China less than Canada?
This post gets some things wrong about economics.
A strong dollar helps American consumers while hurting American export-facing industries. American consumers get to buy cheap foreign stuff, while export-facing industries become less competitive as their prices implicitly rise. Cost of living doesn't rise for Americans because the US dollar is strong, unless perhaps they get laid off from their export-facing job? That's a small slice of the American economy these days anyways.
A strong dollar doesn't particularly impact insurance or real estate. It seems like you're just listing off sectors you dislike, using words like "financialized", and implying a strong dollar is somehow directly responsible. Housing is expensive because... people aren't building houses. The strong dollar isn't really involved, except indirectly.
Tariffs aren't going to fix much of what you listed, and they're certainly not going to make American consumers better off.
I wouldn't want a monarch like King Charles to be able to pardon people either, as their lifetime status makes them even more shielded from consequences of corrupt pardons.
For absolute monarchs, the ability to pardon basically just kills the rule of law. The only recourse people would have is outright revolution. It's a terrible system.
The median sentence for participating in Trump's attempted self-coup was 60 days. I looked through a few of the longer sentences and they seemed justified given the violence that had taken place. I don't consider BLM leniency to be an excuse because I also would have liked for the book to be thrown at those protestors as well.
Have pardons ever been realistically used as a political check against other branches like this? If I squinted I could maybe see something like Carter's pardoning of draft dodgers or Obama's pardoning of non-violent drug offenders, but neither of those really seem like they'd fit that well. I don't think it works that well as a check even if it had been. The real check the Executive has over the Legislative is the ability to dominate one party of the split chambers which has effectively rendered Congress inert. Kicking the can to pardons being punished by the President's relationship with Congress also doesn't work that well since, again, that implicitly relies on voters punishing politicians who don't do what they want. If they don't really punish the President, why would they be expected to punish Congress indirectly?
I disagree with the notion that the J6 protestors were politically prosecuted, at least insofar as participating in Trump's self-coup wasn't already political. The median sentence was 60 days, with those receiving substantially longer sentences mostly having engaged in violence. I don't like the framing of comparing it to BLM leniency, because two wrongs don't make a right. This isn't a prisoner's dilemma, it's just blatant hypocrisy. If anything, this will just make the situation worse as Democrats can now use this pardon to do another round of their own nonsense when they retake the White House at some point.
This is the only sane take. The people claiming this is like a prisoner's dilemma are crazy, given that the prisoner's dilemma involves some level of personal gain (or at least losing less) for playing. Here, it's just pure negative. Nobody here gained from Biden's pardons, nor did they gain by the J6 pardons.
Perhaps the better idea would have been to reduce pardoning power, rather than responding with "the other party is corrupt, so that means I'll be extra corrupt!"
After Biden's pardons and now this, it's pretty clear that the President's unilateral ability to grant clemency to anyone ought to be dramatically reduced, if not removed entirely. Literally every president in my lifetime has abused this power, and the expected guardrails (voters will punish bad pardons) mostly don't work.
There's nothing to stop a president from goading political violence or corruption, and then pardoning afterwards (or hell, even before!). It's a highly abuseable, very obvious point of failure.
The leftist take is generally that the female prostitutes are either empowered women or hopeless victims, and that the Johns should all burn in Hell. Some feminists prioritize the empowerment of women while mostly ignoring Johns (they still think they should probably burn in Hell), while other feminists think the presence of Johns is so terrible that the entire industry needs to be incinerated. Sometimes one or the other group will dominate. Other times there'll be compromises like in Sweden where prostitution is legal for women to sell, but illegal for men to buy. It's truly a shining model of feminist equality.
Thanks for the clarification. I broadly agree with this.
What other benefits? Aside from legal protections around having children, there's little else that marriage offers to men that a close male friend couldn't also provide, oftentimes at higher quality. And there's the issue of "marriage" and "close male friends" are often substitutes, i.e. men often lose their male support groups when they get married either due to time constraints or from the woman covertly sabotaging things (e.g. controlling the social schedule and deprioritizing them).
"human fleshlight, plus domestic labor" lens (and the far-left and far-right agree that this is the best a woman can do in life
There's a lot of horseshoe in gender discussions when it comes to the far left and far right, but I'm not sure the far left would go that far. Care to elaborate a bit?
Gynosupremacists are simply making sure there's no competition for domestic women, so they can get a higher price for their assets ('why buy the cow' and all that). Casting aspersions about the safety and morality of the competitor's products is a classic sales tactic.
I definitely agree there's a ton of this going on. I'd say "sex cartel" concerns account for roughly 80% of the discussion around prostitution, although nobody would admit it obviously.
It just looks like he’s socially pressured by middle aged women into parroting a feeling he doesn’t share or agree with.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of that going on. "Age gap" discussions have always been farcical. It's OK for a 20 year old woman to take a loan or a job from a 60 year old man, but not to have sex with him? The double-standard is extremely obvious, and it's clear that most "age gap" stuff is just older women being angry at older men not finding them attractive as they once did.
In contrast, watch this video of Trump sound like a lunatic or of this video where he talks about "itchy" heaters. He's clearly suffered a pretty significant mental decline since 2016.
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