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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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According to Trump (or Tony Schwartz) one of the key skills of a sucessful negotiator is the ability to remain focused on what is rather than what ought to be, or what people say.

Sure, but now we have what appears [to me] to be tactically-inconsistent backpedaling. Enhanced high-tech manufacturing capabilities were supposed to [by who?] be the goal but now only token tariffs remain in the most important areas- and yes, the US has weaknesses in this area that are so significant that major Chinese manufacturing firms being told to suspend shipments of that equipment to the US is probably a bigger deal than most give it credit for. The Americans might indeed not be in any position to unilaterally establish independent industry at this time.

And while people do indeed have incredibly short memories- people barely remember 2020-2022 these days and that economic cataclysm dwarfs any economic disturbance tariffs have caused (oh, market fell 10%? I don't hear reparations for the 30% inflation over the last 4 years in addition to all the authoritarian shit so I don't fucking care!)- my main problem is that the negotiations are highly public, but the timeframe is not.

Let's take the whole 51st State thing as an example. I feel that to start trying to accomplish that goal... well, the economic tactics are sound ones, but there's only a concept of a plan here, nothing more substantive [as perceived by the general public].

When working on any project, the answer to most questions [from a stability/investment mindset] cannot actually be the Underpants Gnomes strategy; we pour foundations so that we can accomplish the next step of the process, but to pour those foundations the finished product needs to be coherent. Is it self-sufficiency, like petroleum? Is it simply reduced dependence with an eye towards self-sufficiency? The last major economic reformer in US history, FDR, had the fireside chat specifically for this reason- massive and immediate reforms benefit from someone explaining why. That should be Vance, since he's capable of doing this whereas Trump is... very not, but I'm not hearing anything.

And doubly so if we're going to see dealmaking consistently in public- whereas right now, we just have the disruption. And yes, this sort of thing absolutely is bad for American provinces like Canada and the EU; to the point that I see the offer of statehood as an early buy-out package for performers capable of being disruptive to larger goals before the layoffs begin... which, you'll recall, was exactly what was occurring around that time.

I've been seeing comments here about how trump is "erratic", "stupid", "illiterate", and a "retard", about how he's going to tank the economy and usher in a new age of Democratic party rule, about how his supporters are all deep-throating cock-slobberes who deserve to lose everything.

The only real criticism is "erratic", the other ones are all just incoherent screaming (same with "corrupt"; I have yet to hear how substantiated/used outside of a thought-terminating argument).