Right, that was a point I made in there somewhere. That the reality is that this will make billionaires more money which tracks with Trump. But even if that were somehow addressed the last part would still happen, it is a feature not a bug. The economic depression is necessary to burst all bubbles, and we have a lot of them, which in turn will make domestic production cheap enough that it is actually feasible. It does require the absolute implosion of markets and the destruction of all speculative wealth that exists in the system. The middle class will be the one to take the hardest hit in fact, not only because they will lose the value of their spending money, and their good paying jobs, but their retirement funds will be in tatters. Buuut if you see it through, at the end of the depression we should have a better functioning economy than what we have now. The problem is Trump simply does not have the spine nor the time to see it through and people really hate sacrificing the short term for an uncertain long term that doesn’t necessarily benefit them directly.

Anyways I think I rambled but I think the tariffs are actually a good very long term play if you are willing to cause a lot of shock and pain in the short term. We just don’t have the stomach for it, so maybe the artificially inflated economy is better. At least until the balloon pops anyways and we have no other choice but to suffer through the same depression but it is easier to stomach because there’s literally no other choice.

That’s antisemitism!

This man has got to be the most punchable face in the entire world. Milhouse looking fuck.

You just know he pays black guys to fuck his wife in front of him.

What I find most fascinating/hilarous about this is “leftists” up in arms about this. This is like the most far left thing you can do other than actually seizing the means of production.

I am not exactly a leftist but I find the tariffs wonderful. Consumerism is a pox on the nation, this should fix this.

Why are we opposed to exploitation and pollution here at home but are ok when China does it because it allows us to buy a year’s worth of clothes every week for the price of single ethically produced garment??

Over leveraged billionaires are in trouble, BIGLY. If this continues they will be margin called and forced to start selling their shit. Of course the flip side is that liquid billionaires will come out of this richer than before. Probably the real plan behind this.

Also can we talk about how much of the economy was just fantasy? Billions, even maybe trillions of dollars of our economy is simply speculative value backed by mass delusion.

Turns out Trump may be a tankie after all.

The one problem is that it will not yield results within 4 years, so it will cause a whole lot of pain only for whoever is in power next to reverse it as soon as they take office. Hell this might not last till the end of the week for all we know.

Damn she didn’t get her tubes tied after plopping out two gremlins? Yeesh.

Edit: simmer down guys, it was a fucking joke.

It’s not validating them it’s about not letting them fester in the shadows where they can create social unrest like they are doing now. And it is a difference in opinion in a few ways, like I don’t hate trans people but I for the life of me no matter what cannot state that trans women are the same as a assigned at birth women. The fact that I had to sit and think for a moment there about which words to use so that it cannot be twisted through rhetoric highlights that. I have no hate against trans people though, I’ve even been involved with one. But to say that they are the same? I can’t trick my brain that way especially if they don’t pass. So you might say that it is a fact that trans women are women, but due to the lack of hard scientific evidence of that (and of what my own two eyes tell me) Im just gonna call it an opinion and disagree with you.

Also the reason the echo chambers are allowed to grow is because you live in a country in which freedoms of expression is a right, an almost holy one one would think, so it’s legal to say whatever hateful thing you want and be a part of hate groups. It’s enshrined in the constitution and that’s not gonna change. There’s no legal basis to disrupt them unless they act on their rhetoric.

The best you can do is not let them control the narrative and give them the spotlight a little in places where they will meet resistance so they can embarrass themselves like they always do. We used to bring the KKK on tv and they basically stopped existing for a long while after that.

This idea that letting someone speak in a forum is validating their opinions is ridiculous and is the reason we are where we are.

And the democrats stay silent which is an admission of their support. The republicans will keep twisting this knife like they always do with cultural issues ,and it will keep winning them points unless democrats come out and speak plainly against these issues or at least take the most neutral of stances. People dislike it so much they they’d rather vote for Trump or not at all than support trans women in sports or transitioning minors. This is the line that a lot of “common sense” liberals won’t cross and they so happen to be the kind of voters that win elections. I’m sorry to say but the trans community will need to keep fighting for at least a decade or two more I think.

Linguistic and logical gymnastics are not convincing. Just because you can do cartwheels around the definition of a woman doesn’t mean that you are correct and it just makes you much less likely to convince someone who is not convinced because it comes off as a bad faith argument or a straw man . Trans women are not the same as women that are born women. If you begin the conversation from there then you might be able to win more support from the so called “everyday American”. If you can’t then nothing will change.

Everyone is, which is why we kinda need to take a step back and maybe listen and even if we disagree on the conclusions you’ll find the root grievances to be the same.

Newsflash. In a democracy, the bigots still get to vote. And if there are more bigots than minorities then the bigots get to keep the minorities down. The minorities effectively need to convince the bigots to give them the rights. But this whole rhetoric is bs, trans people have equal rights, not equal acceptance into society, but the government can’t really force that.

No one who is in favor of trans women in sports, or for minors to have any form of hormonal treatment is gonna win an election and trust me that for a lot of people those two issues, while they will never affect them, are greater than any economic issue. It tends to cause such an emotional reaction in people that it overrides everything else.

This is the political reality that a would be candidate needs to grapple with.

Im saying that shunning everyone from the right is giving the racists a platform, a stage and an audience in which they can still recruit more racist shitbags but without any opposition and even more disimformation.

They built an entire eco system under your noses, and they have as much reach and influence as the “mainstream” ecosystem. That would have never happened without this whole deplatforming people bullshit for even the smallest disagreement with the agenda mentality. This is why far right ideology is spreading more than ever. You cannot suppress ideology, when you do you only make it more appealing to the kind of people who are already susceptible to it.

I know that. Hence the implication that we should actually be platforming them.

“Deplatforming” people is explicitly the reason why the far right has gained so much power. We used to bring the KKK to tv and they always embarrassed themselves. When you deplatform people you in fact send them to platforms where they can control the narrative, and where everyone agrees or won’t disagree with them (like Joe Rogan). Instead platform them and put them in a position in which they have to defend their views against someone who disagrees with them.

Forbidden ideology is as alluring as forbidden knowledge.

Yes but it has not shifted yet, and the backlash is massive. So until public opinion shifts this is the stance to take in order to win. Reminder that Obama ran opposing gay marriage.

The reality is that in a democracy, minorities need to win their rights by convincing the majority that they deserve them. As awful as that sounds, it’s the reality. So the trans movement still has a long fight ahead.

Technically we’ve been an oligarchy since day 1. It just didn’t have oligarchy vibes.

I don’t think that’s his point. I mean like the person you are replying to says, Trump is absolutely correct on this. Planning on a quarter by quarter basis is awfully miopic and has resulted in a marked enshitification of everything because people sacrifice the long term for the short term.

I don’t think there’s evidence that his policies will have good long term effects, but he’s right that we need to start adopting a long term view when gauging economic performance.

In the context of presidential elections? I guess I do. The US is supposed to be a country of countries, so governors should be decided by popular vote as they are the ones who will have the most direct effect on the lives of people. The president was originally intended mostly to oversee big picture stuff that affected all of the states, and as such all the states needed to have equal say in the president. Which is why the states elect the presidents via the electoral college.

Of course the problem is, once more, that the executive branch and the federal government have expanded their power so much that their policies have more effect than original intended over the daily lives of people and understandably people would like to be able to influence that. So for me there’s really only two solutions: we walk back things to their original intent or we might as well start an entirely new system because ours is not designed to work with all this added power.

The reason I agree with the usually right wing idea of restoring the original power structures is that I have seen enough evidence to believe that strong state sovereignty is the best way to go. It’s a very good foil to authoritarianism because power is concentrated at the lower levels. Right now if Trump and Co. manage to completely take over, they will still have a hard time doing everything they want because States have tools to defend themselves against the federal government. But it’s also a “freer” system as it also allows people to move from state to state and choose the one that most aligns with their views instead of a singular vision being imposed from the top down.

I defend them because for all their moral failings they did design a system that is more resilient than any other to autocracy. We could have extended participation to all without destroying that system, and Trump would have never happened. Or if he had he would not have had the power to do the things he’s doing now. But every president takes a little bit more, and you don’t say anything if they belong to your party but cry bloody murder when the other one does it. And then when you’re back in power do you ask your lawmakers to stop the power grab? No, why would you, you like what’s being done. And that’s how we get here.

But I digress, you wrote all of that and never refuted the fact that the electoral college does in fact work. Land might not vote but states need equal say regardless of the population they have. If New York and California decide all elections, how soon until the other states start to secede because their votes count for nothing?

States have strong individual cultural and administrative identities and unless you erase that, there’s no way you can abolish the electoral college without also destroying such a thing as the United Staes of America.

Just do the following mental excercise: Texas and Florida are the two fastest growing states at the moment. Let’s say they remain red and manage to get a bigger population than all the blue cities combined (because of all the space they have) and now because of them every election a Republican president wins. Would you be ok with that? If not then you have to be in favor of the electoral college.

It’s kind of the same thing right? I mean when I mean socially conservative, I mean a candidate that when asked about trans right will say what Newsom said not too long ago. The fact of the matter is that the republicans rely on democrats staying mum about trans issues. They will spend hundreds of millions to stir up grievances that don’t really affect most of the voters but it stirs their emotions. If dems don’t address it directly, the voters think (rightfully), is because they agree with this agenda, so I won’t vote for the dem candidate because I do not want men in women’s bathroom.

You need a dem candidate that says he is not for that. The progressive wing might not like it, but the progressive wing is not gonna win the elections alone.

Tim Walz wouldn’t win an election even if he ran unopposed.

The DNC needs a socially conservative but economically progressive candidate if they want to reclaim the narrative that they are the party of the working class. Tim Walz is already Tampon Tim to them. Like it or not, middle America wants to keep trans people in the margins. I know it’s awful to say, but they will need to keep fighting to win acceptance in society. The government simply cannot forc, coerce or even nudge people to accept them.