Sure miss the days where there wasn’t headline generating chaos from the White House resulting in market volatility. Make Government Boring Again.
Or are Wall Street actors gaming the volatility for further profit?
Or both?
Just learned from Twitter tariffs will be rolled back in a day or two.
I remember seeing that on SNL in the 80s; it has always stuck with me.
For 1/3 of eligible voters, it's "I don't care about voting".
1) They can't vote, either because of local politicians meddling in their election process/with their polling places, being convicted of bullshit non-crimes, or simply being unable to get to a polling place. Shock of shocks, majority of political fuckery involved in taking away people's right to vote is brought about by conservatives. Even more shocking, the groups that tend to be disenfranchised trend progressive in their voting habits, wow, such a weird coincidence.
2) They have no desire to vote, because as much as I understand voting for the lesser of two evils (and doing it with regularity) that just isn't motivating, and neither is choosing which party you want to join that's going to leave you for dead the second the election is over. To be clear: this is not "both sides are bad." Both sides are bad, but one is just useless bad, and the other is actively tearing down the state to sow chaos that it can use to consolidate power and bring about a theocracy. And while both of those are bad, they are not even remotely comparable.
Nope, that's just more uninformed "both sides are the same" nonsense.
The Democrat and Republican voting record proves you wrong.
And one side is only "useless" because the other side are obstructionists, and that side can only obstruct because too many people with low IQs believed lies and voted against their best interests.
I mean, you can trace various seemingly random effects today to Reagan policies.
Essentially, yes those other comments are linked to politics. All things could be extrapolated to politics. That doesn't mean we should directly talk about the political aspects, otherwise it drowns out curious discussion
Over the past few months I doubt there have even been 10 discussions total with some non-circular, credible, arguments along with some coherent logic backing them…
There is nothing to discuss. What we are witnessing is, to be crass, an exercise of pure idiocy.
There’s not a widely agreed upon definition of intelligence last time I checked. So it seems impossible for “idiocy” to be any better defined.
There’s not even such an agreement that all human adults are even sentient in the first place, or what the critical threshold is.
That trump's narrative of what tariffs are is a lie and that these do not in fact help the economy. They can help, but not the way trump is using the tools.
>There’s not a widely agreed upon definition of intelligence last time I checked.
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It’s clearly possible for people to have ulterior goals and motives… so assessments based on outward usages, of anything, seem irrelevant to determining intelligence, or the lack of it.
I'm not interested in this tangent here that you keep trying to veer on. Point it many economists know this trade war is not good for the economy. The history of this is as recent as Trump 45.
Like it’s not doing him any favors, I tend to feel it’s some kind of personality defect.
Though it did get him a lot of attention in the past, which substantially led to him becoming president.
Either he can’t turn it off, or the decade plus of increasingly internet centric media exposure among the general population just selected for a guy who had obvious populist but not too radical views and also makes ridiculous statements to get attention.
Greenland will not be taken by force. The reminder of a possibility of force may be used as leverage in the negotiation. The messaging is kind of whacky, but it would make sense to broadcast the threat widely to achieve credibility. Like “he’s so crazy he might just pull the trigger”.
In my experience, the ‘personality defect’ you are thinking of is what many folks would call ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder’. He only wants Greenland because someone once told him he couldn’t have it, and it gets him attention every time he brings it up.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he has no actual idea what Greenland actually is like, and has never visited it. He might even be confused between Iceland and Greenland, if you asked him to point to Greenland on an unlabeled map.
Plenty of other people though would benefit from the strife created by him actually taking it, or from him being happy with them by actually getting it for him, so I expect there are active plans in motion right now to invade Greenland.
He’s telling everyone what he wants to do, no one is delivering real consequences to stop him, and he is in charge. Listen to what he’s saying.
Refusing to take him ‘seriously’ and actually act against him, is exactly what normalizes his actions when he later does the thing that seemed crazy a month or a year ago.
Look at what he was saying that seemed crazy and hyperbolic a year or two ago. Look at what he is doing now, and no one is stopping him.
I think, though, that the narcissism mechanism acts a bit differently than you say.
I think he sees himself as a great man, a man who can see further than others, a man who gets things done and above all a man who makes deals. I’m not saying his is any those things, he’s not, just that this is how he narcissistically sees himself.
Interestingly, I think this disordered thinking is probably what makes him not give any shits about what other people think. Like, from his perspective he’s going to do a thing that will be unpopular because people are myopic, but eventually his results will be too obvious to ignore. Picture a narcissistic software engineer, they do the same thing. He does this very clumsily, because he is not actually a great man in the way he sees himself, and he has never made any attempt to work on his personality shortcomings, because narcissism.
To be absolutely clear, this is what I think is occurring in his mind, I am not personally saying that he is a great man etc. His self perception as that is just what drives how he acts.
Anyway, he does want Greenland. Taking Greenland would make him a major historical figure, from the perspective of a man (himself) who developed his sense of historical significance from literal school history books, not from any deep thinking. Physics phds want to be the guy in the physics textbook. He wants to be the guy in the history textbook. Annexing Greenland would give him that.
However, he will not use physical force to achieve that. I would put big money on that prediction. It doesn’t fit with his m/o. He is bluffing about using physical force, in order to strong arm Denmark into a purchase deal. Because, you know, he sees himself as a master deal maker. Doing a deal on Greenland would be a massive win for that aspect of his persona, in terms of that self belief being supported in the narcissistic sense.
Using physical force on Greenland would be literally insane, and if you listen to the man talk for a long enough time, as I have, he has shown signs of being many, many things, but being literally insane is not one of them. Nothing he has done so far has surprised me (with the exception of the Gulf of America, he did catch me off guard with that one).
His supporters don’t really care about Greenland. I think from their perspective, Trump does some pretty goofy stuff, but if he’s the guy who will do something about 1) the Mexicans and 2) the trade policies that created the rust belt, then he’s their guy.
I guess the disconnect comes from the fact that for many people including myself, the perception has always been of the exact opposite.
I don’t think he is clinically insane, or incompetent in a court of law insane. Deep down he knows what the truth is, or he couldn’t do what he is doing. You can’t go in the opposite direction of something if part of you doesn’t know where it actually is.
NPD is a disorder, which isn’t the psychological definition of insanity either.
He just refuses to believe or acknowledge anything that doesn’t reinforce his world view, regularly preferring (and enforcing on others) his delusional world view instead, which has him as a strong man, excellent deal maker, etc.
He also goes out of his way to destroy anyone who disagrees with his delusional world view, to the point of committing what appears to be clear criminal acts to do so, and prefers coercive control over any sort of mutually beneficial bargaining.
It all fits.
Look at the consistent outcome for people who are around or under the control of malignant narcissists, and you’ll see why this is a big problem. He is going to end up destroying everything valuable or real in everything he has control over in his attempt to make it fit his world view, and destroy anyone he can who attempts to stop it.
If economic means don’t work, he has assassinated folks before, and while yes it doesn’t fit his MO to start wars directly - at some point it’s going to happen.
All it takes is for someone to stand up to him in the right circumstances.
If he can take Greenland, and sees no real consequences (he certainly didn’t get any for taking out the Iranian general, despite hundreds of service member injuries), even if it involves force - seriously, why wouldn’t he in your world view?
And do you think the cowards currently in power elsewhere are going to risk starting WW3 for a bunch of ice? Greenland only has 56k people in the whole country, and most of them are rural farmers who will never have to care what gov’t is actually running the country.
Oh, and here it is again today - he’s going to ‘make them rich’ [https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-people-greenland-we-will...].
That answer is why he’ll almost certainly end up ‘taking’ Greenland.
Personally, I figure a month or less.
Or wanting to create "camps" to hold immigrants, and then sending them to Guantanamo?
Things like threatening retaliations against perceived enemies?
Withdrawing support from Ukraine and groveling to Putin?
I'm pretty tired of people dismissing his crazy outbursts as something he just says because he's not just all talk, he (too) often does the crazy things.