The propaganda on tariffs is that foreign imports are bad and domestic manufacturing is good. And plenty of the conservative community accepts this, because they aren’t trying to buy direct from overseas. This guy is an outlier - a MAGA dude who is attempting to import a $2000 widget from Spain for whatever reason - and not representative of the average American voter.

Trump’s statements on tariffs aren’t even strictly false. Businesses can and do shave their margins, eating some percentage of the cost of tariffs, in order to keep their bulk exports competitive. You’re just not going to see that happen on a one-off specialty import, because the guy in Spain isn’t trying to be competitive at scale with a rival US industry.

We’re already seeing more high value manufacturing happening within the US to evade Trump’s tariffs. US tariffs on Japanese imports during the 1987 trade war brought electronics and auto manufacturing into the country in the same way. That’s why we’ve been building Toyota Cars in Kentucky for decades.

Now we’re seeing Samsung and LG planning plants in the US. We’re seeing the same from BMW and Volkswagon. Is this smart trade policy? Feel free to inject your own economic orthodoxy below. But to say its not working as intended… No. The US has enormous influence in global trade. What Trump’s doing has absolutely reversed the flow of manufacturer outsourcing.

So much of the modern political landscape is just suburban white people waking up and realizing they aren’t exempt from the police state that’s been harassing everyone else since the nation’s founding.

Admittedly, this is how you get class consciousness. So it’s not bad, per say. Just a bit ironic that Trump’s War On Woke is radicalizing entire municipalities at a breakneck pace.

Everyone thinks they’re above it, that they can detect the bots or remain unmoved.

I’d say the bigger problem is that there’s nothing “to be done” at an individualist level. Bot swarms are going to exist and you’re going to be exposed to them either directly (via your social media diet) or indirectly (via traditional news, casual conversation with people who consume social media, and the public policies that inevitably emerge from these trends). Simply “being aware” isn’t a defense. You’re still going to have your priors chipped away by these tidal shifts in public discourse.

Look at the impact the High Protein diet fetish has had on every fucking food retailer. Seems like every product has to include a sticker telling you how many grams of protein is in it. We went through the same diet fad exposure with GMOs and saturated fats and fiber. We got deluged with crime statistics in news, entertainment, and politics at every angle to justify the War on Crime. We’re still eating tons of shit from the anti-vax trends of the Bush Era.

But that won’t stop society from imploding.

Society isn’t ending. It’s always doing this shit. When you were young, the baseline felt normal because its all you knew. Now its changing under your feet and you’re struggling to rectify your childhood awareness with an evolved landscape as an adult.

You’re the one imploding, as you try to reconcile the contradictions of your past and present.

I mean, tell it to the folks watching CBS Evening News. Or reading the New York Post.

For some reason, its only the newer forms of media that ever take flak as “brain rot”. As though the style carries more weight than the substance.

TikTok was the big left-liberal influence platform in a sea of neoliberal, conservative, and outright fascist platforms.

But one too many Tokkers posted bad things about Israel and/or good things about Iran, Venezuela, and our immortal enemy China. So President Brandon had to shut that shit down.

Now the US branch of the platform is back in line with the rest of US media

The F-35 Lightning II faced significant, long-term restrictions preventing it from flying within 25 miles of thunderstorms or lightning due to a faulty Onboard Inert Gas Generation System (OBIGGS) that could not safely protect fuel tanks. Although fixed in 2024 via hardware/software updates, the jet remains sensitive to environmental factors like heavy rain, requiring specialized, climate-controlled hangers to prevent stealth coating degradation

Based

Sort of a joke that these planes can’t fly in anything but the most ideal conditions

Duh. That’s how extortion works.

You think the mob ever delivered anything on time and under budget?

If this was all they were doing, I’d agree

Reagan Republicans in 2005?

I guess Bush Republicans would be a better turn of phrase. But they all came out of the same White Flight that Reagan kicked off in the 1980s. The big Republican landslides of 1994, 2002, and 2010 either flipped or purged a bunch of the Kennedy Democrats from the Gulf Coast states and turned them into GOP strongholds.

The gerrymandering of the first Bush term also gave birth to a bunch of flipped House seats and state legislatures, ultimately paying off big in 2004 (and again in 2010 and 2014 and 2016 and 2022).

It was a vastly better situation than a lot of wandering tribes had it back then.

No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.

Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.

Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.

But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.

Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.

They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well.

The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).

Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.

I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.

I’ve lived my entire life in fear of being called uncivil.

Free at last, free at last.