I have a conspiracy-adjacent question. Let’s say your goal was to reduce globalization, but tariffs were too unpopular a way to do so. They too directly put the blame on the president for what happens.
Would starting a war with Iran, shocking energy and transportation prices, raising the costs of exports from every other country be a more solid mechanism? Especially when the US is a net exporter from oil and could conceivably protect domestic industries from the same?
It also - if Trump loses the presidency, the Iran war impacts will continue for years, the impact of tariffs would end relatively quickly.
>> tariffs... too directly put the blame on the president. Would starting a war with Iran... be a more solid mechanism?
War puts the blame on the president even more directly.
>> Especially when the US is a net exporter from oil and could conceivably protect domestic industries from the same?
The US is a huge net importer of goods. The oil surplus is rather small, has been recorded only for the last 3 years and it can't meaningfully change the US balance of trade.
> shocking energy and transportation prices, raising the costs of exports from every other country... and the US could conceivably protect domestic industries from the same?
Nothing will be protected, quite the opposite, the US will be the country hardest hit by inflation because, given the huge net imports, we are the country that benefits the most from unimpeded trade and lower cost of production in other countries.
Trumps tariffs didn't decrease the trade deficit, in fact the deficit for 2025 was significantly higher than the pre-covid 2019. The deficits for Feb and Mar 2025 were the highest monthly deficits in history, beating the previous records by almost 100%.
>> Let’s say your goal was to reduce globalization
"reducing globalization" is a meaningless term, reducing the standard of living is what matters, choking international trade will cause higher reduction in the US than in other countries.
> I mean it’s high risk and maybe dumb, but I wouldn’t put it past the current thought leaders to turn against traditional free market ideology.
"Ideology" is a fig leaf, what matters is the money and power in the hands of the most special interest groups, it's a small club and you ain't in it.
Trump decided to bomb Iran because Netanyahu told him that it'd be cool if he did it. He didn't have a coherent plan beyond "bombs cool." This is why we got the rapidly changing and totally incoherent set of plans for the war and the strategic objectives.
Trump is incapable of understanding that he isn't winning at something. So we are getting a "no, fuck you" response. The most thought I could possibly imagine going into this is that Trump has seen that it is possible to extract wealth from shipping lanes and just decided that he deserves that now.
Thinking too small. Look at the opportunity cost incurred by over focusing the military on Iran. That's force and munitions not going to Ukraine, not usable to protect Taiwan, the extension of hostilities will be essentially the equivalent of an attack on our NATO and SEA allies, if they can't get their shipping through the Strait. Russian oil is no longer sanctioned by the U.S... This is Putin's wet dream. The unmaking of NATO played out in realtime. Our President could not be a more transparent Russian asset if he tried. With every day, those in the Kremlin are probably rejoicing at this ally they've found they don't even need to seemingly pressure to do their bidding. Even if this is all coincidence and it's really just his dementia driving this.
I hope everyone who voted for him is really happy with what they're getting.
This assumes the American system survives intact until then, which is likely, but no longer feels guaranteed. Let’s see how the midterms go, if Trump is able to get away with throwing out results in states that don’t like him, we are in serious trouble.
The United States (not exceptionally so) has often casually committed war crimes in public. I mean, this was a huge argument during the Vietnam war protests and the Iraq war protests when the Bush administration elevated the use of torture. I'm not saying don't be mad, in fact I'm saying be madder! But thousands of innocent victims of past American wars, are wondering when America was the good guy.
The framing is pure propaganda, I think to make people less mad and soften the blow of criticizing America.
Right, American law also considers multiple types of murder based on intention.
It's amazing how coments like GP vaguely hand wave the start difference as if their POV is from the outside when that opinions looks mostlike like a far right nationalist POV also. "This is just what america does, why you guys getting made this time?"
We seem to have this argument every decade "America is not the good guy anymore" after war crimes in Vietnam, after war crimes in Iraq. 5 years from now we'll launder this moment and America will be the good guy again when people need something from America. Maybe we should look at the world through sober analysis and not "good guys" and "bad guys", so we have a shot at stopping the next set of war crimes before they happen.
Yes, but when it comes to politically-motivated murder attempts by random people, part of this is because surveillance technology and policing effectiveness have gotten to the point that it is very difficult to get away with such a murder attempt. See how Luigi Mangione was caught, for example. Many murders are unsolved every year, but when there is a high-profile politically motivated killing, the police seem to really go all-out to solve it.
If it wasn't for the effective policing, I think that such incidents would be more common.
Look I want government subsidized childcare and to tax wealth, but I don’t know that it would actually do much to move birth rates.
Poor people on average have more kids than rich people. It is likely more cultural than strictly speaking financial. No one’s all of a sudden having five kids because of government subsidized childcare.
A theory I might have about this is that - AI doesn’t expand total available cognitive load bearing.
I find that I like AI because it makes it easier and more fun to do my job. Faster to fix tech debt, refactor, add tests, gather data. But I can’t act on that many more domains than before.
AI makes easier problems easier but it puts you in contact with that many more hard problems.
Similar to your observation - I can think of at least one person who is definetly a lot smarter than than me, and yeah, I’m not sure I could tell you why exactly.
Part of it looks like focus, I think I have a broader skill set than they do. But I don’t know that I could like rank a set of people smarter than me.
I don’t know how to follow this intuition, but I weirdly suspect more left leaning people nerd out about this kind of thing than right leaning people. There’s a reason liberal arts programs lean left. Nothing about MAGA seems to be all that like intellectually conservative these days.
There are definitely some conservative Christian nerds that have their favorite early father of the church and won’t shut up about e.g. the difference between homoousios and homoiousios, but in my experience these people tend to be too aware of the intricacies of Christian doctrine to think much about MAGA-based Christian revisionism.
Would starting a war with Iran, shocking energy and transportation prices, raising the costs of exports from every other country be a more solid mechanism? Especially when the US is a net exporter from oil and could conceivably protect domestic industries from the same?
It also - if Trump loses the presidency, the Iran war impacts will continue for years, the impact of tariffs would end relatively quickly.
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