This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are elected Republicans now saying that tariffs previously led to the worst depression our country has ever seen after supporting them just recently?”
Instead of asking why they “are now saying,” you should ask, “Why didn’t they say so before?”
The answer to your question is easy to figure out through simple “pocketbook logic.” It can be endured if something affects someone, be it health, mood, or anything.
The moment something affects their pocketbook, however, it becomes a serious matter.
Up until now, they believed their pocketbooks were safe. Now, they no longer believe that.
They now believe that their pocketbooks are being severely damaged. Now they think their long-term economic future is in jeopardy. They now fear losing their jobs and being forced into the poverty they have been creating for their constituents for decades.
In many ways, sadly, this harsh dose of life-threatening reality might be the kick in the butt of the complacency of a nation.
Nothing can motivate 350 million people into united action more effectively than all fearing for their lives.
The longer the public and the authorities allow this economic destruction to continue, the more likely the entire world will experience a severe depression. If that happens, there will be no placating the massive chaos that will ensue without taking dramatic steps to reign it in, such as by instituting Martial Law.
If Trump can maintain his power while instituting Martial Law, the odds are excellent that democracy will be set back one hundred years. We can then expect a return to an almost primitive social existence with gated communities for the elites and the rest of humanity living like herd animals.
If Martial Law is instituted through a military coup where Trump is hauled off to prison or shot for treason, then it will take the rest of this century for the world to restabilize. We will experience a dramatic restructuring of government processes, such as through a modern version of a “grand new deal.”
On the back end, for those lucky enough to survive the nightmare, humanity will earnestly face the environmental challenges we’ve been postponing.
The sooner we can reassert sanity, the sooner we can adjust our behaviours and restructure our collapsing societies as we transition into a fully automated system for human civilization to thrive.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why does it seem that there is no neutral ground for political parties in America? You seem either extreme right or extreme left. Indeed, agreeing that the opposite party have a point seems to brand you as a traitor? Why is there this perception?”
The perceptions you describe result from a myopic lens in which the nation is ruled by one extreme.
There is no extreme left in the U.S.
No parties or groups are demanding to seize ownership of the means of production.
You argue that there is an extreme left because it helps to lessen the seriousness of the challenges facing your nation today. It’s a perception that helps to justify its Nazification as a reaction to a perceived enemy rather than a decline and degradation of its long-held moral values.
To believe an extreme left exists is to deny the harsh reality of natural cruelty your nation has been cultivating for decades.
Gordon Gecko was a warning against this cruelty, but as a nation, you embraced it, and you embody it by permitting the ongoing mass murderers of children in schools, by denying healthcare as a human right, by permitting whole towns to poison their people through contaminated water, and by justifying a profit motivation.
Your nation has been welcoming this transition into a culture of sociopathic dehumanization for decades, and you have cheered it on. You cheered when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers’ union. You cheered when he shut down mental health facilities and threw the vulnerable out onto the streets. You supported his hatred of gay people and allowed countless murders of them by denying them life-saving medical treatment.
You justify the fabricated existence of a far-left because you struggle to avoid facing the ugly truth of the nation you have become by choice.
There is no neutral ground because all that remains is a toxic evil threatening global stability. Those who struggle to muster the courage of their ancestors are stunned to find themselves engaged in a surreal battle against monsters who should know better than to deem themselves modern-day kings among the educated and democratized masses.
This question assumes that a threshold is crossed, and a switch flips between a non-dictatorship and a dictatorship. The reality is that there is a transitional stage between the two states.
If you think of the process as day becoming night, twilight occurs between the two unless you live on the equator.
The U.S. is in the twilight stage of becoming a dictatorship and already exhibits key stages of the transition into darkness, such as launching a strategic assault on private law firms that would challenge his executive orders and other actions in court. His strategy has been to intimidate those entities that would restrain his efforts to achieve a complete dictatorship.
Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps are two major law firms that have capitulated to Trump’s bullying. These entities are essentially among the nation’s final layers of protection against a full manifestation into a dictatorship. If these protections fail, full-on chaos is the only option for the people. There won’t be enough time to hold out for another almost two years for a mid-term election. Americans will have no choice but to embrace a violent uprising because defeating these entities essentially guarantees he has the full cooperation of the courts to do what he pleases.
That means he will likely declare Martial Law to tamp down any resistance to furthering his stranglehold on the nation.
Americans are on the precipice of losing their democracy completely. Even though they’ve endured the pseudo-democracy of a corporatocracy for the last more than one decade, they’re entering entirely new territory if Trump succeeds in defeating enough law firms to gain his legal stranglehold over the nation.
To answer this question from the perspective of a countdown to midnight clock used to determine how close the world has been to nuclear annihilation, the U.S. is best expressed through a song by Midnight Oil, “Minutes to Midnight”:
Everybody say, “God is a good man” (Minutes to midnight) Everybody say, “God is a good man” (God is a good man) Ah, clock on the world (Yes, he’s a good man) Driving a dump truck up to the sun (Is he a soul man?) A sigh in the human heart (Three sides to every god)
I look at the clock on the wall It says three minutes to midnight Faith is blind when we’re so near
But ears can’t hear What those eyes don’t see But ears can’t hear What those eyes don’t see And you can’t see me
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is there any way that these new tariffs by Trump will bring any new jobs in the next 5 years or will they just add more inflation and costs to the US families?”
Let’s assume the plan is to increase jobs in the U.S., such as with increasing aluminum production. That would mean Trump would now be in the middle of discussions on that issue, if not initiating plans for increased energy production through hydroelectricity. Plans would be on the table for the development of dams that can serve to replace Canada’s aluminum production.
Why has there been no discussion?
Are there even any sites in the U.S that can compete with Canadian dams?
Why have there been no feasibility studies?
Why has there been no discussion about addressing the increased costs of tariffed products?
Everything about Trump can be described as a knee-jerk response from a bully. He consistently behaves like a childish bully who is used to people capitulating to his demands.
When Canada and the European Union discuss developing their trade relationships, he threatens to escalate his tariffs.
That doesn’t sound very forward-thinking to me. Does that sound like strategic thinking to you?
How does he intend to compensate for the burdens he’s been placing on the working class?
Oh… that’s right, he and Musk have been talking about how an allegedly short restraint would benefit the American people because they’ve become too complacent in their luxuries as their quality of life tanks and life expectancy shrinks.
The harsh reality is that the American people are being played for suckers by the wealthy class for who a bit of belt tightening isn’t a threat to their lives. Belt-tightening for them barely registers as cutting back on options for the new nested doll yacht purchase and cutting back on staff to maintain it on their behalf.
They won’t feel the pain of the inevitable recession he’s causing. Many are likely looking forward to it as an opportunity to invest in business purchases for fire sale prices.
How anyone may parse his decisions, they can’t avoid concluding that he intends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the working class.
That’s the core goal of Project 2025 and the Dark Enlightenment group as they reduce the nation to a two-class system of rulers and serfs.
He doesn’t care about your jobs.
He already knows his buddy Elon will replace many jobs with intelligent robots. The little people will become even less substantial and be viewed as more of an unwanted burden.
The more he can eliminate from the bottom of the economic hierarchy, the more he can upgrade his toilets from gold to platinum.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are things that Americans should know about Canada, so that they better understand why Canada is so resolutely against being annexed to the USA?”
This Canadian’s view is that any American who needs an explanation to understand how obnoxiously offensive their confusion is over this matter is precisely the delusional arrogance that has made America the dysfunctional dystopia that it is today.
It’s like the bullying asshole who steals candy from a baby, being incapable of understanding how that’s precisely what qualifies them as a bullying asshole.
We see precisely this behaviour being played out when Musk claims social security is a Ponzi scheme, but can’t understand why the people who depend on it to stay alive are so angry with him for taking it away.
Elon Musk embodies precisely what is wrong with America today.
He deliberately provokes the entire world with a Nazi salute and, when criticized for it, doubles down with childish stupidity to mock people over it and then starts complaining about being hated for being a Nazi while scratching his head over what he thinks is wrong with other people.
There is no self-awareness on his behalf, nor empathy or compassion demonstrated toward others, but he expects sympathy to be expressed toward him.
Elon IS America with this behaviour and attitude.
America made 9/11 happen, then stood tall and declared the 9/11 responders to be heroes whose sacrifices should never be forgotten but then tossed them out like yesterday’s garbage to suffer.
Americans routinely declare how much they value those who shed blood on behalf of defending the nation and its values but then show them what those values actually are by treating their veterans like yesterday’s dogshit.
Then you wonder why people hate you.
That’s the core of what is wrong with America.
You people are sick, and you need help.
You must admit, like every AA member does, that you can’t go it alone. You need to open up to a world that is more than willing to help you get better.
You have to stop stealing their stuff and bullying your way through their lives while treating people like dogshit.
You can’t spread democracy by the point of a gun. You can only show people an example of how it makes your lives better. Right now, however, you’re showing the world how easily corrupted your democracy can become when you don’t restrain the individuals within your nation who have too much power.
You have forgotten how the greatness of a nation is found within how it treats its most vulnerable.
Admit that you need help.
That’s the first step every addict must take to get on the road to their recovery.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think by the time Trump’s second term is over, he will have successfully reduced identity politics to include only “Trump supporter” and “anti-American”?”
That’s exactly what his strategy has been to date. It is precisely that divisive strategy employed by conservatives everywhere he has leveraged into his position of power. This has been the consistent strategy of conservatives who claim the entire world is ugly, evil, and broken beyond repair while claiming they’re the only ones capable of fixing the messes they have made.
It’s a tiresome strategy that has worked wonders for them as they’ve instituted privatization programs throughout every democratic nation. They intentionally sabotage functioning institutes by defunding them to create problems that otherwise would not exist and then claim those institutes would be better served by the private sector.
People have been lapping this lie up since Ronald Reagan betrayed democracy by claiming the government was the problem. By demonizing the government, he created an entity the public would turn against as an enemy and scapegoat for all their problems. He successfully detached the notion of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people and converted it into an imaginary boogeyman that the people would willingly fight against rather than rise to their responsibility to change it in ways that more effectively represent their needs.
Disparagements like “nanny state” have often been used to characterize government as a paternalistic entity while attaching the opposing sentiments of historically destructive autocracies living within the cultural imaginations of people who have always fought for their right to self-determination. At the same time, the ownership class has endlessly justified their need for the government nipple to support the people by themselves as a proxy of wealth custodians with a paternalistic responsibility to care for the people by creating jobs for them.
In the minds of the people, blurring the distinction between a democracy and autocracy made it easy to turn the people against the only entity capable of protecting the integrity of a government of the people against the people. By turning the people against their only protection, he successfully made every citizen in every democracy around the world vulnerable to the only enemies of humanity that humanity has ever had — parasites who steal our value and hoard it in service to their egos.
DonOld Trump’s rhetoric, along with every CONservative political leader, makes a point of feigning solidarity with the working class while besmirching them in private. A recording of this dynamic was Romney’s downfall as he publicly pretended to have a working-class sensibility in the most awkward ways, making him give off uncanny valley vibes that made it difficult for people to buy his ruse.
George Bush Jr., however, was elected based on people’s perceptions that they could enjoy a casual conversation with him over a beer. Neither of these people understood or cared about the lives of everyday citizens. We have all been little more than disposable pawns in their games of power all along. The ownership class breeds this dehumanizing class distinction within every generation while disparaging anyone who does not share their misanthropic regard for humanity.
Trump hasn’t done anything different or unique from that playbook. He has merely capitalized on the inculcated belief that billionaires are job creators. Trump has leveraged the lie that his wealth is a product of pure effort and individual initiative. Trump has benefitted from the lie that anyone could have his wealth if they worked hard enough and were smart enough about how they spent their money.
He has taken the strategy of bamboozling the public over decades to its logical conclusion. He has benefitted from the illusion that an avocado toast diet has been responsible for irresponsible people suffering in poverty. It has been a strategy of mollifying the working class to such a degree that many have shown an eager willingness to wage war against their fellow citizens to defend the ownership class.
The ownership class has been so successful in cultivating the image of a blurred distinction between classes and making themselves appear as one of the little people that they’ve begun dropping any pretense of their disguise being a lie. They made themselves abundantly clear with the threat issued by the president of the Heritage Foundation when he declared Project 2025 would be a restructuring of the nation that would be bloodless only if the left capitulated.
The arrogance of the tech bros perpetuates a horror show of arrogance over the little people through a disgusting betrayal they have coined as a “dark enlightenment,” which hearkens back to biblical references and the devil’s temptations.
The most consistent characteristic of hubris, however, is its finite and fleeting moment of ascendancy because, like Icarus, the most arrogant humans who deign to fly too close to the sun fail to understand how their wax wings inevitably melt under the light of truth.
They will always fall to their doom.
This is the broad lesson of the history of social evolution.
Dynasties and monarchies are anachronisms because people invariably tire of the lies, the abuses, and of being played as fools while watching their dreams shattered one by one and the ownership class flying to the stars in their mechanical penises.
It is an embarrassment that Bezos remained so utterly oblivious to the profundity of that flight that he had to drag along a human symbol capable of interpreting an experience he could not appreciate. He struggled to acknowledge that that was only possible for him by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to his hoard.
The ownership class has been successfully whispering in the ears of their hordes of Stockholm Syndrome victims that their power is an inevitability, that it belongs to them by a divine right of kings as old as humanity. They ignore how their power rests on the shoulders of those who support them, and they do not have infinite patience for egotistical abuses.
Our stories are written by those who have historically stood against their power and have consistently transformed human society into something more approximating the justice history inexorably bends toward.
Trump will only have succeeded in pushing the stale ruse past its due date and causing it to smell so much like rancid fish that even the MAGAt army supporting him today will turn on him like rabid animals when they can no longer believe his lies.
By the end of his term, many of his MAGAt followers will have hit rock bottom. They will be ripe for vengeance against him and all the arrogant members of the ownership class who have been steadily waging a war against the little people for centuries. If all goes well, this will finally be the last of this primarily silent war because the little people will have learned that power should never be unlimited within anyone’s hands. Power must always be restrained. That’s the only way we can survive and meet our future.
By the end of Trump’s term, he will either be dead because his body will have finally given out, locked in prison (and primarily for his protection) or be in hiding from an enraged electorate that has finally figured out the truth about his betrayal against them and the nation he fraudulently claimed to be a patriot of.
The hordes of the people who outnumber the ownership class by orders of magnitude will either destroy the edifices of power while seeking retribution for their betrayal, or they will be satiated by an awakening among the ownership class that they either share their power or lose it altogether.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If tariffs make things more expensive for the other party, why is putting counter tariffs a good idea?”
Let’s first begin by dropping the notion that throwing counter-punches is a “good thing.”
A vast difference exists between a “good thing” and a “necessary thing.”
“Good things” result in mutual progress and shared benefit of growth.
A “necessary thing” is a strategy for mitigating loss and facilitating the reversal of destruction.
Punching someone back after they have punched you isn’t a “good thing,” but a “necessary thing” because they will continue to beat on you until you can do nothing but submit like a broken animal to their assaults until they decide to stop or until you’re dead.
Tariffs are often used in negotiations to achieve balanced results between two parties.
Tariffs can be a means of securing a stable trade relationship.
Tariffs can also be used punitively to attack a negotiating partner, precisely how bullies like Trump approach their negotiations. He championed this strategy of overwhelming negotiating partners with force in his “Art of the Deal” piece of provocative garbage. Bullying is his life pattern.
Trump has always been a bully and his behaviours have destroyed people’s lives.
The only way to deal with a bully that tries to overpower you is to debilitate them.
This approach is precisely how Putin has resolved his conflicts. He has never stopped at just pushing someone back. He has always taken his conflicts to an extreme resolution to eliminate any shred of threat as a message to anyone else who might threaten him. None of his political opponents were beaten to live their lives in a reclusive or marginalized state. They were all murdered to ensure they could no longer pose a threat against him.
Being assaulted by someone like Trump with a long history of behaving in a consistently bullying manner and whose commitments aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on — and who is backed by a psychopath like Putin whose goal is the total eradication of resistance means the necessary option of overpowering Trump and his strategy to such a degree that he is beaten to the ground like a rabid dog is a survival necessity.
Until he has been so broken and defanged that he can do nothing more than gum his way through future assaults, he will always be an existential threat to human civilization. Preventing him from throwing punches isn’t enough. He must have every single weapon of his broken beyond repair so that he lives in a state of total impotence like the swamp slug he is.
This is not a “good thing” by any stretch of the imagination. This is a horrifyingly “necessary thing,” if we want to see something resembling sanity return to society that can allow some form of stability to emerge.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why haven’t we seen a more transparent Federal Government until 47?”
Nothing is transparent about the obfuscating nonsense a grifter is dumping onto the public consciousness.
Anyone with a lick of sense who watched Elon Musk speaking from the Oval Office as if he were an unelected and self-appointed president, enacting broad changes to public infrastructure as if his words were intended to create the best outcomes for the people would have been horrified by how thick his petard was spread.
It was like watching a Fox entertainment talking head barf up a stream of irrational gibberish because he figures a gish gallop argument of nonsense is enough to sway 350 million people… and if it isn’t, it’s enough to sway 70 million people who will run defence on his behalf so that he can continue to destroy the nation.
The most obvious example of “transparency by obfuscating petard” was hiring child hackers with criminal histories to tap into the private records of 350 million people instead of forensic accountants with a clear mandate to identify waste and fraud. Their agenda, goals, and processes should have been made public before beginning his process. Instead, it was rushed through to get as far as they could into violating the nation’s protections before being stopped by the checks and balances built into the system.
The alarms should have been ringing loudly that he has overlooked the most obvious target of waste and fraud in the military budget — which has never been audited.
Why do you think that is?
Right… it’s because they’re counting on military support to rein in the disruptive elements in society when they need to ramp up their pogroms to the next level of insanity and round up citizens who get deemed dissidents by the state.
The Freedom of Information Act has already guaranteed government transparency. You can bet any effort to obtain details on the justifications of fraud and waste supporting the decisions of what has been cut will never be revealed to the public. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to spot his motivations, considering that every target of his is a public institution designed expressly to protect the public interest, holding him accountable for his criminal behaviours.
Ask yourself this simple question:
If this administration cared about transparency, why is Trump the only president who has refused to make his taxes public?
Why did Trump lie about Project 2025 during his campaign while appointing a VP who called him Hitler? Why would the VP join someone they thought was Hitler, to begin with? Why is the VP not only a contributor to Project 2025 but also someone who publicly justifies lying to capture attention?
How does any of this constitute “transparency” in your worldview?
Subordination is the foundation for authoritarian regimes.
Authoritarian regimes are rigidly hierarchical.
Rigid hierarchies are inflexible and abusive toward all people downward in the power hierarchy.
Authoritarian regimes eventually break because humans have limits on the abuses they can tolerate.
Democracies survive because they are fundamentally adaptable to change.
Democracies are fundamentally adaptable to change because they accommodate individuality.
Individuality empowers self-determination to maximize flexibility and adaptability.
Flexibility and adaptability are contingent upon responsiveness to succeed.
Responsiveness demands input and engagement from diverse perspectives to be effective.
Dissent filters out ineffective processes that inhibit adaptability.
Navigating change requires dissent to ensure that adaptation initiatives succeed.
Without dissent, changes are made blindly to make adaptability impossible and guarantee failure.
Hence, dissent is the foundation of a democracy.
Furthermore, embracing dissent improves all of us, particularly in the essential skills area of critical thinking.
The greater our embrace of dissent, the better our thinking skills become.
The better our thinking skills become, the more robust our democracy.
Democracies are being threatened worldwide because we have been failing to equip citizens with the skills they need to build a better world together.
We have been failing to equip our citizens because arrogant assholes with too much of a desire for power wish to reduce citizen efficacy in self-governance systems because they deem themselves superior humans entitled to their power and to lord over the little people.
It’s past time they begin to relearn their lessons in humility.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do leftists stay hopeful/resilient in times like these where fascism is on the rise and history is repeating itself?”
History has shown us that fascism always gets beaten back when the public realizes how much less they like fascism than the chaos of democracy. Every time and after enduring a period of suffering under the rule of despots, voter turnout makes a strong comeback as fascism encourages the apathetic non-voters to rethink their strategy of staying home.
Think of fascism as a lesson in consequences where people need to suffer enough to realize just how precious the delicate balance of freedom is in society and how vital the sausage-making process is, no matter how boring and dry it may otherwise seem.
People eventually learn they prefer to get off the couch and go to the polling stations to cast their votes for people they want to trust to represent their best interests. They also eventually learn that no matter how much the fascists want to paint their opposition as being identical to them, they’re not. The fascists inevitably piss off the people enough to go to war against them, and that’s precisely what Trump and Musk are inviting from the world.
They’re poking a tiger, and they’re going to get burned while they set the world aflame.
The only real question left on the table is, Just how much more pain will the people endure before the riots break out?
This isn’t even about being hopeful because we already know, just like everyone who’s been pushed past their limits, that once the anger takes over, there’s no stopping it. That neighbour who’s been pissing you off with their loud music invariably gets an earful that may embarrass you afterward. Still, it’s an emotional explosion that can’t be controlled during its moment of emotional release.
My guess is that if Luigi Mangione gets the death penalty, that might be the final trigger before all hell breaks loose. It’s hard to tell because Americans seem able to tolerate incredible horrors without doing anything substantial about them.
I know that if I was living in Flint, Michigan, for example, and I had a kid who died from the poisoned water, I would have pulled a Luigi myself. If a kid of mine were gunned down in a school while my local representative did nothing to institute sensible measures to prevent this from happening again, I’d lose my shit.
As it stands right now, from what I’ve been put through on a personal level, I’m already doing everything I can to keep from doing something stupid while attempting to resolve an issue in the most civilized manner possible. As it stands, the bullies responsible for destroying my life are behaving as if they’re going to walk away without suffering any consequences for their actions as they tell me to shut up and die quietly.
I know I’m not the only person at the end of their rope, and all it will take is the right match to set this nightmarish dystopia ablaze.
People like Musk will have to come around or beef up their security because it’s only a matter of time before their arrogance blows back like a nuclear bomb in their faces.
“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution necessary.”
The trouble with this dynamic is that millions of people have to be pushed to their breaking point before they realize how much less pain there is in risking death in a revolution than to continue enduring a walking death in slow motion toward oblivion.
This is all just history repeating itself.
It’s not new by any stretch of the imagination.
Those who refuse to learn from history force us all to replay it, and we all get uglier about it each time we must endure the stupidity of people who refuse to read the writing on the wall.
The only salient aspect of hope in this mess is that we can avoid the worst chaos before returning to sanity.
thotbag 