

I’d throw in greed and ignorance into the mix but yes
I’d throw in greed and ignorance into the mix but yes
Oh, you misunderstand me.
Absolutely yes, people will continue to trade with the US after a few years. Hell, they are still doing it today!
What’s different is the level of dependence the rest of the world will enable in the future. Their special status no longer applies; and there is no trust they will be good actors in the future.
Long term cooperation will be built in anticipation of likely irrational and volatile behaviour. Something like the integrated North American auto industry or aligning with the US as primary defence contractor or intelligence, these mistakes will be not be repeated.
There will continue to be trade, but across the world a higher priority will be given to domestic production and alternative suppliers for critical products. For example Canada had been slowly retreating from our protectionist policies on dairy — but instead I expect these to now be strengthened. I expect to see a stronger push away from reliance on the US for military equipment, semiconductors, financial and digital services, and more.
I need to hire you to summarize my lengthy pretentious blathering into a nice concise sentence. :)
From my perspective in Canada, there’s nothing the US can do to unfuck this situation.
Let’s say folks unseated Comrade Spraytan somehow and reversed all of his policies. I would still never trust their country again with economic or security dependence in the way that much of the world has enabled in the status quo.
It was the American voters who selected this foolishness, not once but twice. They and their country will not be trusted for a generation or maybe longer. They threw away a very good thing for them because of abject greed, and now it’s gone forever.
Over-estimating is just as dangerous. People – and our governments – keep getting surprised by this pattern of behaviour because we pig-headedly refuse to admit the truth.
In order for our countries to plan economic matters, and defense and intelligence and more – we need to expect the same patterns of stupidity and irrationality as we’ve seen demonstrated time and time again. This doesn’t mean all the actions will be stupid – folks like Putin other intelligent evildoers are in the mix of those who are manipulating the president. But they have shown a lack of ability to fully control the irrational behaviour from surfacing in policy whims.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me thousands of times… c’mon at some point we have to learn.
We’ve all been conditioned to not accuse our political opponents of being stupid.
For one, it can cause you to underestimate your opponents — you don’t want to be caught unawares of some secret plan.
Second, there’s an aspect of pettiness to just labeling your opponents dumb. Most often people attribute “stupid” to “I don’t understand this”. For example, the idea of it being stupid for poor people in Kentucky or whatever to vote against their interests and aid billionaires and oppose their own healthcare — when it’s not stupid, it’s a misunderstanding of how important identity politics are to these groups.
Third, there’s a pushback to the “Jon Stewart effect”, where we sit back and laugh about how our opponents are dumb and we smugly know we are smarter. This is an excuse to do nothing, and it’s an ugly impulse and we must fight it.
But all this conditioning — and more — has led us to a point where we can’t actually recognize stupid when it’s staring us in the face.
The video doesn’t show evidence of this being a planned out endeavour.
For it to be grift, those people would have had to benefitted from the dip in some way. But that’s not what this shows, it’s just billionaires having their shares go down in value because of trumps idiocy and then back up from the whiplash when he erratically reversed course.
Spraytan is trying to ingratiate himself to these rich assholes by taking credit for their gains by wilfully ignoring their losses were inflicted by him.
This is not to say that no one in the administration is using this for their own gains. It’s entirely likely that some are.
I’m just super sick of this narrative that Trump secretly has some master plan when we have 40+ years of well documented evidence about how stupid this man is.
Oh my gourd please stop
He is a failed nepo baby whose only successes in life were being a hired hand on a reality tv show and accidentally stumbling into politics via undisguised racism.
He
Is
A
Fucking
Moron
It’s important to the world to drop the “quietly” bit.
The US administration is behaving erratically and irrationally. This isn’t a punchline to some smug joke, it has important repercussions for world trade and defence needs.
Let’s cut the conspiracy theories about how they are doing this for graft, and the unfounded “4d chess” approaches. Some people in the administration may be trying to steer the government in these ways, but the captain of the ship is an unleashed chaos monkey surrounded by sycophantic yes-men.
The tariffs could double tomorrow or be gone tomorrow. The US could invade Greenland with a military force tomorrow or drop it completely move onto some shiny new idiocy.
We in the rest of the world need to move with urgency in order to be prepared for the worst. This is a tall task, so the longer we keep these admissions quiet the longer we are vulnerable
“Born on third, thinks he got a triple”
Everyone makes jokes like it’s funny but it bears repeating in a serious tone.
Trump either is a Russian asset, or has been successfully manipulated by Russian assets for many years. Whichever one it is doesn’t even matter that much because their level of control is so significant.
No, he’s not just “Trump being Trump“ or some coincidence, it’s a specific pattern with a plethora of supporting evidence. This news is an extra grain of sand stacked on mountain. All by itself, the unexplainable appointment of Russian agent Tulsi Gabbard to head of US intelligence should be proof enough.
The rest of the world needs to take this seriously even if the American voters don’t. The evidence demands that countries should stop intelligence cooperation, and should move with haste to remove American equipment from areas of critical infrastructure and national security. Amongst other things.
That’s a big problem and nontrivial to accomplish but we can’t deal with it by laughing and being smug about how dumb Americans are.
This was news to me, thanks for sharing this OP.
Stardew valley lied to me!
It’s not just money, it’s the realization that we are nothing to them. It’s the betrayal of seeing someone you thought was a friend stab you in the front without remorse.
So I do believe it is different this time. Perhaps history will reveal you to be correct — PP yipping about being “Americas best friend” indicates at some think the old status quo will return — but I don’t think so.