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Generational Dynamics World View
(03-04-2018, 11:51 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:
(03-03-2018, 11:54 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: >   I just wanted to note that without the border adjustment tax,
>   we're now imposing much less well thought out tariffs that are
>   already causing threats of retaliation and counterretaliation.  We
>   should have done this the sensible way when we had a
>   chance.

Whether those tariffs will be enacted is far from certain.

The economically-orthodox part of the Right already shows its opposition. Tariffs are anti-competitive; they cause great dislocations and force distortions of market economics.


Quote:What we're actually seeing is a repeat of a script that we've seen
several dozen times in the last year.  Trump says or tweets something,
the mainstream media becomes hysterical for several days, and in the
end Trump wins because he was successful in controlling the media.

I remember watching this with amazement on the first weekend of
Trump's presidency.  That weekend there was going to be this huge
march on Washington by feminists, being described by the mainstream
media as the greatest women's march in history.  During the night on
Friday night, Trump tweeted a couple of things -- I don't even
remember what the tweets were about, but the mainstream media
considered them outrageous.

Reagan and Dubya both said outrageous things, only to back down. Trump does not back down. He thus develops a reputation for extremism. His best is the unexpurgated worst of Reagan or Dubya. Whether this makes him extreme or stubborn is hard to tell. But I look at the polls, and he has been consistently behind Obama, who had a similarly-vociferous and well-organized opposition from the Right. But Obama kept his approvals in the mid-40s rather consistently, which was always within striking range for winning the next election with a spirited, competent campaign. He barely won the popular vote in 2012, but he did. Trump is out of the range of winning re-election with the polling that he now has, which seems to fluctuate on Gallup polling between the upper thirties and low forties.


Quote:The mainstream media went completely hysterical.  So all we heard on
the news on Saturday is how Trump was violating the first amendment
and was using Twitter to be a new Joseph Goebbels.  He was also a new
Adolf Hitler because of whatever the content of the tweets was.  He
was already the worst president in American history and he should be
impeached as quickly as possible.  Others on the left were more direct
in saying that Trump should be jailed or shot or beheaded.

You exaggerate about the perception of the President. The mainstream media despises him because he violates the usual rules of political conduct without a compelling need for such.  They see trouble in a political leader whoshows disdain and contempt for anyone and any group that voted against him. Because he is without precedent in America, one must look to foreign countries, and the  patterns do not look good.

Calling for the President to be imprisoned or killed is not mainstream rhetoric.

Quote:One argument that even Republicans used was that Trump shouldn't be
tweeting because it distracts from his agenda.  He should be talking
about his policy issues, and the fact that the news was all about his
tweets proves that he's sabotaging himself since nobody is talking
about his agenda.

But that was never going to happen anyway.  If it hadn't been for
Trump's tweets, the discussion all weekend would have been one woman
after another talking incessantly about how Trump was a deplorable --
"racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it."


I am satisfied that his tweets are exactly what he means. His agenda is an America that fits a Marxist stereotype of what capitalism is, an economic order that sweats the worker for near-starvation pay and accommodations that he can barely survive. He is beyond any denial a pathological narcissist who holds a solipsistic view of reality. This is someone with the intellectual development of someone in elementary school.

Part of his agenda is to make those who 'fail to recognize His Greatness' to suffer for such. Politics is ideally something far richer than settling scores. Yes, he is a bigot, a classist, and a sexist; and he will never be able to slough off the 'grab them by their crotches' statement.


Quote:So this was an almost total victory for Trump.  The feminist march was
ignored by the press, and was completely forgotten by Monday.  Within
a couple of more days, the press was consumed by Trump's next tweet,
and that dominated the news for a few days.

But what he says stays in people's consciousnesses. Offense becomes subconscious as something else offends the sensibilities of decidedly more than a majority of Americans.  In 2018 Democrats will be running against his sexist behavior in a culture that shows much less tolerance for sexual harassment than it recently did.

Just think of the most recent affront to most sensibilities. Arming teachers in the classroom?I would rather that a live rattlesnake slither into a room than that I carry a firearm into it -- and that is simply a question of danger. (Of course by carrying a weapon I would become more like an enforcer than a teacher. The roles of teacher and prison guard are incompatible). I am concerned that someone would take the gun from me and use it against a fellow student who snitched on him or on a teacher (me) that that student hates. The  only way in which I would ever have possession of a firearm in a classroom would be if I had just wrested it from someone who brought it in.

As for the live rattlesnake -- I would clear the classroom if any snake were to get loose... and get help.


Quote:Since day one, Trump has been successfully mocking and baiting the
mainstream media and the left, and it works every time.  Even now, as
I'm typing this, I'm hearing on CNN that Trump is "unglued,
unravelling, uncontrollable" and "the White House is in chaos."  I
could have heard exactly this same thing in the first week of Trump's
term.  It's the same thing, over and over again, week after week after
week after week.  Meanwhile, from what I can tell, Trump keeps driving
his policy agenda forward as well as Obama or any other president.
According to supporters, Trump has accomplished 63% of his policy
goals in the first year, which is excellent.


The mainstream media do not have the influence that you claim. As for the Left -- people are attacking the President from the Right on economics and foreign policy. This Presidency looks more like a bad royal court than the well-oiled machine of Barack Obama or Dwight Eisenhower. His foreign policy is so much a repudiation of the Obama foreign policy that it repudiates even Ronald Reagan.


So his supporters are happy? Whoop-dee-doo! Whoop-dee-doo! Whoop-dee-doo! Don't tell me that the likes of Mugabe, Chavez, Castro, and Kim are without supporters.



Quote:It's the media in chaos, not the White House.  This past week, the
mainstream media was in total chaos, as Trump used two statements to
drive the news agenda.

First, the gun control statement - restrict some gun sales, don't be
afraid of the NRA.  This was a total victory by Trump, as he
completely disarmed the attacks by the left-wing and the mainstream
media on Trump over gun control.  In the end, I doubt that anything
will be done except perhaps to outlaw gun stocks.


Then he backed down as the all-powerful National Rifle Association made clear what it wants. The smart, eloquent kids and teachers that the Mainstream Media found at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School gave reasoned, mature expressions of grief at the pointless loss of good friends. This is very different from Sandy Hook because the child victims were early-elementary children who could not formulate  mature responses to seeing their good friends slaughtered. Take a 17-year-old with an IQ of 130, and you have someone of the usual level of maturity of grad students. Add to this well-organized protests in front of the Florida State Legislature with placards that make good sense (the antithesis of "The ZOO has an African LION/ The WHITE HOUSE has  a Lyin' African", and you can see the demise of the idea that a troubled person has a right to a firearm. The middle-class parents of the middle-class victims of the horrific crime did well, too, at expressing the effort that they put into raising kids to that level. So how many sales of firearms are wor5th a human life?


Quote:Second, the trade tariff statement.  One thing that I heard that I
never knew before is the claim that the US is almost tariff-free,
while the EU and China have massive anti-American tariffs already.
The people in the tsunami of criticism against Trump have not
criticized this statement, leading me to believe that it's true.  If
so, then Trump's statement was extremely effective and successful in
illuminating an important situation.


Free trade is good for consumers, and it is good for keeping down the cost of doing business. The only rationale that I can see for tariffs is that in a developing country, imports are luxury goods purchased by economic elites while non-elites are generally outside the cash economy. Otherwise, tariffs are highly-discriminatory versions of sales taxes and they load costs onto anything that uses the item with a tariff. Construction is the largest variable use of iron and steel, and raising the cost of imported steel can greatly inflate the cost of building, repairing, or replacing a bridge. The "glass box" skyscrapers that give great cities 'vertical space' become more expensive to build  while giving a huge windfall for anyone who already owns a bunch of them (such as Trump interests).


Quote:So whether any tariffs will actually be put into place will have to be
seen.  But in the meantime, the political discussion now has on the
table this big discrepancy in tariffs between the US and other
countries.  So, once again, Trump has scored a big success.

I expect legislative failure. The 'Left' in the Democratic Party would rather make things better for workers through the strengthening of labor unions and the institution of big public projects. The 'Right' has its mavens of free trade. That is enough to stop the costly, distorting tariffs that President Trump has pushed.


Quote:So maybe the left is right.  Maybe Trump is unbalanced, has Alzheimers,
is spiraling completely out of control, is about to resign, is lashing
out, etc., etc., etc.  But after a year of hearing the same crap from
the left, week after week after week after week after week, there is
no reason to believe any of the crap on the left.  The constant flood
of vitriolic, hate-filled, hysterical, chaotic statements from the
left and the mainstream media simply do not fit the facts of what's
actually getting done.

He has succeeded only at enacting a tax cut that will enrich his social class and hurt everyone else with wild promises that wonderful things will ensue because when the filthy rich get even more filthy rich they invest in sybaritic excess such as castles and palaces.  If you believe that, then maybe I can offer you a piece of the lost fortune of Murderer Qaddafi or Satan Hussein in return for sending me a few thousand dollars. Problem is, I'm not Nigerian, and federal law enforcement would catch me quickly for wire fraud just for offering such.

Quote:In the meantime, the REAL problems -- North Korea, South China Sea,
Syria, etc. -- are getting worse every day, but are ignored by the
left and the mainstream media because they're completely full of crap
and can't talk about anything else but the crap they're full of.

They are getting worse because our President can't demonstrate a spine in the presence of Vladimir Putin or
Xi. The mainstream media seem to be treating Syria and North Korea with deadly seriousness in part because the media rely heavily upon advertisers for profit. China is more troublesome because about every large American corporation is heavily invested in or imports much stuff from China. Go too harshly on China and you might lose advertising revenue from Apple, General Motors, or Wal*Mart.

Yes, there are some obnoxious people on the Left, and you are free to treat me as one of those fools in need of a philosophical enema. This said, we would be far better off with some other President less erratic than the current President, even if that President is some conservative Republican. Donald Trump is a borderline fascist and not a conservative.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


Reply


Messages In This Thread
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by radind - 05-14-2016, 03:21 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by radind - 05-23-2016, 10:31 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by radind - 08-11-2016, 08:59 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by SomeGuy - 01-18-2017, 09:23 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 02-04-2017, 10:08 AM
RE: 25-Feb-17 World View -- Border Adjustment Tax versus the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Law - by pbrower2a - 03-04-2018, 08:00 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 03-13-2017, 03:33 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by SomeGuy - 03-15-2017, 02:56 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by SomeGuy - 03-15-2017, 03:13 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 05-30-2017, 01:04 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 07-08-2017, 01:34 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 08-09-2017, 11:07 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 08-10-2017, 02:38 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 10-25-2017, 03:07 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by rds - 10-31-2017, 03:35 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by rds - 10-31-2017, 06:33 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by noway2 - 11-20-2017, 04:31 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 12-28-2017, 11:00 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 12-31-2017, 11:14 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 06-22-2018, 02:54 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-11-2018, 01:42 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-11-2018, 01:54 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-19-2018, 12:43 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-25-2018, 02:18 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 07-11-2018, 01:58 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 08-18-2018, 03:42 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Galen - 08-19-2018, 04:39 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 09-25-2019, 11:12 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 03-09-2020, 02:11 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Camz - 03-10-2020, 10:10 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 03-12-2020, 11:11 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by JDG 66 - 03-16-2020, 03:21 PM
RE: 58 year rule - by Tim Randal Walker - 04-01-2020, 11:17 AM
RE: 58 year rule - by John J. Xenakis - 04-02-2020, 12:25 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by Isoko - 05-04-2020, 02:51 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by tg63 - 01-04-2021, 12:13 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by CH86 - 01-05-2021, 11:17 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-10-2021, 06:16 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-11-2021, 09:06 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-12-2021, 02:53 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-13-2021, 03:58 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-13-2021, 04:16 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by mamabug - 01-15-2021, 03:36 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 08-19-2021, 03:03 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 08-21-2021, 01:41 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 02-27-2022, 06:06 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 02-27-2022, 10:42 PM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 02-28-2022, 12:26 AM
RE: Generational Dynamics World View - by galaxy - 02-28-2022, 04:08 PM

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