Not an American but a lot of these have always been obvious. IMO, the handling of economy over the past two years and the reindustrilisation are his biggest successes.
Interestingly, the biggest loser here is Europe. Brussels really does need to listen to Macron and come up with it's own industrial policy. Else it'll just be stuck with having to buy either American or Chinese.
Another thing, tbf, most of his foreign policy victory in the SCS is because Beijing is just very bad at foreign policy. They really need to fire everyone in their foreign ministry. But Biden did a good job of capitalising on it.
The out of context social media clips of Biden really make him seem incompetent when he isn't at all. Great article. Thanks for the good work.
>Interestingly, the biggest loser here is Europe. Brussels really does need to listen to Macron and come up with it's own industrial policy. Else it'll just be stuck with having to buy either American or Chinese.
Ideally, Europe's industrial policy would be cooperative with America's, along with all the other allies like Canada and Japan and Australia. Free trade is generally extremely good, the exception being trade with potential enemies like China. Among allies, industrial policies should be aligned.
The first order of business for Europe--and America--should be to stop the incoming tsunami of China Shock II. If the US & EU cannot or will not stop this incoming flood of highly subsidized goods, they won't have *any* manufacturing base left. Period.
Back during China Shock I, the French set up a single, tiny, grossly understaffed customs office to process the masses of containers piling up in Le Havre and Marseille filled with gazillions of cheap Chinese VCR's. Which caused those piles of containers to rise ever higher...without enacting any formal trade restrictions.
That's what has been going on for decades and exactly what the US is going back on. Nanufac is leaving Germany and going to the US right now. Alliance or not, every country will stick out for themselves first. This type of reasoning why all the big tech Europe uses is American. It'll simply favour the Americans disproportionately
Agree that China is bad at foreign policy, and not just with regard to the SCS. But firing the entire Foreign Ministry would not change a thing. Chinese leaders, supported by a huge number of their countrymen, are still reacting to what they call the "century of humiliation," during which a superior civilization, deservedly the center of the universe, was humbled by lesser peoples who had better guns. It can be argued that century ended with the formation of the PRC, but to the leaders it's a useful concept to keep the Chinese people both stirred up and in line. Any new Foreign Ministry would be filled with people of a similar mindset. They would still see international relations as a zero-sum affair and would continue to pursue those relations equally clumsily in pursuit of Chinese dominance, or better yet, international recognition of the innate superiority of China.
Oh I'm aware firing the foreign ministry wouldn't solve anything. They get orders from the Politburo after all. Not sure what a proper solution would be honestly. Decades of propaganda means that even the leadership largely buys the rhetoric now, something that happens in practically every big country it seems.
Xi could rectify it if he really wanted to, he doesn't really. It's no surprise that the current leadership is a bit out of touch with reality. What is important is what happens when Xi administration ends. I really hope they get a post Mao type situation where the new leader actually understands that pushing territorial claims aggressively does nothing but hands over your neighbours into the hands of your biggest rival.
I personally think the ukraine war and israel - gaza war are disasters that could have easily been prevented by biden. You guys just needed a proxy war with russia such that EU is completely dependent on USA and can't balance with china. I'm not a fan.
What action could Biden have possibly have taken to cause Putin to not launch his 2022 invasion? And how could it possibly be something he could do "easily"?
Getting tough on Israel--by actually stopping or slowing the flow of weapons--would've been political suicide for Biden and the Dems. AIPAC and the combined clout of the rest of the Israel Lobby would have destroyed them, pushing Trump and the GOP way over the finish line in November. That said, AIPAC wants to keep both parties fully compliant regarding US Israeli policy, and definitely does *not* want to make an enemy of the Democrat party, despite having already alienated the crucial Dem youth vote.
The fact that Congress just happily approved a whopping $24 billion dollar bailout for Israel--a country of only 10 million--is a very clear example of AIPAC flexing its muscles.
It's strange that Biden's foreign policy is being portrayed as a success, while during his term the world has entered its most dangerous period since 1945. Would they have forgiven Trump if this had happened during his term? When the U.S. appears to withdraw from every confrontation, bad things inevitably happen. Just as when the U.S. appears eager for confrontation and a bit crazy, like in the Trump era, good things happen. It's also strange that Biden's immigration policy isn't mentioned here. It allows anyone to just take a backpack and head to America, pretending to be a refugee.
The US is the most powerful nation in the world. It is by no means all powerful. I've never understood this logic. What exactly could they have done to stop Putin from invading? Or to stop Hamas from attacking. It was clear to everyone that Israel would respond very aggressively to a Hamas attack.
Right, it's a completely nonsensical take. The argument goes something like "Trump was so crazy that enemies wouldn't try shit while he was in office." which just doesn't stand up to reality. Sometimes things happen regardless of who is President.
About Russia, Putin isn't a big fan of taking risks, and Trump while generally pro-Russia (but not always, see the German-Russian gas pipe) was unpredictable, which made the risks more significant. Biden, however, is very predictable and will always do the minimum required. On Hamas, it's clear that they knew their "civilians as human shields" strategy would work extremely well with Democrats. They also received hundreds of millions from oil-rich Iran after Biden quietly lifted oil sanctions on Iran.
Hamas actively wanted a more violent response from Israel because the point was scuppering the deal with saudi arabia. If you aren't able to understand their war goal you have no business talking about this.
As for Russia, if Putin was afraid of Trump, his repeated support for trump (but financial and informational) makes no sense. Trump was an isolationist from day one who opposed NATO at every turn and was catastrophically incompetent at diplomacy. The idea that Trump would actually fully throw himself into a war on behalf of Ukraine is insanity.
Putin is not risk-averse. See Chechnya, Georgia, and Crimea, just to name risks that involve military action. It's just that in the past, he took risks that paid off for him, but this one didn't.
It continually astounds me how willfully blind people are on the Ukraine invasion. It could have been *easily* averted if we had just not threatened Russia by taking steps to bring Ukraine into NATO. Putin and the Russian foreign establishment made it clear for decades that this was their red line, and the US ignored it. Total disaster and incompetence on the part of Biden and his staff.
On another note, zero mention of the debt spiral in this article. It’s pretty easy for the economy to “appear great” when you’re running WW2 style deficits.
Wasn't the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 more down to the EU than NATO, in the sense that it began with the Euromaidan revolution?
That revolution had happened because president Yanukovych had pledged to get Ukraine into a trade agreement with the EU, but had then reneged on that pledge in the face of Russian bullying.
"That revolution had happened because president Yanukovych had pledged to get Ukraine into a trade agreement with the EU, but had then reneged on that pledge in the face of Russian bullying."
This is not what happened. Yanukovych negotiated with the EU, who demanded massive austerity in Ukraine in order to join. That was political suicide, so Yanukovych decided to take the deal with Russia which required no austerity.
Wouldn't that imply that Russia made a terrible mistake in 2014 by stealing Crimea and starting a war in the Donbas, because without those acts of aggression the 2019 elections would likely have been won by a pro-Russian candidate anyway?
LOL, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had absolutely nothing to do with NATO. It continues to astound me how incredibly, unfathomably stupid people are for parroting this bit of risible Russian propaganda. You aren’t this incredibly stupid are you?
I think on social media a lot of times people come up with or hear something that sounds clever/intelligent without really giving it any thought. When someone points out how dumb/wrong it is, they either slink away or aggressively double down.
This is weak argument that I hear a lot. Not being able to beat the Taliban for 20 years didn't demonstrate the limits of US military strength to our enemies but withdrawing made it very clear to everyone that the US had suddenly become very weak.
Not to mention Russia had been messing with Ukraine since far before we withdrew from Afghanistan. These types of arguments fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
And weren't Western forces in Afghanistan (a landlocked country remember) logistically dependent on Russian railways, such that the West couldn't seriously oppose Russia for as long as those forces were there?
I don't care about what Ukrainians think. You could ask them what their views are about the fact that the US couldn't defeat the cave dwelling Taliban after 20 years.
Afghanistan was costing us $90 billion a year. A Forever War with no appreciable strategic benefit.
And Trump it was--not Obama--who withdrew 90% of US forces at the end of his term. But didn't withdraw the final 10%, leaving that poison pill to Biden.
After Trump pulled nearly all of our forces out, within 5 months the Taliban annihilated the Afghan Army. Then, all that was left under US control was Kabul. There were no *local allies* left. Unlike Vietnam, when much of our heaviest casualties occurred during the drawdown, we lost almost nobody in 2019-20; because the Taliban were focusing exclusively on wiping out Afghani garrisons.
When Biden withdrew our *token force* there were no *local allies* left, because they were all dead. Do some research on this if you don't believe me.
And remember that Trump also threw the Syrian Kurds, another set of *local allies* under the bus when asked to by Erdogan.
I think running the counterfactual here (Trump wins 2020) is helpful.
- Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if Trump was in office? The answer here is probably yes, or something similar would have happened that would have resulted in Russia achieving much more in Ukraine than it has in our reality. NATO would be dying or just a EU project in Trump term two. Someone said a robber doesn't mug the old lady if she's about to hand you her purse, and Trump was the old lady.
- Would Hamas have attacked Israel? Hard to say. If Hamas had initiated 10/7 anyways, we all know Trump would be way worse for the Palestinians, and maybe Hamas knew that. On the other hand, they were still the killer combo of stupid, bloodthirsty, and cowardly to attack and then hide behind civilians, so I don't put much stock in their strategic reasoning abilities.
- Trump would absolutely not have been able to start building the anti-China Pacific coalition that Biden has gotten underway
- Good chance Trump would either not left Afghanistan, or orchestrated the exit such that we ghosted the Afghans overnight and did absolutely nothing for the hundreds of thousands of Afghan civil servants, soldiers, translators, etc who served us well in the full faith that we'd have their backs, because Trump is odious and would never risk anything to help others.
Net net, I think the dam was going to break on the post-WW2 order regardless, and if anything, it's the fecklessness and weakness shown by Trump 1 that laid the groundwork since it showed the world that America is a country that's wavering in both its commitments to global order and frankly its sanity.
What makes you think Trump would have not made the withdrawal a total shit show? Why would he have handled it any better than Covid? Also what makes you think any other president would have handled the withdrawal better? I’m old enough to remember the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia. It was the hollowness of the Afghan forces that made the withdrawal what it was not Biden.
Hamas attacked Israel in large part to short circuit the impending agreement and tighter alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. No reason to think Trump short circuits, the opposite actually
I don't like Trump, but it's hardly fair to blame him for Covid in 2020 being an utter shitshow for the US!
The only countries that did well Covid-wise in 2020 were either isolated islands with no truck-borne international trade that could easily seal themselves off from the outside world (Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand) or communist dictatorships with the power to force contacts of any infected people into quarantine camps (China and Vietnam).
The subsequent anti-vaxxism of the MAGA right would later cause lots of avoidable deaths, but the MAGA movement became anti-vaxx in spite of Trump, not because of him.
lol where did I blame Trump for Covid? My comment was about his own response to Covid once it got here which with the arguable exception of the vaccines was a total shit show. (And even with the vaccines he lost interest in them once the election was over which is one reason the rollout was so sluggish)
Taking Covid seriously and being halfway competent. If he’d done that, then we can start talking about actual policies, but Trump’s response led to a huge rise in Covid denialism and antivax that seriously undermined any actual policy responses even by blue states.
"What makes you think Trump would have not made the withdrawal a total shit show?"
The fact that he smartly scheduled it for May, at the beginning of fighting season. Biden, not wanting to look like he agreed with Trump, delayed it until August when the Taliban were already in Kabul.
lol did you really believed this when you wrote this or do you make a bag of doorknobs look like a Mensa meeting. I mean I thought your Covid stuff was moronic but this is just as dumb but funnier.
Dude, the Afghan military completely collapsed, they might as well have been the Washington generals given all of the resistance they offered the Taliban.
I get you MAGAs are complete suck ups to Trump but you do you really have to fellate Trumps ass and dick at the same time?
Hamas is certainly bloodthirsty but I wouldn't see them as either stupid or cowardly: wasn't the point of 10/7 basically to turn the entire Gaza Strip into a ginormous Alamo that would radicalize the rest of the Muslim world into destroying Israel for them?
And Egypt's refusal to admit Gazan refugees plays very much into Hamas's plan, as it will likely eventually force Israel to either abandon its war against Hamas or commit an outright genocide in Gaza.
I was under the impression that the plan was another 1000-1 hostage trade, and re-establishing deterrence after the Al-Asqa mosque clearances and west bank provocations.
Laws that allow generous admission to the United States to refugees were adopted long before Biden became president. In part, they were adopted to conform to international conventions on refugees. It's just that Central and South Americans have recently learned how to take advantage of them.
To make Biden responsible for the world erupting into warfare assumes that he has godlike powers. Remember that Islamic violence against the United States erupted under George W Bush in a development that surprised everyone. US presidents can only control what they can control.
It's ironic that our presidential candidates tend to present themselves as all powerful saviors, and then we foolishly expect them to actually be all powerful saviors.
The real take is that Biden caused the border crisis by getting the economy running so well that literally everyone wanted to come here to work. Asylum seekers don't look to enter places with high unemployment!
America has never once "controlled the world". For example, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic fission bomb in 1949. China about 1963. It only took China 3 years to then develop megaton Hydrogen bombs all on their own without Soviet Russia help. Pakistan, India as well.
Immigration even undocumented is growing America. We need them
immigration is THE reason why inflation wasn't worse than it was. Remember the "worker shortage"? Remember "nobody wants to work anymore"? Those ended because we took in millions and millions of hardworking latinos and chinese who filled in the gaps in the service industry.
Is it your opinion that Trump appears "eager for confrontation"? He's basically announced that European security isn't the US's problem and has expressed to his advisors that he wants to leave NATO. He's also talked about withdrawing US forces from Asia and letting Japan and Taiwan et al. fend for themselves. During his presidency I think he did one thing involving missiles fired at Iran, which was not particularly scary.
Is there any evidence for Trump being scary to other superpowers, other than wishful thinking?
lol how quickly we forget that Trump signed the agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan or that Trump threatened to deny aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine helped with his reelection campaign.
Biden is not the President I would choose ideally, but he's the President we have and while I know many people think he's selfishly holding onto office: I am quite skeptical any other Democratic nominee would do much better. The small amounts of polling we have don't show much improvement over Biden (and occasionally shows worse results too).
The thing that scares me about the present moment is how nostalgic people are for Trump. I don't get it at all. It's like we all got collective amnesia about the man nearly four years after he left office.
Furthermore as an economist (by training): I find the nostalgia dangerous. His policies were awful on the merits, he himself is incompetent, and I don't think people realize how much luck factors into things.
What I have a hard time understanding is why Biden doesn't dump Harris and find a more attractive VP. Agree with you that it'd be too hard to swap out Biden right now, but there are a plethora of more attractive VP candidates than KH.
Talk with insiders suggest #3 weighs particularly heavily on people’s minds. The theoretical discussions I’ve heard about replacing Harris all assume the replacement will be a black woman.
Which then leads to the conundrum of who? Here are the top ranking African American women in the US:
House Representatives:
-Maxine Waters (No, would not help)
-Sheila Jackson Lee (Probably would not help)
-Barbara Lee (Maybe… it skeptical)
-Gwen Moore (never heard of her but she is from Wisconsin)
Senators
-Laphonza Butler
I could MAYBE see it, but she declined to run for reelection so does she really want to be VP? I doubt it. She’s never ran a campaign before
There are no African American women serving as a governor, there are four currently serving as a lieutenant governor which frankly is not a big enough position to jump to being a running mate
In Biden’s cabinet only one confirmed official is an African American woman, Linda Thomas Greenfield who is the ambassador to the UN, and Marcia Fudge recently retired and said she’s done.
Out of office candidates are Stacey Abrams, who has lost significant shine IMO. Carol Mosely Braun was a senator but has been out of politics for years. I suppose he could look to Susan Rice again, or Loretta Lynch. But frankly neither has ran a campaign either.
Overall there simply isn’t a better candidate out there than Kamala Harris who is also an African American woman. She is clearly the most qualified for the job
And then there’s the issue of what happens to Harris? She can’t run for her old seat anymore as it’s too late. I could see her moving to the Supreme Court, but there would have to be an opening. Serving in the Cabinet would be a demotion.
Replacing your VP is just a hard thing to do, Obama discussed it with Biden but that fizzled fast. Pence didn’t go (but he is done in politics now)
A good article, but you once again ignore the issue of the Israeli right and offensive weapons.
Ben Gvir, the Israeli Security minister, has openly advocated getting all of the palestinians out and settling Israelis in Gaza in their place.
There are a lot of serving officials in the Netanyahu government who have openly advocated for ethnically cleansing Gaza. That the US is still sending offensive weapons to Israel when these people are in power is worrying.
The big risk for the US is that the Israeli Right will use US support to ethnically cleanse Gaza (by getting most of the Palestinians to go "somewhere" while also killing many through starvation and collateral damage) from 2024-2025.
Even if Netanyahu goes next year, the new Israeli government will say, "That was awful, but it's done, we promise we won't do it again" None of your posts have talked about this aspect, and it makes this blog look very myopic on this topic.
Like if we want Indonesia on our side, Biden has to say something to assure them we aren't just a rubber stamp for the worst people in Israel to take more Palestinian land.
But not in the "Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left" post.
The existence of sitting israeli ministers who campaigned on and actively want a Gaza/west bank free of Palestinians was a very glaring omission. The pro Hamas side is rightly undermined when their real policy positions and quotes about killing/expelling all Jews are included.
That you would not do a similar roundup of the many Israeli officials who have said similar things about Palestinians really undermines that piece.
That is a good doctrine for the protest, but it still takes as a given that the Israeli/Netanyahu brutality is a unfortunate side effect of their campaign and not, as has actually been said by many sitting Israeli officials, a conscious policy of removing Palestinians to make a greater Israel sovereign across all of Judea.
Imagine if you were in the 1800s and you were talking about the Indian wars, and you listed the brutality by the US government as an unfortunate side effect and not the conscious plan of many government officials. Even if half of the government says officially that they don't want to kill all of them, it would be relevant to include the quotes from people like Sherman and Sheridan saying that their goal is to permanently remove the natives, regardless of the "official" position.
So as a "steelman" leaving out those quotes by people like Ben gvir is a missed opportunity
Isn't there an argument that it would be pointless for Israel to destroy Hamas without ethnically cleansing Gaza, because a new terrorist movement very much like Hamas would re-emerge in short order?
The script you're presenting as realistic is not reasonable at all. Israel gave up all territorial claims in Gaza as part of the disengagement in 2005. In international law, there is no way to reverse that.
In 1831, the Supreme Court ruled that forcing the Cherokee Nation to leave Georgia and go to Oklahoma was unconstitutional.
It was illegal. It was "reversed" and therefore the Cherokee didn't have to lea....
Wait, What's that?
President Jackson just said, "Let the Supreme Court try to enforce it" and the land was permanently taken by land hungry settlers.
What part of what's going in the West Bank (which is also not part of Israel under International Law) with settlement expansion makes you think the current Israeli governent will limit settlers at all? They are a key part of Netanyahu's coalition.
I am genuinely curious. Why do you think that the Israeli government will respect the 2005 decision (by a previous government) with regard to Gaza when they haven't restrained settlements in the West Bank.
Just because far-right ministers are calling for it, doesn't make it real. If Israel really wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, it would and could have done so a long time ago. It's exactly what Russia and many other regimes do par for the course. Same for genocide. If the shoe was on the other foot, and Hamas had the chance to ethnically cleanse and/or kill all of Israelis, it would have done so a long time ago.
>If Israel really wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, it would and could have done so a long time ago
There's a segment of the Israeli population and government, such as Ben Gvir, that wants exactly that. Other Israeli people and politicians hold them back, but it's not a foregone conclusion that Nethanyu will be the farthest right Israeli ever leading their government.
I believe Israel has a right to defend itself and stamp out Hamas. I don't believe it has a right to settle the West Bank and ethnically cleanse Gaza.
I'm not sure what policy the US should take exactly. Noah think the US should withdraw entirely because the US doesn't have any interests in the region and that the US should focus entirely on Russia and China. I think Iran is a clear #3 threat after Russia and China and keeping a good relationship with Israel can be useful. I'd lean towards being more lenient about Israel's actions in Gaza, where brutality to stamp out Hamas can be necessary, but drawing a hard line around West Bank settlement which, while they don't have *as* much cruelty, also have 0 justification.
Israel could certainly do much worse than they are.
Hamas would certainly do worse.
But the objection to the original characterization of the steel man of the protest was that the far right Israeli ministers who run such minor ministries as "Security" have also advocated for removing all of the Palestinians, were not mentioned.
In Donetsk, for example, Russia doesn't want to kill all Ukrainians, it is not working to kill all civilians. It is killing civilians to advance the war effort and to terrorize the population, but those are methods, not ends. Instead, the objective is to take legal control of the territory and make sure the locals that remain acknowledge the Russian government as sovereign and no longer present a "security risk".
This objective exactly what the Israeli settler Right says they want to do in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers don't systematically kill Palestinians, they just take the land and dare the Palestinians to object and get shot by the IDF.
This is what the protesters worry about. They worry, possibly needlessly, that Israel is going to maintain military control of Gaza, allow in settlers, and just make facts on the ground. A map of Israel's de facto territory now versus their territory in say 1990 shows that this is a legitimate worry.
Isn't Egypt the biggest obstacle to any Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza, because it refuses to take refugees from Gaza?
A big part of the reason why is that Egypt's current dictator came to power in a coup against the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is essentially the "Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine".
As of 2022, I noticed that the only border changes post-1945 that weren't just a country getting independence, or countries merging, involved either Russia (taking Crimea) or Israel (gaining and then losing Sinai, and whatever the status has been of Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza).
He was wrong to include India in the category of countries that are struggling because of birth rate issues compounded with a lack of openness to immigration. India doesn't have a demographic problem yet and there are plenty of immigrants from neighboring countries (Nepal, Bangladesh, etc. ) who come to India for work.
I dunno, man. He's not wrong. India is xenophobic in the sense that it doesn't want Muslims nor does it want to trade particularly with Muslim nations while being surrounded by them. The Congress is full of loonies in terms of economic policymaking but I can imagine a good leader from the party working towards improving relations with Pakistan or Bangladesh which would, in the long run, probably have led to a better regional economy, outsourcing of factories from Indian companies of inputs and, possibly, some sort of aspiration amongst the neighbours to become Indians. I never thought of India as a xenophobic nation but it might be one except it excludes people based on the nebulous concept of Indianness which is increasingly becoming a Hindu-first one.
Wouldn't that make India Islamophobic (perhaps understandably so, given how mercilessly the Indians were exploited by the Mughals as well as by earlier Muslim invaders) as opposed to xenophobic more generally?
Yes? And if its understandable, it's also clear that the boot has been on the other foot for years now. The current prime Minister basically made his career during riots that killed 2000+ Muslims.
I may have misunderstood what "India doesn't want Muslims" meant. I thought you were referring to Indian Muslims, which wouldn't qualify as xenophobia.
Even so, some of India's major trading partners and immigrants are from Muslim countries. India does have a pretty good relationship with Bangladesh and since India hasn't been the aggressor in Indo-Pak wars, I don't see any politician from any party making a difference in improving the relationship with Pakistan.
"India is also one of the world’s top destinations for international migrants. As of 2015, about 5.2 million immigrants live in India, making it the 12th-largest immigrant population in the world. The overwhelming majority of India’s immigrants are from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh (3.2 million), Pakistan (1.1 million), Nepal (540,000) and Sri Lanka (160,000)."
Yes, but imagine what a difference it would have been if there was concerted diplomacy to improve the relationship further with Muslim neighbours instead of the continual dog whistling. Meanwhile, there's an actual law that forbids non-Hindu migrants from obtaining citizenship and voiding residency for existing residents in border states. Sure, it's a destination for migrants simply because of its massive economy and relative industrial complexity but it can be much bigger and, frankly, needs to be bigger for much of the infrastructure growth that needs to happen this decade.
It's happening. When I visited Bangalore last December, I interacted with a lot of Nepalis. Identity is a thorny issue in Indian domestic politics. I hope a day comes within my lifetime wherein becoming an Indian becomes an aspiration for people in South Asia and West Asia.
It's less xenophobic than East Asian states, perhaps, but more than Malaysia (one needs to bring money or buy property) or Singapore which have a more relaxed attitude towards citizenship.
And yes, say so out loud was stupid. Kind of like pointing out that our largest Middle Eastern ally treats women as near slaves. Both are true, but unwise to say openly.
Outdated, at least to an extent. If Japan was xenophobic, it really hasn't been since Abe opened the country up to immigration. IIRC half of all marriages in Japan are 'biracial.' Hell, Tokyo is overrun with tourists. India has loads of issues, but they're more related to their domestic divisions than some kind of fear of countries abroad.
Obama was the first progressive president in decades. He worked with a much broader coalition to pass important reforms. Biden is distinctly better on some things (foreign policy) but as far as domestic politics are concerned he has the advantage of building on Obama's foundation. If Obamacare hadn't ever been passed, the situation with healthcare would be even worse now than it was, and it would be the only thing Biden could work to solve.
What I will say is that Biden has shown clear leadership in certain moments where the democratic party seemed poised to do something stupid. He didn't listen to the moderates on trans issues, and has been vindicated. He didn't listen to the radicals on police, and has been vindicated. Obama's key failure to me is that he occasionally was too receptive to polling and overly cautious with his political capital.
He wasn't actually very progressive at all though? It's like Chicago's last mayor: she was a black lesbian, so no one could believe that she was as conservative as she actually was.
I respect Noah's opinion, even when I disagree with him. He certainly knows howe to make his case.
But let's cut to the chase:
What has killed the housing market is high interest rates. Those rates didn't exist under Trump. They are the direct result of Biden's major screw-up, throwing money at an economy that couldn't absorb it. As I frequently say, but DC never listens, you can print money, but you can't print prosperity.
As for all the reinvigorated manufacturing under Biden, that is the direct result of Biden throwing funny money at the 'problem'. We are paying for that reinvigoration with the decreased buying value of our hard-earned dollars. As of right now, a Biden buck buys 80 cents worth of what a Trump buck bought. We are ALL screwed.
As for climate change, could we all try to keep one foot in reality? Climate changes is perpetual. We are coming out of a great ice age. It's been warming for over twelve thousand years. And unless you're fond of living on glaciers, that's a good thing. Sure, let's continually work to lessen man's negative impacts on the environment. But where did anyone get the idea that the best way to do that is solar panels and windmills? For all of you that hate capitalism and who call government subsidies of capitalism 'welfare for the rich', well, guess what. Solar panel and windmill companies are capitalism on steroids. And they aren't capable of existing without government subsidies. And they aren't the best way to reduce CO2. And CO2 remediation isn't the best way to control man's environmental influence. Natural gas and nuclear power are. Biden and his ilk are actively undermining two of the most environmentally friendly ways of producing energy, in favor of boondoggles that are breaking the bank, and can't support our energy needs. Ask yourself; are they doing this because they are incredibly scientifically literate, or because they are party hacks playing us for fools?
Every policy Trump has proposed to implement if he wins in 2024, from tax cuts to mass deportations to tariffs, will increase the deficit and increase inflation or interest rates.
His only mitigating strategy is cuts to social security or Medicaid, which is taking money out of normal people’s pockets so he can pay for bullshit.
If you like natural gas and nuclear energy, gas output has actually reached all time highs under Biden and he has done more to push for nuclear energy than Trump ever did.
Everyone, including me, would do well to remember that the president is not all-powerful and certainly shouldn't be. Rarely, if ever, does a president deserve all the credit of all the blame for anything.
Let's consider a scenario where an incredibly capable president took office. He was elected with a near totality of electoral votes. OK, now what? He' still dealing with Congress, SCOTUS, and a vast administrative bureaucracy that makes most of the rules we have to live by. Our problems are systemic and can't be solved by any one president.
Well, that's it. I guess open borders are the only way to go. We wouldn't want to decrease the labor force after all.
I'm sure the fact that 25-54 year old, American born men are less likely to be in the labor force than ever before just totally, randomly, happened to coincide with the largest illegal immigration influx in our nation's history. Surely there's no connection at all though.
Look, if the issue you really care about is that there aren’t enough unskilled labor jobs for white men, then one way of solving that could be deporting millions of people who are willing to do those jobs for cheaper.
I’m just saying that if it works the way you want it to work, it will also probably result in higher prices for whatever those jobs produce.
Yes, they are boondoggles. Electric cars are hugely subsidized by the capitalist car companies, and they are still losing huge amounts of money. Solar panels are hugely subsidized, and can't support themselves on their own 'profits'. Windmills, same thing.
And what problem do they solve? Contrary to myth, there are no signs that they make much difference at all. The environment, including climates, are way too complex to sum up with simple calculations concerning CO2 levels.
So, yes, the whole politicized climate change panic is a boondoggle. The programs are not administered by our best and brightest scientists and engineers, they are administered by politicians and autocrats.
As for your link, I ended up here, and it largely supports what I've said:
> Contrary to myth, there are no signs that they make much difference at all. The environment, including climates, are way too complex to sum up with simple calculations concerning CO2 levels.
I suppose if you don’t allow addition in your calculations, then there are no calculations that show *anything* making *any* difference to the environment.
Moving past your unfounded statements about profitability (which utilities don't believe, as they clamor to build solar and wind in the US: https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/Queued%20Up%202024%20Edition_R2.pdf, page 14) and your similarly unfounded climate skepticism, its pretty clear you didn't read your own article you linked. The most he claims is that solar is a bit overhyped compared to nuclear, but goes on to say it is a fact that solar will be cheaper:
> I think, relative to popular opinion, nuclear is underrated and solar is overrated. Nuclear has been vilified and solar has been romanticized and glorified. So maybe techno-optimists are reacting to that. But I'm not a nuclear maximalist, and you shouldn't get too emotionally attached to any particular technology—you certainly shouldn't let a technology become your identity. Whatever combination of technologies delivers the best result at the lowest price is what deserves to win.
> “Shouldn't our excitement about different technologies shift as the technological facts themselves shift?” Solar getting cheaper is a technological fact, and we should get increasingly excited about it.
I keep hearing that solar is getting cheaper. I never hear that it is turning a profit. If the subsidies are removed, solar, wind, and electric cars disappear. Period. If you think not, then you logically should be in favor of removing the subsidies. Are you?
I don't know what hill you think you are fighting to defend, but I'm not defending anything. There is essentially no one on this planet that wants to see it destroyed by man's largesse. What makes you think you and your friends are unique that way? I stand by everything I've said because it's true.
So, what is "climate denial"? Is anybody claiming that there are no climates?
On the other hand, there are multiple good reasons to discuss the cost and availability of energy on an economics blog. Energy is essential to all aspects of an advanced economy.
Huh? Would you care to summarize what it is that you thought I said?
There's been significant climate change since before modern man existed, and it will continue. All life will have to continue to adjust to it. But I'd rather adjust to glaciers melting than to glaciers advancing. I'm silly that way.
5 percent interest rates are more the normal level than the ridiculously low rates from GWB to the present. Cheap money has fueled the the huge rise in housing prices the last 25 years.
Certainly, some truth to that. Cheap money is not automatically a bad thing, but it is when there is a housing bubble and cheap mortgage rates. That's what caused the housing collapse of 2008. There was a long run-up to the collapse. Housing prices went up and up, mortgage rates stayed low, and people just kept refinancing to get money out of their house to spend on lifestyle choices. Those parties always end abruptly.
It was plain for years that the bubble was going to burst. I knew it, and I'm no economist. You can't lay the blame entirely at the feet of interest rates. You have to blame the people who abandoned common sense and reason in favor of acting like unsupervised kids in a candy store. That includes the clowns at Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers, Fannie and Freddie, and the just plain folks who enjoyed the ride, but had no plans for what to do when the ride stopped.
I won't brag too much, but I took advantage of the low rates, refinanced my home, and used money wisely, KNOWING that the ride would end. Bubbles happen on a fairly regular basis. Those who recognize them can use them to advantage. Those who don't get screwed.
My sermon ends with me stressing that it is essential that each of us become financially literate and politically savvy. Counting on demagogues and ideologues to make your choices for you is a recipe for disaster.
Larry Summers correctly notes that when you include the cost of money real wages are way down and the mystery of consumer sentiment being low isn't a mystery anymore.
Biden has spent a bunch of money. If it turns out to have been spent well, OK. If it doesn't, it sucks. Noah loves industrial policy but its one of those things we might all write about in ten years as having been an expensive failure, like California high speed rail.
I'm not a warmonger like him, so I'm not excited about expanding the military-industrial complex. I think we are creating our own enemies rather then responding to them.
Noah's remarks on crime are quite frankly baffling. Crime surged with BLM, which is a movement that Biden vehemently supports. He's technically been against Defund the Police, which is great, but the movement more generally has been the cause of the crime wave.
Alternatively, maybe we should consider the fact that the rise (and subsequent fall) in crime occurred exactly at the same time as a pandemic, when millions of people were underemployed and kids were out of school.
We had a first BLM wave of crime in 2015. It was less national and more concentrated in a few highly black cities where BLM was active (I lived in one). No pandemic.
There's a chart in Noah's article that shows a tiny bump in 2015 that is (in the scheme of a 20-year massive fall in crime rates) totally unimpressive. It's small enough that you can make it go away by switching from NCVS to UCR reporting. It feels a lot like you have a preferred conclusion and are cherry picking evidence to support it.
Black Lives Matter began in 2013. It was involved in several high profile cases before Freddie Grey. St Louis went through a similar BLM driven crime wave after Michael Brown.
Its certainly the case that Baltimore had given up on broken windows policing leading up to Freddie Grey and that was a problem.
Murders shot up in Baltimore from 33.8 to 55.4 from 2014 to 2015 and stayed elevated since.
From my own experience murder is the only crime Baltimore cops even bother investigating. I reported my care being broken into the first time, but no the subsequent half dozen times.
Murders dropped from the mid-40s to the low 30s between '07 and '11 so the rise back to the 50s isn't as impressive as you make it by picking an unusually low year.
Similarly, BLM may have existed in some larval form in 2013, but I don't remember any widespread protests occurring in Baltimore prior to Freddy Gray. Yet the sharp drop in arrest rate speaks for itself and clearly predates even 2013. To me that's the most likely candidate for the durable rise in murders.
Also for the record, Baltimore is a pretty amazing city. Relatively affordable and beautiful, with a harbor, and on a major train/highway route between NYC and DC and Philly. Terrible city government and a state government that wants to dump its problems there. Never had a problem here (let alone a drug murder), but I did once get mugged in Palo Alto, CA.
I'm hardly a Biden fan here, but a 5% Fed Funds rate is not "high interest rates". We ran 0% interest rates for almost 20 years, bought up debt of all kinds with QE and QE2, and still Jerome Powell has managed to restore normal monetary policy without causing a recession or massive inflation (9% inflation for 24 months is not massive.) That's amazing! I didn't think it possible.
On climate change, I'm afraid you're screaming at a brick wall with Noah. He's been pushing solar panels, windmills, and even (if I remember right) a battery-powered convection stove company. He's all-in on global warming both financially and ideologically.
The anthropogenic contribution to current climate change is significant and undeniable. Not to mention other environmental impacts (ocean acidification, habitat destruction, etc) that also ultimately undermine ecological resilience and diversity.
It is decidedly *not* a good thing.
In specific cases solar panels are by faaar the best way to lessen the impacts you say you care about: Noah has already written about this on several occasions.
Re: CO2 remediation…. Dude I’m sorry here you’ve lost me. Maybe if I go read some blog posts from 2009 I’ll get a handle on what you’re rambling about.
Nuclear is good. Natural is good temporarily, insofar as it replaces worse-polluting fuels, but long term it also has to be phased out and replaced by superior substitutes. Fossil fuel consumption has an incredible history of government subsidy. Maybe we should start there instead of griping about support for essential and nascent technologies?
OK, so much for ideology. Now, show me IN DETAIL, the degree to which climates today would be different than they are, if man had never existed.
I don't need speeches, rants, or hyperbole. I need specific facts, data and mathematical calculations. If you can't specifically, factually, mathematically answer that question, then you have no business pretending to know what man's effects on climate have been.
But I suspect that won't stop you from continuing with the hyperbole until hell freezes over.
Dude, way to make your original argument over data and science into a chest-beating masculinity test. We are all very impressed with your ownage of the libs.
I’m partial to some of your arguments, but saying we don’t need to intervene in the market to reduce CO2 because ‘the climate has changed before’ is pretty boneheaded. Earth’s climate has never changed at this fast a pace before. https://xkcd.com/1732/
The US can’t solve climate change on our own. But we have the highest CO2 per capita of any nation. If we can’t clean up our own house, who the hell are we to ask developing nations to?
Actually, the USA has, largely as the result of fracking, lowered CO2 emissions far below most other countries. That is because fracking has made natural gas available to replace coal as a fuel for electric generation. It is arguably the one biggest effect on CO2 reduction in the world.
As many people are slowly starting to realize, we should never have abandoned nuclear. It is the quickest, most effective way to eliminate CO2 production in electric generation. For all the trillions spent on solar panels and wind, they barely scratch the surface of energy needs.
And all the you and I have said presumes that CO2 reduction makes any real difference. The evidence says no such thing. We are told we must have solar and wind, and electric cars, or ELSE. Or else, what? Overall, the earth is getting warmer, just as it has been for many thousands of years. We are far better for it. A mere twelve thousand years ago, which is a blink of the eye in earth history, the earth was deep in an ice age. It lasted about 100 thousand years and, technically, we're still in it. How is climate change bad? Have you noticed that there is a PRESUMPTION that climate change is caused entirely by man, and that it is necessarily a bad thing. Why these presumptions? Because they're scientifically accurate? They aren't scientifically accurate. Here's a thought: These presumptions fill a need for some people to feel guilty. They feel bad about themselves, and they need a way to manifest their feelings in real life. Voila! anthropogenic climate change! Yes, there's real science that tells us important things. No, most people know little or nothing of it, concentrating instead almost entirely on celebrity nonsense, political manipulation, and emotional confirmation bias.
Noah, you may not be a Biden shill, but you are a liberal shill. I don't mean that as a dig. Liberalism has a coherent and valuable philosophy that is deserving of respect. However, can you really look around the college campuses and say that the Democratic Party is still the party of liberalism? You say "the leftist kids are silly", but the leftist kids are the ones setting the agenda. That was true in 2020 with Nancy Pelosi kneeling in the house rotunda and they're at it again in 2024. And it's not confined to campus but increasingly in media as well as corporate DEI and HR bureaucracies.
I actually agree with you on all the points you bring up about Biden's policies. But those are downstream of his philosophy, which is no longer liberal in any Enlightenment sense. If you really believe in tolerance and the free exchange of ideas and rational discourse and the rule of law and not starting wars... these are not found on the Left anymore. I'm not saying the Right is perfect on them and certainly not that Trump is the ideal candidate, but if you believe in liberalism, the Democrats aren't your party and Biden isn't your man.
I'll grant you that 100%. Those channel Burke instead of Locke. But they are minor.
The question of 2024 (and likely 2028, since whoever wins this year will be a caretaker only) is: "do I believe in Enlightenment civilization?" Because the Left has abandoned the Enlightenment and gone all in on destroying civilization. There is simply no other way to describe a party that says dividing people by race (and treating some differently than others in law) is a positive good and slicing the private parts off children is a civil right. Is there a better symbol for the destruction of civilization than students trashing the Portland State library in the name of Palestinian "justice"? This isn't a contest of ideas; it's a rampage of the barbarians. Peter Boghossian (a progressive academic) put it best: "You were warned Portland State. The thugs you have helped create are devouring what you have built." https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1785797912741687648
There have been times when the risk to civilization came from the Right. But this is not one of those times. These barbarians are all from 1 political party: the Democrats. The question for this year is whether you will vote for the party of the barbarians or for someone opposed to it. Are you willing to defend civilization even if it means voting for someone you disagree with on most other issues? It's a terrible position to be in, but that's where we are.
I'll raise you: The Right has abandoned objective reality.
The Enlightenment is just fine and will outlive us all. The Enlightenment is not a damsel in distress that requires heroic measures in a battle of good vs. evil. No one is obligated to venerate The Enlightenment; in other words, if we stop clapping our hands, Tinkerbell won't die.
I look out at the other Tribe. What do I see? Horse paste as a COVID cure. "Free speech" as moral hostage-taking. Conspiracism as tribal consciousness. That last one is a biggie. Ironically, it's the internet -- the zenith and practically the Platonic ideal of free, fast and accessible information -- that has so overloaded us with information that society has been numbed and dumbed back into pre-literate ways of thinking. Charlie Warzel wrote about "evidence maximalism" in The Atlantic:
Admittedly, nearly all of us engage in this kind of thinking to some degree. You'd have to be a hyperaware logician or skeptic to be in rationality mode at all times. I'm also wary about a contingent of My Tribe -- you might ridicule them with a word that rhymes with "smoke" -- who do offer subjective perspectives as a replacement for objective reality because so much Enlightenment knowledge was advanced by Problematic White Bros.
Conspiracism, though, is endemic to the right. All events big (election outcomes, wars, policies) and small (mail getting delivered to the wrong address, tech support hanging up on you when you've waited a long time, the store running out of the one thing you came to buy) is evidence of A Plot Against You. The GOP (one of only two parties America's political system can sustain at one time), the No. 1 network on all of cable TV, the No. 1 podcast host, AM radio, the YouTube and Facebook algorithms, your socioeconomically homogeneous social circle, and the pulpit all serve to feed and reinforce conspiracy fantasy.
There's a rational basis for unreality: No one wants to be kicked out of the tribe.
Yes. Rational thought is in short supply at the moment.
However, one tribe's (your word) irrational actors are in control of the media, the NGOs, the K-12 educational system, the dominant Internet platforms, govt bureaucracy at all levels, the universities, and the Presidency.
The other tribe's irrational actors control.... what exactly? A handful of state governments? They certainly aren't using them to advance their agenda particularly well. FoxNews? Twitter? Elon may be kooky at times, but he's hardly a conspiratorial freak. Tucker Carlson is beclowning himself. The military? Yeah, those people with the stars on their lapels that are pushing anti-whitness training are secretly all-in for QANON.
Let's say Trump wins and nominates Marjorie Taylor Greene as Secretary of Interior and J.D. Vance at AG. What terrible things could that really produce? Especially when it still takes 60 votes to get anything done (Senate Republicans will not nuke the filibuster, not even for abortion.)
Neither party is sane. But one party believes it's on a holy war to remake the country and the other party is still trying to find its ass with both hands. I'll take the latter. My goal is try and hold some form of civilization until saner heads prevail.
>The other tribe's irrational actors control.... what exactly? A handful of state governments?
How about the fucking Supreme Court and the House of Representatives? Marjorie Taylor Greene has beclowned herself far more than Tucker Carlson and she actually gets to vote on things.
I am constantly boggled by how much weight the right wing places on the people who have the ability to say mean things about people, as opposed to the people who actually write and enforce laws.
And the Supreme Court has done what, exactly to advance "far-right conspiracy theories"? Dobbs? A decision that punted abortion back to the people, the majority of whom appear to be ready to legalize it?
And the House of Representatives has been a clown show for the last 6 months.
Again, not saying there aren't loons. Only that one needs to pay attention to the power differential between the loons of each side. Anyone seriously concerned about a Trump-led, Christian theocratic dictatorship taking over does not understand what time it is.
I use the terms My Tribe and Your Tribe ironically. I'm fully aware I look ridiculous using the term, but I'll let you in on a secret: I'm using humor to smuggle in a provocative argument that stands a better chance of survival than if I had to steelman it and defend it on the square.
The Tribes come from a famous treatise by Scott Alexander Siskind. Before I go further, A DISCLAIMER: I AM WELL AWARE SCOTT ALEXANDER SISKIND AND HIS SLATE STAR CODEX/ASTRAL CODEX TEN COMMUNITIES ARE PROBLEMATIC, AS WELL AS THE FAR-RIGHT IDEAS HE HAS CARED FOR AND FED IN HIS FORUMS. I am pointing to Alexander Siskind as the author, not endorsing him, his community or his ideas. If you wish to read what I am talking about, query his name and tribes on your preferred search engine and use your discretion on whether you wish to reward him with your attention. Oh, and SSC/ACD pieces are long-winded and maddeningly boring, so don't drive or operate heavy machinery after reading. You've been warned.
TL;DR: Siskind argued that America's political ideologies are functionally more like tribes: Blue represents Democratic voters, Red represents Republicans, and Grey represents soi-disant libertarians. (The piece kind of Mary Sues the greys). All Americans pride themselves as individualistic, and individualism is the one value everyone agrees on. However, everyone also lapses into a bias into themselves as individualistic, while people they disagree with are tribal. This viewpoint is right and wrong at the same time. Outsiders rightly recognize similar ideas, values and behaviors of the other tribe and see no individuality. They fail to see that their own ideas, values and behaviors are shared by others very similar to them. They also like bonding with people like themselves, and dislike people who don't share similarities. That's one of the bases of tribalism, and our individuality is an illusion. Paradoxically, our individualities are refracted through our tribes, because for humans as social animals the pull of belonging is just too strong.
If those are minor, so are trans issues (in terms of number of people affected). The student protestors are not popular in either party so it would be incorrect to judge the Democratic party based on some fringe elements. MAGA on the right is not a fringe movement. DeSantis is not a fringe politician but the governor of one of the largest states. Neither party supports liberalism IMO. Libertarians come closest but even they are mostly conservative on social issues like abortion. Gary Johnson was the last principled candidate.
Again, no argument about portions of MAGA being sane. Everyone talks about Jan 6th, but truthfully, I found the Jericho March a month earlier far more disturbing. Divinizing of political figures (which Eric Metaxas did) worry me far more than a few hundred people rioting, breaking into and wandering around the Capitol building for a few hours.
I do think trans-idiocy is vastly more significant than abortion though. Abortion affects a single woman and a single baby. It's important, but micro, at an individual level. Abolishing male and female as meaningful categories has large macro effects. In the early 2000's you used to hear, "how will my neighbor's gay marriage affect me?" Ask Jack Phillips. On either issue. The LGBTQIA++2S lunatics can not coexist with anyone who disagrees with them.
I guess I'm a little more red-pilled than you are. I would love to live in a broadly tolerant and liberal society based loosely on historical, Western, Judeo-Christian norms. I just don't think that's on the menu. So for 2024, my goal is simply to contain the damage and hope for better options in 2028. As weird as it sounds, I think an incompetent narcissist and a fractured GOP will be less damaging leading the country than an experienced politician at the helm of the openly illiberal and sometimes truly revolutionary Democrats. As I said, it's a terrible position to be in, but that's where we are.
I’m not as concerned as you because I live in a deeper blue area of a deep blue state and even though I’m way more traditional than those on the radical left, their presence has not affected my life in any meaningful way on cultural issues. I don’t like the left’s attitude and lack of effort on crime and general law and order issues but even that has changed a lot in the last couple of years because of pushback from moderate liberals.
The pushback on crime is also coming from working-class Blacks and Latinos, who bear the brunt of crime victimhood.
The defund the police slogan carried very little truck with the general public. The communities who tried defunding police budgets saw crime get worse, and reversed course. Large cities with progressive activist communities who urged diversion of policing work to mental health, social services or other "root causes" also saw crime and public disorder spike, because a lot of those "root causes" were also public safety emergencies and crimes in progress.
In Los Angeles County, either the county or city fire department has asked leaders to abolish mental health crisis teams because they proved to be ineffective in actual crises that police and fire-paramedics could resolve.
I live in CA. My 2 Senators for years were Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, 1 loon and the other senile. And for every Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, there is a Barbara Lee or a Maxine Waters.
Hold your moral indignation about the 2020 election until after 2024. If Trump wins in November, I expect 95%+ of House Democrats will vote against certification. (I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see how people who've spent 8 years screaming "Trump is Hitler" could ever vote to put him into office.)
In my 30 years of adulthood, the Left's litany of insults has evolved: racist, sexist, hater, bigot, homophobe, misogynist, transphobe, and fascist. They've now come full circle with anything to the right of Nancy Pelosi being "white supremacy" and "Nazi-ism".
Much of that time, it was obvious they did not believe their own rhetoric -- no one really thought Republicans wanted to starve poor children (food stamp reform, which passed) or throw Grandma off a cliff (Medicare reform, which didn't), and yet Dems happily regurgitated these lies. That's politics though. If you can't play the game, get off the field. And to be fair, the GOP called plenty of liberals names too.
However, since 2016 I've felt a change from the Left. It's no longer just rhetoric. When they say "Republicans are a threat to democracy" or "Trump is Hitler" it feels like they really believe it now. It started with the activists (college students, as always) but it has made it's way up the Democratic hierarchy. The willingness to use the DOJ to arrange multiple criminal trials of the leading opposition candidate during an election (despite the fact that the "crimes" he's being charged with are from years ago) is a giant, flashing warning sign to me.
If the Democrats in Congress were to broadly certify Trump's election, it would make me believe their leadership has stepped back and returned to "playing the game" instead of trying to kill the other tribe. It wouldn't alter my views of their policies, but it would restore a little of my faith in the American electoral system.
The pandemic was clarifying: we saw a lot of people who really would work to make sure more Americans died to score political points. And afterwards we've seen an obvious lie (Biden actually lost the election) become one of the main loyalty tests on the right.
"it would restore a little of my faith in the American electoral system"
Your timing would be exquisite given the likelihood that it would be the last meaningful vote you will cast. The Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to respect the results of elections. They are playing the game "heads I win, tails you lose".
Michael, I hear EXACTLY the same thing from my Trump-loving friends about the Democrats. Each side thinks it's the Flight 93 election and the terrorists are the other team. They're both wrong (I hope.)
I oppose Biden because he is an extremist on Woke issues, particularly LGBT. He absolutely needs to lose, and Trump absolutely needs to win.
Biden has openly celebrated the mutilation of children, employed sick degenerates like Sam Brinton and ‘Rachel’ Devine in his cabinet, and is now erasing biological sex from the law with Title IX.
All who were expecting a moderate, George H.W Bush caretaker administration have been spat in the face. Whilst on economics his administration has had some positive tendencies, on cultural issues he was exactly the kind of Trojan Horse the right predicted he would be.
I’m not a diehard Trump supporter. Whilst the Mueller and Durham Reports reveal a deep state conspiracy to undermine him, and the repression of the Hunter Biden Laptop, fully revealed in the Twitter files, likely shifted the election on the electoral college level, there is no real evidence to suggest the actual counting of the votes was rigged, proved by the numerous Trump-appointed judges and GOP politicians who refused to indulge it. He is unquestionably guilty in a lot of the things he’s accused of.
However, you do have to choose the lesser of two evils. Whilst Trump may be more individually a criminal, Biden and the Democrat’s whole Woke agenda is criminal.
I disagree with Trump on many issues, most notably climate change, but when push comes to shove he, and Project 2025 behind him, pledges to root out the Woke disease, and completely end the crimes against humanity that the LGBT establishment is committing in broad daylight and bring the perpetrators to justice.
What about democracy you say? What about January 6th? If I don’t believe in the ‘Big Lie’, why would I ignore that? In 2015, when the Supreme Court overturned 32 state referendums to impose gay marriage on the nation, and turbocharge Wokeness in the process, liberals revealed just how little they valued democracy. The fact that support for gay marriage INCREASED after this corrupt, lawless ruling show that, as long as you are able to control the media and narrative, overturning democracy pays off.
Obergefell gives moral justification to January 6th. If democracy is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, if it is only legitimate if one wins, and whoever appoints the court determines whether the ‘rule of law’ will be somewhat followed or completely fabricated to favour liberal fashion, why should conservatives give ‘losers consent’ to liberals who completely denied them this when the roles were reversed?
Project 2025 is probably the last chance America has to eradicate this cultural and institutional disease that is mutilating children, enforcing Orwellian control of language, and indoctrinating a whole generation of young people into the Woke worldview through censoring social media.
So, in full knowledge of his immorality, criminality, authoritarianism, and major policy disagreements… Trump 2024!
Found the bigot. Imagine willingly someone you admit is authoritarian, criminal, and immoral all because you're so full of hate, towards children mostly. The fuck is wrong with you? You're the sicko, not the "left" that you straw man with bull shit you saw on OAN.
It's clear it was the 'bigots' who were keeping society from descending into totalitarianism and destruction.
It's also a word spoken with such odious smugness, condescension, and desire to degrade and humiliate. 'Bigot' is to Whites what 'n*gger' is to Blacks. It should become a word with that stigma attached.
The fact people like you get so aggressive when I mention that Obergefell was such an attack on democracy only confirms how much you hold differing opinions in contempt. Whilst you may criticise the worst excesses (though I'm not sure you do), the fact that you sound indistinguishable from the Woke on the issue of gay marriage proves that you are an enemy of a free society.
I'm sure you'll throw lots of taunts at me, that the cause is hopeless, that I'm on the 'wrong side of history, etcetera etcetera. But none of your repugnant means of demoralisation will make me change my mind, it will only strengthen my burning desire to see the likes of you crushed, humiliated, ostracised, and totally ejected from political discourse. You may not believe it will happen; and due to pathetic conservative surrender, I do not blame such disbelief. It will have to be seen to be believed, but trust me, I really hope one day you see it.
At least they're not advocating for the mutilation of children and don't force people to say the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5.
It's their authoritarianism or your totalitarianism, which operates under the guise of democracy. But allowing you an inch allows you to plaster ideological pride flags everywhere, indoctrinate and mutilate our children, deny reality, and brainwash the youth to believe it.
I am so glad we won our independence from your ancestors 248 years ago. Just because we share a language doesn't mean you're in the club and get to LARP about US politics. The UK is totally unable to deal with any of the real crises it faces and all it can do is argue about trans kids. Cooked. Deep fried. Cope and seethe. Hope you guys figure it out, build some damn houses and good luck on those post-Brexit trade deals lmao
I encourage the Trump campaign to run ads under the Arcto platform: Trump is a criminal who wants to overturn gay marriage. This seems like a clear electoral winner!
Just like supporters of gay marriage didn’t give people a choice, now that the public supports it, I have no moral qualms being similarly anti-democratic. Because public opinion is fickle and downstream from power, as they proved.
It is an interesting perspective. However, the U.S. was founded with the Bill of Rights to ensure judges could protect individuals in certain cases, even from the will of the majority. I agree that "woke" ideas have gone far, but the Obergefell decision on gay marriage seems legitimate to me.
Lol, like the drafters of the 14th Amendment had gay marriage in mind. You also completely ignore the 10th Amendment. The US constitution has so many competing, contradictory amendments and clauses that interpretation is always a political question, though liberals are far more open about politicising the court than conservatives, with Originalism still trying to maintain a semblance of neutrality (though, if Common Good Constitutionalism ever comes to prominence, you would 100% have brought it on yourselves.)
It was an attack on the rule of law, like all of the Warren Court precedents. You only think it was justified because you agree with the outcome, and therefore support a judicial dictatorship.
If you really think that hating gay people is more important than every other issue, then I wish you good luck. Maybe if the UK adopts your ideas, one day they’ll be poor enough that they’ll rejoin the EU.
The only additional wealth that community brings in, if it gets too comfortable (and smug) is decadence and filth. We are always better off without it.
I don’t really think the two issues are directly connected, I just think making the former your top priority will lead you to support people who have really bad ideas in other, more important policy areas.
Quick question while I have you: what’s your opinion on housing policy in the UK, specifically London. Should politicians try to relax zoning and build more apartments, or restrict new housing to preserve local character? Do you think banning pride flags will solve this issue?
MAGA trolling, yours, is even less interesting than 1950's baseball trivia. Take a vow of silence, you and the rest of world could use the improvement.
Naturally, I am sure that the non-woke, highly conservative government in your proud country is doing a great job of running things. LOL. How much does it cost to buy a home in london these days? And what salaries can you get there?
You're mentally ill. I'm not unsympathetic, but you need treatment, not 'affirmation'.
You either believe your born in the wrong body in some schizophrenic like psychological delusion, are a fetishist, or have been groomed into a cult. All of which, you need medical help. Unfortunately, the medical profession has been infiltrated and subverted by postmodern ideologues that have pushed this ideology onto you.
I do feel sorry for people like you, you've been sold a con and have irreversibly damaged your bodies. The transgender industry has you in a trap; you'll never be the gender you want to be, but they'll convince you it's all just bigotry or you just need 'one more procedure', but your gender will never change.
Go ahead and feel sorry for the straw men in your head; I'll let you know if you ever get close enough to understanding a trans person to feel sorry for us.
The belief that traditional Western society is inherently and structurally oppressive to all who aren’t non-trans, straight White men, this oppression is all pervasive across the society and is intersectional, and constant activism and deconstruction is needed to dismantle these hierarchies of oppression and establish equity.
"So on the daily issues that affect Americans the most ..."
Inflation also falls in this category.
Since I'm in CA, I can afford to vote for neither but even if I was in a swing state, there's no way I would vote again for Biden if Trump wasn't the alternative. I would have picked Haley over Biden if she had been the nominee.
The problem with Biden in 2024 is that Democrats will not learn anything from this election. If Biden loses, they'll blame his age and BS non-factor issues like Israel/Palestine instead of illegal immigration, inflation, trans, student loan forgiveness. If he wins, they'll still try to nominate someone who is much further to the left of the median voter in 2028 instead of a moderate left of center candidate (like Obama or Biden). The US government is not designed well for a 50-50 split and I think the country needs to move in one direction or the other. Ambling along without any clear direction or switching directions every 4 years is hurting progress.
Left is the only side that has any solutions to real problems. I guess we are going to have to test so other ideas to failure and exhaustion before you admit it though...
I’m surprised that the discussion of Biden’s foreign policy on Ukraine did not cover several valid criticisms of how he’s handled it so far:
1) Failure to deter the Russian invasion in the first place, including removing sanctions on Nord Stream that were put in place under the Trump administration and not providing weapons or applying sanctions in advance at Zelenskyy’s request.
2) Endless hand-wringing about “escalation” and Putin’s “red lines” that very quickly proved completely wrong-headed and counterproductive and yet caused critical delays in the provision of key weapons systems (HIMARS, cluster munitions, ATACMS, Patriot batteries, the list goes on). This allowed Russia to establish significant defensive lines that made Ukraine’s future offensives much harder.
3) The unseemly Biden administration tendency to take credit for all Ukrainian successes and put all failures on the Ukrainians- perfect example being the failed counteroffensive (even though the US has never succeeded in a similar operation without air superiority).
4) The Biden administration’s incorrect presumption that Russia could take Kyiv in days.
5) The Biden admin’s misrepresentation of Russian sanctions- pretending they are the strongest sanctions when in reality they are highly circumscribed and targeted in a way that makes them almost toothless (albeit with some much overdue improvements recently by beginning to apply secondary sanctions).
6) The Biden administration’s misrepresentation of how much we are helping Ukraine, fooling Americans into thinking we are being so generous in our support, when in reality it is a drop in the bucket compared to what we have implicitly budgeted for a future war with Russia.
7) The Biden admin’s fear of causing Russia to collapse outweighing the fear of Russia being able to declare victory in Ukraine (see: Biden admin telling Ukraine not to exploit the Prigozhin coup attempt).
8) The fact that Russian nuclear sabre rattling has caused the Biden administration to deter or limit or support for Ukraine has caused a massive increase in the likelihood of nuclear proliferation and nuclear blackmail around the world. See: Japan, Poland, South Korea exploring nukes.
I think historians will rightfully raise many of these as legitimate criticisms of how Biden has handled Ukraine.
No. 1 sounds like Green Lantern theory, that the President must be able to will a policy outcome into being. Sadly, a lot of Americans hold this view that an institutionally powerful office as the presidency conflates to personal power, a president as an action hero.
America's intelligence agencies correctly observed that Putin was mobilizing against Ukraine and warned Zelenskyy, who had time to marshal the military and prepare civilians for war. Putin largely thought he had a hot hand with the military successes he racked up, saw weakness in Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal and an internally divided NATO. He was expecting to capture Kyiv with little effort.
Putin was surprised that Biden did the work to marshal international support for Ukraine, and vastly underestimated the fighting capabilities of Ukrainians themselves.
In the alternate universe where either John McCain or Mitt Romney won their respective election against Obama, it’s hard to see Putin even invading in the first place. If you listen to Obama even these days (see Amanpour interview), he doesn’t sound so different from Putin in pointing to “Russian speaking / Russian ethnic” populations in eastern Ukraine as a reason why the US shouldn’t have been more forceful in opposing Putin’s imperialism.
I don't see a scenario where foreign adversaries fear a Republican presidential administration. Putin would still shoot his shot and annex east Ukraine, which was under political turmoil from the Maidan Uprising and the leadership upheaval, all of which happened independent of the U.S.
Well, I find it odd timing that both the initial invasion and subsequent expansion both occurred under Democratic presidents (one inexperienced president who wanted to “reset” relations with Russia and another president who Robert Gates considered to be wrong on almost every foreign policy issue dating back 4 decades). Romney was calling for Biden to give the Ukrainians MiGs in the first few months of 2022, whereas McCain saw right through Putin in a way Obama never did:
I can't believe that Putin didn't believe that Ukraine wouldn't resist a Russian invasion to the utmost, given that in 2018 the Ukrainian military implicitly positioned itself as the successor to the 20th-century Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
This involved adopting a modified version of the OUN's anthem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdANpB9PnY) as well as replacing the Soviet-era greeting "Hello, comrades! We wish you health!" with the OUN-derived (and now world-famous) "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!".
Didn't the election of Zelenskyy itself increase Putin's motivation to invade, both out of confidence (Zelenskyy was a Russian-speaking comedian by trade and Putin saw him as a weakling compared to his predecessor Poroshenko) and out of fear (because Zelenskyy was the first Ukrainian President to try to do something about oligarch power, which may have given ideas to the Russian people)?
Could be any, all or none of those things. They all do go with the "hot hand" theory, that Putin wanted to parlay his battlefield successes into a scramble for Ukraine.
Look at the two of them and what they say in public and believe your eyes. One person perceives reality and has some slips of the tongue. Another is hallucinating.
Mine too (I'm a decade older). I had to wait until middle age before a political party reflected my preferences and values. You see, I was born too late to have lived experience of the New Deal or the post-WWII boom. I was the product of the post-'64 Civil Rights Act backlash and the rightwing dominated politics and the economy while the leftwing got pop culture as a consolation prize.
I witness in my childhood and early adulthood all institutions atrophy. I am Generation X, poisoned with cynicism. And possibly lead.
This might somewhat misguided but I would credit Biden with the FDA legalising cultured meat. I always expected both the left and right oppose cultured meat. I know cultured meat was legalised in Singapore and Israel already but you need a big market for the technology to scale. In the long run this would be a major climate technology imo.
If the FDA has approved lab-grown meat does that mean it's like mifepristone now? Does the state of Florida have any authority to outlaw it, in other words?
Wouldn't it violate the amendment regarding interstate commerce? Generally the states can't take away freedoms granted by the federal government I'm pretty sure.
States can ban all sorts of things that are not federally banned. For instance, most states used to ban gambling, even though it was federally legal. California banned the sale of pork and chicken that had been raised with various inhumane practices, and Iowa tried to sue them, but lost.
States can have different rules about guns, fireworks, gambling, lots of things. Banning cultured meat is pretty dumb but I don't see a constitutional problem with it.
Gun regulations has been a states rights thingy because of the second amendment. For restricting the USE of fireworks and gambling establishments, the states probably have sovereignty. I'D imagine the state can't stop you from buying fireworks made in a different state.
The most they can probably do is to ban cultured meat production and impose non tariff barriers like stop restaurants from serving cultured meat. They might tax it as well. They can't actually stop you from buying cultured meat made in a different state.
BTW I'M NOT AN AMERICAN AND HAVE NO LEGAL TRAINING WHATSOEVER. TAKE THIS WITH A MASSIVE GRAIN OF SALT. IF YOU THINK I'M WRONG PLEASE CORRECT ME.
You probably can't ban cultured meat or fireworks if and only if they're made in another state. But you can ban the thing, regardless of where it's made. I'm not a lawyer either, or a fireworks enthusiast, but I know there are (or used to be) a lot of fireworks stores on the Tennessee side of the Kentucky-Tennessee line, and on the Indiana side of the Indiana-Ohio line. I'm not sure why cultured meat would be different, legally.
States are allowed to set their own standards for products and services within their boundaries. California does it all the time. So does NY. So does Florida.
I don't think so. Even the FDA's pre-emption on drugs isn't absolute. (Abortion drugs are a unique class for obvious political reasons.) I can't imagine the FDA would attempt to assert pre-emption over a food product like lab-grown meat.
Sweden and FINLAND joined NATO. Norway was always a member.
Oops! Thanks, fixed.
Norway is still mentioned with Sweden in a second spot.
You only fixed one of the mistakes.
"Sweden and Norway even emerged from neutrality to join."
Thanks for beating me to this correction.
Not an American but a lot of these have always been obvious. IMO, the handling of economy over the past two years and the reindustrilisation are his biggest successes.
Interestingly, the biggest loser here is Europe. Brussels really does need to listen to Macron and come up with it's own industrial policy. Else it'll just be stuck with having to buy either American or Chinese.
Another thing, tbf, most of his foreign policy victory in the SCS is because Beijing is just very bad at foreign policy. They really need to fire everyone in their foreign ministry. But Biden did a good job of capitalising on it.
The out of context social media clips of Biden really make him seem incompetent when he isn't at all. Great article. Thanks for the good work.
>Interestingly, the biggest loser here is Europe. Brussels really does need to listen to Macron and come up with it's own industrial policy. Else it'll just be stuck with having to buy either American or Chinese.
Ideally, Europe's industrial policy would be cooperative with America's, along with all the other allies like Canada and Japan and Australia. Free trade is generally extremely good, the exception being trade with potential enemies like China. Among allies, industrial policies should be aligned.
The first order of business for Europe--and America--should be to stop the incoming tsunami of China Shock II. If the US & EU cannot or will not stop this incoming flood of highly subsidized goods, they won't have *any* manufacturing base left. Period.
Back during China Shock I, the French set up a single, tiny, grossly understaffed customs office to process the masses of containers piling up in Le Havre and Marseille filled with gazillions of cheap Chinese VCR's. Which caused those piles of containers to rise ever higher...without enacting any formal trade restrictions.
Time for all of Europe to do a repeat.
What can western countries do to make it easier for consumer to seek out products that are NOT "made in China"?
That's what has been going on for decades and exactly what the US is going back on. Nanufac is leaving Germany and going to the US right now. Alliance or not, every country will stick out for themselves first. This type of reasoning why all the big tech Europe uses is American. It'll simply favour the Americans disproportionately
Agree that China is bad at foreign policy, and not just with regard to the SCS. But firing the entire Foreign Ministry would not change a thing. Chinese leaders, supported by a huge number of their countrymen, are still reacting to what they call the "century of humiliation," during which a superior civilization, deservedly the center of the universe, was humbled by lesser peoples who had better guns. It can be argued that century ended with the formation of the PRC, but to the leaders it's a useful concept to keep the Chinese people both stirred up and in line. Any new Foreign Ministry would be filled with people of a similar mindset. They would still see international relations as a zero-sum affair and would continue to pursue those relations equally clumsily in pursuit of Chinese dominance, or better yet, international recognition of the innate superiority of China.
Oh I'm aware firing the foreign ministry wouldn't solve anything. They get orders from the Politburo after all. Not sure what a proper solution would be honestly. Decades of propaganda means that even the leadership largely buys the rhetoric now, something that happens in practically every big country it seems.
Xi could rectify it if he really wanted to, he doesn't really. It's no surprise that the current leadership is a bit out of touch with reality. What is important is what happens when Xi administration ends. I really hope they get a post Mao type situation where the new leader actually understands that pushing territorial claims aggressively does nothing but hands over your neighbours into the hands of your biggest rival.
Bidenomics is a loser. Period.
What a useless comment.
But 10% true
It's a heck of a lot better than any policy we got coming out of 2007.
Right wingers are completely useless children and should be blocked on sight.
I personally think the ukraine war and israel - gaza war are disasters that could have easily been prevented by biden. You guys just needed a proxy war with russia such that EU is completely dependent on USA and can't balance with china. I'm not a fan.
What action could Biden have possibly have taken to cause Putin to not launch his 2022 invasion? And how could it possibly be something he could do "easily"?
Put nukes in Ukraine like it should do anyway
Yes, that worked well for the USSR and Cuba in the 1960's.
Excellent point!
Getting tough on Israel--by actually stopping or slowing the flow of weapons--would've been political suicide for Biden and the Dems. AIPAC and the combined clout of the rest of the Israel Lobby would have destroyed them, pushing Trump and the GOP way over the finish line in November. That said, AIPAC wants to keep both parties fully compliant regarding US Israeli policy, and definitely does *not* want to make an enemy of the Democrat party, despite having already alienated the crucial Dem youth vote.
The fact that Congress just happily approved a whopping $24 billion dollar bailout for Israel--a country of only 10 million--is a very clear example of AIPAC flexing its muscles.
Political suicide happens both ways. Bibi really screwed Biden on this.
How likely is it that it was AIPAC that ultimately forced House Speaker Mike Johnson to stop blocking the aid bill for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan?
The natural gas we are exporting to Europe now comes from Speaker Johnson’s district.
Congratulations on completely destroying your personal credibility.
Biden needed the death of over 500,000 to cover his corruption in Ukraine.
Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine, not Biden!
It's strange that Biden's foreign policy is being portrayed as a success, while during his term the world has entered its most dangerous period since 1945. Would they have forgiven Trump if this had happened during his term? When the U.S. appears to withdraw from every confrontation, bad things inevitably happen. Just as when the U.S. appears eager for confrontation and a bit crazy, like in the Trump era, good things happen. It's also strange that Biden's immigration policy isn't mentioned here. It allows anyone to just take a backpack and head to America, pretending to be a refugee.
The US is the most powerful nation in the world. It is by no means all powerful. I've never understood this logic. What exactly could they have done to stop Putin from invading? Or to stop Hamas from attacking. It was clear to everyone that Israel would respond very aggressively to a Hamas attack.
Right, it's a completely nonsensical take. The argument goes something like "Trump was so crazy that enemies wouldn't try shit while he was in office." which just doesn't stand up to reality. Sometimes things happen regardless of who is President.
About Russia, Putin isn't a big fan of taking risks, and Trump while generally pro-Russia (but not always, see the German-Russian gas pipe) was unpredictable, which made the risks more significant. Biden, however, is very predictable and will always do the minimum required. On Hamas, it's clear that they knew their "civilians as human shields" strategy would work extremely well with Democrats. They also received hundreds of millions from oil-rich Iran after Biden quietly lifted oil sanctions on Iran.
Hamas actively wanted a more violent response from Israel because the point was scuppering the deal with saudi arabia. If you aren't able to understand their war goal you have no business talking about this.
As for Russia, if Putin was afraid of Trump, his repeated support for trump (but financial and informational) makes no sense. Trump was an isolationist from day one who opposed NATO at every turn and was catastrophically incompetent at diplomacy. The idea that Trump would actually fully throw himself into a war on behalf of Ukraine is insanity.
There was a good case to be made that Trump was likely a KGB asset pre-2016. His utter surrender to Putin at Helsinki and thereafter proved it.
If Trump is *not* an asset of Moscow Centre, he sure does a great job of behaving otherwise. Like Dana Rohrabacher on steroids.
Tamritz suffers from Trump derangement syndrome.
It’s amusing how they strip all context out of everything to make Trump look good
Putin is not risk-averse. See Chechnya, Georgia, and Crimea, just to name risks that involve military action. It's just that in the past, he took risks that paid off for him, but this one didn't.
lol this is just silly tbh.
This is at least as dishonest as your previous comment.
To what extent was Trump's hostility to Nordstream 2 a case of his anti-German mercantilist instincts trumping (hah!) his Russophilia?
It continually astounds me how willfully blind people are on the Ukraine invasion. It could have been *easily* averted if we had just not threatened Russia by taking steps to bring Ukraine into NATO. Putin and the Russian foreign establishment made it clear for decades that this was their red line, and the US ignored it. Total disaster and incompetence on the part of Biden and his staff.
On another note, zero mention of the debt spiral in this article. It’s pretty easy for the economy to “appear great” when you’re running WW2 style deficits.
Wasn't the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 more down to the EU than NATO, in the sense that it began with the Euromaidan revolution?
That revolution had happened because president Yanukovych had pledged to get Ukraine into a trade agreement with the EU, but had then reneged on that pledge in the face of Russian bullying.
"That revolution had happened because president Yanukovych had pledged to get Ukraine into a trade agreement with the EU, but had then reneged on that pledge in the face of Russian bullying."
This is not what happened. Yanukovych negotiated with the EU, who demanded massive austerity in Ukraine in order to join. That was political suicide, so Yanukovych decided to take the deal with Russia which required no austerity.
Wouldn't that imply that Russia made a terrible mistake in 2014 by stealing Crimea and starting a war in the Donbas, because without those acts of aggression the 2019 elections would likely have been won by a pro-Russian candidate anyway?
LOL, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had absolutely nothing to do with NATO. It continues to astound me how incredibly, unfathomably stupid people are for parroting this bit of risible Russian propaganda. You aren’t this incredibly stupid are you?
Russia is in the process of subverting Georgia. Presumably we'll get some "NATO" based explanation for this.
LOL, yeah.
I think on social media a lot of times people come up with or hear something that sounds clever/intelligent without really giving it any thought. When someone points out how dumb/wrong it is, they either slink away or aggressively double down.
I've never encountered an honest right winger.
We should have just preemptively nuked Russia and China
We can lose.
Please remember that before shilling for more war. We can lose.
Thank you
And Stephens is wrong
This is weak argument that I hear a lot. Not being able to beat the Taliban for 20 years didn't demonstrate the limits of US military strength to our enemies but withdrawing made it very clear to everyone that the US had suddenly become very weak.
Not to mention Russia had been messing with Ukraine since far before we withdrew from Afghanistan. These types of arguments fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny.
I view it favorably. A US with one less unproductive foreign entanglement is a US that can better focus on critical priorities like...Europe.
And weren't Western forces in Afghanistan (a landlocked country remember) logistically dependent on Russian railways, such that the West couldn't seriously oppose Russia for as long as those forces were there?
I don't care about what Ukrainians think. You could ask them what their views are about the fact that the US couldn't defeat the cave dwelling Taliban after 20 years.
Afghanistan was costing us $90 billion a year. A Forever War with no appreciable strategic benefit.
And Trump it was--not Obama--who withdrew 90% of US forces at the end of his term. But didn't withdraw the final 10%, leaving that poison pill to Biden.
After Trump pulled nearly all of our forces out, within 5 months the Taliban annihilated the Afghan Army. Then, all that was left under US control was Kabul. There were no *local allies* left. Unlike Vietnam, when much of our heaviest casualties occurred during the drawdown, we lost almost nobody in 2019-20; because the Taliban were focusing exclusively on wiping out Afghani garrisons.
When Biden withdrew our *token force* there were no *local allies* left, because they were all dead. Do some research on this if you don't believe me.
And remember that Trump also threw the Syrian Kurds, another set of *local allies* under the bus when asked to by Erdogan.
I think running the counterfactual here (Trump wins 2020) is helpful.
- Would Putin have invaded Ukraine if Trump was in office? The answer here is probably yes, or something similar would have happened that would have resulted in Russia achieving much more in Ukraine than it has in our reality. NATO would be dying or just a EU project in Trump term two. Someone said a robber doesn't mug the old lady if she's about to hand you her purse, and Trump was the old lady.
- Would Hamas have attacked Israel? Hard to say. If Hamas had initiated 10/7 anyways, we all know Trump would be way worse for the Palestinians, and maybe Hamas knew that. On the other hand, they were still the killer combo of stupid, bloodthirsty, and cowardly to attack and then hide behind civilians, so I don't put much stock in their strategic reasoning abilities.
- Trump would absolutely not have been able to start building the anti-China Pacific coalition that Biden has gotten underway
- Good chance Trump would either not left Afghanistan, or orchestrated the exit such that we ghosted the Afghans overnight and did absolutely nothing for the hundreds of thousands of Afghan civil servants, soldiers, translators, etc who served us well in the full faith that we'd have their backs, because Trump is odious and would never risk anything to help others.
Net net, I think the dam was going to break on the post-WW2 order regardless, and if anything, it's the fecklessness and weakness shown by Trump 1 that laid the groundwork since it showed the world that America is a country that's wavering in both its commitments to global order and frankly its sanity.
What makes you think Trump would have not made the withdrawal a total shit show? Why would he have handled it any better than Covid? Also what makes you think any other president would have handled the withdrawal better? I’m old enough to remember the fall of Vietnam and Cambodia. It was the hollowness of the Afghan forces that made the withdrawal what it was not Biden.
Hamas attacked Israel in large part to short circuit the impending agreement and tighter alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. No reason to think Trump short circuits, the opposite actually
I don't like Trump, but it's hardly fair to blame him for Covid in 2020 being an utter shitshow for the US!
The only countries that did well Covid-wise in 2020 were either isolated islands with no truck-borne international trade that could easily seal themselves off from the outside world (Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand) or communist dictatorships with the power to force contacts of any infected people into quarantine camps (China and Vietnam).
https://anthonylamesa.substack.com/p/10-reasons-the-united-states-couldnt
The subsequent anti-vaxxism of the MAGA right would later cause lots of avoidable deaths, but the MAGA movement became anti-vaxx in spite of Trump, not because of him.
As for antivax Trump helped create an environment that helped antivax spread.
https://www.psypost.org/study-indicates-donald-trump-was-the-main-anti-vaccination-influencer-on-twitter-in-2020/#google_vignette
Bleach enemas!
lol where did I blame Trump for Covid? My comment was about his own response to Covid once it got here which with the arguable exception of the vaccines was a total shit show. (And even with the vaccines he lost interest in them once the election was over which is one reason the rollout was so sluggish)
https://open.substack.com/pub/aaronrupar/p/trump-covid-response-revisited?r=auz4n&utm_medium=ios
What response would have changed anything?
Taking Covid seriously and being halfway competent. If he’d done that, then we can start talking about actual policies, but Trump’s response led to a huge rise in Covid denialism and antivax that seriously undermined any actual policy responses even by blue states.
"What makes you think Trump would have not made the withdrawal a total shit show?"
The fact that he smartly scheduled it for May, at the beginning of fighting season. Biden, not wanting to look like he agreed with Trump, delayed it until August when the Taliban were already in Kabul.
lol did you really believed this when you wrote this or do you make a bag of doorknobs look like a Mensa meeting. I mean I thought your Covid stuff was moronic but this is just as dumb but funnier.
Dude, the Afghan military completely collapsed, they might as well have been the Washington generals given all of the resistance they offered the Taliban.
I get you MAGAs are complete suck ups to Trump but you do you really have to fellate Trumps ass and dick at the same time?
Hamas is certainly bloodthirsty but I wouldn't see them as either stupid or cowardly: wasn't the point of 10/7 basically to turn the entire Gaza Strip into a ginormous Alamo that would radicalize the rest of the Muslim world into destroying Israel for them?
And Egypt's refusal to admit Gazan refugees plays very much into Hamas's plan, as it will likely eventually force Israel to either abandon its war against Hamas or commit an outright genocide in Gaza.
I was under the impression that the plan was another 1000-1 hostage trade, and re-establishing deterrence after the Al-Asqa mosque clearances and west bank provocations.
Laws that allow generous admission to the United States to refugees were adopted long before Biden became president. In part, they were adopted to conform to international conventions on refugees. It's just that Central and South Americans have recently learned how to take advantage of them.
To make Biden responsible for the world erupting into warfare assumes that he has godlike powers. Remember that Islamic violence against the United States erupted under George W Bush in a development that surprised everyone. US presidents can only control what they can control.
It's ironic that our presidential candidates tend to present themselves as all powerful saviors, and then we foolishly expect them to actually be all powerful saviors.
The real take is that Biden caused the border crisis by getting the economy running so well that literally everyone wanted to come here to work. Asylum seekers don't look to enter places with high unemployment!
America has never once "controlled the world". For example, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic fission bomb in 1949. China about 1963. It only took China 3 years to then develop megaton Hydrogen bombs all on their own without Soviet Russia help. Pakistan, India as well.
Immigration even undocumented is growing America. We need them
I think a very high percentage of immigrants are a great boon to our society.
immigration is THE reason why inflation wasn't worse than it was. Remember the "worker shortage"? Remember "nobody wants to work anymore"? Those ended because we took in millions and millions of hardworking latinos and chinese who filled in the gaps in the service industry.
I love our immigrants!
Man, we should have nuked Russia, China, and Pakistan back to the Stone Age before that
Is it your opinion that Trump appears "eager for confrontation"? He's basically announced that European security isn't the US's problem and has expressed to his advisors that he wants to leave NATO. He's also talked about withdrawing US forces from Asia and letting Japan and Taiwan et al. fend for themselves. During his presidency I think he did one thing involving missiles fired at Iran, which was not particularly scary.
Is there any evidence for Trump being scary to other superpowers, other than wishful thinking?
Wait, was Trump making the US eager for confrontation? I thought he was the one that wanted to withdraw the US from all international actions.
lol how quickly we forget that Trump signed the agreement to withdraw from Afghanistan or that Trump threatened to deny aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine helped with his reelection campaign.
lol
I have yet to encounter an honest right winger.
"Good things"?
I guess your generation wasn't the one that actually had to fight the war on terror.
Biden is not the President I would choose ideally, but he's the President we have and while I know many people think he's selfishly holding onto office: I am quite skeptical any other Democratic nominee would do much better. The small amounts of polling we have don't show much improvement over Biden (and occasionally shows worse results too).
The thing that scares me about the present moment is how nostalgic people are for Trump. I don't get it at all. It's like we all got collective amnesia about the man nearly four years after he left office.
Furthermore as an economist (by training): I find the nostalgia dangerous. His policies were awful on the merits, he himself is incompetent, and I don't think people realize how much luck factors into things.
What I have a hard time understanding is why Biden doesn't dump Harris and find a more attractive VP. Agree with you that it'd be too hard to swap out Biden right now, but there are a plethora of more attractive VP candidates than KH.
1. Because if she’s a bad pick now what does that say about his choice in 2020?
2. Because the benefits are low, few vote for the VP (and there isn’t a great option to really help Biden win)
3. Because it could royally piss off a key constituency (African American Women)
Talk with insiders suggest #3 weighs particularly heavily on people’s minds. The theoretical discussions I’ve heard about replacing Harris all assume the replacement will be a black woman.
Which then leads to the conundrum of who? Here are the top ranking African American women in the US:
House Representatives:
-Maxine Waters (No, would not help)
-Sheila Jackson Lee (Probably would not help)
-Barbara Lee (Maybe… it skeptical)
-Gwen Moore (never heard of her but she is from Wisconsin)
Senators
-Laphonza Butler
I could MAYBE see it, but she declined to run for reelection so does she really want to be VP? I doubt it. She’s never ran a campaign before
There are no African American women serving as a governor, there are four currently serving as a lieutenant governor which frankly is not a big enough position to jump to being a running mate
In Biden’s cabinet only one confirmed official is an African American woman, Linda Thomas Greenfield who is the ambassador to the UN, and Marcia Fudge recently retired and said she’s done.
Out of office candidates are Stacey Abrams, who has lost significant shine IMO. Carol Mosely Braun was a senator but has been out of politics for years. I suppose he could look to Susan Rice again, or Loretta Lynch. But frankly neither has ran a campaign either.
Overall there simply isn’t a better candidate out there than Kamala Harris who is also an African American woman. She is clearly the most qualified for the job
And then there’s the issue of what happens to Harris? She can’t run for her old seat anymore as it’s too late. I could see her moving to the Supreme Court, but there would have to be an opening. Serving in the Cabinet would be a demotion.
Replacing your VP is just a hard thing to do, Obama discussed it with Biden but that fizzled fast. Pence didn’t go (but he is done in politics now)
A good article, but you once again ignore the issue of the Israeli right and offensive weapons.
Ben Gvir, the Israeli Security minister, has openly advocated getting all of the palestinians out and settling Israelis in Gaza in their place.
There are a lot of serving officials in the Netanyahu government who have openly advocated for ethnically cleansing Gaza. That the US is still sending offensive weapons to Israel when these people are in power is worrying.
The big risk for the US is that the Israeli Right will use US support to ethnically cleanse Gaza (by getting most of the Palestinians to go "somewhere" while also killing many through starvation and collateral damage) from 2024-2025.
Even if Netanyahu goes next year, the new Israeli government will say, "That was awful, but it's done, we promise we won't do it again" None of your posts have talked about this aspect, and it makes this blog look very myopic on this topic.
Like if we want Indonesia on our side, Biden has to say something to assure them we aren't just a rubber stamp for the worst people in Israel to take more Palestinian land.
Well I've called for no longer sending weapons to Israel.
But not in the "Palestine is the end of the line for the New Left" post.
The existence of sitting israeli ministers who campaigned on and actively want a Gaza/west bank free of Palestinians was a very glaring omission. The pro Hamas side is rightly undermined when their real policy positions and quotes about killing/expelling all Jews are included.
That you would not do a similar roundup of the many Israeli officials who have said similar things about Palestinians really undermines that piece.
Check out these sentence in that post beginning with "A smart move"
That is a good doctrine for the protest, but it still takes as a given that the Israeli/Netanyahu brutality is a unfortunate side effect of their campaign and not, as has actually been said by many sitting Israeli officials, a conscious policy of removing Palestinians to make a greater Israel sovereign across all of Judea.
Imagine if you were in the 1800s and you were talking about the Indian wars, and you listed the brutality by the US government as an unfortunate side effect and not the conscious plan of many government officials. Even if half of the government says officially that they don't want to kill all of them, it would be relevant to include the quotes from people like Sherman and Sheridan saying that their goal is to permanently remove the natives, regardless of the "official" position.
So as a "steelman" leaving out those quotes by people like Ben gvir is a missed opportunity
Isn't there an argument that it would be pointless for Israel to destroy Hamas without ethnically cleansing Gaza, because a new terrorist movement very much like Hamas would re-emerge in short order?
I don't think the Gaza polls support that. https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/969
The script you're presenting as realistic is not reasonable at all. Israel gave up all territorial claims in Gaza as part of the disengagement in 2005. In international law, there is no way to reverse that.
In 1831, the Supreme Court ruled that forcing the Cherokee Nation to leave Georgia and go to Oklahoma was unconstitutional.
It was illegal. It was "reversed" and therefore the Cherokee didn't have to lea....
Wait, What's that?
President Jackson just said, "Let the Supreme Court try to enforce it" and the land was permanently taken by land hungry settlers.
What part of what's going in the West Bank (which is also not part of Israel under International Law) with settlement expansion makes you think the current Israeli governent will limit settlers at all? They are a key part of Netanyahu's coalition.
I am genuinely curious. Why do you think that the Israeli government will respect the 2005 decision (by a previous government) with regard to Gaza when they haven't restrained settlements in the West Bank.
Just because far-right ministers are calling for it, doesn't make it real. If Israel really wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, it would and could have done so a long time ago. It's exactly what Russia and many other regimes do par for the course. Same for genocide. If the shoe was on the other foot, and Hamas had the chance to ethnically cleanse and/or kill all of Israelis, it would have done so a long time ago.
>If Israel really wanted to ethnically cleanse Gaza, it would and could have done so a long time ago
There's a segment of the Israeli population and government, such as Ben Gvir, that wants exactly that. Other Israeli people and politicians hold them back, but it's not a foregone conclusion that Nethanyu will be the farthest right Israeli ever leading their government.
I believe Israel has a right to defend itself and stamp out Hamas. I don't believe it has a right to settle the West Bank and ethnically cleanse Gaza.
I'm not sure what policy the US should take exactly. Noah think the US should withdraw entirely because the US doesn't have any interests in the region and that the US should focus entirely on Russia and China. I think Iran is a clear #3 threat after Russia and China and keeping a good relationship with Israel can be useful. I'd lean towards being more lenient about Israel's actions in Gaza, where brutality to stamp out Hamas can be necessary, but drawing a hard line around West Bank settlement which, while they don't have *as* much cruelty, also have 0 justification.
There are no rights in international law.
Israel could certainly do much worse than they are.
Hamas would certainly do worse.
But the objection to the original characterization of the steel man of the protest was that the far right Israeli ministers who run such minor ministries as "Security" have also advocated for removing all of the Palestinians, were not mentioned.
In Donetsk, for example, Russia doesn't want to kill all Ukrainians, it is not working to kill all civilians. It is killing civilians to advance the war effort and to terrorize the population, but those are methods, not ends. Instead, the objective is to take legal control of the territory and make sure the locals that remain acknowledge the Russian government as sovereign and no longer present a "security risk".
This objective exactly what the Israeli settler Right says they want to do in Gaza and the West Bank. The settlers don't systematically kill Palestinians, they just take the land and dare the Palestinians to object and get shot by the IDF.
This is what the protesters worry about. They worry, possibly needlessly, that Israel is going to maintain military control of Gaza, allow in settlers, and just make facts on the ground. A map of Israel's de facto territory now versus their territory in say 1990 shows that this is a legitimate worry.
Isn't Egypt the biggest obstacle to any Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza, because it refuses to take refugees from Gaza?
A big part of the reason why is that Egypt's current dictator came to power in a coup against the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas is essentially the "Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine".
Russia gave up all territorial claims in Ukraine in 1991.
This is why reversing it entirely disrupted the global order. Israel isn't powerful or irrational enough to do something like that.
As of 2022, I noticed that the only border changes post-1945 that weren't just a country getting independence, or countries merging, involved either Russia (taking Crimea) or Israel (gaining and then losing Sinai, and whatever the status has been of Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza).
Wasn't Biden correct about Japan and India being xenophobic? Or is this one of those he's right, but shouldn't say it, type things?
He was wrong to include India in the category of countries that are struggling because of birth rate issues compounded with a lack of openness to immigration. India doesn't have a demographic problem yet and there are plenty of immigrants from neighboring countries (Nepal, Bangladesh, etc. ) who come to India for work.
I dunno, man. He's not wrong. India is xenophobic in the sense that it doesn't want Muslims nor does it want to trade particularly with Muslim nations while being surrounded by them. The Congress is full of loonies in terms of economic policymaking but I can imagine a good leader from the party working towards improving relations with Pakistan or Bangladesh which would, in the long run, probably have led to a better regional economy, outsourcing of factories from Indian companies of inputs and, possibly, some sort of aspiration amongst the neighbours to become Indians. I never thought of India as a xenophobic nation but it might be one except it excludes people based on the nebulous concept of Indianness which is increasingly becoming a Hindu-first one.
Wouldn't that make India Islamophobic (perhaps understandably so, given how mercilessly the Indians were exploited by the Mughals as well as by earlier Muslim invaders) as opposed to xenophobic more generally?
Yes? And if its understandable, it's also clear that the boot has been on the other foot for years now. The current prime Minister basically made his career during riots that killed 2000+ Muslims.
That's not what xenophobic means. Didn't read the rest.
Dislike or prejudice of people from other countries. Your loss.
I may have misunderstood what "India doesn't want Muslims" meant. I thought you were referring to Indian Muslims, which wouldn't qualify as xenophobia.
Even so, some of India's major trading partners and immigrants are from Muslim countries. India does have a pretty good relationship with Bangladesh and since India hasn't been the aggressor in Indo-Pak wars, I don't see any politician from any party making a difference in improving the relationship with Pakistan.
https://www.eximpedia.app/blog/major-trading-partners-of-india
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/03/03/india-is-a-top-source-and-destination-for-worlds-migrants/
"India is also one of the world’s top destinations for international migrants. As of 2015, about 5.2 million immigrants live in India, making it the 12th-largest immigrant population in the world. The overwhelming majority of India’s immigrants are from neighboring countries such as Bangladesh (3.2 million), Pakistan (1.1 million), Nepal (540,000) and Sri Lanka (160,000)."
Yes, but imagine what a difference it would have been if there was concerted diplomacy to improve the relationship further with Muslim neighbours instead of the continual dog whistling. Meanwhile, there's an actual law that forbids non-Hindu migrants from obtaining citizenship and voiding residency for existing residents in border states. Sure, it's a destination for migrants simply because of its massive economy and relative industrial complexity but it can be much bigger and, frankly, needs to be bigger for much of the infrastructure growth that needs to happen this decade.
It's happening. When I visited Bangalore last December, I interacted with a lot of Nepalis. Identity is a thorny issue in Indian domestic politics. I hope a day comes within my lifetime wherein becoming an Indian becomes an aspiration for people in South Asia and West Asia.
It's less xenophobic than East Asian states, perhaps, but more than Malaysia (one needs to bring money or buy property) or Singapore which have a more relaxed attitude towards citizenship.
India, no. Japan absolutely.
And yes, say so out loud was stupid. Kind of like pointing out that our largest Middle Eastern ally treats women as near slaves. Both are true, but unwise to say openly.
Outdated, at least to an extent. If Japan was xenophobic, it really hasn't been since Abe opened the country up to immigration. IIRC half of all marriages in Japan are 'biracial.' Hell, Tokyo is overrun with tourists. India has loads of issues, but they're more related to their domestic divisions than some kind of fear of countries abroad.
At one point perhaps, now no
It’s still idiotic to call allies xenophobic
The comparison of Biden's achievement with Obama are pretty devastating to the latter.
Eh, there's ACA, Dodd-Frank, withdrawal from Iraq, General Motors alive and bin Laden dead.
Obama was the first progressive president in decades. He worked with a much broader coalition to pass important reforms. Biden is distinctly better on some things (foreign policy) but as far as domestic politics are concerned he has the advantage of building on Obama's foundation. If Obamacare hadn't ever been passed, the situation with healthcare would be even worse now than it was, and it would be the only thing Biden could work to solve.
What I will say is that Biden has shown clear leadership in certain moments where the democratic party seemed poised to do something stupid. He didn't listen to the moderates on trans issues, and has been vindicated. He didn't listen to the radicals on police, and has been vindicated. Obama's key failure to me is that he occasionally was too receptive to polling and overly cautious with his political capital.
He wasn't actually very progressive at all though? It's like Chicago's last mayor: she was a black lesbian, so no one could believe that she was as conservative as she actually was.
Yup. Unironically Biden is the most effective liberal president since LBJ.
I respect Noah's opinion, even when I disagree with him. He certainly knows howe to make his case.
But let's cut to the chase:
What has killed the housing market is high interest rates. Those rates didn't exist under Trump. They are the direct result of Biden's major screw-up, throwing money at an economy that couldn't absorb it. As I frequently say, but DC never listens, you can print money, but you can't print prosperity.
As for all the reinvigorated manufacturing under Biden, that is the direct result of Biden throwing funny money at the 'problem'. We are paying for that reinvigoration with the decreased buying value of our hard-earned dollars. As of right now, a Biden buck buys 80 cents worth of what a Trump buck bought. We are ALL screwed.
As for climate change, could we all try to keep one foot in reality? Climate changes is perpetual. We are coming out of a great ice age. It's been warming for over twelve thousand years. And unless you're fond of living on glaciers, that's a good thing. Sure, let's continually work to lessen man's negative impacts on the environment. But where did anyone get the idea that the best way to do that is solar panels and windmills? For all of you that hate capitalism and who call government subsidies of capitalism 'welfare for the rich', well, guess what. Solar panel and windmill companies are capitalism on steroids. And they aren't capable of existing without government subsidies. And they aren't the best way to reduce CO2. And CO2 remediation isn't the best way to control man's environmental influence. Natural gas and nuclear power are. Biden and his ilk are actively undermining two of the most environmentally friendly ways of producing energy, in favor of boondoggles that are breaking the bank, and can't support our energy needs. Ask yourself; are they doing this because they are incredibly scientifically literate, or because they are party hacks playing us for fools?
Every policy Trump has proposed to implement if he wins in 2024, from tax cuts to mass deportations to tariffs, will increase the deficit and increase inflation or interest rates.
His only mitigating strategy is cuts to social security or Medicaid, which is taking money out of normal people’s pockets so he can pay for bullshit.
If you like natural gas and nuclear energy, gas output has actually reached all time highs under Biden and he has done more to push for nuclear energy than Trump ever did.
Everyone, including me, would do well to remember that the president is not all-powerful and certainly shouldn't be. Rarely, if ever, does a president deserve all the credit of all the blame for anything.
Let's consider a scenario where an incredibly capable president took office. He was elected with a near totality of electoral votes. OK, now what? He' still dealing with Congress, SCOTUS, and a vast administrative bureaucracy that makes most of the rules we have to live by. Our problems are systemic and can't be solved by any one president.
Some people think governments solve our problems. I think governments CREATE most of our problems. Certainly, there's some of both. Anyway, as to Biden and petroleum supplies, I found this article that seems very informed and unbiased. https://www.eenews.net/articles/oil-production-is-surging-how-much-is-due-to-biden/
Mass deportation will 1. Require spending and 2. Decrease the labor force which will drive up prices through either higher wages or just lower output.
Biden’s tariffs aren’t great for the economy, but they are a more targeted and useful than Trump’s idea of a 10% tariff on *everything*.
Well, that's it. I guess open borders are the only way to go. We wouldn't want to decrease the labor force after all.
I'm sure the fact that 25-54 year old, American born men are less likely to be in the labor force than ever before just totally, randomly, happened to coincide with the largest illegal immigration influx in our nation's history. Surely there's no connection at all though.
Look, if the issue you really care about is that there aren’t enough unskilled labor jobs for white men, then one way of solving that could be deporting millions of people who are willing to do those jobs for cheaper.
I’m just saying that if it works the way you want it to work, it will also probably result in higher prices for whatever those jobs produce.
Not having slave labor available usually results in higher prices. But that's a lousy reason to retain slavery.
I think its pretty clear nowadays that solar and wind are not "boondoggles" and are perfectly capable of supporting themselves: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/nuclear-vs-solar?utm_source=publication-search
Yes, they are boondoggles. Electric cars are hugely subsidized by the capitalist car companies, and they are still losing huge amounts of money. Solar panels are hugely subsidized, and can't support themselves on their own 'profits'. Windmills, same thing.
And what problem do they solve? Contrary to myth, there are no signs that they make much difference at all. The environment, including climates, are way too complex to sum up with simple calculations concerning CO2 levels.
So, yes, the whole politicized climate change panic is a boondoggle. The programs are not administered by our best and brightest scientists and engineers, they are administered by politicians and autocrats.
As for your link, I ended up here, and it largely supports what I've said:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/interview-jason-crawford-nonprofit
> Contrary to myth, there are no signs that they make much difference at all. The environment, including climates, are way too complex to sum up with simple calculations concerning CO2 levels.
I suppose if you don’t allow addition in your calculations, then there are no calculations that show *anything* making *any* difference to the environment.
Are you disputing my statement, or just arguing?
Moving past your unfounded statements about profitability (which utilities don't believe, as they clamor to build solar and wind in the US: https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/Queued%20Up%202024%20Edition_R2.pdf, page 14) and your similarly unfounded climate skepticism, its pretty clear you didn't read your own article you linked. The most he claims is that solar is a bit overhyped compared to nuclear, but goes on to say it is a fact that solar will be cheaper:
> I think, relative to popular opinion, nuclear is underrated and solar is overrated. Nuclear has been vilified and solar has been romanticized and glorified. So maybe techno-optimists are reacting to that. But I'm not a nuclear maximalist, and you shouldn't get too emotionally attached to any particular technology—you certainly shouldn't let a technology become your identity. Whatever combination of technologies delivers the best result at the lowest price is what deserves to win.
> “Shouldn't our excitement about different technologies shift as the technological facts themselves shift?” Solar getting cheaper is a technological fact, and we should get increasingly excited about it.
I keep hearing that solar is getting cheaper. I never hear that it is turning a profit. If the subsidies are removed, solar, wind, and electric cars disappear. Period. If you think not, then you logically should be in favor of removing the subsidies. Are you?
I don't know what hill you think you are fighting to defend, but I'm not defending anything. There is essentially no one on this planet that wants to see it destroyed by man's largesse. What makes you think you and your friends are unique that way? I stand by everything I've said because it's true.
Climate denial comments on an economics blog in 2024 is embarrassing for everyone involved.
So, what is "climate denial"? Is anybody claiming that there are no climates?
On the other hand, there are multiple good reasons to discuss the cost and availability of energy on an economics blog. Energy is essential to all aspects of an advanced economy.
Let's put electric car subsidies against the way we subsidize home insurance in places that global warming is hitting, shall we?
You aren't going to make much of an economic case if you cannot admit to the costs associated with global warming.
Huh? Would you care to summarize what it is that you thought I said?
There's been significant climate change since before modern man existed, and it will continue. All life will have to continue to adjust to it. But I'd rather adjust to glaciers melting than to glaciers advancing. I'm silly that way.
Solar and Wind have been propped up for decades while nuclear has been regulated out of existence.
5 percent interest rates are more the normal level than the ridiculously low rates from GWB to the present. Cheap money has fueled the the huge rise in housing prices the last 25 years.
Certainly, some truth to that. Cheap money is not automatically a bad thing, but it is when there is a housing bubble and cheap mortgage rates. That's what caused the housing collapse of 2008. There was a long run-up to the collapse. Housing prices went up and up, mortgage rates stayed low, and people just kept refinancing to get money out of their house to spend on lifestyle choices. Those parties always end abruptly.
It was plain for years that the bubble was going to burst. I knew it, and I'm no economist. You can't lay the blame entirely at the feet of interest rates. You have to blame the people who abandoned common sense and reason in favor of acting like unsupervised kids in a candy store. That includes the clowns at Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers, Fannie and Freddie, and the just plain folks who enjoyed the ride, but had no plans for what to do when the ride stopped.
I won't brag too much, but I took advantage of the low rates, refinanced my home, and used money wisely, KNOWING that the ride would end. Bubbles happen on a fairly regular basis. Those who recognize them can use them to advantage. Those who don't get screwed.
My sermon ends with me stressing that it is essential that each of us become financially literate and politically savvy. Counting on demagogues and ideologues to make your choices for you is a recipe for disaster.
Larry Summers correctly notes that when you include the cost of money real wages are way down and the mystery of consumer sentiment being low isn't a mystery anymore.
Biden has spent a bunch of money. If it turns out to have been spent well, OK. If it doesn't, it sucks. Noah loves industrial policy but its one of those things we might all write about in ten years as having been an expensive failure, like California high speed rail.
I'm not a warmonger like him, so I'm not excited about expanding the military-industrial complex. I think we are creating our own enemies rather then responding to them.
Noah's remarks on crime are quite frankly baffling. Crime surged with BLM, which is a movement that Biden vehemently supports. He's technically been against Defund the Police, which is great, but the movement more generally has been the cause of the crime wave.
Alternatively, maybe we should consider the fact that the rise (and subsequent fall) in crime occurred exactly at the same time as a pandemic, when millions of people were underemployed and kids were out of school.
We had a first BLM wave of crime in 2015. It was less national and more concentrated in a few highly black cities where BLM was active (I lived in one). No pandemic.
There's a chart in Noah's article that shows a tiny bump in 2015 that is (in the scheme of a 20-year massive fall in crime rates) totally unimpressive. It's small enough that you can make it go away by switching from NCVS to UCR reporting. It feels a lot like you have a preferred conclusion and are cherry picking evidence to support it.
PS This chart is incredible. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/
PPS I live in Baltimore and this chart tells a lot of the story. Notice that police arrests plummet well before 2015 (and Freddy Gray.) The drop happens before BLM was even a thing. https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190803_USC488.png
Black Lives Matter began in 2013. It was involved in several high profile cases before Freddie Grey. St Louis went through a similar BLM driven crime wave after Michael Brown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter
Its certainly the case that Baltimore had given up on broken windows policing leading up to Freddie Grey and that was a problem.
Murders shot up in Baltimore from 33.8 to 55.4 from 2014 to 2015 and stayed elevated since.
From my own experience murder is the only crime Baltimore cops even bother investigating. I reported my care being broken into the first time, but no the subsequent half dozen times.
Baltimore man. What a craphole. Glad I got out.
Murders dropped from the mid-40s to the low 30s between '07 and '11 so the rise back to the 50s isn't as impressive as you make it by picking an unusually low year.
Similarly, BLM may have existed in some larval form in 2013, but I don't remember any widespread protests occurring in Baltimore prior to Freddy Gray. Yet the sharp drop in arrest rate speaks for itself and clearly predates even 2013. To me that's the most likely candidate for the durable rise in murders.
Also for the record, Baltimore is a pretty amazing city. Relatively affordable and beautiful, with a harbor, and on a major train/highway route between NYC and DC and Philly. Terrible city government and a state government that wants to dump its problems there. Never had a problem here (let alone a drug murder), but I did once get mugged in Palo Alto, CA.
Police strikes have that effect, yes.
I'm hardly a Biden fan here, but a 5% Fed Funds rate is not "high interest rates". We ran 0% interest rates for almost 20 years, bought up debt of all kinds with QE and QE2, and still Jerome Powell has managed to restore normal monetary policy without causing a recession or massive inflation (9% inflation for 24 months is not massive.) That's amazing! I didn't think it possible.
On climate change, I'm afraid you're screaming at a brick wall with Noah. He's been pushing solar panels, windmills, and even (if I remember right) a battery-powered convection stove company. He's all-in on global warming both financially and ideologically.
The anthropogenic contribution to current climate change is significant and undeniable. Not to mention other environmental impacts (ocean acidification, habitat destruction, etc) that also ultimately undermine ecological resilience and diversity.
It is decidedly *not* a good thing.
In specific cases solar panels are by faaar the best way to lessen the impacts you say you care about: Noah has already written about this on several occasions.
Re: CO2 remediation…. Dude I’m sorry here you’ve lost me. Maybe if I go read some blog posts from 2009 I’ll get a handle on what you’re rambling about.
Nuclear is good. Natural is good temporarily, insofar as it replaces worse-polluting fuels, but long term it also has to be phased out and replaced by superior substitutes. Fossil fuel consumption has an incredible history of government subsidy. Maybe we should start there instead of griping about support for essential and nascent technologies?
OK, so much for ideology. Now, show me IN DETAIL, the degree to which climates today would be different than they are, if man had never existed.
I don't need speeches, rants, or hyperbole. I need specific facts, data and mathematical calculations. If you can't specifically, factually, mathematically answer that question, then you have no business pretending to know what man's effects on climate have been.
But I suspect that won't stop you from continuing with the hyperbole until hell freezes over.
My friend you can Google all this in 5 seconds.
https://scitechdaily.com/consensus-revisited-do-scientists-still-believe-in-anthropogenic-human-caused-climate-change/
I found this for you in the time it took me to buy a coffee at Prets. Happy reading.
Gee, thanks. But if you can't tell me yourself, I have to presume you are ignorant.
YOU show me the math. I asked a question that is essential to any consideration of anthropogenic climate change, and you have punted.
Dude, way to make your original argument over data and science into a chest-beating masculinity test. We are all very impressed with your ownage of the libs.
/S
????
I’m partial to some of your arguments, but saying we don’t need to intervene in the market to reduce CO2 because ‘the climate has changed before’ is pretty boneheaded. Earth’s climate has never changed at this fast a pace before. https://xkcd.com/1732/
The US can’t solve climate change on our own. But we have the highest CO2 per capita of any nation. If we can’t clean up our own house, who the hell are we to ask developing nations to?
Actually, the USA has, largely as the result of fracking, lowered CO2 emissions far below most other countries. That is because fracking has made natural gas available to replace coal as a fuel for electric generation. It is arguably the one biggest effect on CO2 reduction in the world.
As many people are slowly starting to realize, we should never have abandoned nuclear. It is the quickest, most effective way to eliminate CO2 production in electric generation. For all the trillions spent on solar panels and wind, they barely scratch the surface of energy needs.
And all the you and I have said presumes that CO2 reduction makes any real difference. The evidence says no such thing. We are told we must have solar and wind, and electric cars, or ELSE. Or else, what? Overall, the earth is getting warmer, just as it has been for many thousands of years. We are far better for it. A mere twelve thousand years ago, which is a blink of the eye in earth history, the earth was deep in an ice age. It lasted about 100 thousand years and, technically, we're still in it. How is climate change bad? Have you noticed that there is a PRESUMPTION that climate change is caused entirely by man, and that it is necessarily a bad thing. Why these presumptions? Because they're scientifically accurate? They aren't scientifically accurate. Here's a thought: These presumptions fill a need for some people to feel guilty. They feel bad about themselves, and they need a way to manifest their feelings in real life. Voila! anthropogenic climate change! Yes, there's real science that tells us important things. No, most people know little or nothing of it, concentrating instead almost entirely on celebrity nonsense, political manipulation, and emotional confirmation bias.
Noah, you may not be a Biden shill, but you are a liberal shill. I don't mean that as a dig. Liberalism has a coherent and valuable philosophy that is deserving of respect. However, can you really look around the college campuses and say that the Democratic Party is still the party of liberalism? You say "the leftist kids are silly", but the leftist kids are the ones setting the agenda. That was true in 2020 with Nancy Pelosi kneeling in the house rotunda and they're at it again in 2024. And it's not confined to campus but increasingly in media as well as corporate DEI and HR bureaucracies.
I actually agree with you on all the points you bring up about Biden's policies. But those are downstream of his philosophy, which is no longer liberal in any Enlightenment sense. If you really believe in tolerance and the free exchange of ideas and rational discourse and the rule of law and not starting wars... these are not found on the Left anymore. I'm not saying the Right is perfect on them and certainly not that Trump is the ideal candidate, but if you believe in liberalism, the Democrats aren't your party and Biden isn't your man.
Banning abortion after 6 weeks and lab grown meat aren't shining examples of liberalism either.
I'll grant you that 100%. Those channel Burke instead of Locke. But they are minor.
The question of 2024 (and likely 2028, since whoever wins this year will be a caretaker only) is: "do I believe in Enlightenment civilization?" Because the Left has abandoned the Enlightenment and gone all in on destroying civilization. There is simply no other way to describe a party that says dividing people by race (and treating some differently than others in law) is a positive good and slicing the private parts off children is a civil right. Is there a better symbol for the destruction of civilization than students trashing the Portland State library in the name of Palestinian "justice"? This isn't a contest of ideas; it's a rampage of the barbarians. Peter Boghossian (a progressive academic) put it best: "You were warned Portland State. The thugs you have helped create are devouring what you have built." https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1785797912741687648
There have been times when the risk to civilization came from the Right. But this is not one of those times. These barbarians are all from 1 political party: the Democrats. The question for this year is whether you will vote for the party of the barbarians or for someone opposed to it. Are you willing to defend civilization even if it means voting for someone you disagree with on most other issues? It's a terrible position to be in, but that's where we are.
I'll raise you: The Right has abandoned objective reality.
The Enlightenment is just fine and will outlive us all. The Enlightenment is not a damsel in distress that requires heroic measures in a battle of good vs. evil. No one is obligated to venerate The Enlightenment; in other words, if we stop clapping our hands, Tinkerbell won't die.
I look out at the other Tribe. What do I see? Horse paste as a COVID cure. "Free speech" as moral hostage-taking. Conspiracism as tribal consciousness. That last one is a biggie. Ironically, it's the internet -- the zenith and practically the Platonic ideal of free, fast and accessible information -- that has so overloaded us with information that society has been numbed and dumbed back into pre-literate ways of thinking. Charlie Warzel wrote about "evidence maximalism" in The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/02/evidence-maximalism-conspiracy-theories-taylor-swift/677390/
Admittedly, nearly all of us engage in this kind of thinking to some degree. You'd have to be a hyperaware logician or skeptic to be in rationality mode at all times. I'm also wary about a contingent of My Tribe -- you might ridicule them with a word that rhymes with "smoke" -- who do offer subjective perspectives as a replacement for objective reality because so much Enlightenment knowledge was advanced by Problematic White Bros.
Conspiracism, though, is endemic to the right. All events big (election outcomes, wars, policies) and small (mail getting delivered to the wrong address, tech support hanging up on you when you've waited a long time, the store running out of the one thing you came to buy) is evidence of A Plot Against You. The GOP (one of only two parties America's political system can sustain at one time), the No. 1 network on all of cable TV, the No. 1 podcast host, AM radio, the YouTube and Facebook algorithms, your socioeconomically homogeneous social circle, and the pulpit all serve to feed and reinforce conspiracy fantasy.
There's a rational basis for unreality: No one wants to be kicked out of the tribe.
Yes. Rational thought is in short supply at the moment.
However, one tribe's (your word) irrational actors are in control of the media, the NGOs, the K-12 educational system, the dominant Internet platforms, govt bureaucracy at all levels, the universities, and the Presidency.
The other tribe's irrational actors control.... what exactly? A handful of state governments? They certainly aren't using them to advance their agenda particularly well. FoxNews? Twitter? Elon may be kooky at times, but he's hardly a conspiratorial freak. Tucker Carlson is beclowning himself. The military? Yeah, those people with the stars on their lapels that are pushing anti-whitness training are secretly all-in for QANON.
Let's say Trump wins and nominates Marjorie Taylor Greene as Secretary of Interior and J.D. Vance at AG. What terrible things could that really produce? Especially when it still takes 60 votes to get anything done (Senate Republicans will not nuke the filibuster, not even for abortion.)
Neither party is sane. But one party believes it's on a holy war to remake the country and the other party is still trying to find its ass with both hands. I'll take the latter. My goal is try and hold some form of civilization until saner heads prevail.
>The other tribe's irrational actors control.... what exactly? A handful of state governments?
How about the fucking Supreme Court and the House of Representatives? Marjorie Taylor Greene has beclowned herself far more than Tucker Carlson and she actually gets to vote on things.
I am constantly boggled by how much weight the right wing places on the people who have the ability to say mean things about people, as opposed to the people who actually write and enforce laws.
And the Supreme Court has done what, exactly to advance "far-right conspiracy theories"? Dobbs? A decision that punted abortion back to the people, the majority of whom appear to be ready to legalize it?
And the House of Representatives has been a clown show for the last 6 months.
Again, not saying there aren't loons. Only that one needs to pay attention to the power differential between the loons of each side. Anyone seriously concerned about a Trump-led, Christian theocratic dictatorship taking over does not understand what time it is.
I use the terms My Tribe and Your Tribe ironically. I'm fully aware I look ridiculous using the term, but I'll let you in on a secret: I'm using humor to smuggle in a provocative argument that stands a better chance of survival than if I had to steelman it and defend it on the square.
The Tribes come from a famous treatise by Scott Alexander Siskind. Before I go further, A DISCLAIMER: I AM WELL AWARE SCOTT ALEXANDER SISKIND AND HIS SLATE STAR CODEX/ASTRAL CODEX TEN COMMUNITIES ARE PROBLEMATIC, AS WELL AS THE FAR-RIGHT IDEAS HE HAS CARED FOR AND FED IN HIS FORUMS. I am pointing to Alexander Siskind as the author, not endorsing him, his community or his ideas. If you wish to read what I am talking about, query his name and tribes on your preferred search engine and use your discretion on whether you wish to reward him with your attention. Oh, and SSC/ACD pieces are long-winded and maddeningly boring, so don't drive or operate heavy machinery after reading. You've been warned.
TL;DR: Siskind argued that America's political ideologies are functionally more like tribes: Blue represents Democratic voters, Red represents Republicans, and Grey represents soi-disant libertarians. (The piece kind of Mary Sues the greys). All Americans pride themselves as individualistic, and individualism is the one value everyone agrees on. However, everyone also lapses into a bias into themselves as individualistic, while people they disagree with are tribal. This viewpoint is right and wrong at the same time. Outsiders rightly recognize similar ideas, values and behaviors of the other tribe and see no individuality. They fail to see that their own ideas, values and behaviors are shared by others very similar to them. They also like bonding with people like themselves, and dislike people who don't share similarities. That's one of the bases of tribalism, and our individuality is an illusion. Paradoxically, our individualities are refracted through our tribes, because for humans as social animals the pull of belonging is just too strong.
If those are minor, so are trans issues (in terms of number of people affected). The student protestors are not popular in either party so it would be incorrect to judge the Democratic party based on some fringe elements. MAGA on the right is not a fringe movement. DeSantis is not a fringe politician but the governor of one of the largest states. Neither party supports liberalism IMO. Libertarians come closest but even they are mostly conservative on social issues like abortion. Gary Johnson was the last principled candidate.
Again, no argument about portions of MAGA being sane. Everyone talks about Jan 6th, but truthfully, I found the Jericho March a month earlier far more disturbing. Divinizing of political figures (which Eric Metaxas did) worry me far more than a few hundred people rioting, breaking into and wandering around the Capitol building for a few hours.
I do think trans-idiocy is vastly more significant than abortion though. Abortion affects a single woman and a single baby. It's important, but micro, at an individual level. Abolishing male and female as meaningful categories has large macro effects. In the early 2000's you used to hear, "how will my neighbor's gay marriage affect me?" Ask Jack Phillips. On either issue. The LGBTQIA++2S lunatics can not coexist with anyone who disagrees with them.
I guess I'm a little more red-pilled than you are. I would love to live in a broadly tolerant and liberal society based loosely on historical, Western, Judeo-Christian norms. I just don't think that's on the menu. So for 2024, my goal is simply to contain the damage and hope for better options in 2028. As weird as it sounds, I think an incompetent narcissist and a fractured GOP will be less damaging leading the country than an experienced politician at the helm of the openly illiberal and sometimes truly revolutionary Democrats. As I said, it's a terrible position to be in, but that's where we are.
I’m not as concerned as you because I live in a deeper blue area of a deep blue state and even though I’m way more traditional than those on the radical left, their presence has not affected my life in any meaningful way on cultural issues. I don’t like the left’s attitude and lack of effort on crime and general law and order issues but even that has changed a lot in the last couple of years because of pushback from moderate liberals.
The pushback on crime is also coming from working-class Blacks and Latinos, who bear the brunt of crime victimhood.
The defund the police slogan carried very little truck with the general public. The communities who tried defunding police budgets saw crime get worse, and reversed course. Large cities with progressive activist communities who urged diversion of policing work to mental health, social services or other "root causes" also saw crime and public disorder spike, because a lot of those "root causes" were also public safety emergencies and crimes in progress.
In Los Angeles County, either the county or city fire department has asked leaders to abolish mental health crisis teams because they proved to be ineffective in actual crises that police and fire-paramedics could resolve.
Libertarians crossed the Peter Thiel Memorial Bridge over to neoreaction.
I don’t think the kids are setting agendas. If they were, universities would have sold their couple shares of Boeing months ago.
Ya it's probably more the money from Qatar and other ME states.
The left and right both have extremists, but there's a difference: the right elects theirs to Congress.
Remember, a majority of the GOP representatives voted to overturn the election on January 6th.
I live in CA. My 2 Senators for years were Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, 1 loon and the other senile. And for every Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene, there is a Barbara Lee or a Maxine Waters.
Hold your moral indignation about the 2020 election until after 2024. If Trump wins in November, I expect 95%+ of House Democrats will vote against certification. (I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see how people who've spent 8 years screaming "Trump is Hitler" could ever vote to put him into office.)
If Trump wins, and they don't vote 95% against certification will you change your mind?
Partially, yes.
In my 30 years of adulthood, the Left's litany of insults has evolved: racist, sexist, hater, bigot, homophobe, misogynist, transphobe, and fascist. They've now come full circle with anything to the right of Nancy Pelosi being "white supremacy" and "Nazi-ism".
Much of that time, it was obvious they did not believe their own rhetoric -- no one really thought Republicans wanted to starve poor children (food stamp reform, which passed) or throw Grandma off a cliff (Medicare reform, which didn't), and yet Dems happily regurgitated these lies. That's politics though. If you can't play the game, get off the field. And to be fair, the GOP called plenty of liberals names too.
However, since 2016 I've felt a change from the Left. It's no longer just rhetoric. When they say "Republicans are a threat to democracy" or "Trump is Hitler" it feels like they really believe it now. It started with the activists (college students, as always) but it has made it's way up the Democratic hierarchy. The willingness to use the DOJ to arrange multiple criminal trials of the leading opposition candidate during an election (despite the fact that the "crimes" he's being charged with are from years ago) is a giant, flashing warning sign to me.
If the Democrats in Congress were to broadly certify Trump's election, it would make me believe their leadership has stepped back and returned to "playing the game" instead of trying to kill the other tribe. It wouldn't alter my views of their policies, but it would restore a little of my faith in the American electoral system.
Long answer, but it's the truth.
The pandemic was clarifying: we saw a lot of people who really would work to make sure more Americans died to score political points. And afterwards we've seen an obvious lie (Biden actually lost the election) become one of the main loyalty tests on the right.
We don't trust you to deal with reality any more.
"it would restore a little of my faith in the American electoral system"
Your timing would be exquisite given the likelihood that it would be the last meaningful vote you will cast. The Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to respect the results of elections. They are playing the game "heads I win, tails you lose".
https://ijr.com/scott-repeatedly-pressed-commit-accept-2024-election-results/
Michael, I hear EXACTLY the same thing from my Trump-loving friends about the Democrats. Each side thinks it's the Flight 93 election and the terrorists are the other team. They're both wrong (I hope.)
Why is it always projection with conservatives?
I oppose Biden because he is an extremist on Woke issues, particularly LGBT. He absolutely needs to lose, and Trump absolutely needs to win.
Biden has openly celebrated the mutilation of children, employed sick degenerates like Sam Brinton and ‘Rachel’ Devine in his cabinet, and is now erasing biological sex from the law with Title IX.
All who were expecting a moderate, George H.W Bush caretaker administration have been spat in the face. Whilst on economics his administration has had some positive tendencies, on cultural issues he was exactly the kind of Trojan Horse the right predicted he would be.
I’m not a diehard Trump supporter. Whilst the Mueller and Durham Reports reveal a deep state conspiracy to undermine him, and the repression of the Hunter Biden Laptop, fully revealed in the Twitter files, likely shifted the election on the electoral college level, there is no real evidence to suggest the actual counting of the votes was rigged, proved by the numerous Trump-appointed judges and GOP politicians who refused to indulge it. He is unquestionably guilty in a lot of the things he’s accused of.
However, you do have to choose the lesser of two evils. Whilst Trump may be more individually a criminal, Biden and the Democrat’s whole Woke agenda is criminal.
I disagree with Trump on many issues, most notably climate change, but when push comes to shove he, and Project 2025 behind him, pledges to root out the Woke disease, and completely end the crimes against humanity that the LGBT establishment is committing in broad daylight and bring the perpetrators to justice.
What about democracy you say? What about January 6th? If I don’t believe in the ‘Big Lie’, why would I ignore that? In 2015, when the Supreme Court overturned 32 state referendums to impose gay marriage on the nation, and turbocharge Wokeness in the process, liberals revealed just how little they valued democracy. The fact that support for gay marriage INCREASED after this corrupt, lawless ruling show that, as long as you are able to control the media and narrative, overturning democracy pays off.
Obergefell gives moral justification to January 6th. If democracy is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, if it is only legitimate if one wins, and whoever appoints the court determines whether the ‘rule of law’ will be somewhat followed or completely fabricated to favour liberal fashion, why should conservatives give ‘losers consent’ to liberals who completely denied them this when the roles were reversed?
Project 2025 is probably the last chance America has to eradicate this cultural and institutional disease that is mutilating children, enforcing Orwellian control of language, and indoctrinating a whole generation of young people into the Woke worldview through censoring social media.
So, in full knowledge of his immorality, criminality, authoritarianism, and major policy disagreements… Trump 2024!
Found the bigot. Imagine willingly someone you admit is authoritarian, criminal, and immoral all because you're so full of hate, towards children mostly. The fuck is wrong with you? You're the sicko, not the "left" that you straw man with bull shit you saw on OAN.
I wear 'bigot' with a badge of honor.
It's clear it was the 'bigots' who were keeping society from descending into totalitarianism and destruction.
It's also a word spoken with such odious smugness, condescension, and desire to degrade and humiliate. 'Bigot' is to Whites what 'n*gger' is to Blacks. It should become a word with that stigma attached.
The fact people like you get so aggressive when I mention that Obergefell was such an attack on democracy only confirms how much you hold differing opinions in contempt. Whilst you may criticise the worst excesses (though I'm not sure you do), the fact that you sound indistinguishable from the Woke on the issue of gay marriage proves that you are an enemy of a free society.
I'm sure you'll throw lots of taunts at me, that the cause is hopeless, that I'm on the 'wrong side of history, etcetera etcetera. But none of your repugnant means of demoralisation will make me change my mind, it will only strengthen my burning desire to see the likes of you crushed, humiliated, ostracised, and totally ejected from political discourse. You may not believe it will happen; and due to pathetic conservative surrender, I do not blame such disbelief. It will have to be seen to be believed, but trust me, I really hope one day you see it.
God, you're stupid. Have a good life, inbred.
Dude, the bigots ARE the totalitarians pulling us down into war, repression, and the wrist excesses of police states.
Don't believe me? Take literally any dictator in the world. Do they agree with you about trans issues, or me?
Hint: they agree with you.
Good.
At least they're not advocating for the mutilation of children and don't force people to say the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5.
It's their authoritarianism or your totalitarianism, which operates under the guise of democracy. But allowing you an inch allows you to plaster ideological pride flags everywhere, indoctrinate and mutilate our children, deny reality, and brainwash the youth to believe it.
You're not even American shut up
Ugh dude the UK is cooked, it's a deeply unserious place that has total brain worms over trans issues and this post is hilarious
Some of us are slightly more concerned about mutilating kids, though it's still not nowhere near enough.
I am so glad we won our independence from your ancestors 248 years ago. Just because we share a language doesn't mean you're in the club and get to LARP about US politics. The UK is totally unable to deal with any of the real crises it faces and all it can do is argue about trans kids. Cooked. Deep fried. Cope and seethe. Hope you guys figure it out, build some damn houses and good luck on those post-Brexit trade deals lmao
Don't worry. The "based mohamedians" will save you from the evilish wokism on the left.
I encourage the Trump campaign to run ads under the Arcto platform: Trump is a criminal who wants to overturn gay marriage. This seems like a clear electoral winner!
Public opinion is manufactured.
Just like supporters of gay marriage didn’t give people a choice, now that the public supports it, I have no moral qualms being similarly anti-democratic. Because public opinion is fickle and downstream from power, as they proved.
It is an interesting perspective. However, the U.S. was founded with the Bill of Rights to ensure judges could protect individuals in certain cases, even from the will of the majority. I agree that "woke" ideas have gone far, but the Obergefell decision on gay marriage seems legitimate to me.
Lol, like the drafters of the 14th Amendment had gay marriage in mind. You also completely ignore the 10th Amendment. The US constitution has so many competing, contradictory amendments and clauses that interpretation is always a political question, though liberals are far more open about politicising the court than conservatives, with Originalism still trying to maintain a semblance of neutrality (though, if Common Good Constitutionalism ever comes to prominence, you would 100% have brought it on yourselves.)
It was an attack on the rule of law, like all of the Warren Court precedents. You only think it was justified because you agree with the outcome, and therefore support a judicial dictatorship.
If you really think that hating gay people is more important than every other issue, then I wish you good luck. Maybe if the UK adopts your ideas, one day they’ll be poor enough that they’ll rejoin the EU.
The only additional wealth that community brings in, if it gets too comfortable (and smug) is decadence and filth. We are always better off without it.
I don’t really think the two issues are directly connected, I just think making the former your top priority will lead you to support people who have really bad ideas in other, more important policy areas.
Quick question while I have you: what’s your opinion on housing policy in the UK, specifically London. Should politicians try to relax zoning and build more apartments, or restrict new housing to preserve local character? Do you think banning pride flags will solve this issue?
I’m a YIMBY and a Georgist.
https://anglofuturistmag.substack.com/p/how-georgism-can-bridge-economic
Banning pride flags is essential. They are a symbol of domination and humiliation.
MAGA trolling, yours, is even less interesting than 1950's baseball trivia. Take a vow of silence, you and the rest of world could use the improvement.
Looks to me like he's a British homophobe, not "MAGA".
Naturally, I am sure that the non-woke, highly conservative government in your proud country is doing a great job of running things. LOL. How much does it cost to buy a home in london these days? And what salaries can you get there?
It's not harsh enough on Wokeism.
I wish we had Ron DeSantis, Chris Rufo, or even better... Viktor Orban.
So, I'm trans. What is your political platform towards people like me?
Do I have a choice in who to vote for if I want to survive?
You're mentally ill and need psychological help.
You shouldn't be able to propagate your mental illness like it's something normal and healthy.
Right. So if I want to live free and incarcerated, you can't ever have any power. Got it.
You're mentally ill. I'm not unsympathetic, but you need treatment, not 'affirmation'.
You either believe your born in the wrong body in some schizophrenic like psychological delusion, are a fetishist, or have been groomed into a cult. All of which, you need medical help. Unfortunately, the medical profession has been infiltrated and subverted by postmodern ideologues that have pushed this ideology onto you.
Lol. "I'm not crazy, YOU are crazy!"
Very convincing argument. You should try it more places.
Let me know if you ever get out of the grip of the cult.
I do feel sorry for people like you, you've been sold a con and have irreversibly damaged your bodies. The transgender industry has you in a trap; you'll never be the gender you want to be, but they'll convince you it's all just bigotry or you just need 'one more procedure', but your gender will never change.
Go ahead and feel sorry for the straw men in your head; I'll let you know if you ever get close enough to understanding a trans person to feel sorry for us.
What is woke?
The belief that traditional Western society is inherently and structurally oppressive to all who aren’t non-trans, straight White men, this oppression is all pervasive across the society and is intersectional, and constant activism and deconstruction is needed to dismantle these hierarchies of oppression and establish equity.
"So on the daily issues that affect Americans the most ..."
Inflation also falls in this category.
Since I'm in CA, I can afford to vote for neither but even if I was in a swing state, there's no way I would vote again for Biden if Trump wasn't the alternative. I would have picked Haley over Biden if she had been the nominee.
The problem with Biden in 2024 is that Democrats will not learn anything from this election. If Biden loses, they'll blame his age and BS non-factor issues like Israel/Palestine instead of illegal immigration, inflation, trans, student loan forgiveness. If he wins, they'll still try to nominate someone who is much further to the left of the median voter in 2028 instead of a moderate left of center candidate (like Obama or Biden). The US government is not designed well for a 50-50 split and I think the country needs to move in one direction or the other. Ambling along without any clear direction or switching directions every 4 years is hurting progress.
(FYI, I'm an independent)
Left is the only side that has any solutions to real problems. I guess we are going to have to test so other ideas to failure and exhaustion before you admit it though...
Testing ideas requires winning elections first.
We won't have to learn anything if Biden loses. We'll be in mass graves by 2028.
I’m surprised that the discussion of Biden’s foreign policy on Ukraine did not cover several valid criticisms of how he’s handled it so far:
1) Failure to deter the Russian invasion in the first place, including removing sanctions on Nord Stream that were put in place under the Trump administration and not providing weapons or applying sanctions in advance at Zelenskyy’s request.
2) Endless hand-wringing about “escalation” and Putin’s “red lines” that very quickly proved completely wrong-headed and counterproductive and yet caused critical delays in the provision of key weapons systems (HIMARS, cluster munitions, ATACMS, Patriot batteries, the list goes on). This allowed Russia to establish significant defensive lines that made Ukraine’s future offensives much harder.
3) The unseemly Biden administration tendency to take credit for all Ukrainian successes and put all failures on the Ukrainians- perfect example being the failed counteroffensive (even though the US has never succeeded in a similar operation without air superiority).
4) The Biden administration’s incorrect presumption that Russia could take Kyiv in days.
5) The Biden admin’s misrepresentation of Russian sanctions- pretending they are the strongest sanctions when in reality they are highly circumscribed and targeted in a way that makes them almost toothless (albeit with some much overdue improvements recently by beginning to apply secondary sanctions).
6) The Biden administration’s misrepresentation of how much we are helping Ukraine, fooling Americans into thinking we are being so generous in our support, when in reality it is a drop in the bucket compared to what we have implicitly budgeted for a future war with Russia.
7) The Biden admin’s fear of causing Russia to collapse outweighing the fear of Russia being able to declare victory in Ukraine (see: Biden admin telling Ukraine not to exploit the Prigozhin coup attempt).
8) The fact that Russian nuclear sabre rattling has caused the Biden administration to deter or limit or support for Ukraine has caused a massive increase in the likelihood of nuclear proliferation and nuclear blackmail around the world. See: Japan, Poland, South Korea exploring nukes.
I think historians will rightfully raise many of these as legitimate criticisms of how Biden has handled Ukraine.
No. 1 sounds like Green Lantern theory, that the President must be able to will a policy outcome into being. Sadly, a lot of Americans hold this view that an institutionally powerful office as the presidency conflates to personal power, a president as an action hero.
America's intelligence agencies correctly observed that Putin was mobilizing against Ukraine and warned Zelenskyy, who had time to marshal the military and prepare civilians for war. Putin largely thought he had a hot hand with the military successes he racked up, saw weakness in Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal and an internally divided NATO. He was expecting to capture Kyiv with little effort.
Putin was surprised that Biden did the work to marshal international support for Ukraine, and vastly underestimated the fighting capabilities of Ukrainians themselves.
In the alternate universe where either John McCain or Mitt Romney won their respective election against Obama, it’s hard to see Putin even invading in the first place. If you listen to Obama even these days (see Amanpour interview), he doesn’t sound so different from Putin in pointing to “Russian speaking / Russian ethnic” populations in eastern Ukraine as a reason why the US shouldn’t have been more forceful in opposing Putin’s imperialism.
I don't see a scenario where foreign adversaries fear a Republican presidential administration. Putin would still shoot his shot and annex east Ukraine, which was under political turmoil from the Maidan Uprising and the leadership upheaval, all of which happened independent of the U.S.
Well, I find it odd timing that both the initial invasion and subsequent expansion both occurred under Democratic presidents (one inexperienced president who wanted to “reset” relations with Russia and another president who Robert Gates considered to be wrong on almost every foreign policy issue dating back 4 decades). Romney was calling for Biden to give the Ukrainians MiGs in the first few months of 2022, whereas McCain saw right through Putin in a way Obama never did:
https://youtu.be/HLAzeHnNgR8?si=6N7hfoL5HikxWTf3
I can't believe that Putin didn't believe that Ukraine wouldn't resist a Russian invasion to the utmost, given that in 2018 the Ukrainian military implicitly positioned itself as the successor to the 20th-century Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
This involved adopting a modified version of the OUN's anthem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdANpB9PnY) as well as replacing the Soviet-era greeting "Hello, comrades! We wish you health!" with the OUN-derived (and now world-famous) "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!".
Didn't the election of Zelenskyy itself increase Putin's motivation to invade, both out of confidence (Zelenskyy was a Russian-speaking comedian by trade and Putin saw him as a weakling compared to his predecessor Poroshenko) and out of fear (because Zelenskyy was the first Ukrainian President to try to do something about oligarch power, which may have given ideas to the Russian people)?
Could be any, all or none of those things. They all do go with the "hot hand" theory, that Putin wanted to parlay his battlefield successes into a scramble for Ukraine.
"Sweden and Norway even joined NATO. <...> Sweden and Norway even emerged from neutrality to join."
You presumably meant Sweden and Finland? Norway has been a NATO member since 1949.
Lost me at “and more mentally acutely than Trump”. Should I believe you or my lying eyes?
Look at the two of them and what they say in public and believe your eyes. One person perceives reality and has some slips of the tongue. Another is hallucinating.
The delusion of the shitlib knows no bounds.
I bet you believe Trump has abs too.
Considering the circumstances, Biden is EASILY the best president of my adult lifetime (I'm 35).
Mine too (I'm a decade older). I had to wait until middle age before a political party reflected my preferences and values. You see, I was born too late to have lived experience of the New Deal or the post-WWII boom. I was the product of the post-'64 Civil Rights Act backlash and the rightwing dominated politics and the economy while the leftwing got pop culture as a consolation prize.
I witness in my childhood and early adulthood all institutions atrophy. I am Generation X, poisoned with cynicism. And possibly lead.
Definitely lead [airborne gas]
From a Zoomer, you have my sympathy.
This might somewhat misguided but I would credit Biden with the FDA legalising cultured meat. I always expected both the left and right oppose cultured meat. I know cultured meat was legalised in Singapore and Israel already but you need a big market for the technology to scale. In the long run this would be a major climate technology imo.
If the FDA has approved lab-grown meat does that mean it's like mifepristone now? Does the state of Florida have any authority to outlaw it, in other words?
Wouldn't it violate the amendment regarding interstate commerce? Generally the states can't take away freedoms granted by the federal government I'm pretty sure.
States can ban all sorts of things that are not federally banned. For instance, most states used to ban gambling, even though it was federally legal. California banned the sale of pork and chicken that had been raised with various inhumane practices, and Iowa tried to sue them, but lost.
States can have different rules about guns, fireworks, gambling, lots of things. Banning cultured meat is pretty dumb but I don't see a constitutional problem with it.
Gun regulations has been a states rights thingy because of the second amendment. For restricting the USE of fireworks and gambling establishments, the states probably have sovereignty. I'D imagine the state can't stop you from buying fireworks made in a different state.
The most they can probably do is to ban cultured meat production and impose non tariff barriers like stop restaurants from serving cultured meat. They might tax it as well. They can't actually stop you from buying cultured meat made in a different state.
BTW I'M NOT AN AMERICAN AND HAVE NO LEGAL TRAINING WHATSOEVER. TAKE THIS WITH A MASSIVE GRAIN OF SALT. IF YOU THINK I'M WRONG PLEASE CORRECT ME.
You probably can't ban cultured meat or fireworks if and only if they're made in another state. But you can ban the thing, regardless of where it's made. I'm not a lawyer either, or a fireworks enthusiast, but I know there are (or used to be) a lot of fireworks stores on the Tennessee side of the Kentucky-Tennessee line, and on the Indiana side of the Indiana-Ohio line. I'm not sure why cultured meat would be different, legally.
States are allowed to set their own standards for products and services within their boundaries. California does it all the time. So does NY. So does Florida.
What I wondered is whether express approval by the FDA makes a difference. It does for abortion drugs
I don't think so. Even the FDA's pre-emption on drugs isn't absolute. (Abortion drugs are a unique class for obvious political reasons.) I can't imagine the FDA would attempt to assert pre-emption over a food product like lab-grown meat.