And yet DOGE (Elon Musk) is actively pursuing cutting resources at the Loan Programs Office which helps American companies like Tesla attempt to innovate.
There is not and has never been any trace of free speech or free market "ideology" from Trump. Perhaps as a talking point but never in any policy or action. Trump is the anti-libertarian, severely authoritarian and moving things toward a centrally planned economy!
> Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke"
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
If you genuinely don't think that each side has principles, which in fact overlap considerably, you aren't very curious about the world.
ETA: In case you are genuinely interested in learning about how liberal and conservative people differ psychologically, Jonathan Haidt is a very good person to read.
One groups principles are hierarchy, control, and cruelty.
Arbitrary corrupt incompetency is what they're looking for.
Caring about other, having respect, being sensitive, these are all 'woke' things from the "great awakening" cult.
I want more affordable college and the people in charge want to send people like me to concentration camps through kangaroo courts. This is the difference.
The people who go on about “woke” are the most performative victims of all. Invoking the word “woke” for things they don’t like is a form of that performative victimization.
You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.
Or, in my city, the cops who blew the whistle on other cops for electrocuting people's testicles as a means of extracting forced confessions. The "back the blue" crowd absolutely hates those guys.
Most of these examples are good ones, but this one actually isn’t. I don’t know what part of the country you’re from, but in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens. I don’t want to debate the substance of the view, I’m just pointing out that it’s not actually contradictory like you’re implying. I grew up in virginia when it was a red state, my first reaction would’ve been relief that it was still possible. But it also would’ve been my first reaction 25 years ago when I was a Gore supporter in a Bush county. Jefferson’s tree of liberty and all that.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
> in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens
From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.
And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
> From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
The question is who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself. Ordinarily police are deployed to protect citizens from criminals, so it’s bad to attack the police. But the Capitol police are protecting government officials from citizens, so attacking them is less bad. That’s the view.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The assertion that the civil rights era signaled a major shift in views about the relationship between individuals and the government is hardly controversial. There’s a book on this idea (probably more than one): https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
Indeed, folks in the progressive left share more or less the same premise. If you talk to a progressive about foundational principles like federalism and limited government, the chief response is that those ideas were championed by our forebearers so that the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. The point of disagreement is about whether the new approach is better than the traditional one.
> Today, when you talk about foundational principles like federalism, limited government, etc., the chief response is that those are incompatible with having a government powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority.
We live in different bubbles, it seems. I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. The majority can always protect itself by changing the law.
I skimmed through this. The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that. And look at this piece of doublespeak:
When I talk about civil rights, the reader should not get the impression that I’m friendly to segregation, or hostile to the civil rights movement as it existed for the whole of the 20th century up until 1964. In fact, I’m very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation for equal citizenship that went on up till then, but there were problems in the Civil Rights Act that were not evident at first.
They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution. They are "very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation", however. :)
> I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
That’s the same argument from the other direction. The federal government, as designed, wasn’t powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. Those rules entailed a major expansion of federal power. Indeed, you can see the seams in the civil rights laws. For example, Title VI’s ban on discrimination in public education is implemented through conditions on federal funding. Because the federal government can’t legislate such a ban directly.
> The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority.
That’s exactly the civil rights era retconning of the constitution I’m talking about. The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip.... The statement is about self determination: the right of a people to determine their own form of government. The equality being referred to is the equality between Britain and its monarch and the colonists.
The founders said almost nothing about protecting minorities from the majority, except perhaps in the context of religious freedom. Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.
> The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after ...
The context before and after is quite well known; I don't have to read it. What they say is that 'all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among those life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And to protect those rights, governments are instituted among men.' (from memory, probably a few errors).
All means all - minorities included. The equality is for "all men"; rights are for "all men". Nothing is said about Britain and its monarch, except in your dreams of rationalizing oppression. The language is plain and clear, part of the reason it is so well-known.
That seems inconsistent with the history of slavery in the US. The evidence is that the people writing that didn't actually mean "all men" - if I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United... it suggests 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. That seems like strong evidence that the literal text was being interpreted with implicit caveats.
A document cannot simultaneously holds all minorities to be equal with a right to liberty and accommodate slavery as it existed in the 1700s. Some of the signers may personally have disagreed with slavery but it seems difficult to say that the document itself represented a repudiation of the practice.
> The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that.
But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.
That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.
Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.
Even if you think that all that matters is “where you end up,” your logic still doesn’t work. Adhering to principles of federalism and limited government also changes other aspects of society, in ways that people might deem desirable.
> The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers.. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote:
> "This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system ...[or else] oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished... Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."
As well as :
> "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."
As well as:
> "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
Prior to the civil rights movement it was assumed that by freedom of association, it was beyond the scope of the government to prevent things like segregation by private citizens. e.g. if a business owner did not want to serve black customers, then that is his right. So yes, someone who does not support the government having that power to infringe on freedom of association will not support any government intervention to prevent voluntary segregation.
This is why he distinguishes between the civil rights movement before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was only concerned with preventing government enforced segregation.
He opposes any known solution to the terrible evil of segregation, and doesn't care to offer any other. If you stand by while someone is drowning, eating a hot dog, you can claim 'I do support agitation for drowning victims', but the facts are plain.
Even in your analogy, that just means you’re not willing to jeopardize yourself in any way to help, not that you affirmatively want the other person to drown. In fact they recommend that you don’t try to help drowning victims, because they often cause their rescuers to drown as well. More generally, not caring about other people isn’t the same as affirmatively wanting to harm them.
> who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself
I must have missed the outpouring of Republican support for the black lives matter protests when they were attacked by police riots or when police stations were attacked. No private citizens being protected there, and the protesting was directly against government oppression (including of the 2nd amendment even!).
Republicans don’t think that police using lethal force against people with long criminal records—which come from terrorizing fellow citizens—is “government oppression.” That doesn’t describe every person that was the subject of the protests, but certainly describes the people who became the figureheads.
That's some high and mighty rhetoric, but it doesn't apply at all to Kenneth Walker (whose second amendment rights were trampled on) or Breonna Taylor (who died because of it). So once again, did I just miss the outpouring of Republican support for those specific protests or what?
'I'm all for rights, except the right to life (of some citizens)' is absolutely disgusting. Wow this comment says a lot about you and should remove the good faith people around here give you.
You're just giving him an opening to retrench at a steelman - when the police have to respond with deadly force for some completely reasonable justification, "right to life" doesn't have much to do with it.
The point is that even in very clear cut situations where the police are in the wrong, and have trampled over the very 2nd amendment rights that Republicans claim to love so much, it's then still crickets from Republicans. So this alleged "violence against the government is treated as distinct" seems to be just more post-hoc rationalization nonsense.
The problem is that rayiner is continually trolling with gut-appealing half-truths, sidesteps the straightforward logical implications as long as he can by responding tangentially, and when he can't do that any longer he just bails on the conversation rather than confronting the contradiction.
I guess I'm just glad us actually-conservatives (meaning everyone from "RINOs" to "the left" that actually respects our societal institutions enough to not want to see our country on the scrap heap) have reached a critical mass to beat back this wall of disingenuous bad-faith bullshit.
The US Civil War was fought over protecting minorities from private slaveowners, so the federal government’s role didn’t fundamentally change in the 1960s.
> as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
Unless it's the Jan 6th protesters.
Or the so-called "trucker convoy" across the border up here in Canada. (Convinced half the new-found hostility to us comes from this incident somehow getting on the radar of people who normally barely acknowledge Canada as existing)
In the end it's very much tribal, and little to do with the substance of issues and more to do with perceived teams.
Is this saying the viewpoint is that violence against the government (capitol police) is supported, violence against local police is not supported (back the blue) and violence against citizens is supported (back the blue)?
The guy's arguing all over the place. Not much of it makes logical sense unless you stop looking for logic in the arguments.
Suffice to say, like most ideologues, the beliefs make sense when analyzed in accordance with the logic rules of the holder of the beliefs.
Think of the beliefs being discussed more as doctrinal tenets of a pseudo religious sect, and you get a little closer to the thinking of the adherents.
I tend to think of "rule of law" as describing the fairness of the courts. But then you need effective law enforcement for the courts to mean anything.
Freedom of religion as well, and the age and mental acuity of the president. And handling of secret information. And being involved in foreign conflicts.
As a 20th century political theorist once said, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy." If you hear someone talking high-minded rhetoric and idealism but they won't make a friend or an enemy over it, they don't believe it.
I have come to believe that many people's political attitudes can be boiled down to a single uniting element: an overwhelming fear that other people might do to them the kinds of things that they would absolutely do to other people if given half a chance.
This line of thinking is increasing and dangerous (and no doubt intentional from at least some of the popular examples that come to mimd). It will make it that much harder for authentic candidates to talk about legitimate change and ideology.
Many of these people literally believe that "free lunches for school children" inevitably turns into "those socialists will force me to eat bugs in an Orwellian nightmare".
For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.
Meanwhile they somehow don't see wealthy and powerful people using their political connections to enrich themselves by garnering favorable treatment from powerful government officials as an essential part of how things worked in the USSR.
The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.
The bad guys are the one in power right now trying to turn the US democracy into an autocracy, following the Project2025 playbook and what other autocrats have done like Putin. This isn't a normal administration.
Funny thing about the fictional "Wilhoit’s Law". It's not a law of science. It's nothing but an Internet snipe from a blog post by a music composer. It wasn't even written while the political scientist Frank Wilhoit was alive.
It's not relevant that the quote came from a composer specifically. It's relevant that it didn't come from someone with any expertise about politics. Yet it's been elevated to the status of a "law" by people who just really like the way it insults their opponents.
Don't forget Kenneth Walker's second amendment rights. You could understand some failing to live up to their values if they were minor issues, but it's like all of their core issues. About the only thing that seems consistent is wanting to harm their fellow citizens that they perceive as different.
Trump and his administration have explicitly directly claimed that they are the law, at least in as much as the executive branch should believe. They gave an executive order instructing every employee and official of the executive that they shall wholly and exclusively defer to the interpretation of the law as dictated by the president.
> You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024.
What groups? What people? Are they on HN? Are you responding to them?
This is just sneering. You're not responding to a particular argument or person - you're you're just creating a fictional (in that they don't exist as a coherent, self-identified group, and are only a group in your own mind based solely off of these attributes) until group of people with some alleged hypocrisy and using them to dog-whistle indirectly attack a group of people based on some political ideology that you don't like (and which is largely irrelevant to the alleged hypocrisy that you're inventing). This is some of the most anti-intellectual drivel possible and the diametric opposite of what belongs on HN.
Trump was never actually a "free market" idealogue. And the GOP officially dropped any mentions of it from their party platform a few years ago.
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
The behavior I’ve seen from so many libertarians from 2017 onward, especially during the pandemic, January 6th, and Trump’s reelection, has revealed so much to me and has made me rethink my libertarianism. So many libertarians, when pressed, would gladly align themselves with the far-right for their own benefit, whether to accelerate the destruction of the state they hate so much, or whether because, deep down inside, they agree with the far-right on social views, and libertarianism was simply a cover for them to promote abhorrent social views.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Thanks for the thoughtful post with the rich historical references. For what it’s worth, I experienced a drift which is the mirror image of yours, starting left, developing my appreciation for the necessity of economic competition, and then coming to grips with the limitations of government intervention.
I think Georgism is a pretty limited position, not a complete framework. I do agree with land value tax and tax on natural resource. But I'm not sure its the complete solution.
Also not sure if the idea of paying out people from this tax makes much sense. Arguable it made more sense when he wrote it, before the social state.
Perhaps it‘s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I find it hard to consider anyone enamored with Trump to be legitimately libertarian. The guy basically regards himself as a dictator and his edicts are mega-authoritarian.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
One of the biggest challenges with the libertarian movement is that it attracts people who like libertarianism not because of the non-aggression principle, but because it enables them to legally engage in certain activities.
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
Libertarianism is essentially "more powerful and richer people should not be restricted in any way whatsoever". If your freedom or rights are limited by someone who is not directly government, libertarian answer is "that is their freedom you dont matter, government should protect their right to mistreat you".
I'm right there with you, friend. I still consider myself a 'libertarian' though. Just always with a small 'l' because the party is garbage, as the ideals are primed to spread corporate propaganda like wildfire once someone buys into the fallacy that coercion by non-governmental entities is definitionally impossible.
When I was younger I'd do online political tests and invariably come back with left-libertarian. Then the detour into cpunks, ancap, and the "two axis political chart" made me see myself unaligned and see a lot of utility in rightism. But that started to fall apart when it became clear that fundamentalism doesn't address the big picture of emergent layers of complexity. Ironically it was Moldbug's writing that nudged my transition back to seeing myself as latently left-aligned. No matter how much you'd like to, you can't fight thermodynamics!
Something like that happened to me, but I'm European, and I never had many illusions about much American libertarianism. It was clearly funded by people who were just using the movement to get favorable regulation. And that was reflected in the issues they were talking about. I think there is no contradiction between a small government and one that can fine or arrest people aggressively when they break the rules.
In addition to that, it always had a strong southern "state rights" dog whistle. Personally I never liked Murray Rothbard. And the Rothbardian full on appropriation of Mises. Plus they often welcomed 'libertarians' that had very bad ideas, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
In terms of Austrian economics, I always much prefer the George Mason people. I think the economics fundamentals of Austrianism were very forward thinking and they produced a lot of great stuff and people, both directly and in the larger bubble of associated researchers.
> I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
I think American Libertarianism basically went way to far into hyper-individualism and total freedom of action and defense of historical privileges and laws. While different classical liberal philosophies would focus way more on the cost of those actions and negotiation a balance between individual freedom and society.
Classical liberal philosophy was never supposed to mean that you can park your car anywhere and throw garbage out of the window or that you can carry your gun everywhere.
Also I think there is a huge difference between restricting government on a federal level and on a local level. I don't think any philosophical school has really figured out this issue. Both centralizing and localizing have lots of problems.
I'm at the point where I am not really have a clear 'movement' that I can point to. I still agree with much of the criticism of communism, socialism and many typically left ideas. I disagree even more strongly with the far-right.
In Europe we have central parties, but those often are socially conservative and have sub-optimal economic policy and bad local politics. So like many others I have to end up voting center-left even if I don't agree in principle with their philosophy.
On thing that helped me is not to think of absolutes and end-states, and only think of incrementalism. Even if I disagree with the something in principle. As current laws exist I might support things I wouldn't in a different situation.
In Swizterland where I life, at least we can often vote on specific issues. And that can cut across parties. And the consensus based federal government is globally unique and works pretty well for stability and consistency.
If I was forced to say one good thing about the guy, it's that he is quickly and faithfully delivering on his campaign promises, moreso than any other president that ever served in my lifetime. He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist and doing exactly what he said he'd do. Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving, but he said he'd do them, was elected, and then subsequently did them. So, I'll give him that.
While I agree with the sentiment that he is not backing down from a lot of his batshit promises, let's not forget that he made a lot of promises. The Russian invasion didn't end on day 1 or day 100 and he decided to only strongarm one side - iirc he said he would threaten Ukraine with withdrawing support and threaten Russia with giving obscene amounts of support to Ukraine.
His predictions about what other people/countries would do were, of course, wrong, but his promises about what he (and his admin) would do or try to do themselves are for the most part being delivered.
It's not for the most part.
He's delivering far lower percentage of his promises than most presidents.
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
When you promise to broker peace you are promising only to try since it is obvious that you do not have the agency to guarantee success. There are a million things to hate about Trump's handling of Ukraine and Russia, but this just isn't one of them.
He lied and said he had no idea about Project 2025 - when people say "he's doing what he said" no - he's lied about everything and double backed a half dozen times.
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
He explicitly stated that he was not familiar with the contents of Project 2025 on numerous occasions. This did not stop the media from pushing it as yet another hoax. It is unclear whether anyone has actually read Project 2025 or if it just sounds scary.
It's truly remarkable how much honest material there is to criticize Trump with, yet folks insist on repeating blatant lies.
I don't get what you mean. It's not some secret - it's available for everyone to read. It's also written by people who are all around Trump and who got influential positions from him. It's been talked about for ages. Trump not knowing about it would be extremely weird. (Or if he actually never heard about it, that would mean he's extremely clueless - I'm not sure what's worse for him)
> He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
When I read "elites" it always makes me wonder what kind of elites are meant. Surely not elites in intelligence or wisdom and knowledge. Does it mean just having tons of money? What does it mean to be an elite university in contrast to being an elite person?
That's always been a feature of the 2-party system. I mean, the Democrats were once the party of southern white supremacists. We don't really get new parties, but the parties we have change over time as the coalitions within them rearrange.
I think a multi-party parliamentary system would be better at finding middle ground, but it's silly to say that the two-party system keeps politics "fixed".
True, the make-up and priorities of both Republicans and Democrats have changed a few times over the years.
I would say that in this case, it's a party aligning to an individual far more than it has ever been in the past. Racist Southern Democrats didn't become Republicans because they were enamored with a Republican leader, they changed parties because they found themselves misaligned with the Democratic Party's pivot to civil rights.
I wholeheartedly agree that a parliamentary system would serve the US better.
In terms of tariffs you're normally either a "protectionist" or for "free trade". That's sort of the two sides of that argument. There is some middle ground, but those are the extremes. It is not really related to regulations, that's more if you believe that the market is able to regulate itself, in terms of environmental impact, fair wages, safety and those sorts of things. The latter is the things which are impacted by firing regulatory enforces, or removing regulation altogether.
The Trump administration seems to run a protectionist policy, with a deregulated home market. This will hurt exports as it makes products more expensive, but also less likely to be able to comply with the regulations of other markets, e.g. in the EU, which is heavily regulated. US companies have a reduced incentive to comply with EU rules, if they know they have a protected market at home they can milk instead.
What speech that makes him uncomfortable has he banned exactly ? Asking out of curiosity because I see posts on twitter all the time calling him Nazi, blah-blah.
There are tens of thousands of posts with the word "cisgender" at the moment on X. So, I think this "ban" is currently only in one's febrile imagination. Putin does not allow tens of thousands of opposition politicians, so the analogy also does not hold.
Its an extremely big difference from the Biden era where any post critical of the vaccine and backed up with papers was taken down pronto. This was even confirmed in several senate hearings.
As a non-American, I was very happy when Musk bought out twitter - it was ridiculous being unable to criticize vaccines - you couldn't even articulate the Indian government's stance on Pfizer and how Pfizer refused to provde test data. "Freedom of speech" was utterly non-existent in that era.
> “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” Mr Musk wrote in June.
> “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.”
> The newly enforced policy, first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, saw some users greeted with a full-screen warning when trying to publish a post using the terms on the X mobile app.
The fact that this is arbitrarily enforced isn't exactly painting it as a haven for free speech. The only thing worse than absolute censorship (which is obvious and can be routed around) is stochastic, inconsistent censorship - which gives him and his defenders a fig leaf[1] to hide behind.
Look, maybe you prefer the new brand of censorship X has adopted. It sounds like you do. Great. But what you can't do is call it a free speech platform, while keeping a straight face.
[1] I would like to point out, as an example: that China doesn't censor the internet - you just mysteriously have your connection go to shit and drop out if you try to search for 4/15.
So, posts are NOT being banned, but only visibility tagged as that article mentions and as many users also explicitly tested. No one reported a ban - only a warning with a visibility setting. Seems perfectly fine. Your speech is NOT banned as you incorrectly claim. And your account is still valid.
Did you ever try writing a mRNA-vaccine critical post during the Biden administration on twitter, quoting factual sources and linking to scientific papers ? Your account got banned pronto.
And as we all know now - it was done at the behest of the US white house.
Firstly, it's absolutely bonkers that any alleged 'free speech absolutist' could consider 'cisgender' to be a slur. It's like saying that 'man' is a slur.
And that's not an argument that you're going to do well with. Because the claim is utterly pants-on-head, irredeemably farcical, as is anyone who would stand behind it.
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But, secondly, if you read the screenshots in the link, you'll see that the posts are being suppressed.
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And thirdly, you don't see me claiming that pre-Musk Twitter was any kind of bastion of 'free speech absolutism'. I'm not making that argument.
The argument I'm making is that post-Musk Twitter definitely isn't one.
Trump has literally been prattling about his love of tariffs for decades and was explicit about his plans to heavily leverage tariffs during his campaign..
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
I just think a lot of democrats really haven't paid attention to how Trump has morphed the Republican party and the realignment that has been going on. They still think of a Republican as George w. Bush / John McCain / Mitt Romney even though they have all been effectively excommunicated from the party. I think part of it was hope was Trump was a momentary blip but that's obviously no longer the case.
Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.
Nation-wide Chesterton's Fence happening right now, with people learning a hard lesson soon enough. Let's just hope it won't be too late to repair their broken systems.
I mean, eventually we also hope some other places develop something like a functioning democracy, or whatever is better in the future, and we hope it will be a matter of time until they at some point do.
The problem with the US is though, that they have the most powerful military on the planet, and the US ending up in smoking ruins probably means lots of other places going down with it, when the US looks outside for reasons of its failure. It is quite dangerous.
Please don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We were much better off the last 4 years than it looks like we will be for the next, but it was far from ideal/perfect.
Maybe they don't like the fact that there's people out there making 500 grand a year? At least not while they're struggling to make ends meet on 50 grand a year.
Now your leaders are supposed to be wise enough to not take down the 500 grand a year guys. But what if they aren't?
Change what though? I'm convinced a lot of this has been right wing media portraying government as corrupt and broken for decades while demonizing the Democratic party as being responsible. True, some of this is likely the result of globalism and neoliberalism, but instead of an educated debate on the tradeoffs involved and how the world has changed, there is a culture war.
Wanting change is a curious notion considering they are FOX viewing baby boomers. Isn‘t it more a change in the sense of stopping change and turning back time?
A rational theory of spite suggests that even if they know that it will be worse for them too, if the level of their spite is great enough, they are still better off because the joy of the suffering of others is greater than their own induced suffering.
To be listened to, rather than to be told what to care about, and to have those concerns make it to competent people with the power to do something about them.
But it's not really compatible with a system where one person represents millions. You'd need something recursive such that no person represents more than a hundred or so, that way there's time to circle back and explain why certain complaints aren't being addressed this cycle and such. You know, responsibility of leadership to the people.
It's also not really compatible with a system where your representative for foo-type issues must also be your representative for bar-type issues, because "competent people" is too broad of a category to be useful.
How to get there from here? I'm not sure but it seems like it'll require a more significant discontinuity than we've seen so far.
What would happen is that representatives are more locally focused on their districts and would vote in larger 'sub'-parties.
In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.
I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.
One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.
> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.
Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.
Where congress just follows the party line. Or does back room deals
I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic. A software engineer in Austin and one in San Jose have far more in common than a software engineer in Austin and a Tractor dealer in Austin.
The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Back room deals aren't necessary a negative. That how the sausage is made. I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise, rather then having media spectral where congress sessions are reality TV. Mostly used to get clips that can then be used in adds.
> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.
I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.
Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.
I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.
"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"
Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.
The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.
I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.
> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.
>I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise,
Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.
It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.
Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.
The parties in the US are pretty damn weak. And their ability and interest in overthrowing their own members is limited. They need to focus resources on the battleground states. So in the US, parties are much less less powerful.
In Britain, you basically get removed from the party very quickly and as an independent its incredibly hard.
Trump is only the latest example of how parties are weak in the US.
Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.
Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,
You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest.
If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.
Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.
If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.
I don't know, if you just have a fixed '50' many people will be very unhappy with the list. That's why I suggested that this somehow had to be algorithmic.
Its an interesting concept, I don't know of anybody that has fully defined how this would work.
The point is to make it easier for people to hassle their representative, and to make it feasible for them to actually understand what the people they represent actually want.
I think the fix is a more drastic refactor than that. We need more depth in this tree. Much more depth.
I imagine a sort of cultural "open enrollment" period during which anyone can mark anyone else as their representative. Perhaps we create four or five categories that we need representation in (foreign policy, infrastructure, education, monetary policy... something like that), so you gotta then find four or five representatives which you personally know and trust.
Then we follow the directed representation graph to its terminal nodes (or cycles) and those are the representatives that we ask to get together and get things done. Those are our leaders. They meet only sometimes, the rest of the year they spend working with their constituents.
Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.
It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.
50 years of attacks on our education systems have yielded exactly what was intended: a nation so poorly educated that they cannot discern truth from fiction anymore.
Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.
But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?
Trump is very adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that is much different from how a standard politician does it, so he gets a lot of people are excited at hearing what they want to hear. A regular politician equivocates and never really commits. Trump just asserts a statement that sounds definitive despite being word salad, and then shamelessly contradicts himself by asserting the exact opposite later. If he gets called out on it he just responds with nonsense.
If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.
They wanted destruction of minorities (racial, sexual, gender, religious), but not of the country. They still hold out hope that Trump will hurt them more in the long run. It’s an extremely mean-spirited party at this point.
By my reckoning, Trump is just the reactionary talk radio monster of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and others finally escaping its cage. They'd get people all riled up with low-information rage against the gubmint, and then dial it back just enough to herd them to the booth to vote for establishment republicans. The main way the party has morphed is that the inmates have finally taken over the asylum.
It's hard to label Trump a free market ideologue. He's more Mr tarrif man.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The Singaporean government's hand in it's own economy is larger than a lot of self-professed communist states - Temasek Holdings, Mediacorp, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines etc etc.
I never understood why libertarians/free market proponents think that Singapore is the paragon of laissez-faire economics. Try studying the country's housing market policies, for example, and you'll quickly realise that the government is extremely interventionist.
The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.
I wouldn't call it a dictatorship -- no label neatly applies to Singapore, but calling it a dictatorship (even if benevolent) is quite incorrect. Describing it as a soft authoritarian country is much more appropriate.
While they are interventionist in some way, so is everybody else. The US government involvement in housing is gigantic as well.
We can learn a lot from the policies, both free market and otherwise. And we shouldn't learn from others.
No free market person thinks of Singapore as some prefect example. As that doesn't exist. So you have to take example from different places. And Singapore has more good examples then most.
> The US government involvement in housing is gigantic as well.
Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
Singapore owns the HDB, which owns the leasing rights to 80%+ of all residential property and almost all land in the country. Issuing 99 year leases to citizens and PRs.
Imagine if the US government owned all land rights, built virtually all apartments and instigated racial quotas to match the demographics of the country; then subsidized the price drastically to make it affordable for the population. That's what Singapore does.
This isn't unique either.
The other libertarian wet-dream Hong Kong has a similar land-leasing policy. The major difference there is that 999 year leases were allowed at one point (rare and no longer issued).
In fact the only freehold property in Hong Kong is St John’s Cathedral.
First of all, I do know the difference between Singapore and the US. But my statement is true anyway. I wasn't drawing a direct equivalence of housing policy.
The person above pointed out that Singpore, is #1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom" and the rank high in other such indexes.
Housing policy in regards to ownership maybe a counterpoint to that, but we are not looking at individual policy but the at everything.
If you want to dispute the claim that Singpore is not 'free market' at all, then please direct me to an index with better methodology in that regard.
> Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
That to, but that's not primary what I am talking about.
No I'm talking about zoning and many, many, many other types of regulation. Plus of course, tax code and many other things.
Typically new land for a city is rezoned, then a developer comes in, build there and often inherits the infrastructure to the city to maintain. Then the city collects some property tax from that.
That is different then the Singapore model but its also a gigantic intervention in pretty much every aspect of the housing market.
Not to mention the government hold many plots of lands that could be developed. The government owns quite a lot of land.
The direct ownership is only one aspect, what you can do is another.
And as I said, I'm not disputing that in such a ranking, their land and housing policy could be considered as a negative compared to the US.
Trump isn't a free market ideologue and never has been. I'm not sure what you expected. He didn't conceal his viewpoints; if you are surprised, I think you weren't paying much attention.
The Republican Party on the other hand is very much in favor of the free market… or was. Many long time Republicans turned on a dime and deserve to be called out on it.
I think it's a bit more accurate to say that many long time Republicans claimed to support free markets. It's a little naive to believe that they actually meant any of that in reality. Them and their donors were growing fabulously wealthy off of functionally non-free markets.
They don't even claim to support total free market as end goal. Both party support free speech and free trade on principle, but support what shouldn't be free is highly political.
They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards. But the party was founded on the premise that tariffs would protect their northern constituents and industries, and they took over a century to shake that tendency. Perhaps the only Republican president before Reagan who was in favor of lowering tariffs was Eisenhower, as part of rebuilding globally after WW2.
Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.
> They were in favor of the free market from Reagan onwards.
Which is the relevant part. I’m not really concerned with historical positions of the party itself so much as the politicians themselves, none of whom were alive a century ago.
Such has been the US agenda in the developing world since the 70's. It's sort of odd to see them do it to themselves though. It's as if they became confused and started believing their own cover story.
Every voice on that (except the last one as it is too vague) is popular with the relevant electorate. I dislike how a bunch of random unrelated shit is stuffed together into a single bill but that is because the US is a vetocracy.
>1) not the point, that list of criticisms was a bad list of criticisms
My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.
There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.
I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.
Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.
>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.
I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.
Ideology is their sales pitch, it's for you and me to consume. It has nothing whatsoever to do with their goals and intentions. This has been true of Thatcher and her deeply protectionist policies all the way up to today with Trump and his tariffs. We're not choosing between regulations and no regulations, we're choosing between regulations that benefit the working class and regulations that benefit the owning class. (Although I suppose it could be argued that in the US you choose between regulations that benefit the owning class and regulations that benefit the owning class more)
What "free market" ideologues are you talking about? Seems like you're just intentionally making the hasty generalization fallacy (same one that leads to racism) to attack a group that you don't like for ideological or emotional reasons, especially because Trump was never a free market idealogue, and the tariffs are evidence of that.
> Then the exact same discussion will come up with a different number
No?
The point is there is no reason for the number 85 other than benefiting Tesla. The metacognitive question should be how one should estimate that variable in a way which balances disruption with incentivising the desired outcome.
Your answer to the question “Is the 5% between 80 and 85% worth a double-digit tariff?” here is “Yes. A double digit tariff on a car that is 80% made in America makes sense.”
and then there is the other side of the 14.9% coin, which will be fought over by Canada(read ontario), Mexico, China, and the rest
when it comes parts and cars made in Canada and Mexico, that is going to be tricky, as both countrys have historicaly bought a lot of US cars and other stuff, but will now be in no possition to also play along with the anti china stance in the US and tarrifs, and all the other issues at the borders.......geoplotical has more meaning now.
And, all used goods bought at secondhand stores are tariff-exempt as well. And so is FB marketplace, Craigslist, and others.
My protest is meager, but effective for us - we just will buy used and use 'Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle' where we can. EnEnough of us doing that will slow and hamper the economy (read: rich peoples' money).
I think the meaning was not "You can import used cars without tariffs", but "If you buy used cars already in the country, you don't pay the new tariff, so just don't buy new cars."
If you're importing it it doesn't matter it's condition other than it's worth less so the tariff would be less. What they mean is if you buy goods that are already here there's no tariff, but they will also go up in price too as the new item goes up.
Isn't that actually what they've been doing in Cuba since the revolution? I'm sure those old cars should have been retired by now and replaced with cheap Chinese imports, but for a few decades, they were refurbishing American-made cars continuously.
The parent comment was a confusing statement. They were saying that buying a used car or goods from a second-hand store does not go through the tariff process because the produce is already here.
There was a loophole in the past where you could take delivery of a car in a foreign country, drive it for a while, and then go through the process of importing it as if you were moving back to the United States. I don't know if the new tariffs honor that loophole or not.
Are you saying if I import a used car, I don't have to pay tariffs? Factory delivery programs would become a lot more popular.
Or are you just saying that if I buy a car that's already in the US and has already had any import tariffs due at time of import paid, I won't have to pay them again? That's a lot less interesting.
Yes. Volvo has had a program for decades where they fly you to Sweden where drive a vehicle around long enough for it to be "used", buy it then they ship it over to the US to avoid US new car import tariffs.
VAT is only levied if it doesn't get exported within a certain amount of time (6 months from the scheduled delivery date).
I knew someone who tooled around Europe for a month before dropping it off to be shipped to her without having VAT incurred (though it was a couple decades ago).
Seems to me that it's probably worth the incremental cost to buy one that's already here and registered in your state; there's a lot of unknowns in customs and vehicle licensing, and I'd rather not deal with it. But I spent my weird car slot on a 1981 Vanagon instead of a kei truck/van.
If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.
This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.
Nonsense. Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years? Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]? Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.
[0] Especially because what it tells our enemies. Iran, take out just this one specific building, and America is done for!
What did the military do on Jan 6? They stood back and did nothing.
That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.
I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.
The mob was literally minutes away from congressional people. They further kept those same congresspeople surrounded and locked up for hours until Trump called them off.
Ashley Babbitt died because she broken through the last barrier between the mob and congress. Had this mob been armed (and there were plans of being armed that were ultimately scuttled), it could have been a blood bath. There was only a handful of LEO between the mob and congress.
This wasn't a "mosquito bite".
Now, what would have changed if the mob had their way with congress or the supreme court? Who knows. For the SC, it'd have given trump the ability to put in more yes men to rubber stamp his election loss narrative.
For congress, the plan was literally to have congressional collaborators challenge the validity of the election (which still happened) to take power. If many democrat reps lost their life, then yes, congress could have rubberstamped a trump victory. Very few republicans stood up to trump or his plans.
"What could they have done", the answer is kill a bunch of congress people in the opposing party to empower their party.
You're exaggerating to try to make a point, but I'm not convinced.
You're saying that it could have been much worse if the mob had gotten into Congress, followed by if the mob had offed Democrats, followed by if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections, followed by if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action and if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything and if the military leadership also had no objections assuming of course that no republicans or Trump himself died at any point through the process.
That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
Correct, which we have documents, conversations and even zipties which show that was the plan.
> if the mob had offed Democrats
Again, multiple conversations and recordings of mob members specifically saying this was the plan.
> if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections
There are literally court documents which ended up getting Eastman disbarred because, you guessed it, this was literally the plan. We even know who the collaborators were because we have recordings between them and Trump/Rudy about executing the plan.
> if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action
The supreme court is literally right around the corner from congress. But I admit, they weren't a part of any documented plan that I'm aware of. However, as we are seeing with the current Trump term that doesn't really matter now does it. If the executive and congress doesn't care about the SC then they are toothless.
> if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything
It was an attempted coup. Who knows what Cali would do, they'd certainly object. But now you have a crisis where congress has declared trump the winner and the military has to choose whether or not they follow Cali or the Executive which they are bound to. How that would have played out is anyone's guess.
> That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
You are now extrapolating past what I did. What would have happened in the aftermath of the coup isn't something that anyone could know. There's no way to know if it'd be successful. But that's entirely not the point. The point is the coup was attempted and it was damn near the point of having multiple congress people killed.
My point, which you are trying to get away from, is that this was more than a mosquito bite. This very well could have caused a huge amount of turmoil and that turmoil was planned and documented. And, of course, those that planned this turmoil were all pardoned by Trump.
What you are doing is downplaying how serious J6 was. You want to act like just because it wasn't successful, it wasn't serious. Or that just because it might never have been completely successful, it wasn't serious. That is ridiculous.
No, you’re stuck with trying to overplay how significant J6 was. Even if it was considered by the participants to be a coup, it’s irrelevant because it simply did not have the manpower, or any chance at taking out all of the branches of government to a significant degree. Even if all of Congress and SCOTUS was killed, there is a line of succession (created in case of nuclear war) which states would then follow.
The claim that J6 was a serious threat, by stringing one improbable event into what could have happened if a dozen additional improbable events also occurred, is the Democratic Party’s favorite conspiracy theory. Both sides have them.
Since you're convinced it couldn't be a coup, would you mind helping see your point of view? How many people would be needed and/or what outcomes would we observe for you to believe it was a coup?
I don't think anyone would deny that. But the question is really, would it have mattered even if some got killed? Congress sure as fuck isn't standing in the way of executive overreach right now. I don't see why we should be so overly worried about politicians getting killed, most of them are less than useless, especially considering how many citizens are killed per day already thanks to garbage political legislation that makes it legal.
I will say this, because I worry that some may have missed the memo. If you keep repeating constitutional crisis like it is some sort of magic word, each time you say it without some level of substantiation, it will continue to lose its power. It is mildly annoying to me that, some, democrat party adherents do not seem to understand this. I can give few more examples if necessary, but my subtle point is:
If everything is a constitutional crisis, nothing is.
Well, you're an adult, and you can tell that different democrats are different people, so engage with what the person you're talking to is saying and not going "everything's a crisis with you people!"
They killed people while storming the capitol. If hundreds of protesters getting their hands on all of our ballots, physically threatening our congressmen, is not a constitutional crisis, I don't know what the hell is. Perhaps you should take your own advice. You can only say "you're overreacting" so much before people realize we can't rely on you to evaluate risk.
I don't think the point was to kill a bunch of Democrats. I think the point was to either kill or pressure Vice President Pence, so that he (or his successor) would accept the "alternate" (false) electors as legitimate. I think the shouts of "hang Mike Pence" were aimed that direction.
I very much doubt even had they managed to kill some congressman that it would have helped them in any way. In fact im more likely to believe that had they actually gotten to a congressman we would have seen far more meaningful response and push back against them, Republicans, and Trump.
Oh I thought the military takes orders from the Command-in-Chief. Silly me. Maybe Alito and Thomas can tell the Joint Chiefs to provide protection to the Proud Boys to storm the Capitol in 2028.
They do, but Congress and the Supreme Court selected by Congress together define who this figure is. There is no sign that the military was prepared to defy either.
> Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.
The same is true about the sitting president and some of his staunch supporters repeatedly "joking" about, and alluding to a third term[1][2][3][4] - including merch[5].
Don't know what to say, P2025 was definitely the plan. A third term is flooding the zone with distractions. And if by some twist of fate it's his intent, the earliest you can do anything about it is midterms. Before that we will have had pivotal moments on tariffs, Ukraine/NATO, DOGE, and due process.
It's not one event that destroys a republic, but a series of little ones that slowly erode the norms, until all of sudden there's someone willing to cross the Rubicon. You've got 44 months of erosion to go.
> Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years?
You know, probably not? It's not particularly comforting to know that democracy will probably survive in 2028.
> Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]?
Did Yoon Suk Yeol seriously think that temporarily obstructing a National Assembly vote would make it impossible for them to end his coup? Yes, and so did the National Assembly - they worked hard to get into the legislative chamber, and once they got in they refused to leave until they were sure the coup was defeated. If the January 6 mob had made it onto the floor while it was in session, and "convinced" even a subset of Congress that they need to say Trump won the election, he would not have agreed to leave office on January 20th.
But Ford can probably get the USA content for gas-powered Mustangs up from 80% to 85%. The electric version is made in Mexico, but once Ford's Blue Oval City plant in Tennessee comes up in 2027, that will move to the US.
Tesla builds Model 3s and Ys in their Shanghai factory using almost entirely domestically sourced components, and even exports a fair number from there. But perhaps the trade war will reduce demand.
I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.
I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.
I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.
Most people feel like hapless midwits, and we know that most of us actually are. Yet we have this tendency to assume, for some weird reason, that people in important positions have their shit together more than we do. Only in emergencies and times of crisis do we see that no one has their shit together. When we see that, we want to blame it on conspiracy or some sort of 5-dimensional chess being played, because it goes against the safe notion that someone, somewhere, is steering the boat (even if we don't like where they're taking us). But the safer bet is that no one is steering, and no one actually can steer, and that it's incompetence all the way to to the top.
Yes, accidental, hapless stumbling onto major windfall on multiple occasions clearly is an indication of nothing more than pure, unadulterated, McDuck level of luck and not, I repeat, not indication of anything but simple return of a favor.
I don't mean to imply that I believe they are excellent people who will take care of us all, nor that there is any illuminati cabal like that other ludicrous comment.
I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.
There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
You've missed the tail end of that story - Trump made an angry call to Bezos, presumably full of threats, after which Bezos announced that they weren't going to do that and totally never planned to.
He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
Totally. But Bezos is leaving a lot of money on the table, and none of this makes political sense. Everyone goes down if things get more expensive. Meanwhile I'm imagining a Chrome plugin that shows you the pre-tariff prices on Amazon [rubs hands]
There seems to be a (largely American) misconception that people in positions of power are there because they earned such a position through being capable and competent.
Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.
It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.
> I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.
The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.
Huh? If anything, it now should be clearer than ever that it has been for a long time. The only difference is that the oligarch that happens to be benefiting from it is in the public spotlight, associated with and part of the current administration, and at the same time main guy for several publicly owned companies.
If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.
Good grief. There are times when I read some posts and it is like reading youtube comments under madtv skit 'apple i-rack' asking what it means... how do you not know what it means?
What part of oligarch is hard to translate into sufficient amount of evidence that does not require me to prove that 1000 million dollars might result in an ability to wield influence that a a simple individual like meself would consider mildly outsized? At this point it is like gravity. You don't have to believe it. It is just is.
You're so wedded to your overly simplistic and conspiratorial worldview that everything is a secret plan by "the elites", that now you've had to invent a new conspiracy about how they all had a secret plan to lose themselves billions of dollars.
Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.
>now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened
They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.
But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.
This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.
He's chaotic and unpredictable by normal standards, but that seems irrelevant to me.
I don't mean the damage isn't consequential. What I mean is he has very obvious and simple motivations and reactions. For the purposes of somehow dealing with him, it's not all that important that "he might do anything". It seems obvious that anyone who wants to deal with him should take that as given and move right past worrying about what he might do and assume that he will, for sure, do anything. But he will do so for completely basic reasons and in response to completely basic stimuli.
A bullfighter completely antagonizes the bull into a frothing unthinking frenzy, on purpose, and owns the bull.
The bull is actually totally predictable and manipulable, and not because the bull can be reasoned with.
Musk and some few on the right are the only ones not being complete idiots about handling him. They are getting everything they want from operating him.
The left probably can't play that same trick since they probably can't figure out ways to tell him he's great and get leftie things out of him. Or forget left & right just business where they're all assholes, everyone can't play the same suck-up game. Musk is apparently doing suck-up without looking like a weak begger suck-up. Or he's allowing himself to look like just enough of a beta to keep Trump from feeling threatened, yet, like how his maga hat isn't red. Flouting the uniform, yet, not. It's probably a fine line there. And there is only room for a few magic pretend-beta slots. Trump will simply not give good behavior to very many people no matter what they say, so if all 100 people in his circle were all the perfect suck-up, still only a couple will get what they want and the rest get pissed on.
So anyone that didn't happen to win that lottery (or just weren't as good as Musk at that game) will have to go the other way which is poking him with a stick.
But they aren't. In the left vs right arena the left just continues to try to use rational arguments and appeals to reason on people who don't give a shit about that. Just who are the dummies when it comes down to that?
Though I wasn't originally intending to talk left or right but just about chaos impacting business and these supposed hard nosed rutheless powerful captains of the world just letting it happen. They only care about one thing, and he's burning that one thing by the billions, and they are...what? Nothing?
So when I say "I can only assume they are somehow ok with it" I mean there must be things I don't know. Like ultimately this doesn't really hurt Bezos and the like all that much. Like they make money on whatever happens somehow. Or they think longer term and they are ready to absolutely gorge themselves on some kind of bounce back in a couple years because they are somehow positioned exactly right. Like how at a smaller scale how Equifax ultimately made a shit ton of new money as a result of having their web site hacked. Maybe all the Bezos's of the country are just arms dealers who make out no matter what.
I don't know. Perhaps everyone's right and they are all tools no better equipped than myself. But I just think that's a kind of stupid take. Some probably are, and some surely are not. I am quite sure I can not solve Apple's Trump problem better than Tim. I simply wonder, what the heck are they doing? It looks from here on the ground like they aren't doing anything. But I can only assume that just means I can't see anything that matter from here, and don't know how to read what I can see.
Mentioned it a few times in the past, but this is just a big freak out and America having a hard time squaring the fact that by almost all meaningful metrics, their "enemy" has taken the lead. Nobody really knows how to fix it, everyone at the top knows they can't really do much about it, but they have to show "power", because that's all they have left. Nobody wants to "lose" in public's eyes, but that's just how some of the world is starting to think.
Honestly, I feel kinda conflicted. From one point, I always looked up to the American values, and way of life. But it's becoming increasingly misaligned with my own values and the things I find important in life.
It appears that the American Automobile Labeling Act measures domestic content on a value basis (that is, the amount the manufacturer pays the supplier for it):
There appears to be someone in my local city that is using their cybertruck as a billboard. They drive around during rush hours and every week or so they switch the wrap to a different company. I wonder if it's being widely done elsewhere.
My wife says the wrapped ones of any color look better than stock. She thinks the stock ones look like toasters, and that Tesla should have painted two red/orange stripes along the tonneau cover to complete the stock look.
I mean, they do. Wraps also ruin the stainless steel finish, so you are committed to wrapping for the rest of the car's life. Wraps aren't meant to last more than 5 years or so.
I haven't seen anything like that where I live. I see the same businesses over and over, and often see them parked at or near the business in question.
I don't know if it's the same people but many of the comments here seem the opposite of the comments on EUs rules where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".
If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
I'm sure the targeted aspect of that one is applauded by the same side that is unhappy about this tariff.
At least in the tariff case, it's an objective numerical target and probably even achievable by other manufacturers. Ford is only 5% away from the target for some of its models.
I would go as far as saying, that almost no one outside the US knows about state specific rules. People watch or read some news, but they are usually not that much into the US inner political theater, that they additionally make an effort to learn what state has what other rules.
I am not even sure how impactful it is, that Washington state does something different. Like ... Are things built or sold there by a large amount? What makes Washington state special? And what are their intentions? And can their lower level rules actually override what is decided at the country level by Trump's gang?
It is bad enough, that people have to deal with hearing about all the crazy stuff the orange clown or his henchmen do on a daily basis. There is a limit to how much people want to deal even more with political stuff from the US, you know?
Yeah, without context it doesn’t mean much. Washington is one of the majority liberal states. OP was pointing to a Washington state law that will also “target” Tesla but in the other direction.
>If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?
Why 85% and not 80%? It’s an arbitrary cutoff that happens to benefit Elon.
Ford will quickly get to 85%, but you can’t deny this is yet again a move that is touted as “pro-America” yet somehow mainly benefits Musk (or Trump or someone in their orbit).
I’d note the ones that meet the threshold are by far the vast majority of Tesla sales and profit. This puts them at a structural advantage. Those three models account for 95% of deliveries in 2024. The rules as stand only impact their highest margin vehicles, which account for 4.8% of their total deliveries.
The fact that Elon Musk is personally involved in the decision making and cabinet level discussions and personally benefits immensely- and exclusively- from this special carve out looks like rank corruption on the surface and at face value. Any other administration in history would be investigated until the cows come home if something comparable had ever happened. Even if it somehow eluded the rule makers that they exempted 95% of one companies sales to the exclusion of all other companies and that companies CEO had curried extensive favor with the administration and this was a mistake, the appearance of gross impropriety and conflicts of interest should cause a rapid reset and roll back. I suspect, however, it will not be rolled back, and that they were entirely aware of what they were doing. This is what kleptocracy looks like.
I don't understand whats going on with this shithole world, the term Conflict of Interest used to be ubiquitous and everyone understood it. Now its such obvious blatant corruption everywhere, has it really always been this bad and we just all have too much information from the internet now?
Being a sell out was bad. Now it is the goal: to be an "influencer"
I think as people feel financially squeezed, they get less strict on how to get by. This leads to acceptance of "take the money and run." The loss of the middle class is the source of many woes.
No, OP is referring to the fact that the companies that are big enough to be subject to the EU DSA's rules about platforms are all American. So any fines handed down for violations of the DSA are exclusively to American big tech firms. The rejoinder is that the rules apply to everyone, it just happens that the companies that are subject are American.
There has been maybe two dozen different barrel plugs widely used over the last two decades, and "12V" and "20V" were already a de-facto standard for laptops with 2S and 3S batteries respectively (there was some artificial segmentation like 18.5V, 19V, 19.5V, 20V, etc. but they are all within tolerance range). I have not seen a male laptop; they are always female, being the "receiver" of the power.
That leaves out all the "what is a computer?" devices that had all sort of plugs that wouldn't be barrel: tablets, chromebooks, raspberry pi, e-readers etc.
Same for all the smaller dedicated devices (audio recorders, camera, controllers etc.)
Those didn't go the barrel plug route in the first place to allow for charging through the same port, and would have been a loophole if barrel was mandated. USB-C was honestly the only option that made sense IMHO.
Most of those used either USB or a barrel plug depending on their size.
raspberry pi, e-readers
USB.
Same for all the smaller dedicated devices (audio recorders, camera, controllers etc.)
Many of those use smaller barrel plugs, appropriate for their lower voltage.
The main problem with USB-C is the tiny fragile connector (search for images of "bent USB-C"), and the fact that it's a standard that tries to be what should really be a bunch of separate standards. It's hard to get a barrel plug wrong. It's too easy to get USB-C wrong, and cause damaged devices:
No, it wasn't. The usb forum could have decided to use a lightning compatible standard, but there were problems with it.
Besides, apple are one of the decision makers in the usb c standard, the legislation mandated a standard, but not a specific one, just the same one for all, and this forum which includes apple decided to go with usb c https://www.usb.org/members
There are European companies that are under the regulation as well.
The DSA is the part that applies to all companies in some way as well (things like the need for moderation and a way for people to reach you with complaints). The DMA is about the market and how to deal with monopolies.
Just a coincidence that the only company that currently fits the criteria is Tesla then.
Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?
With the assumption of course that tariffs won't change before new factories even have come online in a less optimal place. I'd be hard pressed to invest huge amounts of money like that when we are on tariff policy change 80-something in 100 days while I also hearing about imminent "trade deals".
I think Honda already has like 75% American parts in the cars they produce in Indiana. It was actually listed on the Acura ILX I bought from them awhile back.
Genuinely curious why? I live in the USA, but nowhere near any place they make cars. So I have not much interest in helping those folks, fine though I'm sure they are. I'd rather have a Japanese made Honda because it'll likely have higher reliability.
Curious - If this exact act had been done under the Obama or Biden administrations, would you still hold the same opinion ? Tesla was still a love child at that time.
Many companies like Honda are now moving part of domestic production to the US.
If Obama was best buds with Elon and telling the USA to buy Teslas and calling any vandalism against Tesla terrorism and campaigning together and doing Oval Office press conferences together and having Thanksgiving dinner together and letting Elon run a made up government agency?
Come on. It’s blatant corruption in broad daylight. Don’t try and both sides it.
But to answer your question directly if Obama had declared a fake economic emergency to consolidate power to himself and used that emergency power to abruptly pass a series of sweeping tariffs with no clear strategy or messaging and then selectively rolled back some of those tariffs in a way that only benefitted a specific company. Yes. I would feel the same.
According to many other comments the title is misleading, everyone has to pay tariffs on the portion of the vehicle that is not US or a NAFTA member source. Besides all Tesla's sold in the US are manufactured in the US. There would be zero reason for Tesla to pay a tariff on anything but parts.
The key is the “…over a certain size” solely benefiting the richest man in the world, who just so happens to be heavily involved (despite no election) in the very government setting the policy and determining the size.
It's not just the idea in isolation though. I don't think anyone would complain much if the rule was "in N mths the threshold is X". Everyone could do the necessary adjustments and play by the same rules. But if the rule applies immediately, favours the guy who gave you millions, and impacts the competition financially where they need to make me investments to comply with the rules... yeah, that stinks even if it looks like a generic rule.
Ideally that's the long term goal though, right? You want good local production, but not impair the trade forever. The best tariff would be a future one that achieves the shift by threat, then gets cancelled because the goal is complete and there's no point is impacting trade otherwise.
If companies believe today that in 4 years the tariffs will be dropped and that their investment in a manufacturing facility with 25% higher costs than the foreign competition will become effectively worthless, they will be reluctant to invest all that much.
They search space for criteria is practically limitless. They have and would absolutely fish for precisely the criteria benefiting Musk.
This playbook has been applied well by the crony capitalist class in the 3rd world, and is always a moving target. Most players know that and will not chase the moving target, knowing that another set of rules will emerge that will create new hurdles protecting the crony capitalist. A few will, and get burned.
There are two reasons to believe this is applicable here:
1. Trump has a track record of quid pro quos (Adelson being a salient
example). Musk is definitely seeking his pound of flesh
2. Lutnick urged people to buy Tesla (shocking and explicit favoritism)
The view that this is just incentivizing local production is naive.
> where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".
The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.
The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.
This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.
You can tweak the rules infinitely to get the outcome you want. It's suspiciously convenient how the only company that's exempt from those tariffs is owned by the guy that gave Trump $200+ millions during his campaign.
You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.
Trump has been a pretty different politician (both in how he's talked but also what he's done) so I don't think it makes sense to view things he does slightly differently. Also the issue is less that a specific company is targeted but more that it looks like a personal political favor.
Not that your point is entirely invalid, just that I think the context is probably different (though I'm not sure exactly what EU comments you're referring to).
US states do this frequently - for example, Texas often passes laws that stipulate "cities having a population over...." such that only the major cities have laws applied to them or certain companies having over employees/users/customers over a certain amount.
Context matters. In a vacuum, the 85% rule is fine. In reality, it excludes a single company whose CEO not only holds a position in the administration making the rules, but who clearly holds enough influence that the president himself shot a Tesla ad in front of the white house.
Given such visible conflicts of interest, the administration should be bending over backwards to dispel perceptions of impropriety. The fact that they aren't, and that these coincidences keep occurring, should be telling.
I would be surprised if Ford does anything drastic with their supply chain. Probably just wait this out. POTUS is going to be stripped of this ridiculous tariff "power" one way or another.
* Bogus emergency is up for review
* Congress discussing stripping power
* Constitutionality in question
* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up
I've been thinking that reason must prevail for nigh on a decade and while there have been moments where it seems to, overall I can't say that I'm particularly optimistic at the moment. I have been told that "degrowth" (for the purpose of slowing climate change) is the most unpopular policy imaginable, but it seems like we are taking a stab at it for different reasons. Perhaps that unpopularity will have some effect; it does seem (both anecdotally for me and in some data that I've seen) that swing voters are already regretting their decision.
Most of this pantomime is also illegal or unconstitutional. For example you can't pass a law or regulation that targets one person or entity. But it'll take a long time to litigate everything because the DoJ and congress have been rooted.
> For example you can't pass a law or regulation that targets one person or entity.
Yes, you can. Such a law cannot direct punishment or assign guilt to a particular individual or entity without a judicial trial, or it would violate the Bill of Attainder clause, but laws doing other things that apply to a specific named individual or entity are (unless they violate some other provision) Constitutional; in fact, in some cases they are necessary to satisfy other Constitutional rules.
> Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported?
85% of parts != 85% of cost
The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.
It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.
The tariffs cover parts as well as whole vehicles. The thing announced here is that they'll have a rebate program if the car is 85% manufactured in the US, and the rebate will be in effect for 2 years. So you still pay the tariff on parts, but you get some or all the money back if you meet that threshold. The idea being that it gives the company two years to move their parts manufacturing or sources. But the threshold is so high that only Tesla gets to enjoy the rebate, not any other company.
But even Tesla only maxes out at 75 - how are they eligible? Also wouldn’t surprise me if this carve out is special purpose to give Tesla and only Tesla this rebate.
The article is really bad. Even the original source is just an off-hand comment from Lutnick, not the final regulation.
The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.
Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.
I wonder how much their lack of union plays into this. The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW. Tesla doesn't have to worry about unions (at least yet), and so they have very centralized factories where an enormous amount of work is done. Probably makes it easier to do everything in the US if you can do it all in one building
In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.
Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.
Is Citizen's United the only thing that allowed one person to donate $150 million? This is the obvious flaw. We would need a RICO type framework to identify the basket of vectors that one person/organization can use to funnel money to a candidate. This is a bipartisan issue but I don't know how we can surface the narrative so more people can talk about it.
Citizens United has no impact on what an individual can do with his money. It’s purely about corporate spending by entities like IBM, the Sierra Club, or the New York Times Company.
I think you are confusing Citizens United v FEC (2010) with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). (CU is largely “corporations are people applies in the application of Buckley”.)
Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)
I agree that allowing elections to be influenced by spending money was a mistake. Campaign spending is way out of control and it reduces our leaders and politicians into desperately begging for donations.
The democrats also tried to pass legislation in 2021 that excludes Tesla from an EV credit due to it being not built by unions, even though Tesla has by far the largest share of electric vehicles and is the most productive and innovative company in this sector.
Yeah because they were anti union. It wasn't because of any personal dislike of Elon.
And it was inevitable that the more mainstream automakers would sell more evs then Tesla as EVs became a larger and larger share of cars sold. Granted it's taking longer than expected but Tesla is no longer the majority even if it's overall has a large plurality but falling pretty fast
For guys like that, being pro-union is personal dislike.
They see themselves as the smartest, strongest, most clever people in history. They don't need some group moderating their plans, much less one made of people they hired. Any suggestion to the contrary is a strike against the natural order that they perceive reality through.
I think there was a lot of pressure on Tesla/Elon to donate and participate more, and higher ups turned pretty hard on him when he didn't. They were pulling the tax credit from Tesla while holding EV summits with everyone but him. I don't think he was being reactionary, I think his hand was forced.
Further he really isn't a conservative. He's still running around on X talking about how we need to double the number of H1-B's and other social-left causes. Cutting spending through DOGE is something every Republican has talked about for decades, and I don't think it's a major flip for him to want to do that.
I don't think H1-Bs are really a "social-left cause". They're something that big tech companies like because they get to cherry-pick skilled workers and keep them locked in. On the main political spectrum, I think they're pretty centrist. The right dislikes them because they're immigration in disguise, the left dislikes them because they're indentured servitude in disguise.
He's incredibly conservative. He very much likes the idea of Neo-feudalism. You have a class that owns everything (of which he's the prime example right now) and then you have a class that labors to rent things from people like him. Those who don't - or can't - play that game are simply not fit to survive.
It's a school of thought so old that we barely recognize it anymore, but that's what he wants to return to. Lots of tech bros are into it.
> The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW.
That is the story the auto companies like to tell, to make unions look damaging to workers and communities. From what I've read, the migration had a lot to do with race. But regardless, do either of us have any evidence to share? (not me right now)
The race riots didn't help, but they were largely secondary to the factories leaving. The UAW would never strike at their factory; they would usually go across the street and strike at some significant, shared plant (like an engine factory for multiple vehicles). For a long time, logistic constraints prevented major auto companies from moving too far away, but once they figured it out they started putting each factory in a new, usually right-to-work state, so you could only strike at your factory. Flint went from being the home of GM and having ~14 major auto factories to 3. Similar story for Detroit.
Similar things happened in most major industries. The other one I'm familiar with is GE Locomotive, who moved their engine facility to Grove City (which still never unionized), and now has a major facility in Fort Worth as well.
There are several issues of how racism interacted with manufacturing.
One is that the auto manufacturers wouldn't hire black people into serious jobs - for a long time, all they could be was janitors, etc. I read one account that they went to local black leaders for recommendations and one person had a graduate degree - CPA or MBA, iirc. They got a dead-end clerical job or something like that.
Union workers were often actively hostile, even when union leadership welcomed them. Multiple times they walked out when one black person was hired.
Also, local racism crushed the black community, which would be the workforce. Redlining effectively prevented black people from living outside certain neighborhoods and prevented them from getting loans. They ended up packed into these neighborhoods, subject to white slumlords who charged exhorbident rents. Schools were awful. With little education, no money, no access to credit, and even if you overcame all that, no opportunity for career. Don't forget police brutality, race riots against blacks everywhere, lynchings in the South, etc.
What I personally find more interesting is that they consciously did not choose a more conciliatory number ( like 80 ), which would capture more cars and have the benefit of being able to deflect attacks. Almost like it was intended to cause uproar.
Otoh, I listened to conservative ratio the other day and the general tone was "good, he is making them mad and he doesn't care."
If that's the way policy decisions are going to be made every time conservatives come to power in the US, then it's best that the rest of the world not go down with the US when the time comes.
I was thinking about buying an EV in the next several years, but I'll never buy a Tesla, until I see Elon Musk in prison. And I don't think I'm alone.
Major effect of Trump's trade war is yet to be felt. I think Americans' perception of Trump will get much worse soon, and Tesla's brand image will follow suit. A tariff exemption is cute but I don't think that's enough to save Tesla.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 552 ms ] threadIn other words: literally anyone except Elon Musk.
Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke" when they harass people for being it.
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
If you genuinely don't think that each side has principles, which in fact overlap considerably, you aren't very curious about the world.
ETA: In case you are genuinely interested in learning about how liberal and conservative people differ psychologically, Jonathan Haidt is a very good person to read.
Arbitrary corrupt incompetency is what they're looking for.
Caring about other, having respect, being sensitive, these are all 'woke' things from the "great awakening" cult.
I want more affordable college and the people in charge want to send people like me to concentration camps through kangaroo courts. This is the difference.
Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.
> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.
And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.
> 60s ... traditional
It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The question is who the police are being deployed to protect, private citizens or the government itself. Ordinarily police are deployed to protect citizens from criminals, so it’s bad to attack the police. But the Capitol police are protecting government officials from citizens, so attacking them is less bad. That’s the view.
> 60s ... traditional It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
The assertion that the civil rights era signaled a major shift in views about the relationship between individuals and the government is hardly controversial. There’s a book on this idea (probably more than one): https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
Indeed, folks in the progressive left share more or less the same premise. If you talk to a progressive about foundational principles like federalism and limited government, the chief response is that those ideas were championed by our forebearers so that the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. The point of disagreement is about whether the new approach is better than the traditional one.
We live in different bubbles, it seems. I haven't heard that argument. I have heard that 'states rights' is intended to workaround various federal rules, including civil rights.
The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority. The majority can always protect itself by changing the law.
Edit:
> https://lawliberty.org/did-the-civil-rights-constitution-dis....
I skimmed through this. The source is anti-left; of course they are going to give characterizations like that. And look at this piece of doublespeak:
When I talk about civil rights, the reader should not get the impression that I’m friendly to segregation, or hostile to the civil rights movement as it existed for the whole of the 20th century up until 1964. In fact, I’m very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation for equal citizenship that went on up till then, but there were problems in the Civil Rights Act that were not evident at first.
They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution. They are "very much in sympathy with the claims to an agitation", however. :)
That’s the same argument from the other direction. The federal government, as designed, wasn’t powerful enough to protect minorities from the majority. Those rules entailed a major expansion of federal power. Indeed, you can see the seams in the civil rights laws. For example, Title VI’s ban on discrimination in public education is implemented through conditions on federal funding. Because the federal government can’t legislate such a ban directly.
> The foundation is that "all ... are creatd equal", which includes all members of minorities. The Bill of Rights is there to protect unpopular minorities from the majority.
That’s exactly the civil rights era retconning of the constitution I’m talking about. The statement that “all men are created equal” has nothing to do with minorities. Read the context right before and right after: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip.... The statement is about self determination: the right of a people to determine their own form of government. The equality being referred to is the equality between Britain and its monarch and the colonists.
The founders said almost nothing about protecting minorities from the majority, except perhaps in the context of religious freedom. Their concern was exactly the opposite: that a minority cabal in the government would oppress the majority.
The context before and after is quite well known; I don't have to read it. What they say is that 'all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, among those life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And to protect those rights, governments are instituted among men.' (from memory, probably a few errors).
All means all - minorities included. The equality is for "all men"; rights are for "all men". Nothing is said about Britain and its monarch, except in your dreams of rationalizing oppression. The language is plain and clear, part of the reason it is so well-known.
A document cannot simultaneously holds all minorities to be equal with a right to liberty and accommodate slavery as it existed in the 1700s. Some of the signers may personally have disagreed with slavery but it seems difficult to say that the document itself represented a repudiation of the practice.
That's a unique take fundamentally at odds with the very concept of the Senate.
But I think leftists would share the same premise! They would phrase it differently, they’d say something like: “the founders were white men who wanted to limit government power so the government wouldn’t be powerful enough to do things like end slavery or take their property.” But that’s the same argument. The traditional view is a small government of enumerated powers. The post-civil rights view is a powerful federal government that can protect minorities from democracy.
> They won't say they are hostile to the Civil Rights Act and every solution to problems like segregation, oppression of minorities and women, etc. And they don't offer any other solution.
That doesn’t logically follow. The analogous mistaken argument would be saying that those who insist on due process for deportations must support illegal immigration, because “they don’t offer any other solution.” Of course that argument is wrong. Those people simply aren’t willing to compromise on due process to address illegal immigration.
Similarly, you can be unwilling to compromise on federalism and limited government, even if it’s to address oppression of minorities. That doesn’t mean you support such oppression, simply that you prioritize other values more highly.
Yes it does, in fact. And while people can try to doublespeak and have everyone parsing it out, all that matters is where you end up.
James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the United States, wrote:
> "This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system ...[or else] oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished... Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit."
As well as : > "In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful."
As well as:
> "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
This is why he distinguishes between the civil rights movement before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which was only concerned with preventing government enforced segregation.
In life, in practice, there isn't meaningful difference. They still drown because you abandoned your responsibilities.
I must have missed the outpouring of Republican support for the black lives matter protests when they were attacked by police riots or when police stations were attacked. No private citizens being protected there, and the protesting was directly against government oppression (including of the 2nd amendment even!).
The point is that even in very clear cut situations where the police are in the wrong, and have trampled over the very 2nd amendment rights that Republicans claim to love so much, it's then still crickets from Republicans. So this alleged "violence against the government is treated as distinct" seems to be just more post-hoc rationalization nonsense.
The problem is that rayiner is continually trolling with gut-appealing half-truths, sidesteps the straightforward logical implications as long as he can by responding tangentially, and when he can't do that any longer he just bails on the conversation rather than confronting the contradiction.
I guess I'm just glad us actually-conservatives (meaning everyone from "RINOs" to "the left" that actually respects our societal institutions enough to not want to see our country on the scrap heap) have reached a critical mass to beat back this wall of disingenuous bad-faith bullshit.
I hope so.
Unless it's the Jan 6th protesters.
Or the so-called "trucker convoy" across the border up here in Canada. (Convinced half the new-found hostility to us comes from this incident somehow getting on the radar of people who normally barely acknowledge Canada as existing)
In the end it's very much tribal, and little to do with the substance of issues and more to do with perceived teams.
Suffice to say, like most ideologues, the beliefs make sense when analyzed in accordance with the logic rules of the holder of the beliefs.
Think of the beliefs being discussed more as doctrinal tenets of a pseudo religious sect, and you get a little closer to the thinking of the adherents.
Members of the in-group have divine right and shouldn't be bound by laws. Anyone who opposes them is the enemy and should be harmed or destroyed.
For them, Sweden and North Korea are on the same spectrum of communism and will end up the same.
The problem with the saying "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is that a lot of people haven't forgotten history; they simply never learned it in the first place.
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
It's just half of a truism: people apply different standards to "their side". As true of the left wing as the right.
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
> There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
What groups? What people? Are they on HN? Are you responding to them?
This is just sneering. You're not responding to a particular argument or person - you're you're just creating a fictional (in that they don't exist as a coherent, self-identified group, and are only a group in your own mind based solely off of these attributes) until group of people with some alleged hypocrisy and using them to dog-whistle indirectly attack a group of people based on some political ideology that you don't like (and which is largely irrelevant to the alleged hypocrisy that you're inventing). This is some of the most anti-intellectual drivel possible and the diametric opposite of what belongs on HN.
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Although I'm more Georgist these days.
Also not sure if the idea of paying out people from this tax makes much sense. Arguable it made more sense when he wrote it, before the social state.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
The rich, like the poor, are free to live under bridges and starve.
Libertarianism is very simple and easy to dismiss out of hand if you believe this about it.
When I was younger I'd do online political tests and invariably come back with left-libertarian. Then the detour into cpunks, ancap, and the "two axis political chart" made me see myself unaligned and see a lot of utility in rightism. But that started to fall apart when it became clear that fundamentalism doesn't address the big picture of emergent layers of complexity. Ironically it was Moldbug's writing that nudged my transition back to seeing myself as latently left-aligned. No matter how much you'd like to, you can't fight thermodynamics!
In addition to that, it always had a strong southern "state rights" dog whistle. Personally I never liked Murray Rothbard. And the Rothbardian full on appropriation of Mises. Plus they often welcomed 'libertarians' that had very bad ideas, like Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
In terms of Austrian economics, I always much prefer the George Mason people. I think the economics fundamentals of Austrianism were very forward thinking and they produced a lot of great stuff and people, both directly and in the larger bubble of associated researchers.
> I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
I think American Libertarianism basically went way to far into hyper-individualism and total freedom of action and defense of historical privileges and laws. While different classical liberal philosophies would focus way more on the cost of those actions and negotiation a balance between individual freedom and society.
Classical liberal philosophy was never supposed to mean that you can park your car anywhere and throw garbage out of the window or that you can carry your gun everywhere.
Also I think there is a huge difference between restricting government on a federal level and on a local level. I don't think any philosophical school has really figured out this issue. Both centralizing and localizing have lots of problems.
I'm at the point where I am not really have a clear 'movement' that I can point to. I still agree with much of the criticism of communism, socialism and many typically left ideas. I disagree even more strongly with the far-right.
In Europe we have central parties, but those often are socially conservative and have sub-optimal economic policy and bad local politics. So like many others I have to end up voting center-left even if I don't agree in principle with their philosophy.
On thing that helped me is not to think of absolutes and end-states, and only think of incrementalism. Even if I disagree with the something in principle. As current laws exist I might support things I wouldn't in a different situation.
In Swizterland where I life, at least we can often vote on specific issues. And that can cut across parties. And the consensus based federal government is globally unique and works pretty well for stability and consistency.
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
>> One of Trump’s most audacious promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or even before.
“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,”
It's not my fault he made such a dumb, impossible promise. It is true he broke it.
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
It's truly remarkable how much honest material there is to criticize Trump with, yet folks insist on repeating blatant lies.
Yes, that is the "blatant lie" being discussed.
I don't get what you mean. It's not some secret - it's available for everyone to read. It's also written by people who are all around Trump and who got influential positions from him. It's been talked about for ages. Trump not knowing about it would be extremely weird. (Or if he actually never heard about it, that would mean he's extremely clueless - I'm not sure what's worse for him)
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
You seem to have missed, "highly illegal".
But sure "the trains are running on time"
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/donald-trump-jr-m...
True to their word!
I think a multi-party parliamentary system would be better at finding middle ground, but it's silly to say that the two-party system keeps politics "fixed".
I would say that in this case, it's a party aligning to an individual far more than it has ever been in the past. Racist Southern Democrats didn't become Republicans because they were enamored with a Republican leader, they changed parties because they found themselves misaligned with the Democratic Party's pivot to civil rights.
I wholeheartedly agree that a parliamentary system would serve the US better.
The Trump administration seems to run a protectionist policy, with a deregulated home market. This will hurt exports as it makes products more expensive, but also less likely to be able to comply with the regulations of other markets, e.g. in the EU, which is heavily regulated. US companies have a reduced incentive to comply with EU rules, if they know they have a protected market at home they can milk instead.
It's much in the same vein that Putin allows a few token 'opposition' politicians to exist.
Its an extremely big difference from the Biden era where any post critical of the vaccine and backed up with papers was taken down pronto. This was even confirmed in several senate hearings.
https://www.axios.com/2024/08/27/zuckerberg-biden-administra...
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/mark-zuckerberg-says-biden-p...
As a non-American, I was very happy when Musk bought out twitter - it was ridiculous being unable to criticize vaccines - you couldn't even articulate the Indian government's stance on Pfizer and how Pfizer refused to provde test data. "Freedom of speech" was utterly non-existent in that era.
> “The words ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ are considered slurs on this platform,” Mr Musk wrote in June.
> “Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.”
> The newly enforced policy, first reported by TechCrunch on Tuesday, saw some users greeted with a full-screen warning when trying to publish a post using the terms on the X mobile app.
The fact that this is arbitrarily enforced isn't exactly painting it as a haven for free speech. The only thing worse than absolute censorship (which is obvious and can be routed around) is stochastic, inconsistent censorship - which gives him and his defenders a fig leaf[1] to hide behind.
Look, maybe you prefer the new brand of censorship X has adopted. It sounds like you do. Great. But what you can't do is call it a free speech platform, while keeping a straight face.
[1] I would like to point out, as an example: that China doesn't censor the internet - you just mysteriously have your connection go to shit and drop out if you try to search for 4/15.
Did you ever try writing a mRNA-vaccine critical post during the Biden administration on twitter, quoting factual sources and linking to scientific papers ? Your account got banned pronto.
And as we all know now - it was done at the behest of the US white house.
And that's not an argument that you're going to do well with. Because the claim is utterly pants-on-head, irredeemably farcical, as is anyone who would stand behind it.
---
But, secondly, if you read the screenshots in the link, you'll see that the posts are being suppressed.
---
And thirdly, you don't see me claiming that pre-Musk Twitter was any kind of bastion of 'free speech absolutism'. I'm not making that argument.
The argument I'm making is that post-Musk Twitter definitely isn't one.
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
The changes made thus far present at least a decade of rebuilding to fix, and we're only 100 days in.
We're never out of time but the problem is time? There is absolutely a point of no return.
The problem is the time frame of the fix
If the US ends up a smoking ruin it can still be fixed, it'll just take longer.
The problem with the US is though, that they have the most powerful military on the planet, and the US ending up in smoking ruins probably means lots of other places going down with it, when the US looks outside for reasons of its failure. It is quite dangerous.
Predicting the future is hard.
Having said that, certainty does make planning easier.
Maybe they don't like the fact that there's people out there making 500 grand a year? At least not while they're struggling to make ends meet on 50 grand a year.
Now your leaders are supposed to be wise enough to not take down the 500 grand a year guys. But what if they aren't?
Yet people seem to have far less concern about people with such relatively low wealth.
But it's not really compatible with a system where one person represents millions. You'd need something recursive such that no person represents more than a hundred or so, that way there's time to circle back and explain why certain complaints aren't being addressed this cycle and such. You know, responsibility of leadership to the people.
It's also not really compatible with a system where your representative for foo-type issues must also be your representative for bar-type issues, because "competent people" is too broad of a category to be useful.
How to get there from here? I'm not sure but it seems like it'll require a more significant discontinuity than we've seen so far.
What does each one do? What agency does each have?
They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.
In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.
I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.
One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.
> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.
Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.
I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic. A software engineer in Austin and one in San Jose have far more in common than a software engineer in Austin and a Tractor dealer in Austin.
The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.
I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.
Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.
I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.
"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"
Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.
The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.
I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.
> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.
Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.
Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.
It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.
Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.
In Britain, you basically get removed from the party very quickly and as an independent its incredibly hard.
Trump is only the latest example of how parties are weak in the US.
Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.
Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,
You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest. If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.
Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.
If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.
Its an interesting concept, I don't know of anybody that has fully defined how this would work.
I imagine a sort of cultural "open enrollment" period during which anyone can mark anyone else as their representative. Perhaps we create four or five categories that we need representation in (foreign policy, infrastructure, education, monetary policy... something like that), so you gotta then find four or five representatives which you personally know and trust.
Then we follow the directed representation graph to its terminal nodes (or cycles) and those are the representatives that we ask to get together and get things done. Those are our leaders. They meet only sometimes, the rest of the year they spend working with their constituents.
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.
It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.
Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.
Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.
But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?
But then they also vote for him in the general election, since he won, so I conclude he has the support of the Republican base.
If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The difference is between Singaporean policymakers/civil servants and their counterparts from elsewhere is that the former are actually world-class in terms of competence, and their interventions are generally very well-designed/well-justified.
We can learn a lot from the policies, both free market and otherwise. And we shouldn't learn from others.
No free market person thinks of Singapore as some prefect example. As that doesn't exist. So you have to take example from different places. And Singapore has more good examples then most.
Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
Singapore owns the HDB, which owns the leasing rights to 80%+ of all residential property and almost all land in the country. Issuing 99 year leases to citizens and PRs.
Imagine if the US government owned all land rights, built virtually all apartments and instigated racial quotas to match the demographics of the country; then subsidized the price drastically to make it affordable for the population. That's what Singapore does.
This isn't unique either.
The other libertarian wet-dream Hong Kong has a similar land-leasing policy. The major difference there is that 999 year leases were allowed at one point (rare and no longer issued).
In fact the only freehold property in Hong Kong is St John’s Cathedral.
The person above pointed out that Singpore, is #1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom" and the rank high in other such indexes.
Housing policy in regards to ownership maybe a counterpoint to that, but we are not looking at individual policy but the at everything.
If you want to dispute the claim that Singpore is not 'free market' at all, then please direct me to an index with better methodology in that regard.
> Sure, from a financial perspective, particularly around mortgages.
That to, but that's not primary what I am talking about.
No I'm talking about zoning and many, many, many other types of regulation. Plus of course, tax code and many other things.
Typically new land for a city is rezoned, then a developer comes in, build there and often inherits the infrastructure to the city to maintain. Then the city collects some property tax from that.
That is different then the Singapore model but its also a gigantic intervention in pretty much every aspect of the housing market.
Not to mention the government hold many plots of lands that could be developed. The government owns quite a lot of land.
The direct ownership is only one aspect, what you can do is another.
And as I said, I'm not disputing that in such a ranking, their land and housing policy could be considered as a negative compared to the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, our current president has been advocating for tariffs for about as long as the Republicans were in favor of the free market.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trumps-tariff-str...
Which is the relevant part. I’m not really concerned with historical positions of the party itself so much as the politicians themselves, none of whom were alive a century ago.
https://fee.org/articles/10-crazy-examples-of-unrelated-wast...
2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.
As a quick excercise:
- for almost every industry new factories would be needed to significantly increase domestic production
- you are disencintivized to mix foreign and domestic materials if you plan to export (as you are going to pay potentially double tariffs)
- most things (especially cars) have long supply chains
- building a factory takes both non-trivial investment and at least a few months
And you get that for many products it would take sorta
All this to still get quite a few counter tariffs on exports.My claim was merely that the situation was analogous. So yes, it is the point, in my view.
There is a grey area where you can do things that the electorate may want, which also happen to benefit your cronies. This overall issue is more severe for big government types, since more largesse is getting handed out.
I'd additionally highlight your use of the term "relevant electorate". Which underscores that "cronies" and "voters" may be the same people.
Direct Tesla subsidies would probably be quite popular with Tesla workers. That's a relevant electorate. Would that therefore make direct Tesla subsidies defensible? That's what your argument seems to imply.
>2) whether anything that happened in the last month is going to promote more domestic manifacturing is quite dubious at best.
I suspect some of the items from the FEE list won't be particularly effective at their stated goal either. In general, people will disagree about the likely effectiveness of government programs. So I'm not sure "likely effectiveness" is a great way to check for favoritism.
Versus 80%? Those five percentage points are worth a double-digit tariff.
No?
The point is there is no reason for the number 85 other than benefiting Tesla. The metacognitive question should be how one should estimate that variable in a way which balances disruption with incentivising the desired outcome.
Provide source for any claims you make.
Qualitatively? Tesla wouldn’t qualify.
Practically? It isn’t. The same way there isn’t a difference between 85 and 80 other than keeping out Ford.
There is no methodology presented for how 85 was estimated. There probably wasn’t one, given the track record with the tariff rates.
Right?
Punitive legislation? Lawfare? Crony capitalism but for the other companies?
Deflection, whataboutism, sealioning with a side of demanding sources for what is essentially the use of a greater than sign.
And, all used goods bought at secondhand stores are tariff-exempt as well. And so is FB marketplace, Craigslist, and others.
My protest is meager, but effective for us - we just will buy used and use 'Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle' where we can. EnEnough of us doing that will slow and hamper the economy (read: rich peoples' money).
There was a loophole in the past where you could take delivery of a car in a foreign country, drive it for a while, and then go through the process of importing it as if you were moving back to the United States. I don't know if the new tariffs honor that loophole or not.
Or are you just saying that if I buy a car that's already in the US and has already had any import tariffs due at time of import paid, I won't have to pay them again? That's a lot less interesting.
Pretty cool. Lots more info on reddit threads.
https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...
I knew someone who tooled around Europe for a month before dropping it off to be shipped to her without having VAT incurred (though it was a couple decades ago).
I was strongly considering importing a 25-year-old kei truck from Japan before the tariffs were announced.
Even buying one locally that is already registered doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to continue registering it.
If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.
This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.
[0] Especially because what it tells our enemies. Iran, take out just this one specific building, and America is done for!
That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.
I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.
There's no reason to have a full allergic reaction to a mosquito bite.
Ashley Babbitt died because she broken through the last barrier between the mob and congress. Had this mob been armed (and there were plans of being armed that were ultimately scuttled), it could have been a blood bath. There was only a handful of LEO between the mob and congress.
This wasn't a "mosquito bite".
Now, what would have changed if the mob had their way with congress or the supreme court? Who knows. For the SC, it'd have given trump the ability to put in more yes men to rubber stamp his election loss narrative.
For congress, the plan was literally to have congressional collaborators challenge the validity of the election (which still happened) to take power. If many democrat reps lost their life, then yes, congress could have rubberstamped a trump victory. Very few republicans stood up to trump or his plans.
"What could they have done", the answer is kill a bunch of congress people in the opposing party to empower their party.
This was a big deal.
You're saying that it could have been much worse if the mob had gotten into Congress, followed by if the mob had offed Democrats, followed by if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections, followed by if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action and if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything and if the military leadership also had no objections assuming of course that no republicans or Trump himself died at any point through the process.
That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
What am I exaggerating?
> if the mob had gotten into Congress,
Correct, which we have documents, conversations and even zipties which show that was the plan.
> if the mob had offed Democrats
Again, multiple conversations and recordings of mob members specifically saying this was the plan.
> if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections
There are literally court documents which ended up getting Eastman disbarred because, you guessed it, this was literally the plan. We even know who the collaborators were because we have recordings between them and Trump/Rudy about executing the plan.
> if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action
The supreme court is literally right around the corner from congress. But I admit, they weren't a part of any documented plan that I'm aware of. However, as we are seeing with the current Trump term that doesn't really matter now does it. If the executive and congress doesn't care about the SC then they are toothless.
> if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything
It was an attempted coup. Who knows what Cali would do, they'd certainly object. But now you have a crisis where congress has declared trump the winner and the military has to choose whether or not they follow Cali or the Executive which they are bound to. How that would have played out is anyone's guess.
> That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
You are now extrapolating past what I did. What would have happened in the aftermath of the coup isn't something that anyone could know. There's no way to know if it'd be successful. But that's entirely not the point. The point is the coup was attempted and it was damn near the point of having multiple congress people killed.
My point, which you are trying to get away from, is that this was more than a mosquito bite. This very well could have caused a huge amount of turmoil and that turmoil was planned and documented. And, of course, those that planned this turmoil were all pardoned by Trump.
What you are doing is downplaying how serious J6 was. You want to act like just because it wasn't successful, it wasn't serious. Or that just because it might never have been completely successful, it wasn't serious. That is ridiculous.
The claim that J6 was a serious threat, by stringing one improbable event into what could have happened if a dozen additional improbable events also occurred, is the Democratic Party’s favorite conspiracy theory. Both sides have them.
Let's set aside everything else. Do you at least conceed that politicians lives were on the line.
Killing people wasn't necessary.
I still retain enough naive optimism to hope that, had it come to that, that distinction would have mattered.
Enough parts? A lot more than that.
And during a constitutional crisis, the people with their hands already on the levers of power have a huge advantage,
If everything is a constitutional crisis, nothing is.
Something to think about.
They killed people while storming the capitol. If hundreds of protesters getting their hands on all of our ballots, physically threatening our congressmen, is not a constitutional crisis, I don't know what the hell is. Perhaps you should take your own advice. You can only say "you're overreacting" so much before people realize we can't rely on you to evaluate risk.
I'm not sure what it was, but it surely wasn't a coup.
They do, but Congress and the Supreme Court selected by Congress together define who this figure is. There is no sign that the military was prepared to defy either.
The same is true about the sitting president and some of his staunch supporters repeatedly "joking" about, and alluding to a third term[1][2][3][4] - including merch[5].
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-te...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5104133-rep-andy-ogles-pr...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-jokes-ru...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9-ft4BvHTE
[5] https://citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2025/04/29/trump-...
Plus I thought one of trump's things was "no more BS". Is that not a thing anymore?
Don't know what to say, P2025 was definitely the plan. A third term is flooding the zone with distractions. And if by some twist of fate it's his intent, the earliest you can do anything about it is midterms. Before that we will have had pivotal moments on tariffs, Ukraine/NATO, DOGE, and due process.
How am I supposed to distinguish between that and his rhetoric around 2028? How do we know it’s “flooding the zone” and not serious?
Well a good first step would be to not take his word on anything. Why on earth would you have any faith in his P2025 denials?
The danger is here. Due process is being denied, inch by inch.
You know, probably not? It's not particularly comforting to know that democracy will probably survive in 2028.
> Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]?
Did Yoon Suk Yeol seriously think that temporarily obstructing a National Assembly vote would make it impossible for them to end his coup? Yes, and so did the National Assembly - they worked hard to get into the legislative chamber, and once they got in they refused to leave until they were sure the coup was defeated. If the January 6 mob had made it onto the floor while it was in session, and "convinced" even a subset of Congress that they need to say Trump won the election, he would not have agreed to leave office on January 20th.
Literally everyone sat in fear for our republic that day as we watched that happened. What were you doing?
Someone asked what is the car model with the most American parts right now? We will make everyone meet that benchmark or better.
But Ford can probably get the USA content for gas-powered Mustangs up from 80% to 85%. The electric version is made in Mexico, but once Ford's Blue Oval City plant in Tennessee comes up in 2027, that will move to the US.
Of course, who knows where Trump will be by then.
If they were allowed to the US market we know what would happen here.
I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.
I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.
I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.
There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.
It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.
The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.
If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.
Good grief. There are times when I read some posts and it is like reading youtube comments under madtv skit 'apple i-rack' asking what it means... how do you not know what it means?
Good grief, this is just an axiomatic belief, then. No evidence will sway you one way or another.
But that doesn't mean they have enough power to influence the president and to correct course.
Fine. Let us have it your way.
What does it mean?
Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.
They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.
But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.
This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.
I don't mean the damage isn't consequential. What I mean is he has very obvious and simple motivations and reactions. For the purposes of somehow dealing with him, it's not all that important that "he might do anything". It seems obvious that anyone who wants to deal with him should take that as given and move right past worrying about what he might do and assume that he will, for sure, do anything. But he will do so for completely basic reasons and in response to completely basic stimuli.
A bullfighter completely antagonizes the bull into a frothing unthinking frenzy, on purpose, and owns the bull.
The bull is actually totally predictable and manipulable, and not because the bull can be reasoned with.
Musk and some few on the right are the only ones not being complete idiots about handling him. They are getting everything they want from operating him.
The left probably can't play that same trick since they probably can't figure out ways to tell him he's great and get leftie things out of him. Or forget left & right just business where they're all assholes, everyone can't play the same suck-up game. Musk is apparently doing suck-up without looking like a weak begger suck-up. Or he's allowing himself to look like just enough of a beta to keep Trump from feeling threatened, yet, like how his maga hat isn't red. Flouting the uniform, yet, not. It's probably a fine line there. And there is only room for a few magic pretend-beta slots. Trump will simply not give good behavior to very many people no matter what they say, so if all 100 people in his circle were all the perfect suck-up, still only a couple will get what they want and the rest get pissed on.
So anyone that didn't happen to win that lottery (or just weren't as good as Musk at that game) will have to go the other way which is poking him with a stick.
But they aren't. In the left vs right arena the left just continues to try to use rational arguments and appeals to reason on people who don't give a shit about that. Just who are the dummies when it comes down to that?
Though I wasn't originally intending to talk left or right but just about chaos impacting business and these supposed hard nosed rutheless powerful captains of the world just letting it happen. They only care about one thing, and he's burning that one thing by the billions, and they are...what? Nothing?
So when I say "I can only assume they are somehow ok with it" I mean there must be things I don't know. Like ultimately this doesn't really hurt Bezos and the like all that much. Like they make money on whatever happens somehow. Or they think longer term and they are ready to absolutely gorge themselves on some kind of bounce back in a couple years because they are somehow positioned exactly right. Like how at a smaller scale how Equifax ultimately made a shit ton of new money as a result of having their web site hacked. Maybe all the Bezos's of the country are just arms dealers who make out no matter what.
I don't know. Perhaps everyone's right and they are all tools no better equipped than myself. But I just think that's a kind of stupid take. Some probably are, and some surely are not. I am quite sure I can not solve Apple's Trump problem better than Tim. I simply wonder, what the heck are they doing? It looks from here on the ground like they aren't doing anything. But I can only assume that just means I can't see anything that matter from here, and don't know how to read what I can see.
Honestly, I feel kinda conflicted. From one point, I always looked up to the American values, and way of life. But it's becoming increasingly misaligned with my own values and the things I find important in life.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/part-583-american-automobile-labeling-...
There's a mall that closed and, for a while, there were hundreds parked in that lot waiting to be sold (and they were).
If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
I'm sure the targeted aspect of that one is applauded by the same side that is unhappy about this tariff.
At least in the tariff case, it's an objective numerical target and probably even achievable by other manufacturers. Ford is only 5% away from the target for some of its models.
I am not even sure how impactful it is, that Washington state does something different. Like ... Are things built or sold there by a large amount? What makes Washington state special? And what are their intentions? And can their lower level rules actually override what is decided at the country level by Trump's gang?
It is bad enough, that people have to deal with hearing about all the crazy stuff the orange clown or his henchmen do on a daily basis. There is a limit to how much people want to deal even more with political stuff from the US, you know?
Did his competitors do something similar in Washington?
To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?
Also, why is the Model S is stuck at 80%?
Ford will quickly get to 85%, but you can’t deny this is yet again a move that is touted as “pro-America” yet somehow mainly benefits Musk (or Trump or someone in their orbit).
If Tesla was writing these rules, surely they'd have chosen the 80% threshold instead.
I doubt they see the Ford Mustang as being in their same target market, and wouldn't be a reason to increase the standard.
The fact that Elon Musk is personally involved in the decision making and cabinet level discussions and personally benefits immensely- and exclusively- from this special carve out looks like rank corruption on the surface and at face value. Any other administration in history would be investigated until the cows come home if something comparable had ever happened. Even if it somehow eluded the rule makers that they exempted 95% of one companies sales to the exclusion of all other companies and that companies CEO had curried extensive favor with the administration and this was a mistake, the appearance of gross impropriety and conflicts of interest should cause a rapid reset and roll back. I suspect, however, it will not be rolled back, and that they were entirely aware of what they were doing. This is what kleptocracy looks like.
I think as people feel financially squeezed, they get less strict on how to get by. This leads to acceptance of "take the money and run." The loss of the middle class is the source of many woes.
Otherwise I don't see any other rule that would ask the foreign company to move most of it's workforce and production capacity.
Search for "laptop" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_power_connector#Listin...
Same for all the smaller dedicated devices (audio recorders, camera, controllers etc.)
Those didn't go the barrel plug route in the first place to allow for charging through the same port, and would have been a loophole if barrel was mandated. USB-C was honestly the only option that made sense IMHO.
Most of those used either USB or a barrel plug depending on their size.
raspberry pi, e-readers
USB.
Same for all the smaller dedicated devices (audio recorders, camera, controllers etc.)
Many of those use smaller barrel plugs, appropriate for their lower voltage.
The main problem with USB-C is the tiny fragile connector (search for images of "bent USB-C"), and the fact that it's a standard that tries to be what should really be a bunch of separate standards. It's hard to get a barrel plug wrong. It's too easy to get USB-C wrong, and cause damaged devices:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713713
Besides, apple are one of the decision makers in the usb c standard, the legislation mandated a standard, but not a specific one, just the same one for all, and this forum which includes apple decided to go with usb c https://www.usb.org/members
The DSA is the part that applies to all companies in some way as well (things like the need for moderation and a way for people to reach you with complaints). The DMA is about the market and how to deal with monopolies.
Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?
Many companies like Honda are now moving part of domestic production to the US.
Come on. It’s blatant corruption in broad daylight. Don’t try and both sides it.
But to answer your question directly if Obama had declared a fake economic emergency to consolidate power to himself and used that emergency power to abruptly pass a series of sweeping tariffs with no clear strategy or messaging and then selectively rolled back some of those tariffs in a way that only benefitted a specific company. Yes. I would feel the same.
...or to create massive stock market front-running opportunities with plausible deniability.
"But, but, Hanlon's razor!". Sorry, but at this level of responsibility, incompetence equals malice.
We fscking all have to live with the consequences. That includes those of us who could not vote for an alternative.
Not only that, Trump is actively lying about negotiating them down [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-foreign-ministry-says-x...
There are two reasons to believe this is applicable here: 1. Trump has a track record of quid pro quos (Adelson being a salient example). Musk is definitely seeking his pound of flesh 2. Lutnick urged people to buy Tesla (shocking and explicit favoritism) The view that this is just incentivizing local production is naive.
The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.
The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.
This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.
Remember when Oklahoma‘s requirements for a new school bible coincidently where only met by the Trump bible?
You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.
Not that your point is entirely invalid, just that I think the context is probably different (though I'm not sure exactly what EU comments you're referring to).
Given such visible conflicts of interest, the administration should be bending over backwards to dispel perceptions of impropriety. The fact that they aren't, and that these coincidences keep occurring, should be telling.
This administration's policy decisions aren't particularly stable.
* Bogus emergency is up for review
* Congress discussing stripping power
* Constitutionality in question
* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up
Yes, you can. Such a law cannot direct punishment or assign guilt to a particular individual or entity without a judicial trial, or it would violate the Bill of Attainder clause, but laws doing other things that apply to a specific named individual or entity are (unless they violate some other provision) Constitutional; in fact, in some cases they are necessary to satisfy other Constitutional rules.
Would be nice to see a technical definition for how the % imported is worked out.
85% of parts != 85% of cost
The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.
It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.
The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.
Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.
"Final" regulation: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.
Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)
Yeah, how dare they do the things that make reactionaries be... reactionary.
And it was inevitable that the more mainstream automakers would sell more evs then Tesla as EVs became a larger and larger share of cars sold. Granted it's taking longer than expected but Tesla is no longer the majority even if it's overall has a large plurality but falling pretty fast
They see themselves as the smartest, strongest, most clever people in history. They don't need some group moderating their plans, much less one made of people they hired. Any suggestion to the contrary is a strike against the natural order that they perceive reality through.
Further he really isn't a conservative. He's still running around on X talking about how we need to double the number of H1-B's and other social-left causes. Cutting spending through DOGE is something every Republican has talked about for decades, and I don't think it's a major flip for him to want to do that.
It's a school of thought so old that we barely recognize it anymore, but that's what he wants to return to. Lots of tech bros are into it.
That is the story the auto companies like to tell, to make unions look damaging to workers and communities. From what I've read, the migration had a lot to do with race. But regardless, do either of us have any evidence to share? (not me right now)
Similar things happened in most major industries. The other one I'm familiar with is GE Locomotive, who moved their engine facility to Grove City (which still never unionized), and now has a major facility in Fort Worth as well.
That's not what I mean. What I understand was that, in many cities (not just Detroit), racism led to the factories leaving.
One is that the auto manufacturers wouldn't hire black people into serious jobs - for a long time, all they could be was janitors, etc. I read one account that they went to local black leaders for recommendations and one person had a graduate degree - CPA or MBA, iirc. They got a dead-end clerical job or something like that.
Union workers were often actively hostile, even when union leadership welcomed them. Multiple times they walked out when one black person was hired.
Also, local racism crushed the black community, which would be the workforce. Redlining effectively prevented black people from living outside certain neighborhoods and prevented them from getting loans. They ended up packed into these neighborhoods, subject to white slumlords who charged exhorbident rents. Schools were awful. With little education, no money, no access to credit, and even if you overcame all that, no opportunity for career. Don't forget police brutality, race riots against blacks everywhere, lynchings in the South, etc.
There is more I'm not remembering atm.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
Tesla is now above that price from March again. Orangehorseshoe loves Tesla!
https://www.americanautomakers.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/...
Otoh, I listened to conservative ratio the other day and the general tone was "good, he is making them mad and he doesn't care."
If that's the way policy decisions are going to be made every time conservatives come to power in the US, then it's best that the rest of the world not go down with the US when the time comes.
Major effect of Trump's trade war is yet to be felt. I think Americans' perception of Trump will get much worse soon, and Tesla's brand image will follow suit. A tariff exemption is cute but I don't think that's enough to save Tesla.