I believe Drew Magary, at Defector, speaks for all of us:
Hmm, it appears that the nation’s economy is collapsing at Timberwolves-like speed. That big fat trade war that the U.S. launched a few days ago has quickly proven to have the opposite of its intended(?) effect, with every market plunging and every American’s last dollar being fed into a paper shredder. Let’s see what the man responsible for starting that tariff-off has to say about the crisis at hand:
“These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass… They are dying to make a deal.” The president went on to mock the tariff-deal supplicants, pretending to be them as he pitifully pleaded in a simpering voice: “Please, Sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, Sir.”
Oh, shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. Is that so hard? Why can’t you shut up for just two seconds? What, will you break your fucking arm somehow if you accidentally encounter silence? What kind of old man talks this much? When I’m your age, I’ll say a grand total of eight words a year, and those eight words will be the most profound shit you’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, we got President Dumptruck here getting blasted with the makeup cannon and then taking the stage to spew jabberwocky like this:
Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy; it would have been a much different story.
None of that is true. But what do you care, Chatty Cathy? All that matters to you is that you keep flapping your big meaty lips until even folks on the West Coast can smell the day-old quarter pounder with cheese on your breath. Every time you open your mouth, you make everything worse. You order toast for breakfast and the hotel’s kitchen suddenly bursts into flames. Donald Sterling is in sheer awe of your anti-powers. Your voice is its own tax…
And the worst part is that all of the meatbags working for you won’t stop talking, either! That means you, Karoline Leavitt. What do you have to say now that even Elon Musk is unhappy with this tariff shit?
These are obviously two individuals who have very different views on trade and on tariffs. Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue. And you guys should all be very grateful that we have the most transparent administration in history.
Oh, shut the fuck up. The two boys you’re talking about here have a combined age of 131. I’m a boy compared to these zombies, and I got hair in my ears longer than the hair on your head. Just because we have freedom of speech doesn’t mean you need to use it every. Waking. Second. Know what I mean? Of course you don’t. You’re too busy talking on speakerphone while you’re taking a shit…
And what about President Asshole’s little chipmunk sidekick, JD Vance? Where you at, hillbilly boy? I bet you’re shitting your diaper now that your bossman has cost all of your benefactors billions of dollars. You gonna try to help us out? Oh, you’re doing the racism thing. Brilliant. Fan-fucking-tastic. Top notch effort from you, Middletown. Please shut the fuck up. We all know that you already regret taking this gig, kid. We saw your texts, BECAUSE YOU COULDN’T EVEN KEEP THOSE PRIVATE. Oh, thank god for the transparency! Now I’ll be able to see when Xi Jinping is about to nuke us! #Blessed!None of you people were built for this. You’re all unqualified, overwhelmed, and dumber than a post. And you think that standing behind a mic and going Hurrr durrr every other country has a smaller dick than us because of these policies will make you Patton. Well, President Kidney Failure, telling everyone you’re the greatest leader who ever led doesn’t make it so. Quite the contrary. People voted for you because they were bored. Now you’re gonna bleed them dry, all while small-talking them to death. Don’t you ever get tired of talking? Don’t you run out of saliva? Is there a strategic gland reserve that you and your cronies are skimming from to keep your maws properly lubricated? You pieces of shit are wasting words, and that offends me as a professional wordsmith. I choose my words carefully before writing them down, because that’s what people are supposed to do. They are not meant to be sentient word clouds, crying “FREEDOM!” the second a process server knocks on their door…
martha
Anne Laurie, so good to see your post, hope you’re on the mend. And, thank you for Drew’s rant. I don’t smoke but I just took a big slug of wine. And I’m so stealing President Dump Truck…
Professor Bigfoot
Oh, SNAP!
phdesmond
nice writing!
Rich2506
Was busy this week, but here’s my post on last week’s demonstration. pastphotoessays.blog/2025/04/11/hands-off-protest/
bbleh
People are flattering him 24-7, he’s getting more bribes than he can count, he’s in the news everywhere, and perhaps most importantly, he is getting sweet sweet revenge on all those people who he thinks disrespected him.
That he can do this is catnip to his base, who want to be like him.
That his whims and delusions are wrecking things for just about everybody (people who are clued into his tariff pronouncements far enough ahead of time to profit from market fluctuations perhaps excepted) Does. Not. Matter. to him. That much of the country, and even his devoted base, will be left high and dry (or low and soaked to the bone) Does. Not. Matter. to him (see, eg, the areas hit by Helene in western NC). That he has done much to wreck nearly a century of careful stewardship of America’s world leadership role Does. Not. Matter. to him.
Nothing to be done about it. Might as well tell the wind to shut up. Alas.
SpaceUnit
I used to read Drew on Deadspin before that whole joint went down the shitter.
Suzanne
LOL.
This is a thing I actually think about lots of people. Like, aren’t you too old to babble?
Scout211
I always enjoy a Drew Magary commentary. He does not mince words. And his anti-Trump rants are always spot on.
He also writes for SFGate and today he published a review of Netflix’s Adolescence.
Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ is a dire warning about male rage
After reading that review, I’m kind of glad that I don’t have a Netflix subscription.
MagdaInBlack
Oh that was glorious, A.L.
Thank you so much, I needed that =-)
Martin
I mentioned this a few days ago but I’ll repost.
There is a fundamental law of economics that Trump is running up against, called Triffin’s Dilemma.
Essentially, if you are the global reserve currency (which the US is) you are responsible for providing liquidity of dollar to the world so that they have that currency to conduct trade and so on. Essentially the US is forced to operate as a kind of limited Federal Reserve for the planet. The mechanism for distributing those dollars can be anything, but the least expensive mechanism is via trade deficits. Another mechanism is holding US debt because if we’re settling our trade imbalances in dollars, now China has a bunch of dollars that it may not need – so it invests those in the US because we have lots of things you can buy here with dollars, like Treasuries (see Japan in the 90s, same dynamic). We need to hand out dollars, and at least with trade we get back goods and services for those dollars.
The dilemma comes when you don’t want to make that trade-off, which is what Trump is announcing. He wants the trade deficit to hit zero. Okay, we can do that, but we are guaranteed to lose the position of reserve currency unless we replace that with a different mechanism, like just handing out cash as foreign aid. And so that’s why people are saying to look at the bond markets. If the US is going to cut off the flow of dollars to serve as reserve currency, then nations will need to find an alternative, which will mean less demand for US treasuries, which will mean paying more to borrow, and will eventually mean that the US will need to acquire the new reserve currency which will put us on the opposite side of whoever else’s central bank decisions, as right now, if we want more dollars to lubricate the global markets, we get to decide whether or not to print them. We’d be giving up that authority and we’d be at the whims of other nations.
Put aside his strategy or lack thereof, his desire for more manufacturing, and all of that. Trump, completely unknowingly, is toying with this central dilemma in economics and expecting he can win both sides of it, and that’s simply impossible. If this dilemma can be centered in our discussions, it shapes which direction would be preferable for the US to pursue, and what policies the US should have to mitigate the other side of that. None of that is happening, and I suspect 5 years from now CNN will surface it and say ‘yo, did you know there was a law of economics that forced that shitty outcome? Whodaknown?’
NeenerNeener
A new, fresh hell….All Social Security communications are moving to X, at least according to The Daily Beast.
SW
Here here.
LAC
Beautifully written and i am glad to see that this is getting posted instead of earlier vapours about someone (bravo, Jasmine Crockett) calling out these enabling cretins. Motor mouth mussolini and his crew can go to hell and stay there.
hitchhiker
I feel that so hard.
Sad today, thinking about how the normal world assumed we’d made a stupid brexit-style blunder in 2016, and that we’d get our shit together.
Now they all know this is a place where stupidity is in the water, and whatever happens between now and the end of my life in 10 or 15 years won’t be because the big bad USA wanted it. It will be what someone else wants.
Who knows, maybe that will work out.
Scout211
bbleh
@NeenerNeener: also heard — is this true? — that they are ceasing phone support operations and all contact must be electronic or in-person.
Just the thing for America’s Seniors!
Could there be any clearer evidence that they just want people to die already?
Raoul Paste
@Martin: That’s really sobering, and I bet Putin understands this phenomenon.
Mike in Pasadena
Anne Laurie, thanks for the post, but it is more important for you to heal up. Take care of Anne.
MagdaInBlack
@NeenerNeener: So I’d have to have a xhitter account to get any notifications?
(that ain’t happening)
Scout211
@NeenerNeener:
Link
I think we will still get our newsletter and email updates as recipients, though. It sounds like this affects news releases and public information releases.
Also:
NotMax
FYI #1 (emphasis mine).
FYI #2.
FYI #3 (mentioned this video yesterday; if confirmed as an officially greenlit policy, a despicable, devastating development).
RED ALERT: TRUMP IS COMING AFTER ME
bbleh
@bbleh: ah, okay, they were GONNA do it but they backed off. GOOD!
finance.yahoo.com/news/social-security-administration-backs-off-plan-to-cut-phone-service-181403247.…
Martin
@NeenerNeener: Reminder of Curtis Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment ideology of which Vance and Musk are sympathetic to.
Musks aspiration for Twitter has always been that of gov-corp.
This is why I’m turning off of dystopian sci-fi, because these guys watch that shit in order to get ideas. We gotta stop feeding them that. I saw Rollerball as a kid, too, and didn’t see it as aspirational, but the 5% of society which are sociopaths will.
Betty
Oh, a thing of beauty. He speaks for millions, possibly billions.
Spanky
And very fine words they are, in the most cromulent order.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
I read what you wrote about Triffin’s Dilemma the other day, but I appreciate seeing it again – the repetition will help it sink a bit deeper into my brain.
There oughta be a triffid joke somewhere in here though, and I can’t quite put it together. 😁
hells littlest angel
@Scout211:
Adolescence is absolutely brilliant.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Martin:
I have seen numerous conservatives say that want to crash the markets, wiping them out to about half of where they are. They believe that this will discourage the world from using the US dollar as a reserve currency. They believe that this is holding our economy back.
They think they are intelligent and so do other people.
NeenerNeener
I did find it a tough watch though. The rage really was unnerving.
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: And you remind me of something else: one of the other responsibilities of the owner of the reserve currency, the medium of exchange for international trade, is that when and if crises come, they need to be the lender of last resort for partner and client countries’ central banks. That means opening swap lines with all those central banks. I remember reading that a key reason the Great Depression was so deep, is that that didn’t happen, and some banks in Europe fell as a result. I can -just- see that if we suffer another real crisis, Trump will not allow those swap lines to open, will not allow the Fed to bail out those banks. Sigh.
And we’ll get something far worse than we would have otherwise.
Martin
@Raoul Paste: Every government economist understands this phenomenon. If you see someone screaming ‘watch the bond markets!’ you can probably trust they understand this phenomenon as well.
I’m not an economist, but this is a first order effect which is not hard to understand. How you mitigate this stuff through fiscal and trade policy and the 2nd order effects and so on is all big-H hard ask a proper economist stuff. But if we are not contextualizing the trade stuff in this very straightforward dilemma, which only applies to the US. And note, did not apply to the US prior to 1931, the year the dollar was adopted as the reserve currency, and even that took some time, and even then the dollar was backed by gold, so it was really gold liquidity that was at issue, and many people could just mine their own gold. It wasn’t until Nixon in 1971 taking the US off of the gold standard that the only way to provide liquidity to global markets was by the US taking responsibility to print and distribute enough dollars, which could also be done to some degree by proxy through pumping and trading oil.
So you can’t even compare McKinley tariffs to modern ones or even Hoover tariffs to modern ones. It’s a completely different system now that responds very differently.
TONYG
Politics aside — the fact that approximately half the people in this country like to look at and listen to this asshole just shows how evil and stupid this country is.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
This connection may seem like a bit of a stretch, but this idea of gov-corp guaranteeing freedom reminds me of why the Fairness Doctrine was never applied to cable TV: they thought so many channels would ensure that all significant viewpoints got represented. And we know how well that worked out.
Likewise, I’m sure that in practice, a gov-corp world would just give people their choice of multibillionaire-owned dystopias.
bbleh
@Martin: @Raoul Paste: rhetorical question I suppose, but does anyone think anybody with any influence at the WH knows this, or in the unlikely case they do, will ever mention it?
He doesn’t care, so they don’t care. And frankly, next to wrecking NATO and the federal government and the US retirement system, undermining the dollar as the world reserve currency is … kinda bad.
Chetan Murthy
@lowtechcyclist: These dumbfucks don’t understand collective action problems. I remember once reading that hockey players, when asked whether they’d wear helmets, mostly said “no, b/c no helmet means I get an edge in the game”. But when asked if they’d vote to -outlaw- helmetless play, they said “yes, of course” b/c it’s safer. The point being, mandating helmets was something only a third party could do: each individual player would of course choose helmet less.
The same is true of these city-corps: they’ll all end up despicable, all end up polluting, thieving etc, even if that’s a worse equilibrium than if all of them played nice. B/c each of them have incentives that lead them to bad acts. But some larger actor (a -government-) could force them all to behave better, and they’d all benefit from that.
Sheesh, it’s not complicated, it’s been fucking obvious for a century, and yet these libertarians don’t get it.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
The key difference between business and regulated capitalism.
Peale
@Martin: Ah, yes. Pre-enlightenment Medieval times. Known for mobility. And not sacking cities to take their stuff.
So how much “voting with your feet” are these corporations going to allow before they make their peasants sign non-compete agreements and erect guilds so that foreigners can’t just set up a business.
zhena gogolia
@TONYG: They don’t. They don’t watch him. That’s why they voted for him.
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, we have taken the idea that competition in commodity markets will lead to lower prices and extended it so far past where it’s sensible or where observation suggests it would work that the larger plot has truly been lost.
And yes, these gov-corps are absolutely the most dystopian bullshit you will find being advanced by people that have any kind of power. Note that’s only happening inside of spaces that Musk influences probably with an assist by Vance. Navarro is doing something completely different as is Trump. The only thing keeping this from getting really scary is that these guys have competing agendas and so in the Brownian motion of stupidity that is the Trump administration, we drift very slowly.
Martin
@Peale: As if the cost of relocating your job, family, house, and worldly possessions is zero.
RaflW
He’s such an arrogant idiot. Does he think people abroad don’t hear what he says? That no nation has pride or self-respect? His narcissistic personality disorder suggests that he doesn’t think about any of that. But I’m confident that P.M.s including Macron, Ishiba and Modi, not to mention China’s President Xi, are not amused by such moronic bluster.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: This is true. All they see are the curated clips on fox.
Kelly
@hells littlest angel: I concur, Adolescence is absolutely brilliant.
Tehanu
So he’s saying that that the U.S. government was paid for by other countries from 1776 until 1913? And the right way to fund our government is to have some other country pay for it? WTF?
bbleh
@Chetan Murthy: at least as I have understood such of their ranting as I can bear to listen to, they don’t acknowledge the EXISTENCE of anything “collective” — interest, action or anything else.
Those I have met tend to have been raised comfortably and in sheltered environments and generally ignorant of history. They simply don’t have much understanding of the value of collective interest or action, nor indeed much empathy as individuals.
Scout211
Oh I don’t doubt that at all. It’s just not something I can watch right now.
Peale
@Tehanu: I mean, that’s not how it was done in 19th century America. So the model here is really, IDK, Assyria, where the US just threatens to invade and sack your country if you don’t send 1,000 of your best cows and 3 mules laden with goals to Washington DC each Spring. I think the reason he’s picking on Canada and Mexico is that they are closer and have cows and mules.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: I want to know who enforces the rule that the gov-corps all allow easy exit. Historically authoritarian governments usually don’t just let people leave if they think they need their labor, or their uteruses, etc.
Chetan Murthy
@Peale: The funny (ok, it’s not funny, it’s tragic, b/c so many people are harmed) part is that what we had -already- is pretty much that: people send us stuff, and we send them bits of green paper that we can make for cheeeep cheeeep. Hell, after a while we stopped sending them paper, and just change numbers in a database table in New York.
If that isn’t imperial tribute I don’t know what is.
Peale
@hells littlest angel: As is Weak Hero Class 1. Although that’s more entertaining. But I think watching them as a pair would be worth a discussion as to what the problem is.
Peale
@Chetan Murthy: Even the goddamn Assyrians knew that you didn’t force the places you conquered to stop making stuff and buy your own stuff. Otherwise there’d be no mules with gold and then where would you be. But that’s what Navarro apparently wants. And Lutnick with his “Europe. You buy our chickens and don’t raise your own chickens the way you want to raise them, because we’re the best chicken makers and don’t try to find the money to buy those chickens by selling us luxury vehicles.”
Peale
@Matt McIrvin: Its not so much that we can vote with our feet. Its that we can open the gates when inevitably one of the less prosperous city states that has decided to put its effort into a standing armor comes knocking at the city walls.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: <waves hands furiously> Don’t worry about that – it’ll sort itself out.
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: Their choice of billionaire-owned plantations.
Nukular Biskits
Good evenin, y’all.
p.a.
I like the apocryphal (posted by ? recently)
Reporter: Mr President, of the 35,000 lies you’ve told Americans, which is your favorite?
Preznit: I don’t lie.
Reporter: That’s mine too!
Trollhattan
Drew Magary has been bringing the receipts a good long while. We nearly lost him and thank God he got a do-over because I need this.
Ohio Mom
@Scout211: So the plan is to flag just about every mishap the beneficiary or their payee reports by phone? That will just slow down solving them. Which of course is the point.
I suspect a lot of those mishaps will involve disabled people because everything having to do with disability is complicated and full of arcane rules.
We’ve had one big mix-up with Ohio Son’s benefits when he left SSI to go on SSDI, first on my retirement account (I retired first), then on Ohio Dad’s (larger) retirement account.
I don’t think it could have started to be untangled if we couldn’t have sat down with a Social Security staff person and walked her through the paperwork and the numbers.
There were a couple of other mishaps but they weren’t complicated. I barely remember them.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
Lucky for it to be something that seemingly bucolic.
Bupalos
There is such an art to crystallizing and relaying that kind of low common denominator reaction we ALL (here) have in such perfect, elegant terms.
Roth is the best popular writer in America maybe. It’s nice that the commoners have their own Betty Cracker. Warms my heart.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: for sure, but there is a clock running on that kind of thing. I mean, you’re right, but it’s not completely insane for folks to ask “wait tho, how does all this end??? Where is it going?” Because what you described doesn’t actually make human sense, right?
how would you answer someone who said “the national debt can’t just go up forever. People don’t trade everything for nothing. At some point….”
RaflW
@Tehanu: Trump is 109% dug in that the exporting country “pays the tariff.” It’s idiotic, of course. Even if the exporting country pays the money to the US treasury, it’s not like that isn’t instantly added to the cost of production. So the end consumer pays the tariff. But Doltmaster Trump will not accept that things work the way they obviously do. He’s unteachable, arrogant, and deeply stupid.
Bupalos
@Bupalos: Yikes this is Drew Margary. Yeah he shocks me sometimes too but also BETTY CRACKER!!!
NotMax
Remember the Mainers: federal judge orders restoration of Title IX funds.
Bupalos
@RaflW: He knows how this works and he knows the political language to use.
We have to grow up from this “he’s so stupid” thing because what it also means is “no problem to beat him.” It absolutely makes no difference whether he’s “stupid” or not and there is no concrete reality to that question and 200 years from now there will be none and they will be theorizing as much about your need to call him stupid as his particular handicaps.
Here’s the reality. He is saying “they pay” because that is emotional shorthand for ‘damaging their economy by denying them the market.’ And that is the level most people operate on, emotional shorthand. He’s fucking good at it.
And it’s probably more “true” than — or at least more…to the point than — anything our side is saying. People have no idea how much “at least he tried something” has political resonance and “they tried to make it stay the same” is a political death-wish.
This emotional shorthand is his native language.
Because he’s an insane, damaged, singular human.
BUT he benefits when we all do this HAW HAW so stupid thing, OK? Like the HAW HAW thing that we do is literally why he is currently the most powerful person in the world and how he bonds with his base.
That’s why we’re talking about him, that’s how he’s outmaneuvered us. That’s the whole deal.
That thing you’re doing is why he has a super power. But we won’t let it go. It feels so good.
stinger
@RaflW:
And since sales tax is a percentage of the cost of an item, we’ll be paying more in taxes as well.
Peale
@RaflW: Navarro seems 100% dug in that he can get Europe and about 170 other countries to scrap their VAT taxes, or get US companies exempt from having to pay them. And who knows…force them to give US cars a break at the gas pump because its just not fair that Detroit designs cars for a market that where gas is less expensive and where culturally real men don’t care about gas prices while every place else has to design cars to take into account that their consumers have to pay $7-$10 per gallon to fill up. Oh and while your at it, its not fair that the Europeans use those taxes to provide health insurance for their workers at less cost than US companies can so he wants them to scrap that as well. I’m sure the world will get right on those demands and their parliaments will vote to show how wrong they are to structure their laws. And this wouldn’t look like colonialism at all.
Its just so unfair. Everywhere everyone is ripping us off!
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Martin: please don’t step into traffic, however tempting it may be after reading the news, because we need your wit.
Martin
@Peale: I did yell at him a lot, and may have once called him an asshole. It would suck if this was all my fault.
Bupalos
Just a reminder that I just got reminded of:
BERNIE SANDERS WON MICHIGAN IN 2015.
The institutional Dem reaction was (essentially)…. Rage. We’ve been doing slight variations on failure since then, or before then. AOC is right there for you. That direction is still available, but the window is shrinking.
chemiclord
@Bupalos: He won in 2016… and was thumped handily in 2020.
Because it turns out, voters more hated a woman than they liked Bernie.
Timill
@Bupalos: Huh? There was no presidential primary anywhere in 2015.
Bupalos
@Peale: this is an effective counter “we’re being ripped off” narrative. This post. It really is. But the difference is no one cares enough, no one cares like 500MM.. to make this argument the way arguments I guess have to be made.
Bupalos
@Timill: spring I guess. 2016 but before the real 2016 election season. The ramps were still up.
Timill
@Bupalos: Yes. But if they get a simple, checkable, detail like that wrong, can you trust anything else they say?
Bupalos
@chemiclord: Hillary lost because she was a woman eh? Probably that’s why Kamala too eh? Had nothing to do with Biden, or the difference between the status quo and change. Despite every incumbent everywhere in the world losing, in the US what determined it (because we’re exceptional) was sexism. After she instantly bettered the numbers of the white male candidate.
guys, the reason we lose is because of the racism and sexism. And that will never change, so let’s just concentrate on addressing our loneliness. Signed, depoliticized blob drifting towards numbness.
Bupalos
@Timill: No. For sure. Don’t trust them/us.
There are no significant lessons to learn ever, other than what we always and have always and will always know. X is bad. Y is good. WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP TRYING TO MESS THIS UP?????
GunagDean
Excellent share. read the whole piece and its worth it.
sab
So this lastelection we voted to lose our place as the i ternational reserve currency. Oops.
I do hope the Murdoch fsmily is badly invested. I have in the last week lost $50,000 in retirement savings. Falls about$1000 per day. We bought a house last year and spent a lot on fixing it up. Glad we did. The house price was high, but the repairs and improvements were a bargain compared to the new tariff prices.
chemiclord
@Bupalos: Yeah, kinda. Misogyny is a real thing. Unless you want to believe Biden somehow managed to deliver Bernie’s message better than Bernie did.
And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge just south of St. Ignace I’m looking to sell…
Kayla Rudbek
@NotMax: and they have been cutting the non-patent literature search tools at the Patent Office. So big pharmaceutical companies and other chemical and biochemical industries are going to run into a lot of trouble with their patent applications here in the US being weaker (European Patent Office, Korean IP Office, China, Taiwan, and Japan will not be having any of that nonsense) because DOGE let the subscriptions for the chemical search tools expire.
Chetan Murthy
@chemiclord: I don’t understand all these Bernie dead-enders. I mean, I -agree- with all his policy positions, but it’s -eminently- clear that he should -never- be let near any position as the leader of an important and large organization: he proved decisively that he has absolutely abysmal judgment in choosing and supervising subordinates. And that is one of the two most important tasks of a chief executive.
Bernie dead-enders: whaddayagonnadoooooooo
Benno
@Martin: this is…helpful. I find macroeconomics bewildering. I’ve personally met one economist in my entire career with whom I enjoy speaking about their work (and I am not counting public intellectual econs like Krug or Piketty), and I work in a country positively infested with economists. And I care about this stuff. I pay attention and genuinely try! But gods above, this stuff is cosmic dullness cloaked in math. The worst!
Kayla Rudbek
@Martin: these are the people who would read Lois McMaster Bujold and totally be on the side of Jackson’s Hole (the laizzez-faire capitalism run amok to the point where they perform brain transplants into clones of rich people paying for it ie murdering the clone and putting a old person’s brain into the young murder victim’s body) and/or the Cetagandan Empire where genetic engineering is an art form and conquering other inhabited planets in order to get new genetic material is a-ok.
sab
@sab: We didn’t know that was what we were voting for. Most of our voters didn’t even understamd what that was. But here we are, and most of us don’ t know that we are here.
chemiclord
@Chetan Murthy: I also agree with most of his policies. Fuck, I’m damn near to the left of most of his policy positions.
But I also know that my positions aren’t even nearly remotely close to anything resembling a majority, and that Bernie’s appeal has less to do with him, and more to do with him being “Not [x].”
Trying to square how Bernie ran neck and neck with Hillary Clinton, but got resoundingly spanked by Biden after the South Carolina primaries leaves us with one of two conclusions:
1) Biden delivered Bernie’s message better than Bernie did.
or
2) People were voting more against Hillary than they were for Bernie.
One of those is outright farcical on its face, but good luck getting Bernie’s supporters to accept the alternative.
Interesting Name Goes Here
@chemiclord: COVID and George Floyd are why Biden got to take office. I’m fully convinced of that at this point. If those events hadn’t happened, Bernie’s supporters would have gladly stirred up enough shit to throw 2020 to Trump. It’s all they know how to do.
Martin
US beef exports to China have stopped entirely. Pork and chicken haven’t yet, but China is grabbing other markets pretty fast.
We’re going to have to earn that business back.
rikyrah
Hi AL👋🏾👋🏾👋🏾
rikyrah
@sab:
😪😪😪😪
Those phucking clowns ruining the bond market
gene108
Dumbass really believes foreign countries directly pay tariffs to the U.S. out of their treasury.
@hitchhiker:
I think in 2016 the rest of the world was flabbergasted that the person who got the most votes did not win, and wondered why we have an Electoral College that subverts the will of the people.
We fucked up on a technicality.
There’s no way to rationalizing 2024 results other than Trump is what the largest bloc of U.S. voters want. There’s no way to reassure the world that the next Republican president will be sane. Democrats would be sane, then replaced by insane Republicans. The rest of the world doesn’t want to deal with our uncertainty and wild political swings.
@Chetan Murthy:
The Federal Reserve did this during COVID. Trump and the Project 2025 goons weren’t paying attention to this then. They’ve had four years to plan.
gene108
@Bupalos:
There are many many different ways people demonstrate their intelligence. People can be brilliant in one area of expertise and hopeless in others.
Brilliant musicians probably are not very capable in math or science, for example.
Trump is a savant at using white grievance to get people to vote for him.
I don’t understand it, but I’m not an aggrieved white person.
Paul in KY
@bbleh: That was comforting…
Paul in KY
@Peale: Tried and true diplomacy there…
Jeezus,…
Paul in KY
@Bupalos: How about we just repeat “He’s playing you for chumps!!!”
That’s sorta emotionally and true also too.
sab
@gene108: Brilliant musicians usually are quite good at math. Sort of an overlapping of skill sets
ETA Modern classical music is much more math than melody.
artem1s
@Scout211: I think Netflix is surprisingly courageous to have that expose on male rage in their lineup. Beats the pablum and whitewashing and encouraging male rage that Prime has in its lineup daily.
Steve
@bbleh: Maybe if Dump Truck causes a violent kitchen disaster ordering breakfast he will get bumped off in an improbable way like in the Final Destination movies.