Comment by hayst4ck
4 days ago
These tariffs are a soft blockade carried out as part of a decapitation strike[1] against America.
Imagine you are Russia, and you want to stop American support of Ukraine or that you are China and you want to annex Taiwan. You can't enact a blockade or take military action against America yourself, but you can attempt to destroy us from within by compromising people in positions of power. Oligarchs have more in common with each other than with their countrymen.
This administration lies with the truth. It is true that there are trade deficits harmful to America and that not being able to produce our own masks is a national emergency, but enacting a policy like this is insanity. Those trade deficits are born out of financialization[2] which is a result of the exorbitant privilege[3] of managing the reserve currency.
I can't imagine anyone who writes software intuitively supporting this. Radical changes in policy/code break things. Maybe you do it with something vestigial, but would you do something like this to your databases? The economy, the beating heart of the country, is being put at risk.
[1]Timothy Snyder -- Decapitation strike: https://archive.is/1xkxK [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
It takes a truly wild level of being so mad at Trump that it makes you go full Reagan and extol the virtues of free trade and perpetual war to maintain the reserve currency.
Conversely, it must take a truly wild level of indifference towards American politics to watch globalism go up in flames and cheer. Regardless of where you stand on the aisle or how old you are, surely you can't feel much hope for America's economy watching the Apple supply chain capsize. The economy isn't scripted by Seth McFarlane, America's automotive business and manufacturing bases aren't going to start hiring again overnight.
America has supported perpetual war in Palestine for decades and will continue to do so regardless of how globalism fares. There is not an informed citizen in America that will take this rhetoric seriously, we treat Tel Aviv like they're fighting WWIII but can't spare Maxar access to Ukraine during an active conflict.
You want to associate globalism with conflict so badly, but you just can't deny that America will wage war regardless. It's tragic.
>watching the Apple supply chain capsize.
A professional geographer says that Apple is almost unique among major American corporations in how dependent they have chosen to become on Chinese manufacturing. The US economy is in fact much less dependent on international trade than places like China, Germany, the Netherlands and most of the developing nations are. This self-sufficiency of the US economy has been true for at least a century (with a notable exception that the US was dependent on oil imports from about 1960 to 2018, which had the full attention of the US national-security establishment because of how important access to oil is during war).
You don't hear about that much because the small parts of the US economy (mostly in the professional-managerial class) that profits the most from trade with China has been effective at convincing the public that the trade is more vital than it actually is. (Note that most Americans don't even know that the US economy is no longer dependent on oil imports.)
And Apple will survive their mistake.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but I'm even less a fan of the ideology that Mearsheimer calls "liberal hegemony" that is so quick to wage war on any non-democracy anywhere in the world no matter how tangential to American national security interests and no matter how awful and large the number who have died or become refugees in places like Iraq, Libya, Ukraine and Syria because of past applications of this ideological commitment.
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We voted to watch globalism go up in flames! Many of us thought Obama would do it but he turned out to be the consummate globalist.
Israel/Palestine is a unique situation, I’ll give you that. But I don’t think we must inexorably be “Team America: World Police.” I think our commitment to propping up the so-called “rules based international order” really is in service of free trade.
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Accusing someone of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a rhetorical technique to pathologize dissent -- to call dissent a sickness, an irrationality. You did all but use the term. You're presupposing my anger at disastrous policy decisions as irrational to ignore addressing the critique directly. You're putting words in my mouth about Reagan, free trade, or perpetual war. I don't support "free" trade or "free" markets. I believe regulation is necessary, regulation, meaning to control the speed or flow of. Trade or Market's can't be free, only people can be free, and I believe in regulating markets and trade to promote freedom for people.
I don't support war, but I also don't support neutrality. Justice requires taking a side in conflicts. Without solidarity, taking a side in disputes and being willing to sacrifice for the benefit of others, justice cannot prevail.
You know you are literally supporting the policy of someone who is threatening Greenland, Canada, and Panama while also arguing against perpetual war right? Smashing trade relations is a prelude to performing actions our trading partners would disapprove of.
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