Comment by wonnage
8 days ago
I've seen people use "sanewashing" to refer to the type of comment you're replying to, there's no sane explanation but people try to come up with one because the world doesn't make sense otherwise
8 days ago
I've seen people use "sanewashing" to refer to the type of comment you're replying to, there's no sane explanation but people try to come up with one because the world doesn't make sense otherwise
I think often trump's policies are rooted in some sort of idea that is perhaps controversial but at least not totally insane, and then implemented in the most boneheaded way possible.
E.g. one explanation given for these trade policies is that trump sees a war with china down the line and is worried that china has tons of factories that could be converted to make ammunition while usa does not.
If so, there is at least some logic to the base idea, but the implementation is crazy, probably not going to work that effectively, and going to piss off all amrrica's allies which would be bad if WW3 is really on the horizon.
1. US will never outproduce China in ammunition
2. Alienating allies won't help the US produce ammunition
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You're giving him too much credit.
Trump has always liked tariffs [alas, I can't find the source for this pre-presidency, its been blown out by current events]. He thinks trade is a zero sum game, and thinks that someone else set up the petro-dollar system.
Trump has consistently and reiliably always cowered away from war. Using other means to stop it (see russia, NK, China, Iran). Yes I hear the "we're going to invade x, y and z" but they never acutally came to anything (is that because of his advisors?)
Trump doesn't think about future capacity, only future pride. Does this change "make american stronger, and other weaker" is pretty much the only calculus that he's doing.
Trump's thinking is roughly as following:
"Why do we have taxes when we can use tariffs to raise cash and bring power back?"
"Why don't they buy from us?"(china/rest of asia)
"why are we spending money on them, when we don't get any money back? They are weak."(NATO)
"Why are we punishing russia, they are offering deals" (Putin offering cash deals)
There is no 4d chess. Its just a man who's pretty far gone, shitting out edicts to idiots willing to implement them.
> Trump has always liked tariffs [alas, I can't find the source for this pre-presidency, its been blown out by current events].
Here you go, Feb 2011: https://money.cnn.com/2011/02/10/news/economy/donald_trump_c...
"The comment repeated past statements from "The Apprentice" star, who has said he wants to put a 25% tariff on all Chinese imports, to level trade imbalances in the global economy."
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> [alas, I can't find the source for this pre-presidency, its been blown out by current events].
Doesn't help that Google's custom time range search is complete garbage. Searched for "trump tariffs" from 1/1/1980 to 1/1/2010 and almost every link is about the current tariffs but with timestamps between 1980 and 2010.
e.g. "20 Nov 1987 — President Donald Trump issued a slew of tariffs on Chinese goods", "30 Jun 1981 — Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced Monday a 25% increase on electricity exports to some American states as a result of President Donald Trump's tariffs", "31 Dec 1999 — IMF says too early for precise analysis on Trump tariff impact", "1 Feb 2001 — Trump's Global Tariff War Begins"
Did find a couple of links that were chronologically correct - a 1999 Guardian story about Trump wanting to tax the rich(!) and a 1987 NYT story about Reagan putting tariffs on Japan.
(duckduckgo was even worse)
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Trump's tariff mania goes back decades. There was an article about it in The Times a couple of days ago. Sadly, it's paywalled.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/why-trump-tar...
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It is the logic of schoolchildren. It is the simplistic logic of a teenager discovering Ayn Rand's wikipedia entry. (Grover Norquits came up with his tax pledge while in highschool.) The world is more complicated than any econ 099 exam.
The US are never going into a direct war with China, and China is never going into a direct war with the US. This is M.A.D in action.
At most we might see a proxy war over Taiwan (i.e. the US supporting and arming Taiwan, with sanctions against the PRC). The risk would then be a widespread disruption of global trade, at which point the US would not want to be dependent on the Chinese economy or factories in any way.
There is no logic to these things. This is the emperors new clothes, over and over again.
The proximate cause for these tariffs is not some future event. This is post fact rationalization.
The proximate cause is still the ongoing “information” war which determines the perceived reality that is litigated in elections.
Earlier politicians played theater, acting as if the red meat being fed to voters was real on TV, but dealing with reality as need be when it came to decision making.
This was a betrayal of voters, who saw their election efforts result in legislators who didnt do what they said.
Trump does what he says. He believes WWE is real, and acts as if it is. His base believes it is real, and now reality is crashing with the fiction.
The fiction will prevail, because his party has also been working to build the power to enact their will.
Everyone sees logic here, the same way that everyone saw the emperors clothes. The alternative is illogical.
This is the reason potential reasons “we dont know” have to be postulated (war / China can make more ammunition)
How will they project power into the Asia Pacific now they have tariffed their allies and probably forgotten about AUKUS?
I like this take a lot. I also think that America competing on manufacturing is obviously never going to happen.
Why is it obvious and why never?
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>Trump sees a war with china down the line
So is destroying diplomatic relations with all their allies and trying to force ceding of power in central Europe to a former enemy who is allied to China?
Go on with ya.
He's a prick saving himself from prison whilst being willingly used to establish an oligarchic fascist state from the former USA.
If you follow the logic of it, at least to the first order - fighting a two front war is bad, forcing europe to deal with russia frees up USA to focus on china. America's withdrawl from europe has made european states panic and re-arm, and you could argue that a well-armed europe that grudgingly helps america with a common enemy would be better than a poorly armed europe that uselessly helps willingly.
The second order effects of what he's doing are pretty obviously terrible for usa, but quite frankly i dont think trump is smart enough to see that.
[To be clear i think trump is stupid, but i don't think his actions are entirely random. There is a chain of reasoning here, it just misses the forest for the trees]
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I entirely disagree with our current administration but your display is a bit comical. I don’t think there is much room to argue that the US has historically given the EU a huge margin of protection. I think about some of those comparisons where the US navy is great than the combined top n countries.
Now again it’s not a defense of the administration or to flex some sort of agenda but it’s hard to argue, the EU has underinvested in its military for decades.
I wish this was true, but I have a strong feeling my nation (UK) will be right there along side any new military adventures.
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Paper backing ggm's take:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43350553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561808
Just so pple get the credit (even if they appear to be not so sane)
It makes perfect sense. You have a narcissistic asshole in the White House who got elected because the Democratic Party fumbled the ball.
I wouldn't put 100% of the blame on the Democrats, here in Australia we are frequently voting for the least worst option not the best, and I'm not sure how the Democrats weren't the least worst option when compared to the other option
but for some reason a whole heap of people decided to stay home this time and this is the result, hope they still feel happy with their decision
I've heard that there's polling lately to indicate that's not true (unsure on source, it might have been an interview at Vox.com), and that higher turnout would have advantaged the Republicans further.
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> You have a narcissistic asshole in the White House who got elected because the Democratic Party fumbled the ball.
It don't want to sound too persnickety, but there is always at least one losing side in an election. It doesn't have to mean they dropped the ball, it could just mean people preferred the other option. Hindsight bias is wonderful, but you have no idea what would have happened if they'd run with a different agenda, they may have had a worse result.
> but you have no idea what would have happened if they'd run with a different agenda, they may have had a worse result.
The 2024 election had historically-low support from normally stalwart Democrat demographics such as Latinos, the youth vote, and black males. That, IMO, supports the conclusion that the Democrats did something wrong this time. Also, not only did those groups abstain but Trump also picked up quite a few votes from them (especially working-age black males), suggesting that they are swing voters who probably could have been swayed to stay on the Dem plantation if exposed to more convincing messaging, or a more compelling Democrat candidate.
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I'm not sure how you could look at 2024 and not see a historically terrible campaign by the Democrats. They had to force the presumptive nominee to drop out because his brain was dripping out his ears. That alone would do it!
Some corrupt members of Congress and the judiciary deserve some of the blame.
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I don't think half the population drafted this policy, so I could easily think the specific construction of the policy is insane without believing half the country is.
He's been articulating this policy for his entire campaign. Half the country voted for him. If you are saying that the details of its implementation are insane, then are you suggesting that Trump actually personally developed and scrutinized those details? Because I don't think any coherent theory of Trump would comport with that.
I do think a lot of the details are bad. But Trump is not exactly a details guy. And while I think they could have been better (by a lot, fairly easily), I do think they are an accurate, if crude, representation of the policy vision Trump has been consistently articulating for decades (he's been talking about tariffs and trade deficits like this since the 90s).
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There's been some reporting that even die hard Trump supporters don't believe a lot of what he says. This gives them the ability to pick and choose what they believe and allowed him to appeal to a larger group.
How someone would vote for someone they know is lying is beyond my comprehension, but here we are.
It is insane and they are insane.
https://nitter.net/KushDesai47/status/1907618136444067901
Because Trump won the vote, you believe that half the population understands and supports his every action. That doesn't follow. His shit still stinks. Pretty sure The Right now have to say how sweet it smells.
This has been a cornerstone of his campaigns since the beginning. I don't necessarily believe they understand the details, but I do believe they understood he would impose high tariffs, and still voted for him anyway. Tariffs weren't a throwaway line, or something. He repeated it everywhere he could.
I think it is true that most people don't understand the economic principles of tariffs, including most economists. But I do think the plan he's implemented largely comports with what he's consistently said he would do.
A large portion of the base, is aghast at his actions, until someone on the news comes up with the defensive talking points.
THIS is sanewashing.
People dont have to be insane to do this, they just have to listen to their trusted news sources.
Sometimes something does not make sense because we don't see or understand the big picture and what people are trying to achieve, and thus it literally does not "make sense".
Trump is neither stupid nor insane and he will have access to many very smart people, too. Based on that the reasonable assumption is that they are trying to achieve a well-defined objective and have set a plan in motion to do so.
The "game" is thus to figure it out. @ggm's comment above is one possibility.
There are two issues with this thinking:
1. It is authoritarian. Democratically elected leader's duty is to present the policies he plans to implement so that voters can decide if they want them implemented.
2. It is based on the "4D chess" myth - that the leader is way smarter than the rest and is capable of outsmarting other countries. The history shows that it is never true. The leaders are normal people. And the institutions are as good as the founding principles that are honored by them.
(1) is you not liking it, not that it isn't the case. Whether it is authoritarian or not is besides the point. (2) I am not claiming that they can "outsmart" anyone, just that the objective and plan may not be publicly or explicitly stated, or even that what is publicly stated is not the real objective (this is not "4D chess" this is actually how things tend to be in practice from politics to business).
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> Democratically elected leader's duty is to present the policies he plans to implement so that voters can decide if they want them implemented.
That's 100% not true. A candidate leader might tell you what they're going to do, and then you elect the leader, and then they do them, but they don't propose plans once in power to see if the electorate like them.
As much as I'm not a Trump fan, I really don't like that people use a separate yardstick to measure him vs people they like.
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1) heads of state can in fact be incredibly incompetent 2) the goal could entirely be 'stay in power' (which can also be implemented incompetently!)
The UK for a good few years had a government which had both these attributes. They were only interested in policies which would appeal to their base, but eventually even those soured on them because the policies were implemented so badly.
"Very smart people"
https://nitter.net/KushDesai47/status/1907618136444067901
Occam’s razor is specifically a counter to this.
The simplest solution is the right one. You are projecting intelligence, because you are used to.
This is AFTER the US government has roundly fired thousands of their experts and workforce, AND has just told everyone of its intelligence and army rank and file that there are no repercussions for a massive dereliction of duty.
AND IT IS ONLY APRIL.
On the contrary, in context I believe my comment is actually the simplest explanation. Claiming that the US government is insane while we, as random members of the public know better, is certainly not the simplest explanation...
It does not imply that what they are doing is a good idea or will work (whatever the objective is), just that there is more rational thought in what they are doing than what people might assume because the public does not have the information and seeing through what is going on requires insights that most people don't have, either.
Again, check @ggm comment above. I am not saying that this is what is going on but it is a possibility, and an average member of the public would never think of that scenario and thus wouldn't see the order in the apparent chaos.
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