Comment by etiennebausson
11 hours ago
Black swan event: an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
> Trump is the direction taken by U.S. politics for decades now. I could see it post- 9/11, and I was not the most enlightened teenager. Others probably saw it coming years or decades earlier.
While it is kinda the same direction, it also has two Black Swan components:
1) What he's doing actually matches the rhetoric, e.g. actually trying to kick out illegal immigrants even though they're the (underpaid) farm workers holding back food price inflation.
2) It definitely wasn't on my metaphorical bingo card that someone with multiple felony convictions and who had been impeached twice for trying to interfere with the democratic hand over of power, went on to become the popular choice for president.
Because his criminal record has little to do with the policies he is pushing.
Sure, the election of a convict was a risky bet, but the appearance of the policies he is pushing was really not.
If Harris had won, she wouldn't have sent ice to invade cities and kidnap people. She wouldn't have hugely increased tariffs, etc. see also putting political minders at network news places as part of federal sales approvals.
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His policy will not work. You cannot pivot America into a second-sector economy while denying China the third sector. Macro 101 stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sector
America has two options; either become the slave of China and enter our century of humiliation, or deny Chinese access to free trade by competing in market economics. Protectionism does not balance America's trade deficits, and US citizens cannot compete against Mexican labor (let alone Chinese prison labor). The economics of it genuinely don't get any simpler than this; American manufacturing will be for naught if we cannot compete in a free market. We already have a successfully financialized economy, throwing out Reaganomics for an even more shit deal is peak neoreactionary nonsense.