191–200 of 259 posts
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Plenty of videos around, default rethoric is to 'give them time, they said it would hurt at first' which sounds awfully close what people in abusive relationships would say now that I think about it.
It also sounds like delayed gratification.
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For what it’s worth it wasn’t me that flagged your reply. All I’m saying is that politics is as intertwined with technology news as much as economics or religion or pop culture or anything else, and imho should be considered as equally valid sidebar conversations as the others. If we can’t talk about things that make people uncomfortable, sicko people will take control of those very things and we will all suffer down…
It's alright, I'm not shy to the flagging and downvotes. I appreciate your thoughtful response From my understanding, your argument is a variation of "many/all things are politics and therefore politics cannot be disentangled from the topic" which I've seen others mention before. Sure, you can find ways to connect things to certain policies and politicians and then talk about that solely. Yes, economics becomes polit…
I was approaching the topic with a smidge of nuance and perhaps that was not clear, and I’m sorry.
Identity is definitely an issue in modern political culture, but I don’t know if PG can solve it anymore than you and I can. I think people just need to recognize and appreciate conjunctive nuances in their own opinions. Politics is identity AND culture AND religion etc etc. that’s my contention anyways.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply yourself!
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Is invading Greenland really all that boring?
Have people not noticed that Trump seems to habitually make hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements? Like it’s not doing him any favors, I tend to feel it’s some kind of personality defect. Though it did get him a lot of attention in the past, which substantially led to him becoming president. Either he can’t turn it off, or the decade plus of increasingly internet centric media exposure among the general popul…
In my experience, the ‘personality defect’ you are thinking of is what many folks would call ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder’. He only wants Greenland because someone once told him he couldn’t have it, and it gets him attention every time he brings it up.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he has no actual idea what Greenland actually is like, and has never visited it. He might even be confused between Iceland and Greenland, if you asked him to point to Greenland on an unlabeled map.
Plenty of other people though would benefit from the strife created by him actually taking it, or from him being happy with them by actually getting it for him, so I expect there are active plans in motion right now to invade Greenland.
He’s telling everyone what he wants to do, no one is delivering real consequences to stop him, and he is in charge. Listen to what he’s saying.
Refusing to take him ‘seriously’ and actually act against him, is exactly what normalizes his actions when he later does the thing that seemed crazy a month or a year ago.
Look at what he was saying that seemed crazy and hyperbolic a year or two ago. Look at what he is doing now, and no one is stopping him.
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I never particularly thought of "free trade" as a conservative policy. I thought it was fairly bipartisan that large corporations want to get the cheapest prices for stuff (which often is not within the US).
As far as I am aware, Free Trade was a clinton era policy, which sparked globalization. Yes it cost American industry jobs, but gave rise to a significant boom in non manufacturing jobs.
The 88 election debate in Canada is famous for the confrontations around this topic. I was in my early teens it was the first election debate I remember watching and having strong opinions about.
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I'm pro tariff - but 25% tariffs are absurd, at most you need 10%-12% in narrowly targeted categories to ensure re-onshoring of production.
They're clearly thinking much bigger, like returning to a model where tariffs are the primary mode of funding the government, and nuking whole sectors/devaluing the dollar to make US exports more competitive with a desperate potential workforce. Not a particularly compelling plan in my view but it has its own internal logic.
Unless, of course, the US has some sort of monopoly on an export that others have no choice but to take. I dont think the US has such a resource.
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Is invading Greenland really all that boring?
Have people not noticed that Trump seems to habitually make hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements? Like it’s not doing him any favors, I tend to feel it’s some kind of personality defect. Though it did get him a lot of attention in the past, which substantially led to him becoming president. Either he can’t turn it off, or the decade plus of increasingly internet centric media exposure among the general popul…
Or wanting to create "camps" to hold immigrants, and then sending them to Guantanamo?
Things like threatening retaliations against perceived enemies?
Withdrawing support from Ukraine and groveling to Putin?
I'm pretty tired of people dismissing his crazy outbursts as something he just says because he's not just all talk, he (too) often does the crazy things.
I don't know if tariffs are the right answer but I want so much less Chinese junk in this country. We are absolutely overflowing with low quality junk.
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Have people not noticed that Trump seems to habitually make hyperbolic and ridiculous sounding statements? Like it’s not doing him any favors, I tend to feel it’s some kind of personality defect. Though it did get him a lot of attention in the past, which substantially led to him becoming president. Either he can’t turn it off, or the decade plus of increasingly internet centric media exposure among the general popul…
I have a lot of experience with this kind of person. I personally will bet real money that the US has troops in Greenland within a year, and is claiming it as US territory. In my experience, the ‘personality defect’ you are thinking of is what many folks would call ‘malignant narcissistic personality disorder’. He only wants Greenland because someone once told him he couldn’t have it, and it gets him attention every…
I think, though, that the narcissism mechanism acts a bit differently than you say.
I think he sees himself as a great man, a man who can see further than others, a man who gets things done and above all a man who makes deals. I’m not saying his is any those things, he’s not, just that this is how he narcissistically sees himself.
Interestingly, I think this disordered thinking is probably what makes him not give any shits about what other people think. Like, from his perspective he’s going to do a thing that will be unpopular because people are myopic, but eventually his results will be too obvious to ignore. Picture a narcissistic software engineer, they do the same thing. He does this very clumsily, because he is not actually a great man in the way he sees himself, and he has never made any attempt to work on his personality shortcomings, because narcissism.
To be absolutely clear, this is what I think is occurring in his mind, I am not personally saying that he is a great man etc. His self perception as that is just what drives how he acts.
Anyway, he does want Greenland. Taking Greenland would make him a major historical figure, from the perspective of a man (himself) who developed his sense of historical significance from literal school history books, not from any deep thinking. Physics phds want to be the guy in the physics textbook. He wants to be the guy in the history textbook. Annexing Greenland would give him that.
However, he will not use physical force to achieve that. I would put big money on that prediction. It doesn’t fit with his m/o. He is bluffing about using physical force, in order to strong arm Denmark into a purchase deal. Because, you know, he sees himself as a master deal maker. Doing a deal on Greenland would be a massive win for that aspect of his persona, in terms of that self belief being supported in the narcissistic sense.
Using physical force on Greenland would be literally insane, and if you listen to the man talk for a long enough time, as I have, he has shown signs of being many, many things, but being literally insane is not one of them. Nothing he has done so far has surprised me (with the exception of the Gulf of America, he did catch me off guard with that one).
His supporters don’t really care about Greenland. I think from their perspective, Trump does some pretty goofy stuff, but if he’s the guy who will do something about 1) the Mexicans and 2) the trade policies that created the rust belt, then he’s their guy.
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well, going to r/conservative, top answer in a tarriff thread: >To influence companies to produce their goods domestically instead of internationally. What is so hard to understand about this? So they are stuck in Just World Land. another top comment linked this: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr... So they more or less buy into "The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, i…
I didn't formally verify it, but during the Russian internet blackout, r/conservative was very quiet. I assume that the responses you read on that forum are not from actual US conservatives. After reddit purged most conservative subs (in 2 waves, when Trump 1 began and when Trump 1 ended), I don't think you'll find any conservative subreddits. Unfortunately, I haven't found a forum that's accessible and with lots of…