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Here are some ambiguous things: 1. Inflation 2. Comparing peer economies 3. Counterfactual timelines
What country did better (other than the imaginary retconned one in your head), so we can discuss the comparison directly?
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It's also for very stupid reasons: The fed dropping rates to the degree that would satisfy Donald Trump would greatly accelerate inflation which in turn would further upset voters, who would in turn blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before).
blame Donald Trump (just like they did Biden before) Respectfully disagree. Republican presidents get a lot more economic leeway than Dem presidents, especially from the media. This has puzzled me my entire adult life. Inflation will bother media and public, but not to the same extent it did 2021-22.
So I'm sitting here as a Canadian wondering what the American people are going to do? I understand a lot of what the President of The United States says - I even agree with some of it, the problem is I don't feel like we're engaging with the American people anymore. I really wonder where you guys are headed and what it means for the rest of us, I spent 15 years in the states, built a public company there, I really li…
> I wonder where you guys are headed. You need to know only two facts about America to guess that: * Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens. Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a…
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This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics. Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops… But yes. Most left wing thought leaders coun…
>This response is funny to me, because there’s been a massive drop in rightwing violence in the US since Trump was elected… but that’s because state-sponsored violence isn’t counted towards the statistics. >Pretty funny how there aren’t any more Proud Boy marches, yeah? Couldn’t be that they’re all getting paid six figure salaries to round up brown people at Kavanaugh stops… Yes, that's how protests typically work. I…
Dunning-Kruger effect billionaire: We don't need that. What's it even for anyhow? I'm not paying for it. All these naysaying wimps and freeloaders say we can't live without out. I will use my unelected government position and bling chainsaw to cut fraud, waste, and abuse to eliminate red tape and unnecessary big government regulation. And I demand a negative tax rate, subsidies, and lucrative government contracts! Rawr!
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America has enough power to help someone else. No one has the power to save America from itself. The cavalry is not coming, and this fire is going to take its course. One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch.
> One day, maybe we will rebuild from scratch The current situation is bad, but this is just doomerism. The current administration will end. Trump can't live forever. His approval rating is already low and falling. We're in for a bumpy ride, but then it's going to start reverting toward the mean. Not necessarily back to the way things were, but periods of extreme like this are followed by a reversion to the mean more…
They way the current administration act, I start to think that their plan A is to stay for a long long time. There is so much open corruption that half of them would land in prison really quickly and they don't seem particularly bothered by that fact.
The US drift into Adam Curtis' broad thesis in hypernormalisation(a) continues apace I see. Great to see J Pow putting up a fight but I fear this is all going one way. (a) >We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don't care. We say we care but do nothing.
> I fear this is all going one way That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
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>Even if one grants that it is a small minority It is. What's more, such support is roughly the same across both parties, but both parties vastly overestimate the other side's support. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116851119 https://x.com/JustinGrimmer/status/1966997411060215960
I don't think this addresses the main point of my question, though. Do you know any prominent Democrats, e.g., representatives, senators, or presidents, who have called for a Republican to be killed?
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> I fear this is all going one way That belief isn't the consequence of the situation, but the cause. There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. They do it in Iran. The Republicans and MAGA movement have made changes that would have been unbelievable ten years ago.
> There is ample ability to change events, but people must believe they can act and act together, as they have for centuries of democracy and for all human history. This is the political will of a plurality of American voters. They certainly can't claim they didn't know what they would get, and they seem unconcerned by any of these actions that many of us find terrifying. It is difficult to see how we can democracy o…
This fallacy gets repeated over and over, but it's obviously false.
Have you really never voted for a candidate who went on to do things you didn't agree with? It's a quintessential fact of politics that voting for a candidate is not equivalent to an endorsement of everything that candidate does in the future. It's a premise that is obviously false when we consider our own votes, but it feels cathartic to force the claim on to the other side.
This administration's net approval rating flipped net negative very quickly after his election and has been trending downward. It's just navel-gazing to pretend like what he's doing has high approval.
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> I wonder where you guys are headed. You need to know only two facts about America to guess that: * Fifty three percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. * As (ostensibly) a representative Democracy America's fate is dictated by the majority of it's citizens. Our future is to become a broken nation governed by middle-school student level thinking. The only way to build a better America is to build a…
Why is literacy so important? Wasn’t literacy lower in the US at other points in time?
The combination of literacy and the algorithmic propaganda machine is a pretty big stumbling block.