SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @ SeventyTwoTrillion @hexbear.net

"Crises teasingly hold out the possibility of dramatic reversals only to be

---

Read more

Posts

113

Comments

2,182

Joined

3 yr. ago

Next thread here.

of course he does, half the country rightfully dislikes him because of his tweets (if you're a lib) or because he's doing serious material harm (if you're impoverished, in a minority group, etc)

I'm just explaining why he can even have an approval rating as high as 48% despite the fact that he's such a bad leader; the combination of the aforementioned "cutting through the bullshit" and the fact that Biden's economy sucked and Trump's was relatively better

I think people just tend to like leaders who can "cut through all the bullshit procedures and just get things done", which is an attractive trait if for your whole life you're been scolded by liberals going "Mmm, well, I've been to university and studied this subject extensively, and it's actually impossible for the president to do good things unless he a) has a Congressional supermajority; b) the full support of the parliamentarian; c) a 7/2 majority in the Supreme Court; d) a White House humidity below 40%, and; e) it's the second Thursday of the month."

And that's not automatically bad - it's actually really the only trait of the average white American or western European that gives me hope. And if somebody doesn't have that desire (typical of consciously ideological liberals) then it's much harder to convince them that socialism is both possible and necessary. It's just a rather bad thing if the "bullshit procedures" are "what few protections for minorities previously existed" or "a dedication to a somewhat livable climate in three decades".

The system relies on good faith

seems like a pretty shitty system. if somebody tries to write a law that will result in the mass suffering or death of homeless people and/or minorities, the revolutionary police should be knocking on their door within the hour; I don't want to be reliant on those politicians or elite figures (if they still exist in the economic system) simply all being nice enough to not take away the rights of workers

I 100% agree and it's one of the biggest unarguable black stains on China's record over the last couple decades.

It's just entertaining how geopolitics is now a race to the bottom.

Putin: "Yeah, sorry guys, I'm working on writing my 58th speech warning NATO about my red lines and letting my central bank fuck over my country. That, and withdrawing our forces from Syria... I'm a little busy at the moment."
Pezeshkian/Khamenei: "I get ya, I get ya, we've got all our best writers working on threats towards Israel and how they're making a big mistake while only actually doing anything big and meaningful to slow down an ongoing genocide every 8 months or so. Plus, we've got secret deals to make with the US after they murder our allies. It's a tough job out here."
Xi Jinping: "Why bother with the speeches, guys? We just give a statement every now and then about how America is bad and then proceed to not even threaten to do anything to counter them. Oh boy, they'll be feeling that lack of germanium soon! No, we can't start to detach our economic system from the West or even lessen our reliance on Western investors, we're doing the opposite in fact."
Trump: "No big deal guys, I'll help you out. I'll boycott the G20 and let China control it, leave the WHO and various climate accords, and freeze funding towards USAID to make the colour revolution pressure stop for a while."

Everybody's fucking up and doing things that are counterproductive to their own positions, INCLUDING the United States, so the net result is still imperial decline.

we better hope the accelerationists are correct because he's following that ideology pretty strictly

The word "gaslighting" gets used a lot but the closest I have ever felt to being actually gaslit in a political sense is having dozens upon dozens of headlines beamed at me being like "Well, the economy is obviously doing great, so I wonder why people don't believe it? I wonder what psychological effect is making people believe that things aren't amazing?" Just to directly name a couple, here's FAIR's reporting over the last couple years:

January 2024: Media Obsession With Inflation Has Manufactured Discontent:

At the time, the misery index, a rough gauge of societal suffering that sums inflation and unemployment, clocked in at nearly 12%. Today, the same index sits around 7%. If the fall of 1984 was morning, we’re well into the day. The dark, turbulent night is not only behind us; it’s been over for a while. That’s not how most of the American public seems to feel, though. People continue to rate the economy stunningly poorly, given its performance of late. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, for instance, most recently registered 61.3, versus 100.9 during “Morning in America.” In other words, consumer sentiment is currently 39% lower than it was at a time when the misery index was 41% higher.

The gap between consumer sentiment and economic performance has sparked extensive pontification online, with a variety of reasons being proposed for the disconnect. Arguments have been made for everything from increases in grocery prices (Atlantic, 12/21/23), to real wage declines during much of 2021 and 2022 (Vox, 8/10/23), to social media misinformation (Washington Post, 11/24/23), to partisan polarization (CBS, 8/14/23), to lagging perceptions and a desire for outright deflation (Wall Street Journal, 10/18/23).

At the end of the day, there’s probably some truth to all of these ideas. But there’s another fundamental cause of economic discontent that should be getting more attention: corporate media’s single-minded obsession with inflation, which has left the public with an objectively inaccurate view of the economy.

November 2024: It’s the Economic Reporting, Stupid

Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.) But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame.

Another offending piece appeared recently in the Atlantic (11/11/24). There, staff writer Annie Lowrey made the case that the cost-of-living crisis, and the Democrats’ inability to tackle it, explains the election results. Curiously, the media’s role in distracting the public from the remarkable achievements of macroeconomic policy during Biden’s tenure in office went unmentioned.

This is not to say that Lowrey and others who have made similar arguments don’t have a point that there are real issues facing the American public. For such a wealthy country, the US has obscenely high poverty, internationally aberrant levels of inequality, and a notoriously ramshackle welfare state. Partially out of sheer necessity, the US welfare state was substantially boosted during the pandemic, and the unwinding of this enhanced safety net after 2021 must have had some effect on Americans’ perceptions of the economy and their own economic standing. Real disposable income, for example, spiked in 2021 due to temporary measures like stimulus checks, but then fell back to the pre-pandemic trend of growth, which may have felt like a loss to some.

Like, you actual motherfuckers. "Well, everybody is reporting in polling that their lives fucking suck under Biden, but these objective, god-given, absolutely infallible inflation numbers (that exclude everything that the average person is vulnerable to) and these employment figures (which, as anybody who works as a gig worker or similarly vulnerable positions, know are hilariously incorrect) are all so good! We can't blame these poor, idiotic, easily misled, slack-jawed rubes that make up our population - no no no, that would be mean, and we are a kind and benevolent group of liberal analysts - we have the magnanimity to blame the media for misinforming them, instead." Fuck off.

every single time we on this megathread critique China's relative lack of activity compared to Russia or the West Asia Resistance, the US shows up and does shit like this that comfortably provides China with an avenue to just keep doing what they're doing and still succeed

Less than 1%, imo. It's already effectively the case that Canada is a US protectorate, and I personally doubt that they'd genuinely want to try and make their ownership official when the drawbacks of having to manage that territory are fairly substantial. American bureaucracy is already in severe decay, and the whole promoted image of American foreign interventions is that they, well, intervene, not invade and annex.

That being said, I could see it happening as a desperate gamble for American capitalists, besieged and drowned by Chinese innovation and pushed out of Asia and Africa, to try and slow the decline of their monopoly position in like 20-30 years. But I don't think the benefits outweigh the costs right now. Their empire is certainly in the decay phase but there's still quite a long way down to go before they'd truly have to stoop to the depths of nakedly occupying and cannabalizing their own allies, versus the more "delicate" approach of Biden blowing up their pipelines and creating massive wars to ensure obedience from Europe.

If there is an annexation within the next decade or so, it'll probably be a coup and look very business-as-usual, to the point where popular discontent may not even last; it probably won't look like American tanks driving towards Ottawa in columns. Beyond that timeframe, perhaps an annexation would have to be more forceful as America's position would have declined relative to China and others'.

we gotta get the Mongolian Empire experts in here to explain which Khan son best correlates to each Trump son

every person who watches a Marvel movie or one of those war movies/series called like "Duty of Service" or whatever gains +5% resistance to bullets and artillery per movie/episode watched, making Westerners invulnerable supersoldiers who go on special black ops missions in experimental aircraft going behind enemy lines where their team of 5 plucky soldiers make quips to each other and kill at least 10,000 soldiers (and are simply forced, by their enemy's brutal and unfair tactics, to blow up a piece of infrastructure that supports hundreds of thousands of civilians)

“They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it.”

I would love for Trump to explain what he thinks a "rare earth" is, off the cuff

I've been focussing elsewhere so I'm not up to date on the whole China fentanyl thing; is this something the US made up as a casus belli to tariff China or is it just "China makes everything so they also make fentanyl and it finds its way to the US"?

either way, I'm assuming that China will fold on whatever Trump wants here

The real answer to this dilemma is to have an alternative bloc (think the USSR and Comecon that was largely insulated from the Western capitalist bloc). Nothing like this exists today, so we all have to listen to what Trump has to say.

I do wonder what the prerequisites are gonna be for an alternative bloc to be formed because I feel like there's this big contradiction where the necessity of its creation - at a time of accelerating American militarism and belligerent sanctions and such - is growing, but none of the countries that would form this bloc seem terribly interested in actually "pulling the trigger" (to vastly oversimplify it into a process as simple as just 'pushing the communism button'). I wonder if China will have to be forced into it, kicking and screaming, totally against their will. They'll be insisting that they want to co-exist with America for development and peace and whatever the fuck right up until the US starts trying to bomb their military bases and infrastructure, or blockades straits and seizes their transport lines. I'm increasingly thinking that it's gonna be a WW1/WW2 scenario where the economic system can only change (the gold standard back then, the dollar system now) when there is literally no choice.

Because you're right - we can talk all day long about how the US bullying all its "allies" will lead to them retaliating, or, at a minimum, reducing Atlanticist tendencies inside those countries. And I do believe that's genuinely true; anxiety about the American hegemon might be a soft and very difficult to quantify thing but transgressions and minor instabilities do add up over time, history demonstrates that time and time again, it just requires years or even decades of patience to see the fruit of it. But all the anxiety and dislike of the US in the world isn't terribly meaningful if there's nothing that, say, Mexico can do. I also want to see Sheinbaum retaliate, but I also realize that it would be deeply stupid to do so. The DPRK and Palestine and Yemen are perhaps the truest warriors of the anti-American movement and they've been isolated and impoverished for that exact reason.

folks, our empire, it's simply enormous! we own China, we own the steppes, we even border the Mediterranean, and it just keeps getting bigger! there are people coming up to my yurt, just yesterday in fact, and told me "Temujin, you are the king of kings, Tengri favors you, we shall clean your stables as long as you live!" my beautiful and large sons will maintain this glorious empire until all the world is under our grasp!

Next thread here.

I predict that Latin America will be the last place in America's imperium to fall; even once they've been forced out of Asia and Africa and maybe even Europe by the 2050s and 60s, they'll be sailing their gunboats around the coast of Peru and Brazil and taking potshots to try and keep them in line.

That being said, resistance will arise as a result of ongoing events regardless of whether the current selection of leaders or politicians is up to it; that's just how, like, history works, materially. I think it's easy to look at the history of Latin America and go "wow, this fucking sucks, it's just hundreds of years of organisations and parties and countries being overthrown and leaders being assassinated," and while that's certainly not a bad way of looking at it (and emphasizes America's destructive tendencies), it's interesting that those organisations and parties and countries and leaders keep arising at all. Compare that to Europe, which has been in a state of subservience since more-or-less the end of WW2. The US only need to occasionally shoot a leader's plane down or blow up a pipeline to keep everybody there aligned with Atlanticism; they don't have to invade Spain every couple decades or outright overthrow the government of Germany every time they elect a communist leader, because they're all nice and docile in Europe and don't generally even want to enact anti-American policies.

It's why a mass deportation policy isn't just horrifically racist and destructive to millions of people, but actively counterproductive to US profitability. it's why I assume that at some point somebody will step in and say to Trump "we, uh, can't actually deport all these people, because we need them to slave away for extremely low wages or many businesses will outright collapse." like, it takes a genocidal white supremacist to lock tens of millions of minorities into systems of exploitation for the purpose of making profit for white people in the wealthy parts of the imperial core; it takes a true idiot to then get rid of all those minorities slaving away for you for mere populist reasons (and then wonder why basic products now cost more money).

although I also assumed that Trump wouldn't actually try and do the tariffs because of how idiotic that is for US imperial strategy and yet here we are

The ceasefire in Gaza is a pretty meaningful part of ending the Gaza genocide. Well, I agree with the critique that the word "ending" it is too strong (it was intended as a somewhat humorous overexaggeration but it was 100% my fault for writing it as it clearly did not land) as the genocide against Palestine has been an ongoing process for like a century, but it would be dishonest to say that getting Israel to withdraw troops and stop bombing civilians and allow aid in without destroying it, etc, isn't a very meaningful act. In talking about genocide, I was referring to the post-Oct7 events. I gave my take in the previous megathread post body:

The recovery for Gaza will take, at a minimum, decades; it could indeed never fully recovery to even how it was before, considering it is not in Israel's interests to see their concentration camps recover. But Hamas has proven to be steadfast and the tunnel network has proven its resilience, despite facing some of the most powerful conventional bombing in history. This shows that Palestine's liberation is a when, not an if; and hopefully a much sooner "when" than expected before October 7th.

Ok, like realistically, is manufacturing really ever gonna come back to America?

If America, within the next 50 years, is capable of producing even 25% of the microchips that Taiwan produces (and entirely inside America, no "let's do the easy part here and the hard part somewhere else"), I will post an image of my dick and balls on Hexbear (or whatever we're using by then). I am being 100% serious.