Pooter

Two things can be true at once. Biden pier = really fucking dumb idea This houthi debacle = also really fucking dumb idea 😂 yeah you might be waiting for that confirmation a while.. Administration: "my fellow Americans, after talks with the houthis we can now confidently confirm our strategy was completely pointless and we are now back to square one."

lol and now we "negotiate" a cease fire between the US and the Houthis that doesn't include Israel. YGBSM https://allisrael.com/houthi-rebels-clarify-that-ceasefire-with-u-s-does-not-include-israel-will-continue-to-act-in-support-of-gaza you guys are right, this isn't rocket surgery. It's just complete stupidity. We spent 1 billion https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-operation-houthis-cost-1-billion-rcna205333 striking the houthis, didn't dislodge them in any meaningful way, dumped 3 super hornets into the red sea, pulled back with our tail between our legs, and Israeli ships are still going to be shot at. Maybe a 'real operator' can explain it to me but this looks almost as successful as our Afghanistan withdrawal

Jesus the things that go over you guys' heads sometimes. The entire point of saying "baddie brown people" is that is how the government views them: just the latest group of troublemaker muslims that we're going to dehumanize and bomb into oblivion.. because reasons. So much so that in the signal chat operation Pete so generously shared with us, we leveled an entire apartment building to get one guy (show me where that is on the CDE tables.) And is the irony lost on literally everyone that to debunk my claim we've been bombing the Houthis to no avail for years @GKinnear says: (paraphrasing) "actually Obama was bombing the dudes on the other side of the gang war." ... and that makes it better how? If anything that proves the strategy is even more incoherent than we thought if we're bombing both sides of a gang war separated by only a few years. Ultimately, I'm not here trying to claim the Houthis are model citizens of the world or that disrupting global shipping is okay. But I'm seeing a lot of the "rah rah rah LFG rah rah rah fuck with my boats and get ready to find out" energy that has gotten us into multiple previous middle east boondoggles, so I think it's valuable to have some pushback against that mentality to balance the conversation. Especially when so far they seem to be fucking with our boats rather effectively. I'm not sure why we seem so intent on parking our boats within "fuck with me" range, handing the Houthis and Iran massive PR wins with each hornet that goes into the drink.

So asking why we’re bombing people makes me the racist? I just want someone.. anyone to tell me wtf the plan is here. I see a lot of cheerleading in this thread as if our policies in the Middle East haven’t been a continuous string of political and ethical disasters for at least 20 years.

Biden (and coalition) bombing the houthis for the fifth time in January of this year https://apnews.com/article/biden-houthis-yemen-shipping-attacks-fc5c1ed40f4e370bed81670bfdda0899# Obama - my mistake.. hard to keep track of which group of baddie brown people are the latest hotness. So I ask again, how is it going to be different this time and why is the president pursuing a strategy he actively mocked as stupid and futile during the campaign.

Maybe im just the dirty hippy around here but Obama, Biden, and the Saudis bombed the houthis for the better part of two decades (which Trump called stupid during the campaign) so what exactly is gonna be different this time? Actually I know what’s different.. we’re taking significantly more losses this time

Not sure if I'm missing something or this is just self-contradictory: so we had a tech boom coinciding with offshoring but we can re-shore everything and it will go amazing and be affordable? What am I missing here? What parts of the supply chain do we get to re-claim for our own, saddle with environmental regulations, and then magically have it be affordable?

I think he muddles two ideas in this article, one good and one bad. Idea 1: it's important to maintain some domestic manufacturing capacity for national security purposes. Definitely a good argument. We don't want to be reliant on Chinese supply chains to build our military hardware and critical national defense infrastructure. Idea 2: We need to claw back manufacturing from overseas to provide jobs for the American people. This one is complete nonsense. This argument presumes we have a big unemployment problem in the form of a huge pool of factory-qualified people who are out of work, just waiting for a new steel plant in Pittsburgh or Detroit to be opened up. The article consistently references these cheap polluters overseas are "costing us jobs" so one would expect that as manufacturing declined in the US, so has American employment. The only problem is, that's not true. Since the US manufacturing jobs peak in 1979, manufacturing in the US has steadily declined as we've transitioned to a more tech-centric, service-based economy. But jobs have not declined, they've grown massively in absolute numbers and unemployment rates are actually better now than they were at peak manufacturing periods. Unemployment today is 4.2%. Unemployment in 1979 was 6%. Unemployment now is also lower than it was every single year from 1970 to 1998. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/historical-us-unemployment-rate-by-year-7495494 Unemployment fluctuates for a wide variety of reasons, but I was genuinely surprised to find it's actually better now than the heavily romanticized eras of peak American manufacturing. The truth is, moving manufacturing overseas has not robbed the American people of jobs, it just changed the kinds of jobs people have. The other funny wrinkle in this argument is that when we were at peak manufacturing in the US, we didn't have all of the environmental regulations in place we do today. Our own industrial revolution was famously pollution-heavy, so I'm not convinced you get to have it both ways. I think the equation goes something like this: -robust domestic manufacturing -feel good about yourself environmentally -affordable goods Choose two.

Trump admin every minute of every day: The right, when you point it out: "what are you some kind of trade expert"

My reading is just fine. Your argument is falling apart as the administration abandons it in real time..

Well that was quick.. tariffs paused now. All part of some genius plan I’m sure. I’m confused, 5 minutes ago weren’t tariffs here to stay, non negotiable, and we all needed to be patient as trump rebuilt the American economic bargain for the every-man? Finally we have someone trying something “different.” oh wait no never mind we got spooked and reversed our entire global trade policy after 4 DAYS. More mental gymnastics incoming in 3.. 2.. 1..

I keep hearing this line - "the world took advantage of us" "we are getting hosed by the whole world in trade" Who, exactly is hosing us? Is it South Korea who imports our goods at near as makes no difference 0% effective tariff rate? Is it Australia with whom we have a significant trade surplus? I was reliably informed that if you have a trade deficit with someone that must mean they're hosing you. So are we hosing Australia? Must be somehow.. And if so why are we slapping additional tariffs on them? Dude just take a step back and call a spade a spade here. None of this makes any f-ing sense. It's a nice graph though. The rich indeed are getting richer at a faster rate than the people with less money. That's exactly how compound interest works. Even for regular folks, it takes approximately the same amount of time to accumulate your first $100k as it does to go from $100k to $1M. Isn't it crazy how math works?! That's also exactly what I would expect growth curves to look like when comparing the 0.1% to the rest of the population. Turns out if youre in the 0.1% you're probably pretty freaking good at allocating money and making more of it. To pin wealth inequality in the US on "globalization" and the "myth of free trade" is definitely a new one. But ultimately the real issue here is your implication that trump's deranged and incoherent tariff plan is going to somehow rectify this wealth problem. What evidence do you have for that? Because so far all I've seen are normie financial dummies panic selling, while the savvy billionaires short the market and use their connections and insider info to capitalize on the insane volatility. The tariffs are also effectively a wildly regressive tax. When you jack up the price of normal goods across the board it's going to hurt regular people far far more, because us normal folks need the same amount of food and toilet paper as billionaires do.

That's the point of the analogy.. the problems are unrelated, and the proposed solution makes no sense. The sink leak is not related to the self induced house fire. So yes, in a way you're right.. there is nothing about our current problems that should make people want to torpedo the economy with blanket tariffs on the whole world. They are entirely unrelated.

This is like saying you have leaky sink in your house, and then decide to burn your house down. "See, my house is burning down! I knew there was a problem!" Yeah but you didn't diagnose the problem correctly or apply an appropriate corrective action, and ended up hurting yourself more.