Political Roundtable Part XXXIV

[dobrojim]

On Maddow last night they did a segment on RFKjr and measles speaking of things
to shake your head about. They showed video of a Dr in west TX at a clinic 'treating'
these mennonite victims. The doctor was affiliated with the anti-vac people that
RFKjr supports. He was actively infected and still exposing himself to everyone in
the clinic. His patients were thanking him for being there and complimenting
him on his character. Apparently this Dr believes getting measles is the best protection
against getting measles.

[FAH1223]

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[Zonkerbl]

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Infuriating, it's no secret what he was going to do. Oh, *now* you understand what we were trying to tell you about tariffs. Goddammit. Be less stubbornly stupid!

[Zonkerbl]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/13/sen-cory-booker-says-congress-should-hold-hearings-on-whether-insider-trading-on-trumps-tariffs-occurred.html

I don't understand why the press is demanding evidence of actual insider trading *before* the investigations begin. Isn't that what the investigations are for? Didn't the Republicans spend years investigating Hillary Clinton without having any evidence at all? Why are the Dems held to a different standard?

Tell you what. Let's go on an endless fishing expedition of the Republican administration FIRST. Then, if the Dems *don't find anything,* THEN we'll consider revising the standard by which Congressional investigations are launched, based on the precedent established by the Republicans.

[dobrojim]

^ it's not like the GOP generally or certainly not
Trump specifically has earned any consideration
for benefit of the doubt. The first Trump admin
was arguably the most corrupt since at least Harding,
probably in our entire 240 year history.

PS- it's hard to understand how the voters didn't
penalize them for that.

[bsilver]

^ it's not like the GOP generally or certainly not
Trump specifically has earned any consideration
for benefit of the doubt. The first Trump admin
was arguably the most corrupt since at least Harding,
probably in our entire 240 year history.

PS- it's hard to understand how the voters didn't
penalize them for that.

If Trump wasn't penalized for trying to overthrow the govt, rape, etc, then corruption isn't going to matter much.
It seems like the only way to get rid of Trump is for the economy to go down the drain.

I think the economy cold recover, because it always has. But re-establishing good government will be a big challenge with all the damage taking place. We haven't seen this before in modern history.

[Zonkerbl]

^ it's not like the GOP generally or certainly not
Trump specifically has earned any consideration
for benefit of the doubt. The first Trump admin
was arguably the most corrupt since at least Harding,
probably in our entire 240 year history.

PS- it's hard to understand how the voters didn't
penalize them for that.

If Trump wasn't penalized for trying to overthrow the govt, rape, etc, then corruption isn't going to matter much.
It seems like the only way to get rid of Trump is for the economy to go down the drain.

I think the economy cold recover, because it always has. But re-establishing good government will be a big challenge with all the damage taking place. We haven't seen this before in modern history.

There's a really easy way for the economy to recover, and that's for Trump to stop imposing tariffs.

I suspect his strategy was to impose tariffs, cause a lot of pain, and have all the countries run to him begging for relief, and then he could have the State Department come up with a list of things we've historically wanted from them and demand that. Through a series of parallel negotiations he could extract a ton of concessions, take the tariffs off one by one, declaring victory each time, and Bob's your uncle - everything returns to normal except Trump has magically extracted all the concessions we have been trying to get for the last fifty odd years out of all these countries.

I mean, that's what I would advise he do. Ok, you've ignored my advice and imposed all these tariffs, now here is how you make it look like a smart thing to do. Because every time there's even the slightest hint of a whiff of a possibility that the tariffs will come off, the stock market explodes back to where it was. So that is the obvious strategy - twist the knife on everybody and see what you can get.

There's two problems with this strategy - one, you completely undermine your credibility. If you try this trick once and get a bunch of "free" concessions out of it, what's to stop you from trying the same trick again? Eventually rational expectations kick on and the market prices in future rounds of tariff extortion and the overall expected future growth rate of the stock market declines. That's why you don't do it in the first place, because it's stupid to throw away trust that took decades to earn. But Trump thinks he's smarter than everyone else so we have to put up with the consequences of his ignorance.

The second problem is negotiations will take time and the more powerful economies, knowing that this extortion trick is hurting us as much as it is hurting them, will hold out so as to offer the least possible amount of concessions. China certainly views themselves as holding all the cards and will just wait for Trump's punching himself in the nads to force us to concede. Trump is of course going "trust me trust me we have the bargaining power against China" but he knows, and we know, and China knows, that he is bluffing. It's going to take time for him to finally admit defeat, he's too proud to do otherwise, and in the meantime the tariffs stay in place, doing permanent damage, rearranging supply lines.

And this restructuring won't be good for us. I was in the Commerce Department when we did stupid stuff like this on a smaller scale, and it doesn't force supply lines to relocate to the US. It forces suppliers to move *out* of the US. When the idiot judge in Montana closed the border to Canada because of BSE, it didn't cause the integrated U.S. - Canada beef supply chain to move towards the U.S., it forced Canada to build feed lots in Canada and we lost 5,000 jobs PERMANENTLY to Canada because of it. We're the untrustworthy partner in all of this, which is going to force supply chains to avoid having links of the chain in the US. We're going to permanently lose out the longer the tariffs stay in place.

[pancakes3]

the president of the soybean growers of america was on NPR this morning and said that the US just lost a ton of business, maybe 20-30% to Brazil permanently because of re-established supply lines. And yet he was still "I believe in this president and I believe that he'll hear us, and do the right thing. I believe that manufacturing needs to return home, and that this is supposed to be a short term pain for long term gain, but I wish he would have considered the jobs that are already here like soybean farming before he enacted broad tariffs."

dumb idiots.

[dobrojim]

It's really hard to rationally and objectively examine evidence and then change your mind on things you fervently believe.
(Capt Obvious)

[AFM]

It's really hard to rationally and objectively examine evidence and then change your mind on things you fervently believe.
(Capt Obvious)

I remember reading a study that showed that people who were shown evidence that ran contrary to their beliefs ended up just doubling down instead of reconsidering.

[Zonkerbl]

It's really hard to rationally and objectively examine evidence and then change your mind on things you fervently believe.
(Capt Obvious)

I remember reading a study that showed that people who were shown evidence that ran contrary to their beliefs ended up just doubling down instead of reconsidering.

I mean, it's tricky. Nate made a career out of jumping into this thread with cherry picked anecdotal data spun to be as convincing as possible to support his general anti-woke theses. Knowing what I know, I was skeptical so I would google it and *every* *single* *time* I would find out that what he had posted was a deeply and intentionally twisted lie, after like 30 seconds of googling. So he got better at it and started posting statistics from extremely biased sources that proved his point, like "look, crime statistics reported by actual police show that black people are five times more likely to commit crimes" and there are very, very few people in this country aware that there are surveys of self reported crimes that show that statistics reported by cops do not reflect the underlying rates of crimes being committed (plus rich people commit wage theft all the time and that's *not even considered a crime*). So I was not persuaded. And Nate, confronted again and again with evidence that he was flat out wrong, just doubled down each time. So then in response I would double down to refute his increasingly and annoyingly less flimsy arguments. So which of us was the one stubbornly doubling down instead of reconsidering? Shouldn't I have at least given Nate credit for becoming more sophisticated in his manipulation of the truth? To be honest if anything that just made me more mad. Look at all this intellectual power going to waste trying to invent arguments to support what you know is a lie. WTF dude.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say I don't think it's a problem to be hard to be persuade if the person trying to persuade you is a known right wing extremist whose worldview is obviously driven by prejudice and hate, even when the argument on the surface seems pretty persuasive. There are contexts where being hard to persuade is the righteous and proper thing to do, and there are other contexts where it is the evil and stupid thing to do. From the outside it can be very difficult to see the difference.

[Fairview4Life]

I believe that manufacturing needs to return home...

[Wizardspride]

the president of the soybean growers of america was on NPR this morning and said that the US just lost a ton of business, maybe 20-30% to Brazil permanently because of re-established supply lines. And yet he was still "I believe in this president and I believe that he'll hear us, and do the right thing. I believe that manufacturing needs to return home, and that this is supposed to be a short term pain for long term gain, but I wish he would have considered the jobs that are already here like soybean farming before he enacted broad tariffs."

dumb idiots.

[pancakes3]

I believe that manufacturing needs to return home...

someone pointed out that this was kind of a sh*tty gotcha by dems because if a full 25% of respondents, who presumably are in the labor force, are saying that they want a manufacturing job (or more likely what a manufacturing job entails: salary, set hours, benefits, union protection) vs what they're currently working (retail, gig work like uber/lyft/doordash, full blown unemployment) then it's not insane for an administration's policy to facilitate that.

it's folly to cling to equate manufacturing jobs with things like clothes, toys, low-tech electronics, and other light manufacturing, but the US are not but fully capable of becoming global leaders in things like... shipbuilding, green/nuclear energy, space aeronautics, etc.

the US is a leader in pharma production but the light manufacturing jobs are very susceptible to automation. building ships and rockets are too big and too precise for automation and still rely on highly trained (and compensated) labor. gee, it sure would be nice if we were the world leader in high speed rail, and had an entire manufacturing industry servicing that for the world.

being at the forefront of technology creates jobs - hilary clinton was saying that back in 2016. the answer to US manufacturing isn't to make US kids sew together soccer balls and sneakers - and no children anywhere should be sewing together soccer balls and sneakers. we can automate dangerous, repetitive tasks, and level up the workforce to do more creative, less rote tasks and create things that bring more value.

EVs is a perfect example. Detroit experienced an auto manufacturing collapse, and instead of pivoting to EV's where we could have taken a chokehold on global manufacturing, we kept on delaying the adoption of EVs, delaying the R&D of EVs and now BYD is eating our lunch. Same with high speed rail. Same with nuclear. Same with green energy. Just decades and decades of complacency without the proper governmental incentives to ensure progress in this country.

[dobrojim]

There was someone here (not naming names) who
was unable to accept that Golfy is in Putin pocket,
even after the former FBI's director Mueller report came out. Plain black and white met with complete denial.

[Zonkerbl]

Yeah this graph is nonsense. Currently only 10% of jobs in the US are in manufacturing. Increasing that to more than 20% would be more than a 100% increase, a massively "successful" expansion by any metric. Successful in quotes because tearing people out of their current services jobs and forcing them into manufacturing jobs won't necessarily make them better off. It's better to be a robot maintenance worker than a burger flipper, but not better than being a software engineer.

[queridiculo]

There are contexts where being hard to persuade is the righteous and proper thing to do, and there are other contexts where it is the evil and stupid thing to do. From the outside it can be very difficult to see the difference.

Did you just describe the capacity to be empathetic?

[Fairview4Life]

Yeah this graph is nonsense. Currently only 10% of jobs in the US are in manufacturing. Increasing that to more than 20% would be more than a 100% increase, a massively "successful" expansion by any metric. Successful in quotes because tearing people out of their current services jobs and forcing them into manufacturing jobs won't necessarily make them better off. It's better to be a robot maintenance worker than a burger flipper, but not better than being a software engineer.

I just think it’s funny we all think there should be more manufacturing, as long as it’s someone else working in the factory.

[AFM]

I personally want every MAGA dummy's sons working in factories.

[Wizardspride]

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