Red Mosquito

tommy wrote:Me

spike wrote:

McParadigm wrote:Here’s why I think voting for the budget bill was a mistake, and it has nothing to do with the bill:

Right now, America is walking away from all of its security agreements. We are torching trade deals, spitting on long-term economic partnerships, and turning our backs on strategic allies.

And there’s no resolution to that.

Every nation on earth is watching us bully our partners, and they are all learning the same obvious lesson from it: keep as far away as possible.

Why would you make any kind of an economic deal with a country that you now know might use that deal as leverage against you? Who might use it to intimidate you? Who might issue veiled military threats or degrade you? Who might just ignore it entirely?

Why would you buy weapons from a country that might decide to turn them off? Why would you plan a vacation to a place that might detain you for weeks, or longer, over a paperwork error that used to be resolved in minutes?

It’s evident that most conservative and many low attention voters have no idea how much the domestic greatness they see as an American birthright was a product of the things we are burning to the ground. I don’t think they realize how much their lives have benefitted from the existence of workplace protections, consumer protections, and national cybersecurity programs. I don’t think they realize how many rural clinics will close if government subsidies dry up, or how financially devastating it can be to have your elders be entirely financially dependent on you.

But there is no world where you blow all of these things up, and it makes America great again.

There’s no world where you blow all these things up, and it makes your life better.

There’s no such thing as a self-contained economic powerhouse. Just lonely losers.

Someday, I hope, we will be in the aftermath of this. We will be picking up the pieces and seeing what can still be rebuilt. And a lot of it…we won’t be able to. Just as the Tesla brand will never recover from this level of ignominy, nations and companies that look for new sources of the things that they used to buy from the United States will probably never come back.

But what might help us, when that time comes, would be the ability to point back at moments like this and say “See? There was always a political will here to fight against that stuff. America can be overrun by pathetic buffoonery…but we don’t give up the fight.”

Instead, what we have is a message that says “when destructive forces come to America, the people who oppose them won’t even bother to use the little leverage they have.” The newspapers will retreat. The universities will retreat. The political class will retreat. The new America is a nation of bullies and cowards….and neither of those groups are people worth partnering with. They're not worth a damn.

Smooth brained America voted in a guy who’s declared bankruptcy six times.

dimejinky99 wrote:Totally normal behaviour

McParadigm wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:

Bi_3 wrote:

tragabigzanda wrote:Now I’m genuinely wondering if anyone in Trump’s orbit has ever put together a PowerPoint on what it looks like if the US loses a trade war.

Isn’t this more likely if the government shuts down during the conflict?

Maybe this isn’t entirely logical, but I’d tend to think of a government shutdown as having a near-term impact on trade squabbles; but the long-term impact of an unchecked Trump agenda would be where the war is potentially lost.

I also think this entire conversation starts off on the wrong foot. What we’re creating isn’t a trade war, and isn’t something that can be “won.“ What we are doing is deleting partnerships, and telling the world that any contract the United States offers you is meaningless.

oasisfan35 wrote:

dimejinky99 wrote:Totally normal behaviour

This is not real DIME reposting helps no one.

McParadigm wrote:https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.44.5_3.pdf

Peeps wrote:

McParadigm wrote:https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.44.5_3.pdf