I'm trying to quit engaging with Twitter slop, but this was too good to resist:
This is what I believe in.
Ruining the joke is lame, but it still must be said: both of these people and their supporters have way more in common with each other than they do with the neolib-neocon establishment.
The populist right is against cheap labor (foreigners) and foreign wars (America 1st). The populist left is against cheap labor (corporate greed) and foreign wars (imperialism). Both want some form of protectionism, as opposed to corporate globalism-- the only difference is some want it to be right-wing flavored (nativism) and others want it to be left-wing branded (socialism).
They support identical outcomes, but for different reasons-- well who cares about the reasons, then? Just get over your differences, and start working together.
Maybe as political polarization winds down, and the country starts to fall apart economically, they can strike a truce over these minor differences and start making peace, finding common ground, and unifying in order to take on the rotten and corrupt establishment.
I think another element in how awful Trump's cabinet picks were is the fact that he must be in tremendous debt or deep shit economically, as a result of the CNBC-warrior jihad against him.
ReplyDeleteHe's resorted to selling various branches of the US government to oligarchs and powerful interest groups, in exchange for wealth / influence / personal favors.
Pam Bondi-- Qatar.
Saudi Arabia & Qatar are some of the biggest sponsors of jihadism in the M-E and abroad, including Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Joulani (the 2020s rebrand of ISIS), and Hamas (useful idiots for Israel).
However they're also insanely rich and some of the biggest allies of the MIC, so these basic facts get covered up on both sides.
In practice, the anti-Islamic conservative warriors carefully avoid targeting their buddies, and instead go after moderate governments like the dictators in Iraq, Syria, Libya etc in order to replace them with jihadists. Or they target the non-fanatic Muslims who protect minorities, like Iran and Lebanese Shia Muslims (Hezbollah), for resisting American-Israeli influence in the region.
Elon Musk, Vivek-- tech lobby.
Fairly obvious, Trump goes on a bunch of retarded podcasts and then gets handed billions. In exchange, he then opens the floodgates on H1B visas and bails them out now that their retarded bubble is about to burst.
Very sad to see Mr. America 1st teaming up with sleazy scammers.
Rubio-- standard GOP slop.
Another total surrender to neocons. This why we're prolonging the war in Ukraine, intensifying the sanctions against Russia, trying to invade Venezuela, etc.
Howard Lutnik--
You can come to your own conclusions.
The based alt-right HATES poor brown people, but they all get on their knees and start apologizing as soon as an upper-class Jewish or Indian scammer shows up!
The entire charade going on with Trump, Europe, and Ukraine has to be one of the saddest spectacles I've ever seen-- just a total theatrical LARP, and of course a humiliation of Europe disguised as some kind of brave-warrior thing.
ReplyDeleteNobody in Europe is in any position to issue threats, since a war with Russia would collapse their nation internally, let alone the Dutch or the Belgians-- two militarily irrelevant nations, that aren't even leaders in their own region (that would be France and Germany, and both of these nations failed to invade Russia), and who have zero ability to carry out any threats or even intention of doing so.
They might as well have the leader of Luxembourg issue final warnings to Putin!
Making verbal threats is always a sign of embarrassing impotence, and in this case also of the deepest submission to the American yoke (slave behavior), which they're trying to rebrand as honorable LOL.
This type of embarrassing WW2-LARPing posturing is also no longer "free" after 2020, since it comes at the cost of depriving Europe from Russian energy, so the more they indulge in it the more they will suffer as prices for all kinds of basic things soar.
Not that America is any better, though. Trump is pretending to be some kind of neutral party "trying to reach a deal", when the Pentagon has been funding the whole thing from beginning.
Ukraine has no military power or economic might or relevance in the world, it's just an anarchic "country" run by neo-Nazi gangs and sleazy Jewish oligarchs. Without American military expertise and legitimacy, it would have no credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world-- and even with those things, they can't restrain themselves from looting their own economy or prevent Russia from retaking more and more territory.
This is another consequence of being such seething neocon haters of Russia and Iran and China etc: you wind up in bed with some of the most corrupt inbred retarded losers of their respective regions, who steal everything while failing on the battlefield-- just an Afghanistan repeat, but the left-wing version.
Revisiting the whole USAID thing, I'm starting to think it was just another example of the same left-wing bureaucratic scamming I've described before.
ReplyDeleteI'm not against interventions in the 3rd world, helping out, or being a good neighbor or whatever. But generally speaking, I think they should take the form of:
-High cost, but short-term
This is if there's some unforeseen Black Swan-type disaster, say a mega-hurricane or whatever, and we swoop in to provide immediate relief. Not "for free" and not "forever", but just to stabilize the whole thing so we don't have to deal with an even larger migrant crisis later on down the line, if their government collapses, for example.
Or something similar to what Iran and Russia did in Syria and Iraq, where they wiped out the bulk of ISIS forces in order to avoid them having a staging ground from which to launch terrorist attacks or take over other countries.
-Low cost, but long-term
This is if there's some kind of future benefit we can gain.
I know there are programs that send young Spanish doctors to poorer LatAm countries to gain experience. Since the environment is more chaotic, and the tools are more limited and low-tech, they gain much more experience than in Europe where there are more solutions and the environment is more stable, and so they come back more seasoned. In exchange I assume they receive discounted older equipment (which may be better than what they have) or the chance to have their own people study at advanced Euro universities, or something like that.
Or if we rent out some land for a scientific expedition, in exchange for favors, that kind of thing.
What should always be avoided are programs that fall into the third category: high cost, long term.
ReplyDeleteThis is where you're forced to spend insane amounts of money for things provide no long term benefit and only seem to grow and grow and grow unsustainably-- this is the worst of both worlds, and is what a real government should avoid, shut down, or ideally nip in the bud before both parties have to deal with the costs.
And these are precisely the kind of programs and 'solutions' that left-wing / public sector hucksters specialize in, in order to maximally leech off of the US gov't and the public.
When they arrive in the 3rd world country with their resources, food, skills, advanced equipment, etc they do provide something of benefit, sure, but it all comes at the expense of wiping out all the less efficient local alternatives for all these things, since they are nowhere as developed as their Western counterparts.
Then since there are always more needy people, or maybe the needy people even reproduce more due to finding a thriving niche, the whole thing spirals from there-- and now they are essentially dependent on 1st world welfare forever.
Then the hucksters tell their bosses, 'We're doing everything we can, but we just need more money to fix pressing issues.' If their bosses were sensible, they might start asking questions-- but fortunately all that stuff gets paid for with other people's money, so there's no reason to investigate any of it, just keep funding it more and more!
And then that's why later on, when there's an 'unforeseen' event (like a recession or an election in the home country) the entire thing just collapses, everything is wasted and both parties are worse off as a result.
('Unforeseen' from the short-term midwit POV, totally predictable and guaranteed from the intelligent long-term perspective.)
Then of course the scammers (on both sides) make sure to remove all of the nuance from the discussion, so that it's impossible to discuss the issue reasonably, and you wind up with the cartoonishly oversimplified and ineffective political "debate" we have today:
ReplyDeleteBased racist isolationists vs liberals who believe we should spend 1 trillion dollars on welfare for the whole globe-- nothing in between, no trade-offs, no asking questions, it's either one or the other.