this is such a delicious and true point.
https://xcancel.com/PhoenixWrightA1/status/1907661609717346468
ht @justinwolfers.bsky.social and the left-right-and-center podcast
Tweet from A. Ham, @PhoenixWrightA1: It's essentially Critical Trade Theory. Any trade imbalance between two countries is de facto evidence of systemic unfair trade practices.
@llimllib it seems like these two possibilities should be mutually exclusive, but there is a kind of quantum superposition of stupidity and canny malignancy to this administration, so i'll go with both.
Suppose Trump had crashed the stock market by sharply raising the corporate tax rate. In a certain sense, "wealth" would have been destroyed, but our actual prosperity would not be impaired. 1/
It would have been a purely distributional change, stockholders would have gotten poorer but the "pie" we share would have been unchanged. 2/
Highly disruptive tariff moves are not like that. The stock market is declining because long-term economic plans, on the production side as well as the sales side, have been upended. Firms that would have been productive will disappear. 3/
We will in aggregate be poorer. The change is not merely distributional. 4/
In the long-term, of course, if the policy environment stabilizes, um, somewhere, new production arrangements will be planned, and it's possible we find a new equilibrium more prosperous than the one we left, short-term pain for long-term gain. We have no evidence this is likely, but sure. 5/
But even if so, there was no need to so sharply destroy in-pipeline production. We could have telegraphed and gradually imposed over five years a more autarkic trade policy, if that's what we want. 6/
We'd have achieved the same putative long-term gain without throwing much of the existing pipeline and several years of aggregate prosperity, in the US and around the world, into the wood chipper. /fin
proletarianize the plutocrats.
i feel like upscale television is moving on from antiheroes to good people caught in overwhelmingly tragic situations.
@BenRossTransit I agree that just emphasizing the positive program that you share is better than trying to confront the crazies in another faction. If you are close to people in the other faction, you can privately encourage some housekeeping. But attempts at public cross-factional discipline often result in splitting apart the coalition.
@BenRossTransit i agree with respect to the crazies of your own faction. but be very careful, if you try to go after the crazies of a faction in coalition that is not your own, that you don’t slip into conflating their crazies with their faction. that’s a trick (of your opponents), to provoke interfactional warfare by getting “crazies” in each faction to start a food fights in which each faction slips into viewing the other in caricature.
a solidaristic tactic might be to just let the stupidest or most hurtful things said by the most ridiculous members of groups you mean to be in coalition with just wash off your backs rather than making a big deal of it. 1/
don’t imagine your opponents don’t encourage and finance the worst and most belligerent elements of every group that might join in coalition against them hoping you will take the bait. don’t. /fin
maybe we elected a new George III to remind ourselves why we did a revolution.
is “cringe” cringe now?
the Republicans are so concerned about election integrity, except where it’s actually threatened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/us/politics/trump-loomer-haugh-cyberattacks-elections.html
ht @Noupside @thinkyparts.bsky.social
look, now that we’ve shaken off the woke and we’re all smoking again, we can just replace all those “lattes” and “cappuccinos” with American-burnt ash dissolved in American-boiled water.
the new Americano.
@admitsWrongIfProven @VeroniqueB99 we’re mutuals! we’ve not chatted directly, but i love her posts.
@admitsWrongIfProven it’s the name given the 30 years from roughly 1945 to 1975 when WWII shattered Western European countries built strong, prosperous social democracies. a miraculous, joyful rise from the ashes, an era of progress rather than stagnation or regression.
@Harald_Korneliussen “bots or people who've turned themselves into bots” is a very perceptive turn of phrase.
what the fuck is wrong with this world? https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-aid-workers-deaths-video.html
promises made. promises kept.
Paul Noth New Yorker cartoon showing a political billboard with a wolf as candidate saying “I am going to eat you” while sheep mill about. The caption is “He tells it like it is.”
On the AMLO/Sheinbaum “Fourth Transformation” of Mexico https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-fourth-transformation/
maybe the plan is to have fascism collapse itself into a smoking crater without a single shot fired and then enjoy the new trente glorieuses.
