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i genuinely believe that trump just doesn't understand how tariffs work. anything macro is beyond his ken. conservatives love to weaponise the micro-scale fallacies about macroeconomics - 'balancing the household budget' and so on - to their own ends. i think trump really is stuck at the micro- level though. he's still a real estate hustler who thinks he can use fiscal measures to shake down foreign powers. not going to work.

i do think the people in his team and behind him know this, but they're seeing big opportunities in this 'reset'. not at all in the interests of the american populace, that goes without saying.

the entire way they've calculated the tariffs leads me to believe this really is not thought through.

in an 'art of the deal' way, they're clearly probably intended as a starting point for some hustle and negotiations. presumably every government is now intended to be quivering in their boots and queuing up for an audience with the capricious emperor.

i'm really not sure how it will play out in realpolitikal terms, however. for instance, the UK has the 'benefit' of a tariff of 10%. but where can we negotiate from here? not much wriggle room on the existing trade arrangements. it's going to mean accepting lots of chlorinated chicken and american private healthcare, i'm sure.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-03 03:11:46)

yes, none of this obviates the fact that a 'reset' has to involve a lot more than tariffs. the tariffs can only be 10% of the economic do-over that's needed if they are sincere about their stated aims of reorganising the global balance of trade.

slapping a tariff on something doesn't nullify the fact that americans want lots of 'made in japan', 'made in china', and lately 'made in vietnam' products whereas most chinese have absolutely no need or desire for a 'made in america' anything.

it's reminiscent of when nixon intentionally tried to sink japan's tiger economy, or when the british started up the opium wars because the qing emperor didn't for anything in trade with the west.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-03 03:23:11)

there's some very funny useful idiots in the british press this week, who have been dyed-in-the-wool thatcherites for the last 40 years, antagonising and organising to similarly doctrinal ends, suddenly bemoaning the death of british steel. offshoring industry and manufacturing has been the entire point, while you've profited and asset-stripped. fucking loons.

https://x.com/quendergeer/status/1907873192053772502

good god, if this is true.

in STEM government we trust.

With everything going on why are you still using Terpufkat?

At present the GBP-AUD exchange rate is going in my favour faster than my stocks are falling, so I'm actually winning.

I want to be a founding father. How do I evade the tariff?

conveniently ignoring once again that the people responsible for bringing us to this point, of elite capture by high-finance and pro-globalisation technocrats, was maggie thatcher with her chemistry degree and a bunch of city spivs. and of all the demagogues taking the world off an authoritarian cliff today in the present, i’m not sure any of them are products of a mandarin’s education in the walled gardens of humanism?

your animus is directed at a stereotype of ‘oxbridge toff’ that isn’t even coherent. you take aim at the pretenses of snobby polymaths (?!) when even the british media and public have the sense to pillory the much-derided PPE graduates who comprise ‘the blob’ in westminster nowadays. pretty much nowhere in the world is this ‘liberal elite’ that populism is staged in opposition to composed of snooty literature aficionados; they don’t exist. the democrats are the party of lawyers and wall street, not professors of new criticism at yale. 

PPE isn’t a snobby humanities gig, it’s a fast-track course for political advisors and student politicians. they do a smattering of political philosophy in their first year and study the shakiest foundations in economics of an extremely orthodox variety, neither of which are in-depth or require the ‘core’ skills of said disciplines, e.g. rigorous logic or mathematical model building, respectively. what it does provide them with is access to elite networks, which is to say 85% of what’s necessary to get on in politics, regardless of actual theory or textbook study: being in the same room and at the same events is the real point. that’s why in background most of the PPE - SPADland/thinktanker - parliamentary staff - MP - minister pipeline are a fairly heterodox lot. there isn’t much in common between liz truss and an old etonian whose great-great-grandfather was a baronet. they just did ‘the’ course that produces the current centrist consensus and elite, which has pretty much … zero to do with humanities academia.

it’s the true mickey mouse degree for braying henry’s whereas - in typical brit snobbery - it’s degrees like ‘meedjuh studies’ at ex-polytechnics that attract all the ire, presumably for teaching the working classes skills of literacy and analysis and preparing them for oikish jobs at ad agencies or working for some beastly outfit like channel 4.

as always, with low-c conservative reactionary opinion, most of your targets have little coherence; it’s just personal resentments all the way down. hating the preponderance of old etonian mediocrities who rise to the top of every establishment job in the uk is one thing; that’s manifestly inherited privilege that is sealed in place at boarding age. hating ‘oxford humanities’ is incoherent.

a lot like how the american right has been irritated to no end by a tiktok of … australian gen-z women at the office?! go figure. it’s like bull fighting with you lot. wave the word ‘oksferd’ around like a piece of red cloth and spend the next 40 minutes waiting until you exhaust yourself.

https://x.com/franzsherbert/status/1909 … 7OKnIcMVqg

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 02:44:26)

the PPE degree is about 100 years old, and has only really enjoyed its total ascendancy since the 1980s and ushering in of the neoliberal consensus.

an inability to identify the social demographic, or more relevantly the vested interests, who have taken society in this direction suggests you could do with a little less ranting (and paranoiac anti-semitism) and a little more 'humanitoooores' reading yourself. it isn't effete literature snobs that have decided, thanks to their extensive reading of pliny and strabo, to export all the jobs to the ends of the known world. it was technocrats and middle-management types, just as often from margaret thatcher's sociological and psychological cast - i.e. the small-town petit bourgeoisie, 'the girl from above the newsagents' - as it has been parodically posh old etonians. and for every comically villainous private bank or wealth fund in the city headed by some scion of wellington or quadruple-barrelled-surnamer, there's been a bunch of 'money!' (to quote harry enfield) yuppies in the city unleashed by deregulation and seemingly unregulated appetites for avarice who are as to blue blood as prosecco is to moet.

the entire idea of PPE is that it straddles both worlds; it's not taken seriously as a humanities discipline. there are no star scholars or heavyweights of PPE; what it has instead are mavens and doyennes, people who occupy the top academic seats who can 'pick up the phone' for a preferred student. they tend to study, you know, philosophy or politics or history as a proper subject. the 'star pupil' of PPE, much publicised because of his etonian rivalry with bojo, was ... david cameron (1:1). QED.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-07 02:49:20)

uziq wrote:

paranoiac anti-semitism

LOL OK, I think the world has now seen the jews for what they are, there's no hiding it away again.

Well not everyone in govt studied PPE, many of them did indeed study dusty books and subjects which equipped them for govt about as well as if they'd spent four years getting drunk and lounging about - which is in fact what most of them really did.
Certainly before PPE thats exactly what they did.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2025-04-07 03:04:35)