BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

NEW STUDY: Nearly $80 Trillion Redistributed from the Bottom 90% to the Top 1% Since 1975

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-re … ince-1975/
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html


OK what we need to do is defund and deport the Rand corporation and its employees.

Well without STEM you wouldn't even have two cans and a piece of string to communicate with.

Trump is delivering to his voters exactly what they wanted: mass deportations and an end to woke.

The MAGA people at my job don't own stock. I have literally heard these people talk about how stocks are scams and they don't believe in it. So the decline isn't real or matters to them. They probably think the whole thing is funny.

I think a lot of people have this belief that "it can't get any worse than this." That's a "failure of imagination." It definitely can get worse. Individually and collectively.

...

I get the feeling of "burn it down." We lived through OWS. But when you are in your 30s and beyond burning it all down seems a bit juvenile.

...

I am trying to not slip into the culture war abyss either but it is hard to find the motivation to go out and advocate for blue collar workers and ethnic minorities when the same group of people will call me a homo for "working a women's job" or can't bother to show up to vote to save their own ass. I understand that better men than me in the past got past the feeling of ingratitude for me to be here but that whatever.

unsure how fractionally significant trump regret is among the blue collar. there's still a lot of deflection onto biden, obama, clinton. some of them are educated just enough to name- and term-drop, have fingered their way through a history book or two rote-memorizing lists of presidents and VPs and stuff like the line of succession, have some college, even 'did high school debate!' yet either there is a gap in their education for doing their own analysis of stuff, or they just don't. they cannot elaborate further or defend in many political arguments past whatever reached them first. "i'm sure the penguin island tariff was just a mistake," lmao, 'mistake' is a word you could use. the softest touch imaginable for the idiocy of trump's presidency.

a glance at whiny fox news in the morning often predicts whatever the off-topic mention will be for the day. or when a thing that's been on social media for months finally makes it their way, so i'm not surprised by a random conversation in june about something that happened last december. i'm sure i could rip some liberal article about The Man, give it the FOX trappings in photoshop with some misleading photos from gettyimages, send it out as an emailer, and they'd think it was amazing.

weirdly: some disagree vehemently with stuff trump is up to. some withdraw from the argument when you say trump is up to it. must be tough! it's so weird just how much someone agree with stuff like getting the homeless into housing, and making sure consumers aren't exploited, and "if europe can do it, why not us," but as soon as it becomes republican vs. democrat, the discussion deteriorates.

i don't really understand the justification to withdraw from it all just because the landscaping guy or TAs or park rangers voted against their own self-interest. not wanting to live for the next ~50 years with magaland in the world should be enough reason for mac to carry on. why should it hinge on whether or not maga is sufficiently chagrinned when their industrial chemical company lays off 500 employees? if mismanagement comes to a surprise to a maga person, well, trump's not exactly been very low profile about what kind of person he was. that's on you, pool cleaner person.

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2025-04-08 11:44:53)

Undocumented or just non-whites need to start going to gun shows to buy up rifles with cash and no paperwork just like everyone else.
Conservative heads would explode on what to do

uziq wrote:

such a fucking asinine comment. yes, and without capitalism you wouldn't have coffee or a phone to post from. i guess we can't criticise anything because 'we live in a society'?

where's that meme pic, surely you have it on file somewhere.

Still tickled that you're going berserk because a STEM nerd has had about sis weeks of fucking things up compared with about two centuries of the other crowd.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

such a fucking asinine comment. yes, and without capitalism you wouldn't have coffee or a phone to post from. i guess we can't criticise anything because 'we live in a society'?

where's that meme pic, surely you have it on file somewhere.

Still tickled that you're going berserk because a STEM nerd has had about sis weeks of fucking things up compared with about two centuries of the other crowd.

i'm not beserk at all. none of this has affected me in the slightest?

it's just funny you've been cumming in your pants over elon's rise in the last few years, and now it turns out your posterchild 'engineering geniuz' who is 'taking humanity to the next step' is a fucking idiot and an insecure nerd who lies about high-scores on video games. talk about feet of clay.

this is the biggest and most expensive demonstration of 'i told you so' in world history. why would you think i'm mad? i don't base my politics on nerd personality cults or repressed rage from not being cool during university. i'm doing fine. are you okay though?

for the better part of a decade now you've been saying 'STEM is best, let scientists be in charge', and people have replied to you that your weird fixations and teenaged tribalism about undergraduate degrees is laughably disconnected from the actual real world and complex issues. i've provided you with a book length of replies with examples of when 'government run by science' has gone disastrously wrong. then you come here and post some random link, apparently having heard of Rand corporation for the first time, and have your 'woah bro' moment. rooting around in the dark undergrowth of your own ignorance. scientists are capable of bad leadership and awful politics, ackshually! and they've been like this for long centuries too! it's almost like someone's undergraduate credentials aren't the best heuristic for understanding this phenomenon!

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-09 04:24:18)

if it's been '30 years in the making' (ok sure) then why is this all a symptom of 'bad humanities leadership'? are you fucking dumb?

the modern western consensus, i.e. neoliberalism, was built by lawyers, MBAs and technocrats. their foundations were not wide reading in the classics or the liberal humanist tradition; they didn't derive from liberal arts schools or patrician yale art history degrees. thatcher was inspired by hayek and the american establishment took after milton friedman and chicago school economics. it has precisely been NUMBERS PEOPLE who have set up this modern world in the interests of dodgy market ideology that masquerades as 'rational', 'scientific', etc. that's literally what has structured the modern world system, hayek-friedman et al, not people writing dissertations on romantic poetry or power-mad philosophy dons. the entire point of PPE is to produce these little business-suited technocrats and soundbite-producing politicos, whose only knowledge of 'economics' is basically friedman orthodoxy 101. where's the pernicious influence of too much humanities learning, in this picture?

you are a fucking idiot, man.

You can't run a country with a U$0.5 Trillion trade deficit every year for years, its not sustainable.

the only time the US has actually ran a trade surplus was ... during the great depression.

the situation is sustainable precisely for as long as the USD is the global reserve currency of choice. this entire situation has been beneficial to mainstream american monetary policy for decades.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-09 06:45:46)

seems about an hour after i made my post that a japanese hedge-fund kamikaze’d the bonds market and caused trump to do a ‘whoopsie’ u-turn on his tariff war.

what was it all for? the idea that the USA can click its fingers and the world will pay attention is fading fast.

weakening the perceived safety and stability of the USD seems like a great way to achieve the multipolar world that pretty well every other power except the US and her allies would like.

the whole post-bretton woods world order was set up for america’s benefit. to see a populist preach to the masses that they are the victims of this system is very fucking odd. americans have been relying on the developing world as one big sweatshop of immiseration, child slavery, dollar-a-day satanic mills, zero unionisation or rights, etc. all so that they can buy $15 leggings from Shein or whatever the fuck.

“we buy from vietnam and taiwan more than they buy from us!” yeah no shit! your ‘development’ experts descended on those countries precisely to build them up as satellite manufacturing hubs for your domestic market, while extracting a maximum of profit! there’s going to be a deficit!

the american establishment has for decades weaponised the international banking system and the dollar standard to ensure that developing countries’ remain right where the US wants them: wage suppressed and straitjacketed by the IMF. no shit that poor workers in the developing world aren’t consooming american goods like rich yanks.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-10 03:05:29)

one of trump’s biographers or one of the many court psychologists or whatever in the press corps pointed out that trump has been a vocal supporter of tariffs ever since some event where a japanese (or possibly chinese; i think the former due to it being in the 80s/90s) new-money type outbid trump on a condo or some development deal. that was when he realised that other countries, the east asian tiger economies in particular, were facilitating his sort of capitalist expansionism much better than his own system, and were pretty well on their way to gobbling up his gold-leaf lunch.

some japanese yuppie got the pad that trump wanted and he has been intent on tariffing the shit out of america’s rich allies ever since.

Last edited by uziq (2025-04-10 03:17:26)