Dumbasses go from not believing everything a politician tells them to believing everything a politician tells them because he’s dRaInInG the SwAmP. Zero sympathy for anyone still buying their lies.
Delete Elon and Trump from existence and nothing will get better.
Why?
Because Americans are dumb as fuck and they’ll still be dumb as fuck when and if those two are gone.
I’m old enough to have seen the same pattern multiple times. Republican leadership fails spectacularly, even pissing off many conservatives in the process. But as soon as the next cycle begins, those conservatives are back onboard voting for the absolute shittiest candidates.
Because to them an actual, literal dictator is better than a Democrat as president.
Our society is circling the toilet and it almost certainly won’t get better within our lifetimes. Prepare yourselves for that.
It took Rome 1000 years to collapse. I expect instability in the us for the rest of my lifetime. I’m struggling to balance that reality and also living my life.
Also- I think COVID is to blame too. More people started living from the survival mindset and actually getting sick impacted their brain. Dictatorships help people feel safe.
I actually don’t consider this an issue of being dumb. It IS an issue with being under-educated (often deliberately in R states) and fed a ton of propaganda
There’s ignorance and there’s stupidity. Stupidity will stubbornly resist any attempt to correct its ignorance.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.
Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
…
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid.
They’re symptoms, not the problem. Even if they were vanished from existing by will of a djinni or something, another would just take their place.
If you’re Republican it’s simple:
- A tariff is Trump’s special magic that saves you from foreigners and wokeness, and MexiCanada pays for it.
- Stuff costs more at the store because the Biden Crime Family hurt the economy so bad, not even Trump can fix it right away. In fact it might even take more than 4 years, so we better keep him in office forever.
I don’t think he’ll live more than 4 years anyway. Hopefully the movement collapses when he does
The r’s are going to replace one clown with another. Approval isn’t necessary if you’re a dictator.
If you’re a republican at this point you’re one of two classes:
-
Elite, business owner, capitalist. Out for yourself and with enough money and resources and support to do what you want and evade hardships with ease while blaming people below you for their own problems. These are the people who know that if the system changes, they will lose their benefits and comforts and have every motivation in the world to keep pushing right-wing ideology even if they don’t actually believe in it on some level. They have the luxury of not actually caring.
-
One of the people below the elite who work two or more jobs or can’t get ahead no matter what they do because the system is designed to keep the poor where they are and keep filtering the wealth upwards. These are the people without the time or education to learn why their lives are trash, and manage to watch 30 minutes of FOX or OAN news clips on facebook every Sunday night before bed so they truly, honestly believe that immigration and trans people are the source of all their problems and genuinely don’t understand why the good guys aren’t doing something about all the bad guys, because this is the extent of their mental strength.
In truth I’d bet most of these people in numbers 2 are watching this stuff on their phones far more often than 30 minutes on Sunday night.
The wildest stuff comes up on my coworkers and acquaintances apps while scrolling. Like they’ll be watching a cooking video then scroll down and a video about why this trans woman is the devil shows up. Usually they’ll scroll right by but it’s a constant stream of hate/disinformation on top of the usual low quality click bait.
-
Even if it were a tax paid by foreign companies, what difference does it make? They would just increase the prices the goods are sold at.
So, lets say, a smartphone that is priced at $1000:
With the 20% tariff in place:
If the Chinese conpanies pay the $200 per device, they just sell each phone at $1200 to the US importer.
If the US importers pay the $200 per device, similarily, they would tack on the $200 (on top of the usual markups), making it $1200 per phone.
There is zero difference, the end consumer always foots the bill.
This is so simple to understand, how are people this stupid
the end consumer always foots the bill.
Or the consumer can’t/won’t take on the extra burden of cost, and the business loses enough sales to go under.
Not necessarily: the company can choose to absorb part or all the tariff, since the demand would drop at the higher price anyway, and they might make more overall profit at a lower margin per item. But generally yes, most of the cost will be passed on to the consumer and prices will increase on average.
Example:
found the economics student
It’s why they’re called “pass-through costs.”
The only difference would be that money we spent would be going to the companies instead of the government. Tarrifs are a government putting taxes on their people to strangle industries in other countries. In both scenarios we pay the same, but the flow of money is different
didn’t understand why he was told the other countries pay the tariffs
that’s easy: you were willing to vote for a guy who lied over 30 thousand times in his first term so he realized you’re a fucking idiot and he could say anything without you thinking even half a second about it.
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
The real Russian plot we’ve all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That’s the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.
The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they’ve done in other countries that they’ve subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what’s true or not. It’s frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation’s interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what’s true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what’s real or not.
It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don’t have communities around us, we don’t have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don’t have groups of people we care about telling us we’re wrong, we don’t have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you’ve never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you’ve been fed the “special birthday boy” narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don’t seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.
You can google “KGB tactics for destabilizing nations” and spend weeks reading about what’s being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because “how do we even know what’s real anymore.”
WHAT’S THE POINT OF EXPORTING SHIT YOU IDIOT WHY WOULD A COUNTRY DO IT IF THEY HAD TO PAY FOR IT
Yeah this is grade school level reasoning telling you that it obviously doesn’t work that way.
A country’s aluminum exports for example aren’t extra aluminum they want to get rid of because it’s junking up their basements and America is 1800-got-junk taking it off their hands at cost. It’s a fucking series of material production companies in a different country. They too are based on capitalism and they too require profits in order to function.
They willing pay the extra funbucks tariff monies for the privilege and honor of shipping it to America (at cost) on a chance some red-hatted half-wit will waste it.
Omg. We’ve come full circle now that smart people are telling idiots to do your own research…
Plot twist: the person writing this is President Musk and the employee he’s referring to is Trump.
Ive never been opposed to learning through experience rather than what others tell you. Dont trust anything you can’t verify yourself.
“Doing your own research” means watching one or two YouTube videos or Facebook posts as far as these people are concerned. No thought for themselves, just parrot what you hear.
What kills me is that we shouldn’t be researching a thing that was taught in school.
Actual footage of us GenX kids learning about The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.
I don’t understand why this even needs to be researched. I’m no economist and I don’t know much about tariffs, but: costs more to get product to me for any reason = product costs me more. When has that ever not been the case? What am I missing?
Hey, you have to factor in things like market capture! They could be operating entirely at a loss just to ensure no other competitor can operate in the same market.
(/s because duh more cost = more price)
I would like to ask them what happens when taffis are increased to 100%? Does that mean producers are giving stuff for free?
And then what happen when the tarris are at 200%? Do they have to send stuff for free and pay on top of that?
One more thing - don’t tell them they are wrong. Tell them they were lied to
And the people who voted for the orangetard will still be shafted by him and his mafia yet will continue to blame “obiden” for their economic woes. 🥱
literally googling tariffs, brings you to a government page that lists tariffs, duties, and taxes under the same fucking definition.
How people like this DO NOT understand this shit, is beyond me. I can respect the humility in changing your position after being that stupid though, please, due your due diligence before mindlessly repeating the shit other people tell you, so you don’t look stupid.
What, visit a website, read it, then comprehend it? What, like a book?! May as well ask them to make a phone call.
Real answer is in the last line there. If 60% of people we’re capable of doing their own research (and arriving at the correct answer) then we wouldn’t have anti-vaxers, flat-earthers and non-billionaire/non-bigot/non-christian nationalist republicans.
The problem lies where they “find” their “research” when they see the answer they want to see on social media rather than an actual study or any factual references.
“He was told the other countries pay the tariffs”, by a bunch of liars and he believed the liars.
The real hard part is it’s a partial truth.
The sellers do pay the tariffs, they just don’t talk about what that does to the prices.
The other problem is it cuts both ways, and a number of the idiots will say as long as you’re hurting them too, fine.
And then we have retaliatory tariffs, which also cut both ways.
IMHO, our biggest issue is we’ve been using cheap Chinese products and labor as a crutch instead of increasing wages. They’ve been able to cut down wages because Amazon, Temu and Shein have been providing products WAY WAY under marketable US made prices.
Some people genuinely are fucking dumber than a rock
