I’m glad you’re not easily bullied! 🙏🏼❤️🔥 You put into words what has been bugging me about the resistance to tariffs. Why *shouldn’t* we sustain ourselves with who and what interrelates with us where we are? I don’t like what Trump wants to do to our lands, but it’s what we’ve been doing to other lands. The real change required, one way or another, is degrowth—or a return to growth, decay, death, and regrowth, which is the way of things, anyway. I’m still gearing toward local, reciprocal, organic, and plastic-free.
I think often about how the country where I live, Luxembourg, only produces enough of one food item to not need imports of it. That's milk, which is great -- but that's the only thing. And every nation is like this, unable to feed itself from the land it occupies, utterly reliant on far-flung trade and the petrocarbons that fuel it.
We're so fucked, really.
And yeah, not worried in the slightest about that legal threat, as I've written nothing untrue. And also, bullies are boring.
It's fascinating the skepticism that comes with accusations of anti-Semitism versus the constant claims of other forms of bigotry which are every bit as dubious.
And you're only realizing now that people exploit the Palestinian cause to present themselves as brave martyrs in the face of the almighty powerful Israeli lobby? This has been going on for 50 years. There are people like Alice Walker and Angela Davis who are both criticized for their strong support of it Palestinians, and because of their extremely unethical and disturbing past behavior and/or beliefs. Then there are people who use the label “Zionist” towards anyone who stands up for Jews, including in cases that have nothing to do with the Palestinian cause.
I judge something as anti-Semitic if it is an attitude or behavior towards Jews that would not be tolerated towards Muslims, Africans, Arabs, Hispanics, etc. Certainly when it goes the other way (when these groups are treated in a way that would not be tolerated for Jews) nobody has a problem calling it racist.
I'm upset about the tariffs, but for the same reason you're optimistic about them. I think they've been thrown together in such a slapdash, retaliatory way that the very idea of tariffs will end up taking another century to recover from. I would love to see some tariffs put in place to encourage local ag and manufacturing and to ensure that companies can't benefit from outsourcing everything to places lacking labor and environmental protections, but instead we're busy picking fights with Canada and Denmark. And nobody's going to invest in domestic manufacturing when the tariff landscape is changing weekly, daily, or even hourly - companies need to believe the tariffs will stick before they set up factories in the US again. I was hopeful these tariffs would work when I heard Vance talk about them during this campaign, but I'm nervous they're just going to fail so miserably we'll end up with another 80-year backlash on the idea.
(I do feel a good bit of schadenfreude when the market dips though, despite my own retirement accounts!)
You're absolutely right -- it's a mess. But, in fact, my optimism derives entirely from the de-stablizing nature of that slapdash regime. As I mentioned in my essay Wildfire Trump (https://rhyd.substack.com/p/wildfire-trump ), there's lots of potential in these crises.
Not to be a jerk, but I don’t care for this take. A lot of human tragedies can be excused by the necessity of disruption. For an admittedly egregious example, much of the world enjoyed a kind of Golden Age after WWII. While many bad things happened, worldwide standards of living and prosperity soared. Many colonized nations won independence and caste systems were overthrown in the US, South Africa, and elsewhere. Yet despite those good outcomes, few of us would say that the Nazis were an improvement on the stagnation of the Weimar Republic.
This is my take as well. A CEO who borrows $10 million dollars to build a new manufacturing plant that will take 10- 20 years to pay for itself based on a business plan that assumes these tariffs won’t be reversed by the next administration would be an idiot. Companies don’t want to hire at-will employees right now because they are waiting for things to settle down. They are definitely not going to commit to building anything.
The other thing that is missing from this (and many) discussions is that the US lacks the infrastructure and personnel to become an industrial powerhouse. The electrical grids in many areas are aging and failing. Texas is a few hot days when people turn on the AC from brown outs. I used to do work at an industrial plant that was voluntold by the power company to run their processes at night because when they powered up during the day, the drawdown in power made transformers blow up in other parts of the city. And this was in a major US city.
Not only is the infrastructure aging, but so is the skilled labor workforce. The workforce of skilled trades declined significantly after 2008, and to cut costs, many companies and union shut down training programs- leaving a giant gap in the workforce. Not only that, the skilled trades workforce is aging rapidly. And despite what “trade schools” advertise, an electrician or plumber is not trained in a couple of years. Legally, an electrician or plumber has to work full time 4-5 years as an apprentice to be eligible for licensing. It depends on the state, but usually a licensed worker can only legally supervise 1-3 apprentices. And rightly so- construction sites are dangerous and people who don’t know what they are doing yet need close supervision. So it’s not like we can fix the labor shortage quickly or easily- unless we drop the standards for becoming a licensed electrician or plumber. Which is a terrifying idea that I expect to be floated very soon- just chuck a bunch of new trade school grads on a construction site and pay the ones who are alive at the end of the week sounds like something we can expect from the “bring back child labor” crowd.
IDK what is going to happen, and like you I can’t help but be amused by the level of shock people have over their fake money going away- even though fake money disappearing hurts me too. I just wish I didn’t see real barriers to the fantasy visions the MAGA crowd has been entertaining about American manufacturing.
And what scares me more is the possibility that it was never offshoring that caused the American working class depression of the last few decades. The US population has more than doubled since 1950- there are a lot more of us chasing the same resources. Or in many cases, diminishing resources as the easy-to-get oil, ores, and raw materials were consumed and mining, oil production, and lumbering became more expensive and less efficient once the low-hanging fruit was used up. I wonder if the truth is that America went into a depression in the 1980s, and we’ve since been floating on extraction from the Global South- that we exported our recession caused by hyperinflation caused by actual scarcity of resources to sweat shops and continued to enjoy a few decades of consumerism on borrowed time (and money when the national debt is considered). And if the American industrial era died of natural causes and then was offshored instead of it being murdered by offshoring, it makes fixing that problem by introducing tariffs 20+ years after they could have prevented that death even more pointless than they already were.
Sorry, long reply here. I guess td;lr is you’re right
No Rhyd, the left were never against free trade per se back in the day. What they opposed was neoliberalism, which masqueraded as free trade but in practice was anything but. Needless to say Trump's tariffs are utterly prosperous, calculated on lies about foreign tariffs which will ramp up prices for the American worker, whilst benefiting the oligarchs who can price gouge with impunity. Tariffs can work if used intelligently, targeting specific industries as part of a broader industrial strategy. Needless to say Trump has nothing of the sort. It will also hurt the world's poorest nations (why is Lesotho facing a 50% rate?) I recommend you read this history of Britain's corn laws in the 19th century, and the various factions who benefited and were hurt by them. It's a much more complex story than merely bourgeois vs proletariat.
I was there. We were *most definitely* against free trade.
The reason why anti-capitalism (let's not call it leftism anymore -- there are barely any anti-capitalist leftists remaining) is against free trade is precisely because it allows wealthy individuals, groups, corporations, and entire nations to flood the market of poorer nations with cheaper products than they produce themselves.
This siphons all local wealth off from those markets back to the foreign capitalists and destroys the means of survival of those people.
Tariffs are the primary means by which any group can prevent foreign capitalists from destroying their local markets. Free Trade abolishes this defense (again, as Marx said, "The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls...")
You may have said you were but what you were protesting against wasn't really free trade. Free trade has never existed in any absolute sense, developed nations all got rich through tariffs, subsidy and market interventionism. For an undeveloped economy, free capital flows are indeed a problem, as it will prevent domestic industries developing. For a mature economy, excessive or sweeping tariffs can result in price rises and anti-competative activity. Which is why urban workers usually supported free trade in corn, as it enabled them to eat.
Regarding the tempest in a teapot around Repeater- I think this is symptomatic of what the left has become. The left was once a perspective from which to view world events, and it suggested a series of practical steps to influence the course of those events. Now it has become a religion. And just as no non-Christian group has ever killed as many Christians as Christians have killed of each other, the peaceful religion of the left is a bunch of repressed zealots desperate for a target to unload their tension, frustration, and rage on. The left is stereotypically made up of young people upset about the state of the world. But the current pop-psychology of the left makes a virtue of self-effacement and presents crying and therapy as the only appropriate ways to handle personal emotions. The only acceptable way to be angry or outraged or aggressive is to pretend that rage is on behalf of someone else- whether that's writers hiding their rage at rejection behind Palestinian children or angry men posting rape threats on JK Rowling's Twitter/ X/ whatever page because she's a "TERF".
The left has backed into an ideological corner of believing that humans are inherently good, and all negative emotions and reactions are the result of trauma or inequity or something external. Which simply does not line up with the reality of life, where even in a perfect society there is much to enrage young people struggling to move past the comfort zone of their families and upbringing and make their own place in the world. The flip-side of this belief is that if someone feels angry, rejected, ashamed, or in pain it is a bad thing, it is a departure from the proposed trauma-informed moral order, and most significantly, that it is preventable and someone's fault.
Ironically, the upshot of all this is that the left demands an almost absolute repression of emotions. And these bottled up emotions break out in ugly ways whenever a situation arises that allows them to hidden behind the fig leaf of righteous rage on behalf of [insert oppressed group here]. Every since the 2024 Trump election and the lack of any meaningful response on the left, I can't get an old Slipknot song out of my head: All Hope is Gone. Particularly these lines:
I am the reason your future suffers
I am the hatred you won't embrace
I am the worm of a pure gestation
I am the remedy, spit in my face
All your laws and rules are outdated
All your subjects are killing the kings
I could rattle off a million other reasons why
But does it matter when the only thing we love will die?
The left has repressed their hatred. They refuse to accept hate and rage as normal human emotions- as part of our evolutionary history that serve the function of protecting us from exploitation and abuse. So they can threaten writers they disagree with with the violence of the state like cage-brave dogs snarling and snapping only so long as there's no chance they'll end up with skin in the game. But when Trump changes the landscape of our country by fiat, the numbers who show up to protest- and just to peacefully carry signs with mildly insulting messages- barely match the numbers that showed up to protest the Iraq War decades ago. The left tried to eradicate anger and fear and hate and ended up destroying motivation.
As far as being a grumpy aging hipster, I just wonder what happens now. I'm just old enough to get culture shock talking to the people who are now 18-25 years old. When I was an angry young socialist, we were debating identity politics and Marxism and intersectionality. But now I talk to the college-aged leftists of this decade and the Iraq War is ancient history to them. Everyone of my age and older remembers where we were on 9/11/2001. I feel a bit like an elderly person talking about "back in my day" and yelling "get off my lawn, you kids!" But I'm starting to wonder if I see the same lawn as them anymore. And I wonder what comes next. In my opinion, the fatal flaw of Marxism was that it thought it was the end of history. But it was just a phase of history, like all the others. I still see a lot of truth in Marxism, and I don't in the alternatives- identity politics, LGBTQIIDJFOSJFOSIDFOSIJFDOSIJFOSIJFOISJFOSDIJFO+ being the main political thing, etc. But what comes next. Into what ideological vessel will the hopes and dreams of the next generation of activists be poured, now that identity politics has failed and Marxism seems as relatable to the next generation as clicking a floppy disc icon to save a document?
Seeing that picture of the box of plants reminded me of my own experience of joy mixed with panic when I received a similar box of blueberries and hazelnuts! Stop the bleeding, indeed! Happy gardening, brother! 🤓
Is egregore synonymous with demon in the perspective offered here?
Right next to the above quotations, the Communist Manifesto describes the bourgeoisie and its exploitation of the world market as a revolutionary, liberating force essentially unifying scattered tribes and nations into one mankind. Ignoring the dialectical considerations distorts the message. Marx & Engels deemed protectionism backwards and the “OG leftist” criticism of free trade petty-bourgeois, I'd say. ‒ From the manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. […] The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.
I’m glad you’re not easily bullied! 🙏🏼❤️🔥 You put into words what has been bugging me about the resistance to tariffs. Why *shouldn’t* we sustain ourselves with who and what interrelates with us where we are? I don’t like what Trump wants to do to our lands, but it’s what we’ve been doing to other lands. The real change required, one way or another, is degrowth—or a return to growth, decay, death, and regrowth, which is the way of things, anyway. I’m still gearing toward local, reciprocal, organic, and plastic-free.
I think often about how the country where I live, Luxembourg, only produces enough of one food item to not need imports of it. That's milk, which is great -- but that's the only thing. And every nation is like this, unable to feed itself from the land it occupies, utterly reliant on far-flung trade and the petrocarbons that fuel it.
We're so fucked, really.
And yeah, not worried in the slightest about that legal threat, as I've written nothing untrue. And also, bullies are boring.
I live in Northern California wine country and am fond of saying, “If society collapses, I sure hope everybody likes grapes!” 😸
It's fascinating the skepticism that comes with accusations of anti-Semitism versus the constant claims of other forms of bigotry which are every bit as dubious.
And you're only realizing now that people exploit the Palestinian cause to present themselves as brave martyrs in the face of the almighty powerful Israeli lobby? This has been going on for 50 years. There are people like Alice Walker and Angela Davis who are both criticized for their strong support of it Palestinians, and because of their extremely unethical and disturbing past behavior and/or beliefs. Then there are people who use the label “Zionist” towards anyone who stands up for Jews, including in cases that have nothing to do with the Palestinian cause.
I judge something as anti-Semitic if it is an attitude or behavior towards Jews that would not be tolerated towards Muslims, Africans, Arabs, Hispanics, etc. Certainly when it goes the other way (when these groups are treated in a way that would not be tolerated for Jews) nobody has a problem calling it racist.
You've obviously got an axe to grind against people who aren't me.
I'm upset about the tariffs, but for the same reason you're optimistic about them. I think they've been thrown together in such a slapdash, retaliatory way that the very idea of tariffs will end up taking another century to recover from. I would love to see some tariffs put in place to encourage local ag and manufacturing and to ensure that companies can't benefit from outsourcing everything to places lacking labor and environmental protections, but instead we're busy picking fights with Canada and Denmark. And nobody's going to invest in domestic manufacturing when the tariff landscape is changing weekly, daily, or even hourly - companies need to believe the tariffs will stick before they set up factories in the US again. I was hopeful these tariffs would work when I heard Vance talk about them during this campaign, but I'm nervous they're just going to fail so miserably we'll end up with another 80-year backlash on the idea.
(I do feel a good bit of schadenfreude when the market dips though, despite my own retirement accounts!)
You're absolutely right -- it's a mess. But, in fact, my optimism derives entirely from the de-stablizing nature of that slapdash regime. As I mentioned in my essay Wildfire Trump (https://rhyd.substack.com/p/wildfire-trump ), there's lots of potential in these crises.
Not to be a jerk, but I don’t care for this take. A lot of human tragedies can be excused by the necessity of disruption. For an admittedly egregious example, much of the world enjoyed a kind of Golden Age after WWII. While many bad things happened, worldwide standards of living and prosperity soared. Many colonized nations won independence and caste systems were overthrown in the US, South Africa, and elsewhere. Yet despite those good outcomes, few of us would say that the Nazis were an improvement on the stagnation of the Weimar Republic.
This is my take as well. A CEO who borrows $10 million dollars to build a new manufacturing plant that will take 10- 20 years to pay for itself based on a business plan that assumes these tariffs won’t be reversed by the next administration would be an idiot. Companies don’t want to hire at-will employees right now because they are waiting for things to settle down. They are definitely not going to commit to building anything.
The other thing that is missing from this (and many) discussions is that the US lacks the infrastructure and personnel to become an industrial powerhouse. The electrical grids in many areas are aging and failing. Texas is a few hot days when people turn on the AC from brown outs. I used to do work at an industrial plant that was voluntold by the power company to run their processes at night because when they powered up during the day, the drawdown in power made transformers blow up in other parts of the city. And this was in a major US city.
Not only is the infrastructure aging, but so is the skilled labor workforce. The workforce of skilled trades declined significantly after 2008, and to cut costs, many companies and union shut down training programs- leaving a giant gap in the workforce. Not only that, the skilled trades workforce is aging rapidly. And despite what “trade schools” advertise, an electrician or plumber is not trained in a couple of years. Legally, an electrician or plumber has to work full time 4-5 years as an apprentice to be eligible for licensing. It depends on the state, but usually a licensed worker can only legally supervise 1-3 apprentices. And rightly so- construction sites are dangerous and people who don’t know what they are doing yet need close supervision. So it’s not like we can fix the labor shortage quickly or easily- unless we drop the standards for becoming a licensed electrician or plumber. Which is a terrifying idea that I expect to be floated very soon- just chuck a bunch of new trade school grads on a construction site and pay the ones who are alive at the end of the week sounds like something we can expect from the “bring back child labor” crowd.
IDK what is going to happen, and like you I can’t help but be amused by the level of shock people have over their fake money going away- even though fake money disappearing hurts me too. I just wish I didn’t see real barriers to the fantasy visions the MAGA crowd has been entertaining about American manufacturing.
And what scares me more is the possibility that it was never offshoring that caused the American working class depression of the last few decades. The US population has more than doubled since 1950- there are a lot more of us chasing the same resources. Or in many cases, diminishing resources as the easy-to-get oil, ores, and raw materials were consumed and mining, oil production, and lumbering became more expensive and less efficient once the low-hanging fruit was used up. I wonder if the truth is that America went into a depression in the 1980s, and we’ve since been floating on extraction from the Global South- that we exported our recession caused by hyperinflation caused by actual scarcity of resources to sweat shops and continued to enjoy a few decades of consumerism on borrowed time (and money when the national debt is considered). And if the American industrial era died of natural causes and then was offshored instead of it being murdered by offshoring, it makes fixing that problem by introducing tariffs 20+ years after they could have prevented that death even more pointless than they already were.
Sorry, long reply here. I guess td;lr is you’re right
No Rhyd, the left were never against free trade per se back in the day. What they opposed was neoliberalism, which masqueraded as free trade but in practice was anything but. Needless to say Trump's tariffs are utterly prosperous, calculated on lies about foreign tariffs which will ramp up prices for the American worker, whilst benefiting the oligarchs who can price gouge with impunity. Tariffs can work if used intelligently, targeting specific industries as part of a broader industrial strategy. Needless to say Trump has nothing of the sort. It will also hurt the world's poorest nations (why is Lesotho facing a 50% rate?) I recommend you read this history of Britain's corn laws in the 19th century, and the various factions who benefited and were hurt by them. It's a much more complex story than merely bourgeois vs proletariat.
You do realize The Communist Manifesto predates neoliberalism by almost 150 years? But perhaps you think Marx wasn't a leftist...
I was referring to the anti-globalisation protests of the late 1990s (as the media christined them)
I was there. We were *most definitely* against free trade.
The reason why anti-capitalism (let's not call it leftism anymore -- there are barely any anti-capitalist leftists remaining) is against free trade is precisely because it allows wealthy individuals, groups, corporations, and entire nations to flood the market of poorer nations with cheaper products than they produce themselves.
This siphons all local wealth off from those markets back to the foreign capitalists and destroys the means of survival of those people.
Tariffs are the primary means by which any group can prevent foreign capitalists from destroying their local markets. Free Trade abolishes this defense (again, as Marx said, "The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls...")
You may have said you were but what you were protesting against wasn't really free trade. Free trade has never existed in any absolute sense, developed nations all got rich through tariffs, subsidy and market interventionism. For an undeveloped economy, free capital flows are indeed a problem, as it will prevent domestic industries developing. For a mature economy, excessive or sweeping tariffs can result in price rises and anti-competative activity. Which is why urban workers usually supported free trade in corn, as it enabled them to eat.
“Utterly prosperous” tarrifs sound fun (rather than preposterous).
Regarding the tempest in a teapot around Repeater- I think this is symptomatic of what the left has become. The left was once a perspective from which to view world events, and it suggested a series of practical steps to influence the course of those events. Now it has become a religion. And just as no non-Christian group has ever killed as many Christians as Christians have killed of each other, the peaceful religion of the left is a bunch of repressed zealots desperate for a target to unload their tension, frustration, and rage on. The left is stereotypically made up of young people upset about the state of the world. But the current pop-psychology of the left makes a virtue of self-effacement and presents crying and therapy as the only appropriate ways to handle personal emotions. The only acceptable way to be angry or outraged or aggressive is to pretend that rage is on behalf of someone else- whether that's writers hiding their rage at rejection behind Palestinian children or angry men posting rape threats on JK Rowling's Twitter/ X/ whatever page because she's a "TERF".
The left has backed into an ideological corner of believing that humans are inherently good, and all negative emotions and reactions are the result of trauma or inequity or something external. Which simply does not line up with the reality of life, where even in a perfect society there is much to enrage young people struggling to move past the comfort zone of their families and upbringing and make their own place in the world. The flip-side of this belief is that if someone feels angry, rejected, ashamed, or in pain it is a bad thing, it is a departure from the proposed trauma-informed moral order, and most significantly, that it is preventable and someone's fault.
Ironically, the upshot of all this is that the left demands an almost absolute repression of emotions. And these bottled up emotions break out in ugly ways whenever a situation arises that allows them to hidden behind the fig leaf of righteous rage on behalf of [insert oppressed group here]. Every since the 2024 Trump election and the lack of any meaningful response on the left, I can't get an old Slipknot song out of my head: All Hope is Gone. Particularly these lines:
I am the reason your future suffers
I am the hatred you won't embrace
I am the worm of a pure gestation
I am the remedy, spit in my face
All your laws and rules are outdated
All your subjects are killing the kings
I could rattle off a million other reasons why
But does it matter when the only thing we love will die?
The left has repressed their hatred. They refuse to accept hate and rage as normal human emotions- as part of our evolutionary history that serve the function of protecting us from exploitation and abuse. So they can threaten writers they disagree with with the violence of the state like cage-brave dogs snarling and snapping only so long as there's no chance they'll end up with skin in the game. But when Trump changes the landscape of our country by fiat, the numbers who show up to protest- and just to peacefully carry signs with mildly insulting messages- barely match the numbers that showed up to protest the Iraq War decades ago. The left tried to eradicate anger and fear and hate and ended up destroying motivation.
As far as being a grumpy aging hipster, I just wonder what happens now. I'm just old enough to get culture shock talking to the people who are now 18-25 years old. When I was an angry young socialist, we were debating identity politics and Marxism and intersectionality. But now I talk to the college-aged leftists of this decade and the Iraq War is ancient history to them. Everyone of my age and older remembers where we were on 9/11/2001. I feel a bit like an elderly person talking about "back in my day" and yelling "get off my lawn, you kids!" But I'm starting to wonder if I see the same lawn as them anymore. And I wonder what comes next. In my opinion, the fatal flaw of Marxism was that it thought it was the end of history. But it was just a phase of history, like all the others. I still see a lot of truth in Marxism, and I don't in the alternatives- identity politics, LGBTQIIDJFOSJFOSIDFOSIJFDOSIJFOSIJFOISJFOSDIJFO+ being the main political thing, etc. But what comes next. Into what ideological vessel will the hopes and dreams of the next generation of activists be poured, now that identity politics has failed and Marxism seems as relatable to the next generation as clicking a floppy disc icon to save a document?
Seeing that picture of the box of plants reminded me of my own experience of joy mixed with panic when I received a similar box of blueberries and hazelnuts! Stop the bleeding, indeed! Happy gardening, brother! 🤓
Is egregore synonymous with demon in the perspective offered here?
Right next to the above quotations, the Communist Manifesto describes the bourgeoisie and its exploitation of the world market as a revolutionary, liberating force essentially unifying scattered tribes and nations into one mankind. Ignoring the dialectical considerations distorts the message. Marx & Engels deemed protectionism backwards and the “OG leftist” criticism of free trade petty-bourgeois, I'd say. ‒ From the manifesto:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. […] The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.