Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mike Spencer Newsgroups: misc.news.internet.discuss Subject: Re: a medieval emperor or mafia don. Date: 04 Apr 2025 17:09:21 -0300 Organization: Bridgewater Institute for Advanced Study - Blacksmith Shop Lines: 66 Sender: mds@enoch.nodomain.nowhere Message-ID: <875xjjg03y.fsf@enoch.nodomain.nowhere> References: Injection-Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2025 22:09:27 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="31d5a55b1a4d1459ef95e66c4010c1de"; logging-data="277303"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+nzMk3aQp9GCZQLuOm20j+aYi/Zzzk7WM=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:3Z0Bvau+ifSThExHYsNQo8qPLOE= X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.7/Emacs 20.7 X-Clacks-Overhead: 4GH GNU Terry Pratchett Bytes: 3956 JAB writes: > Trump's tariffs are about something more than economics: power > > Above all, tariffs give Donald Trump power. They strike fear into > allies and enemies, from governments to corporations. This is a > president who runs his presidency like a medieval emperor or mafia > don. The formula used to assess the tariffs (allegedly) imposed by other nations on imports from the US is a cockamamie bit of pseudo-algebra with no meaning in real economic or trade terms. Total bullshit. Pundits are struggling to deduce or infer economics-based motivations behind this. My take is that there are none. The motive, embodied in Peter Thiel and his acolyte Vance, Musk, Andreessen, other techno-billionaires and their acolytes is "burn it all down". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment However unbalanced or deluded those people may be, they're all brighter than Trump and not deranged in quite the same way, not and cognitively fragmented as he is. This tariff announcement is evidence that Trump is too stupid, ignorant and deranged to rationally do anything in the domain of his job, viz. being US president. But he's a useful idiot who can, perhaps with occasional prompting, be depended on to do irrational, destructive things and hasten "burn it all down". Trumps *own* motives can be reasonably estimated to be limited to self-aggrandizement, vengeance and whim, motives easily manipulated by anyone who can even briefly get his ear. Being the star of his own movie is all he has the cognitive functionality to attend to. This isn't the kind of conspiracy theory that postulates a secret cabal or hidden eminence grise. These guys are on record as believing that anything we'd recognize as democracy is a failed and obsolete system. They're trying to suck as much money out of the government as they can before all of it is turned into wreckage and they're bringing their effectively unlimited money into play to hasten the wreck. Oddly enough, these bright & wealthy fanatics are playing from the same score as "The Hard Reset: A Terrorgram Publication", that launched "hard reset" into a meme but originated with white supremacist, neo-fascist, violence-prone, wannabe terrorist revolutionaries. "Hard reset" and "burn it all down" are pretty much the same. It's the only motivational explanation I can come up with for allowing Trump to get away with being the mad king. When the consequences of the mad king's maddness really begin to emerge, the pundits are saying, we can look for reverting to sane politics at the mid-terms. That's worrisome for the BIAD crowd so there aren't going to *be* any mid-terms. "Where's our Reichstag fire?" > > https://news.sky.com/story/trumps-tariffs-are-about-something-more-than-economics-power-13341209 > -- Mike Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada