2025-03-14
There's an old curse "may you live in interesting times".
The world right now is very interesting.
The American people have once again elected the worst president in history. Or, more accurately, a significant portion of the American people have elected this monster. The actual majority of eligible voters are split between voting against him or not voting at all, as if the choice was somehow "it won't matter either way". I have almost as much disdain for the non-voters as I do for the people who actually voted for the Pumpkin King.
I'm not really writing this to re-litigate the election though. It's done. Hopefully some lessons have been learned, but my main concern is that it's too late for those lessons to mean anything.
By which I mean that I'm assuming that there may never be a "free and fair" election in the U.S. ever again. The levers of power have been handed over to a party overrun with power hungry criminals who have repeatedly shown they are willing to pull every lever imaginable if it means they get to retain power.
There's an old Bill Cosby comedy sketch (yes, the rapey scumbag) in which he talks about having a coin toss before the US Revolutionary war. The terms of the coin toss are if the British win the coin toss, the war will be conducted in a traditional formal manner on the battlefield. If the Americans win the coin toss, the Americans get to wear whatever color clothes that they want to, shoot from behind the rocks and the trees and everywhere, and the British must wear red and march in a straight line. The Republicans are clearly shooting from behind the rocks and the trees and everywhere while the Democrats are marching in a straight line.
A while back I was introduced to the concept of finite and infinite games. A finite game is something like a basketball game. At the end of a game of basketball there is a clear winner. However, when that's over the game of basketball is not done. The winners of that game don't just hang up their jerseys forever knowing that they are the forever winners and no more basketball need ever be played again. Basketball is an infinite game. The only way to end basketball is for no one to ever want to play it again.
Democracy is an infinite game... but the Republican party is chock full of people who are treating it like a finite game. Authoritarians excited to end the game forever so they can declare themselves the forever winners. They are playing a different game than the Democrats, and they are playing to the death.
The paradox of tolerance comes up a lot in my feeds these days. This is the conundrum that democracy is in right now. Democracy requires tolerance of other opinions, but what if the opposing opinion is intolerable? We've fallen victim to tolerating the intolerant. Now we're seeing the effects.
I have a lot of swirling thoughts about what the Pumpkin King and his cronies are up to. His behavior is largely consistent with my understanding of that of a mob boss. Very willing to push every rule or boundary until something stops him. During his campaign he promised to fix things he clearly had no ability to fix. Anyone with a decent amount of understanding about how economics works knew this, and either didn't believe him, or believed he was bluffing. The promises from his campaign which I fully believed he would do, because he could, were all of the incredibly shitty variety. Turns out, he wasn't bluffing about those. This is my shocked face. 😐
I'm pretty sure the current economic policy (if you can even call it that) is just a pump-and-dump scheme. The reason presidents (and honestly, all public officials) need to divest their holdings when they take office is to prevent the temptation to do exactly what is happening right now. It's like the idiot in chief just realized he can manipulate the markets just by saying things. Declare a tariff, market dips, buy buy buy, call off the tariff, market goes up. Profit. 📈 ... except of course the market doesn't just bounce back to where it was. With every new uncertainty declaration, the line overall trends down. 📉
There's a game called Civilization which involves playing as a single nation and competing against other world nations for global supremacy. Kinda like Risk, but with a lot more complexity. I used to play at lot of the game Civilization on my PC back in the 90s. The super old school DOS version. I wasn't very good at playing it the "real" way, but I was a kid, so of course I immediately turned to whatever cheat codes I could find. Turns out there was a special debug mode in the game, which, when enabled, allowed you to instantly see the whole world map, as well as go investigate what the competing civilization's cities were doing... and if you wanted, change what they were doing, to some extent. The president is currently treating the world like we're in that debug mode.
I see a fair bit of sentiment out there right now on social media of "well, I'm not heavily invested in the market, wtf do I care?" -- which as a hot take may make sense. Except that's not how economic downturns work. Those people who are losing millions (or billions) of dollars with every fluctuation? Those are the people who tend to own the companies that average folks work. If those companies' economic fortunes start to look less rosy 2 things will happen: jobs will be cut and prices will go up. I guarantee that the millionaires at the top will not "suffer" in any real sense. They're positioned to weather the storm. They will not have to resort to eating ramen. They will not go broke. They'll be fine.
I don't believe that Trickle Down Economics works, but I definitely believe Trickle Down Suffering is a thing.