With the electoral college and FPTP, even opting in is of dubious benefit.

If Nato fails and Russia attacks

That already happened back in 2022 (arguably all the way back to '08). NATO didn’t do shit because it’s just the US military wearing a dozen different European baseball caps. And after the US finished scrubbing out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, it didn’t have the logistics to launch another Asiatic land war (while keeping China at gunpoint in the Pacific and Iran in check in the Middle East).

American slippage is already apparent across Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Things are only going to get worse for DC going forward.

You would have to be suicidal to stick your neck into that mess, at this stage of the game.

My real point is that if they had been more subtle Lincoln would absolutely have let them keep slavery.

Lincoln wouldn’t have enjoyed the majorities necessary to rewrite the Constitution without the Civil War. He’d have been in the same position as Quincy Adams or Filmore, two outspoken abolitionists who lacked the tools to functionally end the practice.

The war, the voluntary dissolution of opposition in Congress, and the massive depopulation that neutered immediate blowback left the door wide open for revolutionary change. And Lincoln - unlike his successor Johnson or even more distant successor Truman - walked through that doorway. That’s what makes Lincoln significant - he was presented with a serious opportunity to affect change and he took it, when less lucky presidents never had the opportunity and less moral presidents never had the conviction.

A lesson the modern South seems to understand well if the last few decades of the Republican party are any example.

What makes guys like Trump and Bush Jr so horrifying is the fact that they did pounce on their opportunities to affect radical change. The Republican Party is seizing their moment and reinventing the country while the Dems dither, trying to extract as much personal profit from the decaying system.

The modern South is a consequence of bold Republicans capitalizing on a wellspring of white nationalism that’s been bubbling up since the Civil Rights Era, while Democrats seek to apologize for FDR/Kennedy/LBJ and sell off a generation of progressive reform to the highest bidder. When you look at the Dem strategy in states like Texas and Florida, you see this in spades. Candidates falling over themselves to prove they hate student protesters and brown foreigners and union advocates as much as any Republican.

The lesson we’re all learning is that you might as well try to reign in hell, cause heaven is a lost cause.

Lincoln was totally willing to keep slavery to end the civil war.

The thing about Lincoln wasn’t that he was willing to keep slavery to end the war. Virtually everyone was willing to do that.

Lincoln was willing to end slavery to end the war. This was the truly revolutionary view and the reason he’s so celebrated.

So he freed the southern slaves and ordered the South burned to the ground instead

I don’t think you get to rampage all the way into Gettysburg, looting and burning and raping and massacring your way straight through the heart of the Midwest, and then discover moralism during Sherman’s March.

He wasn’t the abolitionist hero American history portrays him as.

He literally was, though. He wielded abolition, first as a weapon to bleed the Confederacy dry and then as a sucture to knit a new nation out of the 13th-15th amendments.

He achieved policy the most radical abolitionists hadn’t even dreamed of ten years prior. An absolute living legend.

If only he’d made Butler his VP or… idk… ducked.

You realise half of the numbers the ccp gives simply doesn’t match reality?

Sure thing, bro.

I think any tariff that passes will have a swiss cheese of exemptions, because that’s just how the game is played in Congress.

Lobby hard enough and you’ll get your country excused one way or another.

Canada being the biggest trade partner would be prime for these.

It would be prime for Canadian ports, and for a host of middle men who get to launder trade goods through a legal loophole.

But that’s the real end game. Not domesticating manufacturing, but monopolizing channels for import/export.

He says he’s really looking forward to prices coming down in the next four years.

Even absent the tariffs, its crazy to think prices will be coming down under a government that loves the idea of price gouging and speculation.

People wouldn’t listen, because they’ve been pre-programmed to believe Harris is a liar.

What’s more, Harris wouldn’t say this, because it would require her to take a position favorable to global trade, a thing her target voter base hates.

Pandering to conservatives wasn’t going to win her the election because she changed her rhetoric.

Tarrifs good cuz fuck china.

American industry has been pivoting away from China for over a decade, because their wages are outpacing India and Indonesia.

Meanwhile, Chinese exports are flooding into Latin America, rapidly improving the economic condition of big countries like Mexico and Brazil.

But sure. Let’s see how this pans out.

no one suffers more from conservative policy than poor, rural conservatives.

That’s a nice fiction, but they’re already so cut out of the fruits of the economy that its dubious at best.

The folks who suffer on net will be middle class professionals who see their economic floor drop out from under them. They’ll be forced into living like poor, rural conservatives as prices skyrocket and disposable income dries up.

I, for one, will absolutely enjoy watching them suffer

You won’t watch them suffer. You’ll watch “Lifestyles of the Crypto Billionaire” on one channel and “Bum Fights: Disenfranchised Minority Edition” on the other because that’s what the folks enriching themselves in the Trump economy want to show people.

Black Rifle Koffee

But (assuming a tarrif is something that can even pass) I imagine you’re going to see a swiss cheese of exemptions for favored countries. And these countries will become a back door for imports.

Expect all of your coffee to be mysteriously harvested from Canada.

And heart and respiratory and neurological, etc etc

It’s also not necessarily a net-gain. There are a bunch of trade-offs to being better able to deal with a lack of food. Specifically, by sacrificing body mass and brain development to conserve energy.

Surviving adverse conditions can mean developing novel evolutionary strategies. But it can also just amount to evolutionary downsizing. Living as a smaller, weaker, stunted version of your predecessors because the runt of the litter needs fewer calories to get by.

The ease-of-use benefits of centralization outweigh the independence of open-source for most people.

Most advanced software has a learning curve. People who have invested a bunch of time and energy learning Walled Garden OS will find other Walled Garden apps easier to use than folks who grew up in the open-source wilds.

That is a big reason why big OS companies (Microsoft most notoriously) practically give their software away to college kids and junior developers. Gates was even quoted saying something to the effect of “I’d prefer software pirates steal Microsoft Windows today than use a competitor tomorrow”

slightly worse

Five years later

only slightly better

Five years after that

Incompatible with my walled garden OS of crap

But, no, ofc “puuuurge elon tomorrow!”.

Wasn’t the whole moral of The Purge that rich people are insulated from the consequences of their shitty policy. And the only real defense against stocastic violence is community with your fellow man and trust in one another?

“Purge Elon!” is a fiction because Elon is at the center of an enormous, slavishly loyal cult. Meanwhile, folks on Lemmy would slit each others’ throats over a bad meme. There’s not going to be a line, because everyone in it would be stabbing one another.

What?

Some weirdo said it in a place none of us ever go?

Might want to Google Fuentes. He’s a depressingly influential right wing figure.

Also Twitter continues to be one of the latest social media companies in the world.

Unfortunately 46% of women voted Trump.

58% of white women specifically, although Trump improved almost across the board from his 2020 performance.

I wouldn’t be fooled by percentages, though. A huge part of this shift was Dem turnout degradation. She saw a historic sag in turnout from Biden peak.

It’s not that women or Latino men or GenX or whatever preferenced Trump so much as the younger voters gave up on a Dem party that had given up on them.

Sadly…

Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist podcaster known for his long history of antisemitic and misogynistic remarks, wrote on X/Twitter as Trump’s victory emerged: “Your body, my choice. Forever.”

The phrase has gained fast popularity on TikTok, where numerous women have been told their bodies no longer belong to them following the presidential election result.