Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/06/how-to-agree-with-something-tr.html
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“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Why, yes, yes it is. Throw it away and get a new clock.
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The funny thing is, I haven’t heard anybody saying good things about TPP. It’s almost as if the few people who stand to benefit are lurking behind the scenes or something.
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That would be tough. Like urinating without breaking wind.
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Not sure if you’re sarcastic or not, because both work, but that’s a really apt simile.
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Sometimes I luck out.
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The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
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If you’re agreeing with something Trump does you should really look into why. You’re most likely being conned.
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… or whistling in the dark.
Thank you for this article Cory. In a hundred years Regan/Bush/Clinton/Bush2/Obama will be looked at as presidents with a single ideology - Neoliberalism. And things would be no different in the present moment if Dukakis/Dole/Gore/Kerry/McCain/Romney had been swapped in for any of them.
Democrats are taking the old adage the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” out of context - It only applies to war. In politics, making your opponent look like an idiot or out of touch, does not mean you look any smarter or more inline with the will of the people.
Trump was weak candidate and he did not win by finding a secret chord and tapping into the “deplorable” vote. He won because lots of people want change above everything else. Don’t get me wrong, I think Trump’s temperament makes him completely unsuited to be president, nor do I support Nationalism as a solution, but the Market State drained the wealth of the US middle class and gave it to the elite over the course of 3 decades.
It is time to voice what you are for, and not just what you are against. I embrace open borders, multiculturalism, equality, etc., and I resist reactive authoritarianism. That does not mean I cannot see what asymmetrical trade polices and an unresponsive elite class have done to the US.
(Edit for typos)
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Nope. Those ones are being conned too, just hasn’t hit them yet.
I think it’s a sign we’ve gone completely insane that simply being intellectually honest requires writing an instruction manual. Just have a position and make your argument; focusing on personalities and who is on which side just serves to muddle thinking. And when someone tries to muddle thinking, I think “hmm, who stands to benefit from muddling our thinking?”
I wrote a paragraph arguing about this and then realized that perhaps instead of the future tense under the TPP you meant can be? I don’t know the current state of tariffs between these countries; but saying that it’s not a trade deal because it removes tariffs makes no sense, so I’m assuming what you’re trying to say is that it’s not really a trade deal because trade is already quite free?
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Frankly I’m annoyed at how often you lot seems to be ‘trump said something I halfway agree with? Gotta revise so I don’t agree with that thing anymore’ and then start going on and on and on.
Even people we dislike a disagree with can occasionally say things we agree with. Saying that a thing can be agreed on does not make us insane because we think something trump said isn’t madness. A lot of what he says is pants on head moronic and the FCC is proof of this that hits horribly close to home for many of us.
Ditto with his rolling back protection from river dumping.
However to think just because something slides out that makes sense means it is automatically evil? Shame on you for coming off as snotty self important brats. Why would anyone on the fence feel at all welcome if you are this level of deionizing? Let the clown dig his own grave. He will do a better job than any of us without the added problem of making us look gleefully like we’re pinning a devil tail on el presidento fuckwit.
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I’ll take a crack at this @stinkinbadgers. Most countries (other than the US) impose a tariff on imported goods. The TPP would have reduced or eliminated them in both directions. Does not sound like a bad deal right?
Here is how it works under NAFTA: A US manufacturer makes car parts in the US and ships them to Mexico for assembly into a car, which is then re-imported into the US for sale. That is counted as trade in that the value of the items is recorded each time the items cross the border even though the items never changed ownership, but it really is not trade.
This effectively reduces the wealth of the middle class by trading away the money the US workers would have been paid and squanders the productivity of the middle class. Adding insult to injury those same workers are now being asked to buy those cars. The only thing that was “exported” were jobs that build cars. This effectively transfers prosperity from the middle class to the elite class.
TL;DR: Long story short NAFTA/TPP trade away millions of good jobs in exchange for tens of thousands of really great jobs.
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And did the Mexicans get good jobs, or do we not care about them?
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If you are asking whether I would rather see my neighbor have a good job or someone in another country have a good job, I’ll pick my neighbor with no guilt. A certain level of localism has merit, as long as it is not punitive or exclusionary, it tends to build stronger communities.
Ideally the wages in Mexico would be the same as here. (IMO economic development in Latin America would be far more effective than building a wall on a dollar for dollar basis.) Predatory corporate practices do not improve the fate of Mexican workers as much as you might think, sure it is a better job than they had, but it is nothing in comparison to a locally owned business.
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While you’re right on most of these points Corey, the US almost certainly entered the TPP in the first place as an anti-China gambit. It was an expansion of the existing TPSEP, of which two of the parties - New Zealand and Chile - were almost certainly courting China to join, having formed individual free-trade agreements with them just prior to the TPP discussions starting.
As a party to the talks the US could use their market desirability to dictate terms that kept China out of coming to the table, as well as offering a market size that would have diminished other nations from seeking China’s markets. As many people predicted, once the TPP was clearly done for, many of the other parties immediately started talking to China about free trade agreements, now knowing the US could not reliably deliver on international trade agreements it had already signed regardless of how incredibly preferential they were to it.
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maxim 29-- the enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. no more. no less.
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I don’t see where you’re getting this. The whole point of @doctorow’s piece was that there are policies that Trump appears to support that are actually reasonable and fairly progressive. Opposing the TPP is one of those things.
It’s important to realize that progressives can agree with individual policies of the Trump administration. But it’s also important to realize that the overall values behind these policies are largely alien to most of the readers of Boing. And this leads to a legitimate conundrum:
Do we support these few areas of shared interest? Or do we resist all aspects of the administration? If we do the former, then we risk inadvertently allowing policies we don’t agree with. And if we do the latter, then we might obstruct things that are actually beneficial.
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