LOL no sympathy, smooth brain dolts
Well I’ll say two things, first the old /r/conservative would never have allowed this open of a discussion. I don’t know if these stayed up long but I remember people even going very slightly against the Fox narrative being banned.
Also this guy, completely and utterly misguided though I believe he is, at least has the courage of his convictions. He’s willing to make a sacrifice for what he thinks is good for the country. I very much doubt he’s right but still, that’s more than most people can say.
Smells strongly of retrofitted justification BS to me.
Yeah. The dude that came up with the term cognitive dissonance described this process in his book When Prophesy Fails. Basically when you are in a cult and your doomsday ends up being a normal day you have a freak out of cognitive dissonance. This isn’t great because people don’t like having their strongly held beliefs shown to be invalid. So they must come up with a post hoc rationalization as to why their doomsday didn’t come true and why they are still right.
Yep, and the more they do it, the easier it becomes until it’s second nature.
Republicans understood this, which is why they tapped into the Christian demographic. People who have already been primed to ignore constant cognitive dissonance.
May also just be a troll tactic. Sowing retrofitted justification with ai. The first comment is bait.
I honestly cant tell anymore. Dead internet theory moving fast on that site.
deleted by creator
Yep, betting long term future on Trump is at very best laughable.
The question remains, does “good for the country” mean good for the citizens, or good for the elite?
I mean if you ask me the answer is obvious. But he didn’t (and apparently still doesn’t) think so.
When you receive information that proves you wrong you can do 1 of 2 things. You can admit you were wrong, or you can double down and twist the situation to avoid admitting it. “This is actually what I thought would happen and I wanted this”. I actually think its cowardly. It takes courage to stand up and admit they were wrong.
Not if you haven’t actually changed your mind. If you believe it’s at your expense but actually better for the country in the long term. Again, I don’t think he’s right but he may think he is.
Gen X’er here, guessing this person hasn’t had to look for a job in a while. Especially when externalities make the search more difficult, like having an entire sector upended.
It took 1500 applications, over 100 interviews, and 4 years to find my current position. And, this was a callback from a prior rejection! They let the first person go that I interviewed with due to sabotaging intake because they were insecure in their position. Have fun with all that.
Average conservative.
They don’t see what the problem is until they get face-eaten. The sad part is the ones who go “Well as long as those brown people get it worse!”
Millennial here, 100% agree. I’m very good at what I do in my field and have a chonky resume of experience. I used to get job offers unprompted on practically a weekly basis. Years ago my apply-to-interview-to-offer % was like 70%+.
In the last couple of years this has shifted dramatically. I do not receive job offers unprompted, because they simply aren’t there. The number of listed jobs has tanked, the ones worth applying for i typically don’t hear anything back from, not even a rejection. One the other day I was told it wasn’t a real position that was open and was simply posted for some HR reason or some crap.
Layoffs across the board are on the rise so there are more people than ever looking and less jobs available.
It took my friend ~1yr to find a job after his last layoff.
This person is in for a world of hurt…and frankly, I have zero sympathy for them specifically.
Regarding sympathy - he is no different than the others who voted for this. These kinds of people aren’t ready to have been wrong. So they claim they expected it. His reply is nothing but an attempt to cope with his bad choices.
It’s absolutely a person speaking out loud to justify everything and avoid thinking about hardship. Humans are great at that.
The last position I interviewed (other people) for, we had over 2,000 total applicants, and this was before the huge swaths of layoffs that are currently happening and being planned.
The country is doomed, literally millions of people are about to be (many of which already are) out of work, while ALL public resources and support are being dissolved by the current regime.
There are over 20 million people employed at the federal, state and local governments in the United States, making it one of if not the largest employer in the world. We’re in for a bumpy ride if they get away with such massive layoffs
May I ask what your job is?
Software Engineer, typically on a contract / consulting basis, proficiently full stack + cloud infrastructure.
Sales. First 900 applications and 50 interviews were in tech.
My bet is also on they wildly underestimated what employable means (or overestimated the value of their skills and experience).
I’m also laughing over here at “long terms gains” of Trump’s policies. Unless this person is one of the billionaire class, there are no long term gains. The people who will benefit from whatever Trump and co. are up to wouldn’t be “out of a job,” they’d just transition to a new role either at the same company or another or be immune from the whole thing altogether.
That’s not even mentioning all the AI automated posting the people and head hunter companies ate doing that is overloading your legit application submissions.
Dude my last 2 job changes were due to layoffs. I had to take the first job offer I got after about 50 job applications because the job market absolutely sucks right now, and honestly I’m not happy with the job I could land because availability forced me to accept some red flags and compromises that I could see from the get-go of the interview process. I’m going to keep applying but I’m not holding my breath at this stage of things
Don’t worry, when the tree he’s under starts letting the rain through, he’ll just move to a new tree.
It obviously isn’t true, but if their statement was consistent, they would be happy to ensure that if it meant the country was better off 🙄
Or you could be like me and get the first job you apply for. All of this is anecdotal, and your situation has no bearing on someone else’s. Its a bummer you had a rough go of it but thats its not indicative of the job market as a whole.
”I was full aware the leopards would eat my face. I’m in great pain right now, but I believe it’s for the best ”
The leopards are eating everyone’s faces, including mine. While this is usually deadly to others, I’ll be fine. I’m willing to take the gamble for everyone as a whole that if enough of their faces are eaten, things will be better long-term. The whiners need to grow a spine and let the leopards eat because the payoff will be worth it.
The gammon types do know that their faces will get eaten, the important thing to them is that the people they hate will have their faces eaten even more. That’s what happens when your life revolves around hating others.
“Hey that guy’s face is being eaten by leopards… Let me laugh and condescend while the leopards grow stronger and stronger…”
“government worshipers” votes for actual authoritarians
“It’ll be a short term hardship, but great for the long term!”
long term effects that FSUBAR*
*fuck shit up beyond all reason
“Im one of the good ones”, “i put in the work”
American conservatives are so fucking dumb. I hope they get everything they voted for, fuck them.
It is actually legitimately hard to wrap your head around how dumb they are.
So dumb that they even go “i voted like this because you wont stop calling me dumb” like a big stupid dumbfuck
The idiology is “trigger the libs” above all else.
The circle jerk continues!
Democrat = big wrinkly brains Republicans = tiny smooth brains
Gosh I’m so fucking smart, it hurts!
Did you grow up in USA? B/c it’s amazingly easy for me to understand both “parties”.
The system has always been trash invented by literal slavemasters to violently enforce their racist and partriarchical privilege. Both flavors of the state fully support this, so it’s not hard to see why some people more so.
The catch with that is everybody else suffers along with them.
It’s like we’re all playing a game together, and these yokles think that if they increase the difficulty level people who are just marginally getting by will suffer a lot more than they will, and they’re sure that by being part of the favored team they can be exempt from the more difficult rules enitrely
Which is what they want. They have been indoctrinated to believe that the government is incapable of helping them. And if they can’t get help, then nobody can.
People around the globe have been suffering under this empire for a looooong time.
Sadly, they get everything they voted for and so does everyone else. They “are fine” with people suffering, and because of this everyone else is forced to suffer and/or watch other suffer.
They deserve more bad things than what they voted for. Fuck them.
Strap in, the brand is coming your way
Okay, so, being incredibly generous here, I sort of get their point, but why not slowly ramp tariffs up to allow domestic production to catch up? Because fuck you, that’s why.
And, as always, none of any of the false promises of prosperity excuse any of the hate Trump spreads.
Instead, the xenophobic hate from an economic idiot is believable enough to start a worldwide depression over trying to get batteries for Elon while making pop-up-factories with AI staff I guess?
Or of course the alternative wartime “economy”.
Genuine answer is likely that it’s not intended to be permanent. It’s designed to make him look good when ultimately removed and secure some support for conservative talking points around stopping drugs and immigration across the borders.
It also distracts from the major damage they’re doing internally to the government via OPM which is much more difficult to reverse.
Yeah, with the Canada and Mexico ones already being cancelled that tracks. Supposedly he’s making an announcement regarding tariffs at 1 PM Eastern today (in 20 minutes) so who knows.
It is performative and done from a place of ignorance.
TFW you’re being principled and thinking long-term but your principles and thinking are a total disaster
Trump could cut this guy’s nuts off and he’d still find a way to put a positive spin on it
He’s been sold on a fundamentally holistic view of the economy. “This may be uncomfortable now, but I trust it will produce a large national windfall in the future”.
It isn’t a bad attitude to have on its face. People do need to accept certain short term discomforts in order to achieve long term economic benefits, whether that means working industrial jobs to produce new useful infrastructure or risking personal health/safety in military conflicts to establish national security or curbing consumption to avoid long term ecological harm.
But the mass media this guy is ingesting is bullshit. So the benign “we’re investing in the future” perspective is corrupted into a gullible “my local neighborhood wallet inspector is just helping to remove these counterfeit bills from the money supply” political apathy.
He’s the victim of an intense, industrial scale propaganda campaign.
Incidentally…
Trump could cut this guy’s nuts off and he’d still find a way to put a positive spin on it
Hey, that trickle down is gonna happen any day now, exactly as promised!
“Trickle Down” is patterned, as a sales pitch, to sound like a Capitalist New Deal. Its the same pitch line, except its keyed to an audience that’s been drubbed over the head with “The government can’t be trusted to do anything nice for you” forty years after the New Deal and Great Society programs have gone stale.
You want modernized infrastructure? You want domestic growth? You want luxury consumer goods? Let private investment work its magic.
And, in fairness, we are now awash in privatized infrastructure, a staggeringly bloated finance sector, and mountains of cheap consumerist babbles well within the reach of the median consumer. The trickle came down. In 1980, a full wall of custom themed Marvel Branded Bobble-heads would have cost you a fortune. Now you can get it on a fry cook’s salary.
The indoctrination system has people willing to suffer and die for their gods.
That guy is choking on copium. Downing in it.
There is no such thing as “gains” here, long or short term. This is 100% bad.
If you want more local production, you incentivize that, not hugely disincentivize everything else.
What do you mean? There are plenty of gains to be had…
…for the already rich and powerful.
making yourself employable doesn’t mean shit when the local community faces economic collapse since they are floating on top of the economic output of a single factory. Dude good luck finding a job with all the millions of other people moving to places where the work will be.
Also I wonder what he thinks the long term gains are? Dude thinks the economy is a muscle that needs to experience stress to get stronger. In the long term other countries will stop doing business with America, since they found more reliable partners.
Hurting minorities as always
Destroying the economy on the off chance that it might also hurt minorities…
It works, but…
I voted for what’s best for the country moving forward
Bigotry? Ignorance of economics? Or both?
Both and probably a lot more. He’s pretty confident that this won’t affect him too much. I am sure the leopards continue to circle for a second pass at him.
Or that if it does, it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make for Glorious Leader.
Increased rates of easily preventable diseases?
I’m actually impressed by some of the critical thinking going on! Some are saying this would cause more US based steel manufacturing while others point out nobody is setting up a company when even Trump himself can’t commit to keeping the tarrifs in place for 4 years. However, nobody is discussing why there needs to be more US based steel production.
What is bad about importing steel? An American factory producing steel and an American factory producing cars from imported steel are both American factories. Why is it so important for the US to produce all of their steel domestically?
I think they’re focused on when you import more than you export, that’s a net loss, or a trade deficit.
One way to view it is that you are propping up someone else’s economy, or you are funneling your money outside.
So I think nationalistic morons just hate that at face value without any critical thinking.
In some formulas this is included in GDP, and growing up in rural America, I always heard whining about how America needed to stay on top and not be beaten by China or whoever else, and a lot of that rhetoric sometimes simply stems from made up crap like who has the bigger number, such as GDP. I can tell you how often I’ve heard idiotic ideas like how some other country like China will just invade and take us over if we aren’t #1 in everything. Like being #2 or 3 somehow means death.
I usually waste my time trying to point out the sun now sets on the British flag every damn day, and yet they still have their country and they still live pretty decent lives. The British didn’t just disappear once their empire was basically over.
Conservatism and nationalism is toxic.
The vast majority of American imported steel comes from Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea. As for aluminum, Canada is the only one worth mentioning. Source.
Canada and Mexico weren’t even considered adversarial until Trump pissed and moaned about how NAFTA is soooooo bad.
For starters, the United States, according to the Reuters article, imported some 508,000 tons of Chinese steel in 2024. By comparison, we imported 6.6 million tons of steel from Canada. According to the American Steel and Iron Institute, American steel production was 1.6 million tons in one week in November alone, and the nation produced over 74 million tons by November 2 of last year. You can annualize that to about 88.4 million tons last year. You can dig as far down to that number to calculate that we produce more steel domestically in two and a half days than we import from China in a year.
They’re really bitching and whining about maybe a dime flowing out of the country when the other 90 cents stays in it.
The American steel industry isn’t what it was in, say, the Carnegie days, and if you think that’s what it should look like, get in a time machine and go back to the gilded age. Please. While your eight year old daughter works from sunup to sundown with your wife at the coat factory, you’ll spend sixteen hours a day seven days a week mining iron ore with your ten year old son. You’ll live in a company town where you’re paid peanuts in what are essentially coupons that aren’t accepted anywhere in the world except that specific company town. Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie gets to make real money selling the steel you break your back mining for over a hundred hours a week. And he gets a fuck ton of it, too. Just consider yourself lucky your wife didn’t die from a postpartum infection because the doctors didn’t wash their hands.
Yes, it is not what it was in those days, and it should never be that way again. American-made steel is still, by and large, a pretty healthy industry. They’re doing fine. The real whiners are the filthy rich owners who want to squeeze every nickel and dime out of everything. So they’re happy to act in protectionist ways that maybe prop up the industry in the short run, but makes everything more expensive in the long run. They don’t care. They know we need these metals for basic shit in our lives. We’ll buy them no matter what they cost.
Finally, the rights you have as a worker today are written in blood. And now, the government we the dopes have elected is working hard to bleach and torch them. People - lots of em - died fighting for what little we have today. And if you think we’re whiners for clinging onto those rights so the richest people in the world get to sleep on a mattress stuffed with a couple fewer hundred dollar bills, maybe it’s time to learn your fucking history.
I can tell you how often I’ve heard idiotic ideas like how some other country like China will just invade and take us over if we aren’t #1 in everything. Like being #2 or 3 somehow means death.
Like all things this is GOP projection. I’ve been being told from the day I was born that if the USA lost its stranglehold on the world then we’d immediately be facing a large scale ground invasion from China or Russia or Iran. As if they were just itching for any opportunity to show up and destroy us because America was just too awesome. Everyone in the entire world hates us because we have so much money and do so well at being the world police, they call us the Great Satan, etc etc.
Lo and behold, the US has been in over 200 military operations since 1950, where we keep itching to show up and destroy someone who doesn’t want us around. People didn’t hate us because of our culture or our money, they hated us because we kept showing up to weaker countries after big devastating events and informing them that they now have a new leader that answers to America, and if you don’t like it, we’ll bomb you for the next 20 years.
The conservative response to any other nation showing some sort of weakness is, traditionally, to load up some boots and some bombs and send em on over to see what sort of profit we can blow up. They cannot fathom that anyone else would do something differently.
Vertically integrated economy.
If your economy has companies performing all steps in the supply chain for making a complex commodity, like cars, you get to extract profit at each step rather than just the last step.
The USA’s economy and geography is large enough to have an almost entirely self sufficient economy.
Except in the case where performing a manufacturing step is too expensive to do domestically because of labor costs. Almost all complex products for sale in america (and the West in general tbh) are only possible at these prices because someone is getting exploited in southeast asia.
This mostly makes sense if you have need for it, costs and quality won’t better automatically. And if demand remains low, there’s little incentive to.
Long term the point is usually to lessen dependency on others, for example to enact war, but Dump isn’t really dependable for anything long term.
Didn’t Dump himself say that it’s a negotiating tactic?
He seemed happy to extract low value concessions from Canada and Mexico. Could be he wants an early win, could be he’s misleading attention, could be he’s appeasing some donors, and could be a fishing expedition to see what concessions he can get from the allies.
Any extraction will enrich himself and cronies, as well as please the autocrats he’s serving and/or courting.
Fine, if he still supports this although he is suffering from it, his choice. But making a lot of others suffer from this, possibly in the long run, just makes him an ignorant asshole.
I knew I would suffer, but I’ll be okay. I’m also making everyone else suffer along with me, and I decided that was okay too.
The selfishness of the average voter everyone. Notice he didn’t talk about anyone else there except in terms of “whiners” while in the same breath admitting he is causing more suffering.
They said that it would be more suffering in the short term for them, but it would protect their future and their country
This wasnt about selfishness, this was about being disinformed
No there’s still selfishness. They don’t consider how much short term suffering affects other people. If that person owns their home, has savings, can brace for not having a job for a while that’s great. But it’s pretty blase to say that they’ll be fine while they disregard everyone else who isn’t set up as well
You can ignore a lot of things if you think its for the greater good
Also, being selfish and not thinking through all consequences is not the same thing
Yes but the selfishness lies in how he claims he will be fine, without regard for others. Selfish. He isn’t either selfish or ignorant, he is both.
They are saying that they would be fine in the context of being a part of the people that would suffer. They might have not considered that there are people in worse situations
That was the post-hoc reasoning, sure…
