No, makes you look like a moron thankfully. Anybody who can be swayed by somebody on social media claiming that Covid is a hoax, Darwin award right there.
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I have to admit that, the consensus here is way more anti-Trump than I initially expect, especially from a sports/entertainment forum. I mean, it can be nearly as anti-Trump as places like Alternate History Forum or AskaLiberal Reddit.
Regarding the Alternate History forum, you know what, it consists of people who are really into history and social science - the kinds of people who are more left-leaning than the average population; is run by a leftist admin; and has very strict kick & ban rules (e.g. posting QAnon tweets there will result in a ban) (To be fair, alternate history genre can actually attract lots of bigots and racists for obvious reasons).
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I think that is largely a function of a primarily non-American membership. Most Americans cannot even begin to understand how much damage has been done to global respect for the United States over the past four years, particularly the past year.
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That’s an interesting point. How would you say this manifests itself? Trump was a hell of a lot of things but he could have been much worse. No war or nukes for starters.
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War? Give him time, not out of the woods yet with Iran.
Having a bullying carny game show host as President is a good start to a ladder that starts with small gestures and ends in catastrophically bad policy. The childish bullshit with handshakes at every international gathering of leaders. The absurd trade wars started on the basis of an understanding that would get an ‘F’ in first-year Economics 101. Boasting to Russian diplomats about US intelligence sources that were actually allied intelligence sources, and eyes only, completely compromising them.
Oh yes, and presiding over what appears to be the most disastrous pandemic response in the world, by the nation hitherto believed to have the best resources to face one.
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But given that he’s now almost gone, not actually in the great scheme of things that bad.
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Unless Biden goes on a very real Cannossa Walk, no one outside the US is ever likely to forget that the US electorate elected Trump in 2016 and that Biden only very narrowly beat him in 2020. And even if such a Canossa walk comes to be, which it won’t since Biden is not a person to agree to humble the United States, it would amount to only something and far from everything.
Like Arminius said concerning the damage Trump has done to US credibility, it is much vaster than most Americans can imagine in their worst nightmares.
The US under Trump has betrayed allies who fought ISIS to Turkey after some Erdogan pressure, leading to ethnic cleansing in Kurdish enclaves in Syria. The US has broken an international pact, the nuclear deal. Breaking a pact is unimaginable even for tin pot dictators and banana republics, no one does that. Credibility is gone and the US has managed the coup it is to make the US into the bad actor versus Iran, which is by the way very well done. Then you have constant attacks on NATO. Then you have active efforts to destabilize the EU.
No one sane trusts the US any more and the damage will take decades and not merely a few years, to mend, if it can ever be mended. The strategic calculus of European states have been altered, the US is no longer seen as trustworthy, the narrow win of Biden was completely disastrous, reinforcing the belief that the US can again manage to elect in the future, maybe someone worse than Trump. If 4 years of constant lies, pandemic mismanagement, pact breaking, betrayals and sabotage against allies was not enough to beat Trump with a land slide, then nothing will.
And unlike Germany who suffered an extraordinary humiliating defeat, had a gravely wounded nationalism, forced to pay unfair reparations, a harsh and terrible depression, class warfare; indeed actual good reasons for the German people to go along with revanchenism and nazism, the Americans had no such reasons.Which is incidentally also the reason why I blame the common American much more than the common German nazi who just walked along with the wave during what was an incredibly difficult time for Germans. Americans have no such excuse what so ever. No national humiliation, no grave depression under Obama, no wounded nationalism and territories lost, none of the factors that historians usually use to explain the rise of Nazism. So many are at a loss to explain Trumpism and the sheer stupidity and self damage of it. Which is why some of us are losing faith in the US democracy and throwing out illiberal ideas because there is no trust whatsoever in the future of US democratic discourse.
As for liking Trump, the only ones who does that in Europe are the Neo-fascists from populist ultra nationalist, or populist right wingers. But even these people usually think he is a complete moron, as these people are elitists that tend to loath their own voters as pawns anyway. Few souls admires him or his administration.
Me personally, I am from a country that values NATO and I am incredibly uneasy looking at the future. The US is not fit in a leadership role anymore and cannot be trusted fully again for mutual defence, after so many Americans have supported Trump’s attempt to make it into a protection racket. And alliances are all about trust, you don’t trust an ally who you think is only 60-90% likely to stick with you in a very serious war, this trust is gravely damaged and maybe it cannot be mended. We cannot know if these people, seemingly countless millions (74.223 millions, a gigantic share of the votes in an election where he rest of the world assumed the US would hopefully get to its senses), get another right wing populist into power.
There are only dark days ahead and a lot of uncertainty. The world will suffer instability because of the US for a long time to come, and various countries, previously trusting the US intimately, are now actively changing their calculus, having seen what madness the US is capable of.
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What if the same forces that produced Trump actually land someone who is not in fact quite stupid? Every ally and trade partner of the United States now has to factor in that possibility.
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My illiberal idea isn’t in any way or form ideal. Illiberal ideas tend not to be ideal.
I am just extraordinary fearful as to what new nonsense will spawn from the cesspool of American democracy, and I am losing faith, indeed, in the type of Democracy they have in the US. I don’t think it works, at all. Too much lobbying is allowed in such pluralistic democratic extremes and too many interest groups are allowed to pay candidates and campaigns. That should ideally be illegal but I don’t see it changing in the US because of how their individualistic society is set up. And of course, this is not at all the only problem.
I don’t know how you would stop Americans from trusting and using disinformation channels and being intellectually critical. I have no idea. Which is why I was throwing out the Civics test as an idea. Illiberal ? Sure, but I am a Social Democract at heart and not a liberal, so I would personally probably accept an illiberal fix here and there for the greater good if it would actually help on a macro level, if it doesn’t infringe too much on liberty. But ideal it isn’t, but still much better than the current in the US, where enormous amounts of prisoners are denied the right of vote (partly probably the reason why the US has so little interest in rehabilitation, to their own detriment I note)
But I am really finding it hard to discuss with my NATO-hating friend these days. It used to be easy before the rise of Trump, it is very hard these days and my confidence in anything American-dominated is very, very low.
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Exactly ! I have been trying to get this across for quite some time.
The calculus has changed, or will be needed to changed. It is all a new reality, a reality where the United States cannot be really trusted. And this is a big, big problem.
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Didn’t they always? I’m still struggling to see how Trump had done (can’t see your post here so paraphrasing) massive damage to the US reputation. All countries can elect morons, that’s nothing new.
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No, Trump really has changed something dramatically. From 1941-2016, NATO allies and some others like Australia, NZ, and South Korea could count on the US for the most serious class of challenges. That is over. The assumption has always been that no single President could really change that because the political constraints (mainly the Senate) were too significant. What we have actually seen is the Senate has abandoned that role in the face of a new populism.
There has always been a sine wave in US politics between populist isolationism and expansionist/imperial thinking, but something has metastasized. That isn’t Trump, but it produced Trump.
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No, all countries do not elect Trump and they do not have a two party system where one of the parties are loyal and enabling to Trump despite every heinous policy idea he and his malignant administration has. The idea that US credibility is not gravely damaged is a fairy tale that you should not allow yourself to believe in.
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This isn’t a very long read. I suggest reading it.
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Trump is the only president of the US, apart from maybe Nixon, who doesn’t actually believe in the democratic system. He thinks he should have absolute power and has behaved in that way. He is also openly corrupt and dishonest, not even attempting to hide it. He is a bullying, lying, unpleasant narcissist with a total lack of empathy or concern for his fellows. He is patently intellectually and emotionally unfit for the office he holds. Additionally, he has given succour to the most hateful of extremists, not only in the US, but internationally. The world is a more cruel, heartless and hateful place since he came to power and it will take a long time to recover, if it ever does.
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As I wrote above, it’s not about removing all the grey zones. It’s about removing the worst fake news.
Is Covid-19 a hoax? No of course, but there are countless people still pretending this because they read it somewhere on the internet, and prefer to believe their fake news source, rather than official ones.
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News breaking now from the US is that no one will get charged after the Kenosha shootings.
In the US, shooting a fleeing man, criminal or not, in the back 7 times, is apparently an adequate use of force from law enforcement.
So based on the facts and laws, no one will get charged. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/05/us/jacob-blake-police-shooting-kenosha-emergency/index.html
Personal comment: What rotten laws they have in that country !
I am posting this in the US politics thread because the shooting lead to wide scale riots and thus had political consequences. Arguably this could have been posted in a News thread instead.
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We will see if the US DoJ later this month decides to proceed on the basis of a civil rights investigation.
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On another note, I am almost looking forward to the drama when Pence does his constitutional duty and Donald raves and rants afterwards:
Like Rick Wilson famously said in 2016, Everything Trump Touches Dies. Not a categorical truth of course, but there is a lot of examples now of political road kills of Republicans that thought they had gone above and beyond for Trump, but just ended up being driven over. It is all very karmic and well deserved in each and every case.
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