Dunning Kruger would have a field day.
Congratulations America - you got the president you deserve
- Thread starter Hercules Rockefeller
- Start date
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
The composition of crude varies a lot and refineries generally need to be set up to process a particular type. Also, the USA is a huge country and the logistics of moving crude may well favour exporting from some locations and importing at others, rather than routing all of it domestically.
There's a graph here, showing how the net imports went slightly -ve from 2020 onward:
Oil imports and exports - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
U.S. crude oil imports sources including OPEC and Persian Gulf, and top five source countries of U.S. oil imports and destinations of U.S. crude oil exports.
You can see this shows there has always been both import and export.
And actually, since the price of crude is set through trading of it as a global commodity, it would be no cheaper even if everything the US economy uses was sourced domestically.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Yup, Trump has considerable form for "frog boiling": making an outrageous statement or carrying out an outrageous action - and then waiting for the Republican loyalists to come round to accepting and rationalising it, and for the right wing media to follow. Once they've done that they can't go back. At which point, whatever it is has become normalised so that it is suddenly "left wing" to point out that it is still outrageous.
Just the same thing happened in Germany in the 1930s. Trump is not Hitler (he has no ideology other than personal aggrandisement - he just wants to rule like a medieval king) but he is using similar methods.
I really need to re-read Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, but just going by memory, these guys are definitely more in the Hitler/Stalin camp than the Mussolini camp. (And Franco was practically a saint next to any of them.) The racial stuff, the terror, the propaganda methods--it's all there. Supplanting independent artistic and intellectual endeavor with mediocre hacks presents more of a challenge in the absence of state run media, and in an era wherein methods for disseminating such are sof diversified, but... they're probably looking into ways to rectify that.
As for the architects? Obviously Trump isn't terribly knowledgeable in these areas, to put it mildly. I suspect Stephen Miller (a Jew, incidentally) is behind a lot of this.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Waiting for Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
-ish.
That's fair. Anyway, I favor Trotsky over Lenin and I concede his defense of the Red Terror is perhaps... questionable, at best.
But... Frida Kahlo. And he got to live at La Casa Azul which is really nice.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
My direct ancestors moved to the US from Ireland in the 1890s. They moved to Arkansas (pilot party had found suitable properties for them) and settled next to emigrants from the Ukraine. Had to be some fascinating "English" going down there.
At least they weren't from Wales. I'm still not convinced that "Welsh" is an actual language, I think they're just messing with us.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Dydw i ddim yn eich credu.
Of course. He squandered $8 trillion dollars last time; a new record. This time he will have no guardrails; there will be nothing to stop his spending.
Yes it is. Unfortunately we are going to see a lot of gloom over the next four years.
So, I've mentioned that I'm an Independent, but didn't vote for him. Why do you think he was able to swing more Democrats his way this time? Not being happy with Trump, I get it, but he was voted back in by not just ''MAGA'' Republicans. What do you make of it?
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Appeals to greed are always in order.
The problem with broad brushing what happened in this election, is that's not a wise ''strategy'' to winning future elections. Where I think Harris' campaign went wrong is she was too late into the race (not her fault), and her messaging wasn't strong enough. I actually feel bad for her, because she was thrown out there by her party. And, I also felt bad for Biden. He too was sort of pushed around and then out of the way.
There seemed to be no strategy, on how to improve the economy, etc. There were other reasons too, in that Democrats didn't bank on ''traditionally'' Democratic voters, or who they thought would vote that way, going to Trump. Or that all of his legal woes weren't problematic enough to overlook the economy and other challenges the US has been facing. Not an expert political strategist by any means, but just my novice perspective from observing this reality show we call a government. I understand where you're coming from, but Trump didn't win based on identity politics, in my opinion.
I truly believe that if Harris had more time to campaign, more time to strategize with her team, she would have won. Whoever was behind that last minute decision to not permit Biden to run, was partially to blame for her loss.
Same over here.We have more than two main parties although until recently it was ,in the UK just the two main ones for the most part.
But anyone or any political grouping can put themselves forward as a choice for the particular electorate.
I find it hard to justify a "closed shop" for political parties although it could be said it makes for continuity.
Trump is a shithole of a character and guess who that appeals to..
So, those non-MAGA types who voted for him are of bad character? This is what I’m talking about and what I’ve been hearing on CNN, etc. They are realizing that these blanket statements could be why he was able to sway some on the left. Not because those “new” voters think he’s amazing, but they liked his policies so overlooked his character. I don’t think Trump’s win is as easy to dissect as we’d like it to be. That’s just my observation.