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[+] 161 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)
  • [–] 113 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Smells strongly of retrofitted justification BS to me.

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  • [–] 62 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 125 points 2 years ago (15 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    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.

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    [–] 118 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    ”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 ”

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    [–] 100 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "government worshipers" votes for actual authoritarians

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  • [–] 83 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "Im one of the good ones", "i put in the work"

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  • [–] 80 points 2 years ago (11 children)

    American conservatives are so fucking dumb. I hope they get everything they voted for, fuck them.

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    [–] 64 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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.

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    [–] 54 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Trump could cut this guy’s nuts off and he’d still find a way to put a positive spin on it

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    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

    There is a precedent.

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  • TFW you're being principled and thinking long-term but your principles and thinking are a total disaster

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  • [–] 50 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 44 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I voted for what's best for the country moving forward

    Bigotry? Ignorance of economics? Or both?

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    [–] 40 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    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.

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    [–] 38 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago

    The depths of conservative delusion truly knows no bounds.

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  • [–] 35 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    "long term gains can be protected". Since the new era of executive orders, how will this ever be the case? We'll just lurch from one side to the other after the next administration comes in and reverses everything that the previous did with new EO's.

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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago

    “They skinned my children alive while they made me sit and watch. But ya know what? I’m glad they did that. It’s what’s best for the country. Plus it builds character, and I’ll have a great story to tell my children one d….oh right”

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I sure hope these leopards find my face delicious!

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    [–] 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    The assumption that everyone else in the country is just him, an able bodied person of working age is telling of how much thought this person put into their vote.

    Also the assumption that they will be able to get another job of equal pay even with keeping up his skills. That is a big and stupid gamble.

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    [–] 25 points 2 years ago

    The current situation we find ourselves in makes me think of this quote more than ever:

    Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

    H.L. Mencken

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    "protected after Trump's term"

    So executive orders are useless for this, and what concessions are Republicans willing to make to get a Senate super majority to pass an amendment, which hasn't happened in most of our lifetimes?

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    [–] 24 points 2 years ago

    Trump: I have concepts of a plan.

    This guy: Oh boy, I hope those concepts survive his term!

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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Hope he suffers as much as humanely humanly possible. He voted for an anti-democratic felon rapist to own the libs. As far as I'm concerned he's a traitor.

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  • [+] [S] 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    Well, look - my softie bleeding heart librul values make me absolutely hate it when economic uncertainty leads to people losing their homes and their livelihoods. But this is the government that we, the people voted for. And if the government that we, the people voted for is creating economic uncertainty that is causing people to lose their homes and their livelihoods, then my bleeding librul heart bleeds for the people who are displaced. But I am also well versed in irony, and brother, this is an irony smorgasbord.

    If you're one of the people who voted for the guy who's creating the economic uncertainty that's currently fucking your shit up... brother, I'm not sure what I can do for you.

    Resistance is always the last option. The best option, and the first you should turn to, is voting in a way that is consistent with your values and your economic priorities. If you voted for this, and you're upset at what your voting got you... I'm not sure that you're going to like what I've got to tell you.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    The copium here is epic.

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  • [+] 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)
    [–] 18 points 2 years ago

    They will happily eat shit as long as you get to smell it. Bunch of absolute morons...

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Man these guys are so dumb I can't 😂😂 "I voted for this, but..." 🤣 I would feel pity for this poor sob normaly but I'm done with their nonsense.

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