$40b is $1000 per Argentine (pop 40m). I bet US soybean farmers would be happier to get that money themselves to offset their losses. But, of course, that money isn't going to Argentines directly, it is going to shore up US investors in Argentina, who just happen to be Trump buddies.
I'm not sure I'll ever get over the fact that so many people, including a surprisingly large number of people here, voted for and support this clearly inept, mean, clueless, inarticulate, sloppy, disgusting, empathy-lacking, greedy, corrupt, incompetent, evil, childish fool to lead them. How anyone cannot see who this man clearly is after minimal exposure is simply beyond me. I keep telling myself that his supporters are just fools because that is much more comforting than alternative explanations, primarily that they LIKE was he is doing, all of it. We can fix foolishness (education), but I'm not sure how we fix a populace which doesn't value democracy and enjoys watching innocent people suffer.
I think many people are (perhaps subconsciously, it’s wrongthink these days) worried about the rapid demographic slide, and he’s the only guy to even pretend to want to do something about it. He also has a lot of other random opinions, which I think most people don’t care one way or another about as long as he pretends to deal with the thing they are subconsciously worried about (not that what he’s doing does anything meaningful in that regard, but the subconscious is not very good at math).
"I voted for the historically corrupt president because I'm worried about there being more nonwhites who live near me" makes it worse in my mind, not better.
Sure, but the responsibility for this dynamic is still on them. They've been buying into this abjectly brain dead narrative about the cause of the demographic slide - blaming immigration instead of the looting elites who have been turning the financial screws of wealth extraction, making it ever-harder to have kids.
As women entered the workforce, the definition of full time employment hours should have halved, right? And failing that, people's saved wealth should have gone up such that they had more negotiating power with their employers and working hours naturally went down. Instead the looters turned up the financial treadmill of low interest rates, dumping all the gains from having double the workforce, plus technological progress, plus offshoring into an asset bubble to benefit the wealthy. This is precisely why "the rent is too damn high".
But still rather than coming to terms with how they've been continuously enabling this by supporting fake "fiscal responsibility" Republicans (Democrats would have still printed most of that new money but at least spread it around a bit), they're leaning right back into that broken immigration narrative like a child's fucking security blanket - always getting stuck focusing on individuals who are different and turning to personal hate, while never even perceiving the system that has been deliberately set up to screw them over.
The slide objectively is due to immigration, though. If you look at the demographics that were present prior to the massive immigration policy change in 1965, they are at about the same ratio as they were prior. Have you looked those up before, and do you disagree with that statement?
The looting stuff also happened, for sure, but in the counterfactual where the immigration policy hadn’t changed in the way that it did, we would be in a temporary and self correcting situation of “too many old people”, not in any permanent change demographically.
Now if we want to say that the people doing the looting are the same people who wanted the immigration policy changed, then yes I could see an argument where the looting is the root cause. But looting can be dealt with separately and it seems to be a much trickier problem as it’s more of a self interest vs society interest, prisoner’s dilemma, human nature type situation as opposed to a pretty simple and well defined problem on the other hand. Not that I think Trump is actually doing or will do anything significant about it, just that focusing on immigration isn’t that dumb in the abstract.
Now, we also do have a situation where it’s considered immoral to reject outsiders. So there is a subconscious temptation to route around immigration as the main problem, else one violates one’s own moral programming. I wonder if you could introspect to see if that’s happening on your end? Like rejecting outsiders has been normal human programming up until less than 100 years ago, the people who literally fought the Nazis would today be called Nazis for their mainstream-at-the-time views, etc. Something weird happened to morality…
One of the difficulties discussing this topic is the large amount of Motte-and-Baileys. For instance, I engaged with your term "demographic slide" in good faith, giving it the charitable interpretation of how most people, especially the middle classes, are having a hard time finding the time/resources to have kids/families - a positive sum context wherein people are focused on their own individual concerns.
You've now rewarded my engagement by dragging the term into a negative-sum racism-first context where
the ethnic makeup of the country is of primary concern - as if I have already accepted that premise.
Do some people care about this? Sure. Do as many people fundamentally care about this as to make it a reasonable framing of the issue? Especially without reactionary talk radio (and now social media) pushing these simplistic narratives to run cover for the looters? I would say definitely not. We are a nation of immigrants, and a young one at that. If you rewound the clock to 150 years ago, you could be making the same point about a "demographic slide" towards the Irish. And yet now they're just an accepted part of "good" American society. We don't get to be a global superpower by insulating ourselves from the rest of the world.
So as I said, the way I see it is that the real issues driving the mass flip-the-table frustration are economic disenfranchisement and the destruction of individual liberty. Racism-first narratives drag us even further back to the fucking dark ages. If you want to die on that hill, then go right ahead. Otherwise if you've just perhaps overfit some comforting too-easy explanations, then pull the fuck up and maybe we can save our society together.
I don’t really understand your framing here. I haven’t tricked you, you just misunderstood what I was referring to. Like it’s fine that you misunderstood, perhaps I wasn’t entirely clear in my writing, but you are acting as if I’ve somehow taken advantage of you and I’m very confused about that.
I have not assumed anything about what premises you’ve accepted. I am just expressing my theory on what to me also appears to be illogical and inconsistent behavior on the part of Trump supporters. I am basically saying “yes, actually Trump supporters are probably subconsciously racist”, which is not really a controversial take among Trump detractors, it’s just less of a low analysis drive by than those takes normally are.
If a group of people is subconsciously racist, then it makes logical (not moral) sense for them to support the candidate who sounds angry about things that are adjacent to that.
I don’t think I’ve yet expressed my own personal opinion on whether demographic change (“slide” from the perspective of people who oppose it) is an issue or the worst issue. It seems like you are arguing with whatever archetype you have bucketed me as in your head and not with me as an actual human. I am probably doing the same with you, to some extent, and it is probably common in these sorts of discussions (“tribalism”), but you are strongly doing it and I think you seem like you wouldn’t want to do it.
I don’t believe I am subconsciously racist. However, I am consciously skeptical about the grand experiment of mixing together people from all over the world. Now I know we were told since we were tiny that this is perfect and pure and good, but once you strip that away it’s basically underpants gnome logic. It’s never happened before in human history. Democracy in general barely works, I don’t really get why everyone is like “yeah we can just take people from anywhere, tell them they don’t really need to assimilate to the local culture, that’s outdated, and their descendants will still come out having our same democratic/egalitarian values”. Like, I would be very, very happy if that worked out. But, there is no way to know that it will. Is that a racism first narrative? Is that a hill I’m dying on? Is that an obviously foolish perspective?
It would be one thing if the same thing were happening in parallel in Asia and Africa and we were all just like, coming together in unison, man. But that is not happening. So if the experiment fails, it fails for us in the west, only. That seems, well, quite risky if you care about whether your grandchildren will still have a good place to live.
The reason you feel like you do about this issue and are, like most people, unable to have a level headed discussion about it, is not your fault. It’s because you were morally brainwashed as a child that this stuff is evil, even though like every American in 1915 (for example) thought this way and we generally don’t consider them to be evil in retrospect. And there has been no great scientific advancement since then to show us that everyone is the same when it comes to executing the functions of our societal structure (which is not itself universal, of course, and I don’t think anyone progressive would claim that it is, it is highly contingent). I was brainwashed too, I am just autistic enough to have mostly uninstalled it. If you can think through this area enough, the pain of entertaining related ideas eventually goes away and you realize that it was a constructed boogeyman the whole time. And you don’t become Hitler in the process, because Hitler was actually just factually wrong in his understanding of the world.
> 2 years into his presidency and Argentina is crashing and burning and the US taxpayers have to bail it out
Has there been study into whether this is Milei's policies' fault?
Argentina's default state is default. Milei inherited a mess. And of their top export categories--soybeans, oil and cars [1]--two are currently fucked. If another policy treatment would have resulted in similar outcomes due to these exogenous shocks and the starting conditions, it's unfair to damn Milei's ideology for what could be a failure to execute.
From what I've read, the currency pressure started "after a heavy defeat for President Javier Milei's party at the hands of the Peronist opposition in local elections" in Bueons Aires [2]. That loss, in turn, is blamed on "claims that" Milei's sister "and other close associates profited from a bribery scheme within the country’s disability agency" [3].
Put another way, the folks who support him are rallying behind corruption. That may be different from those who originally rallied behind his ideas.
I think Milei's policies were fine and the economy was turning around. He didn't make it worse, and it was heading for the right direction.
But (a big but) the series of scandals and corruptions have exhausted his political power. Before that people were willing to give him a chance. Now they don't want another corrupt politician.
It's crashing because outside investors think Argentinians might be out to boot the libertarian out, not because libertarian policies don't work. The problem in Argentina is cultural and Milei is notable exactly because he's so rare there.
The only thing that I don't agree with, depending on how you read it, is "US taxpayers have to bail it out".
The US does not have to do anything here. It is a choice. US taxpayers are being forced to bail it out. At the US government's choice.
But hey, if it's that or supporting US Farmers or US healthcare or education or USAID or etc etc. Choices apparently have to be made, and it's South American libertarians first.
Not the people claiming a hero who achieved absolutely nothing.
Even if one agrees, as everyone does, that Argentina is a basket case, leftists aren’t claiming that leftist leaders of Argentina maintaining the status quo are evidence of the brilliance of leftists or leftist policy.
you see how I was upvoted for providing? that's the takeaway here, not that people don't want to spread this information but that leaving a comment that just says "this is broken, fix it" doesn't help anyone
