u/HaikuHaiku

First things first: Trump is the most corrupt president in history, and most of the people he's surrounded himself with are yes-men who are equally corrupt. Just the fact that he exempted himself and his family from ever being audited again is the most blatant, banana-republic stuff ever.

His domestic policy is also not exactly stellar so far. I will also not claim that everything Trump does is 5D chess. I don't think so at all.

BUT, his foreign policy is really good. Someone in the administration knows what they are doing.

The entire foreign policy under Trump 1 and now Trump 2 is geared towards weakening China. If you look at it from this point of view, everything makes sense.

The Tariffs: everyone knows that tariffs are bad. And the "liberation day" tariff justifications were ludicrous. They know they are hurting the US economy, but they also know that they are hurting China more. That's the point. It's a game attrition.

The Panama Canal: take a global chokepoint away from Chinese control. Excellent.

Greenland: focus on the arctic. Good. The Arctic will become a major trade route, and it is woefully under-utilized by the US. Greenland will become strategically more significant in the future, as another global trade chokepoint. Controlling it is vital.

Venezuela: take oil away from China and Cuba. Excellent.

Iran: restrict oil flows to China, and (hopefully) control another major choke point with Hormuz.

Europe: force Europe to re-arm and distance yourself from the Ukraine war. Good. For over 30 years there have been security conferences where the EU pledged to increase their NATO spending etc. It never happened. Until Trump comes along and stops playing nice. Suddenly, they all increase their defence spending. It goes to show that in Politics, you get nothing for free. You need to apply pressure and the levers you have available.

The outcome: China is significantly weakened. Their economy is reeling and they are unable to exert force or invade Taiwan. Their housing bubble has continued to collapse, erasing 20 years of investment savings from the Chinese public, which has killed consumption.

All of this has forced China to meet with Trump on unfavourable terms, and they agreed to purchase oil and gas from the US, making them dependent on the US.

Slowly, slowly the Chinese levers of power are being undermined, China is being systematically weakened, and the US is growing in strength.

There are of course many people who criticize the policy of this administration, but I think most of that criticism comes from a false assumption: the assumption that we are still living in the Unipolar World of the 90s and 2000s. We are not. The Liberal World Order has ended, and now we are back in a time of Realpolitik.

Since a lot of people spend a lot of time complaining about this politician or that one, I thought it would be good to co0me up with some benchmark or description of what an ideal candidate would actually look like. Here's my version of that:

The ideal candidate:

1. Is a man. Sorry, but I think men make for better leaders than women (gotta keep this a controversial opinion, after all).

2. who grew up in a lower middle-class household.

3. went to a good university and studied a scientific field, not a humanity and not law. We have too many lawyers in politics. At some point he studied abroad, in Europe or Asia, for an international perspective. I also would not object to a military background.

4. went to medical school and became a surgeon, or equivalent. This shows intelligence, and it is also unobjectionable. Surgeons are well-respected, for good reasons. Ideally, he wouldn't be a plastic surgeon, but a heart or brain surgeon.

5. He needs to have started and run his own business. People who have never run a business should not be running a country. Maybe he started his own medical practice, etc.

6. He's married, and has children.

7. He entered politics at some point, and became the governor of a purple state, or a state which generally votes for the opposite party than his own (that shows bi-partisanship, political acumen, and moderate political views). Politicians from deeply Republican or deeply Democrat states are usually ideological nutjobs.

8. He is neither a big city elite, nor a folksy Okie from Muskokie.

9. He is independently wealthy through his business, but that business should not be connected with big industry, finance, tech or anything like that, as this opens to door to corruption etc. We don't need a tech billionaire, or a venture capitalist or hedge fund manager. Why not someone who ran a medical supplies logistics company, or the medical practice I mentioned, or a hospital, or a home builder, etc.

10. He says interesting things. I can't stand politicians who never say anything unexpected. Politicians who are mere mouthpieces of their ideology.

11. His politics should be pretty straight forward: get the budget under control, don't be involved in crazy wars, get the government out of people's lives as much as possible (leave people alone), support property rights and defend capitalism against the commies, be reasonable on all things from environmental to social policy, support the health of the nation, etc. moderate right wing, centrist views on most things. Return to normalcy.

The abstract idea of "human rights" is often used to justify terrible situations.

A good example of this is El Salvador, where Bukele has imprisoned all the crazy gang members with insane tattoos on their faces, and has made El Salvador one of the safest countries in the world. After being the murder capital of the world just a few years ago.

His approval ratings are above 90%. He's the most popular elected leader in any country I think.

And yet, the liberal press can't stop complaining about him, because he's "authoritarian" and because "human rights may be getting violated".

In this sense, I think "human rights" are extremely anti-human. Because they are abstract, and people seem to care more about those abstractions than they care about actual people.

Nobody is saying "Mr. Jesus here is innocent, and he's been imprisoned for 3 years and that's bad", because that is unobjectionable. The innocent should not be imprisoned. But nobody is advancing that argument. People are instead advancing the argument that there "may be people who's human rights may be being infringed".

The parallel can be found in the US as well. We can't do anything about homeless people because they have "human rights", which means the status quo must go on. We can't just force them all off the streets of LA and San Francisco and put them in mandatory drug rehab and mental health asylums, because it would be a violation of their "human rights". Meanwhile, nobody cares that those homeless people are a menace to society, they make the cities un-walkable, they rob and rape and murder each other, they push people in front of trains...

Somehow the people who cry about "human rights" care more about the rights of criminals than they care about the victims.

But you need to realize, "human rights" are a belief in an abstract set of principles. Yes they have their value, but we are enslaved to an ideology that stifles all real solutions because we worship at the altar of "human rights".

There are 574 federally recognized tribes that function as nations within a nation. They are sovereign, and most of them are on a blood purity standard or clear ancestry standard for tribal membership and benefits.

That is, most tribes no longer recognize you if you aren't 1/8th Indian by blood.

I don't really care, and this is all fine by me, but what makes it so incongruous with modern political rhetoric, especially left-leaning rhetoric, is that it completely defies the whole Liberal World Order, where all people are equal under the law, and race-based laws are bad, etc.

It is especially the woke types who would defend ethnocentric politics when it comes to minorities like African Americans (African American only dorms, black-only spaces, etc.), and Native Indians.

But they would never accept this same reasoning coming from Europeans, and they certainly don't accept it coming from Jews in Israel. But white europeans are the natives, the indigenous population of Europe, and Jews are the indigenous peoples of Israel.

Anyway, I just thought this was a funny contradiction in mainstream political discourse.

I recently posted this opinion in a comment and got a LOT of hate for it (although nobody actually seriously argued against me, of course).

I think this isn't even a controversial opinion. It's 100% in line with what feminists themselves argue.

The feminist argument usually states that women have been historically oppressed. That historically speaking, they didn't have equal rights and privileges. And that's true.

But how come they didn't have those rights and privileges? Couldn't they have just asserted them? Couldn't they have thrown off the shackles of enslavement and risen to equality?

No, of course not. In any society in which men decide that women shouldn't have equal rights, they don't have equal rights. Look at a lot of the muslim world as an example, look at the Taliban...

It follows that women's rights are a function of what men allow.

It's so obvious, and yet nobody ever says it, and they act all outraged when someone points it out.

Funny how people don't like to hear what their own ideology implies.