by ericmay | 2025-04-30 17:03:56+00:00
> And yet you don't see the contradiction in characterizing people's fears as being unable to "go without TikTok and Temu junk" rather than being rightfully afraid of the recession and mass economic hardship this will trigger costing many people their jobs and savings. This is going to severely damage our economy for absolutely no reason with no plan whatsoever. People are entirely correct to be worried.

Sure people can be worried. In fact, it's America's great national pastime. But I don't think I made the claim that the Trump administration is going about the decoupling with China in the best possible way, only that the goal is one that's worthwhile precisely because the pain you are describing.

No longer importing plastic junk, again this is separate from manufacturing advanced electronics which are also an important concern, and the effects of which are so devastating that we will trigger as you put it a recession, mass economic hardship, and will cost many people their jobs and savings, seems to place our country in an intolerable situation and a reliance on such imports, which if you read the news from the Right People, China seems to experience no economic hardship from such a decoupling meaning we are simply at the mercy of their benevolence. That's a scary thought, and it seems to me we're just going to experience this pain either way, we may as well do it on our terms, generally speaking.

With respect to TikTok you can just delete it. There's no pain experienced there. I'm close-minded on that specific issue. Social media in general is bad anyway, TikTok is just currently the worst and one we can most easily ban today.

The inability to manufacture advanced electronics at scale in the United States is a self-evident problem. I personally don't care about the arguments suggesting why such things can't be built here, because those just further illustrate the problem.

> Again with the tough-guy nonsense. It's not about "weak" or "strong"

Well I don't really care much about this tough guy stuff you are talking about, but as an aside it is rather important politically, especially when we're dealing with a despotic regime in China that must save face, both culturally and by virtue of dictatorship. I mostly just care about policy and the results of the policy.

When I say Trump is weak, I don't mean he is weak in the sense of being a macho guy - frankly there's nothing less I care about in the world aside from TikTok videos - what I mean is he doesn't have the stomach to go through with the plan because of the potential economic repercussions in the short and medium term. In fact, his inability to be stalwart on this issue is precisely the greatest problem now in our foreign policy agenda (or what remains of it) because now all we've done is screwed a bunch of things up and pissed off the allies we need to actually achieve the goal. The worst of all worlds, so to speak.

> it's that this whole endeavor is beyond idiotic. If the goal is rebuild American manufacturing capacity this just isn't a way to achieve that.

The endeavor has merits and likely those are well worth pursuing. I wouldn't disagree that the way in which we are going about things is not the best way, and I think I mentioned that before. I preferred the Biden administration's approach in general, though I don't think they acted with enough urgency.