The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Nov 2026Well, the people have spoken, and Dwight D. Eisenhower has been elected to serve as the next President of the Untied States. He won’t be sworn in for another couple months, though, so Harry Truman’s administration has to deal with the Korean War until then, which very much includes still working for an armistice that respects the wishes of POWs.
00:00 Intro
00:25 Recap
00:47 Artillery Testing
02:12 Acheson and the UN
04:24 ROKA
06:53 Presidential Election
10:28 Television Campaign
13:20 The Election Results
15:07 Summary
15:19 Conclusion
November 11, 2026
The Korean War Week 125 – America Elects a New President! – November 10, 1952
November 5, 2026
“Machine-tooled emotional manipulation: how a department-store Christmas ad should be”
John Lewis, the British department store with a history of heart-warming (if saccharine) Christmas ads released there their 2026 Christmas ad and … it’s getting a lot of attention, but not the kind of attention the company may have anticipated:
[Previous John Lewis Christmas ads have] often been rather sweet with an agreeable, universal sentiment. Missing friends, shyness, loneliness, not wanting to leave people out, etc. Hibernating bears. Machine-tooled emotional manipulation. Which is how a department-store Christmas ad should be.
This year, however, they’ve assumed we’ll be enchanted by rude, selfish, misbehaving children whose affection has to be bought with great effort and at great expense, in desperation. And the decision to make those children brown – because apparently you can’t have an advert without the statistically unlikely interracial couple – adds a dynamic that I somehow doubt was intended.
Commenter [+] quips,
They’ve accidentally made a Restore Britain campaign video.
What’s remarkable is that the project must have involved any number of highly-paid, supposedly clued-up experts, masters of nuance, and endless meetings, over months … and no bugger spotted how readily the ad lends itself to much less festive interpretations.
I watched it again this morning and am still processing just how weirdly misjudged it is.
For instance, that heartwarming moment when the scowling, diverse grandchildren shake their Christmas cards in annoyance, having found no money in them. Behaviour enabled, one assumes, by the ineffectual, unapologetic parents, who allow their offspring to wreck other people’s homes and to jump up and down on other people’s furniture.
And remember, we’re supposed to like these unparented brats, enough to care about pleasing them. And we’re supposed to identify with the grandma who wants these brats to love her, if only for a few minutes, before they presumably resume their scowling, ungrateful ways.
Feel that Christmas spirit, people.
October 4, 2026
Jaguar – a case study in brand suicide
The Jaguar E-type was, in my opinion, the best-looking car of the 20th century. It was all downhill from that point, sadly:
Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.
The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.
The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic’s vacation fund.
The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.
Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.
The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, “This company is woke trash”. The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won’t change that.
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August 7, 2026
Microsoft has zero incentive or desire to fix Windows
As ESR points out, Microsoft has a long history of not fixing issues that anger users, so Windows 11 isn’t going away and it isn’t getting fixed (in ways that users demand, anyway):
Microsoft will never fix Windows, because the features that enrage users in Windows 11 are exactly the ones that generate recurring revenue and market control. That is exactly *why* they enrage users!
Yes, you’ll get reversals of some idiotic user interface decisions. You’ll get some speed tweaks. These will be loudly hyped in hopes that they distract you from what you’ll never get.
Don’t take my word for this, look at what Microsoft is hyping as fixes in their reform program and Windows 12. Do they say a word about no longer requiring a Microsoft account to do a local installation? Or about removing the repeating nag prompts for OneDrive? Do they make any promises to end the advertising spam?
No. And they won’t. Because that’s where the money is. Windows now exists to broker your eyeballs to third parties and upsell you into Microsoft subscription services.
I’ve been warning anybody who would listen for 30 years that when you install closed-source software you’re accepting a power asymmetry with the vendor. All of their incentives say they should use the control you grant them to take more control. Induce more dependency. Lock you in.
Microsoft has been on this path for a very long time. “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run!”
You might think these tendencies would be restrained by their fear that when they increase the pain level above some threshold they can’t predict in advance, a critically large percentage of their userbase will pay the aggravation cost to escape their clutches. There are two reasons this won’t happen, one general and one specific to Microsoft.
The general problem is that corporations differentially respond to market incentives according to how easily they can be measured. Revenue from cloud services and the adtech vampires is a strong, visible signal; exit by pissed off users creates multiple signals that are diffuse and easy to misinterpret.
The Microsoft specific problem is Azure — which, ironically, mostly runs Linux instances. Microsoft now makes most of its money from Azure, which reduces its incentives to care about pissed-off desktop Windows customers bailing out.
Indeed, if I were a cold-blooded Microsoft strategic planner, I might be tempted to deliberately burn up the desktop business for short-term revenue, knowing that that’s not where my long-term fortress is. I’m not saying they’re actually doing that, but from outside the difference between this move and an over-focus on measurable revenue streams leading to accidental destruction is difficult to make and probably not very informative even if you could.
The bottom line is that it’s just not going to get any better. Ever. In fact, bailing out is doomed to get more painful over time. The more process habits you form around Windows, the harder the dependency gets to break.
The conclusion is obvious. Get out now. A lot of major tech influencers have noticed over the last 18 months that after decades of sour jokes about the year of the Linux desktop, Linux is finally ready for you. It’s time.
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June 30, 2026
A World Cup “first” – no new stadiums built just for WC matches
The 2026 World Cup broke new ground in several different ways, not least of which was that none of the venues for matches were built just for the tournament:
The 2026 World Cup is one for the books, a tournament of firsts. The first to be hosted by three different countries—United States, Mexico, and Canada. The first to feature 48 teams. The first time a single country, Mexico, has hosted the World Cup three times. The first time one stadium, the Azteca, opens a World Cup for the third time. The first time the final will stage a halftime show. And the first time since USA 1994 that no stadiums were built exclusively for the occasion. And while many stories are worth covering with the World Cup, let’s talk about stadiums.
World Cups, like many major competitions, face backlash for their heavy government funding, because once the fans leave, the citizens are stuck footing the bill. For most of these international tournaments, the model is first to build stadiums for the sole purpose of hosting, and then to figure out what to do with them afterward—that’s where most of the funding goes. South Africa built Cape Town Stadium from scratch in 2010, and it barely survives today as a rugby and concert venue, rebranded DHL Stadium. Brazil, the 2014 host, spent more than $3 billion on 12 stadiums, with its priciest venue, the Mané Garrincha in Brasília, a city with no major club, ending up as a parking lot for buses. While 2026 seems to have broken the pattern, at least for now, 2030 and 2034 already have preparations underway and are, in fact, building stadiums. But this time, not one venue was built for the occasion. Every stadium already existed: NFL stadiums in the United States, soccer grounds in Mexico, multi-use venues in Canada. It almost seems like the responsible version.
Almost, because even when you don’t build a stadium, hosting still sends a bill. Take Monterrey, where the stadium is privately owned and was renovated by FEMSA. Public money went elsewhere. Governor Samuel García’s administration poured billions of pesos into the city’s metro — 25 billion pesos — for three new lines to carry fans from the airport to the stadium, but it won’t be finished until 2027, a year after the fans have gone home. And in the weeks before kickoff, the government raised walls along the avenues tourists would travel, in order to hide the poor neighborhoods. Regios called them the walls of shame. It is the whole logic of the tournament in miniature: cover what you would rather the world not see. This isn’t new; hiding the poor before the international crowds arrive is an old Olympic habit.
Most of the stadiums today carry a corporate name, and because of that, most assume that the money behind them was private, too, but it wasn’t. Most US venues for the World Cup are publicly owned, all three Mexican stadiums are private, and both Canadian venues are public. Of the 30 stadiums that normally host NFL teams, only three were built entirely with private money. The rest took public subsidies, even as the name on the façade says otherwise. This wasn’t always the model.
Through much of the last century, private money built and ran arenas, and public funding for them was almost unthinkable. The shift is fairly recent. As historian Frank Andre Guridy tells it in his book The Stadium, grounds that once carried the names of places and local stories became corporate billboards. This modern wave is usually traced to 1985, when Sacramento developer Gregg Lukenbill sold the naming rights to the Kings’ new home to the Atlantic Richfield Company, and ARCO Arena was born. Naming rights themselves go back further, to Rich Stadium in Buffalo in 1973, but it was only after ARCO that the practice became the rule. Today, nearly every arena in the country answers to a sponsor.
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June 25, 2026
Passively shaping public opinion is one of big tech’s favourite techniques
In the portion of this post above the paywall, Celina shows a good example of how social engineering doesn’t have to be blatant to be effective:
Before reading further, open a new browser tab and type the search term “married white woman” into Google Images. Scroll through the first several rows of results. What do you see?
The output which is consistently replicated across different devices and geographic locations is a deluge of mixed-race couples. The output is overwhelmingly dominated by images of white women intimately paired with black or non-white men. To the casual observer passively consuming this digital output, the presentation establishes an immediate baseline for normalcy. The volume and priority of these specific demographic pairings create the distinct impression that such relationships are the standard, ubiquitous, and foundational reality of modern Western society.
Yet, when we contrast this algorithmic simulation with reality, a massive discrepancy emerges. Statistically, interracial marriages remain a distinct minority of overall unions in the United States and across the broader Western world. According to comprehensive data from the Pew Research Center, in 2020, only 11% of all married couples in the United States were interracial or interethnic. When we drill down into the specific pairing that dominates the aforementioned image search, the numbers shrink even further. Marriages specifically between a white woman and a black man account for a mere 7% of that already small 11% sliver of intermarriages. In absolute terms, out of over 51 million married white women in the United States, less than 1% are married to black men.
Despite this statistical rarity, the digital simulation feels entirely “normal” to the modern consumer because media giants like Google, alongside massive stock photography conglomerates like Getty Images and Shutterstock, consciously and relentlessly curate it that way. This immense disparity between reality is the result of neutral, blind code cataloging human existence. It is an intentional act of social enforcement, by artificially elevating specific demographic pairings, media platforms execute a subtle but pervasive socio-cultural engineering project.
It can thus be argued that this engineered visual output serves a distinct ideological purpose: pushing European women toward demographic change and eroding the visual primacy of the homogeneous nuclear family that built and sustained Western nation-states for centuries. When digital representations are manipulated to consistently overwrite physical realities, a significant ontological shift occurs within the host population. The native majority is conditioned to view their own demographic decline as an organic, inevitable, and morally righteous progression. This forces us to confront the question: If images precede and dictate reality, who is engineering our extinction?
I’m long out of the habit of watching TV, so when the NFL season gets started and I’m presented with three-plus hours per week of commercial TV to watch my favourite team play, I can’t help but notice that most commercials that include representations of married couples are inter-racial or non-white. The advertisers are also presenting a small minority of marriages in North America as being the overwhelming majority in their TV ads. Why might they want to do that?
May 18, 2026
QotD: Medical ads
I don’t understand commercials for medicine anymore. I mean, I understand what they’re trying to say when they advertise a medication and list its possible side effects. I just don’t understand why they bother anymore. Nobody takes these advertisements seriously. The other day, I saw a spot for something called Restless Legs Syndrome. I was stunned when it ended without turning into a “Good news; I just saved 15 percent on my car insurance by switching to Geico” commercial. That’s how bad it’s gotten. It doesn’t even matter how legitimate the affliction is. It could be cancer at this point. It could be a pill to stop spontaneous human combustion. Wouldn’t matter. I see these commercials and instinctively shrug them off. I suffer from Grain of Salt Disorder.
Jonathan David Morris, “Thoughts On Health”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-09-18.
May 13, 2026
QotD: The advertising business
That’s what makes the ads a useful window into the black soul of our rulers. The ad makers are all from the ruling class. Look at the team photo of an ad agency and it looks like the faculty of an Ivy League college. There may be a little color in there for show, but otherwise it is all men with small hats and people who still write “Episcopalian” when asked about their religion. The advertising agencies that produce these ads are the special forces of the Judeo-Puritan ruling class.
The Z Man, “Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out”, The Z Blog, 2020-09-04.
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May 2, 2026
Making Real English Toffee from 1881
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Dec 2025Rich, sweet pieces of Victorian Era toffee
City/Region: Everton, England
Time Period: 1881Around Christmas, my house is full of candy and baked goods, and for me, toffee is one of the quintessential Christmas treats. Possibly invented by Molly Bushell in 1753 in Everton, just outside of Liverpool, toffee can be hard like the recipe we’re making here or of a softer, chewier variety.
While either option is delicious, this recipe is specifically for the hard style of Everton toffee. It’s a really simple recipe (the hardest part is waiting for it to come up to temperature), and is such a rich, decadent treat. The lemon extract adds a layer of acidic complexity to the toffee, but it doesn’t taste of lemon.
Feel free to dress yours up by adding some nuts to the dish before you pour the toffee over it, or sprinkle some chocolate chips over the toffee while it’s still hot so that they melt.
Everton Toffee.
Put one pound of brown sugar and one tea-cupful of cold water into a pan well rubbed with good fresh butter. Set it over a slow fire, and boil until the sugar has become a smooth, thick syrup, then stir into it half a pound of butter, and boil for half an hour. When sufficiently boiled, it may be tested by dropping some on a plate, and if it dries hard and can easily be removed, the toffee is ready for flavouring. For this purpose, add twenty or thirty drops of essence of lemon. Pour the toffee into a wide well-buttered dish. If liked, vinegar may be substituted for the water, then the lemon may be omitted.
— Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, England, 1881
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April 30, 2026
The History of BROWN SAUCE: HP Sauce, A1 Sauce, OK Sauce and Chef Sauce
Tweedy Misc
Published 7 Nov 2025Have you ever wondered how British “brown sauce” came about? What is it made from? Who invented it? When was it invented? Which brown sauce is the oldest? When did we start calling it “brown sauce”?
In this video we look into what exactly brown sauce is (and isn’t), we look into ingredients of a number of iconic brands (and some supermarket own brands) and explore the history of the five brown sauces which defined the category: A1 Sauce, OK Sauce, HP Sauce, Daddies Favourite Sauce and Chef Sauce.
Some links to Wikipedia etc in case it helps figure out what this is all about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_s…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.1._Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_Br…If you’re finding the wobbling bottles are a problem for you, here’s a version of the video without any wobbling: • History of Brown Sauce (No Wobbling!)
This video was made using Davinci Resolve 20, with a lot of the still images made using Canva.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:16 What is brown sauce?
2:33 Supermarket own brand brown sauces
4:02 History of brown sauce
4:48 A1 Sauce
10:49 OK Sauce
15:31 HP Sauce
17:06 Daddies Favourite Sauce
19:06 Chef Sauce
23:50 Conclusion
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April 12, 2026
The two kinds of enshittification
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR explains the differences between the two kinds of enshittification we’re seeing these days:
It may be time to start distinguishing between classic two-sided enshittification and a more general single-sided variety.
When Corey Doctorow originally defined the term “enshittification” he was describing a very specific thing that can and does happen when a platform like Amazon or Google acts as a two-sided market-maker. They start by reducing friction for both buyers and sellers, get everybody locked in by the higher cost of doing volume business anywhere else, then start charging tolls on both sides and injecting spamware that nobody wants. Eventually even their search function becomes completely shitty.
The increasingly horrifying “agentic” train wreck that Windows 11 has become isn’t a two-sided platform in the same way, but the feel of its late stages is depressingly familiar. It’s so stuffed with bloatware, spamware, and spyware that its nominal function as an operating system to run programs for its users feels almost like an afterthought.
I’m going to call this “single-sided enshittification”, and point out that both kinds stem from the same fundamental disconnect. They’re both things that happen when the dominant revenue stream from a product is disconnected from the needs of its original users.
In both cases, an important factor, though not the only one, is the attack of the adtech vampires. So very much of the ugliness in enshittified platforms is downstream of the easy money that they offer product owners for allowing them to sink their fangs into the information stream.
I don’t have a solution to this problem. But if there is one, it starts with identifying the problem correctly. Enshittification — it’s not just for two-sided platforms anymore.
From the comments on the original post:
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March 2, 2026
A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator
Forbrukerrådet – Norwegian Consumer Council
Published 27 Feb 2026Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved into enshittification and how to resist it. The report shows how this phenomenon affects both consumers and society at large, but that it is possible to turn the tide.
Read more on: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakin…
(more…)
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February 24, 2026
QotD: The! Exclamation! Mark!
To the grammatically sane, reading the exclamation mark in its proper mode, the modern world appears increasingly deranged, authored seemingly by caffeinated twelve-year-olds. The delirium jumps at you in emails, on billboards, from the end of every other sentence.
The exclamation mark — the name a dead giveaway — means to exclaim. To cry out or speak suddenly or excitedly, as from surprise, delight, horror, etc. That line and dot seize your attention. Help! Now, it seizes your last nerve. Stop! If everything is exclamatory, then nothing is.
To the cynic, the exclamation mark is a hypodermic needle spiking foreign joy into the bloodstream of language. With each excitable email, I wonder, is this person in need of urgent medical attention? Or have they overdosed on Adderall?
Christopher Gage, “Against Enthusiasm”, Oxford Sour, 2025-11-21.
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October 31, 2025
The “internet of shit” is somehow managing to get even shittier
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia enumerates just a few of the ways that advertisers have abandoned attempts to persuade you and instead now run online extortion rackets to get you to pay to avoid having to see their ads:
Advertising is no longer about creativity and storytelling. Ads are now a matter of annoyance, plain and simple (as I recently described in this article).
It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads — so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.
They used to call it extortion — pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm. Needless to say you don’t need an English major to run an extortion business. (However, they do make good victims.)
This business strategy started out in media — where it made some sense. People are familiar with the idea of advertising during screen entertainment.
And here is how it played out:
- YouTube started this with the launch of an ad-free tier in 2014.
- Paramount announced an ad-supported subscription plan in June 2021.
- Disney + launched a low-price subscription option with advertising in March 2024.
- Netflix introduced a similar program in October 2022.
- Amazon Prime did the same thing in early 2024.
But in the last few months, it’s gone crazy. The ads are spreading beyond movies and videos — and into almost anything with a digital interface. So we’ve seen the following in recent days:
- Jeep drivers started complaining about ads on their vehicle touchscreen in early 2025. An ad for an extended warranty allegedly appears every time they stop their car (at a red light, etc.).
- Meta announced an ad-free subscription option for Facebook and Instagram in September 2025. (initially in the UK).
- Microsoft announced an ad-supported subscription plan for Xbox cloud gaming in October 2025.
- A rumor about Apple inserting ads into its map app started spreading in October 2025. This will allegedly launch in 2026.
This is more than annoying — it’s also abusive. A new Jeep can cost $50,000 or more. When you hand over that much cash, you should get an exemption from spam ads on your screen.
But the most annoying move of all is coming from Samsung. They are putting ads on $3,499 smart fridges. They’re rolling out this “software upgrade” right now.
According to Samsung, your smart (or maybe smart-ass) refrigerator will soon share “useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements”. The display will change every ten seconds.
I definitely rely on my fridge for some things — milk, eggs, orange juice, and an occasional cold beer. But you don’t see curated advertisements on that list.
Ads will never be on the list.
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October 27, 2025
Trump versus Carney (and Ford, his court jester)
Another week, another set of bleak headlines about the trade relationship (or lack thereof) between Canada and the United States. For some, this is the story of how Trump Derangement Syndrome has consumed all levels of Canadian leadership, while for others it’s proof that you can’t deal with Trump as a rational adult and instead need to consider him an overgrown toddler with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Or perhaps it’s a little from column A and a bit from column B:
At the risk of overstating my own influence, it’s like the President of the United States read my piece saying he was acting like a toddler and decided, “oh yeah? I’ll show what ‘acting like a toddler’ means!” and did this, presumably once Bluey was over:
U.S. President Donald Trump says he is raising tariffs on Canadian goods by 10 per cent, after accusing Canada of airing what he called a “fraudulent” advertisement that misrepresented former president Ronald Reagan’s stance on tariffs.
In a post published on Truth Social at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Trump wrote, “I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
Trump’s post cited his frustration over an advertisement produced by the Ontario government that used clips of Reagan warning about the dangers of protectionism and praising free trade.
“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he wrote.
Earlier this week, Trump had cut off trade negotiations with Ottawa, explaining it was due to the “hostile” nature of the ad campaign.
“Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump further said in the Truth social post.
The good news is, at least Trump is coming right out and admitting that his “national security” tariffs are really about nothing more than his fragile ego, just in time for the Supreme Court to hear arguments about this very issue.
The bad news is, I think it’s exceptionally naive to think SCOTUS is going to save us from this madness.
Not because I think they’ll rule that what he’s doing is legal. That might be a bridge too far for even Justices Thomas and Alito.
But because this proposition rests on the assumption that Trump considers himself bound by Supreme Court rulings and that anyone else is going to exercise their power to ensure these rulings are followed.
Or, if you think Canadian leaders are deep in a TDS binge:
How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a widespread and serious issue. When one is afflicted by it, their capacity to sense-make becomes compromised. Emotions are a difficult thing for humans to control, and TDS-sufferers seem for the most part unaware of how much their negative, emotional feelings concerning Trump have hijacked their reason.
TDS types reveal themselves in so many ways. One specifically, which often goes unnoticed, is a general uncharitableness when it comes to interpreting the words and actions of Trump, or a general unwillingness to look beyond words – either Trump’s words or anyone else’s which have been inserted into Trump discourse. A prime example of this is the anti-tariff ad campaign involving a 1987 speech by former president Ronald Reagan which the Ford government paid $75 million to have broadcast to American audiences – key Republican areas – for the purpose of undermining President Trump’s economic policy.
Firstly, the uncharitable analysis does not allow that Trump has any right, or any good argument, or reason to be upset about Canada’s trade practices, such as supply management. The uncharitable analysis sees Canada as an innocent victim and Trump as a bully who is trying to destroy us and/or take us over.
[…]
Returning to reason and reality. Trump has justification for being upset with Canada over both our trade practices and in the under-handed and unfriendly tactics of Doug Ford and other Canadian leaders. The ad was an insult to Trump. His reaction or over-reaction to the ad, does not change the fact that what Ford did was antagonistic and not in the best interests of productive trade negotiations. The charitable analysis understands this, and does not lose sight of it, no matter how outlandish the things Trump does may be.
On the other side of the uncharitable Trump analysis concerning Ford’s Reagan ad blunder, is circulating the idea that Reagan was anti-tariff. Why is this idea believed? Because of Reagan’s rhetoric. You can find hundreds of clips of Reagan speaking about the dangers of high tariffs, or advocating for free trade. But the uncharitable analysis refuses to go beyond words. They ignore words that don’t support their argument, and act as if the words that do support their argument were the only ones spoken. Further, they act like words are the be all and end all, by not bothering to investigate the actions of those who speak the words, they pretend that word-speakers always do and intend exactly what they say. Reagan’s oratory contained lots of anti-tariff rhetoric, but his actions included lots of pro-tariff policy in an effort to deal with unfair trading partners.
None of this is difficult once you mea culpa from TDS. If you remain under the spell of TDS, you will not be rational or reasonable, and I for one, will not take you seriously. You will look increasingly foolish as time goes on and Trump’s policies turn out not to be the disasters you hysterical twits dreamed they would be. And the group of people like me, who shake their heads and roll their eyes at you, will grow and grow, under the weight of inevitable mass mea culpa. But you will remain shrouded from truth as you descend further into darkness and gloom and hate. It doesn’t have to be this way … just mea culpa FFS!
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