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[Laterigrade]

When an authoritarian leader cooperates with an external authoritarian leader, it is to bring exterior political force against interior political opponents.
 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Trump didn't stop anything from happening with Russia. Trump cooperated with Putin's agenda and Putin cooperated with Trump's. Both gained politically against internal political opponents.

Also, Trump didn't stop anything from happening with Kim Jong-un. That was another "reality" show event.

In each cases, both authoritarian leaders gained something they could show to their people and they gained it from an external source that could not be countered by local politics. They rose themselves up politically and their political rivals could not raise themselves up the same way.

And the herd-followers say "Our herd-leader successfully fought the great foe, that is why he should be leader, and you wannabe leaders need to do it better before I will accept you as a leader".

I agree. But Biden doing nothing, nothing, nothing isn’t better.
I hate Trump, but I hated worse people criticising him for military spending — especially in light of this scenario, which I thought would happen, but China to Taiwan instead.

[EuchreJack]

I do not think that China will invade Taiwan against US wishes.  I think China will keep subsidizing the American Dream until we have no choice but to let them take Taiwan.

In my humble opinion, China has never been a "Conquer the world" type of country.  They instead see their country as the Empire, and seek to vassalize all the barbarians (which is everyone else, including the US).  They've been doing this sort of thing longer than any other country has been in existence.

[Micro102]

When an authoritarian leader cooperates with an external authoritarian leader, it is to bring exterior political force against interior political opponents.
 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Trump didn't stop anything from happening with Russia. Trump cooperated with Putin's agenda and Putin cooperated with Trump's. Both gained politically against internal political opponents.

Also, Trump didn't stop anything from happening with Kim Jong-un. That was another "reality" show event.

In each cases, both authoritarian leaders gained something they could show to their people and they gained it from an external source that could not be countered by local politics. They rose themselves up politically and their political rivals could not raise themselves up the same way.

And the herd-followers say "Our herd-leader successfully fought the great foe, that is why he should be leader, and you wannabe leaders need to do it better before I will accept you as a leader".

I agree. But Biden doing nothing, nothing, nothing isn’t better.
I hate Trump, but I hated worse people criticising him for military spending — especially in light of this scenario, which I thought would happen, but China to Taiwan instead.

1) Doing nothing against Putin would indeed be better than cooperating with Putin. This I find to be pretty damned obvious.

2) There is plenty being done. An ever growing list of sanctions for example. This is also very obvious to anyone who has even glanced as social media.

So I find it very odd that you are missing out on this very obvious set of thoughts to falsely equivocate Trump and Biden. Sounds dishonest.

Euchre quite literally said greed is good (greed is a sin) and that capitalism should be unrestricted because "muh freedoms" (capitalism is inherently greedy and thus sinful and should be axed, among other reasons). Not a coincidence he's a Trumper.

Believe it or not, its possible to hate both Trump and Biden...

I was trying to be nice, but now I feel this is relevant:

Hey folks!  Which dick tastes better? Trump or Biden?
That's right folks, some of you seem pretty committed to sucking one of those dicks.  Can't realize they're both terribly flawed men.

...there are very good reasons I've avoided the temptation to even look at this thread until very recently.

I think most people here realize that disrespect is proportional, and that one can be far more flawed than the other. And that when someone treats two disproportionately flawed people with equal scorn, they are inherently showing bias towards the worse, by forgiving some of their actions to bring them up to the lesser evil. Let's widen the gap even more to emphasize my point. Hitler and Biden. Does it sound right to say "they are both terribly flawed" or "it's possible to hate both of them"? It doesn't, because one is obviously worse. And given the excessive amount of people all across social media who know that Trump is indefensible, but still want to defend him without looking like a total piece of shit resorting to such methods (an entire subreddit on reddit is dedicated to these type of false equivalences, via r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM), it's important to emphasize that you know that Trump is worse than Biden.

[McTraveller]

Such an interesting mix of responses to the State of the Union depending on if the "analyst" leans left or right.

It is amusing in a sad way that Putin has done something on US leader could do - provide even a single issue on which both parties can agree.

EDIT: I do think it's funny that people are blaming Biden for inflation. The free-cash business-friendly policies came from the previous administration, not this one. It's also naive to think there is a single policy the government could do to stop prices from increasing.  It's not like the government can sign a law and instantaneously create new production that will address the supply-demand imbalance.

Even if the government continued to step up its antitrust/anti-merger efforts, it wouldn't impact the basic supply/demand issues in the near term.  And asking for more stimulus is the wrong approach - that just gives everyone money to pay the higher prices.  That is - you can't lower prices by giving people more money.  You can only lower prices by increasing supply or reducing demand.

[Lord Shonus]

90% of the current inflation is lingering supply chain issues, and was already starting to drop before war were declared. The rest is an enormous increase in the buying power of the average American due to the Great Resignation starting to crank wages up. 90% of Americans have their wages going up faster than prices are.

[nenjin]

Every previous administration and its supporters blames the current administration for financial woes they weren't responsible for. Nothing new here.

[Micro102]

90% of the current inflation is lingering supply chain issues, and was already starting to drop before war were declared. The rest is an enormous increase in the buying power of the average American due to the Great Resignation starting to crank wages up. 90% of Americans have their wages going up faster than prices are.

I would say a good chunk of the inflation is just corporations raising prices. If they are all having lingering supply chain issues, that would suggest that they are struggling. Yet we are seeing record profits.

[MrRoboto75]

Those prices won't go down when the supply chain is fixed.

[The_Explorer]

Its more republicans like to blame democrats for whatever issues are in the current presidency (if the president is democrat). Its vice versa with democrats if a republican is in office.

I've come to the conclusion both choices suck for different reasons (though not always, Obama was amazing), the only upside is we WOULD be in world war if the OTHER person was elected instead. But I wish independents actually had a chance or some offbeat person who is actually a good leader. I still think hillary would do a fine job but kinda up there in age, bernie maybe but he is way up there in age and I'm tired of really old presidents. We really need a younger president or/and someone like Obama, he was still imo the best modern president we've had. A younger president seems to know what most people want, even older people liked obama for most part. And honestly, I didn't hear many republicans dislike him besides the hardcore "republican and republican only" voters hate everything else (but that happens with democrat and democrat only voters too). The ones who said they disliked obama, never had a real good reason to dislike him besides "democrat lawl".

Too bad obama can't be elected again, dunno if we'll see another obama again for a while. None of the competitors are that great and maybe it'll be the same...biden vs trump, since all republicans have is trump, hopefully democrats put out a better contender or try hillary again or something. Either way, seeing biden is avoiding any world war possible, its an easy vote if its between the two. Just wish better choices.

[JoshuaFH]

The prices have been divorced from supply and demand for a long time now. The price of anything to an end consumer is equal to how much liberty that corporations feel they have to gouge prices. This is usually quite a lot of liberty.

[MorleyDev]

I agree. But Biden doing nothing, nothing, nothing isn’t better.

Nothing? There's currently what is quite frankly unprecedented levels of co-operation and agreement going on in the application of sanctions between the USA and Western Europe. And from the European POV it's quite obvious that the USA are the ones *leading* that co-operation and are pushing European countries to get it as harsh as they can. How is that nothing? This is what the USA acting like the 'leaders of the free world' they so often claim to be should look like, not the swinging their military dick around and screaming "Woo freedom!" they've been doing for the last six decades.

[nenjin]

If someone wants to be ignorant and reduce complex geopolitical realities into one word, like "nothing", no single post on the internet is going to change their mind. People have to be willing to expend more intellectual effort than it takes to open a Fruit Rollup to understand "the now" and that clearly ain't the case.

[The_Explorer]

I'm actually rather happy (despite my above post, this is definitely a huge thing for me) that biden hasn't gone and started world war 3. He has been rather smart about it. Honestly keep thinking a big war was going to happen by now, but like I said, he has done everything to avoid a massive global conflict. He has been harsh, using sanctions heavily, and while maybe that won't prevent Ukraine conflict, it may very likely lead to Putin being "dethroned"

[lemon10]

When an authoritarian leader cooperates with an external authoritarian leader, it is to bring exterior political force against interior political opponents.
 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Trump didn't stop anything from happening with Russia. Trump cooperated with Putin's agenda and Putin cooperated with Trump's. Both gained politically against internal political opponents.

Also, Trump didn't stop anything from happening with Kim Jong-un. That was another "reality" show event.

In each cases, both authoritarian leaders gained something they could show to their people and they gained it from an external source that could not be countered by local politics. They rose themselves up politically and their political rivals could not raise themselves up the same way.

And the herd-followers say "Our herd-leader successfully fought the great foe, that is why he should be leader, and you wannabe leaders need to do it better before I will accept you as a leader".

I agree. But Biden doing nothing, nothing, nothing isn’t better.
I hate Trump, but I hated worse people criticising him for military spending — especially in light of this scenario, which I thought would happen, but China to Taiwan instead.

Biden is doing a lot of stuff, but fairly quietly, in a boring manner, and while working with nearly every other western nation on earth, so I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't get a big boost from how absolutely fucked Russia is here thanks to his and allied actions.
If this was Trump he would be shouting about how every single success in the fight against Russia was 100% his doing and how he was solely responsible for stopping the blitz while actually sabotaging the attempts to sanction Russia (cause Putin owns him).

His rabid shouting would of course help convince many Americans that he was doing something and that he was trying to help (just as he convinced many Americans that he was trying his hardest fighting the Coronavirus) even if it was all bald faced lies.
---
Should Biden do some rabid shouting of his own here? Well, it would probably help the democratic party and his chances of reelection, but it certainly wouldn't make him a better actual leader.

[Laterigrade]

No, okay, I take back my ‘nothing nothing nothing’. I had the impression — without having researched it — that the sanctions were bad, but more of a token measure, not a real threat, but now that I read about it they’re really going hard with it.
In the end I guess I just want “tangible” action taken to protect the Ukrainian people, and it frustrates me that that isn’t happening, even though I can see the reasons why.
(take that, nenjin, posts on the internet changed my mind)