[exe34]

How do you go from:

1. White House uses machinery of state to force the hand of private enterprise to hide impact of tariffs on prices.

2. Private enterprise acquiesces.

to "The whole thing is murky at best"?

It's pretty clear fascism to me. From wikipedia (while they are allowed to exist): "centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition".

[somenameforme]

Using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" is a rather hyperbolic way of describing a phone call. I do agree in general that the government should be much more strongly separated from private enterprise than it is, but a phone call to exert pressure is a ridiculously low standard of governmental pressure, not even just objectively but also what we've seen over the past several years in completely systemic practice.

[exe34]

> hyperbolic way of describing a phone call

A phone call is a bit of a coward way to describe the press secretary moaning about a hostile and political involvement of a (somehow) foreign government intervention to international journalists.

[somenameforme]

She was referencing this [1] article. And Amazon did indeed exactly what she said. They launched a side gig "Chinese Books", guided by the Chinese propaganda arm NPPA, at the behest of China exclusively in order to further their reach and business in China. That, while complying with ever more onerous requests of the Chinese government including removing reviews for certain Chinese books, granting complete control of "their" cloud services in China to Chinese government approved companies, and so forth.

It creates a reasonable argument that Amazon will do basically anything to get some of that sweet Chinese $$$, which makes their unprecedented foray into politics (at a consumer facing level), in a way that would be completely beneficial to China, look particularly bad. This still has nothing to do with using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" or anything like that.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-ch...

[exe34]

Wait, because Amazon followed the law in China while doing business in China, anything they do in the US that the Orangefuhrer doesn't like is..... something beneficial to China?

The claim was that Amazon wanted to display the added tax due to the tariff separately, which is what the white house histrionics were in response to. There is no indication that only Chinese imports would have been labelled. China is not the only country that Trumpet added tariffs on.

He relies on MAGAs not knowing what a tariff is. He wants to blame price rises on Biden - if it becomes too obvious that the buyer pays the tariffs, he would lose a lot more support.

[dialup_sounds]

The point is that Amazon wasn't doing it in the first place.

[ethbr1]

One has to be careful, with faced with opposition that ignores facts, not to succumb to the same debasement.

We all have speculation about what might have happened behind the scenes -- but it's just that, speculation.

Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.

Hyperbolic phrasing for effect errodes respect for reality, regardless of which side it comes from.

(I realize there's a 50/50 chance I'm going to get a whataboutism spiel in response to this, focusing on your fascism phrasing, and how you believe it is supported. I'd encourage you to take a beat and instead consider places you were reaching past what facts supported in your original phrasing.)

[vlovich123]

> Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.

Evaluating situations in a vacuum and sticking just to confirmed facts isn’t a hallmark of being considered and knowledgeable. One must also consider patterns of behavior and Trump pressuring Amazon to change a policy of both consistent with all of this. Facts in order of events:

* fact: News report that Amazon is going to show tariff impact on their Haul product

* fact: press secretary blasts Amazon in the news indicating she’s repeating a conversation she just had with Trump

* fact: Trump had a phone call with Bezos

* fact: Amazon puts out a clarifying statement they won’t be doing it.

* contradicting fact: Amazon claims they were never actually going to do it

* pattern: quid pro quo is how Trump operates. see the Ukraine call that got him an impeachment in the first term trying to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for weapons

* pattern: businesses and politicians being yes-men to Trump.

So facts + pattern = reasonable hypothesis of what happened. If you have contravening facts I’d love to hear them but you can’t just stick your fingers in your ear and pretend you have to have a confirmed fact before building a hypothesis of the likelihood of what happened.

It’s like trying to pretend Putin isn’t the one murdering dissident journalists or opposing politicians or trumping up fake charges.

[exe34]

I'm not referring to anything behind the scenes, I saw the press secretary intervention and I was embarrassed for America. It's as pathetic as the president complaining about "bad numbers". I miss the times when the free world had an articulate leader.

[ethbr1]

> I miss the times when the free world had an articulate leader.

Watching historical debates and speeches just makes me sad about the disparity with modern oratory.

[ANewFormation]

Probably driven in large part by the expansion of the voting pool. Great political thinkers have no more appeal to the masses at large than Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or Linux.

So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.

Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.

[ethbr1]

Trump's twice election certainly makes a case for universal voting, but maybe different individual vote weights?

Basic stuff, like if you don't know what 5 - 1/4 equals or what cells are. If not, maybe you shouldn't have as loud a say in choosing political leadership?

[somenameforme]

Universal voting is the opposite of the direction to go. See: Australia. Of course going in the opposite direction is probably impossible, because it's not about knowledge but about susceptibility to typical forms of manipulation, emotional highest among them.

This is the reason that politics has largely shifted from a game of knowledge and vision, to one of mud slinging, ad hominem, and appeals to emotion, fearmongering, and so forth. It's not because the electorate doesn't know enough, but because they have poor emotional control, making them easy to manipulate. It's exactly how conmen, operate with Wiki offering the typical pattern as exploiting "the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed." [1]

And I see no clear solution to this.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam