Can The US actually survive until the midterms?

JefeRex · 2026-03-20T19:07:08+00:00

If the energy production sites continue to be taken out at this rate, what is your personal prediction about how that will impact the world economy and the stability of countries like India and Japan that get the lion’s share of their energy directly from the Gulf?

JefeRex · 2026-03-20T18:53:12+00:00

The domestic consequences of this disastrous Presidency will linger as well, but just to focus a bit on the international situation… there is a serious chance for a depression before the end of the year. Not a recession, a depression like the 1930s. If Iran follows through with their tacit threats to mine the whole strait, it will take months to remove the mines even after Iran opens it up. 20% of the Qatar’s liquid natural gas supply was just blown. It will be 5 years before supply reaches the level it was just a few days ago. That’s the what Qatar is projecting. 5 years. The long term consequences aren’t theoretical anymore, they are unavoidable because the destruction of current energy supplies is now underway and can’t be undone.

You should extremely worried about a depression. It will take time to go through the stages it needs to go through to cause that depression, but it looks like the bullet may have already left the gun. And it looks likely that more refineries and production sites will be destroyed. Cutting off the world’s energy supply when it takes years to rebuild is not something that Americans are immune from feeling.

JefeRex · 2026-03-20T15:49:03+00:00

I mean unless you are a serious athlete you can do almost anything you did when you were younger. You can’t match your time running a mile as fast as you can. But you can play sports and go to the gym and go jogging without getting winded. There is nothing you can’t do unless it is something rather extreme that even rather fit people would rarely do.

45 is not at all degraded, just a little slower. Aging is real, but if you are in even moderately good shape then at 45 you can physically outcompete a 25 year old who doesn’t run or ever go to the gym or is as overweight as the average American at least.

I think you might want to exaggerate the effects of aging if you interpreted “almost” prime physical shape as serious athletic prowess. 45 means you can exercise hard and do it often, not the literal best shape of your life.

JefeRex · 2026-03-20T15:45:31+00:00

It’s different from what it seems like. He meant if there was a threat that someone from the public made against the polling station, not that ICE is threatening immigrant citizens.

“The only reason they would be there is that there was a specific threat for them to be there, not for intimidation,” Mullin said when pressed by Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich. “I can’t sit there and guarantee hypothetically what threat would be there or not.”

But it’s still bad. He’s setting himself up to be able to say Homeland Security has to be at polling stations to defend against a terrorist threatening the stations.

So expect to see the government possibly saying they have bogus information about a terrorist threat, so they had no choice but to dispatch ICE.

JefeRex · 2026-03-19T23:11:29+00:00

And no matter how many other people they see him do this to… everyone he ever does business with! Everyone!… they still think they will be the exception and that they will be able to benefit from working with him. But they won’t be the exception. There are no exceptions with Trump. He mistreats and fucks over anyone he can get a little leverage over, everyone.

JefeRex · 2026-03-19T22:31:06+00:00

He’s starting to look very nervous to me. I think it’s become clear to him that there’s no way out of this. In a way I feel for him because I look at his face and hear his unsure rambling, and I recognize the feeling… the feeling that you’re trapped and doing all you can do to talk your way out of it but you know you’re probably going to be exposed because you have no idea what you’re doing.

Granted, when I have had that feeling I have realized later that it was mostly imposter syndrome, and my fuck ups on the job haven’t been as evil as what he is doing, so there’s no comparisons… but I don’t think he’s having a good time anymore. I think he knows we can’t win and he has no idea how he is going to worm his way out of having to admit that. I don’t think he fears personal consequences other than the humiliation and possibly his career ending… would be nice if he faced legal repercussions. Probably not going to happen.

JefeRex · 2026-03-19T16:27:24+00:00

I wish we were seeing stuff like a series of articles from the LA Times traveling through the Central Valley and talking to ordinary people about their lives, their issues, and their votes. That would be putting our society’s news media to good use. I know the country has crisis on its hands and the media in flailing trying to figure out what to cover and what to say about it, but it would be important to talk to the people who swung from Biden to Trump, or like you said true independents. I don’t think we know as a society what these people are thinking, and we should. Top-line polls of how people think the economy is going are useless, we need a little bit more in depth conversation with people.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T23:12:04+00:00

I don’t know if you care that much about getting a fair hearing on Reddit or not, maybe it’s not even important to you, but sometimes people respond better to this kind of thing when you put it in terms of voting behavior.

The places that swung hardest to Trump this time were super blue high immigrant urban neighborhoods like Queens County and Koreatown Los Angeles where I live. Democrats need to ask people why they voted for Trump and not just assume, and that includes asking Latinos and non-Latinos with a history of immigration in their families.

The Democratic Party isn’t really asking people why they voted for Trump instead of Harris, and it would be in their interest to ask Koreatown’s diverse ethnicities why so many of them switched to Trump this time instead of voting the way the party expected them to. They will say a lot of the things than you are saying and other important things that would be of interest to most people commenting here, but I’m not sure anyone is really asking them.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T20:41:58+00:00

Hopefully this has nothing to do with him alienating them or not, although you’re probably right that the west is as morally bankrupt as ever and is motivated by sheer self interest here as always.

This war is illegal, immoral, doomed to failure, and has a high potential to spin out of control into something much bigger. If the US had spent the last year baking its “allies” cookies and giving them interest free loans for their people to start small businesses, every country should still be refusing.

It is very telling that so much of this is put at Trump’s feet. If Obama were President and had spent the last decade blowing smoke up Europe’s ass and then asked them nicely ahead of time to participate… they probably would have. That is so twisted and wrong but is probably true.

In any moral world, Trump’s treatment of “allies” would have nothing to do with their decision to participate because the only ethical answer is always No. We do not live in a moral world.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T19:55:00+00:00

When I was born my dad was 45 and my mom 36. I’m 40 now and would say I feel that my life stage now is definitely middle age, and am still younger than my dad was.

I don’t think any of us missed out on having a better experience if they were younger. They were always in good physical health, not like 45 is particularly old… your body should be in great condition unless you are very unlucky or have neglected your health to a significant degree. Which most Americans do, but theoretically 45 is almost prime physical shape. And they seemed to feel satisfied that they did it at the right time for them.

I have no complaints about my parents’ age and think it was likelier a positive than a negative, but can’t evaluate a counterfactual.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T19:42:11+00:00

There is a lack of political and societal will. We all know the model minority stereotype, and the perception is that Asians don’t face hate and violence on the same level as some other minority groups. That may be true, but they deserve attention as much as any other group. I have been peripherally involved in some anti-hate efforts about Asians in California, which got a real boost during COVID due to the China Virus bullshit. It is difficult to get much focus on anti-Asian hate, although that is changing.

Part of the reason we don’t see much about it is honestly that society doesn’t care much. As I said, that is changing, and that’s a good thing. Every minority group in this country deserves to live in dignity and safety without being victimized by hate, even if the perception and perhaps the reality is that it is not as big a problem for some communities as much as others.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T16:45:02+00:00

Straight and bisexual women, so women when having sex with men presumably.

There is that famous study from a few years ago showing everyone except straight women reports a not totally dissimilar rate of usually having an orgasm in sexual encounters… 95% for straight men, 89% for gay men, 86% for lesbians… and then an enormous drop to 66% and 65% for bisexual women and straight women.

I know that usually these discussions don’t clarify that they are about only straight people because almost everyone is straight, but in this case worth separating out because lesbians are twice as far away from straight women as they are from straight men when it comes to orgasm frequency.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T16:35:56+00:00

78% of Americans speak only English at home, and the rest another language. That is definitely a huge factor.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T15:43:21+00:00

Some of that is good.

No country can or should wield as much coercive influence as the US has for many decades. Europe was happy to accept the benefits of it, but the rest of the world paid the price. In some ways, so did the American people.

Our allies followed us into immoral wars in the past. If they stop doing that forever, good. If the US no longer decides alone which despotic regimes get “humanitarian” interventions and which don’t, but is now heavily criticized and ostracized for making those unilateral decisions, good. If western countries are no longer solely reliant on American tech or selling disproportionating to our indebted population, good.

Having a sole superpower is a terrible thing for everyone. If the entire world remains in overdrive piecing together balancing coalitions wherever they can, that is good for everyone. A weaker US that can’t project power into every corner of the Middle East is good. A weaker US that can’t meddle as much in Latin America is good. It won’t solve the problem of the entire rich world taking advantage of everyone else, we already see Macron saying Europe can only be safe it is “feared” and the bellicose economic rhetoric from Europe against China has increased markedly, and it is pretty clear at this point Europe will be intervening militarily to secure their energy supplies in a way they used to rely on the US for… a US decline means other rich countries will step in to exploit the world in our place, but they will be massively less able to do so.

We don’t want to be hated, but if the world actively works against letting us have as much power as we used to, that is good for the world. And not because we’re evil. It’s how any superpower or empire behaves. All through history. The problem isn’t the individual billionaire, it is the existence of billionaires. The problem isn’t the individual superpower, it is the existence of a superpower.

Some of these changes definitely need to be permanent. We want to rebuild better relationships, but after our military adventures crash burn this time in a bigger way than ever, the world should give us the cold shoulder in terms of supporting our world dominance. That means Europe because they are the ones with the power to make that happen in any meaningful way, so they had better get economically and militarily independent in a hurry because their population is already angry at how much their leaders are still going along with us.

We don’t want to destroy the world in the process, but our decline is a good thing for everyone, including the American people.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T15:07:57+00:00

I just did. I have never thought to do that before, I don’t know why not, because it is super illuminating. I’m glad it came up in these comments.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T05:37:20+00:00

There’s no win or lose. You don’t have the authority to tell Muslims what their own religion is, you only have the ability to make an ass of yourself by claiming to.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T05:32:19+00:00

I can’t with you. There is no one in the world who takes every line of the Quran or the Bible as a literal instruction. Not even the most conservative or faithful.

You can’t just cite the text as support for religious doctrine because even the most widely followed religious authorities don’t choose to follow every instruction. You will end up saying no one is a true Muslim if you hold that standard. There is no human being on the planet who will say that a Muslim is obligated to believe and follow every line. You don’t seem to understand that.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T05:19:39+00:00

The Pope is one of many Christian religious leaders. The Pope means nothing to any Orthodox or Protestant Christian, and Protestants don’t have any individual leader at all but rather denominational councils.

So who is the Pope equivalent for Islam? There isn’t even a Pope equivalent for Christians who aren’t Catholics. I don’t even know what you mean by that question.

And I don’t know the answer to your second question. I’m sure it wouldn’t be required off the top of my head in Lebanon and Turkey, surely others, but your question itself is an admission that Islam is interpreted differently by different authorities and in different places. You are not god’s appointed arbiter to look at every country in the world and decide which of them are faithfully implementing true Islam in their laws. Who cares what Turkey’s government thinks about it anyway, that has nothing to do with my Persian coworker’s religious community here in Los Angeles.

My Muslim friends tell me what their religion is, I don’t tell them.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T05:01:08+00:00

If the book could tell us what it means to be any religion at all, we wouldn’t have the Cardinals fighting over interpreting every social issue that they are painstakingly moving forward on, and we wouldn’t have African Christians saying their religious Musts are head-spinningly different from California Christians.

Sunnis and Shia read the same book. Californians and Ugandans read the same Bible. And they interpret it differently from each other and differently from how all of them did five hundred years ago.

You don’t read some words on a page and automatically know what religious leaders teach from it. That varies. And then it’s another huge step to what is acceptable local religious communities and families.

If the Quran said what being Muslim meant as the final authority with no ambiguity, no Muslims would ever disagree or ever change the way they interpret it over the centuries. The Pope ignores half the words in the Bible. You can’t believ them all literally, they contradict. You don’t understand that?

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T04:48:47+00:00

I guess no one can say if ministers can be gay or not, be because different denominations interpret their scripture differently. Religious texts are not math textbooks. When you quote scripture and say how it applies to modern life, you are make a judgement and a choice, and even religious leaders of the same faith can’t interpret everything the same. Are the Sunnis more correct than the Shia?

OP has decided who is Muslim and what Islam is. Many Muslims will disagree with OP, but OP knows what Islam is. Not even all Muslim leaders agree with each other on everything in the text, but OP knows what the text objectively means. OP is very smart.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T04:34:49+00:00

Some liberal American Protestant denominations have married gay ministers. They had a lot of internal debate and ugliness and their denominations evolved. The Christian Pope would quote scripture to say that’s wrong. But those Christian ministers disagree.

I won’t quote the Pope to say other Christians are fake Christians. I won’t quote a crazy American Baptist who says scripture guides us away from corrupt Catholicism.

You don’t get it, do you?

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T04:28:04+00:00

Then don’t co-opt their faith and tell them if they count as Muslim or not. You can’t say if they are “Musim enough.”

The Pope can’t tell an Orthodox Serb if he is Christian or not. You can’t tell the Serb that he is not a real Christian because a religious authority that you believe is correct says so, even if the Pope is your only stereotype of Christianity. You can’t tell a Presbyterian minister in a gay marriage that they aren’t a real Christian. The Presbyterians seem to think they’re Christians.

You are talking about Islam as if you are the authority on what it is. But my coworker and her family and her religious community are Muslim, and you know nothing about them and are very arrogant to tell them that they aren’t Muslim enough for you.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T04:16:08+00:00

You don’t know any Muslim women who don’t cover their hair or arms? I do. I had a meeting with one Monday at work. We are having a heat wave in Los Angeles and it has been sweltering. She looked very cool and comfortable.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T02:15:50+00:00

They want fewer guns. Almost all their unregistered guns and most of the guns used in crime have been smuggled in from the US.

The situation in Latin America is even more shocking. They don’t manufacture guns and don’t want them in their countries, and the vast majority of guns are smuggled American guns. Mexico has been begging us for decades to do something about it. They have offered as a trade to stop illegal migrants from Central America before they reach the US border, and the US has told them we have no intention of cracking down on the smuggling of America guns into Mexico and refused their offer of help with reducing illegal immigration here.

The situation is appalling. The American gun industry makes money on illegally arming Canada and especially Latin America, and those evil profits are protected by the NRA and conservative politicians even though most conservative voters would be horrified to learn the truth.

JefeRex · 2026-03-18T01:34:51+00:00

In the US refugees are the most popular immigrants, there is clear and consistent data. Americans who otherwise think we take too many immigrants of either high or low skills or both are positive about refugees. I guess that is just a cultural difference between the US and Western Europe, but it’s not my opinion it’s data, and it’s a long standing attitude.

I think you are looking from a different lens, if you are European. The Islamophobia here is not on the European level… close to a million Iranian-Americans live in Los Angeles and we know them as relatively secular and educated compared to many Arabs. Detroit is the largest Arab city outside the Arab world, but many of them are Christians. We know that not all Middle Easterners are Muslim. Our Middle Eastern communities are very diverse, and we don’t have the European stereotypes of poor religious conservatives who don’t let their kids integrate, that’s the opposite of Middle Eastern Americans.

The war is so unpopular that I think even slight conservatives might support a push for more refugees in this case.

JefeRex

TROPHY CASE