Summary
Russian state TV hosts are celebrating Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks, claiming they could “dismantle America.”
Figures like Vladimir Solovyov praised the nominees, including Kash Patel for FBI director and Tulsi Gabbard for intelligence, as a “radical dream team” likely to undermine U.S. institutions.
Critics in the U.S. warn that Trump’s selections, including conspiracy theorists and controversial figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth, signal plans to weaken federal agencies.
finally. some accurate reporting.
Well, he ain’t wrong.
I feel bad for Americans, but a selfish part of me kind of hopes that the dollar crashes so that electronics become cheaper here in Brazil.
As a gringo who had to buy electronics in Brazil a few times, I’m afraid that dollar exchange rate isn’t the main problem - Brazilian import taxes and tariffs are.
I spent the better part of 2009 through 2011 trying to get spare parts into the country, and customs was always the biggest hurdle. And sourcing things locally was ridiculously expensive.
So to anyone still not convinced that tariffs are a bad idea: Try buying consumer electronics in Brazil.
LOS MUCHACHOS
In fact, he’s absolutely right. And the chums will still blame the gays and trans people.
He’s going to be able to walk right by upper-story windows without any fear.
How much are electronics in Brazil?
Really it’s going to depend on the specific product and where/how it’s produced, but of course as with anywhere else a lot of our stuff is imported from other countries, so since the Brazilian Real lost a lot of its value relative to other currencies in the past few years things have gotten a lot more expensive.
This is obviously not an exact or thorough comparison, but just to give you an idea: The minimum and median wages are, respectively (assuming the usual 40h/week of work):
U.S. - $1.160 | $4.949
Brazil - R$1.412 ($231,86) | R$3.123 ($512,82)
I could be completely wrong but the cheapest USB-3 phone charger I saw on Amazon was $5, so 0.43% of the minimum wage and 0.1% of the median wage, while in Brazil’s main online shop (Mercado Livre) the cheapest one I saw was R$32, or 2.3% of the minimum wage and 1% of the median wage, which seems about right considering the dollar is about R$6 right now.
A new Nintendo Switch Lite costs $200, while here in Brazil the cheapest one I could find was R$1400, so almost the entirety of our minimum wage.
Point is, most things, and especially electronics, are expensive as heck nowadays.
Thanks for the explanation!
Nah, dont feel bad for us. He won the popular vote. Regaurdless of what people in this thread say, we as a country chose this. The democrats who arent stopping this, the
mentally disabled(sorry, thats disrespectful to the mentally disabled) centrists, and the republicans are all equally responsible.It was a difference of 1.6%. A lot of people didn’t vote. It’s not like everyone voted for this, only the magabrained did.
a lot of people didnt vote
Yeah, a lot of people voted for this. Thats whats i said.
That’s fair man. My founder is on a green card. He has said his (asian) color brown isn’t the same problem as the folks to our south have, and he selfishly knows it’s better for him, so he’s keeping his nose down, not upstanding. I get it. He’s got a lot to lose. You gotta do you and get the oxygen mask on.
Your founder? What does this mean? I’m curious.
Sorry, dude at work. Mentioned title to point out he’s running a company (and employing other people, and paying US wages in less industrialized places), so stakes are high in his life in general, exacerbating the challenges of processing one’s feelings about this all.
That is the plan, yes. To weaken us by alienating our allies and actively harming America from within. Donald Trump is compromised by Russia.
this is fine.
– nazis and tankists
It’s more than fine to Marxist-Leninists. In fact, to MLs it’s ideal. They want the United States to collapse. They’re not really shy about it, either. I think US officials just didn’t see MLs as a threat anymore after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They really embraced the “end of history” narrative. They figured that MLism was dead and would never return. Looks like they were wrong.
China is right there. I have no idea how historians will answer the question “Why did the western empires hand their own means of production to the biggest ML country on the planet?”.
Greed. Easy.
Surely they are Marxist-Leninist in name only in 2024? That’s how I see it but I’m interested in hearing your points if you disagree.
It’s Marxism-leninism adapted to the specific context of China. The scientific part of scientific socialism means you adapt your model based on experience. When they tried to adopt the soviet model as prescribed by the soviets, they suffered significant setbacks multiple times. I wish I could find the transcript of Mao referencing specific failures during and after the revolution to an Albanian (maybe Yugoslavian ambassador) after Stalin’s death which illuminated a lot of the sino-soviet split for me, but google fails me.
A lot of westerners consider the overthrow of the gang of 4 after the cultural revolution to be a betrayal of MLism, here’s the CPC’s evaluation 5 years later. Section 32 is relevant to the course they’ve been following since, the rest is background and justification.
Thanks for taking the time to get back to me. Yeah saying they had some setbacks is certainly correct. Whether you agree with his outcomes or not, I assume we agree that Mao was a vicious, mass-murdering dictator. I haven’t heard such accusations about the gang of four (fantastic band by the way).
They just seem so… Capitalist to me. It’s amazing how many Chinese dirt farmers were lifted from poverty for sure. But they have all these seemingly unregulated huge corporations. There are over 400 individual billionaires in China which I think would be appalling to Marx or Lenin. But this is socialism with Chinese characteristics as you said so maybe that’s all part of that description?
Anyway, I know I used a lot of weasel words there and that’s because I don’t know that much about China. I’ve become good friends with someone who lived in Shanghai for years and traveled through the country in that time. He’s been educating me.
Whether you agree with his outcomes or not, I assume we agree that Mao was a vicious, mass-murdering dictator.
I haven’t read much on the subject, but from what I understand, similar to the way the landlords were liquidated, during the cultural revolution it wasn’t Mao going “kill these people” so much as the party telling villages “Set up courts and try the <reactionaries>, we’ll support whatever punishments you deem necessary. Here’s why this is needed, these are some punishments we’ve seen effective at achieving the desired result” and they did.
Giving this kind of autonomy to the locals tends to result in people using the system to settle old scores or get promotions, especially when the scope was expanded to potentially target anyone during the cultural revolution. Similar mechanisms resulted in “Stalin’s” terror.
As far as I can gather, Mao was a great revolutionary but a garbage administrator who probably would be remembered like Lenin if he died in the late 50s.
I’m glad we’re kind of on the same page about Mao. What do you think about the rest of my comment though? Modern China seems like a capitalist country in a communist hat to me. Which comes back to the beginning of the debate about the US giving away all its production to a ML nation.
Don’t get me wrong, I very much wish America didn’t offshore everything. If they hadn’t, it would be good for inequality and better for the climate.
Hubris.
I’m fine with communists of various flavors, even though I personally disagree with it as a political system. Hell, if the current system isn’t working, and someone promises you all the potatoes you can drink, of course they’re going to attract a lot of supporters.
But just because something or someone is in opposition to the status quo, doesn’t mean they’re better. That’s where tankies come in - I see too much idiocy coming from that camp that communists are getting a bad reputation because of them. Stalin was a benevolent head of state, Beria did nothing wrong, North Korea is a worker’s paradise, etc. Oh, and of course some claim an anti-colonialist stance while having no answers to what happened in Afghanistan in the 70’s, eastern Poland in 39, and Finland in 39-40, Tibet in 51, etc
Lemmygrad-brigading in 3… 2… 1…
I take it that by idiocy you mean hypocrisy. Ideology often does that to people. We’re much better at seeing the crimes of our enemies than we are at seeing the crimes of our own ideological group. People can also justify a lot of objectively terrible things in the pursuit of their ideological goals (the ends justify the means). It’s important to note that these phenomena are not unique or exclusive to MLs. These biases exist, to one extent or another, in every ideology.
Add people tired of American bullshit to the list. Without America, assholes elsewhere wouldn’t get legitimacy by claiming that the most powerful country is doing it so we should as well.
If it weren’t for America people like you wouldn’t be able to blame all the worlds problems on America.
Tankies.
i know. i just refuse to give them even that much respect
Dunno, they seem to get pretty triggered when you call them that.
Some accurate reporting out of Russia for once
Don’t worry. Lemmings here told me that nothing changes regardless of who you vote for, or if you don’t vote at all.
I see he’s read Trump’s program and project 2025.
I actually think we’ll endure. These guys are dumber than dogshit and will stumble over themselves trying to do crazy stuff. They’ll mostly fail. They’ll piss off a lot of people and lose their political capital in a matter of months. When then inbred cretins start making threats against their congresscritters, the gears will grind and ain’t shit getting done.
Even stupid can do a lot of damage. My main concern, other than trump’s shortsighted destruction of everything his ego can reach, is the ruling wealthy class he’s inserting everywhere that will wedge the door further open for the oligarchy to control the country for their exclusive pillaging. Yeah, trump might fuck up NATO, give putin Ukraine, let the Israel wipe out Palestinians…but it’s the courtiers that have his ear that will commit the lasting destruction to the US itself. Destroy unions, the CFPB, environmental regs, tariffs sending prices and inflation through the roof, who knows what they’ll do to the ACA, the CDC, or other agencies that directly benefit the people, shoving religion into schools and giving public money to religious schools. There is so much damage to be done.
Not to mention governmental deadlock can be just as damaging as no government, because theyre effectively the same. I wouldnt be surprised if we see the govt shut down for a couple months because they try to ram through federally outlawing trans rights and they wont give on it, so eventually democrats will cave to get shit like school funding and ss flowing again.
You are describing 1979 Iran. The GOP will slap together a massive shit sandwich and everyone is going to take a bite.
My brother in Christ do you not remember 2016-2020??
Did we not endure?
Sweet summer child
I mean…we did, we got a democrat president after.
Barely. But I guess you are forgetting jan 6 or choosing to.
You say barely, but it still happened. Things are worse now, but it wasn’t an apocalypse post 2016. Jan 6th was awful but those rubes can’t accomplish shit and they didn’t accomplish shit.
I think you’re giving them too much credit
I would love nothing more than for this to be right.
We need to believe that this is right… otherwise everyone stops caring and they can really get away with all sorts of shit. The more you toss out laws, the more important that public opinion becomes.
I’m right there with you, but I am preparing for the worst case by moving to a blue state and near the border with Mexico. If things go south, I can go south and stay with relatives for a while.
This smells like copium.
I can’t wait for people to stop saying this dumb fucking word
Why do you not like it? Seriously, I want to know what you think.
When then inbred cretins start making threats against their congresscritters
You mean, the “HEAVILY ARMED and violent, inbred cretins”.
Get the popcorn and sit back. It’s going to be wild.
lmao no one is happier with this than Dobby the elf
Putin picked them for this exact reason.
Yeah, no shit. And the tribe that rubs shit in their hair are too coddled by not only the unhinged nutjob media, but also the “liberal media” to know this. Try talking to any of them about any of this in the past nine years and they squawk out, like good little parrots: “Rawk! Russian hoax! Russian hoax! Rawwwwwk!”
Putin is the one who coached 73 to do this, he’s following Putins 's instructions on how to create an Oligarchy, which is what they both want.
73?
Apparently it was his IQ test score when in military school. I don’t put a lot of stock in IQ testsz but still a fun thing to mock him on.
I think it’d be funny to start calling him 73/78. I know donvict printed up a bunch of hats for his idiots to put on their heads and self-identify as morons. These hats had the numbers 45/47; referring to donvict as another number (his age, or maybe his number of convictions for his crimes) would be a hilarious response from normal America.
Though I guess the claim about IQ is false? Bummer. I know IQ as a measurement has a lot of criticisms, but it’s not like it is the Meyers-Briggs or something.
We are already an oligarchy.
Not like we are about to be.
The purpose of a system is what it does
