The film tariff thing has brought out some of the overall ignorance we see time and time again - had a colleague call it a "distraction" and I'm like: tell that to my friends in the film industry who will lose their jobs over this. Everything is a distraction to someone else and a life-ruining attack to others. Tariffs on "dolls" will cost retailers, truckers, designers, etc. jobs. And he's going after the arts because they'll stand up to him. Computer parts are exempt because techbros bend the knee so fast you'd think it was part of their hot yoga class. Artists tend to have balls tech companies don't.
That Bloomberg interview is perfect in its clarity. If Americans were capable of understanding something explained in a way a fifth grader could understand the way that man does in that interview, maybe we'd save ourselves, but... cult cult cult, I guess.
I called myself a pacifist upthread, but I say that in that in an aspirational way. I'm also the asshole who has never started a bar fight but always ended up needing to end them, like a proper Boston piece of shit townie. And I completely alienated an author panel this past week when I said hope should be angry and that hope can be violent and the other panelists all leaned in on how pointless violence is. But I'm like, well, someone's gotta get their hands dirty first. That's the tough part. You need someone to get bloody, and then you need someone softer to put the shit back together again afterward. Unfortunately right now we have neither.
I think if we were a species capable of pacifism or utopian ideals we'd have gotten closer to it already. Any time we edge close to that, some gorilla motherfucker comes along and chokes out the idealists and takes over. Maybe it's time to just let the cats have their chance as the dominant species on the planet. We've sure as hell squandered it at every opportunity.
