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from the By-the-inch,-it's-a-cinch-but-a-mile-takes-a-while dept.
We've previously discussed ( https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/12/11/1847236 ) how it becomes impossible to reverse the polarization of a community once their differences become too great, and how that plays out both here at SN and in the wider world. Science Blog has a piece ( https://scienceblog.com/527745/computer-model-seeks-to-explain-the-spread-of-misinformation-and-suggest-counter-measures/ ) about a PLOS paper titled "Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261811 ) which uses an interesting computer model to explore how this actually happens.
The model demonstrated that if the new information is too much at odds with a person's existing belief, it will be ignored. Furthermore, if that belief is connected with the person's identity, their current belief will be strengthened as a defense against cognitive dissonance. Interestingly, though, a succession of new information that gradually nudge the person to adjust their beliefs can, over time, cause the person to adopt a belief that is very different from the one they started with. This sounds like how psy-ops manipulate targets to accept extreme views.
What was the gradual change of ideas that have led national political parties to be ever more different from one another, and who fed them those messages?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @09:57PM (1 child)
> Do I strike you as a barely literate mouthbreather?
In this case yes. My reference (which may be flawed?) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership [wikipedia.org]
Per that Wiki page the TPP included a number of countries,but not China. Since China is where the vast majority of USA manufacturing went (via the purchasing department at Walmart, Amazon etc), your claim that dumping the TPP:
> That saved manufacturing in America, and the middle class with it.
...looks pretty idiotic to me.
Canada, Japan and Mexico were the big established manufacturing countries in the TPP and there are/were already other trade agreements with them. Singapore & Vietnam are a couple of up-and-comers, not sure if we had any prior agreements with them, but I've seen plenty of goods from both so they must have been taking some business away from China?
Why not have free trade among our friends and do a little bit to try and control the 800 pound panda (China) in the room?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HammeredGlass on Monday January 17 2022, @01:13AM
Robert Lighthizer's efforts were geared towards eliminating the need for China. It didn't matter that China wasn't included in the TPP. And you forgot about South Korea and the UK. The three you mentioned and the two you forgot was all the U.S. needed as they represented a majority of the American trade portfolio. The U.S. became a net exporter of all energy commodities 3 years ago and it set us up for controlling the world. Steel, aluminum, and automobiles, were not included anywhere in the TPP, as they were reserved as leveraging tools during the trade negotiations on a per country basis. The other great action of these negotiations that did involve China is the secondary currency market where the U.S. Dollar is used as a conversion transfer tool from corporations and countries for 95% of the world. Obama set it up during the Iran deal to use that market to sanction corporations from providing Iran with banned goods. The Trump administration took that tool and started to use against errant countries like China. The previous administration was set to use that tool to begin to take China out of the global market for it's many sins against the world, not the least of which were currency manipulation and copyright/IP theft.
Then covid fucked all those done deals in the nose.