The problem, Steve, is you feel like you should have an opinion other than "what the fuck is this bullshit" which means you've already lost. Ostensibly, Trump ran on (1) deport everyone (2) Tariffs will save us (3) grocery prices are coming down on Day 1 (4) Palestine and Ukraine will be solved immediately. There were no clear plans for any of those points but... Let me digress. I subscribe to FT Alphaville because it's free and it's extreme financial snark. Fortunately for everyone I can't forward or link anything because if you aren't in the system you're out in the cold but every now and then? So this is my new favorite term for Trump-era unforced errors and stupidity, courtesy JP Morgan Chase: "Left Tail Risk." I had a roommate down in LA who I came home to find despondent once. When I asked him why, he said "I have to burn my shoes now." This wasn't him figuring out how he felt about New Balance's ad policies or balancing his comfort with any social inconvenience he might suffer for his Nazi footwear, this was a man who had gotten so wrapped up in a miasma of self-reinforcing social media bullshit that he was looking for lighter fluid before contemplating what he'd wear to work the next day. Counterpoint: We had a patient who was given megadoses of Ivermectin for her COVID by another naturopathic doctor we know, and she wanted to know if it was going to be safe for her baby. Now - ivermectin has been a frontline anti-parasitic since the early '70s. It's a well-profiled drug. You could look up dozens of studies on Ivermectin going back decades, describing its safety and efficacy across many diseases and cohorts, and not find a single one related to pregnancy. Which, since Ivermectin is largely used in the developing world and since pregnancy is not unknown there, says one thing really clearly: Merck has no need to test Ivermectin in pregnancy because they know beyond a reasonable doubt they won't like the answers and "not studied" kicks the shit out of massive nasty contraindication warnings all over their meds. These studies weren't hard to find. It took us ten minutes to go "uhhh, yeah, this could very well fuck up your baby" (baby miscarried). But since the popular media was full of Fauci trying to do his job and Trump telling us to inject bleach, the lunatic fringe elevated Ivermectin to the point where our friends were prescribing it through sheer dumb flooding of the zone. Back to Trump. Of his thumbnail sketch presidential platform, (1) is a bunch of search engine chicanery (2) has been an absolute shitshow (3) hasn't been mentioned since election day (4) is a resort maybe, you know where he got the idea.. The senile, bloviating dipshit is zero for four but instead of looking at that, you're out here trying to have an educated opinion about annexing Panama. veen posted this about four hours before you posted the above: You shouldn't have to have an opinion about annexing Greenland. Nobody should. It's a fucking stupid idea. The fact that it's never come up before demonstrates how stupid it is - there's a world full of experts that make a lot of money to think about feasibility and advantage and "make Greenland a territory" has never come up. Make Puerto Rico a state? Ohhh yeah. That one has been coming up for decades. Trump would never go for that, though because here's the thought process: - see a map - see Russia & Canada - see how much bigger they are than the United States - see how turning Greenland into the United States makes it more bigly The dude hasn't even gotten to Mercator Projection Thinking but here we are jawboning about canal tariffs because Trump walks past Teddy Roosevelt's portrait. And you can think that no one is that black and white, but I know about two dozen people who worked with Trump - the only reason I never worked The Apprentice is I'm an elitist who doesn't like leaving my air conditioned submarine and they couldn't pay me enough but I know both sound supervisors on that show, half the mixers and two thirds of the camera department and that's exactly who he is. We once (before 2016) had a discussion in the booth about who had less object permanence, Paris Hilton or Donald Trump and while Paris won, it was a real debate. When John Bolton calls you a lightweight? You're a lightweight. Someone once described Trump as a poor person's idea of a rich person. He is also now a stupid person's idea of a smart person. None of which would matter, except that your takeaway is I get it? But the DNC had to deal with half the country insisting a vote for Harris was a vote for Intifada. Had to skirmish about transgender prison reassignment rather than the best pandemic recovery in the world by far. "They're eating the dogs" came up in a mutherfucking presidential debate and this is somehow the DNC's fault? THAT is "left tail risk." It's a refusal to grapple with real issues because you're wholly consumed by fake ones.
In short, fuck the DNC for brining us to this point.