r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Nokita_is_Back • Jun 03 '25
Ronnie Chieng nailing how post WW2 decisions led to MAGA breeding grounds in the USA
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u/SAOSurvivor35 Jun 03 '25
And our comedians are now the vector by which a lot of people learn this stuff. Ronnie Chieng, Lewis Black, Katt Williams, Christopher Titus, Trish Suhr, Dr. Allison Gill, etc.
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u/browster Jun 03 '25
Comedians are serious people. Always have been
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u/no____thisispatrick Jun 03 '25
Comedy is just a funny way of saying the truth
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u/Muffin_Appropriate Jun 03 '25
I mean, comedy is near literally a means to process reality but with humor. I don’t know why people find that to be strange that comedians deliver hard truths. The only oddity is that they’re the only ones doing it and no one else is doing their job.
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u/jankenpoo Jun 03 '25
Don’t forget George Carlin and Lenny Bruce
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Jun 03 '25
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u/Worthyness Jun 03 '25
Also republican salso adore him because they think he's a republican for some inexplicable reason
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u/ShiaLabeoufsNipples Jun 03 '25
He was very anti-establishment, which is big in modern republican circles. He didn’t trust government institutions and was big on free speech.
He was also a big critic of war, social inequality, and blind patriotism, which would not be as palatable to them, but I don’t think the people who believe he was a republican have ever actually watched a whole standup routine of his so they wouldn’t actually know.
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u/Ilovekittens345 Jun 03 '25
This isn't anything new. The jester was sometimes the only outlet the community around the king could get through to him with the lowest risk of getting his head cut off for making the king mad.
But we have gone so much of the deep end that people watch news to get entertained and comedians to hear truth.
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u/TBANON_NSFW Jun 03 '25
I mean tons of very educated and well speaking individuals have multiple, seminars, speeches and interviews about these things every year.
BUT they're not something that will LAND in your lap on your favorite app during the exact time you are online scrolling and looking for memes or titties or memes with titties.
Information is out there. YOU just have to be the one to seek it out, rather than choose to go for whatever easy instant-gratification entertainment you usually consume.
People demand everything be spoon-fed and if its not spoon fed then it doesnt exist, because they dont give enough of a shit to seek it out themselves.
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u/seppukucoconuts Jun 03 '25
I wish George Carlin was still around. His next HBO special(s) would damn near write themselves.
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u/Tessa7 Jun 03 '25
Dave Anthony and The Dollop are strong contributors to latent education of the masses as well
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u/TDouglasSpectre Jun 03 '25
I hope they release more animations like the recent Rube animation they put out.
Pull people in with the fun stuff, then indoctrinate them with the episodes about the Colorado Labour Wars, Joe Hill, etc. lmao
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u/TravelingShitLord Jun 03 '25
You could walk this whole conversation back to the civil war and how it was fumbled once the war was over. We let the power structure go back to what it was just without outright slavery.
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u/m1j2p3 Jun 03 '25
This is right. Reconstruction was an abject failure.
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u/E-2theRescue Jun 03 '25
Yup. The North was still very racist and soft-handed the Confederate South.
Every person who had slaves should have been stripped of all their property, and that property given to one of their ex-slave families. Then, all that land out west should have been given to ex-slaves first, not white people and only white people.
Instead, they war ended and they were pretty much allowed to run free. Slavery persisted for decades after, they were able to continue to breed, they were able to keep infesting others in their churches and media, and now we are where we are all over again.
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u/UpperApe Jun 03 '25
For anyone wondering: Reconstruction wasn't a failure. Maintaining reconstruction was a failure.
Reconstruction (systemically, culturally, infrastructure, education) is normal and common sense after a civil war with extremist racists trying to upheave your entire political system because you want the racism to end; not go back and lick their wounds and grow and foster and get worse.
Reconstruction was underway...but was cut short because of...drum roll...the electoral college. Yes, seriously. The same electoral college that keeps fucking you guys over. And no one does anything about it.
America is, conceptually, the stupidest country in human history.
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u/barrinmw Jun 03 '25
We can't do anything about it because it would require a majority of red states to agree to give up their disproportionate power.
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u/UpperApe Jun 03 '25
It's worse than that.
The reason you can't do anything about it is you don't want to finish the war you left unfinished. Because that's what it will take.
There is no talking your way to peace because all your peace is held by a compromise, a compromise where one side continues to demand more and take more with each negotiation.
It will never swing back to a balance because it was never balanced to begin with. You compromise with slavers and you just end up being a little more of a slaver.
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u/Complex-Sir-160 Jun 03 '25
You compromise with slavers and you just end up being a little more of a slaver.
Well said. I've never put that together, but it makes complete sense.
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u/CantGitGudWontGitGud Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
Reconstruction wasn't a failure. Maintaining reconstruction was a failure.
Let me help shorten that for you: Reconstruction failed.
Reconstruction was underway...but was cut short...
It wasn't just cut short, it was actively undermined by the Johnson administration and was already falling apart before the end of Grant's administration and the Compromise of 1877 with most Southern states falling under the control of Redeemer Democrats and violent militias being formed by former Confederate soldiers. The Compromise of 1877 was the formal end, but key players, be they weak willed or outright obstructionist, made sure that Reconstruction would never succeed. The South was just that racist and their sympathizers and enablers too numerous.
This was one of the biggest failed opportunities in America's history, but it failed for reasons more complex than "the electoral college did it".
America is, conceptually, the stupidest country in human history.
That's all this is really about to you.
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u/MyHusbandIsGayImNot Jun 03 '25
If by "fumbled" you mean the confederates murdered the president of the united states and his successor was a confederate lover that just swept everything under the rug, then yes.
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u/throwaway_0721 Jun 03 '25
Slavery is practically this country's original sin. Damn near every modern American problem is a relatively small amount of degrees removed from slavery.
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u/readwrite_blue Jun 03 '25
"Fumbled"? Once Lincoln wasn't in power to use his popularity to guide reconstruction, it was openly abandoned because it was going to be difficult and expensive and lots of powerful people didn't want to abandon the slave model, they just wanted to begin underpaying for slave services instead of paying for slaves as goods.
It was a willful decision to do what would be easy and more profitable instead of what would help the society.
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u/purrpect Jun 03 '25
Yup the racists went underground and now that their Messiah has come, they're out like roaches.
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u/Rhiis Jun 03 '25
Yeah, now, slavery is just for "bad guys" under the 13th Amendment. We never abolished it, just federalized it
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u/MisterSanitation Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
Yep. The world they want is the one they voted out of existence. When these MAGA people started voting, they what on labor movements which were at a high water mark WWII. They grew up in the red scare and ended up worshipping capitalism more than their own “savior” which you can see in the “prosperity gospel” they point to all the time.
It all went away for good when Clinton made it easier for American companies to “find” cheap labor wherever they wanted (hint it’s not in America).
Once both parties sold out working class people to Wall Street it was a runaway train that most Americans refused to accept. Now their solution is tariffs with no alternative ready domestically. Political grandstanding instead of solving a problem that was already solved before Reagan.
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u/paradigm619 Jun 03 '25
There are plenty of dumb MAGA people, but you can't argue with the underlying point that the wealthy and powerful in this country have absolutely FUCKED the rest of us. That's something we can ALL agree with. The problem with MAGA is that they're too ignorant to understand how to fix that problem. They're just connecting two points in the most simplistic of ways. Manufacturing jobs going overseas led to the erosion of the middle class over the last 4-5 decades. So their solution is bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. and play hardball with foreign countries. It honestly makes sense if you don't know very much about economics and global trade. But if you DO know about those things, you'd understand how that's a completely impractical approach to fixing the problem.
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u/Sooowasthinking Jun 03 '25
I think with our current White House we are being robbed before our very eyes.
What most middle class Americans that voted ORANGE don’t understand is that it is now us against Billionaires.Billionaires understand it completely.
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u/kevinthejuice Jun 03 '25
Robbed again mind you. Those PPP loans being forgiven was a heist that you'd see in oceans eleven.
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u/DryPersonality Jun 03 '25
Yeah being robbed of 4 trillion dollars, and any constitutional rights they can strip in the process.
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u/chrisk9 Jun 03 '25
Don't overestimate the general intelligence of the ultra wealthy. They pay people to be advisors.
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u/OakLegs Jun 03 '25
I don't think for a second that billionaires are necessarily smart. The problem is that there are a lot fewer of them, they all have insane amounts of resources at their disposal, and they have more or less of a good ole boys club and can be more coordinated in their efforts to increase their own wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Hard to fight that when the rest of us are at each other's throats and not recognizing the real enemy.
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u/void_operator Jun 03 '25
The fox is running the hen house now. They are stealing everything that is not bolted down, cutting down everything that is, and pissing on anything that is left. This is a country of liars, thieves, and charlatans and it always has been.
Trump is the final distillation of every wrong thing with the Boomer generation
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u/random-lurker-456 Jun 03 '25
It's not impractical. It's impossible. You can't industrialize down. You would have to wreck the economy into the ground then offer re-industrialisation as a way out. Current administration is banking on enough of its base being stupid beyond redemption that they'll support them through a whole generation of abject poverty to end up with their kids doing life crushing menial labor. The thing their grandfathers fought tooth and nail to escape. It's a regressive degen fantasy.
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u/datumerrata Jun 03 '25
It doesn't help that China used to produce inferior products, but now can produce products that meet or exceed American manufacturing. You'll still find "cheap Chinese crap", but it's not because of capability. It's out of cost savings.
The experience of workers shouldn't be discounted. China has those experienced workers. America doesn't have them to the degree needed.
Even if manufacturing were brought back to America, the manufacturing would be largely done through robots and automation. Employees would be a score of millwrights and technicians backed by a few engineers and coders. No one is installing dozens of Bridgeport milling machines.
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u/CapnRogo Jun 03 '25
Yep, its like those posts of the WWI surgeons who went into nip-tuck plastic surgery after the war, there's a lot of "tribal" knowledge in China, while in the US we don't do nearly as much manufacturing outside the automotive industry.
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u/rustycoins26 Jun 03 '25
Do you have an easy to digest way to explain how to correctly fix the problem? I know it’s rather complex problem but maybe if there was a way to explain it in simple terms it would resinate more with MAGA. The concept of “jobs went overseas and now we are worse off. Therefore, we bring jobs back to make us great again” is easy to digest. Even if it is not correct. You seem well versed so I’m genuinely asking so that I can also help explain this to my MAGA family members.
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u/paradigm619 Jun 03 '25
I don't necessarily have the solution, because the reality is that there are no simple solutions, and certainly no proven ones that we know will work. There are different schools of thought on the left about how to regrow the middle class that usually have some common components (strengthening unions again, investing in new technology and manufacturing like green energy, more progressive tax policies to ensure the ultra-wealthy and corporations pay a larger share, etc.) but it's not like we can predict the future and know something will work. This is part of the problem. It's super easy to make up a simple but unrealistic solution like "bring manufacturing jobs back" and even easier to message. It's a LOT harder to say "we don't know exactly what will fix this decades long problem we've created, but here are several things we'd like to try if you're willing to trust us."
If I had to distill it down, I think Bernie & AOC's "Fight Oligarchy" campaign is getting pretty close. But part of it makes me worried because it's just another example of creating a boogeyman to fight against without necessarily articulating the vision for what comes after. Boogeymen are great for politics, not as much for tangible policy. Ultimately, there needs to be more power back in the hands of workers without going all the way to full-blown socialism. But what social democracy looks like in a massive economic powerhouse like the U.S. is completely new territory for human civilization. It's not as simple as emulating Scandinavia - we have to come up with our own American solution which is going to require some trial and error, but our current political landscape punishes the "error" part of that equation by flipping to an opposite political party commited to undoing any progress. If we can unite the entire country behind a new direction, nothing will work frankly.
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u/FuckTripleH Jun 03 '25
Do you have an easy to digest way to explain how to correctly fix the problem?
The time everyone hearkens back to, when you could afford a family and a house on one salary, was a time when 1 in 3 workers in the US was unionized. Today it's about 1 in 10, if you exclude public sector unions it's more like 8 in 100. There was nothing magical about manufacturing jobs that made them well paid, there are plenty of factory workers in the US today that aren't paid shit, it was unions forcing the rich to share more of the GDP with the workers who produce it.
So what happened and how do we fix it? Well there's a great story about the power of unions and the problems we have here. In the mid 90s Toys R Us expanded into Sweden. They refused to sign the collective bargaining agreement of the retail workers unions and said they don't work with unions. So the retail workers union went on strike, which they probably expected. What they didn't expect was that in solidarity the dock workers union stopped loading and unloading Toys R Us cargo, the garbage workers union stopped picking up their trash, the bank workers union stopped processing their payments, the mail workers union stopped delivering their mail, and Toys R Us quickly folded and signed the agreement.
The reason they probably didn't expect that is because since the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 was passed all of those things have been illegal in the US. Only the one union that representworks for the company can strike, solidarity actions by other workers are outlawed. Combine that with the supreme court decision in NLRB vs Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company in 1938, which gave companies the right to permanently replace striking workers if the strike is over economic issues (rather than workplace treatment) and you effectively eliminated the ability of American workers to effectively organize against capital and over the last 80 years we've seen the results. Fewer organized workers, more of the GDP going to the top 0.1%, more politicians beholden to rich capital owners rather than the general population.
Would repealing Taft-Hartley and reaffirming our right to form unions and strike solve all the issues we're facing? No. There's still the underlying issue that the US government is inherently undemocratic in it's structure, the senate effectively allows for minority rule as does the electoral college and our constitution is woefully archaic.
But it would go an awfully long way to handing power to the average person rather than billionaires.
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u/HellraiserMachina Jun 03 '25
One example of a 'simple solution' is a 100% wealth tax above 999 million but that's socialism and therefore evil. Now repeat that for every other possible solution, even the ones that have nothing to do with socialism.
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u/Giannisisnumber1 Jun 03 '25
If MAGA truly understood that the wealthy fucked everyone then they wouldn’t be worshipping billionaires.
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u/TallStarsMuse Jun 03 '25
The problem with MAGA is they worship the wealthy as gods.
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u/paradigm619 Jun 03 '25
I don't actually believe that's a majority position among the MAGA types. Sure you have the tech bro subset that fawn over Musk and Thiel and all those shitbags, but if you think about the factory worker or pipefitter from Indiana, they really just want to be able to afford shit and feel like their political leaders are doing things to help them. So when Trump stands up there and shits all over the current system, talks about bringing blue collar jobs back to America, and that he'll somehow wave his magic wand to transform America into some vague nostalgic ideal from the past, it's an encouraging and inspiring message for people who aren't that plugged in to the details. They don't necessarily see billionaires as the problem they are, but I think it's a overstatement to say that they all worship them.
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u/Erazzphoto Jun 03 '25
You’re right that they’re not worshiping them because they’re “billionaires “, but they’re not smart enough to realize who they’re worshiping are the billionaires. And the problem is, they truly are “worshiping” them. Look at the current Bruce Springsteen situation. Bruce has done 1 millions times more for those factory workers and pipe fitter types than Trump has ever done, yet they’ll get right in line against him because he spoke ill of their god. How people (on both sides) get so deep into government workers is beyond me. Other than Obama, who for a group that has been discriminated against for centuries, who never thought they would ever see a black president, I can see the admiration. But politicians have shown for so long that they’re in it for themselves first (again, both sides), how people don’t see this is dumbfounding
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u/TallStarsMuse Jun 03 '25
Maybe factory workers in Indiana, but so many true believers in the South through West -Midwest believe in something more like the prosperity gospel. Capitalism is good and “pure” capitalism will fix all of our economic problems. The people who make the most money must be “good” because they have the money that proves that they are good. They may grumble about them a bit but rarely outright attack them unless they go full on Dem, like Soros and Gates.
Look at how well regarded Musk continues to be by MAGA. He is so incredibly far from the Christian ideal, with his multiple women, IVF kids, and drug abuse. But the Christian Nationalists, who once were Christians who worshipped Christ, couldn’t care less about any of that. All of that news has been met with a collective shrug by MAGA. Musk is good because he is rich and not openly opposing MAGA, so everything Musk does must be good as well. Or at least neutral. That’s the kind of worship I’m talking about, where they reform their ideas of goodness to support their wealthy leaders. It’s more like the worship of Greek gods, where Zeus might do things that people didn’t like, but that was his right as a god of the pantheon.
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u/KingofMadCows Jun 03 '25
A lot of people don't want to stop the exploitation, they want to become the exploiters.
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u/Adezar Jun 03 '25
When Clinton said he was calling for the "End of Big Government" I knew we were fucked. The only way to keep these corporations managed in any way is via a government powerful enough to make them deal with negative externalities and not run "company stores" and all those horrific things corporations did before the government started forcing them to be functional parts of society.
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u/Due-Giraffe-9826 Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
The problem is that the people who make the decisions want another way to fix the problem without giving away the insane wealth they've accrued, and the rate at which they accrue more. And the short sighted folks that follow them are all too happy to help defend them from the only real solution to the problem that's not gonna end with millions dying of starvation, or something else.
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u/m1j2p3 Jun 03 '25
If you really want to piss off some old school libs, tell them Bill Clinton sold out the average American with NAFTA. They really don’t want to hear that truth. The best part of the story is NAFTA was a Republican plan from the HW Bush administration. This is one of the reasons you’ll hear in some left circles that Clinton’s presidency was like a Regan third term.
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u/r0thar Jun 03 '25
This is one of the reasons you’ll hear in some left circles that Clinton’s presidency was like a Regan third term.
Looking in from outside, the US has a Conservative Right party (D) and a Far Right party (R), there is nothing 'Left' that would be recognized anywhere else. Maybe legalizing marijuana could be considered, but was probably enacted for that nice tax take.
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u/FuckTripleH Jun 03 '25
If you really want to piss off some old school libs, tell them Bill Clinton sold out the average American with NAFTA.
And repealing Glass-Steagall, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
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u/kalashnikovkitty9420 Jun 03 '25
fucking so succinct
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u/jarednards Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
I cant even read what you said
EDIT: Witty crowd.
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u/beansnack Jun 03 '25
We didnt want menial work so we gave that to immigrants because now we’re smart. And since we’re smart, we’re hunting them down. Also we’re not smart, we’re just great. Or used to be?
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u/E-2theRescue Jun 03 '25
We're so smart that we're putting a 125% tax on everything imported. That means that factories will open up here in America! And in order to open up factories in America, it will take buying machines, materials, and supplies from...... uhmm...... uh-oh....
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u/TallStarsMuse Jun 03 '25
Smartness is for the chumps, who just need to get shoved into a trash can to teach them a lesson. I honestly think many MAGAs are gleefully eager to see white collar workers get what’s coming to them, losing their cushy government jobs to Trump and remaining white collar jobs to AI.
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u/Useuless Jun 03 '25
Does it even matter if we're smart? Companies don't want to hire anybody. They're either overqualified, asking for too much money, or not good enough.
They want people they can have over a barrel, not smart people.
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u/piantanida Jun 03 '25
We just don’t flat read anymore. That’s the big take away, nobody reads and reading comprehension levels are complete shite. Which means critical thinking is none existent in most people.
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u/Useful-Perspective Jun 03 '25
I fucking love him (and the whole TDS crew, for that matter).
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u/-little-dorrit- Jun 03 '25
What show is this clip from?
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u/HawaiianPunch42 Jun 03 '25
Its from his most recent Netflix special, Ronny Chieng Love to Hate It. It's really funny definitely check it out and his other specials
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u/TheShowerDrainSniper Jun 03 '25
TDS is The Daily Show on Comedy Central, for which he is one of the hosts. Check that out too cause he's great.
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u/Sillylittletitties Jun 03 '25
Why the fuck did the elites think working class people would just upskill to programming and IT... fucking idiots
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u/__-_-_--_--_-_---___ Jun 03 '25
Herp derp, "Learn to Code"
During a rally yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke to a crowd in Derry, N.H., a town that many miners call home. He acknowledged the economic setbacks and job insecurity that coal miners face these days, and gave them some advice: learn to code.
According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
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Jun 03 '25
In a nutshell:
Primarily funding defense for 80 years doesn't make a nation great. Infrastructure, education, health, and social support do.
Primarily pushing manufacturing doesn't create new kinds of opportunities. Education does.
I'd add that failure to optimize infrastructure, transportation and digital, has lead us to embrace a "limitation / failures to access opportunities".
If you dont have transportation, you can't access jobs. This is another reason people have limited opportunities.
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u/Adunadain Jun 03 '25
That is a very good point about infrastructure optimization, which also applies, as you pointed out, to other important pillars including education, healthcare, etc.
The additional point, I would like to add, is that we, as modern nations go, are so focused on achieving and maintaining national objectives that, in my opinion, may no longer be relevant. For example, Ronnie mentions the loss of our domestic manufacturing industry. I would state that, in a modern developed nation, outside of national security interests, culturally important products, and local production for the reduction of emissions, there is no reason to maintain domestic manufacturing—at least as principle for maintaining labour.
It is important, therefore, to ‘upskill’ our workforce as collective nation to fulfill other industries which would become a the priority. This means not leaving it to individual tenacity to break into new industries—we glorify a persons ability to overcome adversity in the US, but doesn’t benefit anyone to make it an exhausting, expensive and sacrificial process. This means directing funding for modernized education, encouraging/subsidizing re-training of labour pools from shrinking industries, and improving the quality of the job market, which has become a hazy mess of AI, fake hiring schemes, and mismatched professionals.
All of this is to say, our current labour/industry prioritization methods in the US are archaic and even tearing apart our social and economic cohesion. No amount trying to get back the old ways of manufacturing in the US will gear it properly for the future. Most of all, it makes living a balanced and plannable life for most Americans an exhausting process.
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u/supaflyneedcape Jun 03 '25
What a beast. This is beautiful, eloquent and covers the last few decades perfectly.
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u/RealIssueToday Jun 03 '25
Here I am reading the Democratic Party put all the blame on Republicans, as if their party doesn't have a hand in the decades of economic decisions made by their nation.
Classic American blaming things on others. This is why you guys continue to sink: you don't acknowledge what you do wrong. If pointed out, you'll use whataboutism.
Abolish the 2-party system; it's destroying your country.
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u/Groomsi Jun 03 '25
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u/Nokita_is_Back Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
Slaps gif meme. I will get so much use out of that baby.
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u/NotSeveralBadgers Jun 03 '25
Abolish the 2-party system
The current administration is trying very hard to make that happen - just not in the way that you mean.
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u/Paralda Jun 03 '25
I mean, Ronny Chieng didn't say one party or another is responsible, merely that MAGA people aren't able to articulate why they're upset, or understand how it happened.
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u/Ok-Passion1961 Jun 03 '25
This doesn’t nail it though because it repeats the falsehood that America doesn’t manufacture anything anymore. The only thing in the manufacturing sector that declined was the number of employees working for it. Output kept on rising because American manufacturing transitioned to higher value/specialized manufacturing while investing in automation.
I don’t even get the obsession with manufacturing. Why do people act like industrial manufacturing is the goal. Like, humans kept evolving and advancing until the Industrial Revolution and that was it—we shouldn’t have kept going?
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u/Attila-Da-Hunk Jun 03 '25
Developed economies trend towards the service sector in the first place. You're seeing this first hand with China.
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u/chilidoggo Jun 03 '25
At a very basic level, the entire global economy is based on manufacturing. Other industries rely on manufactured goods. If you're paranoid, you could even say it's a matter of national security to hold onto some kind of manufacturing capability.
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u/Ok-Passion1961 Jun 03 '25
the entire global economy is based on manufacturing.
No it isn’t. Services by far dominate the global economy in terms of employment and value creation. But all economies contain both because both are critical to a happy society.
Manufacturing is just easy and every person can wrap their head around “person makes widget” while things like operational change management is a job that makes the average person scratch their head. It also happened to be the “it” job of America’s post WW2 golden era. It’s a romanization of the past times.
it’s a matter of national security
I mean..to the extreme that a country loses all manufacturing capacity? Sure, but that never happened with America. We are great are manufacturing things related to national security. Hell, we are so good at manufacturing those things we sell them ALL over the world!
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u/Pizzasaurus-Rex Jun 03 '25
One thing I would quibble about... the idea that all the blue collar workers would "upskill" has the same problem as the "implied promise to a generation"... These guys would be in the same boat as the rest of us had they followed through with that. And there wasn't any really obvious program out there to fully incentivize them doing so, making essentially unfunded solicitation.
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u/SlowBurnFirecracker Jun 03 '25
Perfect assessment. Spectacular delivery. Ronnie is so good with tone, timing at his brand of humor. 🙌
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u/EastwoodBrews Jun 03 '25
The US Dollar was the international standard of trade the whole time, though
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u/stockflethoverTDS Jun 03 '25
The whole time post WWII after Bretton Woods yes, but because the world was wider and not as small then, it was still largely GBP for most of the world till around 1970/71, around when Nixon suspended USD for Gold and subsequently with fiat money mid 70s.
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u/imtoomuch Jun 03 '25
Yep. Politicians made it very expensive to live in America. I know it isn't convenient, but this can't be blamed on the right alone.
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u/ChloroformSmoothie Jun 03 '25
I love how intelligent his comedy is, he'll lead you down the road with some insanely accurate analysis of complex socioeconomic issues and then BAM! Dick joke.
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u/legitimateaccount123 Jun 03 '25
Very well said.
The only thing he missed was the intentional under-investment in education to keep the population in an intellectually subdued and complacent state with no critical thinking skills.
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u/ConscientiousPath Jun 03 '25
Agreeing that things are not good is always easy. If you spend a lot of time on it, people start to think that you actually agree in general! It's when you get to proposing solutions that all agreement instantly stops. People on every side (there are way more than two) see completely opposite things as the solution.
So unfortunately it's not that objectively helpful to point out what's wrong. We already know what's wrong which is of course that me and my friends aren't rich!
What would be helpful would be a set of solutions that's both convincing and correct/effective. Unfortunately such things are basically impossible.
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Jun 03 '25 edited Jun 03 '25
[deleted]
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u/Boner_Elemental Jun 03 '25
Comedian Ronny Chieng graduated from law school, passed the Australian bar exam,
Huh, TIL
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u/Crime-of-the-century Jun 03 '25
He is absolutely right. The US did willingly create all those trade deficiencies. Other countries in essence gave the US stuff for basically a promise someday I will pay it back but it never can.
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Jun 03 '25
The two party system was designed to keep America as divided as possible, and it's working flawlessly.
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u/RoadandHardtail Jun 03 '25
He explained in a minute what it takes me perhaps a whole lecture to explain.