The steel trade thing, I didn't have a problem with.
The way that the EU, in the process of turning itself from that trade agreement into the EU - mostly by bolting an entire civil service onto the side of a trade agreement - is the bit I have a problem with.
Case in point, the EU parliament ... unlike most parliaments, the EU parliament isn't the primary legislative body in it's organisation. That would be the EU commission. The EU parliament basically gets to spell-check whatever the commission puts out. Importantly, even if the EU parliament objects to commission legislation, that will not stop the legislation.
Imagine what your country would be like if laws were made by your civil service and that civil service could completely ignore your parliament if that parliament objected to or changed the laws the civil service proposed.
The problem is that these idiots don't see the problem in saying "Well, I can write an additional bit that means it's now political - my politics - and now it's canon!"
Cue possible evil laugh
And then wonder why, having quite consciously turned a hobby into a political choice, anyone who might interact with this hobby disappears off over the horizno.
Why do the most obnoxious people always assume their opinions represent everyone around them?
I'm fairly sure they know that they don't, but, like any good Marxist, that simply means that their first job is to brazenly assert the opposite and dare you to contradict them.
I believe the hope is that after the thoroughly representative votes of 2020 a lot of local work has gone into local election security measures.
Plus, there's no lockdown to justify some of the more heinous antics that various partisans got up to during 2020.
It's very, very hard for me to place the Biden administration's actions into any kind of context.
About the only one that makes sense is if they're intentionally torpedoing the US economy to preserve the natural resources of the US for whatever comes afterwards - presumably some kind of Great Reset power.
Honestly, it's not far different from the way the left normally approaches things.
For all that the lefties in question here are talking about "choice", what they actually mean is that they want every course of action except the one they prefer removed with the power of the state, or, failing that, with the state cowed into running cover for them - and persecuting their opposition - while they go ahead and remove options they deem haram by themselves.
A leftie's ideal world is one in which everybody lives in perfect harmony with the ever-shifting moral codes of their high-caste social betters ... and is dragged off, never to return, the moment they fail these impossible standards.
They appear to be of the opinion that if they're allowed to burn down enough things belonging to people who oppose them they can make it a de facto right by force of arms.
If they're not being punished for their behaviour I'm not sure how they are wrong.
This is a group, "Jane's Revenge", saying that they have little "patience or mercy" for groups they perceive to be taking away their abortion rights.
Jane's Revenge appear to perceive even allowing mothers to deliver their babies - whatever those mothers choose - as an assault upon their rights. Nothing less than mandatory abortion would appear to satisfy the terms dictated by this group at this pint.
As I recall, one of the primary motivations for switching to 5.56 NATO was that you could carry roughly twice as much for the same weight as you could 7.62 NATO. Full-on 7.62 NATO battle rifles are also very hard on the troops using them, I've heard them described as "fully-automatic flashbangs", with deleterious effects on situational awareness due to the power of the round.
Given that most countries wanted to switch away from 7.62 anyway - it's a round fit for combat out to 600+ metres, which, given the amount of fire support most infantry has on tap, is kinda pointless - 5.56 was a decent enough fit, but, perhaps more importantly, it was an American-produced cartridge. The British .280 (7mm) was also up for consideration but the US effectively vetoed it.
And oh, look. The next calibre the US is after is 6.8mm. Not that I expected them to actually choose a 7mm round, that would be a little too on the nose.
I don't honestly know which way the Texas secession thing will go in the end.
The issue, as I see it, is that (for example) Texas is baulking at the Federal policies that are possibly-designed at this point to inflate USD to worthlessness to make the national debt somewhat less crippling than it is now - and if that reduces most of the US population into poverty and dependence upon the government, that's a price the Biden administration is certainly willing to pay.
The problem being that somewhere like NY pretty much insists on stuff like this - and is counting on TX tax dollars to make it happen. NY cannot walk away without losing all those big chunks of other people's money that they are spending. So TX might eventually have to.
Wasn't there a survey where it showed that democrats have no understanding of conservative viewpoints at all, while vice versa republicans were rather accurate in describing liberal viewpoints?
That's because if you subscribe to mainstream media you will only ever hear a parody of conservative viewpoints, certainly nothing touching on the underlying principles, I suspect because the left doesn't really believe in principles.
Agreed on the response to this caricature they're presented with, though. Lefties who have fully bought-in to the philosophy are utterly hateful in the truest sense of the word - fully-indoctrinated lefties endorse a level of racism, for instance, that would make the KKK blush, when you actually look at what they state black people, for instance, are capable of. But they've got amazing PR.
Fully-indoctrinated lefties are horrified at the thought of conservatives gaining power because they are terrified of receiving the same treatment they enthusiastically endorse for their enemies.
They certainly have not phrased it the way you did, but "ever closer union" - a nice turn of phrase - only happens by EU countries progressively surrendering their own sovereignty to the EU.