Item — HN Reader

I love your rushing to pretend that you didn't write what you wrote:

>Good. This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished.

>Or that would have been my reaction until I read the article:

>"Countries with more than 75,000 tonnes in post imported annually - mainly the United States - may apply their self-declared new rates from July 2020, UPU officials said."

>So does 'mainly the US' mean 'only the US'? I don't want an exception just for the US because they are too powerful to ignore, I want the same rule to hold for every EU country. Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement.

In other words:

* Requisite snarky remark about Trump

* Complaint that the rule change is only for the US (written before you read the rest of the thread and realize that this refers to the US getting the rule change slightly earlier than other countries, as we can see by ...)

* Stating that "this is not an improvement" because other rich countries won't benefit from the rule change, again because you hadn't yet read the read of the thread. (Even were you correct, this would be an improvement for the US, which is Trump's concern. As I said, he is not the president of the EU.)

1 comments

I'm not pretending I didn't write what I wrote. I did write what I wrote. I didn't write what you claim I wrote:

> "then go on to say that he is at fault for not helping Belgium or Austria"

That is not something I wrote. I never said Trump is at fault for these results. That is something you're trying to put in my mouth, and I'm telling you not to do that, because it's a dishonest way of arguing.

If you're looking for bad things to blame on Trump, there's tons of that around. This is one of those very rare things where he actually did the right thing. And had the UPU only made this an exception for the US, and not changed the rules for everybody, that would have been on the UPU as a whole and presumably the EU members who failed to negotiate this properly. Fortunately that's not what happened; it was a misunderstanding on my part (based on a cursory reading of the article, so I was already hoping it was the article or my reading of it that was wrong).

>I never said Trump is at fault for these results.

No, but you blamed Trump for not getting the results for other countries. Let me repeat again what you wrote:

>Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement.

That you wrote the above without understanding the full ramifications of the change is immaterial, because you

* Take a swipe at Trump ("This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished")

* Then say, based on your misunderstanding, that this "is really not an improvement".

The implication is clear: Trump is at fault for not obtaining the same improvement he gained for the US for other, "small rich countries" as well. I reiterate my original reply to you:

>Trump is president of the United States, not of the EU. It is the EU and its member states' onus to obtain similar changes, should they believe them desirable.

>That you begin with a snarky remark about Trump, and then go on to say that he is at fault for not helping Belgium or Austria win the kind of changes that the US needed to seriously threaten to leave the UPU for, says more about you than about the US or Trump.

> "No, but you blamed Trump for not getting the results for other countries."

As you can see from your own quote out of my comment, that is simply not the case:

> ">Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement."

Nowhere do I mention Trump. I'm not blaming this on Trump.

> "Take a swipe at Trump ("This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished")"

Well, it is. There's not a lot of good he's accomplished in other areas, has he? He's mostly a disaster. This is the one truly good thing I can see that he has accomplished.

> "Then say, based on your misunderstanding, that this "is really not an improvement"."

And indeed it wouldn't have been an improvement if it had only created an exception for the US. I'm glad that's not the result of these negotiations. I will absolutely credit Trump for this one good thing he has accomplished.

But if it hadn't been this good result, and it had only resulted in an exception for the US, he would not have accomplished this one good result. Surely that's clear, right? You can't claim credit for something that didn't happen (though I'm aware that Trump sees that differently).

However, had the result been not as good, that doesn't mean that Trump is automatically to blame. I understand the assumption, but he's not doing these negotiations on his own. It would be the whole of the UPU, and particularly the EU negotiators, that would have failed to replace the previous rule with a better universal rule, opting for an exception instead. That exception would probably have been good enough for Trump, so he'd still have gotten what he wanted, but this is an issue that's bigger than just the US, and I'm glad the UPU recognised that. I'm also glad Trump addressed this issue. Credit where it's due.