On September 25 2016 05:49 Danglars wrote:+ Show Spoiler [full quote chain for context] +On September 25 2016 02:59 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On September 24 2016 09:32 Danglars wrote:On September 23 2016 17:16 ChristianS wrote:
But I wasn't really looking to pick a fight either. I don't really long to be a civil rights crusader. The 50's and 60's sound awful, and I'm glad I didn't have to be around for it. I honestly wish that we were having a relatively normal election between, like, Tim Kaine and Jeb Bush, and I could tune out and read the occasional headline without click on it and maybe get around to registering to vote if I had nothing better to do, but I probably never would because I wouldn't care that much who won. This part is pretty illustrative. Jeb Bush particularly is the kind of establishment candidate everybody likes: stands for nothing, doesn't fight for anything. To me it's looking at the looming debt, lawlessness, and bureaucratic control and deciding that everything fine, let's have some more of it! I even get some of the wistful feelings for an area of boring politics. Not for today's age, try the 1950s. Well it's hard to tell how I would feel if there were a Republican candidate who stood for debt reduction, restoring rule of law to American government, reducing red tape, and all that other stuff Republicans used to stand for. We may never know, because Donald Trump is not that man. His tax proposals are about as bad for the debt as any we've seen from a nominee in a long time, he only talks about "fixing bureaucracy" or "reducing government spending" in the vaguest of terms, and he's shown blatant disrespect for rule of law. Hell, we catch a criminal and we put them in prison, or give them healthcare while they're in jail, or give them a lawyer, and he throws a fit. He doesn't see why we shouldn't go out there and punish terrorists' families for what they've done. He favors racial profiling and a "stop and frisk" policy across the country's police forces. That kind of justice isn't about rule of law and due process. It's about riling up your friends about how bad the suspect is, and going down there and beating the shit out of him, maybe killing him, because we all just know he did it. It is, again, the type of justice seen in lynch mobs and pogroms and vigilanteism. The candidates that act like they stand for debt reduction, restoring the rule of law, and reducing red tape give it all away. Every single damn time. So when you put Trump up there and then typical RINO that talks nice, we're just repeating the rodeo with one. You chant the Republican slogans during election years, you grow the size of government and do nothing. I can grasp that part of the Trump appeal. Show nested quote +Instead we've got a large, disgruntled population of lower- and middle-class white people who feel that they've been wronged by the world. They think they used to have some kind of glory and power, but now their manufacturing jobs are fading away and they're losing their privileged place in the world, and they feel betrayed and unsafe and powerless. We've got a demagogue candidate who's appealing to this population by telling them that they lost their power because of Mexicans and Muslims and China. He's parading around families of people that were raped or murdered by illegal Mexicans to gin up a rage against these foreigners that are raping and murdering their wives and children. He's saying the whole world is laughing at them because they don't win any more. And he's promising them that if they support him, then by the time he's done, nobody will laugh at them again. Lest we forget, we had a political class of BOTH parties that declared they would fight for their jobs and bring back all this economic growth and prosperity. You try explaining that most manufacturing jobs aren't coming back when you've lied for your entire political career. The backwards trade view that dominated both Trump & Bernie's campaigns is primarily the result of bad education and political lies that eroded people's faith in government. Donald Trump hasn't lied about it for his entire political career be cause he doesn't have a political career. He's under no obligation to lie to these people. He does it because he knows their hurt pride and their outrage helps him, and it can be elevated by lying to them and telling them there was no reason their jobs had to go away, it's those dirty liberals and cuckservatives that gave their jobs away in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation or w/e. The more trivial and unnecessary it seems, the more outrageous it is that those people didn't consider these poor and middle class white people's interests. When in reality, the only way to save those jobs (protectionist trade policy) would have hurt those workers just as much. I'm talking about the Trump voters. You malign a population that's disgruntled and wronged by the world. And you also accuse me of throwing wild punches. Sorry, any outright slander of the population voting alongside you is incomplete without the rhetoric of those in elected office. I gather you read what I write, so you may have comprehended my point though you want to address the sides of it and not the front, maybe out of agreement. With time, education, and MAYBE a political class that gets back to the issues and REAL stances worth pushing, we can seek to address voter misapprehensions. The wrong way is to blame the result and criticize only these racists (Clinton & poster term) voting for Trump. Show nested quote +This is not a drill, this is how real life racial persecution gets started. This is the type of movement that used to lead to pogroms and lynchings and blood libel. People get so caught up in the movement and the propaganda and the cult of personality around a charismatic leader that they stop paying attention to facts and policy, to the point that you can explain to them that the crime rate is down, not up, that they lost their manufacturing jobs to the inexorable forces of globalism and no one can bring them back, and that illegal immigrants actually commit violent crime at a lower rate than the rest of the population, but it has absolutely no bearing on how they feel. Not by a long shot. The reason we get stories about illegal alien rapists in the country is nobody cares about securing the border. The reason we get repeat offenders is the release policies and deportation policies and sanctuary city laws create a catch and release system. If this issue got even a fraction of the news dedicated to black men shot by police, justified and unjustified, it wouldn't be an issue because the American people would demand an end. But it's awfully inconvenient for comprehensive immigration plans and amnesty/citizenship plans to deal with people that have nine previous felonies and one deportation being arrested for another crime. Two prior deportations on record, but now he's back for felony sexual penetration with force. Now do you have a heart? Would you sooner go up to a grieving black mother and tell her that her son deserved to die, or a grieving white mother and tell her that the illegal alien that killed her daughter is a member of a group with lower-than-average crime rates? When you show callous disregard for every anecdote of another death or rape, that's what builds resentment. Sanctuary cities are never brought up by your Tim Caines and Jeb Bushes, and they are one part of letting criminal aliens go free and flee deportation. It's not really about having a heart. No, I wouldn't tell a grieving black mother that her son deserved to die, or tell a grieving white mother that it was really improbable for an illegal alien to have done this, and it would have been far more likely to be an American citizen. I would tell them I'm sorry for their loss. But Donald Trump isn't just telling victims he's sorry for their loss. He's parading these victims in front of millions of people to try to tell everyone, "this is what illegal Mexicans do." As he's said from the beginning, "they're rapists." Victim worship is a well-worn tradition of racist movements to make followers feel like they're not attacking members of that race, they're defending themselves from that race! That illegal immigrants actually have a lower rate of violent crime than the rest of the population would seem to prove that preventing violent crime is not really a legitimate reason to think we should crack down on illegal immigrants, but by arguing with anecdotes instead of statistics, Trump avoids that issue and continues to explicitly and implicitly slander a whole class of people (who happen to have a different skin color). Worth noting this isn't really equivalent to cases of police brutality. If I kill someone, it's not national news; if a cop kills someone, it is. That's because police are supposed to protect us. If the cop was justified, most people aren't too bothered by the news. But when a black guy calls the police because an armed robber was in his house, and then the cops show up and shoot him instead, it would seem to highlight that the justice system is not working for black people. In the single greatest situation in which you would want the police to come defend you (armed intruders are in your house), he's still better off taking his chances with the armed intruders. If these cases were very rare, and highlighting them was in spite of statistics, it would be the same. But these cases happen frequently, and are indicative of statistical fact – black people are far, far more likely to be wrongfully shot by a police officer. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Yours and others: Yep. Exhibit A that he's calling Mexicans rapists. Intentional pull-quote for a racial agenda. Crime comes over the border in small amounts proportionally just given the huge volume. A porous border is open season on criminal drug runners. The stories coming daily from the border patrol are bold cartel actions and wanton cruelty from coyote smugglers. When you talk evenly about closing up the border, the mainstream media ignores you. ChristianS ignores you too. But pump up the warnings, and the topic's back on the front burner because the only way to get national attention these days is to get the lynch mob to persecute you for racism. Like Hugh Hewitt on language: HH: And that’s, I’d just use different language to communicate it, but let me close with this, because I know I’m keeping you long, and Hope’s going to kill me.
DT: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right? I can understand your desire to avoid things that look like victim parading. I can even go as far as to say other country's actively racist movements rely heavily on similar tactics, though the end differences are the soul of the definition. But not here. The issue is ignored, deflected, rounded up as "only racists would say and do such things." You wish to say "I never said Trump's immigration policy means he's racist" but you would stand by as any policy close to his is ignored in coverage to the American voter until they get really, really mad about issues close to their heart never entering their discourse. It's in your blind spot, I'm even willing to say you're ignoring it in good conscience of your actions. You also claim to be "opposed to much of the social backlash that currently exists against people and positions viewed as "racist." But you would allow those people to be the dominant vocal force in society and the biggest mouths against less divisive candidates proposing funds be spent on a large border fence/wall/doublefence. You're not going to grab a protest sign and go to Washington demanding attention to illegal immigration that isn't amnesty every ten years. It's not an issue close to your heart or you would sit back someday and realize that a growing snowball of ignorance demands a big, boisterous loudmouth to finally break through the curtain of silence (punctuated by racism shrieking). Jeb Bush typifies an era where the only two acceptable positions on the border were "citizenship/amnesty now" and "pathway to citizenship later" and talk on securing the border (Congress defunded duly passed Congressional law to build that wall. Comprehensive reform types like to ignore that we'd have a secure border if elected politicians were faithful to their legislation). Now, the issue is back where it should be, you must take the border to be of prime importance and dealing with those illegally in this country, criminals if only in the sense of violating duly passed immigration law. We have one guy to thank for that, and it's one of his shining aspects. Just like your cops example, police meant to protect us, so also with the southern border, our immigration laws and border police/INS should protect us from foreign nationals illegally entering our country. Instead, something like one million enter annually (government data for ex. three million over course of 2014-2015). Some commit crimes and are caught only to be deported. Some come back after deportation and recommit. Some never get deported because sanctuary cities illegally prevent them from being brought to justice. Outrage? Nope, it is widely ignored. Citizens and legal immigrants have not been bashing in storefronts or committing violent crime to bring attention to the issue. How do you stop politicians bringing up the victims to hear their story? By hearing their story the first time. No matter how bad it makes your political parties feel. No matter how letting a story like that get retold when it occurs might hurt your re-election stances. No matter how many people like ChristianS would accept the injustice because he can claim the actual crime commission rate of one million new illegal aliens every year is low as a bulk rate. You're in the business of creating the atmosphere of demagogic ideologues. You can't see the things you support end in results of things you would never support. But that's the way of politics. And it's tough coming face to face with some very scary conclusions of your own actions and those of your like-minded thinkers in the aggregate. Show nested quote +Seems like you're throwing out a lot of punches at stuff I'm not sure if you're assuming I support. I'm also not sure what's meant by terms like "racial realism." It seems to denote a position which acknowledges the realities of race (about which this "regressive left" is presumably in denial), but I'm not sure what realities you think those are. A white supremacist might say they're a "racial realist" for acknowledging that white people are better than black people. An SJW might call themselves a "racial realist" for acknowledging the power dynamics between whites and various minorities in America today, such that a "color-blind" approach can't solve racial issues. I assume you're in neither of these camps, so you probably mean something more along the lines of acknowledging black culture has some toxic trends which contribute to blacks' underprivileged state (which the regressive left insists is a racist position)? I'm only guessing at your meaning here. I'm just using as mushy of a term I could find to contrast with the similar passage you used originally. Progress and racial equality are in the eyes of the beholder. How much discrimination in job applicants is permissible to achieve racial quotas? Is disparate impact alone enough to prove racism and discrimination? How do you square equal protection under the law and disparate impact provisions? It's a very easy thing to believe in a utopia of an "inevitable march towards progress and greater racial equality," but when it comes down to policy, a lot of it looks like pushing for the hardest discriminatory hiring systems and promotion rules, throwing out good candidates for candidates with the right skin color in the name of equality. I say racial realism to call attention to the mushiness typifying the debate (apparently the alt-right has already defined it and added it to their lexicon--oops). After all, who can be against progress and racial equality or antiracist attitudes? Let me just keep it simple. Staying in reality and approaching race with a healthy attitude means reducing and eliminating how many issues we observe purely through the lens of race. It's police training on brutality and firearm discipline first, not white cops shooting unarmed black teens. Fix the problem, don't racialize the problem for political power and influence. Understand that making everything about race demonizes whites and white hispanics and poisons cooperation on real issues. Your talk about Trump inciting future racial persecution is a good case in point. Fix the issues and let tempers go back down, don't pretend the man in front of the movement is using race for nefarious purposes. So this is more or less what I thought, you're throwing out a lot of punches against stuff I didn't really advocate. So let's say you're right about this stuff. Let's say we should abolish affirmative action. Let's say that police brutality really doesn't have anything to do with race. Let's say white people are right to be mad that they're being passed over for jobs and college admissions due to affirmative action. None of that excuses the stuff I'm criticizing in the Trump movement. Slandering Mexicans as rapists is still racist. Birtherism is still racist. Trying to convince everyone that their women and children won't be safe while those illegal Mexicans are still around is still racist. The alt right is still: a) racist af, b) growing rapidly in popularity (in large part because of Trump), and c) enthusiastically backing Donald Trump 100%. It's been a while since we've seen a racial demagogue run for such a high office in the US, but we really still ought to be able to recognize it when we see it. Worth noting that you skipped over the first part of my reply, which actually went into some of the explicitly racist shit Donald Trump has said and done in his lifetime (e.g. really blatantly discriminating against blacks in his apartment buildings because he preferred to rent to Jews and rich white guys). Sigh. Okay, so you deny the logical consequences of politicians lying to their constituents (detailed earlier) and a media and segment of population that don't even see it on their radar. That is the antecedent to the punches I throw. You'll deny they pertain to you because you will not now and may never follow your advocacy to it's end (it may also be that you have other gripes with the status quo of politics that you haven't brought up yet, because I don't actually want to put words in your mouth, truly). Let's say the tenor of the debate shifts from the race of the participants to the issue. I can't allow you a hypothetical that involves abolishing affirmative action because that is a subject we could get into with depth. I just brought it up because you use progress and racial equality not realizing it's a vacuous as me adding in racial realism. You might have an idea in your head of what it means to you, but I only know politicians and a spectrum of political debaters, and some of that racial equality talk comes to some very insane ends. I can't read your mind, so please don't accuse me of ills that come from not being able to read your mind. I'm sorry for not personally responding to your groundwork on "racist things Donald Trump has said and done in his lifetime." I've spent hours and hours on this thread writing, and days reading. Some of those quotes are either bad in other ways, justified given the surrounding political climate, lies and slander, or completely relevant and hardly objectionable. Defending them is pointless concerning the meaninglessness of the term racism in politics and considering the free pass given to the other side on issues where the language is now accepted. In the alternate universe when Bernie and Hillary were roundly condemned as being too extreme for American politics or everyone gets mad at Obama's speeches too, I could see purpose in the exercise. But for now, you'll have to believe what you choose to believe about it. Or find a special pleader for Trump, I did not cast my vote for him in the primary and wanted a better candidate to oppose Hillary. So you'll have to make due with boisterous loudmouth and my deep concern for his temperament, and only contrasts with how radically left the other choice has gone in US politics. Show nested quote +On September 23 2016 21:18 xDaunt wrote:On September 23 2016 18:42 Acrofales wrote:On September 23 2016 17:16 ChristianS wrote:On September 23 2016 15:49 Danglars wrote:On September 23 2016 15:03 ChristianS wrote:
Jesus this thread is depressing sometimes.
The last ~24 hours of discussion have put a sobering thought into my head, and I wonder what you guys think of it. Basically, in the last 50 or so years, there's been a strong anti-racist movement in the country as a whole. Laws that discriminate against blacks became widely considered unacceptable, public figures are shunned for expressing racist ideas or using racist epithets. The implied justification was that we as a society were making a concerted effort to eliminate racism as much as possible, and drive whatever resistant strains that survived to . Considered with other historical moves towards equality (elimination of slavery, blacks joining the military, Brown v. Board, etc.), it fit nicely with an overarching narrative of racial progress.
Maybe this is just a problem with anecdotal evidence, but it seems to me those attitudes are completely different in a lot of people today. Hardened Trump supporters often try to deny that Trump is a racist, but far more frequently I see people that just don't seem to care much. They might even lean toward thinking he probably is, but it's just not that important an issue. This is really baffling to me, since for my whole life there's been a widespread cultural agreement that overt racism is one of the ugliest sides of human civilization and absolutely cannot be tolerated, but in the broad view of history, racism is absolutely the norm. Not always as bad as early American South racism, but it's always been pretty normal to distrust people with different cultural and ethnic background than you, treat them worse, value their life less than that of your family or friends or tribe members. I always figured that was just part of progress – unlike humans for most of history, we have cars and refrigerators and computers and a prevailing cultural understanding that racism is bad. It's a nice stroll through memory lane, but you make a sudden leap into modern times by contrasting the civil rights era with Trump and his supporters. Sit at the back of the bus was racism. Separate eating establishments based on race was racism. Immigration policy isn't. Political invective on several issues isn't (though abrasive speech will still cause others to bristle no matter the subject). You're right to call it anecdotal, and it's intensely subjective. You'll see the comparisons to late 1800s racism and xenophobia, others will see you as a wannabe crusader longing for a bygone era but without a real civil rights cause today. Worth noting I never said Trump's immigration policy means he's racist. I was honestly more focused on Trump himself. Being prosecuted by Nixon's Justice Department for really explicitly discriminating against black tenants in his hotels back in the 70's. That stuff by Jack O'Donnell about how when he was president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump went off about not wanting a black guy as an accountant because blacks are lazy, and he only wants Jews counting his money. Calling Mexicans rapists. Those shitty stereotypes he embraced talking to the Republican Jewish Coalition. Y'know, that stuff. But I wasn't really looking to pick a fight either. I don't really long to be a civil rights crusader. The 50's and 60's sound awful, and I'm glad I didn't have to be around for it. I honestly wish that we were having a relatively normal election between, like, Tim Kaine and Jeb Bush, and I could tune out and read the occasional headline without click on it and maybe get around to registering to vote if I had nothing better to do, but I probably never would because I wouldn't care that much who won. Instead we've got a large, disgruntled population of lower- and middle-class white people who feel that they've been wronged by the world. They think they used to have some kind of glory and power, but now their manufacturing jobs are fading away and they're losing their privileged place in the world, and they feel betrayed and unsafe and powerless. We've got a demagogue candidate who's appealing to this population by telling them that they lost their power because of Mexicans and Muslims and China. He's parading around families of people that were raped or murdered by illegal Mexicans to gin up a rage against these foreigners that are raping and murdering their wives and children. He's saying the whole world is laughing at them because they don't win any more. And he's promising them that if they support him, then by the time he's done, nobody will laugh at them again. This is not a drill, this is how real life racial persecution gets started. This is the type of movement that used to lead to pogroms and lynchings and blood libel. People get so caught up in the movement and the propaganda and the cult of personality around a charismatic leader that they stop paying attention to facts and policy, to the point that you can explain to them that the crime rate is down, not up, that they lost their manufacturing jobs to the inexorable forces of globalism and no one can bring them back, and that illegal immigrants actually commit violent crime at a lower rate than the rest of the population, but it has absolutely no bearing on how they feel. My sobering thought was this: what if we're not on an inevitable march toward progress and greater racial equality? What if the anti-racist attitudes of the last 50 years aren't a lasting cultural achievement, but just a temporary backlash against the ugly racism of the 40's and 50's? People saw how hideous that Nazi movement was, and they saw the horrible treatment of blacks in the South, and the lynching of Emmett Till, and the dogs and firehoses deployed against civil rights protesters, and for a while it became fashionable to be against racism.
But now that all that stuff isn't such recent memory, racism takes on all of the advantages that made it prevalent in human society before. Scapegoating is an easy way to feel better about your problems. Stereotyping is almost inescapable in the psychology of how humans understand the world. Many apparent virtues that people are encouraged to cultivate (e.g. loyalty, empathy) can subconsciously promote tribalism (e.g. loyalty involves favoring those you're close to over those you're not, empathy encourages greater connection to people who are more like you). Racial minorities are often small enough in number that society can get weird impressions of them simply from having too small a sample size, and once a weird (especially negative) bias gets in place, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy effects tend to maintain or expand that bias.
I've been hoping all the bigotry of the Trump movement would be remembered by history as a weird spike of bigotry as the white American middle class came to terms with several realities it had been in denial about for years. But what if history remembers these past ~50 years as that brief period where American society was largely anti-racist? My sobering thought is this: what if the current campaign against out-of-fashion ideas and racial realism won't be reversed for many years? What if the zealots of today, the current victors of the culture war, won't realize how hideous their own movement has become, nor how the '60s rebellion against authority became a puritanical persecution from authority (cultural leadership brought to you by Your Moral Betters™). Scapegoating and stereotyping of Trump supporters for social ills could continue, as much as I wish it would not. It is intensely psychological and the fight in every generation is to inspire the better angels of our nature. I'm hoping the atmosphere of moral scolds today are later regarded as a weird period of American history when people embraced racializing every issue to the detriment of true debate on the issues. When language was so bastardized and social media lynch mobs so emboldened that every political opinion was viewed by the color difference of the author & subject's skin. I look with some hope to the next generation. Today's left-leaning culture responds to criticism like a priest to sacrilege, and even young people today can see how bizarre it acts. It's far more likely that today's regress, disguised as progress, continues to win and that's a very sobering thought indeed. Seems like you're throwing out a lot of punches at stuff I'm not sure if you're assuming I support. I'm also not sure what's meant by terms like "racial realism." It seems to denote a position which acknowledges the realities of race (about which this "regressive left" is presumably in denial), but I'm not sure what realities you think those are. A white supremacist might say they're a "racial realist" for acknowledging that white people are better than black people. An SJW might call themselves a "racial realist" for acknowledging the power dynamics between whites and various minorities in America today, such that a "color-blind" approach can't solve racial issues. I assume you're in neither of these camps, so you probably mean something more along the lines of acknowledging black culture has some toxic trends which contribute to blacks' underprivileged state (which the regressive left insists is a racist position)? I'm only guessing at your meaning here. But you seem to be opposed to much of the social backlash that currently exists against people and positions viewed as "racist," and I assume you don't think we shouldn't stigmatize actual racism, so you must think the labels of racist and bigot have been over-applied by the left. I might even agree with that. Online articles trying to teach white people about "microagressions" and the like can be alright when they come from a place of earnestly trying to help whites understand how to make racial minorities feel more at ease and less alienated, but when they come in the form of condemning anyone who uses the question "So, where are you from?" in small talk as Grand Dragon of the KKK, I think it weakens the label of "racist" and makes it easier for actual racists to hide behind the cover of just being "politically incorrect." A lot of people that use terms like "cultural appropriation" and "gentrification" to explain how white people are literally Hitler are being sloppy in their reasoning, and mostly just making people think it's okay to be skeptical that they could possibly ever be racist. So I think you've assumed that I'm a member of that club, and I'm really not. Back in saner times, most of my online arguments were with those very people. But that group mostly just whines and blogs about Miley Cyrus appropriating this or that. This ethnocentrist movement wants to take over the world. I was hoping that, based on a progress-based view of racial equality, America had come far enough that it could tell the difference between telling an off-color joke to your friends (i.e. political incorrectness) and accusing Mexico of deliberately sending rapists across the border (i.e. racism). I was wrong, thus I am rethinking my assumption that racial equality has steadily improved over time and will only keep getting better. I think this is the first opinion since the "racism war" started about 20 pages back that is actually worth reading. His post is the saner and nicer version of Kwark's 40% of America is racist posts. And it's unsurprising to me that he, like everyone else on the other side of the issue, struggles with this part of Danglars' post: My sobering thought is this: what if the current campaign against out-of-fashion ideas and racial realism won't be reversed for many years? What if the zealots of today, the current victors of the culture war, won't realize how hideous their own movement has become, nor how the '60s rebellion against authority became a puritanical persecution from authority (cultural leadership brought to you by Your Moral Betters™). Scapegoating and stereotyping of Trump supporters for social ills could continue, as much as I wish it would not. It is intensely psychological and the fight in every generation is to inspire the better angels of our nature.
I'm hoping the atmosphere of moral scolds today are later regarded as a weird period of American history when people embraced racializing every issue to the detriment of true debate on the issues. When language was so bastardized and social media lynch mobs so emboldened that every political opinion was viewed by the color difference of the author & subject's skin. I look with some hope to the next generation. Today's left-leaning culture responds to criticism like a priest to sacrilege, and even young people today can see how bizarre it acts. It's far more likely that today's regress, disguised as progress, continues to win and that's a very sobering thought indeed. The struggle is real. I always have hope for the newer names to have the light bulb turn on and step into somebody else's shoes. Glad to hear there's still hope for me yet. I only wish both sobering thoughts were as well understood by both sides.
The candidates that act like they stand for debt reduction, restoring the rule of law, and reducing red tape give it all away. Every single damn time. So when you put Trump up there and then typical RINO that talks nice, we're just repeating the rodeo with one. You chant the Republican slogans during election years, you grow the size of government and do nothing. I can grasp that part of the Trump appeal.
But the idea here seems to be that because your candidates always seem to promise these things and then never deliver, you instead pick the guy that doesn't even promise them. Remember, you criticized Jeb as a candidate for those who look at "looming debt, lawlessness, and bureaucratic control" and say yes, more of that please. But at least more typical candidates (I don't know about Jeb specifically, I didn't follow him much) would identify these problems and say they wanted to solve them and propose solutions to them, whether or not they ever actually spent the political capital to follow through. It's obvious at the outset Trump doesn't give a shit about debt reduction, limited government, or rule of law.
I'm talking about the Trump voters. You malign a population that's disgruntled and wronged by the world. And you also accuse me of throwing wild punches. Sorry, any outright slander of the population voting alongside you is incomplete without the rhetoric of those in elected office. I gather you read what I write, so you may have comprehended my point though you want to address the sides of it and not the front, maybe out of agreement. With time, education, and MAYBE a political class that gets back to the issues and REAL stances worth pushing, we can seek to address voter misapprehensions. The wrong way is to blame the result and criticize only these racists (Clinton & poster term) voting for Trump.
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. I didn't intend "throwing punches" as an accusation, I just meant that you seemed to be criticizing positions I wasn't really advocating. Speaking of positions I wasn't advocating, I didn't really intend to malign the population that's disgruntled over their economic difficulties and feels wronged by the world. Sure, politicians have lied to them about "bringing back manufacturing jobs" for ages, to the point that these days almost any politician has to say they're going to "bring back manufacturing jobs." It's almost as vacuous a promise as "I'm going to grow the economy" at this point.
I suppose it's fair of you to assume that I was making a judgment against these voters since at least some moral judgment seems appropriate against someone who succumbs to a racist movement. But these movements operate on propaganda and demagoguery and mob mentality so much that it's difficult to assign individual blame to members of the movement. Even members of lynch mobs or Hitler's Youth probably thought they were doing the right thing, and in the heat and fanaticism of the moment they probably didn't stop to think, "wait a minute, is this moral?" I'm not really interested in assigning blame, as much as identifying what's happening in hopes of breaking a cycle that's repeated itself so many times in human history.
+ Show Spoiler [long quote] +Show nested quote +When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Yours and others: Yep. Exhibit A that he's calling Mexicans rapists. Intentional pull-quote for a racial agenda. Crime comes over the border in small amounts proportionally just given the huge volume. A porous border is open season on criminal drug runners. The stories coming daily from the border patrol are bold cartel actions and wanton cruelty from coyote smugglers. When you talk evenly about closing up the border, the mainstream media ignores you. ChristianS ignores you too. But pump up the warnings, and the topic's back on the front burner because the only way to get national attention these days is to get the lynch mob to persecute you for racism. Like Hugh Hewitt on language: Show nested quote +HH: And that’s, I’d just use different language to communicate it, but let me close with this, because I know I’m keeping you long, and Hope’s going to kill me.
DT: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right? I can understand your desire to avoid things that look like victim parading. I can even go as far as to say other country's actively racist movements rely heavily on similar tactics, though the end differences are the soul of the definition. But not here. The issue is ignored, deflected, rounded up as "only racists would say and do such things." You wish to say "I never said Trump's immigration policy means he's racist" but you would stand by as any policy close to his is ignored in coverage to the American voter until they get really, really mad about issues close to their heart never entering their discourse. It's in your blind spot, I'm even willing to say you're ignoring it in good conscience of your actions. You also claim to be "opposed to much of the social backlash that currently exists against people and positions viewed as "racist." But you would allow those people to be the dominant vocal force in society and the biggest mouths against less divisive candidates proposing funds be spent on a large border fence/wall/doublefence. You're not going to grab a protest sign and go to Washington demanding attention to illegal immigration that isn't amnesty every ten years. It's not an issue close to your heart or you would sit back someday and realize that a growing snowball of ignorance demands a big, boisterous loudmouth to finally break through the curtain of silence (punctuated by racism shrieking). Jeb Bush typifies an era where the only two acceptable positions on the border were "citizenship/amnesty now" and "pathway to citizenship later" and talk on securing the border (Congress defunded duly passed Congressional law to build that wall. Comprehensive reform types like to ignore that we'd have a secure border if elected politicians were faithful to their legislation). Now, the issue is back where it should be, you must take the border to be of prime importance and dealing with those illegally in this country, criminals if only in the sense of violating duly passed immigration law. We have one guy to thank for that, and it's one of his shining aspects. Just like your cops example, police meant to protect us, so also with the southern border, our immigration laws and border police/INS should protect us from foreign nationals illegally entering our country. Instead, something like one million enter annually (government data for ex. three million over course of 2014-2015). Some commit crimes and are caught only to be deported. Some come back after deportation and recommit. Some never get deported because sanctuary cities illegally prevent them from being brought to justice. Outrage? Nope, it is widely ignored. Citizens and legal immigrants have not been bashing in storefronts or committing violent crime to bring attention to the issue. How do you stop politicians bringing up the victims to hear their story? By hearing their story the first time. No matter how bad it makes your political parties feel. No matter how letting a story like that get retold when it occurs might hurt your re-election stances. No matter how many people like ChristianS would accept the injustice because he can claim the actual crime commission rate of one million new illegal aliens every year is low as a bulk rate. You're in the business of creating the atmosphere of demagogic ideologues. You can't see the things you support end in results of things you would never support. But that's the way of politics. And it's tough coming face to face with some very scary conclusions of your own actions and those of your like-minded thinkers in the aggregate.
But here you stop just short of admitting it's racist demagoguery; you say the "end differences are the soul of the definition" and without any more specificity I don't know how to respond to that. The fact is, if he says racist things like racist movements do, and he uses the same tactics that racist movements do, why on Earth would this story not end the same way racist movements do? What if he's not just getting a lynch mob to "persecute him" (odd terminology) for racism – he's getting a lynch mob to persecute Mexicans? This is basically what I was talking about in my original post: for a while everyone was sufficiently anti-racist that people believed a politician saying racist things was beyond the pale, even if he was just doing it to gin up votes or get attention for an issue. Often people might say ambiguous things as a dog whistle at racist voters, while insisting they had meant something perfectly innocent, but outright racism was untouchable. At this point I hardly hear people argue "well, but he said he assumes some of them are good people" to argue it isn't actually a racist thing to say. They just say "yeah, but immigration is important!"
But let's tackle immigration a bit. Here's where I understood the issue to be pre-Trump:
Virtually everyone agreed the current system sucks. The economics were such that people in Mexico and a number of other Latin American countries have/had strong incentives to migrate to the US for work. And this wasn't just for their benefit: the economic benefit to the United States was huge. People who fuss over the jobs lost to immigrants often gloss over (or just lack the economic understanding to realize) the benefits they've received in, for instance, dirt cheap food prices. Mass deportations like what Donald was initially promising (and maybe still is?) aren't just impractical because of the logistic challenges with finding and transporting ~12 million people against their will; the economic consequences for the United States would be dire as well. Food would rot in the field because we had no one to pick it. Prices would skyrocket, and those same disgruntled white people who are furious over the jobs that were taken would be unable to feed their families, even if they did find it easier to get manual labor jobs.
In other words, there were a lot of good policy reasons to allow immigration. But the system we had in place for legal immigration was absolutely buried in bureaucracy and red tape, such that immigrating legally was all but impossible. Meanwhile we had this massive border that was quite difficult to police well; that is, without the massive tides of would-be immigrants we could probably secure it well enough, but with millions of people coming over every year, we simply couldn't stop them all, and the ones we did stop, we would just take back to Mexico only for them to try again.
If we could agree on whether or not we want to allow this tide of immigration, this system wouldn't be that hard to fix. If legal immigration were made more functional, the tide of illegal immigrants would be less, and for that illegal immigration which was still happening, we could more easily find support for funding preventative measures (more ICE agents, a wall, or what have you). But for those who didn't want the immigrants here at all, making legal immigration easier was the exactly the wrong choice, and they'd fight it tooth and nail. Meanwhile for those that wanted immigration to be possible, strict border security measures without some attempt to fix the legal immigration system amounted to trying to keep all those dirty Mexicans out, and they'd kill any attempt at it if they could.
So what we got instead was a sort of worst-of-both-worlds scenario where those who didn't want immigrants to come in couldn't pass the border security measures to do so, while those who wanted to allow the immigrants to come in couldn't get support for lowering the bureaucratic barrier to legal immigration. A few open borders advocates might disagree, but I think almost everyone on the political spectrum would agree that a system of controlled, legal immigration (even a fairly loose and permissive border) would be better than an impenetrable barrier to legal immigration and a porous border. But when people like Rubio tried to pass immigration reform, conservatives insisted we need to secure the border first; and when we try to secure the border or deport illegal immigrants currently living here, liberals insist we first need to fix legal immigration and grant amnesty to the immigrants who have been living peacefully and contributing to American society for decades.
Donald Trump's solution does, I grant you, break this stalemate. Basically he embraces the "keep those dirty Mexicans out" tack and raises racial tensions so much that, if it works, as many people as possible feel so threatened by illegal immigrants that they won't worry as much about the humanitarian concerns with mass deportation. Under other conditions, ripping people from their homes and forcing them back to a country they may or may not even be from is abominable. But we had to! Otherwise they might have raped our women and children!
The Hugh Hewitt exchange is telling, because he was talking about calling Obama "founder of ISIS" when that exchange happened. Hewitt has always been prepared to bend over backwards to embrace the Republicans' talking points, so you can see him trying as hard as he can to justify what Trump said into a reasonable thing to say. Trump won't have it – he said what he said, and he won't have it softened to "Obama's weak foreign policy allowed this new threat to rise" or some such. No, Obama founded ISIS! He's their MVP!
Again, he's gone past the point of dog whistling and just literally says the crazy, racist, conspiracy theory shit that infowars and world net daily freaks have been spewing for years. Obama is a plant sent by our Muslim enemies to destroy the United States from within. Maybe that's not what Donald Trump believes, but that's what he's saying, that's the crowd he's appealing to, and that's the type of movement he's trying to create. Sure, he brought attention to the issue of ISIS, but it's not like people weren't talking about ISIS before. Hell, we can barely get done talking about ISIS in one news cycle before they blow some shit up again and we have to start all over. Directly spouting racist propaganda should be just about as disqualifying a sin as a politician could commit, and that isn't changed if he's doing it to "bring attention to an issue."
Sigh. Okay, so you deny the logical consequences of politicians lying to their constituents (detailed earlier) and a media and segment of population that don't even see it on their radar. That is the antecedent to the punches I throw. You'll deny they pertain to you because you will not now and may never follow your advocacy to it's end (it may also be that you have other gripes with the status quo of politics that you haven't brought up yet, because I don't actually want to put words in your mouth, truly).
Let's say the tenor of the debate shifts from the race of the participants to the issue. I can't allow you a hypothetical that involves abolishing affirmative action because that is a subject we could get into with depth. I just brought it up because you use progress and racial equality not realizing it's a vacuous as me adding in racial realism. You might have an idea in your head of what it means to you, but I only know politicians and a spectrum of political debaters, and some of that racial equality talk comes to some very insane ends. I can't read your mind, so please don't accuse me of ills that come from not being able to read your mind.
Again, I think I must have miscommunicated this somehow (and again, I did not mean to accuse you of trying to straw man me, only to clarify what I was arguing for). I wasn't trying to introduce a hypothetical world in which affirmative action didn't exist, and arguing that in this hypothetical world Donald Trump is a racist. I was granting, for the sake of argument, that affirmative action is bad policy, pure special interest politics by the Democrats to win minority votes, and that white people are right to object to this policy. My point was that even ceding that issue, outright racist propaganda geared toward building a movement exactly like what the alt right stands for is still completely unacceptable.
I mentioned before that I think you have me pegged as some kind of SJW. I'm not, and like I said, I used to argue with them over plenty of issues. One of the biggest was the fact that social justice for them so often took the form, not of a political position, but of a rationalization for their lives not being as bright and successful and prosperous as they had hoped. It's so easy to say you didn't get that college admission or promotion or scholarship, not because you weren't good enough, but because the system is broken. It wasn't political philosophy so much as self-help theology, geared to make you feel better more than to change the world in a positive way.
Much of the outrage over affirmative action or immigration is exactly the same. It isn't offering any new perspective on the causes and cures for racial inequality, or how automation and globalization are making the possibility of decently paid jobs with relatively little education or training more or less impossible. It's just a bunch of white people whose lives aren't everything they wanted them to be for a variety of political, economic, and personal reasons looking for something to blame. You didn't get that promotion, or you didn't get into that good college, or your kid got arrested for robbing a liquor store, but it's not your fault! Affirmative action kept you out of that job. Affirmative action kept your kid out of that good school. Illegal immigration made it so your kid couldn't find any low-education work, so he turned to crime. It's just like the SJWs, except that unlike them, this movement isn't content to whine about it on the internet and write blogs inventing terms like "cultural appropriation" and "color erasure." They're out for vengeance, in a large part because of Trump's shameless tactics.
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