US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8453

On August 17 2017 11:10 Falling wrote:

Vox Day is exactly why I started to seriously question the identity basis to a lot modern arguments. "As a/an _____________, I don't think you can argue this that or the other." The seemingly necessary intersectional qualifier used to underly an argument reached a breaking point when I saw Vox take up the very same minority ethnic group arguments and turn it back on its head. (You can't touch my argument because I am American Indian, an oppressed class.) It was obvious to me that I disagreed with what he was saying, but it left me in a rather uncomfortable spot, if I wanted to be consistent.

Either
1) I had to get into a weird purity test, like what you seem to be doing- one needs to be sufficiently of a group to make certain claims. Well that seemed to make things even more hyper racial and I'm not exactly comfortable arguing "you are not X enough to belong to X group." That's not a path I wanted to go down.

Or 2) I could claim that they had internalized their oppression (queue h3h3 gif). This is a road certain feminists like to take when met with women who disagree with their particular branch of feminism. That too wasn't really a route I liked because while it is possible this is true in some cases, I don't think it can be true in all cases, and likely not true in most cases. At the very least it's a rather patrionizing argument- 'you don't really know what you are talking about, but I know what's up with you!' Well that's a rather arrogant claim, if you think about it. I'd like to think that while some people may be brainwashed, most people have reasons for thinking what they think. They might not even be good reasons, but they are reasons that they hold and not something that they are subconsciously being manipulated by other forces that they have no insight into but somehow I magically do.

So then I was left with 3)
Abandon ship with underlying arguments with an intersectionality. The argument has to stand on its own. Because what I realized is that method of argumentation is very vulnerable to bullies and discriminatory views- there's no good defence against it. It works so long as everyone making the arguments are basically good people, but as soon as you have a malicious person that can legitimately wrap themselves in whatever oppressed class to spout all sorts of malcious things, you need to be able argue that they are making a bad argument, not that they are the wrong sort of person to be making that argument.

On the eve of his first-place finish in the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, Roy Moore -- a former Alabama judge who advocated for the display of the Ten Commandments -- attracted some attention for a comment he made about Muslim Sharia law.

Sharia law is a wide-ranging set of rules that govern aspects of Islamic life, including religious practice, daily living, crime and financial dealings, but Muslims differ on its interpretation.

Some commentators, particularly on the right, have warned that Sharia poses a threat to the United States’ legal system. But PolitiFact has debunked a string of claims about the influence of Sharia law (or aspects of it) in the United States, including by retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who became President Donald Trump’s short-lived national security adviser.


Moore made his comments during a campaign stop to meet with members of the pro-gun group BamaCarry Inc. There, reporter Jeff Stein of the website Vox.com asked him, "Some right-wing conservatives think Sharia law is a danger to America -- do you?"

Moore responded, "There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country. Up in Illinois. Christian communities; I don’t know if they may be Muslim communities. But Sharia law is a little different from American law. It is founded on religious concepts."

Stein pressed Moore to name the communities under Sharia law. He responded, "Well, there’s Sharia law, as I understand it, in Illinois, Indiana -- up there. I don't know."

Later in the interview, Stein tried again, asking Moore to be specific and name which communities he was referring to. Moore said, "I was informed that there were. But if they’re not, it doesn’t matter. Sharia law incorporates Muslim law into the law. That’s not what we do. We do not punish people according to the Christian precepts of our faith -- so there’s a difference."
...
We found zero evidence of it. (We did not hear back from the Moore campaign.)

The office of the Illinois attorney general told PolitiFact that there are "no communities under Sharia law" in the state. Experts were equally dubious.

"Seriously, I've never heard of any such thing," said Nathan J. Brown, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies and a specialist on the rule of law in the Arab world. "I suspect the only accurate part of his statement is when he confesses, ‘I don't know.’ "

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na‘im, an Emory University law professor, was equally skeptical.

"I have not seen evidence of entire communities being run by Sharia law anywhere in the United States," An-Na‘im said. In fact, "it is legally impossible for any community anywhere in the United States to be ‘under Sharia law’ simply because for that to happen, Sharia law must be enacted as the law of the state, and that is unconstitutional under the First Amendment."

Specifically, the First Amendment "allows for accommodation but not establishment," said Cyra Akila Choudhury, a law professor at Florida International University. "So, private groups may choose to abide by religious law, such as Jews who abide by judgments made by rabbinical courts and Muslims who might abide by a decision made by their Sharia council or imam. But to assert that Sharia is being enforced by the state is entirely incorrect."

On August 17 2017 11:48 Plansix wrote:
He didn't call the mayor after a terrorist attack. When a Muslim attacked people with a knife, Trump flew out to see the family.

On August 17 2017 11:51 Plansix wrote:
https://twitter.com/mlcalderone/status/898000785149050880

They are the dumbest people alive. Like he ran a publication.

President Donald Trump’s decision to double down on his argument that “both sides” were to blame for the violent clashes at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was driven in part by his own anger — and his disdain for being told what to do.

Trump’s temper has been a constant force in this eight-month-old White House. He’s made policy decisions after becoming irritated with staffers and has escalated fights in the past few weeks with everyone from the Senate majority leader to the volatile dictator of North Korea.

The controversy over his response to the Charlottesville violence was no different. Agitated about being pressured by aides to clarify his first public statement, Trump unexpectedly unwound the damage control of the prior two days by assigning blame to the “alt-left” and calling some of the white supremacist protesters “very fine people.”

“In some ways, Trump would rather have people calling him racist than say he backed down the minute he was wrong,” one adviser to the White House said on Wednesday about Charlottesville. “This may turn into the biggest mess of his presidency because he is stubborn and doesn't realize how bad this is getting.”

For Trump, anger serves as a way to manage staff, express his displeasure or simply as an outlet that soothes him. Often, aides and advisers say, he’ll get mad at a specific staffer or broader situation, unload from the Oval Office and then three hours later act as if nothing ever occurred even if others still feel rattled by it. Negative television coverage and lawyers earn particular ire from him.

White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.

That latter trigger — of attempting to corral him — set in motion the past five tense days surrounding Charlottesville. On Saturday, the president failed to condemn white supremacists, who had marched through the city shouting anti-Semitic chants and assaulting counterprotesters. One of them killed a 32-year-old woman and injured roughly 20 others when he rammed his car at a high speed into a crowd.

Under intense pressure from aides and fellow Republican lawmakers, whose support the president needs to advance his agenda, Trump gave a more conciliatory speech on Monday. He clarified that he does not support specifically the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but then he backtracked to his more defiant stance just 24 hours later during an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower, meant to focus on infrastructure.

“I do think there is blame — yes, I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said, equating the actions of the white supremacists with the other protesters. Hate group leaders like David Duke saw the comments as yet another sign of the president’s support.

The majority of Trump’s top aides, with the notable exception of Steve Bannon, had been encouraging Trump to put to an end this damaging news cycle and talk that makes him seem sympathetic to groups that widely decry Jews, minorities and women. But the president did not want to be told what to do and seemed in high spirits on Tuesday evening, even as headlines streamed out about his seeming overtures to hate groups, according to one White House adviser who spoke to him.

The president “thinks he's right. He still thinks he's right,” an adviser said.

But in this White House, Trump’s anger isn’t just a side detail for stories about the various warring ideological factions, or who’s up and down in the West Wing. Instead, that anger and its rallying cry helped to fuel his rise to the White House, and now Trump uses it as a way to govern, present himself to the American public and even create policy.

In one stark example, the president’s dislike of being told what to do played a role in his decision to abruptly ban all transgender people from the military: a move opposed by his own defense secretary, James Mattis, and the head of the Coast Guard, who vowed not to honor the president’s decree.

The president had grown tired of White House lawyers telling him what he could and could not do on the ban and numerous other issues such as labor regulations, said one informal White House adviser. While multiple factors were in play with the transgender ban, Trump has grown increasingly frustrated by the lawyers’ calls for further study and caution, so he took it upon himself to tweet out the news of the ban, partly as a reminder to the lawyers who’s in charge, the adviser said.

“For Trump, there came a moment where he wanted to re-establish that he was going to do what he was going to do,” said the adviser, who knows both the president and members of the staff. “He let his lawyers know that it’s his job to make decisions and their job to figure out how to implement it.”

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday night: "The President is focused on what Americans care about — growing our economy, creating jobs, protecting our border and keeping our country safe — not tabloid gossip, which the media seems to care so much about."

Trump is by no means the only president to be driven by his temper at times. Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon all were famously known for their anger, while John F. Kennedy had a reputation for speaking sharply to staff, said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and clinical associate professor of public service at New York University. Nixon’s aides dealt with his vitriol by trying to build walls around him to protect the public from his moods as an internal set of West Wing checks and balances. It’s harder to set up those guardrails for the tweeter in chief.

“It’s not unusual to have presidents motivated by anger," Naftali added. "The difference with Trump is the lack of filter, so we’re seeing much more of his thinking than we ever saw with past presidents.”

Trump’s quickness to anger and the destructive aftermath have been a hallmark of his presidency from the very beginning. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer was widely mocked after he was forced to tussle with reporters in the briefing room and make factually inaccurate claims about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowds as the president fumed at the side-by-side comparisons with President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The Alt Right does not believe in the general supremacy of any race, nation, people, or sub-species. Every race, nation, people, and human sub-species has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, and possesses the sovereign right to dwell unmolested in the native culture it prefers.

The Alt Right is opposed to the rule or domination of any native ethnic group by another, particularly in the sovereign homelands of the dominated peoples. The Alt Right is opposed to any non-native ethnic group obtaining excessive influence in any society through nepotism, tribalism, or any other means.

The Alt Right is a philosophy that values peace among the various nations of the world and opposes wars to impose the values of one nation upon another as well as efforts to exterminate individual nations through war, genocide, immigration, or genetic assimilation.

The Alt Right understands that diversity + proximity = war.

The Alt Right is openly and avowedly nationalist. It supports all nationalisms and the right of all nations to exist, homogeneous and unadulterated by foreign invasion and immigration.

The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Graeco-Roman legacy.

TL;DR: The Alt Right is a Western ideology that believes in science, history, reality, and the right of a genetic nation to exist and govern itself in its own interests.

The patron saint of conservatives, Russell Kirk, wrote: "The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal."

This is no longer true, assuming it ever was. The great line of demarcation in modern politics is now a division between men and women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage. The Alt Right understands that the former will always lose to the latter in the end, because the former is subject to change.

On August 17 2017 08:52 IgnE wrote:
you mentioned "pluralism" as one of the pillars of western civilization so im just hoping that one of your major disagreements with the alt right is this fixation on "homeland" and "ethnic" homogeneity. unless you meant pluralism in the strictly narrow sense of division of governmental powers.

cultural homogeneity seems more like the xdaunt brand of fascism. properly oedipal but enlightened enough to not worry about the fiction of race

On August 17 2017 12:38 geript wrote:

This is bullshit though. Like I don't expect orangeface to a normal politician. I don't expect him to reach out to someone who wasn't in any way harmed by the incited nazi violence in his city. Like if we're going to condemn Trump, let's do it for good reasons: like promoting racism, destroying the environment, blaming his lack of support staff on congress when congress can't even deny nominations that haven't been put forth, etc.

On August 17 2017 12:37 Plansix wrote:
Destroy the plurality and diversity that has shaped our history to protect nothing. As a fifth generation white Christian, people like Vox are the antithesis of America values. And do no accuse me of not understanding the simplistic writings of Vox fucking day. I understood them in 2014 and understand them now. It is just the repacking white first dogma that has plagued this country since its inception. The sad part is that people think this is original. But then again, our public education system has been criminally neglected for decades.

On August 17 2017 12:24 xDaunt wrote:
So let me start by addressing why Vox Day's 14th Point ("The Alt Right believes we must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children.") is not about white supremacy.

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.