US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9717

On January 18 2018 11:39 Plansix wrote:

They had to really crack down once the Catholics started showing up. And the “Southern Europeans.” The era when Italians were not white. And the Irish where of “inferior stock.”

On January 18 2018 11:54 Sermokala wrote:

And lets not even talk about the Polish, you can say polak on television and no one will even flinch.

On January 18 2018 11:26 Plansix wrote:

Literally all my ancestors who immigrated couldn’t read or write. This guy would be throwing rocks at my Irish great grandfather as he got off the boat, racist clown he is.

On January 18 2018 12:25 IgnE wrote:


Yeah we need more illiterate immigrants to take the jobs we have that don't require literacy.

On January 18 2018 12:57 mozoku wrote:
Except nobody is proposing we bar immigration wholesale from any country really, so you wrote your extended example addressing no one.

The Times editorial board has been sharply critical of the Trump presidency, on grounds of policy and personal conduct. Not all readers have been persuaded. In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close. Tomorrow we’ll present some letters from readers who voted for Mr. Trump but are now disillusioned, and from those reacting to today’s letters and our decision to provide Trump voters this platform.

To the Editor:

Donald Trump has succeeded where Barack Obama failed. The economy is up, foreign tyrants are afraid, ISIS has lost most of its territory, our embassy will be moved to Jerusalem and tax reform is accomplished. More than that, Mr. Trump is learning, adapting and getting savvier every day. Entitlement reform is next! Lastly, the entrenched interests in Washington, which have done nothing but glad-hand one another, and both political parties are angry and afraid.

Who knew that all it would take to make progress was vision, chutzpah and some testosterone?

STEVEN SANABRIA
OAKDALE, CALIF.

To the Editor:

I voted against Hillary Clinton more than I voted for Donald Trump. That said, President Trump has exceeded my wildest expectations. Yes, he is embarrassing. Yes, he picks unnecessary fights. But he also pushed tax reform through, has largely defeated ISIS in Iraq, has named a number of solid conservative judges, has prioritized American citizens over illegal immigrants, has gotten us out of several bad international agreements, has removed a number of wasteful regulations, is putting real pressure on North Korea and Iran, has reined in a number of out-of-control agencies, and so on and so on.

I loved George W. Bush, but he failed on policy over and over again. If it takes putting up with Mr. Trump’s brash ways to see things get done, that is a deal I’m willing to accept. To be honest, I’m not sure he would have accomplished what he has so far without being an unrelenting public bully.

Continue reading the main story
JASON PECK
HOLTSVILLE, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I voted for Donald Trump and, considering the alternative, I would do so again. Newsflash: Not all Trump voters are Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.” Many of us are well-informed and highly educated, and we are weary of the Democrats’ tiresome focus on identity politics, class warfare, and disparagement of corporations and the “wealthy.”

Opinion polls give Mr. Trump a low rating, and I would, too, for character, personality and temperament. But I would give him high marks for policies and programs that are stimulating the private sector, which, after all, pays the bills for the Democrats’ extravagant welfare programs. And because of Mr. Trump we have an education secretary who actually cares more about educating children than appeasing the teachers’ unions.

Even more important, we desperately needed a seismic change in the pusillanimous foreign policy pursued during the Obama years, which emboldened our adversaries, including China, Russia, North Korea and Middle East militants. I also support a more robust approach to border security and illegal immigration, which could still entail legal residency for law-abiding Dreamers but not an undeserved pathway to citizenship.

DAVID MACNEIL
CHATHAM, N.J.

To the Editor:

Yes, I was a Trump voter. There, I’ve said it. Though I am subjecting myself to derision, I think that President Trump has performed well policywise. Changes for the good of our country in both foreign and domestic affairs have happened under his watch.

Much of the media, as the hotbed of hatred against Mr. Trump, has pushed me more toward him than his social behavior has done the opposite.

SONIA SCHWARTZ
VALLEY STREAM, N.Y.

On January 18 2018 13:05 KwarK wrote:

If you refuse to educate yourself about the basics of the topic under discussion then we cannot have a meaningful dialogue here.

On January 18 2018 11:36 mozoku wrote:

I did not, and I'd like to make a slight correction that all of my comments were about the quote in the Twitter post. I never made any statement about the content of the video, as I'd never watched it. I explicitly stated that in my follow-up post on the topic.

Where did he say that a "blacks on drugs are worse than white on drugs" and what does "worse" even mean? How do you arrive at "racism" from strawmanning the guy's quote, and have it hinge on a (conveniently) horribly ambiguous word which you make no attempt to clarify?

On January 18 2018 13:11 Danglars wrote:
https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/953765337371115521

NYT

Good exposure for NYT readers, provided they don't throw it away

On January 18 2018 14:25 Plansix wrote:

One of like 20 of those run in the last 12 months. It is an ongoing theme. Sadly, I don't see it being reciprocated in right leaning media.

The one theme is constant in all the articles, Trump supporters do not like being told about the negative impact Trump's policies have. And blame the media for any negative feelings they have about supporting him.

Granted we have the most unpresidential president of our time. Crude, rude, clueless dude — but I believe, with the help of his friends, he’s stumbling through one of the most effective presidencies in memory.

As the Sonny LoSpecchio character wisely concluded in the movie “A Bronx Tale,” it’s better to be feared than loved. My hope is for our enemies to fear Donald Trump and for his domestic opponents to realize he’s on their side.

On January 18 2018 13:19 m4ini wrote:


Nah mate, fuck off. This here is what you said.



The quote in that twitter post was a literal quote. That's literally what he said. Not paraphrased or emphasised. It doesn't matter if you responded to the video or the tweet: it's the fucking same thing. Word for word. The same words i used.

Not watching the video btw conveniently didn't seem to stop you from accusing me of strawmanning (makes sense). You then go ahead and compare it, as if it were somehow surprising or outrageous, to some dude screaming "fuck white supremacists".

You're talking about "pushing reasonableness aside", while literally being an idiot. There's nothing reasonable in a racist statement, and here's the kicker: there's nothing unreasonable screaming "fuck white supremacists". Isn't that interesting. Here's the hint: white supremacists are a group, not a race. White supremacy isn't a genetic flaw. If the politician would've said "fuck black panthers", sure. Fuck em, i'll join the chorus.

It's just very "interesting" (and by that, i mean telling) that you can't even tell the difference. You're actually worse than a racist, you're the guy behind the racist trying to justify it/play it down.

On January 09 2018 16:08 m4ini wrote:


Are you trying to generalise a stupid statement (black people are poor, hence more prone to alcohol addiction), or the blatantly racist one (blacks on drugs are worse than white on drugs because genetics)?

Just making sure.

Unless of course you want to tie social problems to genetics, too. In that case you make a consistent point, albeit a retarded one.

edit: i wouldn't actually call the first one stupid necessarily, if you argue in the context that you chose. That's not the context that dude chose though. He's (very clearly) not talking about social stigmas etc - he's talking (literally) genetics.

On January 09 2018 16:22 mozoku wrote:
Where did he say that a "blacks on drugs are worse than white on drugs" and what does "worse" even mean? How do you arrive at "racism" from strawmanning the guy's quote, and have it hinge on a (conveniently) horribly ambiguous word which you make no attempt to clarify?

I didn't watch the video, so maybe I missed something but the quote itself isn't unusually terrible by any objective standard. The outrage, video notwithstanding, appears to be purely a function of the racial context.

Compare this to the much more muted (i.e. none) outrage, back in the summer, when Nancy Pelosi labeled a free speech rally organized by a guy who is publicly on YouTube screaming "Fuck White Supremacists!" as a white supremacist rally. By the way, this rally ended up being cancelled by the organizer out of concerns of violence by counter-protesters (presumably spurred on by Pelosi).

Racism shouldn't be tolerated, but the aggressively "progressive" camp seems willing to push side all reasonableness in the name of this strange religion of zealous anti-racism.

On January 09 2018 16:32 m4ini wrote:
"Where did he say what you said he said in the video i didn't watch anyways, you're wrong".

Really?

It's a fucking 2 minute video. Why on earth would i make the effort to explain anything if you can't be arsed watching the clip in the first place?

"Why do you think drugs were outlawed in the 30s? One of the reasons why, and i hate to say it, [..] they were, uhm, basically users, basically, uhm, responded the worst on those drugs - it's because their, uh, character make-up, th-their genetics and that."

Yep. I totally misrepresented the statement you didn't watch in the first place.

edit: apart from the obvious racism, it's even funnier in that context. Who would've thought that a black person, you know, the people you actively, systematically suppressed and exploited "at the time", has a higher chance to go ballistic once unhinged. I'm not even sure it'd count as mental gymnastics to arrive at the conclusion that character and genetic preposition are to blame for a "worse drug response".


I actually agree. There's a shitstorm currently about H&M and a black kid wearing the wrong hoodie or something, that's idiotic.

An old fuck who grew up in a time where blacks weren't even allowed to vote or marry white gals or whatever arguing that blacks respond worse to drugs because genetics, that's a different story. Now, if it were your grampa, i wouldn't care - but if a politician openly points out his thoughts about blacks and it turns out to be a whitewashed view that was very widespread in the 50s, then we need to talk.

Democrats Are Repudiating FDR’s Precedent of Détente With Russia

By criminalizing alleged “contacts with the Kremlin”—and by demonizing Russia itself—today’s Democrats are becoming the party of the new and more perilous Cold War.

And yet today, post–Soviet Russia and the United States are in a new and even more dangerous Cold War, one provoked in no small measure by the Democratic Party, from President Clinton’s winner-take-all policies toward Russia in the 1990s to President Obama’s refusal to cooperate significantly with Moscow against international terrorism, particularly in Syria; the role of his administration in the illegal overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych in 2014 (a coup by any name); and the still shadowy role of Obama’s intelligence chiefs, not only those at the FBI, in instigating Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump early in 2016. (Obama’s so-called “reset” of Russia policy was a kind of pseudo-détente and doomed from the outset. It asked of Moscow, and got, far more than the Obama administration offered; was predicated on the assumption that Putin, then prime minister, would not return to the presidency; and was terminated by Obama himself when he broke his promise to his reset partner, then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, by overthrowing Libyan leader Gaddafi.) It should also be remembered that the current plan to “modernize” US nuclear weapons by making them smaller, more precise, and thus more “usable” was launched by the Obama administration.

Which brings Cohen to President Trump, who, whether Trump fully understood it or not, sought to be the fourth Republican president to initiate a policy of détente—or “cooperate with Russia”—in times of perilous Cold War. In the past, a “dovish” wing of the Democratic Party supported détente, but not this time. Russiagate allegations, still mostly a Democratic project, have been leveled by leading Democrats and their mainstream media against Trump every time he has tried to develop necessary cooperative agreements with Russian President Putin, characterizing those initiatives as disloyal to America, even “treasonous.” Still more, the same Democratic actors have increasingly suggested that normal “contacts” with Russia at various levels—a practice traditionally encouraged by pro-détente US leaders—are evidence of “collusion with the Kremlin.” (A particularly egregious example is General Michael Flynn’s “contacts” with a Russian ambassador on behalf of President-elect Trump, a long-standing tradition now being criminalized.) Still worse, criticism of US policy toward Russia since the 1990s, which Cohen and a few other Russia specialists have often expressed, is being equated with “colluding” with Putin’s views, as in the case of a few words by Carter Page—that is, also as disloyal.

Until recently, Democratic Russiagate allegations were motived primarily by a need to explain away and take revenge for Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election. Now, however, they are being codified into a Democratic Party program for escalated and indefinite Cold War against Russia, presumably to be a major plank in the party’s appeal to voters in 2018 and 2020, as evidenced by two recent publications: a flagrantly cold-warfare article co-authored by Joseph Biden, who is clearly already campaigning for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs; and an even more expansive “report” produced by Democratic Senator Ben Cardin purporting to show that Putin is attacking not only America, as he purportedly did in 2016, but democracies everywhere in the world and that America must respond accordingly. Both are recapitulations of primitive American (and Soviet) “propaganda” that characterized the onset of the early stage of the post-1948 Cold War: full of unbalanced prosecutorial narratives, selective and questionable “facts,” Manichean accounts of Moscow’s behavior, and laden with ideological, not analytical, declarations. Indeed, both suggest that “Putin’s Russia” is an even more fearsome threat than was Soviet Communist Russia. Tellingly, both implicitly deny that Russia has any legitimate national interests abroad and, with strong Russophobic undertones, that it is a nation worthy in any way. Both preclude, of course, any rethinking of US policy toward Russia except for making it more aggressive. These latter approaches to Soviet Russia were eventually tempered or abandoned during the era of détente for the sake of diplomacy, relegated mainly to fringe groups. Now they are becoming the proposed policies of the Democratic Party.

I've looked over it again now, and I'll agree, having watched the video due to so many requests, that the statement is racist. I sort of guessed he said that quote haphazardly and without much thought, but meant something more along the lines of what I posted.

On January 18 2018 12:42 KwarK wrote:
The claim that barring people from "shithole" countries is some kind of attempt to move to a merit based system is nonsense. A merit based system may result in more people from first world countries in northern Europe than they do from Africa but you don't create a merit based system by taking broad trends about the average applicant and using those to arbitrarily narrow the field.

It would be no different from arguing
1. The IT field is dominated by men
2. Therefore the average man may statistically be more qualified as an IT professional than the average woman
3. Therefore women are a "shit" sex when it comes to IT and should be disallowed from applying to IT jobs
4. This isn't sexist, it's just a merit based system, the statistics don't lie, we just want the best possible IT professionals

Any idiot could tell you that a merit based job application would be open to everyone, even if there was a trend in the people selected based upon their merit. A gendered bias in output does not justify a sexist rule limiting inputs. And yet people are defending the pivot to "it's not a racist rule, we're just trying to select by merit". You're not selecting by merit if you disallow people from "shithole" countries from applying in the first place, you're selecting by race.

All you're doing is stating that you think the most meritorious individual from a "shithole" country is less desirable than the least meritorious individual from Norway. And that can only be explained by racism.