US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1572

On June 25 2019 06:33 Ayaz2810 wrote:


That's why I appreciate this thread so much. I have not had a conversation with a Trump supporter face to face that has been had in good faith and based on facts. Literally 100% of those conversations ended with the other person using the word "snowflake" or making a "wahhhhh" baby noise to dismiss whatever I'm saying. funnily enough, 100% of those conversations also involved Hillary, emails, and Obama. They're like a fucking stupid inbred hivemind.

In an attempt to justify Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s absurd comparison of American detention facilities to Holocaust-era concentration camps, many figures within the media have shared a viral video clip of a legal hearing in which a Department of Justice attorney debates a panel of judges as to what constitutes “sanitary conditions.” The majority of the shares were of a version put out by NowThis News, which claimed that the video shows a Trump administration official arguing that “children don’t need soap, toothbrushes, or beds to be ‘safe and sanitary’ while in Border Patrol custody.” The claim has led to several days of outrage, and has been used repeatedly as evidence that the current administration is being intentionally cruel to migrant children. Countless journalists, along with clickbait outlets such as The Hill and the Huffington Post, have highlighted the video inside this framing.

Unsurprisingly, it is not that simple. Indeed, the hearing in the video was related not to actions taken by the Trump administration, but to a challenge of a 2017 ruling that the CBP under the Obama administration had violated the Flores Settlement agreement with its treatment of children in custody. The judge in that case cited specific infractions that she felt were in violation of the “safe and sanitary” requirement under the Flores agreement and recommended a special monitor be appointed to ensure these facilities were complying with the original standard. The DOJ attorney in the video, Sarah Fabian, was not arguing that the United States should decline to provide those items to children, but rather that the Flores Settlement agreement didn’t specifically require those items. The notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit judges disagreed with this argument, preferring to read Flores narrowly. Fabian has been arguing similar cases on behalf of the Justice Department for years; that is her job. Some of her legal arguments have upset immigration advocates before. But they have never led to this type of media coverage, or to the claim that her fulfilling her legal role is indicative of a moral shortcoming.

INB4 Obama did it too. Not true. They're here illegally! Not true. Dems won't give more money. It's their fault! Not true. It's not a concentration camp because people aren't being killed! Not true. They're human traffickers/drug smugglers/terrorists/cartel members! Not true.

I'm so fucking fed up I don't even know what to do anymore. Do I just stop engaging with morons who keep regurgitating the lies they are told by right-wing media and Facebook?

On June 25 2019 06:40 Gorsameth wrote:
When Hillary's deplorables was in the news I once made the statement that a significant part of the electorate are simple lost and cannot be saved from indoctrination and their own stupidity.
Some people got really mad at that.
I stand by it. Some people are to far gone and can no longer be reasoned with.

On June 25 2019 08:15 Nebuchad wrote:


Here's my usual answer to this:

A lot of the contradictions that we see in the conservative logic stem from our assumption that they agree with the liberal values that they claim they agree with. I would contend that it's much more likely that they actually don't. It's not that they are failed liberals who are somehow too dumb to follow logical arguments, it's that they just aren't (classical) liberals, and they're saying they are because that's politically correct.

On June 25 2019 06:09 IgnE wrote:


So you think that the accusations about breaking campaign finance laws and about committing perjury in order to obtain citizenship are accusations about breaking fundamentally unjust laws?

On June 25 2019 08:30 Gorsameth wrote:
The group Ayaz2810 complains about are not just logical contradictions, its a complete indoctrination where basic facts are no longer relevant, regardless of any thought on liberal values and who can only regurgitate the pr lines they have been fed by spindoctors with 0 critical thought.

On June 25 2019 06:27 IyMoon wrote:


My cousin is hardcore MAGA, and everytime I try to point out flaws in his arguments he calls me "some name" liberals

So I have just resorted to calling him a dumbass instead of being nice.... it actually works a bit better than being nice did

On June 25 2019 08:46 Nebuchad wrote:


If we go into details on the arguments and examples I expect you'll find a lot of the irrationality is based on liberal values. But yes there will also be some level of indoctrination involved, especially if there is a component of religious morality.

Here's some nonsense I heard irl recently: in the context of telling me that he wouldn't accept his kid being gay, some dude that I had never met before that day told me that homosexuality is bad because it's like loving yourself. You have to love someone who is different from you, of a different sex, otherwise it's narcissism.

So let's look at the rationality of that claim, it obviously doesn't work. Two people who have the same sexual organs can, indeed, be different, and they are. It's also hypocritical because the person who said this to me is going to date people who are very similar to them in a bunch of ways despite being female; probably white, probably far right, probably from Switzerland. Most definitely cis. They would never engage in a date with a girl and think: hold on, that girl is cis, I'm also cis, that means it's narcissism.

Here's the thing, how dumb would that person have to be to not realize that they have a different standard for gay people than they do for themselves, or that men aren't all exact copies of themselves? The level of idiocy is hard for me to imagine. It's much easier for me to assume that they just don't believe people shouldn't be discriminated against based on their identity, but they can't just say that, so they come up with some nonsense instead. Then we receive that nonsense and instead of thinking "That person wants to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation, they actively want straight people to have more privileges and more rights than gay people", we think "That person is very bad at logic".

On June 25 2019 07:41 Danglars wrote:
I haven't had a conversation with a liberal about the border that didn't diminish Obama's execution of the same policies...

On June 25 2019 07:08 KwarK wrote:

You appreciate this thread because you get to have more of the same in an easily accessible online text based format?

On June 25 2019 09:38 Ayaz2810 wrote:


Aaaaaand you lost me. While a shitty thing to do, what the Clinton/Bush/Obama admins did was not even remotely comparable. The fact that you even say that, when you know better, kind of illustrates my point from earlier. This did not start with Obama, it has nothing to do with Obama, and the set of facts are completely fucking different from when he was in office. Nope nope nope nope.

EDIT: Actually, after thinking for a minute, it WASN'T a shitty thing to do under Obama if we're being specific. Their detention time was nothing compared to this, and for the most part, people were only separated to verify identity among other legal concerns. This is like comparing apples to my asshole.

EDIT EDIT: "This is one of the biggest misconceptions I see on social media. Family separations for the purposes of deterrence do not predate the Trump administration. Before Trump, including under President Obama, immigrant families were only separated if border agents believed that a child was in danger, such as when they suspected that a person claiming to be a parent was actually a human trafficker, or if the parent had an extensive criminal record that could impact their ability to keep the child safe.

It’s true that border agents have always had discretion in deciding who is a danger to a child and who is not, but interviews that my colleagues and I have conducted with career officials (as opposed to political appointees) at federal immigration agencies suggest that separations are far more common today than they were under any previous administration. The ongoing separations are being tracked as part of a federal lawsuit out of the Southern District of California, for those who are interested. I’m linking here again to a recent story I reported with my colleague Miriam Jordan, which helps to explain: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/us/migrant-family-separations-border.html"

Caitlan Dickerson - NY Times Reddit AMA

I have not had a conversation with a Trump supporter face to face that has been had in good faith and based on facts.

On June 25 2019 11:14 Danglars wrote:
The great influx of family units claiming asylum was created by Trump’s separation policy?

Secondarily, it’s as if Jen Johnson (Obama admin) didn’t want to detain families together, and courts declare that to be impossible. (NYT)

A year has passed since President Donald Trump signed an executive order ostensibly ending his controversial policy of broadly separating immigrant families at the southern border and a federal judge ordered the government to reunify more than 2,800 children it had removed from their parents. The judge allowed the government to continue separating families if the parent posed a danger to the child or had a serious criminal record or gang affiliation. But no guidelines were imposed.

As a result, hundreds continue to be removed from their parents — often, advocates say, for unclear reasons or with little apparent justification.

More than 700 children were taken from their parents or, in a few cases, from other relatives between June 2018 and May 2019, according to the most recent data the government provided to the American Civil Liberties Union in the ongoing federal court case overseeing family separations. They are placed in federal shelters or with foster parents until they can be reunified or resettled with relatives or sponsors. Sometimes they languish for months in federal care.

“In the last few months these types of separations have risen drastically,” said Lee Gelernt, lead lawyer for the ACLU case. “The government is trying to drive a truck through what was supposed to be a very narrow exception.”

He said many cases involve children as young as toddlers whose parents are accused of criminal history as minor as a traffic violation.

“The government is unilaterally deciding parents are a danger and then separating them without informing the children’s facilities that the child has been separated, without telling the parent the basis of the separation, and without affording any due process to the family to contest the separation,” Gelernt said.

...

Since the court ordered that the government reunite parents and children immediately after adults served any criminal sentence, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has appeared to prosecute far fewer parents traveling with their children for entering illegally. Instead the government has ramped up separations by alleging the child could be at risk or the parent is a criminal.

According to federal data released to the Houston Chronicle by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, officials listed a parent’s gang membership or criminal history as the reason for separating 65 percent of about 400 children between the June 20 executive order and March 2019. In only 3 percent of cases, according to that data, were children described as separated because of questions about the parent’s relationship to the child or issues of child safety. The remainder were mostly removed after parents were prosecuted for entering illegally or returning after being deported.

Attorneys and advocates handling such cases said the government often uses claims that would not be permitted to remove American children from their parents — relying on minor crimes, questionable accusations of gang membership, and unverified safety concerns. They say the process needs far more oversight, and that there is no systematic way to inform advocates and attorneys that a separation has taken place.

“When it happened under prior administrations there were usually strong indicators of real and legitimate child welfare concerns,” said Lisa Koop, associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center, which is representing several separated parents. “What we’re seeing right now is of an entirely different character. These are gratuitous separations.”

Golden McCarthy, an attorney with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, said the number of separated children in shelters has been rising steadily since January.

"They are carving out the judge's exceptions to separate more children," she said.