ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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Xavderion wrote:

Those articles prove nothing, they're either hearsay or fake news. And you're spreading fake news about his father.

T/N: "I have completely closed my mind to any possibility of any bad news about Trump. I have absolutely zero interest in hearing any of it, and will reject it out of hand without further thought. I'm not interested in debate; I am a sycophant."

Sadly this is increasingly common within the republican party. It's such a convenient way of arguing, too! It's a shame it's batshit crazy from top to bottom.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Racism is a form of stupid. For instance, let's say me and a racist were tasked with sorting people within a large group into tiers of intelligence. I would have each person take a standardized IQ test; the racist would sort the group by ethnicity, ranking them in some way (e.g. East Asians > Whites > Hispanics > other > Blacks). I am thoroughly convinced that my method, while perhaps not perfect, would grounp people better around their actual intelligence than the racists' method. Because my understanding is closer to reality than the racists', my way is smarter.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It wasn't intended as bait when I wrote it, but now that you've said what you've said, I feel an overwhelming anticipation in the hope that you'll bite.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

So for the first time in a long time Congress did a thing: they passed a bipartisan bill calling for an end to US military interventionism in Yemen.

Trump vetoed it yesterday (it's 1AM where I am, so by "yesterday" I mean today, kind of). Just when you thought they were finally driven off, looks like neoconservative military-interventionist advisors have finally seized the ear of the President.

Of course, whenever Congress actually does something right, you can bet your ass it's not by a veto-proof majority.

Very disappointed in our President right now, when I wish I could have felt proud of our legislature.

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RPGlitch wrote:

Business insider gives you a link, right on that filibuster comment, as to why it wouldn't and didn't pass in the Senate.

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You are not right to say it was political infighting between republicans.

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Except by that logic, so does legal immigration. So does giving birth. So does literally any action taken that increases the population density of any given area, even if the population in question is statistically far less likely to commit crimes than the native population.

You are forgetting legal immigration...is legal.

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Again, why is talking about total crime bullshit? And why divide it by another statistic to make sense of it?

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Arguing about public policy with someone whose anti-immigration is always uniquely frustrating, because your opponent has a trump card they wouldn’t otherwise be able to use in any normal debate; which is to say, “What if a whole gigantic population of people I don’t like simply vanished, taking their problems with them?” Take, for example, the issue of mass school shootings in the U.S. This is a complicated problem, and I might posit a variety of contributing factors that need to be examined: easy availability of firearms, lack of access to mental health support, toxic masculinity, the stultifying atmosphere of U.S. schools, and the attendant sense of powerlessness this creates in young people, etc. Now, imagine my opponent simply says to me, “This has gone too far. The problem is teenage boys. No more teenage boys. Get rid of them.” I might reply that there are a lot of teenage boys in the U.S., and most of them are not shooting anybody! And maybe the ones who are disposed to shoot people could be prevented from doing so if we reached them early enough! “No,” my opponent says, “that’s an unacceptable risk. There will be no more teenage shooters if we get rid of the teenagers. They have no right to be here. Their parents were foolish to have had them in the first place.” And of course, this is strictly correct; so what can I say?

This is approximately how it feels to argue about immigration. I can agree with Murray that somebody murdering a journalist over a Muhammad cartoon is bad, or that someone plowing a truck into a crowd in the name of Allah is bad, or that the mass groping of women at a rock concert is bad. I can point out that these awful events have complex causes, and that attempting to prevent future incidents of the same kind will require a lot of thoughtful community work. Murray will simply say that all of the people who committed the above-cited crimes are immigrants or descendants of immigrants; therefore, the problem is immigration, and the solution is to restrict immigration. If there are no immigrants, there will be no murders or sexual assaults by immigrants. Problem solved.

If this line of thinking sounds reasonable to you, I am not sure I will get far persuading you otherwise. Extremist attacks, like school shootings, are an infrequent but terrifying phenomenon with a variety of social causes, and treating millions of Muslims (or immigrants generally) as somehow guilty of terrorism by proxy is not a proposition that any morally serious person could entertain. Extremism aside, I don’t much like to get into fights about whether immigrants commit more or fewer crimes than native-born people: I’ve written previously about how difficult it is to collect reliable data on this topic, and how much I dislike the underlying assumption that it is ever wise to treat demography as a proxy for criminality. Murray does bring up some clearly bogus figures: for example, that Sweden’s rape rate (thanks, he implies, to predatory migrants) is higher than Somalia’s. As countless weary commentators have repeatedly explained, Sweden’s reported rape rate is high because Sweden counts more forms of sexual assault as “rapes” than most countries, and because every separate instance of assault by a single perpetrator is counted as an individual case; to say nothing of the fact that there are comparatively fewer cultural barriers to reporting sexual assault in Sweden, relative to other countries internationally. The fact that Murray cited this figure without caveat is clear evidence of his bad faith.

That said, I myself make no assumptions about whether there are any crimes that immigrants or certain subsets of the immigrant population commit at higher rates than the native population. If it turned out to be true, or not true, I would be equally unsurprised. On the one hand, you might posit that immigrants are likely to commit fewer crimes because they don’t want to risk deportation. On the other hand, you might posit that many immigrants come from conflict zones or areas of extreme deprivation, and are now living apart from their family units and familiar community structures, and that this makes it more likely that they would commit crimes. (Data out of Germany show that the crime rate is quite low by international standards, but that non-Germans are questioned as suspects at a rate higher than their representation in the population… which is an inherently difficult figure to unpack. It could mean that immigrants are more likely to be suspected of crimes, or it could mean that immigrants are committing more crimes, or both.) Murray, like most anti-immigration commentators, can sow a lot of uncertainty about the scale of immigrant-perpetrated sexual assault by recounting anecdotes about women who were reluctant to reveal that their attackers were migrants, or government officials who were initially reluctant to believe stories of sex trafficking rings run by immigrants, thus implying that there may be mountains of unreported assaults looming in the background. I do think that because sexual assault is routinely underreported (and, even when reported, often not taken seriously) it is extremely hard to develop a clear picture of what’s actually going on in any country. I don’t think our intuitions are very reliable guides here, and for me, differential crimes rates across immigrant populations, even if they existed, would not be a reason for an otherwise stable and prosperous country to refuse to admit immigrants, any more than I think the fact that men commit exponentially more rapes and murders than women is a reason to precautionarily exile all men to a Martian penal colony.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Or some basic understanding of why, when the republican senate passes a clean CR via a unanimous vote and the republican house rejects it because the republican president is going to veto it, it is not somehow the minority party's fault.

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Y'know I threatened mocking laughter but this is honestly just sad. Almost as sad as the realization that you will probably vote in the next election. And possibly even breed.

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This makes literally zero difference to your argument. Some legal immigrants commit crimes. Therefore legal immigration leads to crime. See why it's such a stupid fucking argument?

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Now, there are obviously caveats (if you significantly increase the population but do nothing to hire more cops to accommodate that population, you'll run into trouble, because the raw number of crimes actually does matter compared to the raw number of cops, but this is because it's important to keep the number of cops proportional to the population), but anyone making the insanely stupid argument that illegal immigrants cause more crime because "more people = more crime" needs to get their head checked.

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1. A town with 100 people living there that sees, on average, 1 violent crimes every year.
2. A town with 1,000 people living there that sees, on average, 20 violent crimes every year
3. A city with 10,000,000 people living there that sees, on average, 400 violent crimes every year

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1. A town with 100 people living there now has 50 extra illegal immigrants and sees 2 crimes per year.
2. A small town with 1,000 people now has extra 500 illegal immigrant living there that sees, on average, 50 violent crimes every year
3. A city with 10,000,000 people has 10,000 illegal immigrants living there that sees, on average, 600 violent crimes every year.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

Also, for consideration, an excerpt from one of my favorite magazines.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/01/the-death-of-europe-has-been-greatly-exaggerated

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

So for the first time in a long time Congress did a thing: they passed a bipartisan bill calling for an end to US military interventionism in Yemen.

Trump vetoed it yesterday (it's 1AM where I am, so by "yesterday" I mean today, kind of). Just when you thought they were finally driven off, looks like neoconservative military-interventionist advisors have finally seized the ear of the President.

Of course, whenever Congress actually does something right, you can bet your ass it's not by a veto-proof majority.

Very disappointed in our President right now, when I wish I could have felt proud of our legislature.