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@IlDiavolo
Ok, I see you're more fked up than I thought.
*Yawn*. Can't refute anything I've said so you turn to personal attacks. How surprising.
So, you're basically saying that this perception is natural.
To some extent, yes it is. Why do you find this surprising? Do you not think we are wired to find certain traits of individuals desirable? Do you know what the golden ratio is? Do you not find it odd that this ratio is so reliably predictive? If beauty wasn't largely natural why would this be the case?
If you refuse to acknowledge the natural you fail to understand how we got here in the first place. Again, our history wasn't an accident.
We've been born to be racists, there is nothing to do about that. Right?
I didn't say that genius. In fact this is the entire point of talking about racism - to recognize personal biases buried deep within us and bring to the forefront of our conciseness how they manifest, thereby enabeling us to deal with them. Recognizing these natural intuitions shared by most people also helps us to understand what black people have to deal with every single day giving us a better understanding of what they're talking about when they use terms like micro aggressions. They don't get to pretend these factors aren't real like you do, they're living them.
To me it's pretty evident, children just copy adult's behaviour. They refuse the black doll because it's a perception they grasp from their surroundings.
What about a black child growing up in a black family teaches them that the black doll is the bad one?
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@WyIted
I swear, as a participant in this platform,that I will judge debates based solely on argument quality,not on personal belief, identity, or allegiance to any group or ideology.I will vote for the side that made the stronger case,even if I disagree with their conclusion.
My biggest issue with debating on this site. I have no issue losing, but I find it really irritating when someone votes against me cause they didn't find what I had to say convincing to them with no reason why my opponent was any better. Like bro, maybe I could have addressed your road blocks if I was debating you, but I wasn't. I can only respond to the rebuttals I was given to work with.
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@IlDiavolo
I just explained to you why this is not about what happened in the past. Did you read a word I wrote? Cause judging by your response it doesn't appear so.You talked about legacy which is inexorably connected to history.
I talked about how that history effects them today. This post I am responding to was written in the past, so technically that's history too.
You mentioned black people are viewed as inferiors, but this is just a perception based on what they know about their history spread in movies, music and documentaries.
It's basic human nature, coupled with the reality of living in a multiracial society.
We don't judge people we don't know based on their insides, we have no access to that. So what we base everything on initially, which tends to dictate what we will absorb about them, is their appearence. Pretty privilege is a real thing and studies have proven that over and over again.
Black people are inherently considered less desirable in every way by the majority of society, even within the black community. In black families children often come out with different skin tones, and it is well known that even in their own families, darker skin children get treated worse than lighter skin children. It's biological programming, and it's not limited to any group of humans.
Even in the sex industry, it is well known that black women cannot charge as much as white women. They are not considered desirable.
In many workplaces, there are appearence and hygene and standards ensuring their employees are properly groomed. This in many cases, prohibits black people from wearing their hair the way it grows out of their heads. Only recently have laws in many states been passed outlawing these practices.
This isn't about the movies. Our history and the historical mistreatment of black people didn't come about by accident, it's baked into human nature.
It's the legacy they recognized, but it's hard to believe that society sees black people as inferior, that's stupid since several blacks have shown that they can achieve what white people could.
Anecdotes are irrelevant. I can show you a story of a guy who jumped out of a plane and lived, doesn't mean we no longer need parachutes.
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@WyIted
for centuries that they are less than human and therefore not deserving of basic rights. That is a view that largely remains unchanged today as evidence by people like you.It's literally not accepted anywhere in polite society .
Ok, sure. I was being hyperbolic, what has remain unchanged is the fact that black people are still largely seen as inferior, which was the point of bringing up the doll study. It's subconscious, and if it's baked into black people it for damn sure is baked into everyone else. So again, the main point here is that the mistreatment of black people historically isn't about circumstance, but about qualities they still hold and are still viewed negatively by society. For any black person who has to live everyday with this reality, you can't just brush it off. It is your entire existence. And it is this very reality of their existence that the n word is weaponizing against them.
to not internalize it takes serious work to which many black people are unable to overcomeDon't be a dick. Black people are not weak and pathetic they can overcome these things.
Overcoming what I have been describing is a massive undertaking, to classify everyone unable to do so as weak and pathetic is absurd. We're not talking about a paper cut. People spend their entire lives traumatized because they got made fun of as a child and it shapes who they are and how they see themselves for the rest of their lives, and you think this is easy?
anyone can demand a stoic worldview from themselves and infuse a warrior mentality.
Or... Instead of expecting everyone to be a warrior for the dignity of their own existence how about we just start treating black people with basic respect and human decency, starting by not using the n word?
Concentrated poverty doesn't account for the entire disparities here but enough of it so we know what issue to attack to improve society.
I don't really have any interest in debating what the primary causes of the disparity is, I will just point out that many of the behaviors at the root of it trace back to slavery. To take one example, fatherless homes. The children of slaves were almost always sold off and raised by strangers, and psychology teaches us that someone who grew up without loving parents is far more likely to not be there for their own children. Sure, any individual can overcome that but zoom out and facilitate this reality on any large population of people and the result will likely be the same.
Is there anything we can do about this now? Not much, if anything, but that is very real and should be thought about as you use fatherless homes to justify dehumanizing black people by throwing the n word around. We (white people) did that.
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@WyIted
If this was really about historical trauma, you'd see the same pattern across other groups. You can say absolutely vile shit to an Armenian, a Jew, a Cambodian — people whose families were actually genocided and most of them won’t start swinging.
See my earlier post 25 to IlDiavolo. The trauma carried in the black community is substantively different than any of the other examples you provided. The historical and persistent injustices committed against black people weren't because of circumstantial conflict, they were committed because of a persistent view amongst human civilization for centuries that they are less than human and therefore not deserving of basic rights. That is a view that largely remains unchanged today as evidence by people like you. It is not something you can just brush off as my earlier post described, to not internalize it takes serious work to which many black people are unable to overcome, especially with morons like yourself throwing back in their face.
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@IlDiavolo
Well, I think it's still stupid to react according to what happened in the past.
I just explained to you why this is not about what happened in the past. Did you read a word I wrote? Cause judging by your response it doesn't appear so.
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@IlDiavolo
I guess it's the same with the N-word, whatever the historical load it has, it's stupid to get mad at it.
It isn't about historical load. Black people in America live everyday with reminders of how inferior they are viewed by all of society in ways most white people couldn't even be bothered to think about.
Have you ever sat around with your friends musing about what you would do if you had a time machine? What would you witness? The declaration of independence, signing of the constitution, the Salem witch trials? Ever ask a black person that question? No, because in almost any historical example you'd give they would be hung of anyone even saw them. Not exactly a fun hypothetical when their existence in these scenarios was considered less than human.
Ever decide to go on ancestry.com and check you're family lineage? Not if your black, their ancestors weren't listed as people, they were listed at property so they didn't even bother to track where were sold off to do they have no way to trace back their family tree.
What about your last name, curious to know where it came from? Not of your black. Al Sharpton's last name was the name of his slave plantation owner, that's the story of many many black Americans. Their last names are not a legacy, they're a reminder.
And then there's the psychological. Years ago an experiment was performed where they showed dolls to a bunch of children and asked them which one was the good guy and which was the bad guy. They almost unanimously chose the white doll to be the good guy and the black doll to be the bad. Even the black kids did the same. That's the result of the system teaching over generations, often unconsciously, that black people are lesser.
So no, this isn't about history, it's about what black people are reminded of every single day. You should try it, then let us know if you think it's stupid to get mad at someone twisting that knife in your back just because they can.
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@fauxlaw
What insurrection? No one has ever been accused of insurrection, let alone convicted.
The fact that no one has ever been charged with insurrection is irrelevant to the question of whether January 6th would qualify under any reasonable definition. It is a fundamentally bad faith argument to suggest otherwise because you're conflating that which can be observed and reasonably derived, with that which would likely meet the burden of being proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. There is a reason no one in US history, even confederate generals, have ever been tried under this statue.
This is why I've never referred to J6 as an insurrection, not because it's not reasonable to call it that, but because partisan hacks like yourself tune out every legitimate point made about why it matters so you can play the legal gotcha game as if that's really what we're talking about. This is just deflection.
But in this case notice I wasn't even referring to J6 broadly, I was referring to Trump specifically by calling him an inserrectionist. That's very different. And why is that a fair label for him? Because he incited a mob to attack the US Capitol in order to stop the certification of an election he lost. And before you respond with all the usual nonsense about how he isn't responsible because there's no such thing as inciting a grown adult who can make their own decisions...
You could have argued he really didn't mean it up until the 187 minutes of him watching the attack play out on live TV doing absolutely nothing as president to stop it and wondering why the rest of his inner circle wasn't as excited about what they were seeing as he was. At that point, all of those arguments collapse.
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@WyIted
So let's take social security for example. The goal here is to find obvious cases of fraud like 300 year olds on it and then stop cashing those checks.
Except that this is complete bullshit and any reasonable person should know that. There is no epidemic of 300 year olds collecting social security checks. The system never wiped these folks out of the database, that doesn't mean they were getting paid.
This is such basic common sense to test. Ask yourself, with all the furore over this claim, if it were true, that would mean thousands upon thousands of Americans have been committing fraud for decades... So where are the prosecutions? Do you seriously think if they even found one example of this out wouldn't be all over Fox News and right wing podcasts everywhere?
Fraud is the excuse they give to cover for the fact that all they're doing is saving by kicking real people off of their health insurance. That's what's happening here and you are the reason they're able to pull it off. You're a sucker and they're manipulating you.
The reason we cut taxes on tips and overtime which Democrats voted against was to help the working class
The tax cuts on tips only apply to the first $25k, as in poverty level income. After that they're taxed as normal income. So while this is nice, it's not the big break they're making it sound. Overtime is capped as something like $12k, so even less. But still, it's something. What's remarkable however about what they did is that these tax cuts will expire literally as soon as Trump leaves office. Meanwhile, the tax cuts for the wealthy are made permanent.
This wasn't the republicans fighting for the middle class, it was them paying lip service so that they could put meaningless points on the scoreboard as a way of covering for their true priority.
what we do now is try to mitigate the damage from over spending to help these programs exist for longer
If you want the programs to last longer then prioritize them over making the rich richer. It's not that hard.
It doesn't help the country if we go the direction the left what's to go and turn into Venezuela
This is what Paul Krugman termed a "zombie lie", that is, a lie that gets debunked over and over again and yet it's proponents keep spreading it anyway, like the walking dead.
There is no legitimate comparison to what the left is promoting and what happened to Venezuela, in fact an argument can be reasonably made that what MAGA is promoting mirrors Venezuela more precisely. This is just bad faith, plain and simple.
We don't have like unlimited money. I know it's nice to thing "well we should just give everyone everything for free" but the reality is that harms society look at societies that have attempted it, so the goal is to just be reasonable.
No one is promoting a society where everything is just given away for free. You're again, having a conversation with yourself.
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@WyIted
How does it strip the poor of their healthcare to cut wasteful spending in that program
Because the poor who are Medicaid are the very people being deemed wasteful spending.
so it's more sustainable long term and can help more people?
Adding another $3T to our debt is what makes programs like this unsustainable. The idea that any individual program has to be cut for sustainability is ridiculous. We can spend the national treasury however we want, the only question is what are our priorities? In this bill that question is answered; tax cuts for the wealthy and a national police force to get rid of the brown people. That's what you voted for.
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@fauxlaw
A decision between Trump and Kammycakes is a logic pretzel?
No genius, the reason you offered to back up your decision - as in the one where you tried to paint the democrats as objectionable because of their lack of adherence to the principals of democracy while voting for the insurrectionist - is a logic pretzel.
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@fauxlaw
Dud I say I support Trump? I'm an Indie. I voted for Trump b because the other choice was a cat-5 joke who garnered not one single solitary primary vote. The Party choose her, regardless of the voters' preference, which was clearly Biden until he was shoved out. BY THE PARTY. And this is the third time in modern history that the Democrat Party has nominated against the will of primary votes of the people.
This is why I don't take you seriously when you claim to not be a Trump supporter, cause even if that's somehow true you are indistinguishable from one as you sit here jumping through logic pretzels to justify voting for him.
First off all, calling Harris a joke in contrast to the biggest buffoon we've ever seen in American political life is already ridiculous. But even worse is the fact that you are in part justifying your vote for the guy who literally tried to steal an election on the idea that the democrats do not practice democracy adequately enough for you. Wow.
Let's look at what you're complaining about. You say the party chose her regardless of voters preference. Well, if you look at the primary ballots that were cast, they actually voted for the ticket where Joe Biden would be at the top, and Kamala would be his backup if he could no longer continue. That's exactly what happened. It was exactly what they voted for.
The concept of democracy is where the voters choose their leaders. Democracy does not entail the person chosen by the voters to serve against his/her will. So once Biden resigned, they were months away from the election and couldn't possibly have run a primary, so they choose their only option at that point. This is exactly how democracy is supposed to work.
You do not care about this. If you did you would be looking at the other side with the guy who incited an attack on the US Capitol because his ego couldn't handle the will of the people.
No one who doesn't support Trump would think any of this sounds reasonable.
Am I ignoring we're talking about the President. I am; he's the one who won both by Elec College and the pop vote. Have you another you'd like to mention out of a wish balloon factory?
You guys really do feel big about yourselves now that your side finally won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years don't you?
When Biden won the popular vote the right talked about the 74 million people who voted for Trump constantly, for 4 whole years. The idea was that we cannot ignore the will of such a sizable chunk of the American electorate. But now that Trump, finally, for the first time in three tries, won the popular vote now you guys think it's game over no one else matters.
So yes I get that you want to ignore what the president of the United States is doing cause you have more important things to focus on. Why don't we spend some more time talking about what bathrooms trans people are using or how all those brown people picking fruit are stealing our jobs.
Who hates the poor? Well, by appearances of the last 40 years of jealousy for Wall Street, it sure appears that's descriptive of the Dem Party, since the official position is that the poor can be kept in line by giving away free stuff, rather than encouraging private, individual ambition, planning, and execution.
Right. So the party that believes in ensuring poor people have what they need to live is the party that hates them, and the party that believes in stripping them of these things so that they can give it to the rich so that the rich can graciously give it back to them... That's the party that loves the poor.
Cause that makes sense.
If you actually cared about encouraging ambition, planning and execution, you would support things that would make people want to work, like a living wage for example. But I suspect you don't care about that one either.
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@fauxlaw
Blame Trump.
You guys blamed Biden for literally everything that happened while he was president, so that seems fair according to right wing standards.
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@fauxlaw
So, are we finally going to admit"We" who? You and your windsock puppet? You have Trump so deeply embedded in your head, you likely include yourself in your scorn even while he lives there, rent-free. Let it go, already. Is there nothing else to stir the pot than Trump all day and night? God in heaven, get a life
This is such a stupid post.
It seems apparent first off all that your answer is "no", you're not going to admit that the republican party are not the party of the forgotten man as Trump used to tout. That was predictable, as was your propensity to deflect, so not exactly disappointing.
But what's ridiculous is to pretend like we're not supposed to be talking about the president of the United States, especially as he upends everything we all used to agree made us the superpower we are. But I get it, if I found myself supporting this monstrosity out of pride or whatever keeps you supporting him I would duck and dodge the conversation too.
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@WyIted
Why do you oppose no tax on tips. No tax on overtime. And getting rid of wasteful spending in Medicare so it can be used by more people and sustainable for a longer period of time? Do you hate poor people who depend on Medicare or do you hate the working class who need the money they earn on overtime and tips?
Not sure who this was for, so I'll assume myself since I started the thread and this is at least close to being on topic.
This is yet another example of you inventing a Boogeyman to argue with. I really don't know why you bother, at some point one would think it would be more interesting talking to real people.
Opposing a bill doesn't mean you oppose everything in it. No tax on tips is at least conceptually a good idea. Same with no tax on overtime. No one opposes getting rid of wasteful spending. The only people who hate the poor are the ones stripping them of their healthcare.
Any more questions you'd like to ask a real person?
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@LucyStarfire
You guys should match your stories. You are telling me that people cant pay for their own healthcare, and this other guy is telling me...
I don't care what some other guy is telling you, I speak for myself. Did you read what I wrote, do you have any thoughts about it?
Not looking for a response just to respond, if you have nothing worthy to contribute feel free to ignore this post.
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@LucyStarfire
Its time for people to pay for their own healthcare instead of expecting from others to pay for them.
The reason so many people either don't have health insurance or rely on government subsidized health insurance is because unlike almost every other developed nation on earth, healthcare is prohibitively expensive here in the US. That is something that an political party for the "forgotten man" would take into account and advocate for.
But what did they do instead? Pass legislation that will kick millions of them off leaving them with no way to pay for their healthcare.
You can agree or disagree with that policy position. What you can't do is pretend the party responsible is the party are for the little guy while the party opposing all of this is the party for the elites.
And not for nothing, I think your post epitomizes why the republican party is not the party for the working class. In any legislative disagreement the right wing view becomes clear - it maintains an almost unshakable level adherence to the idea that financial success is the true measurement of not only one's contribution to society, but how much one deserves to have within this society. So if someone can't afford their own healthcare, they're a bum who needs to stop mooching off of everyone else.
On the left we take into account that capitalism promotes a deeply disproportionate set of outcomes where hard work and even strong contributions can still result in one living in poverty. The idea of a government that ensures people are able to enjoy a dignified living isn't about giving to those who haven't earned it, it's about making sure those who have are able to enjoy what they've earned.
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So, are we finally going to admit now that Trump and the republican party are not the party of the "forgotten man", or we just going to keep pretending that the democrats represent the elites because they get celebrities to endorse them?
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@Mall
What's your style?Do you rehearse your points, make out drafts?
I like to give it a few hours or even a day after reading my opponent's argument, think of all the things I want to say, then create an outline in my mind. I find that time helps to clarify. Then I write a draft, then play devil's advocate and try to pick it apart a dozen times before posting.
To me the most important thing is the flow. It's easy to get lost in the weeds and feel like every individual point must be addressed. That can be detrimental. At the end of the round I ask myself, what will the reader take away from this? What's the big picture here? I think it's crucial to stay focused on that question and think about how each paragraph plays into it.
I do miss the old days when I was single and used to prepare these on a PC. Now I'm married and I don't have time to do this at home so about 90% of my writings on this site are either to or on my way back from work, likely in the subway. It's harder on a phone and I rarely ever have service. That's partly why I prefer philosophical debates, I don't want to have to do no research plus that's tedious and boring. I prefer thought exercise to a Google battle.
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Then I think they would pick the monarch.You decide Trump will be the dictator and an AOC style democrat wins every future election, the MAGA person picks the monarch.Everybody it seems is pro monarchy and executive order if the monarch or executive order is someone/something that agrees with them politically.
You're missing the point.
Democracy isn't valuable because we enjoy casting ballots or feeling like we have a choice. We value democracy because history and human psychology show that it's the system most likely to deliver outcomes that serve the broadest range of people over time. When leaders are accountable to voters, they’re incentivized to act in the public interest. When power is seized or maintained through fear (as in dictatorships) leaders are primarily incentivized to protect themselves. They govern to maintain control, not to serve the people.
Your hypothetical ignores that foundational insight. It reduces democracy to a procedural ritual and then asks us to weigh it against a fantasy scenario with predetermined outcomes. But by fixing those outcomes in advance, your scenario eliminates the very uncertainty and pluralism that make democracy both valuable and necessary. You're not offering a real dilemma, you’re offering a false dichotomy: "Would you rather have democracy and hell, or dictatorship and utopia?" Framed like that, of course people lean toward the latter. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s coercion disguised as choice.
Worse still, your setup reverses the actual purpose of democracy: it's not an end in itself, but a means to safeguard freedom, pluralism, and human dignity. So when you ask democracy advocates to choose between democratic process and the results democracy is designed to achieve, and then accuse them of inconsistency for preferring those results, you're attacking a straw man.
Your scenario is not the "gotcha" you think it is. It shows that when people are pushed to extremes, they’ll choose survival, dignity, and justice over abstract principles. But that’s not a flaw of democracy, it’s an argument for strengthening it so people aren’t forced into that kind of choice in the first place.
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@n8nrgim
i’ve seen atheists try to claim people dont experience elaborate afterlife stories when they die, but there’s no other way to describe it. they died, clinically. they’re not hallucinating random imagery like aliens or fractals or something like a drug trip
No one is claiming the hallucinations took place after brain activity ceased. Like dreams, hallucinations can take place in an extremely shortened time period right before the brain creases all functionality, and in fact, what we do know about what happens to the brain during that short period aligns with what has been described by those who experienced (a pulling sensation, a light, etc.).
it’s a stupid, but admittedly possible, theory to say they’re just hallucinating all these stories so consistently. it’s at the very least a big mystery as to why they would just hallucinate all this, to which atheists have no good answer
The only part of these experiences that are notably consistent are the structural characteristics I described above. The content of these experiences are remarkably inconsistent with each other, the only notable consistency is that they overwhelmingly tend to align with whatever religious beliefs the individuals in question already held.
All of this is consistent with NDE's being a product of a physical brain.
I never saw the following response to me in a prior thread which you linked to so I'll respond to it here:
if we observe people describing what happens outside their body, and blind people are seeing for the first time, and there's a whole book 'evidence of the afterlife', and there's the philophsical point that these are coherent elaborate afterlife stories that they have no doubt about and are more real than their earthly life and with common themes like tunnels meeting dead relatives seeing a being a light, speaking telepathically, that doesn't happen anywhere else with drugs dreams and hallucinations... then this is objectively evidence of the afterlife
Let's run they them one by one:
People "describing" what happened to them outside of their body is not proof that their experience happened outside their body. The latter is the very thing you're trying to prove so this is begging the question.
Blind people seeing for the first time - unverifiable. And even if it were, you're still describing a natural phenomenon. That is not evidence for the supernatural.
A book of evidence for the after life... then list the evidence here. The book is irrelevant.
The fact that the people who experienced these "have no doubt" is irrelevant. Conviction is not evidence.
An experience cannot be "more real" than our "earthly life" if our "early life" is our starting point for determining what is real, that's like asserting there's something north of the north pole.
The light, speaking telepathically, etc. - all of this happens in people's dreams. There are mountains of books, shows, all centered around these concepts.
It doesn't matter how much evidence you can cite of none of it is valid. 100 x 0 is still 0.
More than one scientific study has concluded that when out of body experiences occur, they are almost always 'accurate or at least consistent with reality'.
Any scientific study that concludes this is almost by definition, not a scientific study.
There is no possible way to examine every "out of body experience" in order to assess what the statistics on those would look like because not every experience is reported. In fact most are probably not. If a person has one such experience that contradicts known facts, the people around that individual at the very least if not the individual themself would dismiss it as a dream or hallucination so the selection bias of such a conclusion is damming.
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@WyIted
But the fact that he grew up in a Trump supporting household and his classmates recalled that he was clearly ideologically conservative... Well that means nothing.No it's doubtful that a person donating money to liberals is openly conservative.
This is exactly my point. Here you have two conflicting set of facts, so what do you do?
If you were a rational person who valued the principals of critical thinking you would recognize that this these present problems for either narrative which assumes he was politically motivated.
But what do you do instead? Take the narrative that suits your preferred narrative and disregard the rest.
That's the opposite of how critical thinking works.
Why would a hardline Republican try to kill the only real Republican running for president?
Black or white fallacy. No one is claiming he was a "hardline" republican. There are plenty of other options, first off all.
Second, no true Scotsman fallacy.
Third, it is easily conceivable that he was a republican that wanted to kill Trump to bring the GOP back to it's small government less taxes roots.
The Republican registration can be explained and I explained it. You have yet to give any explanation for the donation to act blue.
I don't need to, I'm not asserting his motives, you are.
Just because you "can" explain it doesn't mean you did. You have almost no information to work with so it's all highly speculative. That's the point.
I assume it means he wanted to attend a Biden event because he supported him.
Your assumptions are irrelevant. It is easily conceivable he researched Biden's schedule because he would have tried the same with Biden. Same amount of assumptions.
If his real target was Biden I am pretty sure he would have targeted Biden
That's exactly your problem; you begin with the assumption that he had a "real" target, and now you're working backwards to align the evidence to it. Not how it works.
What is your theory that he was MAGA and since Biden wasn't in town he targeted Trump?
The only thing we know for certain is that he wanted to kill a political figure. The conflicting information coupled with clues that he was deeply mentally disturbed suggests that the truth is that simple. Any expansion on that is not only unjustified but conflicts with other established facts, making it irrational.
And just to reiterate again, the motivations of one clearly deranged individual do not in any sense represent an entire political movement, so your original statements remain unjustified.
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@WyIted
Nikki Haley is openly fascist? My god you are deranged.
Only in your world is registering to vote republican a sign of likely Democratic activism.
But the fact that he grew up in a Trump supporting household and his classmates recalled that he was clearly ideologically conservative... Well that means nothing.
Oh, and he also researched Joe Biden's schedule to see when he would be coming to Butler PA, but I'm sure that doesn't mean anything either.
You are so obviously cherry picking everything that supports your predetermined narrative while hand waiving away anything that doesn't and completely defying Occam's razor, which shows an incredible deficit in critical thinking.
All of this is of course irrelevant anyway. As I've pointed out multiple times already, the initial claim here is that basically anyone on the left is 'on the side of those who tried to assassinate Trump' which somehow is supposed to justify political violence against the left. So even if we accepted the ridiculous position that the kid was a clear lefty, that still doesn't get us anywhere near what you're trying to argue.
You want political violence and are trying desperately to pretend it's justified. That is so pathetic.
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@Greyparrot
it's their non-assimilating culture that Americans worry about
This is just bigotry dressed up as a rational objection.
your backward thinking is what causes American schools to assimilate to the kids of illegal migrants, hurting the opportunities of the kids of both legal immigrants and Americans. it's not anti-kid to say that parents who knowingly break the law and impose burdens on public systems need to be held responsible. The schools didn't invite them.
No, our ridiculous asylum laws invited them. The influx of migrants into our country is a product of US law, so claiming they're all law breakers for being here is pure fantasy.
If only there was a way to address our asylum laws.
That is definitely one of the major reasons most legal brown people think you are crazy for thinking you can continue down this road.
Propaganda and the weaponization of current US law by republicans is why most legal brown people, along with most of MAGA think people like me are crazy. You guys are all shadowboxing with a caricature of your own invention, and it's exhausting consistently arguing something only to read the responses to the imaginary person you think you're talking to.
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@thett3
I mean I don’t disagree that it would cause a lot of suffering but I disagree about moral culpability.
Culpability is irrelevant to the children involved (most of which are US citizens) as well as the friends and other family of those you would deport.
It's also crazy to me how immigration hardliners pretend these people just picked up and moved here because they had nothing better to do or figured they'd get free stuff or something to that effect. The overwhelming majority of these people came here fleeing violence and extreme poverty, so I get that they didn't do it the right way but the way folks like yourself hold that against them morally is quite insane. The backlog for processing applications is like 10 years, many of these people would be dead by the time they got an answer. It may not be our problem - we can't take in every refuge on earth, but if you're going to act as if you're not engaging in something that is horrible at least from one standpoint you're just divorced from reality.
Being sent back to your country of origin is not a rights violation in any way.
No one is claiming this.
I’m so confused. Finding people where they are including the entire country and work places IS the normal enforcement of laws???
So... What Trump is doing right now is perfectly normal then?
The point of the hypothetical is to see how you’d react if there was the mass illegal immigration of people from a culture YOU disliked. It seems that if that happened you are okay with deporting them you just disagree with some tactics.
Full circle - I've made this clear since the start of this thread. I never expressed or implied that I had any principal issue with deporting anyone here illegally. What I have always taken issue with is the prioritization of this as our national issue. It's not that your arguments are wrong, I just don't believe the reality is anywhere near what folks like yourself claim and to the extent any of them are right they are offset by so many things that should give serious pause to bany rational and decent person.
Fix our absurd asylum laws including more judges to process these claims and remove those with no justification, plug the border with more agents and better technology to stop illegal aliens and drugs from entering, deport anyone who commits crimes or lands on our radars for any legitimate reason, and move on.
For the farm workers, nannies, carpenters, etc. who are here working and contributing, leave them alone. We have better things to worry about.
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@thett3
Hold the phone there partner. Thats gonna get a big “citation needed” from me.
Yeah, I already told you I'm not going back and forth on a my study vs your study debate, that would be a monumental waste of time.
I will just comment on a few things. Your case is that the illegal immigrant population is a net negative when factoring their children, which most studies don't do. But that's also the case for the vast majority of the American population, should we deport them too? Educating children is expensive but it's not an expense as much as it's an investment, and children of illegal immigrants tend to do very well later in life compared to their US born counterparts, so this argument falls flat to me.
It also fails cause if the argument is that they need to go because they're costing us money, do you really not understand how much it is/will cost to deport them? Not only in deportation costs but also the economic costs stemming from the shock of losing their contributions over such a short period of time? This is where I find this argument disingenuous. Go all out on stopping any more from coming in, fine. No issue there. But removing everyone here, that's way more expensive than anything you'll spend educating and providing healthcare for their kids.
Nope, you made a big rhetorical error by taking the bait to complain about white people.
What are you talking about?
I didn't "complain about white people". I said that I often disagree with their arguments because I find them ignorant of what it's like to not be white. My issue is with their viewpoints not them or their "culture", which, naturally, means it only applies to those white people as well as anyone else who thinks like that.
Either it’s okay to hold generalized opinions about the cultures of groups of people or it isn’t and if it isn’t what you’ve said is just as bigoted as what I said.
Everyone holds opinions about groups of people, if you don't then you are just willfully unobservant about the world. When those opinions lead to intolerance of or indifference towards the suffering or inhumane treatment of those groups, that's when you've crossed the bigotry line. Nothing I've ever expressed on this site qualifies, so nice try.
At least I’m complaining about foreigners and not my own countrymen.
The fact that you think it makes a difference with regards to holding negative views towards groups of people makes my point. This is exactly the kind of otherism Trump is so effectively weaponizing.
Your position is doing so would be mean, and I said something bad about their culture which is a big no no.
I said way more than that, but of course that's all you heard.
It is telling that when I talk about tearing people away from their lives, families, friends, and communities, all you heard is "they're being mean". Such childishness is usually at the core of MAGA aligned thinking.
Thought experiment: imagine if it comes to pass that all the millions of chavs in the UK who voted for parties like the BNP, UKIP, or Reform UK suddenly showed up at the US southern border during Trump 2.0. Trump does absolutely nothing to deter them and they’re very obnoxiously Chavvish/ quasi MAGA. An overwhelming majority of the country is furious about the presidents immigration policy. A Dem wins all seven swing states and a trifecta with sending these people back as a major component of her campaign platform. You good with them staying?
First, whatever the majority of Americans voted for is irrelevant to what I believe about the issue.
Second, if Trump worked out bipartisan legislation in Congress to address the issue and the Democratic president stopped that legislation just to win my vote, I'd be absolutely furious with that president and everyone who allowed that to happen, and I wouldn't be giving that president credit for solving anything.
Third, I would not be ok with that Democratic president violating the rights to these chavs, like due process, and using gross tactics to hunt them down like doing workplace raids and getting rid of people who've been here for years and even decades, haven't done anything wrong and are actually working and contributing.
Fourth, to answer your question directly, what I would support is that we follow the law and get rid of whoever we get rid of in accordance with normal enforcement of those laws. I wouldn't be ok with deportation forces being unleashed upon the entire country, especially when, curiously, those forces would be concentrated in red states where they are least unwanted.
Fifth, your analogy misrepresents what Biden did. His policies, however detrimental from a migration overflow standpoint, were objectively more in line with US law than Trump's policies. The law in this case is the problem, and your "side" did nothing to help fix that issue, so your criticisms of the prior administration fall flat at best and at worst is blatant and weaponized hypocrisy.
Sixthed, this entire analogy is deeply flawed. Of course I would have a problem with a group of people being "let in" because of their political ideology, but that's putting the cart before the horse. The communities closer to the illegal immigrant population do not support democrats because they're just naturally democrat, they support democrats because of how you guys treat them. Of course these chavs would vote against my side of my side's entire ethos was that the key to making our lives better was to get rid of them. So no, you don't get to oppose someone's existence in your country and then pretend the reason your opposition is justifiable is because of their political views when their political views are mostly self defense against your opposition.
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@thett3
Anybody who consumes is “contributing to the economy” in some sense, as it causes the big line to go up. That doesn’t make the presence of more immigrants an inherent good
No, that's when we turn to the data which tells us that overall, illegal immigrants contribute far more in taxes than they receive in public services.
You don't agree with that because you think all of the studies that show this are partisan. Fine. Regardless, you're still not getting it.
I'm not advocating for us to bring more people into this country or to just ignore the ones that are here. Obama was dubbed the importer in chief, I don't have any issue with what he did. I support the bipartisan border deal which would have done a lot of really good things to address the actual problem. What you are advocating for is categorically different. You are the one supporting the use of federal dollars to go around the country and round all of these people up indiscriminately and deport them all, regardless of the impacts it will have on our society or the inhumanity of tearing these people apart from their families, friends, and communities. That's what I take issue with.
Again; whatever your issue with how these people got here, they're here. The question is what do we do now? You are the one who wants to spend our public resources and focus our public discourse on this, so it is you, not me, who needs a legitimate reason to justify that position. My position is that we have much bigger problems to deal with, because we do.
you seem to have a serious issue with me being “very critical” of other groups. Why is it okay for you but not me?
Because I'm not trying to justify going around the country and rounding up millions of white people to deport them. I'm not the one looking at a situation where white people are being sent purposefully by this administration to a foreign torture prison on an effective life sentence and shrugging it off cause they shouldn't have come here, as if illegally crossing a border warrants life in prison.
Our positions do not resemble each other. Mine is a combination of pragmatism and human decency, yours is one of bigotry and indifference dressed up as reverence for the rule of law.
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@WyIted
Yeah he was too young to register to vote prior to the 2024 election but he gave money to the democratic party.
Yeah, he donated $15 to act blue. Everyone knows that. He also grew up in a conservative Trump supporting household and his former classmates said he was clearly conservative in his ideology. He also researched killing many different celebrities. So when it comes to his motive, pretty much everything we know about him conflicts with each other, and yet you take the one factoid that supports your narrative while ignoring the rest. If you were honest you would recognize that his motives are not clear, but you're not, so whatever fits the narrative that is most convenient for you is what it is.
Nobody claimed this but I am on Twitter so i know how much most of you celebrate political violence.
Yeah, cause Twitter bots are a great representation of what the average person is thinking.
I think I see the problem here...
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@fauxlaw
The system isn't broken because the law is broken, it's broken because the executive in the former administration refused to enforce the law.
This is just partisan nonsense.
One of the biggest difference between Biden's policies vs Trump's is that Trump relied on title 42 to expel asylum seekers, which is legally dubious at best. Biden reversed that in order to bring his administrations policies back to being in accordance with the law. Did it result in higher levels of migration to the US? Yes. But to claim it's because the president wasn't following the laws is just stupid, the truth is literally the opposite.
Hell, Biden thoughts he ran for US Senate. HGe said it enough in his 2020 campaign, and several times referred to Harris as 'the president."when are you goings to admit thins guy was old toast? That's what Trump is doing. Endforcement. Get it?
I get that you have no argument so you had to make a claim that is egregiously false and then quickly change the subject to political gotchas on Joe Biden.
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@fauxlaw
When did I saythat the constitution effectively renders the PCA and inserrection act unconstitutional
In Post 65:
Yeah, I know that. But those laws do not supersede my quotations from the Constitution. When the citizens of any State are threatened, the president has authority to act, and he has.
I asked you if you knew there were laws regulating when and under what circumstances the president has the authority to federalize the national guard or deploy the military on US soil and you responded by saying they don't supercede the constitution. The only rational interpretation there is that they would have to supercede the constitution to be applicable, which would make them unconstitutional by definition.
my main point that Democrats are sky-screaming and have no argument
They're arguing that Trump's actions are illegal, because they are and your attempt to refute had fallen flat on its face.
and that Biden was a poor candidate and the Big zero in the Oval
Irrelevant partisan opinion.
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@thett3
A technicality?? Legal status is not a “technicality” and “you’re here illegally” is a perfectly valid reason to send someone back where they came from...You are the one who needs to provide me a reason why I should support people being here illegally
It appears you did not absorb what I wrote. Let me repeat:
the question here is not whether we should enforce our laws, the question here is how much focus and [at] what cost are we going to do so. It's about priorities as we weigh the pros and cons. Trump has made, and you support, a high priority to round up millions of these people, with no benefit to the economy, with no benefit to the Treasury, with no benefit to public safety, and at great human suffering, for what?
My point wasn't that being here illegally wasn't a reason to send someone back. I'm talking about making it a national priority to engage in mass mobilization. I'm talking about the fact that everytime the right and left come together to debate politics, immigration is always front and center in that conversation over a multitude of other issues we could be addressing. My question to you and every other right wing immigration enthusiast is why this issue is so important to you?
For me, my position is that we have way bigger things to worry about than how many brown people are here. If these people were en masse not contributing to the economy, I would care. They are. If these people were en masse not respecting their communities by violating laws (other than existing here), I would care. They are.
So why do you care? Because they are according to the law, illegal? Do you care about other illegal things going on? Do you care about the recent slew of Trump pardons for people who committed actual, real crimes that actually hurt people? Do you care about the fact that Trump is violating the laws we have in place which provides limitations on when the president can federalize the national guard or deploy the US military on our streets? Did you care when Kilmar Abrego Garcia's rights to due process were violated?
I suspect you don't care about any of that, certainly not as much as you care about this. Why? If following the law is your true value then you would care about all of it just the same.
This is not a conversation about whether we believe in legality, it's about values.
You should be able to understand this because you’ve made it abundantly clear by your posts over the years that you dislike white people.
lol wow, that's just silly.
I tend to be very critical of white people, particularly in most matters of racial tension because I find that white people tend to have a very self centered viewpoint which fails to recognize what it's like to not be white. That is very different from disliking white people. I also abhor MAGA which is just factually dominantly white, but my abhorrence there is purely ideological, not racial as it applies just the same to anyone who shares it. I just find it more understandable when it's a white person.
Earlier in my life I held most if not maybe even all of the biases against people of other races that I imply you or the rest of MAGA hold. I would have chosen a room full of white people over a mixed room any day. But then I learned and I adjusted my views accordingly.
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@fauxlaw
Tautology aside, the fact is true: We have immigration law, and it is being ignored
It's not being ignored, it's being abused. That's why Congress worked out an immigration bill last year and Trump killed it, because he doesn't care about the issue, all he cares about is pounding his chest.
Migrants have a legal right to seek asylum, and we have a legal obligation to process those claims. Ironically, that's what's being ignored now. Also ironically, the reason this is being abused to badly. They've always had a right to seek asylum, it wasn't till Trump made it a campaign talking point that the entire world caught on which helped to fuel the rise in asylum claims we've seen. So in typical fashion, Trump helped to create the very problem he now wants credit for fixing, even after stopping the actual fix.
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@thett3
I DONT think that illegally immigrating to another country is as serious as violent crime. However I also don’t think that being sent back to your country of citizenship is in any way a punishment or a violation of rights or whatever.
Whether you want to call it punishment, violation of rights, or something more benign is irrelevant. Deporting someone is a depravation of what that person currently has, you cannot rationally or rightfully support that without some underlying reason, a mere technicality of whether that person is here lawfully fails.
If you want to argue that it's harmful for these people to remain here, fine. If you want to argue that these people deserve it, fine. But argue something. This point works on paper but is just meaningless.
We have laws, it’s time for them to be enforced and after that if we decide democratically as a society that immigration policy should be changed then congress should change it.
We had a change, Trump blew it up. Regardless, the question here is not whether we should enforce our laws, the question here is how much focus and say what cost are we going to do so. It's about priorities as we weigh the pros and cons. Trump has made, and you support, a high priority to round up millions of these people, with no benefit to the economy, with no benefit to the Treasury, with no benefit to public safety, and at great human suffering, for what? The satisfaction of being able to say "that's the law"? Why? I still haven't found an answer.
Why not just leave them alone? It’s an absurdity that people have been here illegally for years or decades. Unless one is in favor of full blown open borders that should NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.
What should have happened is irrelevant. The only question that matters is what do we do about it now?
The economic arguments for immigration are extremely strong on paper, but when you look at similar countries that have had sudden large increases in immigration (like Canada, the UK, arguably the US 2021-2023) the results are catastrophic.
Why are you linking post COVID economic conditions to immigration?
And yes I do have reasons you’d probably consider bigotry
This is the only thing that makes sense to me. Look I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm genuinely trying to understand if there is some other reason people have for their intense focus on this issue, I just can't find one. I would love to think better of people, I'm just waiting for someone to provide me a reason to.
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@Greyparrot
I love how DoubleR's doing the typical "mah both sides" gaslighting to suggest only Republicans have ideological purity tests when it's totally clear a Democrat assassinated another Democrat purely on the basis of Ideology.
Do you enjoy arguing with imaginary people? Is there a reason you refuse to engage with the things I've actually said and argued and instead just insist on making it all up?
Republicans just want people to be normal and do normal things like obey the laws get along, and stop fucking shit up, and stop pissing on the ideas that made America.
They prefer their shit on the walls of the US Capitol
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@WyIted
The kid switched parties to vote for Nikki Haley to vote against trump. A relatively easy process while actually committing his hard earned dollars to the democratic party . I don't know why you think trump supporters are tying to murder trump or what type of weird cope that is.
It's not a coping mechanism genius, you're the one justifying your thirst for political violence by arguing the political affiliation of the individuals who committed those act. I'm just throwing your own bullshit back at you.
Here was never a registered democrat, you're either being manipulated or you're lying.
Regardless, their political ideology is irrelevant. Neither of these acts were part of any organized plot, none of them were derived from any meaningful interpretation of anything that any prominent figure on the left has advocated for, and every prominent figure on the political left rightly condemned this. To claim that somehow every left wing minded individual Isa part of this is beyond stupid. But again, this is all you've got so you'll keep riding that dead hoarse till the sun sets.
The economic freedom index is how I defend my world view and the results of being anti freedom are apparent in Venezuela, North Korea and China.
Yeah, and Donald Trump is in love with all of the individuals running them.
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@WyIted
Yeah they attempted it with Trump so anything he does is really fair game. Don't want to be assassinated don't be a part of the team that does assassinations
"They"
By "they" you mean one deranged conservative kid who researched killing multiple celebrities before landing on Trump, and another conservative who was deciding between supporting Vivek Ramaswamy or Nikki Haley?
You can't actually be this stupid.
Or maybe you’re just willfully this stupid, because this is all you've got. You can't defend your political worldview on its own terms, so instead you fall back on lazy conspiracy theories and absurd logical fallacies, pretending that if the other side is worse, your side is automatically justified.
It’s pathetic. And it shows.
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@fauxlaw
These 5 conditions blow your following claim out of the water [also from your '121]
So you went from arguing that the constitution effectively renders the PCA and inserrection act unconstitutional to now arguing that Trump's actions are lawful because they are in line with these very laws. Well, that's progress I guess...
Now the problem is that none of your conditions are met. What happened in LA is a priest that turned violent. That's it. That doesn't qualify as a rebellion under any stretch of legal imagination, it's not an insurrection, it's none of that. The president doesn't just gey to declare it so, that's not how the rule of law works.
The authority granted to the president by the PCA does not "trample over state's rights
I never argued it did, pay attention.
I'm talking about Trump's actions, such as federalizing the national guard over the governor's objections, without a valid legal basis from which to do so.
By the way, the relevance is that in 2021, there were violent protests underway in NYC, Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and.... oh, yeah. L.A. In case your recent presidential history is not that accurate, the recent 2021 update of PCA I mentioned last night was during the administration of a Democrat president, derelict though he was, campaigning actively, on several occasions in 2019 and 2020 for the US Senate... you know, the actual legislative body, not the executive.
What on earth are you talking about?
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@Greyparrot
DoubleR, your entire argument hinges on a cartoonish misunderstanding of democracy, the kind that sounds good in a freshman poli-sci seminar but collapses under the weight of actual day to day governance.
Ok chatGP.
You claim that laws are "meaningless" if the executive decides for himself whether he's acting within them. But that’s not how the system was designed. The president doesn’t wait for pre-approval from district judges.
No one claimed this. You are as usual, arguing with yourself.
What you’re promoting is a perversion of checks and balances, where the judiciary gets to preemptively neuter the executive branch any time it disagrees politically. That’s not democracy. That’s a judicial oligarchy.
This is just plain stupid.
What I'm promoting is a system where the executive has some check on his power. If the president acts illegally and no one can intervene and say that's illegal, then the legality of his actions is irrelevant and by extension, so are the laws limiting his authority.
MAGA loves to pretend this is some grave injustice of a purported Democratic system, which is ridiculous and goes to show what unprincipled hypocrites you all are. When the courts were striking down Biden's actions none of you took issue with it, suddenly now that Trump is president he becomes the lone voice of the people and anyone who stands in his way is a traitor I the country. This is exactly the fascistic crap I'm talking about.
This isn't to say there isn't an issue with district judges unilaterally striking down a president's policies, of course there is. I never argued the system is perfect, I'm responding to your stupidity claiming that the country should go to war all because Trump's actions were dare deemed unlawful. That's what fascism looks like.
So no, [imaginary] DoubleR, we don’t need an executive leader who waits around patiently while every policy gets chopped up by partisan judges.
Fixed.
America needs one who can act decisively within the limits of the law
No shit, that's the point of having a judiciary - to ensure that's what actually happening.
If that scares you, maybe you don’t trust the people as much as you pretend to. maybe you don't trust democracy.
Trusting democracy has nothing to do with allowing an executive to govern unchecked. Your entire issue with my position is made up.
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@FLRW
In a December 2023 interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that if he were to win the presidency again, he would act as a dictator for "one day" to implement his agenda.
And Congress would then define one day as the rest of the term
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@ADreamOfLiberty
You never let "paying your lawyer with your own money" penetrate your skull.
Oh I did, and I explained why you are wrong over and over again. The penetration of skull problem isn't on my end.
Go ahead and revive that thread, I will happily show you why you're wrong, again.
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@Greyparrot
Democracy can't work if an executive leader can't dictate the will of the people.
This is one of the dumbest things you've ever said to me, and that's saying something.
Executive leaders do not "dictate" the will of the people. That's called a dictatorship, the literal opposite of democracy.
Executive leaders carry out the will of the people - in accordance with the constitution and laws they are sworn to protect.
That's why we have judges. It turns out that laws are quite meaningless when it's up to the executive leader to decide for himself whether he's acting in accordance with them.
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@Savant
Trump isn't the first president to take aggressive military actions or challenge the checks and balances on his office, nor the first politician to stretch the law to attack his political opponents. Maybe it's simply the case that Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, Lincoln, Truman, and FDR are all fascists, but if one authoritarian action makes someone a fascist, then I'm not sure how useful the term is, or how consistent it is with how other political descriptors are used.
This is really nothing more than an attempt to equivocate by rendering the term fascism meaningless. First off, I never said or implied that anyone becomes a fascist by one single action and it is dishonest to frame your argument as a counter to that idea.
Fascism has a number of specific identifiable traits (which I will spare for now), the way we determine whether a movement qualifies under any rational assessment is to see how many of the boxes they check. If they check the overwhelming majority of them (as MAGA does), you cannot tell me that doesn't qualify.
So in just the past week Trump has deployed the US military onto US streetsIs that fascist? An appeals court temporarily allowed this, so I think that's a stretch.
It's merely one example. The question isn't whether it is fascism, it's whether or meaningfully fits into the label. Given the circumstances, like the fact that we're talking about nothing more than a protest that turned violent as well as the fact that state and local officials not only didn't ask for them to be there but asked for them to leave... Yeah, this is an example.
And you're misrepresenting what has happened in the courts. The decision regarding the military was that they weren't on the ground yet, so they didn't weigh in on it. They did weigh in on Trump's federalization of the national guard, and the lower court emphatically ruled it unlawful. The appeals court reversed the order, not because they assessed it as wrong but to give it time to be worked out before taking the drastic step of changing the hands of leadership only for leadership to be changed again should they or the SC disagree, which is a perfectly normal and sensible thing the courts often do.
Sure, let's grant that this is authoritarian. I think the bar for fascism is probably higher than that, given that he's not the first president to make vague and likely unenforceable threats.
Yes, the bar is much higher than that, that's why I listed multiple examples which you spliced into pieces only to act as if each piece individually doesn't cross the bar. Not only does that fail to address my point (having listed everything together) but I also pointed out that all of this was just in the last week. Obviously, if this is just over the past week there's a much longer and more potent list of actions I could have provided.
He said he wasn't arrested. But sure, let's grant that forcibly removing him from a building is authoritarian.
They through him down on the floor and handcuffed him.
I'd say Trump is more authoritarian than some presidents and less authoritarian than others. Arguably FDR (or any president to fight a world war) has a better claim to being fascist than Trump. If we're calling Trump fascist for what he's doing now, you definitely can't give a pass to FDR for internment camps or to Washington for owning slaves or to Abraham Lincoln for forcing Native Americans out of their land.
You’re conflating leaders who made immoral or authoritarian decisions in specific moments with a leader whose entire political identity is built around the core features of fascist ideology. Yes, FDR authorized internment camps (a terrible abuse of power) but that was a single policy during wartime, not part of a broader effort to undermine democracy itself.
Washington owned slaves, Lincoln displaced Native Americans. Both indefensible, but they weren’t building movements to dismantle democratic institutions or install themselves as unaccountable rulers.
Again, you don't assess whether someone is fascist by pointing to one action, you have to look at the totality of the actions and their ideology.
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@Greyparrot
He didn't. You know there's video of this incident right?yah, I saw the video. They asked for physical ID, and he pulled the "do you know who I am?" card.Then he pushed through anyway and FAFOed.
This is why our country is so fucked.
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@fauxlaw
But those laws do not supersede my quotations from the Constitution. When the citizens of any State are threatened, thepresident has authority to act, and he has.
Yes, he has the authority to act... Under the laws he swore to uphold. He doesn't have the authority to unilaterally decide whatever force he deems necessary. That's not constitutional government, that's dictatorship.
All you did in your prior post was cherry pick certain parts of the constitution that fit the narrative you wanted to create. You ignored the most basic principals of the constitution, one of which is that it exists to ensure the protection of everyone's rights, not merely the president's authority. These rights also include Congress role in defining the limitations of executive authority in situations like this. That's why we have the inserrection act and the posse comitatus act in the first place, and no one has ever questioned their constitutionality before until a moron like Trump came along and continues to drag the rest of us into Idiocracy.
what's going in in L.A., my hometown, as it bappens], is not peaceable assembly. period.
Irrelevant. The bar for which the President is authorized to trample over state's right is not and cannot be the point at which a protest turns violent. That's absurd, and you would never support that notion of it were a democrat in office.
We now have an true executive in the Oval
You mean a wannabe dictator
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@fauxlaw
1. And yet we became the most powerful nation on earth, so what's your point?
2. Tautology true, therefore meaningless. What's your point? Do you have a response to my last post which addressed this directly?
3. Irrelevant to every point raised in this thread
4. Due process is a whole different conversation
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@fauxlaw
Your load of crap is defeated by a few words from the supreme law of the land: "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." [1A,] No rational person will agree that the current protests in L.A. are 'peacefully assembled.' The President is sworn to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution,[Article II, Section 1, clause 9] and is on the hook to "...guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence." [Article IV]Get it? I didn't think so.
You do know there are actual laws defining when the president can federalize the national guard or deploy the military to the US interior... Right?
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@WyIted
This is why you are low IQ.
Your suspicion of my IQ is meaningless. Here's an example of why:
Imagine me saying fascist movements have to pretend to not be fascist until they cancel elections and then somebody being enough of a brainlet to say that somehow means I am stating a group isn't fascist.
Fascism isn't just referring to an active state of achieved political power, it also refers to set of ideas aka an ideology. That's why the word ends with "ism". Do I need to explain to you what that means? Do I need to point out to you that the title of this thread specifically ascribes through implication the word fascism to a specified political movement, which by definition cannot hold power?
2+2=4
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@WyIted
Why don't you admit [that you're a racist]?What do you think my beliefs are?
I think the fact that you have openly used the word n*ggers to refer to black people on this site quite recently makes that clear.
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@WyIted
The title of this thread is a stupid question. Anyway, like we can't stop pretending we're not fascist until we cancel elections dumb ass.
Whether your movement qualifies as a fascist movement is irrelevant to whether you succeed in cancelling an election genius.
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