I heard something recently, one of those splash-of-cold-water-on-the-face reminders about exactly where we’re at. The person was talking about how on some issues, the goal isn’t really discussion but to move a ball across a goal line. By any means necessary. People may full well understand that a person’s point of view is reasonable and deserving of consideration in a normal atmosphere, but on certain subjects the only thing that point of view represents is an obstacle to getting that ball over the goal line.
So you see a lot of personal attacks, attacks on character, misrepresentation, basically the worst elements of discussion. It does occur to me that anything involving Trump will always be one of these subjects. The ball across the goal line is tearing down Trump, to utterly destroy him. The furnace of anger is stoked hot, and there’s little patience for impedance.
Reading my post, then reading your reply, I ultimately concluded that I was correct in follow-up: You read something into my post that wasn’t there, then got angry about it.
My message was so far disconnected from what you took from it, the “giving a pass” interpretation went right over my head.
This is such a crock of shit. The Trump administration has thrown lots of money at the border recently, and absolutely none of it has been aimed at speeding up or streamlining the asylum backlog. Every single thing they’ve done has been aimed at making any attempt at legal immigration as painful as possible – closing checkpoints, mandatory arrest and incarceration for not following all procedures to the letter, setting up these makeshift prison camps, sending the military down to intimidate potential immigrants.
The stated goal of all of these actions is to deter asylum seekers. It’s an end-run around the law of the land. “Come to the US, sure, but there’s a good chance we’re going to separate you from your kids, possibly lose them in the process, put you in a miserable camp while we sort everything out, and do everything we can to find a reason to turn you away. Still want to come here? I didn’t think so.”
So it’s no surprise that people are still going to try to avoid this “legal” route, and that means dangerous treks through the desert where we know some percentage of them are going to die in the process. You can’t go out of your way to prevent people from coming in via legal means and then when they die trying to find alternatives throw up your hands and say “It’s a complicated issue.”
I’m guessing that this particular line of argument is posted high on the wall at IRA, and consequently is being echoed all over the Putin/GOP-aligned politi-sphere, but it’s a markedly poor and ineffective tactic.
First, the tactic requires the reader or listener to believe that attacks on Trump’s words and deeds are unjustified because Trump’s words and deeds are “reasonable and deserving of consideration,” as you put it. This proposition is unlikely to be accepted by intelligent people with the capacity to actually observe Trump’s words and deeds.
Second, the tactic requires the reader or listener to believe that there is some sort of mystical or supernatural quality embodied in Donald Trump—and most intelligent people are highly unlikely to see that as a possibility.
The argument ‘people attack Trump for no rational reason’ necessitates the positing of an irrational reason—and the possibilities are limited to: 1) all those who criticize Trump are crazy or evil, and 2) all those who criticize Trump are impious: that is, they are responding to his supernaturally-endowed wonderfulness by rejecting the deity who conferred that wonderfulness.
All this makes little sense to persons of acumen and experience.
Thus you are left arguing ‘criticism of Trump is bad and wrong because he’s so wonderful’ to people who already think he’s wonderful; you convince no one who isn’t already convinced.
That, by definition, is a poor and ineffective argument.
I was referring to people talking about Trump-related subjects, not anything Trump himself says. I should have said, “…any discussion by third parties that involve Trump as the subject matter…”.
It’s well understood that Trump gets plenty of well-deserved flak and pushback for the things he says. This isn’t even debated by regular people.
I think where the argument falls apart, is that taken to it’s logical conclusion, any border security would leave blood on our hands if a person crossing illegally were to die in their journey. So if you had a bare minimum border presence, but at least some border security, that could precipitate an illegal crossing. And if that crossing led to the death of that individual, the blood would, the argument goes, be on our hands because of that person was pushed into that decision by our border presence.
In this argument, the only path to absolution would be open borders.
Or you decide that the blood is acceptable. Is that too much to ask? To say, Is whatever we get as a country for this level of border security and immigration restriction worth this person being dead? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but any time someone dies based on the decisions we make we should ask ourselves that question.
Personally, I don’t see how anyone can decide that we’ve gotten anything from Trump’s changes to immigration policy and border security that are worth any amount of human life.
Some of his decisions have been questionable at best. And I think much of it has to do with needing to appear “tough on immigration”, which, I agree, is not at all a positive benefit when contrasted against the death of someone. But even if his decisions are at least in part rooted in image, proponents of border security are not without meritorious arguments. There’s a reason countries all over the world have an immigration system and border security. It’s hard to argue, at least from my perspective, that tougher immigration policies in and of themselves need to demonstrate quantifiable benefit in order to be validated in the face of accusations of responsibility for risk-takers dodging those policies.
No, the only path to absolution is a sane immigration policy.
If people are claiming asylum, they should be able to, according to international law, cross at a valid border crossing, and present themselves to a border authority, and be taken into custody and given an asylum hearing. That is how it is supposed to work.
However, we have our agents actively preventing people from crossing at valid border stations to present their asylum case. Because of that, because we have made the border station that should be accessible to asylum seekers non-accessible, people have to cross in other places. Because they have to cross in other places, because of the actions that we have chosen to take in violation of international law, the crossing becomes much more dangerous.
That’s on us. We are breaking international law, and people are getting hurt as a consequence. Yes, the blood is on our hands, blaming the victims of our actions doesn’t absolve our guilt.
Before we even get into whether we should be changing our quotas or metrics for immigration, or arguing over whether increasing quotas counts as “open borders”, we should follow international law to allow asylum seekers access to border crossing stations.
Now, personally, I advocate for what some on your side would call open borders, as I favor a much more liberal and generous immigration policy. I see this country as needing quite a bit of work, and we need help to do it. There may be a number of Central American immigrants that is too much, but I do not think that we are within an order of magnitude of what we can, and should, take in.
We should be encouraging people to cross at official points of entry, both to improve our border security, and to prevent tragedies like this. Shutting them down just causes people to cross in other places, which harms border security and leads to tragedies like this.
When the practical effect of what Trump and his supporters call border security not only causes humanitarian crises that lower our moral standing, but also harms our country’s economy and people, and actually decreases border security, it is hard to take it seriously their claims that they are doing it for any positive reason, and it is actually only about racism and bigotry.
What happens with you is that you may say something reasonable at times, but then you also pull shit like this. Here you’ve just poisoned the well. If anyone disagrees and does blame Trump for what happened, they are just out to vilify Trump.
To use your previous metaphor, this is not saying “Actually, best estimates are that 6 million Jews died in the holocaust, not 50 million.” It is the equivalent of saying “Your goal is to tear down Hitler, and thus you ignore reasonable arguments and personally attack anyone who gets in your way.”
The former may not be pro-Hitler. But the latter is, saying that Hitler is maligned.
There’s also this. You claim that he misinterpreted you. But you offer no clarification of what you actually meant. You don’t actually show that he got you wrong.
It sure seems to me that you made a “both sides” argument. I’ll quote you: “Everybody, for the most part, does this. Many people will eviscerate Trump for his false statements, but have nothing to really say about falsehoods on their own side. The passion they have for the truth only bubbles to the surface if the issue is angled a certain way.”
You defended your previous statement of only caring about truth that is pro-conservative or anti-liberal by saying everyone does that. That’s a both-sides argument.
You also have Trump feature heavily, while at the same time talking about conservatism, conflating the two. Conservative truth should also be anti-Trump truth, as Trump is not a conservative. And you have previously stated that you are anti-Trump, meaning you are a real conservative, not a CINO like the pro-Trump faction of the Republican party.
You had one reasonable post (#196) where you were questioning whether it made sense to blame Trump when we don’t know exactly what happened. You said you needed more info about whether DHS and CBP acted badly or negligently before you could decide. You admitted that this was a complicated issue and included parts for why Trump looks bad, but also why it might not be his fault.
For some people this is the case. Maybe not all people all the time, but some of the people some of the time.
I explained earlier how the outrage only occurs when it’s Trump doing the thing. When tear gas was used at the border, anyone who supported Trump was complicit in war crimes, was a horrible person, and the personal attacks on character flew. Then it came out that Obama did the same thing, and the first reaction was to insinuate that the Washington Times was outright fabricating data. Then, once it was established, the story just went away.
The goal was to smear Trump. They intended no discussion about whether it was reasonable to use common crowd-dispersal methods at the border. No, it was a war crime, they said, and you’re a bad person if you disagree.
Again, it’s not all of the people all of the time, but there is certainly, without a doubt, a certain subset of people who are only interested in destroying Trump, or maligning him, and that’s their prerogative. But when someone who sort of calls balls and strikes steps in and clears the air with facts, they’re “bad people”.
I used to discuss politics at great length during the Obama years on another board, actually moderated the political forum. And even as a right-leaning guy, people were for the most part respectful. I gave Obama credit where credit was due, but also criticized his failures, and my progressive opponents were likewise respectful in disagreement and often would concede a point. When Trump got elected, the mood all changed. It’s a war zone. I’m still the same guy who calls balls and strikes (with a conservative bent), but suddenly I was a Russian bot, a bad-faith poster, a crypto-Nazi, just all the crap you can think of for saying, “Hey, maybe this thing Trump is doing isn’t the worst idea,” or, “I don’t think Trump-Russia collusion is there.”
But maybe it was a mistake to air that post here, to “poison the well” as you put it.
I mean, it was hard to divine what exactly his complaint was with “Take your both sides crap and shove it”. So I took a stab at it. the whole point of the post was to explain what I meant by “truth from a conservative angle”, that falsity against conservatives are what usually motivates me to write, not that falsity on the left or the right should be “given a pass”.
Nothing I wrote implies “both sides say wrong things, so lay off conservatives when they do it!”
The discussion about tear gas at the border taking place in 2012 would have been much different. I would be arguing that it’s an effective crowd dispersal method that we even use on our own citizens during a riot, and I think progressives would be inclined to agree that even if it’s unfortunate, it certainly isn’t a war crime for the Obama CBP to use tear gas at the border. Maybe they’d like to see better immigration policy, but it’s not a humanitarian crisis. I’d defend Obama, and I defended Trump on this issue. But because it’s Trump doing it, people abandon this reasonable discussion we would otherwise have, because reasonable discussion isn’t the goal. The goal is to malign Trump.
This is what I meant by what I said. But I certainly don’t approach anyone who is critical of Trump as simply “not interested in discussion”, I judge their words on the merits. carnivorousplant, for example, had a simple, reasonable point that I was happy to talk about. Others as well.
There are different contexts. With Obama, there were some issues at the border, and somethings needed to be done. He was not presented with good options, and so chose the least bad option, even though it was also, a bad option in and of itself.
With Trump, he is intentionally creating these situations. He knows that if he closes the border to asylum seekers, then some of them will be somewhat upset bout this, and maybe try to cross anyway. He even said that he was telling the military to shoot anyone who throws a rock.
As I’ve said before, Obama was the guy at the switch, deciding if the run away train is going to run into the orphanage full of nuns, or the nunnery full of orphans. Trump is the guy who sold off the safety system that would have prevented that situation in the first place.
You really cannot equate the two. Their actions do need to be taken in the context of their attitudes and actions. Just looking and seeing that one time, Obama did something superficially similar to what Trump is doing, and using that as an excuse for what Trump has done, is not an honest argument to make.
So with the family of the second dead child, the mother explicitly statedthat the men are encouraged to bring a child along with them to increase their chances of being allowed to stay. Most of the family is left behind, one small child is dragged through thousands of miles of dangerous conditions to be used as a hall pass. Of course, that won’t be enough for many people to admit that the deaths are the fault of the two fathers…