The Wehrmacht did not weaponize leprosy!
Not sure why this is in GD, but as others have said, there are several definitions of invasion that have nothing to do with armed force. And invasion of locusts doesn’t require tanks and planes, after all. That said, Trump is an idiot and he’s basically using the term invasion to fire up his base for the election. It’s a stupid use for the purpose of riling up the faithful about a few thousand refugees fleeing a terrible situation and hoping for sanctuary in the US, and he’s even more of a fucking asshole than usual (and that’s saying something) for trotting it out.
On my own Trump-BS-o-meter it gets a .00001 out of 10. On the ‘he’s a fucking asshole’ meter, it’s pretty close to the top of the scale (I had to re-calibrate it several times though as he kept blowing it up)
You’re missing the point of the thread.
I can’t really do anything about your perception, but in the OP you asked:
The answer would appear to be ‘yes’. Do you agree?
Possibly.
But he’s correcting an erroneous interpretation of his previous post, which seems a fully legitimate thing to do.
Snipping your quote because I agree with a lot of other stuff you said, but it bears repeating: an invasion of soldiers, locusts, or whatever is commonly held to be an unwanted advance of a dangerous thing.
When people fleeing terrorism in their home countries are viewed to be threats, people who see it that way have lost their humanity. How ironic that so many of them assert that they are some stripe of Christians, supposedly with goodwill toward their fellow man.
Trump’s being stupid. The individual’s choice is whether or not to share in that stupidity.
I do not. The invasion talk seems to have two thrusts, that the migrants are going to do an illegal border crossing, and that the whole thing is a Soros/Jewish conspiracy.
For the first, well, the caravan certainly isn’t Sneaking across the border- it isn’t sneaking anywhere. As I understand it, they are asylum seeking refugees. Applying for asylum, though perhaps unwelcome and en masse, does not, to me, meet any of the definitions of invasion presented up thread. How do you figure it does?
As for the Soros thing, puh-leeze.
When I called in a company to look at my yard problem (basically, a bunch of local nasty weeds throughout my back yard), the guy said it was an ‘invasion of local vegetation’. I didn’t take this to mean I needed to start building machine gun nests and breaking out the barbed wire, nor did I see it as dangerous…just highly annoying (especially the goat head).
Also, just because you (and I, and most other rational people) don’t see this ‘invasion’ as ‘a dangerous thing’, doesn’t mean that everyone is on board with that. Certainly, there is a segment of the US population (probably a segment of EVERY human population) that would see a ‘large’ group of refugees headed towards their borders as ‘an unwanted advance’ and ‘a dangerous thing’, even if you include those as vital parts of the ‘invasion’ definition.
Like I said, I agree with you wrt the supposed danger here, and we both know exactly why Trump is doing and saying the things he’s saying, and we both know, and probably most in this thread know that these folks are desperate refugees fleeing the terrible conditions in their home countries as well as the regional disruptions that have been happening, and that they should be portrayed that way, not as some sort of ‘invasion’ force bent on…well, whatever loony horseshit Trump et al are trying to portray or whatever fevered imaginings are happening in folks swallowing this tripe.
Trump use of the word “invasion” in describing the caravan tosses proportion away.
By adopting Trump’s rhetoric, many conservatives are ignoring that his words are like gasoline tossed in to the fire:
And this is how the OP should have couched his question, instead of the final line, which is what we are mainly discussing in this thread. Basically, the OP SHOULD have been about the wild rhetoric being used to spin the narrative, not stuff about Operation Barbarossa compared to the caravan and the definition of ‘invasion’.
The vast majority of those people will not get anywhere near the US border. The vast majority of the tiny fraction that do reach border will request asylum as they are legally entitled to do. The vast majority of those asylum claims will be denied and those people will not stay in the US.
A tiny fraction of a tiny fraction will be granted asylum and have a chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US. Does this sound like it could meet some definition of invasion?
Further agreeing with you, we should continue to point out that in the minds of most of this group we’re talking about, the supposed “danger” of these people is really about their national origin and virtually nothing else.
Absolutely. We should, as a nation, be helping these people. In addition, as a nation on the macro level and who has a vested interest in this region of the globe, we should be doing a lot more to bring stability and prosperity to the nations hardest hit by all of the chaos, much of it caused by freaking us. The whole give a man a fish or teach a man to fish thingy. Like I said in another thread, we really should be doing the Chinese equivalent (only less evil and debt-trappy) of belt and road throughout the entire region instead of this stupid anti-NAFTA stuff that actually undercuts Mexico when we need to be helping them to build up. The real way to stop migration caravans is to make conditions in the region such that folks don’t want to migrate (or, in this case, flee in terror and fear for their lives and their children’s lives). Not only would this help us on this one issue, but (twirls evil capitalist mustache) it will provide us with new sources for goods and services and markets for our goods as well as places we could be building manufacturing as well. It COULD be a win/win for us, instead of this stupid, asinine exercise by the idiotic red haired moron in chief.
Key distinction: invaders, whether Mongol hordes, locusts or whatever, never ask permission.
Asylum seekers, by definition, do ask permission.
To what extent did those in the caravan ask & receive permission to enter Mexico at the Guatemala border? (I ask out of curiosity - I’m fairly confident at least some did.)
I don’t want to turn this into a whole immigration debate.
I’ll say that I disagree with most of your assumptions. Why do you think “the vast majority will not get anywhere near the US border?” It appears as though the numbers are increasing, not decreasing and the 4-10 thousand are now only 10 days away. You toss “the vast majority” around as if that’s fact and it’s not.
The big issue as it resonates at all with me, or the people whose opinion I care about, is that this can be viewed as yet another (albeit small) component of an invasion that has been going on for years at about 11.4 million.
But as I stated up thread, with all that is going on right now, this statement by Trump is the least of my concern.
As an American, however, that would be your god-given right.
#secondisnumberone
Keeping in mind that you asked if there is “any way to justify” labeling the caravan an invasion (not whether you personally would do so), here are some quotes from earlier in the thread:
If you can’t already see how it might (at least in some way) be justified, I doubt I could say anything more that would make that clear to you. Personally, I’m with Xema, spifflog, and Banquet Bear on this one: There are some definitions of “invasion” that this caravan meets.