Then you choose not to see the answer, and there is nothing I can do about that.
Ah, the nuances have escaped your notice; too bad. I’m not really inclined to explain it to you, but I did want you to know that I noted your trouble here.
No, his numbers aren’t “good”, but they’re not really appreciably different from where they’ve been bouncing around for the last year. I think trying to characterize every little dip as “bleeding” or “dropping fast and nothing he’s doing makes any difference” is silly, and I’m confident that our less-partisan readers will see that.
So, no lines from the speech then? Alrighty.
No; it doesn’t.
Nope; that’s not true either.
Nope, 3rd untrue thing in your post, and the post only contained these 3 things. Sad.
“Immigrants” lumps in all the foreign exchange students, H1-B visa holders, green card recipients, and tourists with “illegal immigrants”, which is the group that was the focus of the speech tonight.
Illegal immigrants are also more law abiding than people already living here.
As much as I dislike Trump, and as much as I frequently disagree with HD, he’s spot on here. Yes, Trump’s aggregated approval rating on 538 has been trending down in recent weeks, but that change is still very small. As HD noted, Trump’s approval rating throughout 2018 wobbled around in a pretty narrow range of 40-44%.
I study these kinds of numbers (in a marketing context) for a living. Right now, if I were analyzing those numbers for a client, my observation would be “the trend doesn’t look great, but it’s not dropped low enough, or declined for long enough, for me to feel confident that it’s evidence of a real change in the market.”
In other words: if it continues the downward trend of the past few weeks, and drops below 40%, and stays below that range where he’s been for the past year, then I might start to suspect that there’s an erosion in his support. Right now, it’s too hard to tell if it’s something bigger than the usual small-scale up and down from the daily news cycle, and / or statistical variance.
while that is true, there’s no solid actual stats for crimes committed by illegal immigrants, but overall there’s no reason to suspect they arent the same.
I had a hamster who’s nuts were huge, I thought my hamster was just special, guess not.
Edit: MS-13 just stole my car and job as I was typing this. Should have parked it in the bailey, damn.
This is my understanding as well. I think the sparse research that has been done in this area comes from heavily-biased sources to boot. I’d call it an unknown at this point, or perhaps an uncertainty.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. Why do we have to import it from China and Mexico? What’s happened to this country?
Are you kidding? The whole topic–the entire reason why it’s even an issue–is because of the campaign. Most of the people can see through him now, so the only thing left that he can do is pander to those remaining suckers who still fall for his dog-and-pony show–that’s Trump campaigning.
The media were expecting something different, and all they got was the same old bullshit–Trump’s eternal campaign. The fundraising letters–which deceived their recipients into thinking the money would go for the wall–was just the final touch of shameless venality.
Oh, I hope that’s wrong. It was wonderful to watch that imbecile struggle to awkwardly read a speech like a scared seventh-grader giving a book report. I want to see more of this, in this exact same format. I imagine it’ll end his reputation for charisma. Plus, bonus, we should throw in a couple big words, just to watch him struggle through them. And the sniffles!
Oh, and nine minutes is the right length. Short enough to be the cringey sort of funny, while not being so long as to be boring.
EDIT: Hahahaha the pauses at the wrong points in the sentences! Hahahahahaha! More more more!
“America’s heart broke the day [LONG PAUSE AT THE WRONG POINT] after Christmas.”
“In California an illegal immigrant was charged with murder for killing [LONG PAUSE AT THE WRONG POINT] beheading and dismembering his neighbor.”
“Over the last several years I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen [LONG PAUSE AT THE WRONG POINT] by illegal immigration” [P.s. “stolen by illegal immigration”? This idiot can’t even read off a card properly.]
And so much more. So wooden. So bad. Like when an athlete goes on SNL and awkwardly reads from the cue cards during his skits (except for the “athlete” part, of course. And the humor (other than the unintentional kind))
I think you misunderstand Trump supporters. They KNOW he was bull shitting. They just don’t care.
I recently saw an interview with some coal miners that lost their job Trump promised to save. They still think Trump is the greatest thing ever.
I mean, what’s there to really criticize? It’s the same speech he always gives, and it boils down to one handy phrase: “Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you”. This is a classic chestnut of demagogery, used against any group of people the dominant social demographic does not like to spread fear and hatred against them. Age-old, time-tested, not really much to say about it.
It’s really simple. In any demographic, as long as it’s large enough, there will be some people who commit heinous crimes. That’s just a matter of statistics - it doesn’t matter who you’re talking about. And once you have a handful of cases like that, you can harp on them endlessly, treating them as the Most Important Thing we all need to be talking about. And at that point, it doesn’t matter if most of that demographic are innocent, or even if that demographic is statistically far less likely to commit that sort of crime; when people think of that demographic, what comes to mind is that one fucking example. It’s so easy! You can do this with Mexican immigrants. You can do this with Syrian refugees. You can do this with Jews literally anywhere in Europe. You can do it with freakin’ cardiologists! You can do it with the police - as I’m quite sure any opponent of #BlackLivesMatters knows all too well*. And it’s especially easy to do with immigrants, as UltraVires shows us nicely:
See? We could have a billion illegal immigrants and if even one of them is anything less than a fucking saint, none of them should get to stay, and we should spend the effort to arrest and deport each and every one of them. Let no expense be spared in driving this population from our lands, lest even one of them steal a fucking candy bar from a convenience store.
Exaggerated, sure. But that’s the logical conclusion of this position. That’s the point of metaphors like the “bowl of skittles”; the scope, of course, being hidden and distorted. Because why else should our national consciousness be gripped by the existence of the handful of anecdotes that get bandied about over and over again?
To take it from a CurrentAffairs article I recently read:
So much for Murray’s tone: What about his analysis of the social problems caused by immigration? Arguing about public policy with someone whose anti-immigration is always uniquely frustrating, because your opponent has a trump card they wouldn’t otherwise be able to use in any normal debate; which is to say, “What if a whole gigantic population of people I don’t like simply vanished, taking their problems with them?” Take, for example, the issue of mass school shootings in the U.S. This is a complicated problem, and I might posit a variety of contributing factors that need to be examined: easy availability of firearms, lack of access to mental health support, toxic masculinity, the stultifying atmosphere of U.S. schools, and the attendant sense of powerlessness this creates in young people, etc. Now, imagine my opponent simply says to me, “This has gone too far. The problem is teenage boys. No more teenage boys. Get rid of them.” I might reply that there are a lot of teenage boys in the U.S., and most of them are not shooting anybody! And maybe the ones who are disposed to shoot people could be prevented from doing so if we reached them early enough! “No,” my opponent says, “that’s an unacceptable risk. There will be no more teenage shooters if we get rid of the teenagers. They have no right to be here. Their parents were foolish to have had them in the first place.” And of course, this is strictly correct; so what can I say?
This is approximately how it feels to argue about immigration. I can agree with Murray that somebody murdering a journalist over a Muhammad cartoon is bad, or that someone plowing a truck into a crowd in the name of Allah is bad, or that the mass groping of women at a rock concert is bad. I can point out that these awful events have complex causes, and that attempting to prevent future incidents of the same kind will require a lot of thoughtful community work. Murray will simply say that all of the people who committed the above-cited crimes are immigrants or descendants of immigrants; therefore, the problem is immigration, and the solution is to restrict immigration. If there are no immigrants, there will be no murders or sexual assaults by immigrants. Problem solved.
[…]
I don’t think our intuitions are very reliable guides here, and for me, differential crimes rates across immigrant populations, even if they existed, would not be a reason for an otherwise stable and prosperous country to refuse to admit immigrants, any more than I think the fact that men commit exponentially more rapes and murders than women is a reason to precautionarily exile all men to a Martian penal colony.
:rolleyes:
So yeah. Stupid xenophobic point, done to death, basically the only speech Trump ever gives. What is there to talk about? Even if every single fact and claim he offered was 100% accurate and on the level, the fundamental point they’re building to is unreasonable - and, as Germany knows very well, dangerous. Interestingly enough, I’m not convinced the president would actually be allowed to hold that speech here in Germany - we have laws against “volksverhetzung” (roughly translated as “rabble-rousing”, typically propaganda meant to spread hate and fear towards certain demographics, and you can probably guess why those laws exist), and this is a pretty classic case of it.
It’s an extremely basic, extremely easy polemic to make, if you’re willing to distort the facts and use cherry-picked anecdotes to stir up fear. It’s been used for centuries, and at this point I’d just as soon we deport anyone who actually buys into this crap than any given illegal immigrant, as they are demonstrably more dangerous to the countries they belong to than any illegal immigrant could ever be. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the address is how little energy this guy put into such a basic emotional appeal. Like… dude. For these things to work you want your oratorical style to sound like Adolf Hitler, not Ben Stein on Quaaludes.
–
*Bipartisan cuteness aside, there are real systemic problems in the police that make abuses easier to cover up and harder to track that need to be addressed. It’s not just a matter of “a few bad apples being blown out of proportion”; the thin blue line does an excellent job of protecting itself from investigations into its own abuses.
Wild guess: Given the recent scandals involving Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes, maybe they’re apprehensive about firing an openly gay man.
I am reminded of:
Trump, Murray, UltraVires, etc are essentially Dark Judges, who have followed the logic to its inevitable conclusion: crimes are committed by the living; ergo, the solution to crime is to kill everyone.