So…it’s okay to support Nazis, as long as it helps you win?
Well, yes. What’s your point?
Infrastructure projects need to build things that people can use in the future. Just building more airports, bridges, and roads won’t do the trick. And again, what about coal country? Trump can’t just bring that back. And those roadside construction jobs aren’t going to replace what cities like Youngstown, OH lost over decades.
Yeah, this could be shaping up to be Ryanomics against Bannonomics. One has to wonder where Mike Pence fits in all of this and where his loyalties lie.
I didn’t vote for Trump and think he will be a disaster as president, but I’m struggling to see what’s wrong either with praising Marine Le Pen, or with objecting to mass migration (in this case of Indians and East Asians to Silicon Valley).
Ethnic diversity tends to lower social trust and weakens the fabric of society, and this is especially the case when you have market dominant minorities (e.g. when Silicon Valley CEOs are predominantly Chinese or Indian). I don’t want to live in that kind of society, and Bannon isn’t wrong for pointing that out. Or for pointing out that in many cases (e.g. the Rotherham statutory rape scandal in the north of England), the desire to be “anti-racist” at all costs has led European countries to shut their eyes to horrendous behavior on the part of (in this case) ethnic minority communities.
Mass migration and ethnic diversity does in fact damage the social and cultural cohesion of communities, and it has serious costs as well as benefits. You can certainly argue the benefits outweight the costs (I think in some situations they do, and in others they don’t), but Bannon and his publication were not wrong for pointing out the costs, though I think the costs have been much more serious in Europe than here.
Asians are nowhere close to being a dominant minority in Silicon Valley; Bannon was greatly exaggerating the number of Asian CEO’s which itself is a bad sign. The benefits for Silicon Valley of being able to top the widest global talent pool are obvious and the costs in terms of “social trust” and “fabric of society” are speculative handwaving at best.
Wow. Just wow.
White nationalism. For us all to see.
Just wow.
Indeed.
Also, Hector, of all the things that might be eroding “the fabric of American society” – whatever that even means – you’re going with “Our CEOs aren’t white enough”? Seriously?
I find via Google that in Spring 2015 there were four blacks (0.8%) among the Fortune-500 CEOs. That’s 0.8% more than the portion of blacks who signed the Declaration of Independence or Constitution and shows us how far down the road to perdition we’ve come. Moreover
Whatever Dopers may think of letting Asians or Spanish speakers fire real Americans, I think we can all agree that 4.8% female executives are about 4% too many.
Business as usual for Bannon: the politics of resentment. It doesn’t matter what actual proportion of Silicon Valley CEOs are Asian; what matter is that whites resent them.
I don’t like Bannon from what little I know of him. However a couple of points.
First, racial preferences for elite college admissions effectively limit Asian dominance at those institutions, and the left doesn’t have a problem with that. This IMO substantially weakens the immediate deployment of ‘white nationalism, just wow’ etc. if somebody suggests it could be anything less than socially optimal to have unlimited disproportionate representation of Asians in prestigious positions.
The specific statement (by Bannon) though has the big problem of being factually inaccurate, or at least highly doubtful*.
On the larger issue of mass immigration, the left must IMO better explain why it’s ‘racist’ if people already legally in the US question whether further large scale immigration is good for them and if they aren’t convinced it is, why they shouldn’t vote against it. If anything I think it would easier to make a moral argument why recent immigrants might be (not necessarily saying I think so) hypocritical to view further immigration as contrary to their interests. But for native born people (of any color) I don’t see the moral argument why they have to support further large scale immigration. And if it’s not inherently racist to believe your interests aren’t served by further large scale immigration, it’s at that point irrelevant if some of the people who oppose further large scale immigration happen to actually be racists. Some of the people seeking essentially open borders are also racists. Some people with various positions on any issue are racists.
In order to oppose something on a moral basis, as in calling it ‘racist’, you must show why the issue position you oppose is immoral, not just claim that people with a different opinion than yours are racists, then pretend you don’t have to address the issue itself. This happens more with immigration than any other issue IMO.
*the debunking fact checks all seem to quote Asians as % of all SV managers, or less relevantly what % of Asian workers in SV are managers, when Bannon was speaking of CEO’s, presumably of major companies; several SV mega-corp CEO’s are Asian, though it would still be hard to define it so that ‘2/3’s to 3/4’ would come out anywhere near correct.
Learn something about him by like having hearings, like they did with the Garland nomination?
That poor sumbitch. What must it be like, to consult the Magic Eight Ball and have the one float into view that nobody ever gets, the legendary “You are* sooo *boned!”
If the worst thing that happens in the next four years is the Trump family pads its pockets at tax-payer’s expense by building roads and bridges, I’ll say we dodged the bullet.
Sure, but what odds they limit themselves in that way? As things stand, they will be completely free to make foreign policy (including trade deals) based solely on how policies and deals affect their own bank accounts–to hell with the nation’s actual interests, whether in the security sphere or the economic.
If you examine your nation’s interests in the light of your own livelihood, it opens the mind to fresh perspectives.
Arguments based on liberal normative ethics don’t work, otherwise Trump would’ve gotten blown out. A more hopeful argument is he won in spite of this, not because of it. Guess we’ll see how public opinion shifts over the next four years. I’m not particularly optimistic.
I disagree with both of your points. On this one, the Asian-representation thing was extensively discussed in GD before. The argument seems to center on Asians being under-represented in the Ivy League based on academic rating. But it’s long been a fact of life that in the intensely competitive Ivy League admissions process, non-academic as well as academic criteria play a significant role.
Some of these are subjective and they implicitly include social legacy as well as academic and non-academic accomplishment as putative predictors of success. Is it problematic that the Ivy Leagues’ selection criteria are informed by a vested interest in their alumni’s probability of prominent success rather than by altruism and egalitarianism? Perhaps, but I’m not sure it’s quite correct to just dismissively say that “the left doesn’t have a problem with that”, but rather that any perceived failings in Ivy League admission policies are not seen as a sufficiently compelling social problem to justify any further interventions than the non-discrimination protections that already exist.
It’s called race-baiting, and race-baiting is usually careless with the facts.
The “larger issue” is really that the traditional objections to immigration are as old as America itself, and stem from an insidious mix of opposition to the different and the fact that it’s much easier to see how new immigrants can consume jobs and public resources than it is to see how immigrants grow the economy, contribute to productivity and culture, and benefit the nation at large, which is more or less the founding principle of the country. But generation after generation, there has always been a faction that, once having immigrated themselves, wants to roll up the welcome mat, turn off the lights, and close the border for good.
However the election issue is over a much narrower question, and terms like “large scale immigration” and “open borders” (which you also used, further on) are just straw men that no one is actually talking about. At their worst, they’re not just straw men but dog-whistle terms for “Hispanic immigration from Mexico and points south” and “Muslim immigration from anywhere”. And that’s where the groundless fear, racism, and xenophobia comes in.
The plight of the Syrian refugees is a good example. Even under Obama, the number of Syrian refugees admitted to the US in the past year has been almost insignificantly tiny compared to the numbers admitted by most western nations, not just shamefully tiny on a per-capita basis, but actually less in absolute numbers than countries with much smaller populations like Australia, Canada, and the UK. And in the midst of this humanitarian crisis, the Trump regime got elected on a promise to essentially reduce this miniscule number down to zero. Neither this nor the strident demands for mass deportations has anything whatsoever to do with “further large scale immigration” or “open borders”.
You failed to mention which state Sessions represents in the Senate. Was it too embarrassing for your case? Did you miss it? I’ll give you a hint: It’s the state Mississippi is happy to have in the Union because it means Mississippi doesn’t come last in every category.
Serious question: Which appointments by Obama did “your side” think were comparable to Trump’s appointments like Bannon or Flynn (Colin Powell: “[Flynn is] abusive… worked against policy… right-wing nutty”). Flynn, who has accepted money from the Kremlin, has already chosen his own son — a conspiracy nut — to be his chief of staff.
Trump’s appointments are so bad that the new CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, is being touted as the adult among them. Yet Pompeo is a Tea Bagger who doesn’t believe in climate change, opposes abortion even after rape or incest, and is on record claiming that some U.S. officials involved in the Iran deal should be imprisoned. … That’s the “reasonable” one among these slimy appointments.
Yes, Mitt Romney may become Secretary of State. But that high office is often used to project a veneer of respectability abroad, while hawks in the White House plot in an opposite direction. (Recall Cheney’s SecState, Colin Powell.)
So HurricaneDitka, let me ask again: Who were the Obama appointments that support a “Your side is just as bad” claim?
300,000 deleted treasonous e-mails! Silly question, really.