The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

sigh....

EDIT:
I don't even see how that video helps your argument. It basically says "within 25k years we'll see the climate go cold towards an ice age, according to research based on climate history and knowledge about astrological facts. Except we humans screw with co2 so much we're actually not really sure what that will do long term with this ice age thing, but probably push it away for 100k+ years, so be sure to realize: That massive greenhouse climate we're making right now will suck".

The temperature is rising now, predicted to reach critical levels of rise that will very seriously screw over large parts of the planet in many ways within less than 100 years.
An ice age that slowly is arriving within 25k years won't help us with this.

What happened to "Let this thread die" that people were advocating a few days ago?

American politics was shot in the head by its heavily armed population.

EDIT:

The real author of that book seems to be in quite a shock of what he has contributed to.

I am at a loss why people support Trump. Hillary sucks, I get that. But is that the only reason? Hatred for Hillary and ambivalence about the consequences of voting Trump?
What makes a person think that Trump, with all his obvious extreme flaws, could be a good President?
The general explanation is that of "a revolution of angry white man who lost their jobs to globalization and are afraid of foreigners and generally just not well educated".
But that just doesn't fit with the population of this forums, does it?
Kiwi, Mered, Elodea, all the others in this thread who appear to be happy about Trumps victory are basically my age range. I'd consider you all likely to be rather intelligent.
So what's the pattern? Are you the children of the angry white man group? Are you just random irregularities? Are you clinically insane? Am I clinically insane? wtf? According to logic you have to have some reason why you would support a person who basically stands for hatred towards humanity this much? Are you somehow unhappy with your life?

EDIT:
Also Elodea, weren't you like the most radical liberal I've ever seen? Do you realize Trump basically wants to shut down international US trade by law? Isn't that something you thought is the end of the world?
The general consensus in German media basically is that Trumps election stands for the newest extreme of the crisis of liberal values and the new rise of fascism and I'd agree with that assessment. Yet here you are defending Trump. You, the most extreme liberal I've ever talked to.

No-one is clinically insane, we are merely working from different bases of informaation. If what you assume about trump is true e.g. a racist bigot who hates all of humanity and seeks to destroy the world in a nuclear winter, then no reasonable person would disagree with your conclusion. Given the information that you making conclusions from, ofcourse you would be frustrated that people didn't seem to see what you did.

The problem is some of us have more/different information. We don't agree with the premise of this extreme cartoon villian. With good reason we believe it is a false narrative born from progressive victim culture subsequently amplified by the Hillary campaign and associated corporate media.

One of the foundational ideas of progressivism is that of white privilege, which is where your very concept of the angry white man comes from. Like all identity politics, that narrative is just a racist trap that seeks to divide us into nothing but the colour of our skin.

All it is is tribalistic in/out group behaviour. Ask yourself, what is the most cherished liberal moral value? Inclusivity. It should not come as any surprise that the most common way the left attacks its political opponents is also within that moral framework where it demonises them ignorant, anti-intelletual, anti-inclusives regardless of whether they are or not. The classic Ben affleck vs Sam harris on Real Time was a textbook example of this kind of behaviour. The aftermath of that show had Sam defending himself against false accusations of racism and bigotry for months and months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60

Trump is certainly not the perfect messiah, but so much of what gets tossed around about him involve quotes taken out of context, false rape accusations, smearing, dishonest media spinning etc. Your good intentions and well meaning instincts have been hijacked for the political games of others. Yes we should fight racists, but trump isn't a racist.

- Trump fighting for minority rights.
- pew exit polls showed black and hispanic voter swing towards trump while white voter preferences remained constant.

Douglas Murray recently wrote an excellent piece on this topic
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/donald-trump-wont-be-as-bad-as-you-think/

If you still have doubts, I'm sure we can have a clear discussion where you make a claim about Trump's disgusting character and I will respond with how it is most likely misinformed.

Smarter and more articulate people than myself have caught onto what's going on so I'm just going to leave you with a favourite quote of mine and a small list of independent thinkers you may or may not be interested to check out. In particular you should listen to Jonathon Haidt and his argument that you may just be trapped in a partisan information matrix. Hence your frustration at not being able to understand the views of people like mered, kiwi, and myself.

John Stuart Mill

Jordan B Peterson
https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos


Jonathon Haidt



Dave Rubin
https://www.youtube.com/user/RubinReport
Interview with David Sirota
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRCZBY7oZxY

Gad Saad
https://www.youtube.com/gadsaad

Video evidence of racist alt right, KKK grand dragon, white supremacist, mysoginist Trump supporters beating up defenseless black women and children.

If you're surprised that Trump won just read this, this, and this by someone who has been paying attention to Trump's strategy. If you don't watch/read anything else here then these should be the things to read IMO.

http://imgur.com/gallery/HO5TT
http://imgur.com/gallery/SxpJC
http://imgur.com/gallery/ZtcST

If you're still not convinced:
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/11/trump-will-consider-keeping-parts-of-obamacare-report-says.html

Already changing his views, for the better it looks like. Soon I bet it will be him changing *some* of his views in climate change.

Exactly. People need to stop treating art of the deal as the devil's bible. If you want to understand Trump for purely academic reasons, get yourself a copy and read how he operates.

It will be interesting to see what actually happens, that's for sure...

He has made an aggressive case to build a practically impossible to build wall to keep out immigrants whom he called rapists, murders, etc pp. By using such aggressive anti immigrant rhetoric, even if he doesn't mean anything he says, he pushes such views among certain parts of the population who really believe the **** he says.

He has stated he'd like to reintroduce torture as a means of dealing with terrorist suspects. I think it's plain obvious why that's a no-go.

He has demanded to target the families of terrorists. That's a war crime.

He demanded any Muslim from being stopped to enter the country at some point. That's again pushing hatred towards other groups of people/religions and even if he just says it to get more votes, by that he pushes those views in people again.

He may or may not have jumped back and forth on these views. But he said these things and some people saw him say those things and went "I guess it's socially acceptable to think that". But it is not. It should not be. It cannot be. Calamity awaits if it becomes socially acceptable to demand such things.

Oh right he also had that stuff where he is persecuted in several sexual harassment cases. Or that Trump University thing where he screwed over people as well and is getting sued.
You're unhappy Hillary was under some criminal investigation for some e-mail server? Trump is under criminal investigations as well. Multiple ones apparently.

It's not easy to understand why anybody would support this guy. He's a joke. Not a serious contender to be a president of any country.

It seems to me like you basically do not care at all what Mr. Trump says, you somehow seem to be sure that whatever he says, he'll do something vastly different and better in reality. You judge him by actions not yet taken, not by what he has said up til now?

No lol, when I said some of his issues I did not mean "whatever he says". I do not agree with quite a few things Trump stands by.

"whatever he says" probably was going a little too far, sorry

.

Didn't think you would put out that many points. Here is how you've misinterpreted or misconstrued each one.

With respect, you're being ridiculous with this same old talking point about 'drumming up the racists'. Here is Bill Clinton on border control and illegal immigration 20 years ago.


Trump did not equate immigrants with rapists and murderers. It should be obvious that an immigrant is not necessarily a rapist, and a rapist is not necessarily an immigrant. Likewise, legal immigration is distinct from illegal immigration. The people who spin the narrative you are putting forward need to take a good look at themselves and feel shame for being the only ones in the room spreading hatred and racial division. There are plenty of clips of Trump specifically making the distinction between hard working immigrants who contribute to America and criminal immigrants who break the law.

Here is what Trump actually said

Sensible countries practice border control for good reason. If you have a problem with what is defined as illegal, that is not a problem with the enforcement of border control, that is a problem with the law that governs border control.

Also, the wall matters very little. Either Mexico pays for it and it gets built, or Mexico doesn't pay for it and it doesn't get built. Business 101. If someone wants to offer you something for free, what's not to like about that. In either case, this is not a problem for Americans.

Yes and no. This is one of the points I disagree with Trump on. Institutionalised torture sanctioned by the state is nothing but asking for trouble .

However, let me ask you this. You have in your custody a terrorist who knows the location of several dirty bombs in a metropolitan city that will explode in 30 minutes. The terrorist is refusing to co-operate with you. What do you do? Promise to reward him with cookies? At some point, violence can only be met with violence.

This has been taken out of context in order to imply something that wasn't intended. Trump was talking specifically in the interview about ISIS family members who knew and supported terrorist activities. 'Family' does not automatically give blanket immunity. Hostile actors are hostile actors irregardless of gender or social relationship.


Actually listen to the source interview for yourself. Here is a transcript of the relevant parts

Interviewer: "What about civilian casualities. What about the fact that we're targeting them [ISIS] and people are very concerned about collateral damage"
Trump: "I would do my best, my absolute best"
Trump: "I mean one of the problems that we have and that we're so ineffective is that they're using them as human shields but we're fighting a very politically correct war."
Trump: "And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families."

He clearly separates innocent civilian human shields from family members with hostile intent and knowledge. "Take out their families" wasn't meant in the literal sense as we see in other interviews.

Here is what he said when questioned about this

It's clear upon further clarification that this honest buffoon only brought up ISIS families in the context of using them as leverage against the terrorist who doesn't care for their own life.

Pushing hatred? Let's start with what Trump actually said.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-...mp-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration

You can find some of that pew research here
http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-overview/
http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/04/worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-topline1.pdf

Trump was talking about a temporary suspension of muslim immigration in the context of the European migrant crisis until government could 'figure out what is happening'. No prejudgement of hate was made against muslims as people, only that an alarming amount of them held violent beliefs to warrant some kind of attention. Poland, Japan and a number of other countries are already essentially doing this. Hardly any of Trump's ideas are new. Why are you hating on him in particular?

This is what happens when you don't have responsible border control. Oops.
http://www.politico.eu/article/german-intelligence-warns-of-is-hit-squads-among-refugees/

Banning muslims however is obviously impossible constitutionally, politically, and pragmatically. Which is why Trump subsequently dropped it and refined his policy position to more accurately target the problem he was trying to address, namely "suspending immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies."

Innocent until proven guilty also applies to rape and sexual harassment. Having a claim brought against you is very different from being found guilty and I hope we all understand why.

You're going to need to be more specific about what cases you are talking about. I only know of the Katie Johnson case in which charges have already been dropped for some time now. It was super shady and involved the same charges being filed and dropped numerous times in slightly different iterations each time. 'She' then conveniently didn't turn up to a scheduled press conference while her publicist simultaneously tried selling videotapes of her account to the media for a million bucks or something.

The guardian did a good piece on this hoax. Something about a producer from the Jerry Springer Show having a history of filing false accusations against celebrities.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/07/donald-trump-sexual-assault-lawsuits-norm-lubow

Oh please. Not only is this a class action against one of his many businesses and not himself personally, this case hasn't been decided one way or another. Court hasn't made a finding nor has there been a settlement. If you have documents or evidence showing that he actually defrauded people i.e. made a false representation, you're more than welcome to share. Without sourced evidence you're just making baseless accusations from something you probably read in a flashy headline.

Up until Wikileaks, Hillary also enjoyed a presumption of innocence. However, now we know she really did break the same federal laws that have seen others punished with jailtime, job loss, and/or political persecution. SAP information is serious business, that stuff is classified need to know and not even the president is briefed. We also know she lied to congress thanks to FBI director Comey. As a result of "just some email server" we now know rather quite a lot about how she compromised the judicial branch.

Trump on the other hand is not under any criminal investigation whatsoever. Let alone multiple. lol

omg....

Well. Let's see.

On that Bill Clinton video: What a nice person. /s

Offer? Mexico never offered anything and obviously won't pay for such a project. Any slight believe into that is plain stupid. Business 101. What would Mexico have from financing a monumental sized wall in the US?

Also I've been looking at this statement in regards to my point:



Rough text is:

Yeah. So here he is going on about how half the world apparently is not their friends and how they're sending their bad people. Yes they may have good people, but obviously why would they send them to us. No the people they're sending are the bad people.

So in this short two minutes he demands to "kill" China and Japan in trade deals and how Mexico, southern American and the Middle East are sending only their bad people to the US. Their drug dealers, rapists, etc.

This is what I call hate preaching. Not as loud and aggressive as some crazy ISIS "all infidels must burn in hell or whatever" dude, but just because he is speaking in a calm and collected manner and puts in a short half sentence "some I assume, are good people" just to negate it with "but it's common sense that they're not sending us the good people" does not make him any less of a hate preacher in this statement.

This kind of hate preaching leads to stuff like this.

You may certainly be rather angry towards them. Scream at them if you want, considering the situation I probably would.
But we, as a society, have a foundation of values that are put into our most important laws.
These laws have been written after experience with a long history of unthinkable horrors.
You may not break them.
Simple as that.
Anything else makes you a hypocrite who goes back on any value if it happens to be convenient.

Yes sometimes it hurts to follow our own laws and values. But still acting according to the rules we set for themselves is what makes us different from terror regimes that do whatever they want. There cannot be any exception, as any exception is like a crack in a damn: It'll grow until the damn breaks.

The extreme hypocrisy of having a long list of human rights in your one hand and waging wars that kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people with the other hand is one of the biggest actual reasons I feel why terrorism is as bad of a problem as it is.
You can't really advertise values to people while you don't go through with them yourself.
It's like having a private coal power plant in your garden and then campaigning that "the others" please start consider the environmental impact of their actions. The others will laugh at you.

I did and I read your transcript. A short summary of what I am seeing is this:

"What about civilian casualties?" (Good question when somebody talks of bombing anything to hell.)

"I will do my best" (What does this even imply? What does he mean by that? How does that even answer the question? What is the best?)

"They're using them as human shields and we're fighting a very politically correct war." (And that is good or bad? Your supports quite often are not very fond of the term political correctness. You're political incorrectness personified. Do you actually imply? No you can't really?)

"And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families." (Oh no you do not just imply, you say it directly.)

I don't see him separate anything. At all.

This basically says "I think by threatening to kill their families we can scare terrorists to think twice about attacking us".

I doubt we know this exactly what that mother saw?

And that is horrible and unacceptable. Even if a family member starts to realize what **** is happening, that's not an offense that warrants a death penalty. Especially not one without a fair trial. That family member might actually be worried sick and try to stop the attacker. They may fail. They may be fightend to do something about it.
I mean consider there are many cases were woman live with violent husbands for quite some time, simply because they're not strong enough to fight back against a mere violent husband. Now consider a setting in a society that thinks nothing of women rights and replace the violent husband with a near insane terrorist. And you say it's justified to throw a bomb at them because they didn't manage to keep their family member in check? Seriously?

Let me guess: Actually the correlation is between countries and the number of American bombs dropped there in the last 15 years. ...

When I tell you that I we should stop all Australiens from entering Germany, because it seems some of them are criminals do you think that would be prejudice? Do you think that would be a good thing to say? Do you know the definition of prejudice? Or generalization? You are looking at a prime example of those things here.

A no, among 1000000+ people there might be a handful of criminals. How horrible. So what? So ******* what?
Hell some of those reports are actually from those refugees. Seems most of them are pretty decent people, trying to help us to find the few bad guys between them?
We have 1 refugee on 80 Germans around here. Germany isn't burning or anything. The USA have how many Syrian refugees? The last number I remember is 50k. In all of the USA. And Trump talks about how dangerous they are and wants to send them home. Refugees who must have been transported by plane to the USA. If there are only a a handful of terrorists in the refugees who came in a completely uncontrollable manner to us then how many will there be among the few lucky who got transported via plane to the USA? They probably were scanned in the most paranoid manner possible?

Also if one were to summarize the terror attacks in Europe over the last year or two I am pretty sure the pattern is mainly not "refugee who just arrived". In many cases they were here since years. They had citizenship since years. They might even have been raised here. Clearly they have nothing to do with helping refugees.

True.

I'll not continue this argument, I am pretty sure I read about way more than just one case, but I've already spent quite some time writing stuff now, and all of it was not in favor of Trump.
Let's put this pile on the long list of other issues that is not part of this argument. I just picked the first few things that came to mind. A simple google about Trump can yield lists and lists of problems with him.

Details. The man put this name onto it. He better stand for what it does.

I actually read a whole article a while ago about it, but in German and I don't have the link handy. Again let's just put this onto the list of things I am too lazy to continue here.
Oh actually I do can at least find this quickly on it:



But you should ask yourself: Why are there so many law suites that target Trump? Do you really think he is innocent in all of these cases? Then why is he getting sued this much? It certainly doesn't help with credibility when a person is constantly fighting against criminal charges of one type or the other.

Actually he is. He may not have been proven guilty, but you can be under investigation before that. You're disregarding it as "but it's only his company", but I don't let that count. He has to appear in court for those cases.
Reminded me of that case where Trump went "that judge is mexican, he isn't impartial when he judges me, because I am building a wall.
That memory yielded me this link: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-the-mexican-judge
Which turns out to be on Trump University...


Also it seems Trump did fool me. I actually had thought he at least would be a little anti establishment.

Nope. In hindsight kinda obvious...

So now after spending nearly 2 hours researching these arguments on Trump I tell you: I've not changed my mind on him. He is exactly what I described him as pages ago.

You're still misunderstanding things out of context and intended meaning to the point where I have to assume in good faith that it's because you're not getting the nuances or intentions of a the type of broken up american speech that Trump employs where he jumps from thought to thought without much polish. I would be the first to admit that clear communication is not one of Trump's strengths.

I'll start with our one point of agreement.

Exactly. This is the kind of reporting that a combative fourth estate is supposed to do and why Trump was the better presidential candidate. I also said in this thread ages ago that the press would be on his *** from day 1 and now it looks like they are on him even before he's in office.

Hillary would have done the exact same thing as Trump, maybe even worse, and no-one in the press would have reported on it. Make no mistake, the same working class America who elected him will without hesitation throw him out of office if he doesn't make good on his word to them. His feet are being held to the fire like no other president before him.

Now for the disagreement.

Bob: "Hey bill, how is your business doing?"
Bill: "Our new washing machines are great, we're killing out competition!"
Competition: "Man we are getting killed! We should make our washing machines competitive again"

Trump then goes on to talk about the problem of drug black markets as another economic problem created by America's war on drugs which does attract bad characters across the border. That was the context.

Again, Trump is terrible at speaking clearly. He is imprecise and mixes up his subject matter a lot but his underlying character is simply not racist or bigoted in nature.

This is a video of kids chanting a meme while others are smiling like they are in on the joke. This is not racial hatred. Ironically, the only thing stirring up racial hatred is the uploader of said video who labelled it "white kids did x". Building a wall understandably has a very different emotional meaning in the mind of a German than it does to an average American kid.

As previously illustrated to you, trump clarified his position to not mean death penalty.

As for innocent, Trump made the distinction between them and hostile actors whether you want to see that distinction or not. This is another product of his terrible off the cuff speech pattern which lends itself to misunderstanding. Again, his position was to use close family members who have hostile knowledge and intent as leverage in order to fight the problem of ISIS using innocent human shields. No one is talking about bombing innocent yazidi sex slaves.

Trump is against American hyper intervention as are all independent party candidates in American politics. Trump wants to neutralise ISIS and subsequently stop de-stabalising the middle east, which solves muslim refugees fleeing war, reduces muslim hate of america, eliminates ISIS indoctrination, and allows immigration suspensions to be lifted.

If a worrying portion of Australians want to blow themselves up killing Germans, then yes it is prudent for you to temporarily suspend all Australian immigration until you have more information to make informed decisions about which Australians pose a threat and which don't. It is not racist or prejudicial to prevent someone from entering your house because you aren't sure if they are going to kill you or not.

We do the same thing when people come back from vacationing in a country that has had a deadly viral outbreak. They get quarantined and prevented from entering the country until we know whether they pose a risk or not to the general public. Likewise, violent ideas and the intention to cause harm are threats to public safety.

The entire point of sensible border control is to filter the good from the bad. In the German context it would have been temporarily suspended immigration until they could put in place a system by which to deal with the problem and duly vet each incoming refugee. By not doing so, a disservice was done to the people already living in Germany.

What are you talking about? Trump is not fighting any criminal charge whatsoever, these are all civil cases of contract. Criminal law is very different from civil law. The former is mostly about intent and lands you in jail with a criminal record to your name while the latter is about restitution and equity irregardless of intent.

Hillary was under criminal investigation - that is when the attorney general representing the people of America prosecutes you and you are judged by a jury of your peers. Trump is being sued in a civil matter - that is when a member of the public files claim against you for damages in a court of law and the judge makes a determination as to whether there is a case for restitution. Governmental law enforcement doesn't get involved in the latter because these are private disputes between private individuals.

Not only is it common for businesses in America to get sued for any number of things, trump certainly isn't "being sued so much". This is exactly what i mean by your liberal bias getting the better of you. You've named just one suit against him in regard to Trump university and somehow that means he is always being sued.

Any research you do on Trump, are from "words", to make your own "words", that do nothing to change anything. At this stage, this is already happening. You might as well actually observe actions from this point forward, rather than study what has occurred. If he does bad, the people should rise up and see to it he's impeached. If he does good, then no problem, AND it'll save you the trouble of doing anything, from research, to complain, to talk about actions you'll/the people'll never take.

Oh lord this is golden. Go home, Colin. Elodea is pulling all the sources I'm too lazy to get. your bias shows through as clearly as John Oliver's.

And for the record, Hillary is a conniving piece of ****, and if you haven't read the wiki leaks emails, you need to.. that should convince anyone how fortunate we are she didn't manage to win this election.

I agree with trophy here - we need to see his actions before passing any judgement on his presidency.