The Politics Thread (PLAY NICELY!)

Your proving my point though. Thanks!

@cola_colin
Your arugment allows this arguement. You're both bringing up things are either half-truths or not entirely true. Yes, you can paint the narrative as a risk or blame cost, but there is no proof outside of "I feel this should be the case."

Could terrorists pose as refugees? Yes. Could they pose as successful saudi businessmen? Yes. Could they be legally coming into this country from Canada or mecico? Yes. You can't start making bans "I feel this could happen."

On the opposite side we have "what pushes someone over the edge?" ... swimsuites.. don't know?

Yep, everyone who disagrees with you is just inhuman and wants to see people in need suffer. Very understanding of you. What do you think the purpose of improving vetting is if not to facilitate a viable refugee program and avoiding a permanent ban?

Dump all that German/EU propaganda programming and learn to hold relative value positions. Wanting to help refugees and wanting to guard the door against bad people are not mutually exclusive. Wake up. There are legitimate criticisms of Trump's EO, and no-one is talking about them because of all this retarded emotional rhetoric.

Oh, and I can only imagine the look on your face when Trump tries to grant essentially amnesty to all illegal immigrants in the US while only deporting the criminal elements. It's becoming ever increasingly obvious this is what he is setting up to do.

--
Anyway, actually wanted to post about the recent violence in berkley. The tolerant left at it again. And people wonder why trump did so well in most states except commiefornia.

Smashing up banks

Smashing up peaceful people


*edit to be less acidic*

When all reason is lost on a person what else can you do but appeal to their emotions?

EDIT:
No need to edit that way, you are right that appealing to emotions isn't the most rational argument. On your question:

It is to appeal to the xenophobic part of Trumps voters.

what reason? All you've done is keep trying to strawman the opposition. "you just don't want to help them, too busy building walls".

They are revoked or expire.

Oh come on, we've been discussing reason in this thread for 100+ pages. I've tried hard along the line somewhere, but I've given up, especially in regard with you, mered and kiwi. Everything I seem to think is logical is illogical to you and everything illogical to me seems logical to you.

We're living on different planets, affected by the propaganda of our environment so much that the best we can hope to achieve is just to accept we won't agree on much.

Hey they ARE building walls and do NOT want to help anybody. That's not a strawman.

I dunno "Making America great again" sounds just like "change" to me

Oh I definitely agree you guys need more parties then the big 2. They seem way to powerful.
You even had some big grassroot movements "Occupy Wall Street / Tea Party" but somehow they just got annexed by the big parties.

Do you guys seeing a third / fourth party getting a chance in the "near" future?

You're taking two policies and putting them together into an argument that suggests they are somehow mutually exclusive. The point of building a wall is so that you can control who you let into your country. If you can't adequately filter for the good refugees, bad things happen.

And 90 days later they'll find the child suffocated in the meantime.

The risk of helping refugees is greatly exaggerated, which is mostly a result of xenophobic agendas.

Is this how you treat people who want to help but need some time to first ensure their own safety in doing so? Do you attack them as racists, subhumans, immoral, no empathy? Calm down.

I love the use of the word "Can" there... the implication being that this was a conscientious choice and they have themselves fronted the money for the flight which in 90% of the cases won't be true but I digress ....

I simply don't believe most of them even want to really help. It's not like the refugee crisis started yesterday. It's been years.

it's actually a well covered topic, for example, in Last Week tonight's video from last year if you want (at around 4:00) as well as other videos and articles.

The US political system seems to always lead to an equilibrium of two major parties because of first past the post and winner takes all. New or smaller parties tend to get co-opted into the larger ones. So you'll get some amount of evolution within both the democrats and republicans, but it'll still be the same structurally. Or if you get a third party that gains traction, they'll just end up replacing one of the two.

Also kind of strange is their lack of preferential voting where you rank candidates, which kinda stifles third parties who don't get co-opted.

They really need political reform structurally to see more than two parties, and it's probably going to take some kind of big crisis event to overcome cultural inertia as well as the interest of both parties to keep a system that maintains the status quo.

*One of the things that baffles me to this day is how the libertarian party, which is left/right neutral from a governance point of view, seems to always do so badly. Under a minarchist system, the lefties are free to do leftie things and the righties are free to do rightie things - which seems to me to be a win for both.

To expand on what elodea posted above on the oxygen mask thing:

In first aid training or any medical training, one of the first things you are taught is that you should never endanger yourself when attempting to assist others.

The mnemonic DRABC stands for Danger, Response, Airway, Breathing and Circulation. The very first thing you should do when approaching any situation is to assess for danger - to the casualty and to yourself. The theory being that if you injure yourself, you're adding to the problem by proving another casualty to be dealt with by the next person that comes along.

In the same vein, when providing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a stranger, you are taught never to do so without a face mask on, and always to wear gloves to avoid catching any ailments yourself.

I'd argue that there are parallels with this to be drawn in the approaches applied by Germany and the USA in response to the refugee crisis.

Germany has rushed into the situation without assessing for danger, and has severely limited its ability to provide further assistance as a result. Popular support for helping refugees has tumbled as a result of the influx and subsequent rise in terror attacks.

Obviously we don't yet know the outcome of the USA's current approach, we're still very much in knee-jerk territory. But I would like to think that by taking a step back to assess the situation, the US might be able to provide more sage guidance to the rest of the developed world to finally bring this crisis to some sort of conclusion.

Footnote: I was encouraged by the fact that the Saudi King voiced his support for local solutions following his initial phone call with President Trump.

I'd love to be that optimistic. Sure that would be great if anything good would come out of it somehow.

I don't quite follow - supporting what? And luckily for whom?

I'm seriously starting to wonder if Tatsu's strategy in this thread, is to post 14 minute video every page and a half, until soon the threshold to "watch all of them" is well over 7 hours, but he'll mock you if you don't watch them.

Dem's not politics, dem's maths. Dat's trufax.

TIL:
Tunsel wants doctors treating infected patients to use no precautions as it is a waste of time. He would rather the doctors also get infected. Think of all the dead patients that the doctor could have saved! Afterall, they could treat more patients if they didn't spend any time sterilising instruments, washing their hands, or putting on gloves. Replacing doctors is easy, who cares amirite.

I'm sorry (been away for a while), but this is incredibly tone-deaf.

These people are obviously people who a) care about things you don't (not that not caring isn't valid, but you're attempting to paint these people as . . . I don't know, the tone of your post is very concerning. It's almost like you're trying to suggest these people aren't there for honest reasons) and / or b) are affected by laws that you're not.

This is a key example of the word "privilege". Being in a better position than others for any reason whatsoever (that right-wing folk tend to exaggerate and demonise as some form of purity politics, when in fact it's a simple factual statement describing which people are worse off than others in specific contexts or situations).