greg1647545532

There's a guy who shot a couple of black people to death in a Wal Mart you may want to have a word with. Tell him racism is dead in America and we don't look at skin color. He must not have gotten the memo.

Really I don't think we have much of a terrorism problem in this country, but when you see this pattern play out again and again you can't help but get annoyed:

But 7 guys in 15 years doesn't mean we have an Islamist terrorism problem either, even if it's a higher % than the white number. You don't need a math guy, you need a stats guy. Can you control for some simple factors? Like, are the 3.5m Muslims in the country most similar to a certain subset of white people? And if you control for those factors, does the percentage of radicalized people who commit murder fall closer in line? I dunno. But looking at raw numbers might not be that useful, especially when you make a big assumption like "Let's assume each attack was by a different person" when it ends up that that was a terrible assumption I mean, I guess Islamist terrorists are trying to terrorize me because I'm an American, and death to America and all that, but I don't feel terrorized generally. I don't feel terrorized by white supremacists either but I don't got to black churches or synagogues. I'm not exactly their target audience.

Not for nothing, but I actually clicked on the GAO report in your link. Your numbers are wrong and I don't feel like fixing them. There are duplicate offenders, eg of the 23 attacks by Islamists, a full 15 of them are the DC beltway sniper. So that's like, 2 guys for like 2/3rds of your attacks alone. 2 of the attacks are the tsaernev brothers, and 3 of the attacks are "related" but it doesn't say if it's the same guy. eta: By my math that's 7 Islamist extremists since 2001. And that number is so small that it's hard to derive any useful statistics from it. But you know, your point that white people commit terrorism in a white country shouldn't be a surprise, but we also have a huge blind spot for white terrorism whereas our response to Islamist terrorism is to lose our collective shit, give our freedom over to the government that we claim to hate, and generally light a pile of money on fire.

I think Sinclair's monopoly is alarming but as far as I can tell the nightly news is still the nightly news, although I only ever watch it when I'm visiting my parents on a weeknight... eta: Of course, the local news has its own problem with "if it bleeds it leads" and it makes old white folks afraid to leave their bubble but I don't think that makes it "fake news" or "the enemy of the people."

I said people need to been wise consumers of media, and here you spell out exactly why I'm right. Was that your intention? Yes, most "news" isn't news, it's entertainment. People need to be able to tell the difference. Which is what I said. Let's start here -- the "nightly news" as I understand it is the hour of news from 6-7 on every network channel. The NBC nightly news that my parents watched every day growing up for 1 hour was real news. People who watch that should believe it, because it's put out by quality journalists with a good track record. People who watch the PBS news hour as their "nightly news" should believe it. People who watch a random hour of Sean Hannity are going to be dumber for it, and anyone who thinks that's the "nightly news" is an idiot and needs to learn better.

Right, the problem here is that "the media" sucks -- Fox News perfected the suck train, and let's not forget the 1 hour of "fair and balanced news" and 23 hours of "let's hate Obama" that we all had to endure for 8 years. That happened. If CNN is mean to Trump it's because Fox News showed CNN how much money you can make putting talking heads on the air 23 hours a day who say nothing of any practical relevance. BUT It's your responsibility as a citizen to be a good media consumer. You have to know the difference between CNN and the NY Times, between the WaPo and and the WaPo editorial section, and yes, between the 1 hour of Fox News that's actually news every day and the 23 hours of political propaganda. What Trump wants, and what you're all giving him, is to lump legitimate investigative reporting in with all of the things you don't like about "the media" to the point where you just throw your hands up in the air and claim it's all corrupt. All. Media. Is. Not. Corrupt. All. Media. Is. Not. The. Same. When you're at a point like Brandon where you share White Nationalist propaganda because you're unable to tell the difference between news and shit, you've lost and Trump has won. But let's not lose sight of the fact that Trump gets a lot of negative reporting because Trump does a lot of dumbass things. Is the media not supposed to report on Trump claiming he can overturn the 14th amendment with an EO? Because 1) that's news, and 2) it make Trump look like an uneducated idiot, and a xenophobic, constitution-hating uneducated idiot at that. And this isn't like all the times Fox News would fire up whole news cycles about something Obama didn't actually say in order to paint him as a constitution-hating Kenyan Muslim. This is real, Trump actually said this. When it comes out that our commander in chief is using an unsecured phone but his own white house says it's not a problem because he's too clueless to spill state secrets (because he doesn't pay attention to the short briefings he gets that inform him of state secrets), is that not news? Should that not be reported? So yes, Kerry is right -- you can hate Trump and hate CNN, and you probably should because they're both hot garbage. But you don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Criticize your president because he's terrible and in America we're allowed to criticize our elected leaders, especially if they're terrible.

Well I wrapped the port in a towel, stuck a screwdriver in it and didn't die. RIP Earth. The towel doesn't look like it can be saved. Had little frogs on it. Poor guys.

All my money's in bitcoin. Gonna moon any day now!

So brave.

Nope, no victim mentality here.

You continue to dance around the obvious. I understand that you don't want jackbooted thugs going around preventing people from giving to charities, and I understand that you don't want jackbooted thugs taking your money to give to charities. I got it, nobody likes jackbooted thugs. But if we can set the jackboots aside and forget about the government, if I said, "Brandon, is it a good idea for people to give to charities to help the poor?" your response, if I can summarize your thoughts for you, would be "No, charities for the poor breed dependence, and that's bad." Just own it, man.

You didn't see it then, either, because you're too dense to see the logical progression of your own thoughts. Charity breeds dependence. But you're OK with charity. You're OK with breeding dependence. But you're not OK with breeding dependence.

I'm not sure you've been following the horribly chain of events that has led us to this situation. America legally allows people to come to the US border and request asylum. That is, their home country is so awful, or their personal situation so dire, that they would like to enter the country for their own safety. This is a legal path to residence. However, they can only legally do this if they come to a border patrol checkpoint. And we've made that very difficult for them to do. *IF* you're an asylum seeker and you enter the US illegally, and then get picked up by ICE and request asylum -- now you've committed a misdemeanor offense, that of entering the country without permission, and the Trump administration is going to prosecute you. Zero tolerance on misdemeanors. This is intentional, because it will deter people. However, we have due process thanks to a pesky thing called the "Bill of Rights", which conservatives love only when it suits them, so we need to have a trial. But since we now have a "zero tolerance" policy and our immigration courts are SWAMPED, this trial will take months. So you get to live in an ICE detention center for months. BUT... the USSC said that you can't keep kids in detention centers for more than 20 days. So now what do you do? Well, the Bush and Obama administrations just let people go with a court date. Most people don't come back for that court date, which sucks, but from a human rights perspective, it's better than the alternative, which is.... kids in cages. OR you can have an immigration policy that doesn't suck, an immigration enforcement system that isn't underfunded and overwhelmed, and a personal belief system that puts letting illegal immigration happen in small numbers above putting kids in cages.

See, that's what I thought too. But apparently a lot of Americans want to see kids in cages because they think it will keep Central American immigrants out.

I'm arguing that Democrats who want to stop putting children in cages on the border are doing so because it's the right thing to do, and not because they think it will keep them in power. Brandon apparently disagrees, and thinks that every Democrat doesn't actually care about any issue.

Would you be OK with the immigrants coming in if private charities agreed to pay for them?

Here.

Brandon disagrees with you, a couple of shitshow threads ago he said that any charity breeds dependence and is bad, no matter where the money comes from.

Did you actually click on the self employment link? I'm sure they don't let a lot of people in under that category. In fact, most of the categories are similar to the US's -- you basically need to be sponsored, either by a family member or a company that can verify that your skillset is in demand, or you need to be famous/rich/both. Every election year when everyone's threatening to move to Canada, there are articles like this that point out that you can't just show up and get a green card. And, like America, if you're poor/unskilled/don't have any connections, your chances are pretty much 0 of getting legal residency. But I hope we can agree on these two seemingly disparate but concurrent facts -- a lot of people want to get into America who can't because the rules make it hard for them, and yet America, as a function of it's population and as a total number, nevertheless lets in a lot of immigrants.

Is this not correct? I know there's a lot of BS information out there and people think that illegal immigrants are just lazy scoflaws when the reality is that most of them have no way to legally immigrate, but the US does accept an awful lot of immigrants compared to other countries. Can we agree that this is a true fact?

But America, which does indeed have some of the least restrictive immigration laws on the planet, has historically done very, very well during a time period where it accepted a lot of immigrants. That seems like a compelling anecdote. I know a lot of people think that it's just a given that we need "laws, tough laws" on immigration, but I reject the premise. There's no evidence that we're anywhere close to a dangerous immigration level as far as I know. And don't we want to make policy based on evidence?

Kerry, whatever you're typing right now, just shut up and close your browser, nobody wants to hear it.

Yeah, maybe I think more of the US than you do.

I'm not sure how letting children into the country to stay with relatives rather than being locked in cages robs anyone of their personal freedom and liberty, but I live in a world where Santa is called a socialist and Fox News said that Mr. Rogers was an "evil, evil" man for teaching kids to be nice to each other, so what the fuck do I know? Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown.