The Official "Damned Trump" Thread

[Aristocatt]

A greater percentage than would respond in the affirmative to a stranger over the telephone when asked that question - and an even greater percentage when it can be done out of sight and out of mind by someone else.  

Did you miss the last four years?

I've been well aware of the last 4 years.

Give me your best guess.  
And which politicians are going to sign on to this bill?  Dems?  Establishment GOP?  Or is it just the Trump base?

How much more likely do you think it is that we will get a bill that proposes the killing of undocumented immigrants once we pass a bill that provides them amnesty and a wall is built relative to how likely it is that we would pass that bill before the amnesty and the wall are up?

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I'm not contesting that this isn't how our system should work, or that there are still barriers to what they want in place - but those are exactly the things that you will be asked to compromise over - already are being told you must compromise over.  Will...compromise over, if the past is any indicator.  Otherwise, as the nutballs are pointing out, the calls for healing and compromise and the big tent are thoroughly disingenuous.  They're not nuts in any sense other than my calling them them.  They're the mainstream.  They keep telling us, they keep showing us...we keep pretending otherwise.  If it hels, my frustration isn;t aimed at or caused by you or any position you hold or any disagreement between any principle we might be likely to discuss.  It's that we are intentionally blinding ourselves to this reality as it;s too uncomfortable to bear and we don;t have easy answers for it.

We worry it might be impossible to bring americas two halves back together forgetting (or wishing to avoid the implications) that we have already consistently centered white supremacists for every bit of our history as a country.  We're already as together with them as we ever were or even could be., imo.

Just to clarify my position...
I think we can do better than compromising on a wall.  I just am not finding your reasoning about why it would be a bad bill particularly compelling.  If you want to argue that we can position ourselves to do better...I 100% agree.

And yeah...I know we are on the same team here broadly speaking.  I am very aware of, and very concerned about the rise of white nationalism and at the more extreme ends, outright fascism, that has gained traction in the US, and also abroad.

[The Grand Nudger]

Giving fascists their monument to fascism is not getting one over on them. It's not using some ineffectual thing they want to get something that we need.

It's just giving them something that they want, and they will sweep away whatever you've gotten that we need at their earliest convenience - as they've been doing. As you've seen, something can be the law of the land, on the books, and that won't exactly matter to fascists. They'll get their wall, you'll get another law they ignore, subvert, repeal, or best of all..actively use to suppress the hated other. Left leaning lawmakers are consistently unimaginative when it comes to how a law supposedly about protecting this or that freedom or group can, instead, be used to exterminate them. This is not a problem that the stephen millers of the world suffer under, for all the other problems they might be suffering under.

I was recently discussing how rfra is being used to further christian dominionism in the armed forces. That was a bill chuck schumer and ted kennedy sponsored. Whats the harm in protecting a little religious freedom™ if the other guys work with us, we might have asked ourselves. Well, in word, this.

[Aristocatt]

Giving fascists their monument to fascism is not getting one over on them.  It's not using some ineffectual thing they want to get something that we need.

It's just giving them something that they want, and they will sweep away whatever you've gotten that we need at their earliest convenience - as they've been doing.  As you've seen, something can be the law of the land, on the books, and that won't exactly matter to fascists.  They'll get their wall, you'll get another law they ignore, subvert, repeal, or best of all..actively use to suppress the hated other.

Most of the atrocities and human rights violations at the border aren't a flagrant disregard for the law.  They are the break down of norms that were never enshrined as law(or in some cases the application of law that had until the Trump presidency been ignored).  It would be difficult to believe in the current political climate, that an amnesty law could be successfully repealed, there just isn't any broad support for that. 

And it still isn't clear to me how building a wall makes it easier for fascists to pass legislation to shoot undocumented immigrants once we expand their legal rights, relative to having no wall and less legal rights.

[The Grand Nudger]

The amnesty law would not need to be repealed, look at how amnesty has been going the past four years. It is not the case that it happened because there were only norms not enshrined in law.

As for the other, ask yourself how building all those confederate monuments allowed us to pass legislation and shoot the hated other even as we expanded their civil rights. What we seem to have is a disagreement over the effectiveneness of being able to flex your power for monstrous vanity projects, whether it can yield tangible political benefits. Well...it's alot harder for them to be effective when the other guys aren't on board, that's for sure. If bidens name ends up on a section of militarized fence that picture will forever stand as evidence that the left really does agree with the right, in their minds - about the issue of mexicans. That they're virtue signaling twats who, given the chance, would stand at attention and sig fucking heil, lol.

That's the kind of pride and boldness the president told them he could give them, to take back their country.

[Aristocatt]

Yeah...so I'll just try to clarify before hand.
We should be getting rid of confederate statues. Easy.

I have read a fair bit about why those statues were erected during Jim Crow/the Civil Rights era...So I understand what you are getting at. I'm just skeptical that they are at all an effective tool. So that probably is where the disconnect here is.

Like I would say the same thing about the Civil Rights Act...
If the only options we had were to pass the Civil Rights Act, but a statue of Robert E Lee would be erected in every major city...Or nothing...I would still pass the Civil Rights Act.

I think the part of this discussion that I am way way more compelled to roll back my position on, is the fact that it isn't the case that we need to build a wall to get amnesty for undocumented immigrants. We can do much better than that.
But given the option to compromise or get nothing done...Let's get people amnesty. I'm also more inclined to believe that amnesty would stay in place for the foreseeable future, but 20 or so years from now, we would look back on the wall as a symbol of hate, and begin tearing it down in much the same way that we are taking down statues today. Which would be the opposite outcome from the one that you are predicting, that the wall would stay and the amnesty would go.

[The Grand Nudger]

To put it another way, how many people would compromise on an american reich, for single payer or tax cuts? The chorus says no, not me..not a one.

The votes say otherwise.

Maybe no one here, ofc...it feels silly to say that though since we're only considering whether our well intentioned but misguided attempts to compromise with fascists might actually be to their benefit and our detriment. I would be super happy if we got a clue and made our proposals fascist proof..but, as in the beginning, that would make the fascists right about us having no interest in letting fascism into our tent.

It's a rock and a hard place. Either we are saying that above..or, yes, we're actually -for- some of the fascists shit they want and will go for that, so long as they go for some (or more) of our stuff. That, not the fascists all by themselves, is responsible for the shape of america today..which, again imo, with respect to the issue of fascism and white supremacy..aint great. That's how we got...here. Maybe less of it would have lead us somewhere else? Disagreements over the full extent of any given bit of propaganda in word or set in stone are credible. I get that there are people who don't think that they're as effective as I do.

I'll tell you who does think that they're as effective as I do..fascists and white supremacists.

[Spongebob]

We're already as together with them as we ever were or even could be, imo.  That's what makes their complaints so ridiculous.  They already have what they want and could better keep it by keeping their mouths shut about it.

I think you hit it on the head with this comment and I've often thought this as well.  What more do they really want?  WASPs already control 98% of everything, but boy they just burn for that missing 2%.

[The Grand Nudger]

They think that it's rather the other way around. Not-Americans are getting all the goodies, they're left with the scraps, the 2%. It's only ludicrous in the wider view. From the ground level where they see shit... circumstances are arranged in a way that a person inclined to believe that could rationally maintain that it were true.

If you believed what these people believed, then these actions would seem completely lucid..and very urgent.

[Spongebob]

Yes, I totally agree. As I said, I've worked with people like this all my life and I've endured numerous whining sessions about all the great free stuff "those people" get. Facts don't penetrate their beliefs.

[The Grand Nudger]

Who are they supposed to believe? Some lib with his silly facts, or what their parents and their friends and their pastor and their favorite shock jock and their youtube crush and the nice man on the nightly teevees and their elected leaders and their presidents have been telling them for years and years on end, right?

Their own failure of a life practically screams out "the blacks have victimized me with the power of the state!" - what else could possibly account for their having failed to fail upward as was their sacred white right?

All that they were supposed to have to do was come from a family with a dad who worked at a factory, get solid d's in a community college they put on credit - and that was supposed to cover a million dollar home and all their kids and healthcare and vacations to see the biggest lint ball in whogivesafuckistan. Now they have to compete with motivated immigrants from shithole countries with better grades from better schools? With homegrown not-americans™ who never could trust that they would fail or even succeed upwards? Bullshit, they say, absolute bullshit. They could never win that fight...unless......