All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[numberthirty]

All that said, some folks were actually talking sense.

(Jesse Jackson/Cleo Fields/Robert Scott at various points during this video...)

[green_garnish]

America being America is the root cause of that violence/poverty.

If someone looks at it and actually sees a country that they think will be the one that is the example for others?

A second look might be in order.

The point was that we should aspire to be a country worthy of being an example to the world.

In this case, other countries would receive foreign aid to offset the costs of having to take in refugees, so they're rewarded for doing the right thing. This wouldn't be a situation where other nations are left on their own and penalized for doing the kind thing in a way that is better for the original refugees (we'll be able to take care of more people with the same amount of money in places with lower costs of living, and they'll be more likely to successfully return to their homeland should it stop being a shitshow.)

Given the current world stage, it would far fetched to suppose that there is any reasonable amount of money that would encourage other nations to take in more immigants and refugees than they already do (sometimes it seems people forget America is not the only place they are fleeing to). I could also see that blowing up in both nations' faces pretty quickly, as each population views the act as bribing a county to take in undesireable people, and would further incense people against the refugees, probably to disastrous results.

[PwrdOn]

The point was that we should aspire to be a country worthy of being an example to the world.



Given the current world stage, it would far fetched to suppose that there is any reasonable amount of money that would encourage other nations to take in more immigants and refugees than they already do (sometimes it seems people forget America is not the only place they are fleeing to). I could also see that blowing up in both nations' faces pretty quickly, as each population views the act as bribing a county to take in undesireable people, and would further incense people against the refugees, probably to disastrous results.

I mean this is the same policy that European countries are using too, basically paying off Turkey to take in the migrants and prevent them from crossing into Europe, which of course ends up being unsatisfactory for everyone, because the migrants don't want to stay in Turkey, Turkey doesn't want them around any more than the Europeans do, and enough of them manage to make it into Europe anyway so the policy hasn't really resolved the problems of migrant camps, and xenophobia among the public remains strong.

Obviously, no one really believes that mass migration of people does not create legitimate issues that need to be addressed, but certainly when it comes to immigration policy, pretty much all countries have settled on solutions that end up being MUCH worse than the problems they were intended to solve. When you start with the base assumption that it's natural and normal to just not want certain groups of people around, and then craft policy toward that objective without ever questioning why these people must be kept out, you inevitably end up with a system that is both cruel AND ineffective.

And frankly, it is impossible to separate modern immigration issues from the long history of imperialism. It is NOT a coincidence that practically all migrants come from countries that have suffered under colonialism, and that all of their preferred destinations are the former imperial powers whose wealth and modernity was largely built from the resources extracted from their colonies. The fact that America, a self-styled nation of immigrants, managed to maintain a white majority population for so long, despite the fact that white people are not native to this hemisphere and make up a tiny fraction of the global population, is just a historical aberration, and trying to keep this up will require increasingly extreme and inhumane solutions. If we want a merit based immigration system, then over time our demographics will look more like a representative slice of the planet. If we want a more open immigration system, then most migrants will come from nearby countries so we'll end up with a more heavily Hispanic population. The only way we can maintain our current demographics in perpetuity is to go back to an explicitly racist system that preferentially admits white people, and even that won't really work because there isn't a lot of pressure for Europeans to migrate nowadays like there was in the 19th century. Back in the 1800s when a country like Norway was an impoverished agrarian backwater, there were a lot of factors driving people there to migrate to the US, but who in their right mind would give up all the perks of living in the modern, oil-rich Norway to move here now?

[Tami]

DOJ going after Texas regarding the Anti-Abortion Law.

[Mister Mets]

The point was that we should aspire to be a country worthy of being an example to the world.



Given the current world stage, it would far fetched to suppose that there is any reasonable amount of money that would encourage other nations to take in more immigants and refugees than they already do (sometimes it seems people forget America is not the only place they are fleeing to). I could also see that blowing up in both nations' faces pretty quickly, as each population views the act as bribing a county to take in undesireable people, and would further incense people against the refugees, probably to disastrous results.

What should the limit be in order to be an example to the world? Should the United States accept everyone who wants citizenship?

This isn't really something you can fix with foreign aid. Migrants from Central America fleeing gang violence likely aren't going to be any safer in Mexico, and no amount of money you throw at that problem will make it go away.

I think a standard of nowhere in Mexico being safe enough for the average refugee is probably too loose. There are much worse places to live.

There would be different policies to anyone who is at great risk in Mexico (IE- anyone who is targeted by gangs who might be able to find them in Mexico.)

I mean this is the same policy that European countries are using too, basically paying off Turkey to take in the migrants and prevent them from crossing into Europe, which of course ends up being unsatisfactory for everyone, because the migrants don't want to stay in Turkey, Turkey doesn't want them around any more than the Europeans do, and enough of them manage to make it into Europe anyway so the policy hasn't really resolved the problems of migrant camps, and xenophobia among the public remains strong.

Obviously, no one really believes that mass migration of people does not create legitimate issues that need to be addressed, but certainly when it comes to immigration policy, pretty much all countries have settled on solutions that end up being MUCH worse than the problems they were intended to solve. When you start with the base assumption that it's natural and normal to just not want certain groups of people around, and then craft policy toward that objective without ever questioning why these people must be kept out, you inevitably end up with a system that is both cruel AND ineffective.

And frankly, it is impossible to separate modern immigration issues from the long history of imperialism. It is NOT a coincidence that practically all migrants come from countries that have suffered under colonialism, and that all of their preferred destinations are the former imperial powers whose wealth and modernity was largely built from the resources extracted from their colonies. The fact that America, a self-styled nation of immigrants, managed to maintain a white majority population for so long, despite the fact that white people are not native to this hemisphere and make up a tiny fraction of the global population, is just a historical aberration, and trying to keep this up will require increasingly extreme and inhumane solutions. If we want a merit based immigration system, then over time our demographics will look more like a representative slice of the planet. If we want a more open immigration system, then most migrants will come from nearby countries so we'll end up with a more heavily Hispanic population. The only way we can maintain our current demographics in perpetuity is to go back to an explicitly racist system that preferentially admits white people, and even that won't really work because there isn't a lot of pressure for Europeans to migrate nowadays like there was in the 19th century. Back in the 1800s when a country like Norway was an impoverished agrarian backwater, there were a lot of factors driving people there to migrate to the US, but who in their right mind would give up all the perks of living in the modern, oil-rich Norway to move here now?

If the migrants aren't willing to accept Turkey, it suggests their situation isn't that bad.

[PwrdOn]

What should the limit be in order to be an example to the world? Should the United States accept everyone who wants citizenship?

I think a standard of nowhere in Mexico being safe enough for the average refugee is probably too loose. There are much worse places to live.

There would be different policies to anyone who is at great risk in Mexico (IE- anyone who is targeted by gangs who might be able to find them in Mexico.)

If the migrants aren't willing to accept Turkey, it suggests their situation isn't that bad.

Somehow the people who keep insisting that American citizenship is a privilege to be earned just so happen all to be Americans only by accident of birth. How do you think most Trump voters would react if we told them that they had to pass a citizenship test, or get deported to the first country that agrees to take them? How long do you think they'd be able to tolerate living in Mexico or Turkey before they try to sneak back into the United States somehow?

DOJ going after Texas regarding the Anti-Abortion Law.

I feel like these lawsuits could backfire disastrously, because eventually they'll end up in the Supreme Court which would then have a pretext to overturn Roe v. Wade.

[numberthirty]

What should the limit be in order to be an example to the world? Should the United States accept everyone who wants citizenship?

...

Man, that's a good one.

For starters?

We should stop being the main thing that drives those countries being dangerous enough that folks would feel the need to leave in the first place.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" published profiles of U.S. Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, the woman whose original campaign for office in 2014 was built around running ads where she shot up copies of the Affordable Care Act with a gun (which she offered as a 2nd Amendment alternative to the government not operating as we like three weeks prior to the election), and promised to go to Washington, D.C. to use her experience growing up on a farm castrating hogs to make veteran politicians "squeal". Since being elected, Sen. Ernst has continued to be a vacuous never-ending stream of moronic, pandering statements. A few examples include her State of the Union rebuttal where she talked about walking home from school wearing bread bags on her feet on wet or snowy days during "tough times" (she grew up during the Reagan administration, so...), the time she said Hillary Clinton "wasn't doing enough on women's issues" (ignoring like, her entire quarter century record on them), and claiming President Obama ordered flags lowered to half mast after a mass shooting in Chatanooga because "he wanted to distract from the Iran deal". She also voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security, as well as voted to defund Planned Parenthood in her first nine months in office.

At the 2016 RNC, which was of course, being overseen by the wisdom of Donald J. Trump... the long line of Trump-backed speakers coming out to fearmonger pushed Ernst's remarks further and further back into the night, as well as The Donald's own WWE-styled entrance on Night 1 of the convention just to introduce his own wife, Melania, so she could plagiarize Michelle Obama at length. By the time Joni Ernst got on stage to bad-mouth Hillary Clinton (which everyone else had already spent the whole night doing), over half the delegates and attendees had already left, probably closer to nine tenths (check the photo from correspondent Alan Rappeport). Those who remained had already been in their seats for over four hours, and barely seemed to even notice a U.S. Senator was pandering to them, and Ernst reported found speaking to an empty arena "excruciating". We find that to be true of her voting record, where she has twice voted to defend the Second Amendment rights of suspected terrorists, and feels that anyone on the “no fly list” should still have a firearm. And even though she claims she’s “pro-life” to her core, Ernst voted against funding for the prevention of the spread of Zika Virus, which causes birth defects in the unborn.

In 2017, Joni Ernst voted for the Senate GOP’s attempt to repeal Obamacare that crashed and burned on a 51-49 vote, voted to place Neil Gorsuch onto the Supreme Court, and voted to confirm every single member of Donald Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors”. That’s part of the reason her constituents wanted to make the supposed pig farmer “squeal” herself when she has returned to Iowa for her own halls in July of 2017, where people who depend on affordable healthcare to survive have kept her scrambling, and the only real applause she got through the whole night was when she agreed with them that Donald Trump should release his tax returns.

Six months later, it didn’t get much better. In January of 2018, Ernst hosted another town hall, and her own constituents laughed in her face when she defended their criticism that Donald Trump’s talk of white supremacy wasn’t doing anything to help our standing with countries around the world, and Ernst was asked what countries Trump’s rhetoric helped, and she meekly responded, “Norway”. As in, Norway, a country that is 83% Norwegian, and predominantly white. The crowd of Iowans also audibly groaned when Sen. Ernst defended Trump from charges of being racist, saying he wasn’t racist “deep inside”.

Joni Ernst has 11 months left left on her freshman term as a senator before her first defense of her seat... She has yet to castrate anything in Washington, D.C., that we know of, has yet to produce any legislation of note, and seems to be a running joke for the GOP. Her re-election campaign kicked off in June, and what was Ernst’s rallying cry? “THE RADICAL LEFT WANT SOCIALISM FROM COAST TO COAST!!!”

Keep in mind, she’s stupid enough to try to deride government assistance at a time when Iowa farmers are desperate to get more of it because of Donald Trump’s stupid trade war with China and all the tariffs getting thrown around crippling her state’s farm industry. She’s also claimed that “Medicare for All means Healthcare for None”, because she hasn’t developed a better lie to attack it like better people at messaging did during the Tea Party Wave to lie about the Affordable Care Act. And her constituents are noticing, heckling her at town halls throughout the state, and mocking her openly when she does things like try to convince people that active shooter drills were something that used to take place in schools when she was a child (again, she grew up during the Reagan administration, so she’s full of s*** about that).

A lot has happened since our last update on Joni Ernst, and the biggest narrative that she’s botched politically while running for re-election is how she’s responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. She’s tried to simultaneously criticize President Obama’s handling of an Ebola outbreak that she campaigned on six years ago where only two people died, while claiming Donald Trump’s handling of Covid-19, where 150,000 people died in four months was “stepping forward”. As the Covid-19 pandemic worsened in the fall of 2020, Sen. Ernst began promoting a completely originally conspiracy theory… that Covid-19 numbers aren’t as bad as the media is reporting, and greedy doctors are only reporting more positive tests so they can bilk more money out of health insurance companies. Does that sound bats*** crazy and incredibly hard to prove? Because it is.

Here’s what her voting record has looked like the past 18 months or so:

• January 31st, 2020: Joni Ernst votes against witnesses being allowed in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, effectively making it a “trial”.
• February 5th, 2020: Sen. Ernst votes against the first impeachment of Donald Trump, in spite of the mountain of evidence showing that he solicited foreign assistance in the 2020 elections.
• February 25th, 2020: Ernst votes for the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, an insane piece of anti-choice legislation that would ask abortion providers to try to admit aborted fetuses to a hospital if they were “alive” after the procedure, which is medically impossible given the age that abortions can be performed at.
• February 13th, 2021: Joni Ernst votes to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, feeling that he deserves no punishment for inciting an attack on the Capitol and jeopardizing the lives of the legislative branch of our government.
• March 6th, 2021: Sen. Ernst votes against the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

There is no bottom for Joni Ernst, as demonstrated just last week, when she claimed that “not once” has President Biden thanked overseas veterans in the past 20 years, a ludicrous statement about a man who has REPEATEDLY thanked them, and literally will pass out hot dogs to them himself to show his gratitude. When reality doesn’t fit her partisan narrative, expect Ernst to try and rewrite it.

[thwhtGuardian]

Somehow the people who keep insisting that American citizenship is a privilege to be earned just so happen all to be Americans only by accident of birth. How do you think most Trump voters would react if we told them that they had to pass a citizenship test, or get deported to the first country that agrees to take them? How long do you think they'd be able to tolerate living in Mexico or Turkey before they try to sneak back into the United States somehow?



I feel like these lawsuits could backfire disastrously, because eventually they'll end up in the Supreme Court which would then have a pretext to overturn Roe v. Wade.

I don't know if the courts would overturn it, as disastrous as the Texas law is I really feel like this is a case of the dog finally catching the car and realizing that they never really wanted to. Abortion was a convenient boogeyman to get the base easily riled up to support the right and I feel like the right is a bit worried about what happens to them now without having that particular stick to stir people up with.

[PwrdOn]

I don't know if the courts would overturn it, as disastrous as the Texas law is I really feel like this is a case of the dog finally catching the car and realizing that they never really wanted to. Abortion was a convenient boogeyman to get the base easily riled up to support the right and I feel like the right is a bit worried about what happens to them now without having that particular stick to stir people up with.

Yeah but it's out of the hands of elected officials now, because inevitably these cases will get kicked up to the SCOTUS and all indications are that the conservative justices are dead serious about their opposition to abortion, because after all that's why they were nominated to begin with.

[JackDaw]

Man, that's a good one.

For starters?

We should stop being the main thing that drives those countries being dangerous enough that folks would feel the need to leave in the first place.

Good dodge of the question…but still a dodge.

Would you allow unlimited immigration?

[4saken1]

What should the limit be in order to be an example to the world? Should the United States accept everyone who wants citizenship?

Typical hyperbolic conservative response. Do you think there might be something between what we have now an this?

[PwrdOn]

Good dodge of the question…but still a dodge.

Would you allow unlimited immigration?

As it stands now, the most convincing argument against open borders is that it would trigger an insane reaction from right wing shitheads, which could create all kinds of problems for everyone. Purely from an economic perspective, immigration is necessary to plug the huge gaps we have in the labor force right now, and declining birthrates means that we are headed for demographic collapse if we don't increase the numbers of immigrants and soon. I have yet to hear a good argument for why we need fewer immigrants that isn't just some racist dog whistle.

[worstblogever]

Typical hyperbolic conservative response. Do you think there might be something between what we have now an this?

If only conservatives discussing immigration could resemble what it sounded like in 1980.

[numberthirty]

Good dodge of the question…but still a dodge.

Would you allow unlimited immigration?

Politely, you have to be looking at things from the wrong angle to look at that and think "Dodge..."

If I am lighting my neighbor's house on fire six nights a week?

"How many nights a week is acceptable for my neighbor to stand in my driveway?..." is the very last question that anyone should be asking.

Never mind me being the one who is asking it.