Cory1848

And once this budget bill passes, ICE will have ten times more money to spend on additional gulags and random deportations. With Stephen Miller’s quotas to fill, anyone who even looks like they might speak Spanish will be at risk of getting snatched off the street. What’s most disgusting is how Trump’s millions of fans -- including people posting here -- revel in this gratuitous cruelty; it’s bringing out the worst in human nature. And we’ve seen it all before, with really bad outcomes. If you’re of European heritage, there might be some way to capitalize on that? My parents were both born in Estonia, so a few years ago I was lucky enough to (re)establish my citizenship to that country.

On your first point, I was born in the US to immigrant parents. However, I pretty much look and talk like a white guy. With regard to the current assault on birthright citizenship, I think we pretty much know that white people are not those being targeted, and that if white people were still the majority of those benefiting from birthright citizenship, this constitutional right would not be under attack. On your second point, sure, TV and the internet can also have deleterious effects on society, but their use clearly falls under the umbrella “freedom … of the press.” Individual lunatics with assault rifles are not part of any “well-regulated militia.” On your third point, it seems pretty clear that growing numbers of Americans are coming to realize that the current executive branch of government is subverting the separation of powers (which is also spelled out in the constitution) by making demands of and threatening the legislative and now the judicial branches. So, “a free state, with citizenry capable of rising up against a tyrannical government,” as you suggest?

Fair enough with respect to Native Americans in the nineteenth century, who were at least to some extent considered to belong to sovereign nations and thus under separate jurisdictions. However, I don’t believe the constitutionality of birthright citizenship has ever been seriously questioned with respect to immigrants and their children; at least, as I understand it, the Supreme Court has routinely upheld this standard. The first person I was responding to pointed out the unassailability of Americans’ right to bear arms as per the 2nd Amendment, but the application of the phrase “a well-regulated militia,” and the fact that firearms have evolved considerably over the past 200 years, have certainly rendered that amendment debatable: whether the amendment should be interpreted to mean that everyone and their drunk uncle has the right to go out and purchase an assault rifle. I’m no legal scholar but would suggest that the phrase “well-regulated militia” has been debated far more vigorously than the phrase “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” especially as the 2nd Amendment has had a far more deleterious effect on US society than the 14th, but both have been pretty broadly interpreted, as far as I know.

Exactly! And what is the current issue all about? Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship. And what does the 14th Amendment say? <All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.> So where exactly does your confusion lie? Or, I suppose, some constitutional amendments carry more weight than others, depending on how deep down in the Trump rabbit hole your brain resides.

Oh, good! So you’re saying that, in January 2029 (if not sooner), when President Newsom or President Ocasio-Cortez takes office, they can immediately issue an executive order that likewise flies in the face of the Constitution, say sending the military into US neighborhoods to go door to door and collect everyone’s guns, and the order takes immediate effect even while the matter works its gradual way through the lower courts, a process that could take years. Even if the courts ultimately rule against the order, by then it will be a fait accompli as the guns will have already been confiscated. Something to look forward to!

Yes, some population groups are more prone to certain diseases than others; I have no argument with that. The following Wikipedia page (many people find Wikipedia suspect, but it’s a quick reference, and this article includes more than a hundred references to scientific research) makes for an interesting read. But none of this argues for the existence of human “races” in the way that most people interpret and use that word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Genetic_basis_for_race As for the verb “to other,” it’s in broad use with widespread applications in history and sociology and more real-life examples than I can count. If the word sounds too “woke” for you, then why aren’t you more woke? Snark will only get you so far. Good luck to you.

Muhammad certainly kept slaves, but they were largely from neighboring Arab tribes, not Africa (his conquests largely took place on the Arabian peninsula, so I’m not sure what contact he would have had with Black Africans). Likewise, many Black African tribes kept slaves, whom they routinely acquired during raids on neighboring tribes. Once European slave traders started appearing on their shores, African chiefs would supply them with slaves, whom they had likewise kidnapped from neighboring tribes. So the Arabs of Muhammad’s time, and West African chiefs of the 1600s–1700s, did not “see” race in the same way we do. Slaves were slaves; the “race” of the slave was immaterial. Race as a marker of social standing came later. Islamophobia, by the way, is as real as antisemitism or anti-Black hatred; in other words, as much as you might wish to deny it, it’s as real as the sun.

For starters, as I’m sure you know, there is no biological reality to “race”: it’s purely a social construct. So “racism” is a form of othering, which, sadly, is all too human a behavior, and easily exploited by demagogues and others seeking power (the easiest way to explain away problems is to blame someone else for them). One can “other” a Muslim just as one can “other” a Black person. Individuals belonging to either of these categories can be similarly lumped together, stereotyped, marginalized, and slaughtered, depending on the circumstances. Is antisemitism a form of racism? Of course it is. More to the point, it’s the same brain chemistry, the same “logic,” that leads, in the mind of the racist, to hatred of Black people (for instance) or hatred of Muslims (for instance). If you want to be a pedant, you can say “racists, Islamophobes, and antisemites,” but the simple word “racist” covers it all, at least in current sociological usage. On your comment that “a child of a black Muslim and a black Christian” is not mixed race, what on earth are you talking about; this is pure deflection. Don’t be absurd.

Sorry, your semantic pedantry doesn’t wash. You’re stereotyping an individual because of his belonging to a group. That’s racist. There’s tons online about just this topic -- you can search on <is Islamophobia racist> for instance. But only if you’re interested in learning, and something tells me that you’re not.

Your sense of self-importance is over the top. I’m a threat to you? Why would I waste my time with the likes of you? The two minutes I’ve already wasted responding to your laughably ridiculous post are two minutes I’ll never get back again …

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/04/president-trumps-first-100-days-attacks-on-human-rights/

Wait, by "the cleanest man in politics," you're referring to Trump? This is high satire, right?

Oh, so there are plenty of Anglo-Brits happy to do janitorial work and other forms of unskilled labor at minimum wage or less? Maybe so; I don’t know; but that’s certainly not the case in the US. If it weren’t for labor from Guatemala and El Salvador working in the chicken processing plants in my home state of Delaware -- and whether they’re documented or not is of no relevance -- there would be no packaged chicken in local grocery stores, or it would cost $30 for a pair of chicken drumsticks. As for your characterizing people from North Africa as “dross”: so many people who are anti-immigration start sobbing when they’re called racist. But your language pretty much speaks for itself.

Well, at least in a US context, most all immigrants -- whether documented or undocumented -- work, pay taxes, and purchase items in their local economy. The benefits they receive are commensurate with their contribution. The same as with US citizens. As for the downfall of (US) society, I expect there would be only a very few immigrants in the US advocating for that, and they would be handled by law enforcement. I don’t know enough to comment about the situation in European countries that have accepted refugees; one friend of mine who spends time in Sweden says that Somali refugees there are overcompensated by the Swedish government, and I have no reason to doubt him. Those immigrants who use their relative freedom to commit acts of terror should of course be arrested and deported, but again, I would think that’s a very small minority. I’m a dual US/Estonian citizen but have lived most of my adult life in neither of those places. However, I have the luxury of choice. Remember, the great majority of migrants leave their homes for an uncertain future elsewhere not by choice, but because they can no longer provide for their families in their home countries -- whether because of war, environmental destruction, or the collapse of their society. You might say, <That’s not my concern>; I would say, we are all responsible for each other regardless of “states” and “borders” -- which in the end are purely political structures and as such are temporary. That’s probably where we differ.

Well, for one thing, human migration has been occurring for millennia, unabated, with varying effects. Cultures as a result are forever evolving, and usually not in a bad way. If a million Syrian and Iraqi migrants, whose homes have been destroyed, are given refuge in Germany, most, at least those who stay, will learn German and assimilate culturally and in other ways even if they retain their Muslim faith. Plus, they will add in their own ways to an evolving German culture: thanks to earlier migrations of Turks, you can now get some of the world’s best doner kebobs in Berlin. That’s a plus! To think that these refugees will suddenly create a state based on sharia law, for instance, is ludicrous. There are 85 million Germans. And second, while the belief that mass immigration is a “threat” to some notion of a “local culture” may not provoke violence on *your* part, the simple characterization of immigration as a “threat” may indeed lead to violence by those who in fact do lean toward xenophobia and racism and fascism -- violence for the sake of some glossed-over, idealized notion of “local culture.” Demagogues throughout history have invented such “threats” for their own political advantage, as is happening right now in the US.

If you’re going to measure a culture’s worth by its GDP, that’s a pretty short-sighted criterion. How much of the West’s wealth did it steal from non-Western civilizations, during the centuries of colonialism for instance (Africa and Asia), or the conquest of Indigenous territories (the Americas)? And in the present day, how much of that wealth is hoarded by the uppermost tier as the wealth gap only continues to grow, at least in those Western countries that follow the neoliberal economic model, which is linked indelibly with your “Judeo-Christian values”? Western culture has indeed produced much of value -- in innovation that benefits humanity, in the arts, sometimes even in philanthropy. However, that has gone hand in hand with violence, destruction, and abject greed. I think the same can be said of most all cultures.

Not sure exactly how Western culture “works” any better than non-Western cultures. All cultures are prone to cycles of barbarism, present-day Islamic extremism being one example. And don’t forget that, with regard to the “Judeo-Christian values” you hold up as the standard, over the past two millennia the “Christian” part has turned on the “Judeo” part with sickening regularity.

No, it's not dying. It's just passed you by.

I would never talk to my wife that way!😆

The cruelty on both sides is unimaginable. My parents (Estonians) lived through the first Soviet occupation in 1940, then three years under the Germans, then fled when the Red Army returned in 1944. According to them, life under German occupation was not so bad (German soldiers were polite enough not to rape local women, and they even listened to classical music!), but Estonia had only a minimal Jewish population; those few whom my parents knew disappeared.

Oh for heaven's sake it's all over the news. But of course, how would you know?

Kubizek’s memoir might indeed be an interesting read, but what are you saying, that Hitler professed some curiosity about socialism during their chats, when they shared lodgings in Vienna in 1908? So what? They were teenagers! By the 1930s, Hitler knew in which direction his political fortunes lay. “Another one bites the dust”? Really? That’s so cute!

Well, a certain present-day US megalomaniac just a few days ago posted that the US did “more than any other Country [sic], by far,” in beating the Germans in the war, and 35 percent of US Americans will fall in line and unquestioningly believe the statement, so there’s that. Said megalomaniac I'm sure has never heard of the Eastern Front.

Who is denying this? More than 3 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody. This figure from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's website.

Pure socialism (collective ownership of the means of production) perhaps comes close to communism, and this has been shown to be antithetical to human nature -- or at least, we haven’t sufficiently evolved as a species to make it work. Social democracy, however, can work beautifully -- whereby the profit motive is removed from major societal sectors that provide services needed by everyone (health care, basic housing, basic transportation and the like) while regulated capitalism can be applied to consumer industries. Something approaching this seems to work in Scandinavia for instance, always at the top in various “happiness” indexes.