US 2024 Presidential Election

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Thaluikhain

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If someone flees from war they are a leech, probably a fraudulent fortune seeker lying about war and definitely a rapist who came here to take your wife by force.

If someone merely comes for economic reason they are a ''fortune seeker'' and they ''dey took er jerbs!''
Unless they are a certain kind of person, such as someone who is a more successful leech.
 

Silvanus

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Donald Trump, at yesterday's Florida rally: "We land on top of it and we took over the ship. We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business. We’re like pirates. We’re sort of like pirates. But we’re not playing games".

Now that's strange, @tstorm823! How exactly is it a "profitable business", seeing as you've explained they have no wish to actually take the oil? You said before the "profit" was referring to a protectionism fee from third parties, but here he is directly referring to the seizure of oil on an Iranian tanker leading to profit!
 

tstorm823

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Now that's strange, @tstorm823! How exactly is it a "profitable business", seeing as you've explained they have no wish to actually take the oil? You said before the "profit" was referring to a protectionism fee from third parties, but here he is directly referring to the seizure of oil on an Iranian tanker leading to profit!
You seem confused. Has anyone suggested that Trump, or more importantly the world, is not interested in Iran's oil? Or was the dispute that you thought Trump describing militarily capturing their oil infrastructure was expressing a plan to send ships to Iran to physically take the oil from their lands against their will for his own profit?
 

Silvanus

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You seem confused. Has anyone suggested that Trump, or more importantly the world, is not interested in Iran's oil? Or was the dispute that you thought Trump describing militarily capturing their oil infrastructure was expressing a plan to send ships to Iran to physically take the oil from their lands against their will for his own profit?
You argued that when he talked about "taking the oil", he was not talking about taking it for profit. I argued he was.

Are you trying to suggest you never argued that, now?
 

Silvanus

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He wasn't in that context.
Lol ok, sure. Its not just that subsequent statements, such as yesterday's, have made it utterly unambiguous that he is, in fact, seizing oil for profit.
 

XsjadoBlayde

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More recent with Ken Klipoenstein
Hi. Ken Klippenstein joins Katy, Cody, and Jonathan to talk about the Supreme Court effectively overturning the Voting Rights Act, the White House Correspondents' Dinner suspect, Janet Mills dropping out of the Maine Senate Race, and what got cut out of Donald Trump's "60 Minutes" interview
 

tstorm823

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But aren't you making a very unsafe assumption there that Donald Trump knew it was unfeasible?
That just takes us back to the inevitable "Republicans are evil and want to make the world terrible, but they're just too stupid and incompetent to pull it off". When there is a rational explanation for someone's behavior, it's not always the reason, but it is the one most worth believing is the reason, particularly when the alternative requires some rather extreme assumptions.
 

Hades

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That just takes us back to the inevitable "Republicans are evil and want to make the world terrible, but they're just too stupid and incompetent to pull it off"
whether its all Republicans I could not say but is it not a fairly reasonable assumption to make about specifically Trump and his inner circle?

Lets take the president as the chief example. He is a con artist, a corrupt businessman, a convicted felon, a demagogue and if we are extremely charitable and say his attempts to overturn the election was not a coup then it was at least unethical and anti democratic to the extreme.

If you take Trump's past then is him being ''evil and wanting to make the world terrible'' not a more rational idea than Trump somehow being a well meaning guy who just by sheer coincidence happened to accidentally accumulate those scandals and outright crimes? And if he wants to take the American system and make it more akin to Putin's Russia then how is that not a deliberate act of trying to make the world worse?

And the people surrounding him? You got the drunk crusader wanabe Hegseth, Europhobic and Thiel erand boy JD Vance, and Elon frigin Musk. Its not some tragic misunderstanding that they routinely endorse the worst causes imaginable or in Thiel's case is an open hater of democracy.
 

tstorm823

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whether its all Republicans I could not say but is it not a fairly reasonable assumption to make about specifically Trump and his inner circle?

Lets take the president as the chief example. He is a con artist, a corrupt businessman, a convicted felon, a demagogue and if we are extremely charitable and say his attempts to overturn the election was not a coup then it was at least unethical and anti democratic to the extreme.

If you take Trump's past then is him being ''evil and wanting to make the world terrible'' not a more rational idea than Trump somehow being a well meaning guy who just by sheer coincidence happened to accidentally accumulate those scandals and outright crimes? And if he wants to take the American system and make it more akin to Putin's Russia then how is that not a deliberate act of trying to make the world worse?

And the people surrounding him? You got the drunk crusader wanabe Hegseth, Europhobic and Thiel erand boy JD Vance, and Elon frigin Musk. Its not some tragic misunderstanding that they routinely endorse the worst causes imaginable or in Thiel's case is an open hater of democracy.
Have you considered that there is a second political party that has an obvious motive, not even an ulterior motive, a primary motive to get people to think more highly of them relative to their opposition?

If we presume politicians are willing to lie to succeed in politics to get ahead of their opponents, not singling any out in particular, then it is a safe assumption that whatever claims one politician or party makes about their competition will be worse than they are in reality. So if you believe everything a politician says about their opponents, you are all but guaranteed to believe lies. My question for you then, is there anything you've ever been told bad about Trump or those connected to them that you didn't believe?
 

Agema

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That just takes us back to the inevitable "Republicans are evil and want to make the world terrible, but they're just too stupid and incompetent to pull it off". When there is a rational explanation for someone's behavior, it's not always the reason, but it is the one most worth believing is the reason, particularly when the alternative requires some rather extreme assumptions.
We're not talking about "Republicans" though, are we? We're talking very specifically about Donald Trump. So, if we want to be rational, we can consider the case that Donald Trump is possibly ignorant about a lot of the things he talks about, and examine the evidence.

Donald Trump has a history of claiming things which are ludicrous, unfeasible, illegal, etc. Whilst much of this is his Herculean propensity for bullshit, plenty of instances suggest he may genuinely have a poor understanding of what he is talking about.

He has frequently made seemingly serious claims about presidential (or in terms of election certification, vice-presidential) powers that no-one outside his own fringe lawyers recognises. He announced on TV that maybe Covid could be treated by injecting disinfectant or somehow shining a UV light inside people's bodies. I draw your attention to this little gem, which strongly suggests Trump doesn't understand the negotiations process. This is within a context of wider stories that he often does not attend briefings, or does not seem interested in them. And we can also consider the quality of information he is receiving, because he often seems to surround himself with dubiously competent advisors.
 

Satinavian

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I don't think all Republicans are evil. Some are just stupid.
There must be something seriously wrong with those still supporting this administration.

Sure, i could pretend to think otherwise out of politeness, but, honestly, why bother?
 

tstorm823

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I don't think all Republicans are evil. Some are just stupid.
There must be something seriously wrong with those still supporting this administration.

Sure, i could pretend to think otherwise out of politeness, but, honestly, why bother?
I think you confuse "support" with "worship". Someone need not be perfect or even good for people to support them and want them to succeed.
 

Phoenixmgs

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You did not attempt to answet the question
Yes, I did...

It was closed due to a storm. My kids school was closed due to a cyclone. Are we blaming this closure on immigrants?

Edit: I should say the building was closed. School was still on. At least my kids got some days off due to storms. Becuase... its a storm. Dont be stupid, stupid

Is it normal for schools in the US to be on during a storm?
Per the news story, it was closed because of immigrants and not because of the storm.
Students at James Madison High School in Brooklyn were informed Tuesday that classes would be conducted virtually on Wednesday because of the school's use as a “temporary overnight respite center."

“To ensure a smooth transition for families temporarily sheltering overnight in the building, our school building will be closed on Wednesday, January 10 and school will be in session remotely for all students,” Principal Jodie Cohen said in a statement to families.

The decision was decried by some parents who held a rally at the school Wednesday morning. One woman who said she is the mother of two students at the school called the situation “unacceptable.”


Setting aside the question of your statements' veracity for a moment:

  • Whether or not the "average person" cares about "how" immigrants come in is not only irrelevant to the topic in general terms, it is also not relevant to anything I presented you with. Moreover, it is a straight up invocation of the "Appeal to Popularity" fallacy. We are not arguing about what people want, we are arguing about whether or not there was a policy deficiency so extreme that the 2025-2026 actions of ICE constitute an "equal and opposite response".
  • The number of people from asylum is absolutely irrelevant in itself. The only relevant question is about whether enforcement efforts strengthened, weakened, or remained static. Otherwise you are not judging by policy but by surrounding circumstance.
  • Even if we took your "a lot of asylum seekers being fraudulent" at face value (and that's a big if), that still would not justify your invocation of asylum numbers as a stand in for fraudulent asylum claims. Those are not the same thing.
  • "Biden literally told asylum seekers to come" is a meaningless prop that you're pushing up, nothing more than a soundbite that occurred in the context of a presidential debate, not a policy decision. And as we've already been through, the administration increased enforcement rather than decreasing it or even remaining static in it.
And once again, the fact of the matter is that you made a policy declaration: That the Biden administration's policy was such that ICE's 2025-2026 actions are normatively justified as "an equal and opposite response". And the data does not support that conclusion.
You're still not getting to the meat and potatoes, there was a massive immigration surge that the public didn't want that happened. That is THE RELEVANT FACT. If you want to argue that the way immigrants were getting in, they would've got in no matter the administration, that is something you can argue if you have anything to prove that. However, saying Biden kept all these other policies the same or increased enforcement doesn't matter if he was lax on the one policy that allowed the immigration surge. When you have the biggest immigration surge in US history and people do not want that, you will have an equal and opposite reaction.

This doesn't show what you seem to think it does, and it doesn't even show 100 years of history. I don't know why you think this in any way backs up your claim that "Citizens were fine with the normal amount of immigration for nearly the last 100 years." Your own chart shows that for the majority of the time covered people have said they want decreased immigration.
So 60 years then... (probably longer but they didn't poll longer than that). Poor wording from me but the main point is that basically 80% of the population either was fine with current immigration and wanted less and only 20% wanted more immigration. With that data on what the public wants, why would any political party run on wanting more immigration when 80% of the population doesn't want that? This is why democrats lose because they keep running on stuff that 80% of the population doesn't want.

You are correct. The far right has the basic stance that it is all unacceptable and they merely switch between which they put focus up for tactical reasons.

If someone flees from war they are a leech, probably a fraudulent fortune seeker lying about war and definitely a rapist who came here to take your wife by force.

If someone merely comes for economic reason they are a ''fortune seeker'' and they ''dey took er jerbs!''

Which of the group is the target of the day is purely a tactical decision. In the economic crisis most focus was put on the later, but when the economy improved and the Syrian migrant crisis began more issue was put on asylum and now the recurring issue because the far right refuses to shut up about it despite asylum seekers statistically being the smallest group around here.
OMG, you have such a slanted view on pretty much everything. If someone is fleeing war, they just don't get to decide what country to go to because if they did like every immigrant fleeing war would choose one of the say five best countries to go to. Those countries just can't take in every person fleeing war or a really bad country. And doesn't any country have the right to choose to take in people or not? I just can't choose to go to another country and live there, it's on them to accept me in. Should say Sweden be forced to take in American "refugees" that think they are living under fascism?