ALL HAIL PRESIDENT TRUMP

*Sigh*

OTL

And people call me a screaming radical...

Are you even listening to yourself, Kam? Nobody is saying illegals aren't a problem. Nobody is saying they should get away scot-free with what they're doing.

People are arguing - on Capitol Hill, as well as here - that building a giant fuckoff wall, stationing snipers all across the top of it, and shooting any Mexican that dares to come with five hundred feet of it in the head because MURICA FURST is not a viable solution to the illegal-immigrant problem. It may make you feel better, but it's not going to stop Five Dollar Pablo from outbidding you for work.

Treating symptoms without any thought to the underlying cause is not how you cure a disease, ne? Why is illegal immigration such an issue, why are businesses and the aforementioned Shifty Lowe's Parking Lot Contractors not only able to do what they do but in a position where doing what they do is preferred to being legal and up-front with their work? If you don't address these issues - and here's a hint for you: the fucking Wall does nothing for these issues - then they will persist.

This is not a walls-and-guns problem. The walls-and-guns problem is south of the border; that problem's solution involves sending U.S. special forces to show Mexican drug runners why they are not, in fact, comparable to U.S. special forces. Border security has nothing to do with the Five Dollar Pablo issue however, and you will see no improvement on that front from ludicrous and unnecessary expenditure on an insulting, pointless Wall.

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Kamchatka wrote:

Why you ask? Well it's obvious: people on welfare tend to vote Democrat, children of illegal immigrants also tend to vote Democrat.

This is a claim that I'd like to be backed up with facts.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/14/key-facts-about-the-latino-vote-in-2016/

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The bolded part has a simple explanation - show me an example of a white supremacist who is not also a maga. You can't because ALL white supremacists are also magas

No, they're not. That's like saying all communists were Clinton supporters. They might vote for her, but they'll just as soon talk about what a corporatist shill she is with the same breath. In the same way, neo-nazis are very far from Trump.

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1453R wrote:

*Sigh*

OTL

And people call me a screaming radical...

Are you even listening to yourself, Kam? Nobody is saying illegals aren't a problem. Nobody is saying they should get away scot-free with what they're doing.

People are arguing - on Capitol Hill, as well as here - that building a giant fuckoff wall, stationing snipers all across the top of it, and shooting any Mexican that dares to come with five hundred feet of it in the head because MURICA FURST is not a viable solution to the illegal-immigrant problem. It may make you feel better, but it's not going to stop Five Dollar Pablo from outbidding you for work.

Treating symptoms without any thought to the underlying cause is not how you cure a disease, ne? Why is illegal immigration such an issue, why are businesses and the aforementioned Shifty Lowe's Parking Lot Contractors not only able to do what they do but in a position where doing what they do is preferred to being legal and up-front with their work? If you don't address these issues - and here's a hint for you: the fucking Wall does nothing for these issues - then they will persist.

This is not a walls-and-guns problem. The walls-and-guns problem is south of the border; that problem's solution involves sending U.S. special forces to show Mexican drug runners why they are not, in fact, comparable to U.S. special forces. Border security has nothing to do with the Five Dollar Pablo issue however, and you will see no improvement on that front from ludicrous and unnecessary expenditure on an insulting, pointless Wall.

Could a wall help reduce drugs and drug cartel, gang activity ECT that sends billions of dollars a year to evil people in central and South America?

If we in the USA stopped sending billions of dollars a year to drug cartels, gangs ECT, would that help make those countries better, more prosperous, great places to live?

Do you care, at all, about the people living down there in these nightmarish, drug cartel, gang controlled hellholes?

I genuinely care about people living in central & South America. Leaving their Country of origin should not be the only option for them to have a good life. It is ridiculous that the USA's love if drugs is destroying so many innocent lives.

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The bolded part has a simple explanation - show me an example of a white supremacist who is not also a maga. You can't because ALL white supremacists are also magas

You know, what gets me about Trump is that he touts high Black employment rates, like that's supposedly a good thing? The employment rate for Black people used to be 100% in 1850, and Trump probably thinks that's even better. He's such a bombastic racist. How many other people would flip putting people into chains, and keeping them in chains, about employment #s? Trump could be the leader of the KKK.

Remember people, don't buy blind. Know where your herbs come from, how they're grown and who your grower is. Always buy organic and support local, ethical growers from within your own community. You don't want to feed any monsters with your purchase dollars.

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Kamchatka wrote:

...
Could a wall help reduce drugs and drug cartel, gang activity ECT that sends billions of dollars a year to evil people in central and South America?

Honestly?

No.

Because people with billions of dollars on the line will find a way to buy a fucking ladder. Or some rope. Or some shovels they can dig a tunnel with. Or a boat they can use to end-run the wall. or any of a hundred other methods of spending far less money, vastly less time, and enormously less effort on getting around The Wall than would be put into erecting the wall in the first place.

Walls have not been serious security measures for centuries. Not for nations. For one building, with a few hundred feet of wall that four men in towers can watch, and which is expected to face nothing more serious than a handful of guys with small arms? Okay. For the entirety of the United States of America? No.

Nobody objects to The Wall because they hate people and want Mexico to die in fire. That's you guys, not us. People object to The Wall because it has no purpose or function save as a checkmark in Trump's 'Win' column. Nobody we actually care about stopping or impeding will be stopped or impeded by a few feet of concrete between them and their billion-dollar markets.

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Kamchatka wrote:

I genuinely care about people living in central & South America. Leaving their Country of origin should not be the only option for them to have a good life. It is ridiculous that the USA's love if drugs is destroying so many innocent lives.

What's ridiculous is thinking that a few feet of concrete is going to change this.

Want to put a dent in the cartels? Do them real damage, send them a message? Legalize marijuana, across the entire country. Set up our own markets, all legal and above-board, with licensed growers answerable to a federal regulations group somewhere (just...not BATFE, because BATFE couldn't find its ass with a GPS system and a native guide). Do the same for any other recreational substance that's less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and start stealing the cartels' market.

Disrupt their market with a legal, regulated one that guarantees its customers are as safe as anyone ever is when getting blitzed and that what they're buying is legit, uncut and above-board. Then send some hard men down south with discretionary powers and an ample supply of loaded magazines. The government makes money instead of losing it by taxing substance sales, same as they do for tobacco and alcohol, the cartels lose a big chunk of their billion-dollar illicit market, and also put them in the ground with active, targeted suppressive efforts.

Everybody wins. Except cartel jackasses and Trump, neither of which deserve any victories if you ask me.

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1453R wrote:

Nobody objects to The Wall because they hate people and want Mexico to die in fire. That's you guys, not us. People object to The Wall because it has no purpose or function save as a checkmark in Trump's 'Win' column. Nobody we actually care about stopping or impeding will be stopped or impeded by a few feet of concrete between them and their billion-dollar markets.

I don't think it's fair to say the Wall would have no purpose. I mean, when it comes to actual border security — let's say, keeping a known terrorist out of the country — it's obviously better to have a wall than not.

Compared to other things we regularly spend defense dollars on where no one says a word, the Wall is actually cheap and effective at border security. Not "OMG we're impenetrable now," but reasonable. Keep in mind that a tank is about $9M and a fighter jet is about $160M.

I totally get that the Right-wing Wall Meme is a borderline religious conviction at this point, where if we only had the Wall then all kinds of problems with immigration would be fixed, and that's not true. But at the same time, um, Israel has a wall, Mexico has a wall (on its southern border)... walls work well as a first line of defense. It's almost as if you've constructed a reverse-meme belief that walls aren't effective at anything, which is silly.

To be totally honest, I find the entire debate petty to the point of near irrelevance. The government spends over 4 trillion a year; the entire wall budget would represent less than 1% of one year's government spending (even assuming it ends up costing 50% more than current estimates). We're only talking about a ~$100 per capita pricetag here. And in return for a <1% expense, what does one get in return? About what is paid for: not a whole lot, but hey, it's something. Just let Trump have his wall and focus on more important things like... Well, pretty much anything.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

...
To be totally honest, I find the entire debate petty to the point of near irrelevance. The government spends over 4 trillion a year; the entire wall budget would represent less than 1% of one year's government spending (even assuming it ends up costing 50% more than current estimates). And in return for a <1% expense, what does one get in return? About what is paid for: not a whole lot, but hey, it's something. Just let Trump have his wall and focus on more important things like... Well, pretty much anything.

Ironically, this is where I'm at with the Russia thing. The waters are so fucking muddy at this point that there's nothing worth learning. Did Russia screw with us? Almost certainly, they'd be stupid not to. Did Trump have anything, knowingly, to do with it? Probably not - Putin would have to be stupid to trust a man as...indiscrete...as Trump with anything sensitive. Is Trump actively attempting to obstruct justice in the case of the Comey/Mueller thing? Absolutely he is - but proving obstruction is clearly going to take such a Herculean effort to shove past Repubs that it's just not worth it anymore.

Let it go. It's a dead letter. if we're not impeaching him for any of the other hundreds of things he's done that's worthy of impeachment, then the Russia thing and obstruction isn't going to do it either. He's not the first president we've had that actively breaks the law in public and expects nobody to care - Andrew Jackson used to shoot people for jollies on the White House lawn.

The Wall thing? I could list half a dozen reasons why it's pointless - and I have. I'll admit however that principally I want it dead and buried for two primary reasons: it's insulting on the face of it, just a huge slap in the face (to use one of the Internet's favorite overburned terms) to the entire international community. And also because of exactly what you said - people are expecting The Wall to solve a hundred different problems by itself just through the magic of existing, it upsets me greatly to see people be so fundamentally dense, so I try and argue them down. The problems they want solutions for are not problems a Wall can solve.

Wasted money is wasted money. If folks are going to complain about wasted money in one place -
welfare, support, social services, all those things red fundamentalists keep screaming that the government is LITERALLY STEALING FROM US to do - then why is it suddenly okay to just completely boondoggle a bunch of money somewhere else?

The beautiful thing about hypocrisy, is that only I’m allowed to do it. The ugly thing about hypocrisy, is it’s the lifeblood of partisan politics.

Let’s assume the $70b estimate for the wall, and add a whopping 50% margin of error (~$100b). We spend $1t annually on various welfare initiatives, or 10x a highly bloated estimate. Similarly, this puts it at ~1/10th Obama’s wealth redistribution plan stimulus package. Unlike the stimulus shinanegans, this presumably would create jobs—material production, transportation, construction, and oversight.. Just depends where we source the materials and labor*. There’s nothing disengenuous about supporting one and not the other, especially if actual costs are closer to 1/50th.

*Ironically, I wouldn’t be surprised if dems negotiated down a budget that kept the work from being done domestically. Then they could screech about how Trump loves sending jobs overseas. Seems par for course (see preface).