The short form of your post was “Irish go home!” back about 1850.
So you agree that it's about culture, not race.
Even with the Irish, it was about race. Look at the cartoons, especially political cartoons, of the time. The Irish were depicted as squat, ape-like creatures, hardly recognizable as human and incapable of civilized behavior. The Wikipedia article, Anti-Irish Sentiment, even has an example that went full-bore ape, "Mr. G. O'Rilla". Another source much richer in examples is Irish Apes: Tactics of De-Humanization:
quote:In the last few hundred years, dark-skinned peoples have been likened to apes in an effort to dehumanize them and justify their oppression and exploitation. This is familiar to most Americans as something that is done peculiarly to Black people (as examples, see here, here, and here). The history of U.S. discrimination against the Irish, however, offers an interesting comparative data point. The Irish, too, have been compared to apes, suggesting that this comparison is a generalizable tactic of oppression, not one inspired by the color of the skin of Africans.
No matter how much you try to hide and deny it, it's about race.
How can I be hiding and denying something I never even heard of before?
But you have indeed heard that your position is racist, such that your participation in this topic centers around your failed attempts to hide and deny that racism. So this attempt of yours to deflect is very sadly transparent.
Although you may be one of those who ***** the nation is going in a positive direction, ...
No, the nation is most definitely not going in a positive direction, but rather quite the opposite. That is why Trump and the corrupt GOP must be stopped and replaced. And Trump and his entire corrupt administration brought to justice.
My mistake. I meant the direction, which is the dominant direction despite Trump's efforts, the Dem party is taking us in.
But still, that is not the direction that we are currently heading, which is dictated by Trump and his complicit party and which is leading to the destruction of America.
You'd better believe that I'm going to be voting for America.
No, I'll be voting against Trump because I understand all too well what he represents to America: a clear and present danger.
I also understand all too well that the GOP is complicit in endangering America.
At this point, we have to count on the people who do value the Constitution, the rule of law, the rights of the citizenry, national unity, secure representative elections, a functional government, a functional state department that will try to repair the damage this administration has done to our international relations (thus greatly reducing national security), sane trade policies, a healthy economy in which people can make a living wage, a clean environment, sane immigration laws and policies, and basic common decency.
Those are just some of the things we need for our country to stop its Trump/GOP-driven slide into becoming a shite-hole country, and to become America again.
We must depend on the Democrats, since the Republicans are all lined up against making America America again.
But it doesn't cover up the news headlines that the four up-and-coming standard-bearers of the Democratic Party (you know, the "Squad" that's giving Speaker Pelosi such headaches) are anti-semites and socialists.
How many varieties of socialism do you know of? "Socialism" is becoming as meaningless as "fake news", just an incantation to ward off something you can't deal with.
In order to have any kind of meaningful discussion, both sides need to agree on the meanings of the words being used -- or at the very least provide meaningful definitions for our own use of those words. Both sides using the same words with different meanings and/or using words without revealing what they mean in your usage destroys any chance of meaningful discussion and only creates confusion.
Those of us with experience in creation/evolution discourse should immediately recognize that, especially in creationist rhetoric. Faith's attempts to redefine "species" beyond all recognition is an extreme example. We cannot even get any creationist to provide a definition of what they mean by "evolution", but when they use that word their followers respond with their own misunderstandings of evolution further shaped by creationist invective against "evolution". In debates, they would label their opponents as "evolutionists" and their opponents would accept the label no knowing the massive body of negative connotations that term has been loaded with; unknowingly, they presented themselves as "the enemy of everything good" and thus lost the debate in the very first minute. Their tactics depend on generating confusion and avoiding meaningful discussion while using miscontrued words to trigger negative reactions against their opponents.
The word "socialist" is being used in the same manner. Republicans use it to invoke fear and hate in their followers who don't even know what that word means and to guarantee the defeat of their opponents, especially the ones who actually know what that word means (which is not how Republicans are misusing it). They are invoking a bogeyman that doesn't exist.
Here again is an informative YouTube video: The Difference Between Socialism, Communism, and Marxism Explained by a Marxist by azureScapegoat (who lives in Sweden).
In that graphic, please note that social democracy is a form of capitalism. Social democracy describes the positions of Democrats that Republicans denounce as "socialists" in order to imply that they are communists, which they quite clearly are not.
So when someone uses the "s-word", they need to not only know what it means but they also have to be able to describe what they mean by it. Only then can we compare what they are saying with reality, even though that is the very last thing that they want to happen.
Edited by dwise1, : Added link for "social democracy"
Edited by dwise1, : Added qs of Sarah Bellum to whom JonF was replying
A Christian once asked what I as an atheist believed in. My spontaneous and totally honest answer was sounded corny, but it was true: "Truth, Justice, and the American Way." That's still my answer today.
GOP Values: Hypocrisy, Corruption, Greed, Lying, Cheating, Voter Suppression, Election Fraud, Conspiring with the Enemy
" ... how hard can that be, to say that Nazis are bad?!" (Barack Obama)
"How are we still fighting Nazis today?" (Daisy Johnson, S5E15)
"Nance's Law: Coincidence takes a lot of planning." (Malcolm Nance)
It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias. (Steven Colbert on NPR)
May I recommend again Mark Levin's latest book, ...
A right-wingnut and a conspiracy theorist. Why should we want to read a pack of lies?
I would recommend Senior Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance, USN (retired), who worked for about 35 years in the intelligence community (including conducting SERE training), including combat with the Iranians (at least they had fired on him -- ). I first heard him on the Dean Obeidallah Show talking about al-Qaeda, their organization and tactics, and how to combat them (he learned Arabic and Russian, BTW), and I could tell that he really knows his s-h-i-t (Navy-speak -- the military ear and eye are very acute when it comes to detecting "stolen valor", wanna-be's trying to pass themselves off). Take that link to the Wikipedia page on him for a complete list of his eight (8) books (6 on combating terrorism, mostly Islamic), but the two pertinent recent ones are:
The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West.
Senior had been a life-long Republican until that party defected to the East, and he owns guns, so please stifle your "left-ist" bullshirt. Like all military veterans, he swore a oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, both foreign and domestic -- as a retiree like me, he has sworn that oath several times, every time he reenlisted. Like many veterans (I would hope), he took that oath seriously, as do I.
Your Mark Levin has none of those qualifications. While Malcolm Nance has decades of very practical, very hands-on experience in these matters, Levin has none.
... just like we hear Trump accused of racism all the time though he's never said a racist word..
First, telling somebody to go back to where they came from is very racist and has been for many decades. It is a very common slur that racists hurl against "the others".
Your cluelessness informs me that you are white, Caucasian (so should we deport you back to the Caucasus Mountains?), so nobody ever said that to you. Same here (though Celtic, not no feckin' Saxon!). Have you ever tried to walk a mile in the non-white's shoes? No, of course not. In your brand of Christianity, empathy does not exist.
Whether Trump is personally racist or not does not matter. Personally, I'm inclined to think that he is, but that is irrelevant to the discussion.
Trump doesn't act nor speak out of his own personal convictions, since he has none as far as we can tell. For him, everything is about him and about how he can benefit from it. He will literally say or do anything at all just so long as he ends up getting what he wants.
There was something from the 2016 campaign reporting that really struck me. A woman fresh out of a Trump rally was being interviewed. She described how she had been following the Trump campaign and how it all left her seriously troubled about what he would do as President. So she approached him and expressed her concerns to him. He assured her that he didn't mean any of what he was saying, but rather he was just saying what his followers wanted to hear. And that made her a Trump follower.
So what is more scary?
That he would say anything at all, just so long as it was what his followers wanted him to say? That would mean that he stood for nothing at all, that he has no personal standards.
Or that that woman would be persuaded to follow a monster like that? That that is what his followers are like?
So then, does it matter at all whether Trump is personally racist? Or that that core of his followers are racist and that he will readily make any overtly racist statement, express any overtly racist sentiment that would appeal to his racist followers?
Trump is deliberately fueling racism. Whether he is personally racist (which I would not doubt) or not makes no difference.
Like all military veterans, he swore a oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, both foreign and domestic....
Just an aside, all officers of the federal government (and most state governments) have to take the same oath.
I did when I was part of the Peace Corps.
Hu-ah!
So why did so few of them actually mean it?
Even though I was never at a level to conduct such military planning, what can we expect to happen as Trump approaches the end of his term, which would be the end of his OLC-memo protection against being criminally liable for his criminal acts? What final act of distraction from his many crimes will he perform? As far as we can see, there are no boundaries, not even the unilateral and pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons. Can you see anything that could possibly hold him back from that? You've heard of a pyrrhic victory in which a victory entails the destruction of the victor -- myself, I was surprised to learn that it had nothing to do with fire. What would a pyrrhic defeat be like? Scorched earth?
When that happens, would anybody in the military chain of command step forward to stop him? Every military officer in that chain of command with any inclination to do so has been systematically eliminated (refer to the NPR Radio Lab episode on that subject, for which I do not have the link right now), since that would be deemed a weak link in our MAD ("mutually assured destruction", not to be confused with our "magnetic anomaly detection" methods of detecting enemy submarines) strategy against our opponent nuclear powers. What about the US Marine Corps guard? Would any one of them step forward to defend the country and the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic? Even if that enemy was the President of the United States himself?
Personally, all I have to look forward to is dying. But I do have a son whose welfare is important to me. And now a grandson whose survival and welfare is also important to me. And, yes, a country to which I am loyal and whose survival is very important and dear to me. I am a fighting man of the United States of America. I will defend my county to my dying breath. I did not serve for 35 years just to see it handed over to Vladimir Putin by an orange clown on a cheap Trump-brand fools' gold-plated plate (along with a coupon for a cheap Trump-brand fake tan).
ABE: Babylon 5
Is this what it must come to to remove Trump from office without him destroying the world to avoid the inevitable criminal prosecutions?
Edited by dwise1, : gold-plated and fake tan
Edited by dwise1, : ABE: Babylon 5. That's how it's done against tyrants.
Edited by dwise1, : the inevitable criminal prosecutions
That is a disgusting piece of character assassination.
And just exactly how can anyone assassinate a suicide?
Or assassinate something that does not exist? Trump has no character, just as he has no morality. Nor does he believe in anything besides money grubbing and fluffing up his pathetic ego. That must be why "true Christians" love him so much, because he's exactly like them.
The only reasons why he's so intent on staying in office are:
To grift even more money from us (eg, the money funneling into his re-election campaign, money being paid to his golf resorts for his far too frequent golf trips which amounts to more than $100 million now, donors using his hotels to launder bribe money for him (eg, the huge block of rooms "donated" to veteran groups)).
To fluff up his ego.
To exploit that OLC memo that is the only thing protecting him from being indicted for his many and ongoing crimes.
Though what I'm not sure about is, if he does get re-elected, then how will he make up for losing that money that's being laundered through his re-election campaign?
... with irrational hatred of everything good while they work to bring down the country.
There is nothing good about Trump and his swamp monsters. They are destroying America for profit (though I'm sure that some of them just hate the idea of America). Those who are trying to stop them are trying to save America.
So tell us, just why do you hate America so vehemently? Did something frighten you in your high school civics class?
Levin's book i s packed with documented information, very very well researched, which includes many pages of references.
Yeah, right. Like the creationist books that have been recommended to me for being well documented with many pages of references. They all ended up being poorly documented, plus the authors had never looked at those sources in their bibliographies let alone actually read them, but rather they just copied those bibliographies from their actual creationist sources who had done the same thing themselves going back for many generations. I describe one such situation, Moon Dust, in which the late leading creationist Dr. Henry Morris cited a NASA document as did his actual creationist source, Harold Slusher, whereas just looking at the front cover of that NASA document (which I did, but neither of them ever did until I sent them a xerox copy and even then they denied it) immediately refuted their claim. There's also that "shrinking sun" claim that gets passed around constantly about "300 years of measurements" at the "Boyle Observatory", whereas the title of the proposed paper gives the range of dates which actually amount to about 90 years and the abstract says that the measurements were taken at the Royal Observatory.
Add to that the sticky fact that you are recommending his book as being "very very well researched". From trying to deal with you for years, we are very familiar with your standards for scholarship and evidence, which is any bullshirt nonsense you happen to make up in the moment (much as Trump operates in his incessant lying, and which he has actually bragged about). So a recommendation from you serves as fair warning for what a piece of carp that book must be.
Instead, listen to Malcolm Nance for good gouge. He's easy to find on YouTube.
In this video of a presentation he gave at USC, at about 21 minutes he tells about the original treatment of the George Clooney movie, Three Kings (1999).
Originally it was about a black Navy chief who spoke Arabic, obviously patterned after Chief Nance who was all over the place in Iraq (and who speaks Arabic as well as Russian). Even after changing the characters to Army, the Nance character, a staff sergeant played by Ice Cube, was still called "Chief" even though that makes absolutely no sense in the Army where it's a chief warrant officer who's addressed as "chief".
Here's another video from USC where he analyzes the Mueller Report:
Since Russia was one of his areas, he is very familiar with how Russia and the KGB (which still operates under a different name) work, what their goals are, and how Trump is working towards those goals. But you don't have to be as knowledgeable as Malcolm Nance to realize that Trump is dirty Alpha-Foxtrot.
™ Version 4.2
