when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people". When they killed Brian Sicknick, he called them heroes and pardoned them. If even 10 percent of the right had drawn a line against political violence after Jan 6 then we wouldn't be here today. They all embraced it when it was their side. Charlie himself chartered the buses and obstructed the resulting investigation.
It’s be really nice if they’d repudiated political violence by not electing Donald Trump president after he mused on stage about how his supporters could shoot Hillary if she won, in 2016.
That was the first big test of whether we were going to enter a new era of normalized political violence, and we (his voters, but collectively we as a country) flunked it. Wave of violence it is, I guess. Reckoned at the time it wouldn’t be much fun, and go figure, it ain’t.
The articles you linked actually confirm my point, did you mean to link something else?
As Snopes and politifact confirms, Trump made the following statement about the "Unite the Right" protestors, a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis who had staged a violent rally followed by a vehicular murder: "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides".
>The articles you linked actually confirm my point, did you mean to link something else?
I meant to link exactly what I linked. The articles do not confirm your point.
You did not make a claim that he simply spoke those literal words. You used a paraphrase that misrepresented who he was referring to.
The sources do not say that he made this statement "about the 'Unite the Right' protestors". They also do not support describing them collectively as being all of those other things you call them.
I do not believe you are engaging in good faith, because someone engaging in good faith ought to notice the clear logical holes in the argument you are making. Especially since it has already been explained to you repeatedly by myself and others.
of course he was talking about the "Unite the Right" protestors. The violence occurred at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, what other "side" could he possibly have been referring to?
My purpose in this post is not to convince you of anything (because I don't believe this is possible at this point), but to make the logical fallacy in your rhetoric as clear as possible to onlookers. This problem is a matter of basic logic, not of opinion; thus you cannot change my mind about it. It's clear that this is not a discussion (https://thoughtcatalog.com/brandon-gorrell/2011/03/how-to-ha...) so I will not reply further.
> of course he was talking about the "Unite the Right" protestors.
There were many protestors with a wide variety of views on many topics among them, who conducted themselves in a wide variety of ways. (All the same is true, of course, of the counter-protestors). To say "there were many fine people on both sides" is to say that each group contained people who were worthy of praise.
You say they were "a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis", but not all of them were racists, not all of them were anti-Semites, not all of them were KKK members, and not all of them were neo-Nazis.
Your initial claim was:
> when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people"
This means that you are saying that he described murderers this way; and then you went on to conflate "right wingers" with a variety of other terms of abuse.
This is blatant and flagrant logical fallacy (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition). It is not logically valid to take a statement made about people "being on a side" (i.e. in a group) and represent it as a judgement of the "side" in general, nor of other people on that "side".
James Alex Fields Jr. killed Heather Heyer. "Right wingers", objectively, did not. "Unite the Right protestors", similarly, objectively, did not.
Donald Trump did not call James Alex Fields Jr. a very fine person. He did not refer to racists as "very fine people". He did not refer to anti-Semites as "very fine people". He did not refer to KKK members as "very fine people". He did not refer to neo-Nazis as "very fine people". He did not describe murder, racism, anti-Semitism, KKK membership or neo-Nazism as virtuous.
He also did not refer to "right wingers" as "very fine people", although of course he presumably believes there is nothing wrong with being politically to the right.
As said by Snopes even in the article headline, Trump did not "call neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'. As explained in the article, he explicitly "condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists outright and said he was specifically referring to those who were there only to participate in the statue protest." As shown in the original quotation, he explicitly described the violence as "vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch". Immediately before the pull quote, he explicitly said "and you had some very bad people in that group" (meaning the Unite the Right protestors). He explicitly elaborated the point: "But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly." When the reporter went on to ask a rhetorical question hinting at the same fallacy of composition, Trump explicitly distinguished the people he was praising from those he was criticizing: "The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest". Which is to say, he explicitly agreed that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are "rough, bad people", which is in fact the opposite of calling them "very fine people".
You use this as a talking point because you are trying to paint Trump as someone who praises murderers. But you know, or at least reasonably ought to know, that your narrative is contradicted by the evidence, because the evidence has been shown to you multiple times. The plain meaning of what Trump said is very nearly the opposite of what you're presenting it as.
You have unfortunately been misinformed about both examples that you brought up.
> when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people"
Trump did not call the killer a fine person, nor did he call everyone involved on the right fine people. He explicitly stated that there were, "some very bad people in that group." The "very fine people" was referencing those who were peacefully protesting both for and against the removal of historical monuments. If you watch the original video instead of the selective reporting this is all made very clear. You can watch or read the transcript of the "very fine people" press conference here: https://www.veryfinepeople.info
> When they killed Brian Sicknick, he called them heroes and pardoned them.
Brian Sicknick was not killed by anyone. The medical examiner ruled that he died of natural causes. There is no evidence that he was killed, which was reflected in the difficulty the prosecutors faced, and its why nobody was ever convicted of murder.
You don't seem to understand why the "very fine people" remark was unacceptable to many of us. Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.
On the topic of Sicknick, I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted. The timing alone is strong evidence that the two are related.
Even if it was "merely" an assault on a police officer, it's political violence and it's acceptable to every Republican voter. You opened this door.
> Like I said, he was excusing political violence. A woman had been murdered by neo-Nazis and he went out of his way to minimize, justify and excuse the act, while condemning imaginary "alt-left" violence at the same event.
I again strongly encourage you to go watch the video or read the transcript since it directly contradicts what you are continuing to claim. Trump explicitly said that that the neo-Nazis should be "condemned totally." A total condemnation is exactly the opposite of your claim that he was "excusing" or trying to "minimize" the events. I will also note that I find it quite odd that you claim to be upset about Trump allegedly downplaying violence, but then go on to downplay and minimize left-wing extremist violence. I believe that all political violence should be condemned, its unfortunate that you appear to believe otherwise.
> I don't find it credible that he died coincidentally the day after being assaulted.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here, I don't find it likely that I will be convinced to ignore the medical expert who examined the case and the corresponding documentary evidence that points against the idea that Sicknick was killed.
Please take a look at the transcript in its entirety. Shortly after the part where he says Nazis should be condemned, he goes on to say that there are "fine people on both sides", undercutting his earlier claim.
I and the other poster looked at the transcript in its entirety, and called upon you to do so as well.
The argument being used to rebut you depends on understanding the transcript in its entirety. Yours depends on taking a few words out of context and misrepresenting the party to whom they refer.
The thing about Trump's speech pattern is that he says word-salads. In both the transcript and the video of the speech, you can see him basically trying to make both points at the same time (as he often does when he's scrambling to figure out what to say). The most charitable steel-man interpretation I can give of his words is
- the specific people who killed a protestor are condemnable
- people were engaging in passionate political demonstration for the issue they were invested in before the killing occurred. They were Americans participating in the American tradition of protest and demonstration, the "fine people" on both sides
Problem is, that second point clashes hard with the footage of the event that showed white-shirted white men carrying tiki torches chanting "blood and soil." Most charitably, Trump wasn't talking about those folks; he was talking about some more moderate, reasonable pro-Lee-statue protestors who were there before the tiki torch mob showed up.
I think people's skepticism that such a moderate protest group actually exists varies, and if your skepticism is dialed to 100%, it's real easy to conclude Trump meant the "Jews will not replace us" crowd were the "fine people" because they don't see any other people he could be talking about.
> The most charitable steel-man interpretation I can give of his words is
In my view, he said this and more, plainly and as comprehensibly as can be expected.
> Most charitably, Trump wasn't talking about those folks; he was talking about some more moderate, reasonable pro-Lee-statue protestors who were there before the tiki torch mob showed up.
He said very directly and explicitly that he was talking about the non-violent protestors:
> There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I'm sure in that group there was some bad ones. The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest — and very legally protest — because I don't know if you know, they had a permit.
He draws a very clear contrast between who he considers "rough, bad people" and who he considers to have "innocently protested".
> Problem is, that second point clashes hard
Only because of a human tendency to assign people to ingroups and outgroups and commit the fallacy of composition. Logically speaking, there is no contradiction whatsoever.
> I think people's skepticism that such a moderate protest group actually exists varies
It shouldn't, first off because they were seen and documented (even if some of the footage may have been suppressed) and second because of a general base-rate assumption that protests have a reasonable basis and are mostly conducted by non-violent people (and fair, intellectually honest discussion doesn't throw that assumption away just because the idea expressed is in the "wrong" general direction).
Put another way: the consensus estimate is that the George Floyd protests in 2020-2021 caused close $2 billion in damages (mainly to property), including over half a billion within Minneapolis–Saint Paul, along with (per Wikipedia) 19 confirmed deaths and over 14,000 arrests. However, this became a global phenomenon with protests spread across thousands of cities and towns, with probably millions of people involved (I can't readily find an estimate) directly in the streets and many more simply taking actions such as putting BLM logos on their webpages. So even with that extent of violence and damage, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that a "moderate protest group actually existed". Right-wingers like to meme about news networks (CNN in particular as I recall) speaking of "mostly peaceful protests" against a background of widespread arson and looting seen on camera; but as it turns out this is not actually a contradiction.
> if your skepticism is dialed to 100%, it's real easy to conclude Trump meant the "Jews will not replace us" crowd
I saw the footage. I heard "You", not "Jews". In some cases, the "Y" may have sounded somewhat like a "J" because of interference from the trailing "s" of the previous iteration of the chant. But I didn't hear an "s" on the end of the word. That would come from a mental auto-correction after already hearing "Jew" and realizing that "Jew will" is ungrammatical.
I concur with most of this, with one minor exception.
> I saw the footage. I heard "You", not "Jews".
I believe your personal experience, but you didn't see the whole story. Both chants were given. Hilariously, one possible explanation is that a subset of the protestors performed mental auto-correction: hearing the "you" chant coming from other protestors, filtered through their own biases, they heard "Jew," went "Oh, we're finally doing this!" and started chanting "the quiet part loud," as it were. Given that "Blood and soil" was also chanted, it may be reasonable to infer that at least a subset of the protestors had mental priors that would make that substitution likelier than not.
(Not terribly important, but as a sidebar: your pull quote is an excellent example of what I mean when I say "word salad" regarding the current President. "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee." is the kind of thing that would make a sentence diagrammer light their own hair on fire. He has a speaking style that leaves his words very open to multiple interpretations).
Entirely plausible. I don't think we have solid evidence, though. People showed me chants where they believed "Jews" was said and I didn't really hear it. At most it sounded as if a minority of them might have been saying it. That would make you technically correct, but I don't think the claims that are generally made accurately represent the situation.
> Given that "Blood and soil" was also chanted
I agree that this originates in hateful, extremist circles. I also think that people who hear it could validly assign different meaning to it and use it with that different meaning, and may validly feel that extremists don't get to decide what it means.
In my experience, very few people who oppose immigration (in majority-white or formerly-majority-white countries) consider themselves to hold a belief in the inferiority of non-white races. Certainly many more of them say things that understandably give the impression of such a belief. But many of them are of those races, too, and give no impression of an inferiority complex. If anything, they resent that they abided by rules that are now (in their view, at least) not being enforced against others of the same race.
----
As regards "word salad":
> "There were people in that rally — and I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee."
This is just Trump speaking the thoughts as they come to mind rather than taking the time to organize them into proper sentences. Taken literally the overall structure is ungrammatical. They are not a prepared speech being read aloud. But it takes little effort to refactor them. I understood this quote as:
> There were people in that rally who were very quietly protesting the fact that a statue of Robert E. Lee was being taken down. I know this because I looked into it the night before. If you had looked into it, you would know this too.
The part you quote is a logical fallacy. (This does not invalidate Snopes' refutation of your point; that would be another logical fallacy.) A group led by extremists can contain moderates, and there is ample evidence that this group indeed did contain moderates. I assure you I am very well informed about the event. It was a subject of very intense discussion in my circles at the time.
Please stop following me around to post about this. I already explained why I was not willing to continue the discussion before, and one of your comments in those other threads has already been flagged and killed.
Rabin and Abe seem to be examples where the assassin more or less got what they wanted (derail the peace process and damage the Unification Church respectively)
if the debt ever causes actual problems, e.g. we can't sell our treasury bonds, then our politicians will suddenly remember how to tax rich people.
In the mean time the impossible, unsustainable, terrifying national debt will be used to justify benefit cuts (like the upcoming privatization/cut of social security when the trust fund runs out in 7 years)
I think even in that situation, politicians will try and play ball with the rich since the majority of them are on that same side. But having to implement emergency austerity measures in this scenario would just outright blow up the US economy.
If the wealthy donors and corporate interests were smart they'd take a haircut on their wealth to try and stave off this issue but it seems we're mostly in a loot-and-raze craze. Realistically I would sooner expect an American-style French Revolution before we see the rich grow a sense of self-preservation.
The revolution wont be like the French revolution, itll be like the Handmaids Tale.
A massive return to conservatism that manages to create a capitalist first theocracy loosely following American Calvinist principles (you have money because you are gods chosen, you are poor because you deserve it, for the poor here is this underclass to blame your problems on so that you dont aim your murder at the rich).
I don't think it'll work out like that, simply because my fellow Americans are still too used to being towards the top of the economic food chain. When the poor can no longer afford the bare minimum necessities and the middle class can no longer prop up their lifestyle I think people will get really, really mad. Like what happened with the healthcare CEO but on a much larger scale.
They've already been trying to sell some of the Calvanist dogma by trying to soften the blow of tariffs which by all indicators has been a massive failure of a messaging avenue, which is why they've moved towards trying to just ignore it instead.
Many of them will get really mad at whoever the person to blame points the finger at, regardless how plausible. But what good does getting really, really mad do, against a government with a functioning panopticon and an effective monopoly on force?
Until now, there has never been a time in human history when an oppressive government had the technical means to effectively surveil and control the population en masse in an automated fashion. It doesn't help that they have a monopoly on advanced weapons, lethal drones, and armed goons. As George Orwell put it: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever".
The possibility of taxing rich people would likely be factored in to the market for bonds. There's not really any alpha to "they could tax rich people".
If we genuinely can't sell treasury bonds, even at elevated payouts, we're probably at a point where we will either have to default in the near future. Or maybe intentionally inflating our currency until the debt is serviceable; no idea which is preferable, but would be curious to hear which and why.
Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
> Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population
Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
> That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
If the surplus economic value created by immigrants who are employed is generally not returned to them in the form of high wages, then yeah, they're not going to be paying it to the government as taxes.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that a lot of people in this thread seem to be conflating per-person net economic benefit and net tax payments. The first can be significantly positive while the second is negative.
> Is it though? Not passing judgement either way, but the most common economic rationale for immigration generally seems to be that it's a source of cheap labor.
If you have cheap labor who draw more in public services than they pay in taxes, then you're using tax dollars to effectively subsidize private profits. Maybe that's the unstated rationale, but few proponents of immigration would say that out loud.
there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.
The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.
> I don’t even know what to call someone who thinks the government should give private parties discretionary grants and contracts, but shouldn’t be able to use those to influence private actors.
The idea that the sovereign should be limited to follow law, due process, and the advice of experts in the administration of grants goes back at least to the magna carta and is so widespread that you would use a more specific term — a "constitutional monarchist", "republican", "democrat", or "democratic socialist", etc., would all agree on this point. The opposite point of view however, has a name — authoritarian — so you could call such a person "anti-authoritarian".
> The idea that the sovereign should be limited to follow law, due process
Due process protects rights and entitlements. Nobody has a right to receive discretionary government contracts or grants. To the extent we’re taking about preexisting contracts, the universities can sue to enforce whatever contractual rights they have. We have a robust system for recovering from the government for breaches of contract.
> and the advice of experts in the administration of grants
The “expert” stuff is the legacy of a scientific racist who didn’t trust democracy. It’s antithetical to democracy to suggest that the public should be forced to give discretionary grants and contracts to particular entities based on what “experts” think. Those experts are often themselves closely intertwined with the entities receiving the funding! They’re alums of Harvard, they met their spouse during grad school at Columbia, etc. They’ve got deep conflicts of interest.
this is a largely meaningless distinction, immunity covers all the most concerning Presidential misbehavior (i.e. abuse of the powers of the office) while leaving him vulnerable to prosecution for petty personal crimes like getting in a fist fight or something.
It's not just the salute, either, which was pretty clearly a Nazi salute that he did twice. It was support for the white Afrikaaners and the AfD in Germany and ripping the aid away from children in Africa, killing them, and on and on.
There's plenty of things to say about the waste and pointlessness of the GWOT.
But there were never enough deployments to justify these levels of disability claims. And not every person deployed goes into combat. And not every person that goes into combat becomes disabled. A rise was predictable. 30% simply implies a lot of a dishonesty.
There is one really great way to measure if helping someone works. If foreign aid would work, then we would see it declining over time, as the recipient have used their aid to solve their problems, the exact opposite is the case. Foreign aid does not solve any problems, in fact it allows countries to not solve their problems and instead create new problems, which then also need to be addressed by foreign aid.
PEPFAR, discussed in the link I posted, is aimed at the HIV epidemic. The HIV epidemic is in fact being solved by the approach of international cooperation and aid: transmission rates are already down by 50% from their peak in the late 90s.
The supply of foreign aid is usually not determined by need but by willingness of the donor countries. So when foreign aid makes progress against one disease or crisis, the money is redirected to the next most pressing issue. This doesn't mean it is useless or is not solving problems.
It is true as a philosophical point that sometimes, an attempt to solve a problem backfires and even worsens the problem. But it is also true that an attempt to solve a problem sometimes solves the problem. You've offered no evidence that foreign aid is ineffective or backfires in any way, just a handwaving story, against the hard quantitative evidence I linked in my comment above.
> through a neutral lens, it's a clear positive for humanity that these rockets are being developed
Musk's cuts at USAid have caused an ongoing humanitarian crisis and some 300,000 deaths, mostly children[0]. I think if you're coming from a neutral, utilitarian point of view then SpaceX's role in this atrocity outweighs any realistic estimate of benefit to humanity.
I guess by that line of thinking, everyone who has ever been involved with Musk has a "role in the atrocity". Everyone who ever bought a Tesla, everyone who ever used PayPal. Now that I think about it... SpaceX launches US government satellites... and the US is a democracy... that means every single person in the US is culpable. Thank you for opening my eyes, I hate everyone and everything now.
You’re deflecting. You can’t claim to be objective and negate the fact this man alone by his totally insane actions has been causing tremendous harms by preventing people from getting life saving drugs just .. for no reason than showing he could do it.
Ok, sure man. Musk bad. That's what you wanted me to say, right? Anyway, I'll continue rooting for SpaceX and Starship, because I've loved space and sci-fi ever since I was a kid and this is the only organization that seems to be moving us toward that future.
