America - The Official Thread

[Johnnypenso]

Being the president gives one's words a little more weight. He commands the world's most powerful army. His tweets have proved capable of immediately causing a company's stock value to plummet by hundreds of millions of dollars. Considering the potential power of his every word, I'm okay holding him to a little higher standard.

Double standard =/= higher standard.

 

[TexRex]

Double standard =/= higher standard.

Double standard = employed by individuals on both sides of the divide, including the one currently occupying the Office of the President, who should be held to a higher standard.

It seems to me that is the point being made.

 

[huskeR32]

Double standard =/= higher standard.

Not sure what your point is.

If holding the president to a higher standard is justified, and IMO it is, then the "left wing media" isn't employing a double standard here.

 

[TenEightyOne]

It's fascinating to see the double standards from the left wing media when it comes to threats of physical violence against someone they don't like.

Trump literally carries the highest standard in the land, the Seal of the President of the United States of America. Such behaviour isn't befitting of many standard holders, certainly not that one.

 

[TexRex]

Trump literally carries the highest standard in the land, the Seal of the President of the United States of America. Such behaviour isn't befitting of many standard holders, certainly not that one.

I mean...THIS!

I can't say it enough. Nevermind matters of policy--someone's going to feel unrepresented no matter who is President.

He, however, is utterly incapable of conducting himself in a manner befitting his station.

Edited in the spirit of harmonious discussion.

 

[TenEightyOne]

A police shooting of an unarmed man who evidently couldn't run. To make matters worse the officer who fired the shot was also carrying Taser, surely a preferable option. BBC.

 

[Dotini]

One way or another, Trump has redefined what it means to be president. Rest assured, there is no going back. It's just terrible; but the next president will be much like him, only much more so. This is certain because of technology combined with postmodernity, the dominant philosophy of our time.


From the NY Times:

By Thomas B. Edsall

Jan. 25, 2018
How should we explain the fact that President Trump got away with making 2,140 false or misleading claims during his initial year in office?

Both the left, in “America’s First Postmodern President” (written by Jeet Heer in The New Republic last summer), and the right, in “Donald Trump is the First President to Turn Postmodernism Against Itself” (written by David Ernst in The Federalist a year ago), have argued that Trump, without knowing the first thing about, say, Michel Foucault, is an avatar of the rejection of objective truth.

Postmodernists, Heer wrote, describe a world where

Fragmented sound bites have replaced linear thinking, where nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) has replaced historical consciousness or felt experiences of the past, where simulacra is indistinguishable from reality, where an aesthetic of pastiche and kitsch (Trump Tower) replaces modernism’s striving for purity and elitism, and where a shared plebeian culture of vulgarity papers over intensifying class disparities. In virtually every detail, Trump seems like the perfect manifestation of postmodernism.

Along parallel lines, Ernst wrote,

if the only one true thing in the world is that all truth and morality are relative, then anyone who pretends otherwise is either an idiot or a fraud. Hence the contemporary appeal of the antihero, and the disappearance of the traditional hero.

Scholars of contemporary philosophy argue that postmodernism does not dispute the existence of truth, per se, but rather seeks to interrogate the sources and interests of those making assertions of truth. As Casey Williams wrote in The Stone in The Times last April:

Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.

It is not usually the job of political journalists to analyze postmodernism, so I turned to some scholars who are devoted to the subject.

Trump’s “truths,” as Alan Schrift, a professor of philosophy at Grinnell College, pointed out,

are not socially constructed but emerge from his own personal sense of what will promote his popularity, his power, and his wealth. This is why his particular, and acute, narcissism is so dangerous: he appeals to no social standards at all, only his own imagination as to what is in his own personal interest.

Put in the most straightforward terms, Johanna Oksala, a professor of social science and cultural studies at the Pratt Institute, responded by email to my inquiry:

I don’t think Trump should be called a postmodern president, but simply a liar.

For something to be objectively true, Oksala wrote,

does not mean that we have to have (or can have) absolute and eternally infallible knowledge of it. But our knowledge claims have to be available for public scrutiny by the scientific community and go through a rigorous peer-review process in order to qualify as scientific or objective truths.

In the Trump era, the core concept of truth has become deeply politicized and among Trump supporters there is scant appetite for “a rigorous peer-review process.” Andrew Cutrofello, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, argues this point in an email:

In the present political climate truth and power have become uncoupled to a certain extent. It’s natural to wonder whether this means the notion of objective truth has been undermined. But it could be the opposite, namely, that what we’re living through isn’t the loss of the category of objective truth but rather a battle over who has objective truth on their side. In other words, the very category of objective truth has become an ideological weapon, having been displaced from relatively neutral territory to the political battlefield.

For some scholars, the attempt to link Trump’s lies — his falsehoods, his prevarications, his exaggerations, his duplicity, his “truthful hyperbole” — with postmodernism grows out of a misperception of the term.

Never before have we had a president, E.J. Dionne, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann write in their book, “One Nation After Trump,”

who aroused such grave and widespread doubts about his commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, to the legitimacy of opposition in a free republic, and to the need for basic knowledge about major policy questions and about how government works.

They continue:

Norms, we argue, are often more important than formal rules in ensuring the function of a constitutional republic.

Observing that “Trump has violated these basic understandings of how our democracy works in an unprecedented way,” Dionne, Mann and Ornstein go on:

This norm breaking, is not simply a matter of political nicety. It is part of Trump’s larger assault on our institutions, his tendency to think in autocratic terms, his abusive attitude toward the judicial system, and his disrespect for civil servants and the day-to-day work of government. We show how Trump’s words and behavior parallel those of authoritarian leaders, past and present.

William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz and Jacob L. Lamb draw attention to the link between normlessness and moral disorder. In the Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development (Vol. 3), they write, “Durkheim identified anomie — a condition of normlessness or moral deregulation — as a moral disease more likely to afflict the top than the bottom of society.”

Wealth, according to Durkheim,

deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only. Reducing the resistance we encounter from objects, it suggests the possibility of unlimited success against them. The less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears.

Trump’s status and wealth have allowed him to ignore limits, norms, rules and regulations and have created a vicious circle — as violations of customary norms go unpunished, such violations become ever more widespread.

Never before have we had a president, E.J. Dionne, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann write in their book, “One Nation After Trump,”

who aroused such grave and widespread doubts about his commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, to the legitimacy of opposition in a free republic, and to the need for basic knowledge about major policy questions and about how government works.

They continue:

Norms, we argue, are often more important than formal rules in ensuring the function of a constitutional republic.

Observing that “Trump has violated these basic understandings of how our democracy works in an unprecedented way,” Dionne, Mann and Ornstein go on:

This norm breaking, is not simply a matter of political nicety. It is part of Trump’s larger assault on our institutions, his tendency to think in autocratic terms, his abusive attitude toward the judicial system, and his disrespect for civil servants and the day-to-day work of government. We show how Trump’s words and behavior parallel those of authoritarian leaders, past and present.

William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz and Jacob L. Lamb draw attention to the link between normlessness and moral disorder. In the Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development (Vol. 3), they write, “Durkheim identified anomie — a condition of normlessness or moral deregulation — as a moral disease more likely to afflict the top than the bottom of society.”

Wealth, according to Durkheim,

deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only. Reducing the resistance we encounter from objects, it suggests the possibility of unlimited success against them. The less limited one feels, the more intolerable all limitation appears.

Trump’s status and wealth have allowed him to ignore limits, norms, rules and regulations and have created a vicious circle — as violations of customary norms go unpunished, such violations become ever more widespread.

Gary Gutting, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, focuses on the crucial role of power in postmodernism — the power to defy norms and the power to determine the veracity of competing claims. He emailed me:

The “modern” in “postmodern” refers to the idea that we should seek truth by the objective methods of reason and science — not by appeals to emotion or tradition. ‘Postmodern’ is often used to refer to those who think there is no objective truth, just various devices we use to con people into agreeing with us. In this sense, Trump is postmodern.

But serious postmodern thinkers like Foucault accept the ideal of objective truth. They point out, however, that practices and institutions claiming to be based on scientific truths often turn out to seek power as much or more than truth. Foucault, in particular, worried that what we think of as scientifically enlightened ways of improving society are often covers for increasing power over the people we claim to be helping.

For Foucault, Trump, who seeks not truth but only power, would be an extreme example of what serious postmodernism opposes.

There was a period, Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard said by email, when

a strain in postmodernism was so giddily determined to call into question the posturing of Enlightenment scientism that its advocates recklessly dismissed the very existence of objective truths.

To these earlier advocates of postmodernism,

everything is just the game of power, they noisily declared, assuring themselves that their deconstructive claims would somehow always be in the service of radical critique.

This view, however, “was eviscerated by philosophers like Bernard Williams and has, I think, virtually no current standing.”

David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale, contended that

academic skepticism about objective truth doesn’t as a rule deny that we can know the fact of the matter — e.g. the answer to the question “How many German troops crossed bridges over the Rhine on March 7, 1936?” Or “By how many degrees did the average global temperature rise between 1987 and 2017?”

Instead, Bromwich argues that academic skepticism

is directed against the assumption that any particular interpretation of the facts should be trusted as quite reliable.

These movements in theoretical analysis are, however, alien to Trump, Bromwich wrote:

Anyway, none of it was required to create Trump’s attitude toward fact and truth. He seems a demagogue of a familiar modern type, but far less coherent and more capricious than most of his predecessors.

In an essay in the London Review of Books last year, Bromwich provided insight into how Trump justifies his falsehoods. Bromwich cited a January 2017 ABC interview of Trump by the journalist David Muir, in which Muir repeatedly challenged Trump’s claim that Clinton only won the popular vote because three to five million illegal ballots were cast for her by undocumented immigrants and other noncitizens.

In the transcript, Muir and Trump go back and forth for 1,168 words — an eternity on television — until Trump acknowledges how he justifies the claim: “You know what’s important, millions of people agree with me.” Trump told Muir that people called in to say, “ ‘We agree with Mr. Trump. We agree.’ They’re very smart people.”

The Muir interview provides evidence in support of a thesis developed by Carlos Prado, professor emeritus of philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Prado argues that instead of representing postmodernism, Trump embodies a very different phenomenon: “Post-Truth.”

“Users of post-truth see themselves as expressing their opinions, but opinions that call for no verification, and in being their opinions, are on a par with anyone else’s opinions,” Prado writes in a forthcoming book, “The New Subjectivism”:

Post-truth is the final step in the misguided move away from objective truth to relativization of truth. If truth is objective, assertions or propositions are true depending on how things are. If truth is relative, assertions or propositions are true depending on how people take things to be.

Trump’s post-truths have drawn a conservative audience of American voters inured to lying. A majority of voters, 59 percent, in an April 2017 Washington Post-ABC News poll, agreed that the Trump administration “regularly makes false claims up,” but, in the same survey, 52 percent said news organizations “regularly produce false stories.” An October 2017 Politico/Morning Consult poll found that a plurality of voters, 46 percent, believe the media fabricate stories about Trump compared to 37 percent who say the media report accurately.

“The criticism of postmodern theory as ‘anything goes relativism’ is a bum rap,” says John Caputo, emeritus professor of religion at Syracuse University:

In postmodern theory we are better served by the idea of having ‘good reasons,’ meaning the best idea that anybody has at the moment, remembering that some obscure fellow working in a patent office because he can’t find a job teaching physics is liable to change the face of physics tomorrow morning.

The problem with Trump, according to Caputo,

is not that he is an “anything goes relativist,” but that he is an authoritarian, a would-be strong man, who launches vile personal attacks on anyone who criticizes him.

Judith Butler, a professor of comparative literature and the founding director of the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, voiced disbelief that

anyone would be inclined to blame intellectual trends in the academy or in the arts for the way that Trump speaks, thinks, or acts. Given that he does not read very much at all, and that the kind of literary and social theory you reference depends on reading closely, the two trends could not be further apart.

Along similar lines, Colin Koopman, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, argued that what is disturbing about Trump is that “he does not value truth in the sense of offering justifications and reasons to those at whom he speaks or tweets.”

As a result, Koopman continued in an email,

only those who are cynical about truth itself can take him seriously. His style is not “postmodern” at all, but is rather cynical.

If postmodernism does not account for Trump’s bludgeoning of the truth, what does? A field that provides insight into the Trump phenomenon is evolutionary theory.

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the forthcoming book “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress,” emailed me his thoughts:

The answer lies in raw tribalism: when someone is perceived as a champion of one’s coalition, all is forgiven. The same is true for opinions: a particular issue can become a sacred value, shibboleth, or affirmation of allegiance to one’s team, and its content no longer matters. This is part of a growing realization in political psychology that tribalism has been underestimated in our understanding of politics, and ideological coherence and political and scientific literacy overestimated.

Once tribalism becomes embedded in the political system, Pinker wrote,

the full ingenuity of human cognition is recruited to valorize the champion and shore up the sacred beliefs. You can always dismiss criticism as being motivated by the bias of one’s enemies. Our cognitive and linguistic faculties are endlessly creative — that’s what makes our species so smart — and that creativity can be always deployed to reframe issues in congenial or invidious terms.

Don Symons, professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of California-Santa Barbara, made a similar point in an email:

Our species is profoundly coalitional, and in most times and places moral prescriptions apply only to one’s in-group, not to humanity in general. I don’t see any evidence that we evolved innate, universal moral rules about how to treat all humans. That’s why history, as James Joyce said, is a nightmare. Prehistory is worse. I assume that coalitional-thinking is what Trump was getting at when he claimed that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his base would still love him. It’s not that they feel that killing a random stranger for no reason is morally ok; it’s that loyalty to their coalition leader is primary.

If tribalism has begun to supplant traditional partisanship, their argument suggests, lying in politics will metastasize as traditional constraints continue to fall by the wayside.

Trump’s success, such as it is, has been to accelerate the ongoing transformation of traditional political competition into an atavistic struggle in which each side claims moral superiority and defines the opposition as evil.

These developments have been unfolding for decades, but the 2016 election was a turning point that appears to have the potential to corrupt the system beyond repair. Trump is determined to leave the destruction of democratic procedure as his legacy. Instead of granting him the title of postmodernist, let’s say instead that Trump is a nihilist who seeks to trample, to trash, to blight, to break and to burn.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/trump-postmodernism-lies.html

 

[huskeR32]

It's just terrible; but the next president will be much like him, only much more so. This is certain because of technology combined with postmodernity, the dominant philosophy of our time.

There's nothing new about his narcissism, bullying, or incompetence. The world has seen his ilk many times before, and will see it many times again. I don't see any reason to pronounce it the new normal this time around.

 

[Danoff]

the next president will be much like him, only much more so.

Probably the one after that. We tend to bounce from one type of personality to another and back again. Reagan was an actor. Bush Sr. was a politician statesman type. Clinton was young, polished and dishonest. Bush Jr was unpolished but seemed genuine and maybe dim. Obama was polished, tactful, and planning. Trump is rash, tactless, unpolished, and impulsive. So the next one (Democrat) should be more thoughtful, polished, and tactful. It's the one after that, when the republicans win again, that it'll be a Trumpalike.

 

[Biggles]

One way or another, Trump has redefined what it means to be president. Rest assured, there is no going back. It's just terrible; but the next president will be much like him, only much more so. This is certain because of technology combined with postmodernity, the dominant philosophy of our time.

The text in the link you provide is certainly interesting, but in fact, most of it states the opposite of what you suggest.

Scholars of contemporary philosophy argue that postmodernism does not dispute the existence of truth, per se, but rather seeks to interrogate the sources and interests of those making assertions of truth

I don’t think Trump should be called a postmodern president, but simply a liar.

 

[TexRex]

Probably the one after that. We tend to bounce from one type of personality to another and back again. Reagan was an actor. Bush Sr. was a politician statesman type. Clinton was young, polished and dishonest. Bush Jr was unpolished but seemed genuine and maybe dim. Obama was polished, tactful, and planning. Trump is rash, tactless, unpolished, and impulsive. So the next one (Democrat) should be more thoughtful, polished, and tactful. It's the one after that, when the republicans win again, that it'll be a Trumpalike.

I agree, for the most part, but I'm inclined to believe that Trump will have had significant enough impact on the Republican party that they and their supporters will steer away from a similar character, and that the next "wild card" may well be the next Democrat. However I do not believe they will go to the same extremes because Trump is the extreme.

I downright reject the initial implication that because Trump is the supposed product of a supposed new consciousness...

...the individual that follows will be as well.

 

[Biggles]

Probably the one after that. We tend to bounce from one type of personality to another and back again. Reagan was an actor. Bush Sr. was a politician statesman type. Clinton was young, polished and dishonest. Bush Jr was unpolished but seemed genuine and maybe dim. Obama was polished, tactful, and planning. Trump is rash, tactless, unpolished, and impulsive. So the next one (Democrat) should be more thoughtful, polished, and tactful. It's the one after that, when the republicans win again, that it'll be a Trumpalike.

I agree - but perhaps the most striking example is Carter being elected after Nixon. There couldn't be more of a contrast between Nixon - the cunning, deceitful, duplicitous, neurotic, experienced life-time politician & the sincere, religious, "peanut farmer" who won a surprise victory after the departure of the disgraced Nixon.

The longer-term effects of Trump on the GOP are impossible to judge at this point. A lot will depend on the result of the upcoming mid-terms & what happens in 2020.

 

[Northstar]

A police shooting of an unarmed man who evidently couldn't run. To make matters worse the officer who fired the shot was also carrying Taser, surely a preferable option. BBC.

Honestly I think even a taser would have been overkill. Granted the footage isn't the best quality (only watched the "right before" footage) but he doesn't look like that big of a guy and he had his pants around his ankles. Seems like a tackle would have been more than adequate unless the guy was on bath salts or something.

 

[Joey D]

Apparently, Trump forgot all that stuff about the free market and how it works:

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-amazon-wants-tax-antitrust-change-jeff-bezos-2018-3

Amazon literally started from nothing, survived the .com boom and bust, and has a business model that works. All the government is going to end up doing is driving up the price of goods on Amazon and people are just not going to buy stuff they otherwise would've. It's not like I'm going to bother going to a small, locally owned store, that charges significantly more, for most of the stuff I'm buying. I'll just buy it from WalMart or on eBay.

 

[Danoff]

Apparently, Trump forgot all that stuff about the free market and how it works:

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-amazon-wants-tax-antitrust-change-jeff-bezos-2018-3

Amazon literally started from nothing, survived the .com boom and bust, and has a business model that works. All the government is going to end up doing is driving up the price of goods on Amazon and people are just not going to buy stuff they otherwise would've. It's not like I'm going to bother going to a small, locally owned store, that charges significantly more, for most of the stuff I'm buying. I'll just buy it from WalMart or on eBay.

I'm not convinced that Trump was ever a free market guy. One particular trump supporter (my Dad) explained to me at length why he had abandoned the notion of free trade (because Trump, and Fox) and was now in favor of protectionist trade policies (this was meant to talk me in to voting Trump). This kind of domestic policy is the natural extension of protectionist market manipulation, long the domain of the left, and now championed by the right. It used to be that rust-belt unions were staunch democrat strongholds. Trump has made a long series of appeals to that group, and any resemblance of sounds economics goes out the window when government tries to prop up dying industries, which is what it takes to appeal to that group.

 

[Dotini]

To be fair, part of Tump's justification for steel and aluminum tariffs is for national security, i.e., our ability to manufacture tanks and such with our own steel.

To be clear, I'm not in favor of our global military empire, continuous regime change and perpetual war. As far as I'm concerned, the only justification for war is self defense.

 

[Imari]

To be fair, part of Tump's justification for steel and aluminum tariffs is for national security, i.e., our ability to manufacture tanks and such with our own steel.

There are already strict restrictions on where raw materials and components can be sourced for defence manufacturing. You can't buy defence materials from China. There was always going to be metals manufacture in the US regardless, just probably not on the scale it once was, and military supply is already indigenous.

The national security angle is a distraction, because many Americans will support anything related to the idea of defence. The tariffs are aimed more at protectionism and pandering to Trump's base. There's reasonably strong economic arguments that the tariffs hurt the US economy overall.

 

[Dotini]

There are already strict restrictions on where raw materials and components can be sourced for defence manufacturing. You can't buy defence materials from China. There was always going to be metals manufacture in the US regardless, just probably not on the scale it once was, and military supply is already indigenous.

The national security angle is a distraction, because many Americans will support anything related to the idea of defence. The tariffs are aimed more at protectionism and pandering to Trump's base. There's reasonably strong economic arguments that the tariffs hurt the US economy overall.

Probably all or mostly true, particular so with the idea of Americans supporting anything related to the idea of defense; and added up, may prove to be winning politics.

In the ultimatum game, as stakes increase, rejection rates approach zero.

 

[Imari]

In the ultimatum game, as stakes increase, rejection rates approach zero.

Sorta. It becomes a game theory thing. For starters, we know that humans tend not to play games optimally, especially not single event games. Psychologically we're more built to go for the choice that is optimal long term, which may not be optimal for a single major choice. There are studies of prisoners dilemma type games, and while humans tend to perform non-optimally in single shot tests, given repeated games against the same person the choices become much closer to an optimal strategy.

But even so, there are situations in which it's not optimal for parties to simply accept whatever terms are given. One situation would be where the terms essentially result in the elimination of the country and it's people. In that case you might as well fight it out and hope for the best. Where the terms are potentially more damaging than the results of refusal, you'll get people refusing.

And there's the fact that people tend to overestimate their own positions. Optimal decision making requires perfect information, which by definition tends not to exist in diplomacy. Take North Korea. I suspect that they think that they've got a shot of at least remaining independent in a war against the US. Likely they're banking on China and maybe Russia providing them with support either overtly or covertly, but they're not simply going to bend over and do whatever the US wants simply because they have a big gun.

This is the problem with enlarging the military. Up to a certain point, the gains are relatively linear. You're improving the ability to defend the country, and you're improving the leverage you have to negotiate with foreign powers. Hunky dory.

But going from say, the UK military size to the US military size (accounting for the relative sizes of the countries) has limited benefits in those areas. The UK can defend itself, especially with NATO on board. The UK can prosecute any reasonable military action against a single foreign target with the possible exception of the US, Russia and China. Going beyond that is more of an erect member embiggening exercise. It has little real world value because unless there's a world war with the entire world vs. the US, that US military power is never, ever going to be fully utilised.

If anything, I'd think it's almost detrimental to the idea of diplomacy as it builds the image of the US as this massive military power that uses might to get what they want, even if that's not correct. The fist is always there behind any discussion, even if no one mentions it. And that's not necessarily helpful if you want to have transparency and really understand what the other party needs for a long term agreement. It's hard to negotiate well with someone who is scared of you.

I think people tend to make rash decisions as the stakes increase, particularly if it's an existential threat.

 

[Sanji Himura]

I personally believe that you can't have a free market unless the market is truly free. There is a concept of financial Mutually Assured Destruction after all and with Trump even announcing the tariffs, he does run the risk of steel and Aluminium prices increasing world wide to adjust for the end goal of offsetting these tariffs. These prices, meanwhile will ultimately be passed down to the consumer.

 

[Biggles]

Bolton/Fox/Tucker Carlson





Only Dotini will be able to make sense of this.

 

[Dotini]

Only Dotini will be able to make sense of this.

Thank you, but I hope that's not entirely true. Astute members will recall Bolton's deep connections in the neoconservative movement. He is very dangerous person. My hat is off to Tucker for not kowtowing to fellow Fox man Bolton with softballs.

 

[Liquid]

BBC: White House criticises China's retaliatory tariffs

When I impose tariffs on them: "I'm protecting our interests"
When they impose tariffs on me: "They're stifling our exports!"

Now that is a double standard.

 

[Dotini]

BBC: White House criticises China's retaliatory tariffs

When I impose tariffs on them: "I'm protecting our interests"
When they impose tariffs on me: "They're stifling our exports!"

Now that is a double standard.

No doubt there is conflict building up. There is no shortage of material on how much better things will be after a nuclear war puts things in order. When both sides are itching for a fight, it will come. But when you summon Mars, he does what he will when he gets here.

 

[Rallywagon]

No doubt there is conflict building up. There is no shortage of material on how much better things will be after a nuclear war puts things in order. When both sides are itching for a fight, it will come. But when you summon Mars, he does what he will when he gets here.

Not sure what the whole mars thing is about, but you cant be serious saying we will be so much better off after a nuclear war... No one is going to be better off, especially those cities that will be laid to waste.

in other news. Trump really seems to love spitting in the eye of our allies and it seems the closer to home the better. http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...rd-to-border/ar-AAvtKZp?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=wispr

 

[Joey D]

Is it even legal for the military to act as law enforcement for domestic affairs? That sounds an awful lot like martial law, but I don't know how that all works.

Also, say this is successful to some degree. What's to say Trump won't use the National Guard to carry out other things? I know the "war on drugs" is heating up again and I don't really want troops patrolling the streets trying to catch drug dealers.

Plus the police are already way over militarized as is, we don't need the actual military adding to that. But I guess they need to justify the insane budget they have.

 

[Rallywagon]

Is it even legal for the military to act as law enforcement for domestic affairs? That sounds an awful lot like martial law, but I don't know how that all works.

Nope, sure isnt. At most they can only support the border patrol and local law enforcement.

Also, say this is successful to some degree. What's to say Trump won't use the National Guard to carry out other things? I know the "war on drugs" is heating up again and I don't really want troops patrolling the streets trying to catch drug dealers.

Plus the police are already way over militarized as is, we don't need the actual military adding to that. But I guess they need to justify the insane budget they have.

Unless martial law is enacted, i dont think this will ever happen. As you mentioned, the military cant legally act as law enforcement within the US.
Personally, i am less worried about the immediate domestic implications as i am with what Mexico will think of us deploying a massive amount of troops on their border.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Is it even legal for the military to act as law enforcement for domestic affairs? That sounds an awful lot like martial law, but I don't know how that all works.

Nope, but the US military (like the military from most countries) already carries out border control operations, usually at sea, often against people/drug traffickers. That military includes the US Navy and the USCG. Holding a border against incomers isn't, imo, a 'domestic' legal issue but a security issue.

That's not to say I agree with Trump but that's how I think he'd get the idea to fly.

 

[Rallywagon]

Nope, but the US military (like the military from most countries) already carries out border control operations, usually at sea, often against people/drug traffickers. That military includes the US Navy and the USCG. Holding a border against incomers isn't, imo, a 'domestic' legal issue but a security issue.

That's not to say I agree with Trump but that's how I think he'd get the idea to fly.

The USCG functions a lot more like the BP. Certainly they are generally the first responders in most US issues. Search and rescue, environmental issues, "border patrols" etc. The navy is generally more in roles of higher risk. Large drugs and weapons shipments, hostile situations, etc.
That said, Clinton and Bush Sr both had deployed troops to assist the BP. Clinton ended his attempt though, after some Marines killed a kid that was only herding goats.

 

[DDastardly00]

That....thing is too ridiculous to be real, but it certainly doesn't look like a photoshop. 'Murica!