@spectrox75 said in #9:
> So this is the problem. Have you investigated how walls work in places which have border problems? The point of the wall is to stop the majority of opportunistic people and to make it hard enough for even determined people that the limited number of defenders on the other side can deal with them. Just like a well around a vault doesn't stop determined people but it will be enough for most and illegal immigration is a numbers game. Yes expired visas are a lot of the issue, but so are border crossings and in fact even the THREAT of the wall was enough to prevent many opportunists. So far from fact -free it's actually useful .
It can work if its part of an overall network that is manning, patrolling, and periodically repairing the wall and its surrounding area for breaches, but the problem is that Trump's signature policy was essentially to make a big, expensive, imposing wall. To quote the wired article below:
> "The really key part is that a wall or a fence or any type of physical barrier only works in conjunction with other tools," says Christopher Wilson, the deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center who specializes in border and immigration issues. "It’s a nice one-liner and it sells well as a sort of silver bullet solution to our complex border problems, but it doesn’t work that way. In reality if you don’t have someone behind the wall then people just climb over it or cut through it or do whatever they need to do to avoid it." And if building thousands of miles of wall sounds expensive, imagine what it would cost to staff a comprehensive, 24-hour patrol.
Meanwhile US Customs and Border Protection were calling for more sophisticated solutions, which included basic fencing for deterrence, but mainly involving increased sensor deployment along the border along with surveillance tools for radar. So the key issue is that Trump's ideas here were considered extremely costly but also deeply ineffective. Not to mention that his plan on paying for it was always politically absurd. Mexico told him when he first campaigned on the idea, that they would not pay for the wall. And they never did.
And if you read the washington post article, the wall was and has been breached over 3000 times since then, precisely because of these gaps in human enforcement or use of sensors. Not only with power tools, but in many places they simply used ladders and rope to scale it, which was always the original concern. And I think the problem with illegal immigration is that the vast majority of the people choosing to get into the US illegally ARE determined. So if you are admitting it probably won't work for them, well, that's pretty much what we've seen.
www.wired.com/2017/01/wall-alone-cant-secure-border-no-matter-pays/
www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/02/trump-border-wall-breached/
> The above is just incorrect on both counts. A) the family separation policy was an Obama policy and not only that it was FORCE by the courts. In fact when the Trump admin conducted DNA testing they found that over 30% of the children brought over were NOT related at all to their "parents" and hence probably victims of child trafficking. The fact that you don't realize that this is a huge issue greatly disturbs me .
First I don't really follow immigration that closely so you'll excuse me if I am unaware of this factoid. I am just recalling the big headlines as to reasons why Trump might be disliked. But on your claim about this being an Obama-era policy, you can read for yourself why this is false on politifact.
> The Obama administration began prosecuting border-crossers who had already been deported at least once, but very few of them crossed with children, so it didn’t become as visible an issue, Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told us for a previous fact-check.
> While Obama’s administration generally refrained from prosecuting adults who crossed the border with their children, the Trump administration chose to prosecute adults, even when they had kids with them, said Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, in June.
www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/nov/29/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-says-family-separations-were-/
Secondly, politifact once again points out that the number you're citing is closer to 20% - read it for yourself here: www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/26/ken-cuccinelli/trump-administration-using-dna-tests-crack-down-fa/
Either way you have 70-80% of families being separated which is still obviously an issue, and not at all what Obama-era regulations did compared to Trump.
> On the "muslim" front this is another incorrect fact. The biggest muslim country (Indonesia) was unaffected entirely by this. In fact the Obama administration again had singled out these countries for restrictions on certain visa waiver programs (e.g. if you were a UK citizen you couldn't get an ESTA if you had been to these countries before for example) and Trump just applied it to general visas.
> As for the kyoto accords - he didn't - it was the Paris agreement. However he did it because China and India had agreed to NO cuts in emissions. He said that China would become far more of a problem per capita than the US and that the US would meet its targets anyway. BOTH these things turned out to be true. China is now far higher than the US and the US reduced emissions BELOW their obligated levels during the Trump presidency - so even if he had stayed in it would make no difference.
You are correct it was the Paris agreement. I think my issue is that for long periods of time, both before and after, he has continuously mocked climate change scientists by releasing tweets about how cold it was in the winter or how the weather didn't reflect a warming climate in other areas, and how that fundamentally misunderstands the difference between long-term climactic changes and short-term weather patterns. Once again, pointing to a person who doesn't take the time to understand things that the climate science community is nearly unanimous about.
But even in what you're saying, simply because China and India agreed to no cuts doesn't mean that the Paris agreement didn't have beneficial consequences. Any step the US takes against the climate makes it that much harder for the rest of the world to pick up the slack. And I think the US reached its goals in spite of, and not because of Trump's inaction. To cite Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Paris_Agreement
> Following Trump's announcement, the governors of several U.S. states formed the U.S. Climate Alliance to continue to advance the objectives of the Paris Agreement at the state level despite the federal withdrawal. As of July 1, 2019, 24 states, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico have joined the alliance,[20] and similar commitments have also been expressed by other state governors, mayors, and businesses
It also had a number of direct negative consequences that hampered action on climate change:
> Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement impacted other countries by reducing its financial aid to the Green Climate fund.[21] The termination of the $3 billion U.S. funding ultimately impacted climate change research and decreased society's chance of reaching the Paris Agreement goals, as well as omitted U.S. contributions to the future IPCC reports.
It was also overwhelmingly opposed by scientists in the US and abroad. Here are some of their statements, for what its worth:
www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22098
> So read the Georgia transcript. He didn't "ask them to find extra votes" what he did is claim that they had won Georgia convincingly and that even a few extra votes compared to the votes he thought were potentially fraudulent would bring Trump over the winning line. If you actually look at the Georgia election data then its pretty clear he had a point especially given how many suspicious practices took place at the time.
> As for the cases against him. Frankly speaking if you take time to look at those cases, they are disgusting. His lawyers are literally being taken to court because they gave him advice. That is EXACTLY what they should have been doing. In addition, the exactly correct approach was indeed to go to the courts. As for what he did to Pence yes it was stupid but there iz ZERO evidence that he did anything other than try to stop Jan 6 being violent. Watch his speech and read his tweets. Anyone who claims Jab 6 was an insurrection is not being fair
I read the transcript, or at least enough of it because to be honest Trump's way of speaking is headache inducing, he meanders from one topic or conspiracy to the next in one single endless paragraph that by the end you're not sure what he's saying. Honestly, are you aware of how he speaks? Does it bother you at all? But anyway, leaving that aside (as another point against Trump I might add), I will quote what Trump said exactly from the transcript on CNN:
> So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
And yes, I understand the reasoning of the Republican side here. Trump argued to Raffensperger that there was all sorts of fraud, and that if even the conservative estimates on fraud were true, then he would have won.
But the fact that he wants Raffensperger to specifically find enough votes for Trump to win the state, is an incredibly suspicious way of phrasing this and not how you go about investigating potential fraud. If you're sure that fraud happened, you can recommend that they look into it and present your evidence, but to blatantly ask them to both find fraud and find sufficient fraud for Trump to win is pretty much the same as telling him to hand you the victory.
Just imagine if the same thing happened in a different setting. Like an election for leader of the student council at a university or something. If I said, look I saw some shady practices going on back there, so I want you, the official school ballot counter, to find 1000 votes so that I can win, does that sound like someone who merely wants to investigate shady practices? When I am specifically asking for you to "discover" enough votes so that I win? You have to be honest here.
And even if you could argue that he didn't mean it that way, and that this is just the way he speaks about things, that he "accidentally sounds incriminating", which is pretty funny by the way, even so you already agree that what he did with Pence was completely unconstitutional. Its not just stupid it is illegal. He is trying to overturn the result of a democratic election. So here we can plainly and clearly see his motives when his back is against the wall, and he has openly said in interviews since then that he is open to jailing his political opponents if he gets re-elected, because in his mind they are all trying to jail him.
Like at best, I could maybe grant to you, that Trump really believes that he won the election, that he speaks his mind poorly and gives the wrong impressions, and so on. But a guy who has these fantastical delusions about how how he "never loses elections" and "look at my rallies! they were so big. There's no way I lost". I don't want someone that delusional in power, just as much as I don't want someone who deliberately overturns elections because he has dictatorial ambitions. Its just as dangerous to have someone who doesn't acknowledge reality to be in office.
I am not even accusing Trump of deliberately planning the insurrection here. But it is clear that his self-delusions have a real-world price to pay. The people follow his delusions and they literally attack the capitol. Do you think it is any less of a threat just because Trump didn't have malevolent intentions? People still died. Things could have been A LOT worse, and they still might be if he refuses to admit defeat in the next election or riles his cult-like supporters up again (no offense, but in recent polls something like 70% of his supporters say they trust Trump more than their own family members)
> Far from this being the case it is the Dems that started off trying to jail their political rivals. Trump is the frontrunner in the GOP election and it is the Dems who are trying to put him in jail. The fact that he didn't even try to go after Clinton when she had clearly done ridiculously bad things with her emails is all you need to know as to who started this "jail political rivals" thing.
The difference between Hillary's emails and Trump knowingly and willingly refusing to submit highly classified documents to the CIA are completely different things. You can read about that online...I'm exhausted at this point lol.
> Watch ANY speech of Biden in 2007 for example. He is perfectly coherent. Now watch speeches that he gives today - any one and he doesn't sound coherent at all.
> Biden's policies have been awful. Inflation has devastated the country - read the "Prospeirity Mirage" if you want a book that predicted his back when Biden was elected. His Afghanistan exit was beyond terrible with over 80 billion in equipment left to the Taliban. The IRA didn't reduce inflation - and even the government itself agreed that it would not before it was even signed.
> The US border is now a disaster with 10 times as many people crossing over as they did during the Trump times.
> I am genuinely not sure what "reasonable" policy you refer to in terms of what Biden has done. Ukraine - well I think to a certain extent Biden gave Putin some thought that he would be okay with the war - saying "it's one thing if there is a small incursion" is at best not helpful and that's exactly what he did. I think we can all agree that Putin is a scumbag, but honestly, the US should not be putting over 100 billion into the Ukraine in a vain attempt to get the Crimea back or whatever they are trying to do.
Mainly I give Biden credit for passive a massive bill to help tackle climate change and foster the growth of renewables as an alternative energy source to coal and oil. This is huge in terms of helping to fight climate change, and many scientists agree on this point. This in addition to other major trillion dollar bills meant to rebuild US infrastructure and provide relief to families who lost their jobs during the covid crisis. Those are generally good things for America. I can see how those high-spending bills affected inflation, but the US is arguably worse off without this spending. Eventually inflation can be reduced, but there are some things that demand immediate, emergency attention, so I think it was warranted spending.
And also I think it is just a decent moral thing to do, and a good policy for us to defend Ukraine from an invasion by a dictatorship. When you compare the funding on Ukraine to overall US defence spending (last I checked, somewhere around 1 trillion) it is still fairly small by comparison. And just to be clear it gets bipartisan support. If you look at the maps detailing Russian vs Ukrainian territory gained/lost we see that Ukraine is gaining ground every day, especially to the south, which will move much more rapidly as F16s are delivered and Ukraine gains access to new GLSDB weaponry.
Anyway I have a day job and many other tasks, I did not anticipate the amount of effort researching all these things takes. I respect your views and that you argued them in a civil way. So with that I can let you have the last word. I think I have to leave these debates to people with more time for these things :P.
> So this is the problem. Have you investigated how walls work in places which have border problems? The point of the wall is to stop the majority of opportunistic people and to make it hard enough for even determined people that the limited number of defenders on the other side can deal with them. Just like a well around a vault doesn't stop determined people but it will be enough for most and illegal immigration is a numbers game. Yes expired visas are a lot of the issue, but so are border crossings and in fact even the THREAT of the wall was enough to prevent many opportunists. So far from fact -free it's actually useful .
It can work if its part of an overall network that is manning, patrolling, and periodically repairing the wall and its surrounding area for breaches, but the problem is that Trump's signature policy was essentially to make a big, expensive, imposing wall. To quote the wired article below:
> "The really key part is that a wall or a fence or any type of physical barrier only works in conjunction with other tools," says Christopher Wilson, the deputy director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center who specializes in border and immigration issues. "It’s a nice one-liner and it sells well as a sort of silver bullet solution to our complex border problems, but it doesn’t work that way. In reality if you don’t have someone behind the wall then people just climb over it or cut through it or do whatever they need to do to avoid it." And if building thousands of miles of wall sounds expensive, imagine what it would cost to staff a comprehensive, 24-hour patrol.
Meanwhile US Customs and Border Protection were calling for more sophisticated solutions, which included basic fencing for deterrence, but mainly involving increased sensor deployment along the border along with surveillance tools for radar. So the key issue is that Trump's ideas here were considered extremely costly but also deeply ineffective. Not to mention that his plan on paying for it was always politically absurd. Mexico told him when he first campaigned on the idea, that they would not pay for the wall. And they never did.
And if you read the washington post article, the wall was and has been breached over 3000 times since then, precisely because of these gaps in human enforcement or use of sensors. Not only with power tools, but in many places they simply used ladders and rope to scale it, which was always the original concern. And I think the problem with illegal immigration is that the vast majority of the people choosing to get into the US illegally ARE determined. So if you are admitting it probably won't work for them, well, that's pretty much what we've seen.
www.wired.com/2017/01/wall-alone-cant-secure-border-no-matter-pays/
www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/02/trump-border-wall-breached/
> The above is just incorrect on both counts. A) the family separation policy was an Obama policy and not only that it was FORCE by the courts. In fact when the Trump admin conducted DNA testing they found that over 30% of the children brought over were NOT related at all to their "parents" and hence probably victims of child trafficking. The fact that you don't realize that this is a huge issue greatly disturbs me .
First I don't really follow immigration that closely so you'll excuse me if I am unaware of this factoid. I am just recalling the big headlines as to reasons why Trump might be disliked. But on your claim about this being an Obama-era policy, you can read for yourself why this is false on politifact.
> The Obama administration began prosecuting border-crossers who had already been deported at least once, but very few of them crossed with children, so it didn’t become as visible an issue, Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, told us for a previous fact-check.
> While Obama’s administration generally refrained from prosecuting adults who crossed the border with their children, the Trump administration chose to prosecute adults, even when they had kids with them, said Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law, in June.
www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/nov/29/donald-trump/donald-trump-falsely-says-family-separations-were-/
Secondly, politifact once again points out that the number you're citing is closer to 20% - read it for yourself here: www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/aug/26/ken-cuccinelli/trump-administration-using-dna-tests-crack-down-fa/
Either way you have 70-80% of families being separated which is still obviously an issue, and not at all what Obama-era regulations did compared to Trump.
> On the "muslim" front this is another incorrect fact. The biggest muslim country (Indonesia) was unaffected entirely by this. In fact the Obama administration again had singled out these countries for restrictions on certain visa waiver programs (e.g. if you were a UK citizen you couldn't get an ESTA if you had been to these countries before for example) and Trump just applied it to general visas.
> As for the kyoto accords - he didn't - it was the Paris agreement. However he did it because China and India had agreed to NO cuts in emissions. He said that China would become far more of a problem per capita than the US and that the US would meet its targets anyway. BOTH these things turned out to be true. China is now far higher than the US and the US reduced emissions BELOW their obligated levels during the Trump presidency - so even if he had stayed in it would make no difference.
You are correct it was the Paris agreement. I think my issue is that for long periods of time, both before and after, he has continuously mocked climate change scientists by releasing tweets about how cold it was in the winter or how the weather didn't reflect a warming climate in other areas, and how that fundamentally misunderstands the difference between long-term climactic changes and short-term weather patterns. Once again, pointing to a person who doesn't take the time to understand things that the climate science community is nearly unanimous about.
But even in what you're saying, simply because China and India agreed to no cuts doesn't mean that the Paris agreement didn't have beneficial consequences. Any step the US takes against the climate makes it that much harder for the rest of the world to pick up the slack. And I think the US reached its goals in spite of, and not because of Trump's inaction. To cite Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Paris_Agreement
> Following Trump's announcement, the governors of several U.S. states formed the U.S. Climate Alliance to continue to advance the objectives of the Paris Agreement at the state level despite the federal withdrawal. As of July 1, 2019, 24 states, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico have joined the alliance,[20] and similar commitments have also been expressed by other state governors, mayors, and businesses
It also had a number of direct negative consequences that hampered action on climate change:
> Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement impacted other countries by reducing its financial aid to the Green Climate fund.[21] The termination of the $3 billion U.S. funding ultimately impacted climate change research and decreased society's chance of reaching the Paris Agreement goals, as well as omitted U.S. contributions to the future IPCC reports.
It was also overwhelmingly opposed by scientists in the US and abroad. Here are some of their statements, for what its worth:
www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22098
> So read the Georgia transcript. He didn't "ask them to find extra votes" what he did is claim that they had won Georgia convincingly and that even a few extra votes compared to the votes he thought were potentially fraudulent would bring Trump over the winning line. If you actually look at the Georgia election data then its pretty clear he had a point especially given how many suspicious practices took place at the time.
> As for the cases against him. Frankly speaking if you take time to look at those cases, they are disgusting. His lawyers are literally being taken to court because they gave him advice. That is EXACTLY what they should have been doing. In addition, the exactly correct approach was indeed to go to the courts. As for what he did to Pence yes it was stupid but there iz ZERO evidence that he did anything other than try to stop Jan 6 being violent. Watch his speech and read his tweets. Anyone who claims Jab 6 was an insurrection is not being fair
I read the transcript, or at least enough of it because to be honest Trump's way of speaking is headache inducing, he meanders from one topic or conspiracy to the next in one single endless paragraph that by the end you're not sure what he's saying. Honestly, are you aware of how he speaks? Does it bother you at all? But anyway, leaving that aside (as another point against Trump I might add), I will quote what Trump said exactly from the transcript on CNN:
> So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
And yes, I understand the reasoning of the Republican side here. Trump argued to Raffensperger that there was all sorts of fraud, and that if even the conservative estimates on fraud were true, then he would have won.
But the fact that he wants Raffensperger to specifically find enough votes for Trump to win the state, is an incredibly suspicious way of phrasing this and not how you go about investigating potential fraud. If you're sure that fraud happened, you can recommend that they look into it and present your evidence, but to blatantly ask them to both find fraud and find sufficient fraud for Trump to win is pretty much the same as telling him to hand you the victory.
Just imagine if the same thing happened in a different setting. Like an election for leader of the student council at a university or something. If I said, look I saw some shady practices going on back there, so I want you, the official school ballot counter, to find 1000 votes so that I can win, does that sound like someone who merely wants to investigate shady practices? When I am specifically asking for you to "discover" enough votes so that I win? You have to be honest here.
And even if you could argue that he didn't mean it that way, and that this is just the way he speaks about things, that he "accidentally sounds incriminating", which is pretty funny by the way, even so you already agree that what he did with Pence was completely unconstitutional. Its not just stupid it is illegal. He is trying to overturn the result of a democratic election. So here we can plainly and clearly see his motives when his back is against the wall, and he has openly said in interviews since then that he is open to jailing his political opponents if he gets re-elected, because in his mind they are all trying to jail him.
Like at best, I could maybe grant to you, that Trump really believes that he won the election, that he speaks his mind poorly and gives the wrong impressions, and so on. But a guy who has these fantastical delusions about how how he "never loses elections" and "look at my rallies! they were so big. There's no way I lost". I don't want someone that delusional in power, just as much as I don't want someone who deliberately overturns elections because he has dictatorial ambitions. Its just as dangerous to have someone who doesn't acknowledge reality to be in office.
I am not even accusing Trump of deliberately planning the insurrection here. But it is clear that his self-delusions have a real-world price to pay. The people follow his delusions and they literally attack the capitol. Do you think it is any less of a threat just because Trump didn't have malevolent intentions? People still died. Things could have been A LOT worse, and they still might be if he refuses to admit defeat in the next election or riles his cult-like supporters up again (no offense, but in recent polls something like 70% of his supporters say they trust Trump more than their own family members)
> Far from this being the case it is the Dems that started off trying to jail their political rivals. Trump is the frontrunner in the GOP election and it is the Dems who are trying to put him in jail. The fact that he didn't even try to go after Clinton when she had clearly done ridiculously bad things with her emails is all you need to know as to who started this "jail political rivals" thing.
The difference between Hillary's emails and Trump knowingly and willingly refusing to submit highly classified documents to the CIA are completely different things. You can read about that online...I'm exhausted at this point lol.
> Watch ANY speech of Biden in 2007 for example. He is perfectly coherent. Now watch speeches that he gives today - any one and he doesn't sound coherent at all.
> Biden's policies have been awful. Inflation has devastated the country - read the "Prospeirity Mirage" if you want a book that predicted his back when Biden was elected. His Afghanistan exit was beyond terrible with over 80 billion in equipment left to the Taliban. The IRA didn't reduce inflation - and even the government itself agreed that it would not before it was even signed.
> The US border is now a disaster with 10 times as many people crossing over as they did during the Trump times.
> I am genuinely not sure what "reasonable" policy you refer to in terms of what Biden has done. Ukraine - well I think to a certain extent Biden gave Putin some thought that he would be okay with the war - saying "it's one thing if there is a small incursion" is at best not helpful and that's exactly what he did. I think we can all agree that Putin is a scumbag, but honestly, the US should not be putting over 100 billion into the Ukraine in a vain attempt to get the Crimea back or whatever they are trying to do.
Mainly I give Biden credit for passive a massive bill to help tackle climate change and foster the growth of renewables as an alternative energy source to coal and oil. This is huge in terms of helping to fight climate change, and many scientists agree on this point. This in addition to other major trillion dollar bills meant to rebuild US infrastructure and provide relief to families who lost their jobs during the covid crisis. Those are generally good things for America. I can see how those high-spending bills affected inflation, but the US is arguably worse off without this spending. Eventually inflation can be reduced, but there are some things that demand immediate, emergency attention, so I think it was warranted spending.
And also I think it is just a decent moral thing to do, and a good policy for us to defend Ukraine from an invasion by a dictatorship. When you compare the funding on Ukraine to overall US defence spending (last I checked, somewhere around 1 trillion) it is still fairly small by comparison. And just to be clear it gets bipartisan support. If you look at the maps detailing Russian vs Ukrainian territory gained/lost we see that Ukraine is gaining ground every day, especially to the south, which will move much more rapidly as F16s are delivered and Ukraine gains access to new GLSDB weaponry.
Anyway I have a day job and many other tasks, I did not anticipate the amount of effort researching all these things takes. I respect your views and that you argued them in a civil way. So with that I can let you have the last word. I think I have to leave these debates to people with more time for these things :P.