The Trump Presidency

It's also odd that you choose to call the reporter, who did not transgress at all, "aggressive" when it was Gianforte who crossed every personal, professional, and criminal line in the interaction. I don't necessarily disagree with you about the electoral spin, but you seem to be somewhat callously normalizing some pretty ****ty and thuggish behavior.

Odd, indeed.

Everything that you disagree with, everything that offends you.

There's a difference between resisting and attacking; Gianforte didn't resist, he attacked—he committed battery without any physical prompting to justify that sort of aggressive response.
 
Meanwhile, the hateful, morally lapsed, ultimately self-defeating anti-Muslim mindset [MENTION=7]thethe[/MENTION] et al are espousing, on behalf of the United States, is not just endangering US citizens abroad, it's already getting non-Muslims killed here at home. I'd like to hope I'd have the fortitude to act as the two murdered victims did in defending their brethren from a deranged and senselessly-hate-fueled attacker like the inaptly-named Mr Christian.
 
Funny how the blacks that do thrive in those schools and get out always mention how they did it by studying and not being on the streets

But I know; life's unfair, someone else's fault. B

Do you understand how systems work? A few anecdotal exceptions do not a tidy explanation make. Very, very often it's not nearly so simple as choosing to "study and stay off the streets".

But if you think arguments against your line of thinking are all about pity-mining and blame-shifting, you're either being accidentally or willfully obtuse. The point in examining the larger causes—the many, many factors feeding poverty and criminality, which range far beyond "personal responsibility"—is to ultimately repair, reform, or replace broken systems, thereby allowing distressed and dispossessed people to actually be personally accountable.
 
Meanwhile, the hateful, morally lapsed, ultimately self-defeating anti-Muslim mindset [MENTION=7]thethe[/MENTION] et al are espousing, on behalf of the United States, is not just endangering US citizens abroad, it's already getting non-Muslims killed here at home. I'd like to hope I'd have the fortitude to act as the two murdered victims did in defending their brethren from a deranged and senselessly-hate-fueled attacker like the inaptly-named Mr Christian.

And this man is a scumbag that should be killed.

It's a straw man because you're still trying to make an equivalency to the amount of violence and death caused by those who espouse Islam. Please continue with this losing argument.

What percentage of Muslims do you think in the Muslim world think that leaving Islam should be punishable by death?
 
And this man is a scumbag that should be killed.

It's a straw man because you're still trying to make an equivalency to the amount of violence and death caused by those who espouse Islam. Please continue with this losing argument.

What percentage of Muslims do you think in the Muslim world think that leaving Islam should be punishable by death?

And what percentage of Muslims in America commit acts of terrorism. Tell us Mr. Statistics.
 
And what percentage of Muslims in America commit acts of terrorism. Tell us Mr. Statistics.

Tremendously small number's and we are fortunate of that. We need to proactively leave from the European nations and not allow larger Muslim populations to congregate and ghetto form. We need to make sure that citizens aren't allowed to freely travel to hotspots that are well know radicalization sites.

I'm so confused how people don't see these things. Why haven't terrorist attacks happened in Poland when they are surrounded by countries impacted by terror?
 
Tremendously small number's and we are fortunate of that. We need to proactively leave from the European nations and not allow larger Muslim populations to congregate and ghetto form. We need to make sure that citizens aren't allowed to freely travel to hotspots that are well know radicalization sites.

I'm so confused how people don't see these things. Why haven't terrorist attacks happened in Poland when they are surrounded by countries impacted by terror?

And what percentage of Muslims in Europe commit acts of terrorism.

There is a serious well-identified problem in the Muslim world that neither the current president or prior presidents have had the courage to tackle (as far as I know). This is the malign influence of the Wahabi sect, whose missionary activities have expanded tremendously due to Saudi oil wealth. I didn't see our brave president mention this on his recent trip there. Perhaps he raised it in private but I doubt it very much. He is too interested in cozying up to the Saudis. I wonder why. Prior presidents (as far as I call tell) have similarly not had the guts to take up this issue.

If any politician were serious about addressing the issue of radical islamism, they would start there and they would have my support. But scapegoating Muslims--here, in Europe or anywhere--is something that will make the problem worse not better. Think seriously about what you are saying and the clown you are so fond of defending. What he has said and tried to implement with respect to Muslims is counterproductive to the extreme.
 
And what percentage of Muslims in Europe commit acts of terrorism.

There is a serious well-identified problem in the Muslim world that neither the current president or prior presidents have had the courage to tackle (as far as I know). This is the malign influence of the Wahabi sect, whose missionary activities have expanded tremendously due to Saudi oil wealth. I didn't see our brave president mention this on his recent trip there. Perhaps he raised it in private but I doubt it very much. He is too interested in cozying up to the Saudis. I wonder why. Prior presidents (as far as I call tell) have similarly not had the guts to take up this issue.

If any politician were serious about addressing the issue of radical islamism, they would start there and they would have my support. But scapegoating Muslims--here, in Europe or anywhere--is something that will make the problem worse not better. Think seriously about what you are saying and the clown you are so fond of defending. What he has said and tried to implement with respect to Muslims is counterproductive to the extreme.

Agreed 100% in respect to the saudis. One of the many mistakes we have made in the last 100 years was to encourage clerics to spread wahhabism to comeat the Russians in the 70s.

But this is the most radical. There are still tens of milions(potentially hundreds) who share extreme beliefs but aren't militant. Those should not be considered to be acceptable either.
 
And this man is a scumbag that should be killed.

It's a straw man because you're still trying to make an equivalency to the amount of violence and death caused by those who espouse Islam. Please continue with this losing argument.

What percentage of Muslims do you think in the Muslim world think that leaving Islam should be punishable by death?

It's hardly a strawman. You literally suggested that forcibly expelling a population on religious grounds "shouldn't be off the table". Certainly that sort of thinking belongs to the same province as the thinking that fueled Mr Christian's violent paroxysm; and indeed I'd be interested to know why menacing women on a train, and stabbing their defenders, is the work of a "scumbag", but exiling US citizens for simply "espousing" Islam is free from such "scumbag" designation. (Either way, I don't personally think Mr Christian should be murdered by the state for his crimes.)

More generally, I hardly think mine is a "losing argument", just because you've pronounced it so. Raining death from the sky, indiscriminately, upon mostly innocents, is not a good technique to discourage counter-attacks—whether you consider one terrorism and one "surgical strike", or both senseless bloodshed. Nor is ignoring "the West's" history of colonizing, indiscriminately carving-up, and knee-jerk meddling in these regions a good heuristic for understanding the current issues, both systemic, semantic, and sentimental. Nor is leaving the option of kicking Muslims out of the US "on the table" a good strategy for forging the sort of relationships the US will need to curtail the very real threat of radical para-military groups like ISIL.

Violence begets violence. I'm not the one trying to get actuarial and compute relative values of violence; and then, from said tables, making moral pronouncements regarding which is Fine and Just violence and which is An Existential Threat violence.
 
Agreed 100% in respect to the saudis. One of the many mistakes we have made in the last 100 years was to encourage clerics to spread wahhabism to comeat the Russians in the 70s.

But this is the most radical. There are still tens of milions(potentially hundreds) who share extreme beliefs but aren't militant. Those should not be considered to be acceptable either.

You know I might not approve of what they think. But if there is no external manifestation of it, then it is not a problem as far as I'm concerned. In an ideal world I would be re-born as the prophet of a new religion that would sweep across the world and replace all the current imperfect religions. In the real world of public policy, any politician trying to do something about islamic terrorism has to choose policies and actions that have a chance of improving the situation not making things worse. What your boy has said and done is extremely counterproductive and I might add hypocritical given his palling around with the Saudis.
 
Uh, "stress of Congress"? That's a knee-slapper.

When I first heard about this story I actually thought it was a plant by the campaign. Throwing an aggressive liberal journalist to the ground, telling him to 'get the hell out' etc. Given Montana's electoral politics, that move undoubtedly won him votes.

I struggled with the word choice, but the job is pretty much doing the exact thing that caused him to assault someone.
 
You sure are toeing the line of this is our fault. That's ignoring the centuries of radical behavior from the middle east. This is not a new phenomenon. We just know about it and they have better weaponry.
 
You sure are toeing the line of this is our fault. That's ignoring the centuries of radical behavior from the middle east. This is not a new phenomenon. We just know about it and they have better weaponry.

And you're ignoring centuries of "the West" meddling and menacing both the Levant and the greater Muslim world. It's no less the fault of "the West" than it is the "Near East".
 
Legend.

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thethe, what jpx is saying about a) colonialism and b) western military intervention creating fertile ground is neither ideologically driven nor particularly controversial. It's really only disputed in the morass of the Islamophobic internet where, IMO, the denizens have more in common with what they rail against than with the rest of the world.

Blaming those things for the fertile ground from which extremism springs doesn't absolve horrific actions nor obviate the individuals' agency in committing them, but to discount them is to embrace a sort of anesthetizing ignorance.
 
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