penningtron wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 12:30 pm

rsmurphy wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 11:37 am They couldn't use same-sex marriage anymore since they all finally got on board in the 21st Century.

Well while we're on the topic of 'scare tactics' and Project 2025..

Concerning the erosion of civil rights there is a lot to fear, and there's a thing or two to be said about the broad tax reforms that would benefit both parties.

Lu Zwei wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 10:02 am I live with 1400$ (after tax) as my monthly income. In that amount I had to include my apartment, bank loan, child welfare and somehow manage as a human being with my needs and hobbies.

That's... a pretty common financial situation here in the US. Loads of people, especially in deep red states, make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which works out to a pre-tax full-time income of $1,160 a month. The working class in the US is still fighting a major uphill battle for $15 an hour in a world where $15 an hour isn't even enough to live in most places where jobs are actually located. Many of these people also have children and are victims of predatory lending practices, especially from payday loan schemes.

In fact, when you compare the numbers, it's a bit of a relative wash between Croatia and the United States. Your income might be lower, but your cost of living is also significantly lower. Rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in a city center averages 572.46 € against an average monthly net income of 1,220.31 €, or 47%. The same figures for the US are $1,829.34, $4,433.23, and 41%. Yet your cost of child care is 15% of average income compared to 31% in the United States, and I guarantee that $4,433.23 figure assumes both parents are working full-time, which is the norm just to survive in the US, and that means 2 cars because you're not getting to your job without a car.

Sure, no single source of data captures a complete picture, and one site's "average monthly income" for the US might be $4,000 while another might be closer to $2,600, but the fact of the matter is the percentage is what counts.

$1,400 doesn't tell us anything. What is your loan cost? What about your child care? How much does it cost you to get to work? What's your monthly rent? Here in the US it's not uncommon for a 1-bedroom apartment to run $1400 a month in a small to medium size city. A wide variety of systematic factors, including changes to the rules governing corporate ownership of homes, has led to massive inflation in the cost of even basic housing beyond what most working-class people can afford as families are forced to compete with each other for limited numbers of apartments as the houses they might have bought in the 1960s have been priced out of their range thanks to corporations turning them en masse into AirBnBs. Sure, gas might be cheap compared to Europe, but you're also probably driving an hour to your job if you have any hope of having a job that makes a dent in your rent, and the housing closer to your job is even more expensive. You're not paying for 8 hours of child care every day, you're paying for 12-14.

I don't quite get what your point is. The far right is a threat to people who work for a living everywhere. Your relative income doesn't change the fact that the GOP's endgame is to make quality of life in the US (and, by extension of their international policy, everywhere else) exponentially worse for everyone but their (white, male) business partners. That doesn't change the fact that people from the "wrong breeding stock" are getting their heads blown off willy nilly by the police in the streets and the GOP intends to make us even more expendable to the state than we already are. This just isn't productive.

dumbass wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 10:23 am

Frankie99 wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 5:37 am but not voting says you don't care about those who would be hurt, suffer, or be killed.

tell that to the palestinians

I don't disagree with you, but what I want to hear is this:

What is your plan?

What actionable, realistic plan do you have to make a measurable change? Anyone can complain. In fact, nobody is better at this than the GOP. The GOP's entire political strategy is to complain about perceived problems while naming vague non-solutions as their "plan." What are you going to do, and how is it going to solve the problem? Because, from where I stand, taking the route of harm reduction is a whole lot better than taking the route of "gee, I dunno."

I think harm reduction as a voting strategy makes plenty of sense.

I plan on voting for the party that does ** not ** have setting up mass deportation camps as part of the official platform, however much I might be otherwise dissatisfied with that party's behavior.


This-- from Scientific American of all publications-- is worth reading, imo:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... p-history/


Trump’s Massive Deportation Plan Echoes Concentration Camp History

Trump’s language about immigrants “poisoning” the U.S. repeats past rhetoric that led to civilian detention camps, with horrific, tragic results

By Andrea Pitzer
Some attendees of the Republican National Convention hold "Mass Deportation Now" signs on July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Some attendees of the Republican National Convention hold "Mass Deportation Now" signs on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wis.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Republican National Convention hit rock bottom on its third day in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 17, with a sea of signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.” If former president Donald Trump is elected for a second term, he and his advisers promise to remove from the U.S., via forced expulsions and deportation camps, as many as 20 million people—a number larger than the country’s current estimated population of undocumented residents. Put into effect, this scheme would devolve quickly into a vast 21st-century version of concentration camps, with predictably brutal results.

Concentration camps are built for the mass detention of civilians based on group identity, excluding protections normally afforded by a country’s legal system. I wrote a history of these camps that traced an arc from their 19th-century origins in Spanish-occupied Cuba through the development of death camps in Germany and their modern-day descendants around the world.

Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide—the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention—draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.

For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.

Justifications for brutal immigration policies have often distorted scientific goals of public health programs. Trump and his advisers have long been prone to panic-mongering over the threat of disease from immigrants. They’ve likewise twisted sociology to stoke anxiety about assimilation to justify a Muslim ban or to try to make racist comments seem less objectionable. Even simple principles of statistics get skewered as Trump lies about crime committed by immigrants.

Trump’s incendiary language echoes dangerous historical precedents. He has called his political opponents “vermin,” referred to immigrants as depraved “animals” and “rapists,” and described the U.S.–Mexico border as an “open wound.” Examples abound of similar rhetoric in Nazi propaganda about Jews.

Less well known is the fact that before World War II, the Nazis framed German Jews as aliens who needed to be forced into emigration or expelled. This was the original logic for stripping Jews of citizenship: to officially render them foreigners. (It should be noted that Trump aims to end birthright citizenship in the U.S.)

Prejudice has always been a part of concentration camps. At the dawn of the 20th century, mortality surged in British camps in southern Africa during the South African War, with children’s deaths blamed on “uncivilized” Boer mothers. Embracing pseudoscientific biology, camp administrators spent about half the money per day for food for a Black African civilian as was spent on white detainees (who themselves received insufficient rations). Bureaucracy and unforeseen crises added immeasurably to the harm. In poorly sited and badly run camps, tens of thousands of noncombatants died.
Curated by Our Editors

Project 2025 Plan for Trump Presidency Has Far-Reaching Threats to Science

Ben Guarino, Andrea Thompson, Tanya Lewis & Lauren J. Young
Migrants from Central America moving towards the U.S
Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens

Melinda Wenner Moyer
Our Immigration Policy Has Done Terrible Damage to Kids

Lucy Bassett & Hirokazu Yoshikawa
Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones

Tori Rodriguez

Other early camp systems included massive networks established on an emergency basis to detain immigrants or expel targeted minority groups. During the Spanish Civil War, when 475,000 refugees poured across France’s southern border in less than three weeks, many were forced into unlivable conditions in remote areas to isolate them from French society. Illness and disease followed on a massive scale.

After the start of World War II, the French government used those same camps to intern foreign Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Germany, detaining them as enemy aliens. And after France fell to the Nazis, French policemen went door-to-door in Paris in May 1941 in the service of the Vichy government to round up foreign Jews who remained at liberty. Some deported Jews were sent to barracks still holding Spanish detainees and “enemy aliens.” Camps often begin as one thing and become something else.

The relocation and detention involved in the deportation project that Trump is proposing are at least an order of magnitude greater than these debacles. The argument that a second Trump administration wouldn’t be able to launch such an operation because of a lack of personnel or legal authority should be understood as largely irrelevant because it presupposes the intention of running a precise, legal project at all.

A professional effort on this scale would be impossible. The mass deportations planned to begin in January 2025 if Trump is reelected are meant to unleash deliberate and collateral mayhem. And if history is any guide, a system of camps built to punish millions represents a threat to every American.

As for what they say they intend, Trump and his allies openly admire the results of the Eisenhower-era “Operation Wetback,” whose very name offers a slur revealing the endemic prejudice that made it possible. This limited deportation blitz led to the deaths of 88 workers in 112-degree-Fahrenheit heat. A new Trump administration would be looking to replicate that operation on a scale heretofore untried, using the largest deportation force ever seen in the U.S., according to both Trump and former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan.

Trump adviser Stephen Miller has described a plan to create “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” and Trump has promised to remove four percent of the current U.S. population in a deliberate plan to spur a massive disruption of the labor market. If Americans took notice of border policy during Trump’s first administration, said Homan earlier this month, “They ain’t seen shit yet.”

The “Mass Deportation Now” signs filling the audience at the Republican National Convention are a grim warning of how much worse the situation could get. Trump, his advisers, the Heritage Foundation (the extreme-right platform that has put forth Project 2025) and countless members of Congress are not only winking and nodding toward detention horrors of the past but also clearly willing to repeat history if it will let them consolidate power.

The U.S. has previously embraced concentration camps during the detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and under the family-separation policy imposed during Trump’s presidency. The broader legacy of camps on six continents offers a panoramic assortment of even more ways in which mass deportations and forced relocation can go wrong. Unleashed on anything close to the scale under discussion, the project Trump and his henchmen are proposing will be lethal to the targeted groups, catastrophic to the stability of the country and extremely difficult to undo. These camps are in no way scientific or even serious policy; they’re the equivalent of dropping a hydrogen bomb to put out a forest fire.

speedie wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 1:51 am

Curry Pervert wrote: Mon Jul 22, 2024 11:58 pm I'm loving that trump's donations to Kamala Harris' campaigns in the past are coming back to bite him.

Wait.. Whut

Trump and Ivanka gave thousands to previous Kamala Harris campaigns

Kamala Harris had an unusual donor to her earlier campaigns: Donald Trump


The obvious line here being "Even trump thinks she's a great pick for office".

Meanwhile, at a jd vance rally:

‘It’s Gonna Take a Civil War’: Trump Campaign Speaker Warns of Violence if Dems Win.

At a rally in Ohio with J.D Vance, a GOP state senator said Trump victory in 2024 is the last chance to avoid bloody conflict.

Curry Pervert wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 11:48 pm Meanwhile, at a jd vance rally:

‘It’s Gonna Take a Civil War’: Trump Campaign Speaker Warns of Violence if Dems Win.

At a rally in Ohio with J.D Vance, a GOP state senator said Trump victory in 2024 is the last chance to avoid bloody conflict.

Thrillbilly Elegy

Vance isn’t even a “Hillbilly’”. He has never lived in Appalachia. He grew up in Ohio. The entire premise of his book is bullshit.

Whenever he’s been pulled up on this he just said his grandmother bought Appalachian vibes with her to Ohio.

Like Trump he’s full of shit.

SE Ohio is considered part of Appalachia.

JD Vance is still full of shit.

I can't believe we have this same sad "debate" every four years in light of the trajectories of the two parties.
I mean even if you break it down to Peter Thiel versus the Disney heir or whatever, the choice should be obvious, there's an appreciable difference in ideology. It can always get worse, if not for you, then certainly for others.

Also, Croatia has universal health care, i.e. state-sponsored insurance plans. The US certainly does not (or only in a rudimentary form)

I’ve constantly bitched on here about the shittiness of the choice facing most of us that live in western managed democracies.

But I always vote for the least worst electable option every single time. If other folks have the time and energy to open up the Overton Window do it, but while we’re opening that window don’t slam it shut.

Just fucking vote for Harris for fucks sake. It achieves the opposite effect you are aiming for by abstaining or voting Third Party under a ludicrous two party system. You’re not sending anyone a message, you’re helping elect monsters.