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The Old Hack

Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

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14 hours ago, Troacctid said:

So far you don't seem to have actually taken issue with any particular point of evidence. For example—people are already going through intense vetting in order to enter the United States. The process for vetting refugees, for instance, is long, rigorous, and extremely arduous, and typically takes years to complete. Is there any part of that process that you can single out as being ineffective or insufficient? To my knowledge, the Trump administration has not offered any examples of deficiencies in the current standards.

Looks like I'm wrong about US vetting procedures.  To be honest I expected something closer to West Germany's "open the floodgates, sort it out later" approach.  Amid the forest of liberal stuff I wasn't going to trust I found a year-plus old article on the Heritage Foundation's website which more or less confirmed what you were saying. 

Were I Trump I might still shut the machinery down for a few months to vet the vetters.  We've seen how multiple government agencies have put politics ahead of professionalism trying to undermine Trump.  I'd want to insure that the people charged with the vetting process would continue to do an as-good or better job for Trump as Obama.

14 hours ago, Troacctid said:

And do you not consider John McCain and Lindsey Graham to be sufficiently conservative?

No.  All respect to McCain for his military service but these days he's one of the few liberal Republicans left.  I'm less familiar with Graham but a quick bit of googling suggests he is similar.

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19 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

I agree that it's a complex situation, and there's no reason to think it's more harmful now than when Obama did pretty much the same thing for twice as long.

Also no more illegal than it was then.

Just how harmful or illegal it is now and was then... that's arguable.

That's incorrect—Obama did not ban travel from those countries. He only made them ineligible for the Visa Waiver Program, which allows people to travel into the United States without a visa if they stay for less than 90 days. You could still come to the United States, but you would need a visa. Obama also did not include an exemption for non-Muslims.

Trump's ban includes an exemption for non-Muslims, and affects Muslims even if they have already been vetted and given a visa.

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/article/2017/feb/03/donald-trumps-executive-order-muslim-ban/

5 hours ago, Vorlonagent said:

Looks like I'm wrong about US vetting procedures.  To be honest I expected something closer to West Germany's "open the floodgates, sort it out later" approach.  Amid the forest of liberal stuff I wasn't going to trust I found a year-plus old article on the Heritage Foundation's website which more or less confirmed what you were saying. 

Were I Trump I might still shut the machinery down for a few months to vet the vetters.  We've seen how multiple government agencies have put politics ahead of professionalism trying to undermine Trump.  I'd want to insure that the people charged with the vetting process would continue to do an as-good or better job for Trump as Obama.

No.  All respect to McCain for his military service but these days he's one of the few liberal Republicans left.  I'm less familiar with Graham but a quick bit of googling suggests he is similar.

Both of them have voted with Trump 100% of the time. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/

The Trump administration has not offered any evidence or any rational basis to believe that there is anything wrong with the current vetting system that we already have. Why the shutdown? What's the justification?

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38 minutes ago, Troacctid said:

Both of them have voted with Trump 100% of the time. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/

The Trump administration has not offered any evidence or any rational basis to believe that there is anything wrong with the current vetting system that we already have. Why the shutdown? What's the justification?

McCain is not new to the Senate.  He has a track record.  I'm going to decide what I think of him from that.

I already gave you the only justification I could think of for the shutdown.  For any more rationale more than that, you'll have to talk to the Trump Administration. 

I'll admit the ban made a lot more sense when I thought that Obama had no vetting process in place.

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15 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

Nope. It's the [Redacted].

14 hours ago, mlooney said:

Pushing the edge of "play nice here or don't play at all".  Just beating ToH to the punch.  :-)

The Moderator: Not pushing it. Crossing it. This is not acceptable. Please avoid it.

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11 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

The Moderator: Not pushing it. Crossing it. This is not acceptable. Please avoid it.

I have redacted the offending post and hereby apologize.

If mlooney and the moderator would care to similarly redact their replies...

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1 hour ago, Don Edwards said:

I have redacted the offending post and hereby apologize.

If mlooney and the moderator would care to similarly redact their replies...

Meh.  No really that is what my reply says now.

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Going to shift the topic north of the border for a bit. Currently there's a bill being looked at by the Canadian senate to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to allow for protection of Trans and gender non-binary people. This looks like a good thing as it includes them as an identifiable group for the purposes of criminal sentencing of hate crimes. Opponents of the bill justify their opposition with the fear that such a law would violate the freedom of expression and make it a crime to use the wrong gender pronouns, like I could be fined if I call a trans-female a he, even if by accident or without knowing they were trans-female. The bill would only deal with extreme cases where such misuse would be considered hate based and discrimination.

Certainly I'm all for equality and personally believe that a lot of the opposition we see to equality laws and rulings are from a group of people that have for a long time considered themselves to be top dog now feeling like they're about to lose that spot. But honestly, it's called the Canadian Human Rights Act and it should be a no brainer that that should mean ALL HUMANS and if you start picking and choosing who it should be included in it, then we might as well change it to the Canadian Rights for Some Humans Act.

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It's not only Top Dogs--it's a number of Middle Dogs who like having somebody to feel superior to. There's plenty of low-income or low-status cis whites who comfort themselves by telling themselves "at least I'm not ___". My paternal grandfather was one such person.

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On 2/12/2017 at 2:22 AM, Troacctid said:

Meanwhile, this past week, the Trump administration has already started rolling back Obama's protections for transgender rights.

In what way? Link?

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Obama issued a guideline to public schools telling them to allow transgender students to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity. On Friday, after the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, the Trump administration announced it was abandoning this policy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trump-administration-signals-change-in-policy-for-transgender-students/2017/02/11/c2fd138e-f051-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html

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In a sane world, transgender people's use of restrooms would not be an issue. People presenting as male would use the men's restroom, people presenting as female the women's. If their physical anatomy doesn't happen to match their presentation, or if for ANY other reason someone doesn't want to display their physical anatomy, they would go in a stall and close the stall door - so nobody would ever know the difference. People who go in a restroom to ogle or harass other users of the restroom would be escorted from the premises and instructed not to return, or possibly prosecuted - for trespass, if nothing else seems to fit (or the potential victims decline to be publicly identified) - without regard to either their sex or their gender.

(Locker rooms are a more complicated problem. I doubt that there's an easy answer - other than a lot of single-user-at-a-time locker rooms, which would be rather expensive in new construction and quite a bit more expensive, if even possible, in existing facilities.)

I disagree with the idea that anyone who claims to be feeling female at the moment has a presumptive right to be in the ladies' room (meaning that they can't be prosecuted for trespass and escorting them from the premises is a violation of THEIR rights), or the equivalent for feeling male. This is the law that several municipalities have enacted, making this issue hot in the public eye.

I also disagree with the idea that government should demand that private entities attempt to enforce restroom segregation by physical anatomy or by what's written on the birth certificate. As it happens, while the New Jersey state law did demand this, the Texas law (not sure if it's been enacted yet) does not.

I want the people who create trouble dealt with as trouble-makers, and the people who don't create trouble left alone. We don't need sex or gender differentiation for that, but selective application of such differentiation can be a useful tool - and it need not be government that does the selection, it can be a store manager.

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16 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

I want the people who create trouble dealt with as trouble-makers, and the people who don't create trouble left alone. We don't need sex or gender differentiation for that, but selective application of such differentiation can be a useful tool - and it need not be government that does the selection, it can be a store manager.

The easiest way to do this, if we must have more legislation in our lives (and I'm not at all sure we do), is to call out the *behaviors* we want to protect against.  They'd be wrong no matter who does them.

Gratuitous or otherwise unnecessary display of breasts or genitalia, especially when children are present.

Gratuitous or otherwise unnecessary "peeping" under, over or around a bathroom partition or door.

Fill in the details and commonsense exceptions and there you go.

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That works if the motive is to prevent those specific behaviors, but unfortunately it appears that the declared motive of the louder proponents of such restrictions is ideologically based.

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38 minutes ago, ijuin said:

That works if the motive is to prevent those specific behaviors, but unfortunately it appears that the declared motive of the louder proponents of such restrictions is ideologically based.

Well aware.  Sometimes practicality if your best defense.  Rather than saying "That's discrimination!" say "That's stupid and impractical.  If you don't want lewd behavior in the bathrooms legislate against that."

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50 minutes ago, ijuin said:

It's apparently not about the lewdness so much as it is keeping the taint of maleness out of designated female-exclusive spaces.

I'd say it's abut running out of steam crusading against gays and looking for someone similar to target.  [sigh]

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1 hour ago, Vorlonagent said:

I'd say it's abut running out of steam crusading against gays and looking for someone similar to target.  [sigh]

Which in turn was running out of steam crusading against people of colour.

It's like I said before, people who consider themselves superior are grasping at straws in their attempt to remain superior, they're like a wild animal being backed into a corner.

It isn't about a person's privacy and safety in a bathroom, it's an excuse because saying they don't want to share isn't an acceptable reason to deny something.

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It's just naked transphobia. It serves no other purpose and provides zero practical benefit. All it does is persecute trans kids. This is what today's Republican Party stands for.

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