How does banning immigration from 7 countries, while also giving special consideration to people who say they are Christian, make you safer?
Will it stop terrorism? Obviously not. Will it reduce attacks on domestic soil? If you remove all domestic attacks from those countries over the past many decades, you result in a reduction of… Zero percent. So how does that make us safer?
In order for you to justify this policy, you need to be able to explain how this makes us safer. Because otherwise, you are restricting liberty for no reason at all. For security theater, like at airports.
Giving up liberty in exchange for the mere appearance of security is bad policy.
I think it’s the only answer you’re going to get, though. I appreciate the rhetoric you’re employing, but you know as well as I do that there is neither a rational nor evidence-based foundation on which the EO was constructed.
If someone is going to throw their support behind an inherently irrational measure, logic isn’t going to sway them. They will simply ignore the notorious “2. ???” step on their way to security.
Then it becomes a problem, because now Trump can just say “see, told you, fake news” and actually be somewhat correct. Not that the ACLU isn’t off the fucking chart in the hyperbole department most of the time, but any time you let Trump be on the right side of an issue doesn’t help since he’ll talk about it for literally months and beat the drum.
The ACLU Isn’t really a news outlet, not in the way that I would hold say CNN and CBS news accountable. They’re clearly a political group with no small amount of lobbying going on.
I grant you Twitter posts seem to be taken as news by the populace.
Sure, neither are politicians and plenty of them took the bait too and that’s not a good thing. Saying something stupid still works against non-Republicans for some reason. Confirmation bias and all that.
Sure. I’m just thinking though this “fake news” garbage is a lot more harmful when directed at the actual media versus say everyone else. The media is supposed to have integrity and hopefully vet their sources. I don’t expect that from the ACLU, the DNC, or companies… I mean you hope they stick to the truth but they all have something to sell, a point-of-view to push. Fox News keeping the Moroccan thing up for days seems more important than the ACLU pushing their agenda. I expect the ACLU to push their agenda and don’t always agree with it.
My expectation for any of the media outlets is they try their best to use facts.
Rationalization is a powerful thing. Outside of sociopaths, nobody wants to think of themselves (or people they respect) as racist, misogynist, etc. With ready, palatable excuses at hand for every terrible behavior, they don’t have to. We can’t trivialize this, though – it’s fucking hard to be introspective enough to penetrate your own rationalizations, just on a single matter.
What’s hilarious in this case, though, is that you have Giuliani enthusiastically (and moronically) giving the step-by-step process for how they got from “Ban Muslims” to “acceptable security action” just by applying justifications and tweaking their targets bit.
The thing that I will never understand, is how when someone is unable to articulate a rational defense for a position, that itself doesn’t make them question it.
Hell, that’s a big reason why I argue here, because it forces me to face my beliefs and either reinforce them or change them.
Timex, I think the issue is that the assumptions being brought to the table are so vastly different, that it’s nearly impossible to find common ground. I think, to RoyalWe, what the president says is taken at (more or less) face value. That is, that there is a threat of terrorism from members of those countries. So, when you ask, “how does this make us safe?”, the answer is patently obvious, that it keeps people from those countries out. You and I don’t accept that premise, which leaves very little room to discuss anything. This is why you two keep talking past each other, I think.
But it’s not a simple rejection of that assertion. I’m just asking to go one step deeper.
How does stopping immigration from those 7 countries actually result in a situation where we are safer?
The only explanation here is that it MAY prevent immigration of certain individuals from those specific countries. But what percentage of terrorism do those people represent? Thus establishing the type of reduction this could achieve.
Based on all recent attacks in the US, the answer there appears to be ZERO. You are achieving a ZERO percent reduction in terrorist attacks.
But even if we are to believe that some future attacks are coming from those specific countries, they certainly do not comprise some major percentage of the overall attacks. If they do, then some explanation is required to explain what has occurred to result in this major shift compared to the previous status quo.
So if we are left with some small, unknown portion of terrorist acts, then this plan is akin to defending the planet against meteor impacts by firing missiles off into random directions. Certainly, there’s a non zero probability that a missile will randomly hit an incoming meteor, but it’s damn near zero. Thus, by firing those missiles off into space, you are achieving no significant reduction in danger to people on earth.
This is what I question about this policy. Even if you ignore the unethical and morally repugnant ideas of turning away those who need our help, you are left with a policy which has no Rational basis for believing that it will achieve anything. So it’s not that we are trading liberty for security… It’s that we are trading liberty for NOTHING.
Dude, you are preaching to the choir. But you are missing the point. The president says there’s a threat and blocking people from those countries will make us safer. If someone accepts that as truth, there’s nothing to discuss. Despite the 1000+ members of the state dept that have said the policy will make us less safe, we can’t actually refute the possibility that the president is privy to info they don’t have. I don’t believe that, mind you, but others might.
I mean I’ve been saying the people who believe Trump are the real problem (well one of them at least) for ages…this shit ain’t news, fake or otherwise. You’ve got a large and electorally potent portion of the population utterly immunized against and opposed to facts, hanging on every crazy, racist, shitty word out of Trump’s mouth like it’s gospel…unrelated point, but statistically, they’re more likely to believe the Gospels than other folks…so what do you do with people who treat rational discourse like an attack and intellect as an affront when they’re wrong about something really important and throwing their weight behind it?
