1) Children and migrants and asylum seekers don't belong in cages / internement camps / prison. But that's where they are, because people like YOU support TRUMP. If not turned away, they should still be treated with civility, as much as YOU would expect if you visited a foreign country. There's no reason to 'dump anyone in the desert' to fend for themselves.

2) Your precious billion dollar wall was defeated by a sawzall. How's that for a waste of money? Something you say you're against.

3) No, not like a single example that had little to do with fish. More like consistenly, overarchingly poisoning our air and water. Try harder.

4) Every single appointment Trump has made has been bought and paid for by campaign contributions. He doesn't elect people based on merit or experience, but by how much money they've given him. If Obama did it too, then he was corrupt too. That doesn't make Trump any less corrupt. Can't blame this on Obama.

5) A good portion of the arson and looting was done by white supremacists trying to inflame race tensions. And if blacks have to burn down building so the cops will stop murdering them freely, then I say good on them.

6) Most if not all the protests in the United States were peaceful. And those peaceful protests were met with flash bangs, tear gas (outlawed by the Geneva convention), and lots of police brutality. Maybe you should change your tv channel once in a while.

7) You really have no idea what you're talking about with this one. People are poor because of your precious capitalism, not minimum wage inflation.

8) Imagine what would have happened without social distancing rules? Triple the number of cases and dead and you're probably close.

9) Please spare me your tripe. When they're packing semis full of dead bodies from covid 19 in your state, please try again.

10) Well, Trump does like to pretend he's a doctor. Amazingly you had enough sense not to start taking hydroxychloroquine, which does nothing, but Trump touted it as a miracle cure. "Pretty soon cases will be close to zero"

All your rhetoric is just useless tripe.

How about the rule of law instead?
There is no political statement in looting and burning down local shops.

I've listened to a (black, apparently conservative) professor named Glenn Loury on Youtube a bit. Have never heard of him before. He seems to be quite sure about the numbers:

• encounters of black people with the cops (as offenders) are, unfortunately, disproportionally more likely given higher incidence of crime

• blacks are also disproportionally more likely to be victims of (black) crime, in fact black people need the police the most

• whites are equally likely to be killed in encounters with the police (harassing is a different matter, but killing is not)

His conclusion is that it's mainly a policing problem but not necessarily a "racial" one.

Do you have sources for that? Especially the "good portion" part?

Yeah, you watch too much TV.

Go back to your regularly scheduled programming, at least you're good at that.

No, no, no! There is not a single socialist state in Europe since c. 1990. By all means, universal health care and state-funded education does not make a state socialist. US has public schools, state universities, and Social Security, too. It's a bit more of that, but still capitalism.
The "actually existing socialism" was something totally different, believe me.

If you only pay attention to leftmedia, you won't know about Antifa. Hence, Edgar is ignorant of them.

Wow. A single case of abuse. Compare that to the thousands of police misconduct stories.

But you know, openly lynching black people like it was the 1800s again is cool.

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Punch Nazis, win hearts. :heart:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/andy-ngo-right-wing-troll-antifa-877914/

Looks like there's a bit more to that story... Apparently he was cooperating with a far-right group that targets left protestors with violence. Also, apparently that was nearly a year ago so not very relevant to now.

Referring to Antifa as an entity, as if it's a hive mind of Borg drones, is equally ridiculous as referring to the "left" as a single entity. There is no Antifa club. There are various groups that share similar ideas and may or may not use that label, but there's no structured doctrine by which all supporters are going to agree and no chain of command that links them all together. It's not as though a group in one neighborhood of one city was taking orders from headquarters on the other side of the country or globe. It's just individuals making split second choices for themselves under stressful and emotional circumstances trying to fight for what they believe in (or fuck shit up, if that's the individual's motive).

As for protestors that do resort to violence I don't see a huge problem with this depending on who the violence is directed at. The government is clearly disingenuous, especially the current administration. If there's no peaceful way to practically achieve righteous change then so be it.

When British, French, and Spanish pioneers landed in the Americans they didn't negotiate shared land usage with the native tribes that occupied the land. They murdered, raped, and enslaved them (and haven't really fully stopped mistreating them 400 years later). And they didn't have to do that. They simply were greedy and ignorant, and chose to do that because they could.

Sometimes change requires a force of hand. Which is very unfortunate, and we're getting better at resolving matters peacefully, but it's pretty damn evident to anybody watching that so called democratic governments aren't so democratic after all. Money is power. And the average person or group of persons does not have enough wealth to go up against the aristocrats. And so we have to exercise our power in other ways. Violence happens to be one of the easiest ones to exercise.

That said, police have been far more violent towards media so I don't think it's worth pointing out a few edge cases where protestors harmed media. It's kind of expected for unruly protestors to pose a danger to media. What's unprecedented in the West, at least as far as my knowledge goes, is police/law enforcement turning weaponry on media (and peaceful protestors)!

That's sort of on the same level as a referee clothes lining a player, kicking him in the face with his skate, and putting the player in the penalty box. You wouldn't be surprised for the player's team to pile onto the referee after that. If the rules aren't going to be followed then anything goes.

Facebook is the worst place to go for news. Fucking hell, every other week my wife yells to me in a panic from another room to warn me about some deadly thing that is spreading on Facebook. Of course, being the voice of reason, I Google it and find that it's mostly myth spread by the idiocy of social media.

For provincial, national, and international news I predominantly use Reuters. I explicitly sought out an unbiased news source, and that's what I came across^[1]. I don't understand why anybody would want news that is politically biased. News is meant to be truth, and the truth is not biased. I avoid most MSM sources because they're heavily biased and corrupt. Which isn't to say that Reuters can't possibly be biased or corrupt, but I certainly haven't seen anything to imply that it is, and it seems to be well respected overall too.

I do get some news from YouTube channels and things of that nature, but I always take this sort of information with a grain of salt. I typically try to first fact check anything that sounds questionable, or anything that I decide to pass on.

Append:

I'll just leave this here:

Funny thing is people are also questioning Trump's medical fitness, and suggesting that he appears to be showing signs of Frontotemporal Dementia.

Democrats did a lot less damage the last 8 years they had office than Trump has done in 4. Face it: Trump is going to lose this, and he deserves to lose. Whether or not Biden will be good for America remains to be seen, but one thing the majority of people on Earth recognize is that Trump is definitely bad for America and for the world.

When I need someone to catch a loose cat, I call the armed police.

When I need someone to calm down an unarmed person with mental illness, I call the armed police.

When I need someone to fix my toilet, I called the armed police.

Because damnit, they are God-fearing, law-loving, righteous men and women. I don't want any peaceful, certified, qualified, educated person involved.

So do we raise taxes to cover additional professional public services, or do we replace some of the responsibilities of the police? (The latter is the most common meaning of "defunding the police.")

Because yes, police chase down dogs and climb trees to save kittens in many cities. Hopefully they aren't fixing toilets, but you never know.

The problem I have with police is that they are over-utilized, over-armed, and over-unionized. Of course we need a police presence, but not every situation requires a hot head with a badge and a gun.

Congratulations! That's great news!

I quit my job and am returning to my old one (after two weeks and a week vacation).