It looks like Biden is beginning to build Trump’s wall, citing the massive surge of illegals entering the country. He waived The Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and Endangered Species Act, among others, with the stroke of his pen.

https://apnews.com/article/border-wall-biden-immigration-texas-rio-grande-147d7ab497e6991e9ea929242f21ceb2

Cue the anger and protests? No; The outrage of the past was as selective as the anti-Trump attention span. It doesn’t suit any political need or signal their hypocritical virtue. The problem is, they virtue-signalled the country closer to disaster with a problem that could have been alleviated years ago. It wasn’t until illegals started showing up on their doorstep demanding the sanctuary of sanctuary cities that these fakes started acting.

It’s a simple matter of organizing our own thoughts. The only thing someone might have to ignore is the knee-jerk and lazy urge of social categorization:

Social categorization is the process by which people categorize themselves and others into differentiated groups. Categorization simplifies perception and cognition related to the social world by detecting inherent similarity relationships or by imposing structure on it (or both). The main adaptive function of social categorization is that it permits and constrains otherwise chaotic inductive inferences. People attribute group features to individuals (stereotyping) and they—less strongly—generalize individual features to the group. The strength of these two kinds of inductive inferences depends on a priori assumptions about the homogeneity of the group. To the extent that social categories rest on detected patterns of feature similarity, their coherence is a matter of family resemblance. Family resemblance categories comprise members of varying typicality, they have fuzzy boundaries (and thus tend to overlap), and the features they contain tend to be correlated with one another. Some social categories are ‘thin,’ however, as their coherence rests solely on arbitrary or socially constructed labels. Both types of categories (family resemblance and social construction) give rise to two common, and socially problematic, biases: (a) ingroup favoritism and (b) perceptions of outgroup homogeneity.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B0080430767017514?via%3Dihub

Avoid thinking in racial terms and “racializing” people.

Omni and Winant define racialization as the process of attaching racial meaning and value to individuals and groups [17]. Racialization is considered the beginning step in the process of racism [18, 19]. It has been argued that it is the socially-assigned race of an individual, the imposed classification of race by others, that results in racial discrimination more so than how one self-identifies [10, 20].

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7011480/#CR18

It follows that we stop imposing the classification of race on others. To avoid social categorization, treat others as individuals, each with their own lives, and learn from them rather than make assumptions based on the colors of their skins. All of that being said, it beggars belief that people cannot understand judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Maybe there is something more pathological in the racist’s being that does not allow what I thought would be a simple principle.

I’m talking about the concept, sure. But I don’t use it in the manner you use it, or in the manner I’ve been criticizing this whole time.

I’ve explained why one out not to use racial categories. I’ve never prohibited nor been prescriptive yours or anyone else’s speech.

Some weird leaps occurring here.

I never use the concept at all. Give it a try sometime.

I propose we stop actualizing it. See these abstract, pseudoscientific concepts for what they are and abandon them in both thought and use.

You will predict based on skin colors who is likelier to be discriminated against based on their skin colors. At what point on the color spectrum does this figure no longer apply? Do you use the same color distinctions, as specious as they are, for statistics in crime, or just the ones that tend to paint arbitrary groupings of people as victims? I thought Europe no longer collects such statistics, for what I thought were obvious reasons. Do you use any other phenotypes, or just the one?

You look at someone’s skin color, and since someone who looks like him may have been subject to prejudice in the past, he is the subject of prejudice today. That’s the logic of racism, as stupid and unjust as it is.

I’ve never doubted that people have categorized human beings according to this false taxonomy.

One cannot determine who has or has not been subject to prejudice by perpetuating pseudoscience or noticing the color of someone’s epidermis, and one certainly cannot solve any of the material conditions by doing so. You’re being both useless and unjust, which is not a great combo.

I'm a sceptic too. I don't think even colourblind people are racially colourblind. Race shows up even in black and white photography. Claim it doesn't have any meaning all you like, but don't pretend you cannot see it, unless you are actually blind.

Here’s why such statements are an admission of guilt rather than a statement of facts. Race is a so-called “social construct”. Race cannot show up in pictures unless one approaches the picture with this construct in mind, and uses it to differentiate between two or more individual people according to it. That this construct is based on pseudoscience makes the admission all the more silly.

He certainly had the qualities of a president, one who polishes the image of American interventionism and the military industrial complex. “Thanks for giving us your children”, is all I hear. Does the deaths of Muslim families disgust you any?

Looking back at President Obama’s legacy, the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko added up the defense department’s data on airstrikes and made a startling revelation: in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 26,171 bombs. This means that every day last year, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.

While most of these air attacks were in Syria and Iraq, US bombs also rained down on people in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. That’s seven majority-Muslim countries.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/09/america-dropped-26171-bombs-2016-obama-legacy

It’s a big blob moving as one, isn’t it?

Trump’s words and cadence and grammar (and spelling) lends itself to ridicule, and rightfully so. But giving speeches is the easy part. In fact I’m glad Trump is bad at it. The whole politics of “optics” and speech-giving can do nothing but bait the public. There is a reason soldiers are captured, and that is because the politics of optics and speech-giving allowed politicians and bureaucrats to send them into other countries with a clean conscience.

McCain and Bush sent people to their death, and they lost. They are losers, and that is not a swipe at losers in general.

It’s just a jab at McCain which you construed as a jab at those who were captured. Why should anyone care?

In so doing he exposes his moral panic. The way he strings disparate words together in order to form this weird little narrative, which is apparently newsworthy, is indicative of his psychology or susceptibility to propaganda, one or the other.

One only has to look at the X accounts of the war-machine’s neo-con propagandists, like Frum and Goldberg and Kristol, to see how gleeful they are of Kelly’s tirade, which concerns petty nonsense we all were foaming about years ago.

You seem to be concerned about a few out-of-context words as reported by a disgruntled employee while dismissing everything else Trump has said about the military and veterans over his lifetime.

How does one make the leap from John McCain to all veterans? He’s taking the piss out of one man in particular.

When those veterans are G. Bush and J. McCain.

But behind closed doors, sources told Goldberg, this lack of understanding went on to cause Trump to repeatedly call McCain a “loser” and to refer to former President George H. W. Bush, who was also shot down as a Navy pilot in World War II, as a “loser.”

This written by Bush and mcCain’s chief propagandist.

By the way, they didn’t die in war.

Did Trump ever visit wounded soldiers at Walter Reid?

No he didn’t. He went on butt-hurt tirade, stringing a loose gathering of words Trump reportedly used in media reports without any reference to anything else.

He’s talking about John McCain, a warmonger, not “veterans”.

Those who were there and who went on record saying none of it happened.

At least neocon Goldberg can now admit who Trump called losers: John McCain and George Bush. Goldberg is one of their cheerleaders, famous for his propaganda regarding the Iraq war.

Before they spun it in the usual way, by removing context and inserting their own. “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’”, and people still believe it. Dupes passed it around in this very thread even after it was refuted.

Disgraceful propaganda.

Thank you.

Yup. My bad.

You’re right, I’m wrong. I apologize. I will ignore the statute, its genesis, and the precedent.

Well then I apologize for believing the provision had anything to do with the statute.

Are you willing to go on record saying that this provision has nothing to do with the statute?

Well, I’m sorry for reading the title of the statute.

And what statute is that a provision of?

Now quote the statute.

You’ll quote me saying otherwise, I’m sure.

It isn’t about witnesses, victims, informants at all, but according to a provision under that statute it is now a federal crime for pulling a fire alarm in Congress, with punishment up to 20 years in prison.

18 U.S. Code § 1512 - Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant

Can you tell me why he’s being charged under that statute? And why pulling a fire alarm is now a federal crime?

Exactly right. So naturally one wonders why he’s being charged under these statutes. I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know.

The title of the statute, the reason the statute was brought into law, and the entire history of its use. But It wouldn’t hurt to look at the crimes themselves and come to your own conclusions.

As far as you can tell isn’t very far, I suppose.

It’s the crime in his indictment. What am I misrepresenting?

It appears to be so. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

The crime is the same and just as stupid in both cases. It’s a witness tampering crime used to prosecute political opponents who inconvenience congress because the law is stupid.