TrickstaPriest

You make your point forcefully and eloquently, Vondy, and I don't wish to denigrate your perspective, any more than I'm sure you don't wish to denigrate mine. For the record, I never got the impression that the black person I cited was talking about blame, but about ownership, and the healing it brings. That was the thrust of Nelson Mandela's "Truth and Reconciliation" commission in South Africa -- bringing the truth out for all to hear and acknowledge, so that it can finally be let go of.
 
Let me give you another Canadian example : For nearly a century, the Canadian government forcibly removed thousands of aboriginal Canadian children (official count for the whole program is around 150,000) and placed them into what was called "residential schools," boarding schools funded by the government but run by the Catholic church. Their intent was to separate the children from their cultural and linguistic environment and assimilate them into the dominant white English-speaking Christian culture. The schools were located far from the children's homes to minimize contact with their parents, who were also given few opportunities for official permission even to leave their reservations to visit them. Many of the children never saw their families for years. Most experienced emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of their teachers/guardians, often severe. After being released from the schools as adults, most of the former students were unable to fit back with their original societies, and were never fully accepted into white society. Many displayed symptoms of PTSD, and many fell into alcohol or drug abuse, or committed suicide. The last residential school closed in 1966.
 
In 2008 the Canadian government offered a formal apology to the victims of the schools, and set up its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission to interview survivors. In 2015 the commission published a voluminous report detailing the survivors' testimony, and the conclusion they had been subjected to cultural genocide. Over the years, even before 2008, the Canadian government has offered various financial compensation packages to the schools' survivors, implicitly validating their complaints; but what I heard time and again in interviews with the survivors who participated in the Commission, is that what mattered most to them, what helped them gain closure, was that they could finally tell their story to the wider world, that it was being heard and accepted, the suffering they went through was being acknowledged, and the parties who were the heirs to those authorities who made the schools publicly accepted responsibility for them.
 
 

I'm a white middle-class male, from the tail end of the baby-boom generation. But I grew up a first-language English speaker in Quebec, Canada, which has always been a majority French-speaking province. When I was young, English was the language of commerce, and of power. French speakers really were treated as second-class citizens in a number of ways. Where I grew up in Montreal, it wasn't even necessary to speak French to live your life comfortably -- you just assumed French Quebecers should learn English. But when I was a teenager, the French nationalist Parti Quebecois came to power. Suddenly the provincial government was "protecting and promoting" the French language and French Quebec culture by demanding the use of French in all public and commercial institutions; severely restricting English's use in signage and other advertising; limiting or reducing English-language educational institutions. French Quebecers became emboldened to publicly express their hostility and resentment toward the way English Canada had treated them (which feelings were not unjustified), and to return some of that to English-speaking Quebecers.
 
That experience gave me a bit of insight into what someone with my background almost never feels elsewhere in Canada or the United States: what it's like to be considered a minority. Not a visible minority, of course -- that's another level of misfortune -- but nonetheless one whose self-identity is being called out and challenged. The effect of the big things is easy to recognize and describe, but what always struck me is how the little things impact you. Constantly being told that you're different, you're lesser, that you don't really belong, having to fight for respect others take for granted... it's like the Chinese water torture, a constant drip-drip-drip that wears you down until you feel either like giving up or exploding.
 
As unpleasant as it was to go through, I think I'm better for it.

The fact that Trump articulated this viewpoint accounts for only half the dismay this generates in me. The other half is because he apparently didn't have the wit to anticipate the condemnation it would provoke.
 
If there's anything more dangerous than malevolence with power, it's stupidity with power.

Timelines for events and information always interests me

I'm still stuck on the words "We complained but we accepted it."  Accepted it?  Really???
 
https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromise-pledge-044311
 
http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/23/the-party-of-no-new-details-on-the-gop-plot-to-obstruct-obama/
 

We put up with George W for 8 years, complained but ultimately accepted it.  So apparently this is something that we can do, and have done in the past.
 
Trump is different. 
 
I could write books on why Trump is different than a crappy president like George W, who was very crappy indeed, but I don't think going on and on about Trump's myriad of flaws would do anything beyond cause your friend to entrench further.   So just let your friend know that we have been there and done that, but find Trump to be a horse of a different color.

Thanks for the reminder to not go on Facebook, ever.

Brett Kavanaugh's selection probably has the mega corporations high fiving all over the nation

Bizarro-world would be an improvement.  There's dirty politics and then there's f_king with toddlers.  As a parent, I am enraged and berserk.

That article draws the conclusion that the move was intended to protect the world baby-food industry, which is dominated by a handful of American and European companies. I don't know if there's any other possible explanation.
 
But threatening trade sanctions and withdrawal of military aid to a country over the wording of a resolution for promoting infant nutrition in developing countries... I don't have the words.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/30/minimum-wage-maximum-wage-income-inequality
 
This will not happen in America in my remaining life time
 
but I wish it would.
 
 

A lot of white people in the US have been angry for a long time, not wholly without reason. They just feel more empowered to speak up now, taking their cue from their President. Unfortunately the most ignorant and spiteful thoughts and impulses are also being expressed, when previously the people having them felt constrained to keep them to themselves.
 
It's an ongoing debate as to whether allowing such poison into the open helps drain it, or spread it.

I don't find it 'bad' but I was surprised, and more than a little impressed.
 
I do agree the Democrats have become , in their way, almost as (Or perhaps just as much) corporate owned as the Republicans. So yes, I like what I hear about this woman spurning corporate donations. 
 
The Democrats have lost a lot of the trust they had from blue collar workers. They need to get it back if they hope to swing things around.
 
Of course, my own biases against monopolies and big biz maybe blinding me to some real politik

What the Democrats need to rejuvenate their support is sticking to an actual Democratic platform instead of being Republican-lite.
 
Of course, with the SCOTUS in full support of gerrymandering and voter purges, that may not be enough.

Yeah... was reading this here... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/26/democrats-primaries-upset-joe-crowley-alexandria-osacio-cortez?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=279391&subid=24646434&CMP=GT_US_collection
 
And I don't see why this is a bad thing. It is exactly what the Democrats need. Assuming the staid leadership realizes it. She may not be a Dem party member, but as Crowley did, the Dems should back her fully.
 
As Old Man said, the Dems have become Republicans (while the Republicans have become extremists in many cases) and that is the problem. The whole country has swung so far to the right, that Hillary is considered a liberal. (She was a Goldwater Girl for christsakes!) I mean, I voted for her as the best candidate for the job at the time, but I really don't like the mainstream Democratic ties to Wall Street and the like. I'm much more of a Democratic Socialist in leaning, but not a Bernie-Bro ideologue. The fact that Bernie is considered "radical" is just another indication of how far the Center has swung right.

Guys, I agree what's happening is wrong and bad, but it isn't a sea change in the nature of American politics or the American people. Watergate. Vietnam War protests. Segregation. McCarthyism. Japanese internment. Dust Bowl migrants. The pendulum swings. Nothing is broken yet. It does more harm to give in to cynicism and despair, and stop trying to be better.

Beyond that, the executive order, like so many other plans of the administration, is probably illegal.  
 
Trump's executive order would have the children detained with their parents.  However, in 2014 a federal judge declared that children can not be detained in jail-like settings even with their parents.  This is what led the Obama administration to letting both the parents and children go free while awaiting their asylum hearing.  It is this "catch and release policy to illegal immigrants" over which folks at Fox and Friends got our president all worked up about, precipitating the whole lets take the children away so that we can lock the parents up policy.
 
In face of public outcry, Trump is just reverting to the detaining children with their parents policy that the federal judge already ruled to be illegal.  Having successfully come up with a even more inhumane way of treating the children of asylum seeker who enter the country with their parent than locking them up together, does not make the policy of locking the children up in jail suddenly legal.
 
 
 
 
 

I definitely want to see hard information like this.  I live in az and I run into way too many people who compare trump and Obama... Or think things like the Muller investigation is bunk...  Or feel his policies are good somehow.  I need me hard data

This is a list of the companies currently profiting from the detention centers
 
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Z04gxhORlgmS5sDhnX_ryDfSF8T2a6AwZWV1PMY-H8/mobilebasic

This move fits with the overall pattern for this administration: withdrawal from multilateral agreements and diplomatic bodies; unabashed partisan support for Israel; and strong-arm bullying tactics with erstwhile allies and partners. If the Trump administration can't get what it wants, it calls what it wants sour grapes. If it doesn't get its way, it takes its toys and goes home.
 
That is a radical departure from decades of American foreign policy. It's a disruption of a world order that the United States had the biggest hand in shaping. I don't think President Trump has a clear vision of where he wants to go, though. I think he's making it up as he goes, "going with his gut" as he likes to say.
 
If his gut is steering his decisions, I wish he'd eat less burgers and fries.

If anyone's interested in an outside perspective on this issue, here's an article dated yesterday from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) news department: What's real, and what's not, about the U.S. border crisis.

Just a personal note—guys, I’m having a really hard time with the kidnapping of immigrant children by ICE. The stories I’m reading are horrific. Seriously, I can barely concentrate at work. I have never been more ashamed to be an American. I thought we were better than this, but I was wrong. 

Republicans Absorb New Lesson: Cross President Trump at Their Peril
 
This sounds to me unsettlingly like the progress of an authoritarian regime consolidating power.
 
And a stark reminder that it isn't laws or institutions that preserve and promote democracy; it's the people's faith in them and willingness to defend them.

Complacency is our enemy. Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) June 14, 2018
 
Why this doesn't sound like a veiled threat at all...
 
And the horse you rode in on, McDaniel
 
 
 
 

Trump's indignation at other countries' trade practices is an act, playing to his base. From the start he's told them that their problems are the fault of other people, that they've been mistreated by everyone who isn't white working-class America (except of course for him and his rich friends). The Donald isn't concerned with fairness, but with getting everything he can that he thinks will make him look good. Just like this meeting with Kim Jong-un -- he made grand promises for what he expected to achieve, but in the end settled for vague non-binding "commitments" to denuclearization. Trump gets the photo-op he craves, something he can sell back home as deal-making. But Kim gets much more, the international recognition and legitimization of his regime that his family has always wanted.
 
It also occurred to me that Donald Trump tearing up the deals, arrangements, and systems established by his predecessors, is so that he can try to establish new ones he can credit to himself. He wants to remake the face of America in his image, to stamp a giant "TRUMP" across it like one of his buildings. I've come to believe he doesn't understand or really care if anyone but himself benefits from that. I also suspect it's why he seems such a fan of Vladimir Putin, because Putin has more or less accomplished that with Russia. Aside from obliviousness to the ethical issues relating to his ruthlessness, Trump doesn't seem to appreciate that Putin accomplished it through patience, discipline, and calculation -- all qualities the Donald lacks.