Trump's possible pick for Homeland Security Sec scary

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Hi, alex. Thanks for your response. Could you address the false accusation of plagiarism Campin_Cat made?

I thought the idea of "plagiarizing" a word was so transparently ridiculous that it didn't warrant a response.

So that both the article and I used the word "excoriate" Campin_Cat felt the need to accuse me of plagiarism and question whether I even knew the definition of the word (yes, I did)? Talk about ridiculous.

You probably should look up the definitions of authoritarian and "far-reaching" before equating the two (even if there may be a relationship between the two)

Honestly, Alex, Hillary doesn't care about the "little guy", including marginalized sub-populations like us, either. Unless it's to rip us off to enrich herself, her family, and her cronies. Trump the demagogue vs Hillary the greedy crook. That's why 1 in 6 Americans would support military rule.

Also, it seems that there are still a lot of people in America who really think that non-binary gendered people are, well, crazy, and need to be medicated into a stupor to "fix" them. If it wasn't Trump and his posse advocating for psychiatric treatment of their enemies, it would be somebody else. I dare anyone with a strong stomach to google the phrase "liberalism is a mental disorder". It's like the old USSR, where the masses want to "cure" people of non-conforming political views via psychiatry. On the other side of the coin, we all know about Mengele's "experiments" on concentration camp inmates. That's a very dangerous place for a society to be.

Why did you need to bring up Hillary? This has nothing to do with her. How about Bernie?

You make a very good point in your second paragraph. I do notice that there is an increased tendency to pathologize alternative points of view, like what happened here:

http://www.nj.com/education/2016/11/rut ... on_af.html

When people express anger over injustice, they may sometimes get labelled as mentally ill and irrational for their anger, is something I've definitely noticed lately.

I think I was assuming that Alex is pro-Hillary or at least supported her over Trump as the lesser evil, and was expressing that somehow in his posts here.

Anyway, I too have noticed that people who protest injustice often get labeled as crazy. There has been at least one case where a physically ill teen was called a hypochondriac and imprisoned in a nut house, and when the girl's parents protested, the parents were labeled mentally ill by a judge who then ordered them into a psych ward too. The double bind here is similar to the way that the USSR was believed to be a "workers paradise", which meant that if you didn't like it you must be crazy, since only a crazy person would hate paradise. In the USA, the system truly believes that "the people are the govt", so if you express an objection to the govt, you're crazy because "people get the govt they deserve". It's like Osama imagining that the American people were to blame for America's misadventures in the Middle East, because after all they are the govt, thus making 9/11 justified in his mind.

pezar,

Following on that point of "the USA being such a wonderful place, only someone crazy would want to leave it", this Nobel laureate gave up his green card so that he could become a Canadian citizen without complications, and not be considered a "U.S. person" (and thus subject to the tax filing requirements of the U.S. exceptional citizenship-based taxation system and the associated complications). He went to the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa to do this, which looked like it was prepared to withstand a siege, but he had a hard time. It seemed unbelievable to the people there that anyone from a Third World country could ever want to give up their green card, and it looked like they were evaluating him psychologically, looking for any excuse to deny him his request, since to them only a crazy person would want to do this:

http://saharareporters.com/2016/11/10/u ... s-adesanmi

But the fact is, the U.S. ain't all it's cracked up to be, and it's not the 19th century anymore; there are plenty of other high living standards countries to live in, and that don't come with all the awful baggage becoming a "U.S. person" does.

The analogy is actually not that dissimilar. Germans in the 1920s and Americans in 21st century were the "enlightened" population of the time. Despite education and "worldliness" in understanding, educated Germans and (currently) educated Americans are accepting (as normal) a leader and a form of government that is both immoral and unethical.

It's quite amazing people never learn from history...

That description of a US Embassy, as well as descriptions of the fortress that "our" leaders have built in downtown Washington DC, and the palatial federal buildings built during the GWB administration, remind me of the old Metallica song ...And Justice For All, as well as their song Eye of the Beholder. Freedom no longer frees you, indeed.

Also, when some of the Cubans who were shoved onto boats by Fidel Castro's goons so he could tweak America's nose said they wanted to go back, Americans thought they were crazy. After all, Americans have been told from birth that not only is their country the greatest, but everybody else in the world wants to be just like us. (Several people who study nationalism around the world have pointed out that the second part of the last sentence is unique among Earth's nationalisms.)

In fact, everybody wants to be like us so much that they'll throw flowers at us when we topple their governments by force. Anybody remember Rumsfeld's "we'll be greeted as liberators"? When we attempted to overthrow Bashir Assad by force, we were stunned to NOT be greeted as liberators, the answer to which seemed to be to bomb the country until a) the Syrians had a change of heart or b) their country was a rubble strewn moonscape and the Syrians were forced into exile for not seeing things America's way. Any deviation from the American elite's view of things is to be punished harshly, since they're always right.

I hate to bring up Hillary again, but when the people elected Trump, America's elites were so shocked that they immediately set about trying to overturn the vote. Hillary should be president because she deserves to be. Why does she deserve to be? Because that's what America's elite want, and what the elite wants is always what America's people want, because the people are the govt. The planet is getting fed up with an empire that literally cannot see why the world would not see things its way.

So you're saying three years from now America is going to be just like Nazi Germany.

No, it's the mindset where acceptance of "evil" is justified. Trump and Hitler simply blamed minority groups for their countries economic problems. Educated people (millions of them) have simply accepted an unethical and immoral leader who surely must challenge their so called "christian values"?

Could you expound on that a little please? I mean as far as evil goes, I read/heard Hillary is evil right and left everywhere and anywhere. Someone that someone else doesn't like, is usually evil according to them. A lot of people were positive Hillary was going to do all kinds of awful things, added on to the awful things they say she did as secretary of state and eventually to start WWIII. Needless to say I take people saying he's/she's evil with a grain of salt.

Ezra,

The Dems are evil, too. I realized this about a week before the election when I realized how legislation passed by the Democrats has been really hurting our expats, and this problem has been going on for years, and warned about since 2012, but the Democrats like to pretend the problem doesn't even exist! Basically, it's the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (2010), which when looked at in isolation appears to be an admirable measure to go after tax evaders in the country who stash their money abroad, but in conjunction with our exceptional policy of citizenship-based taxation has become a means to harass our expats with very burdensome tax filing requirements (which are much more burdensome and penal than those stateside),--even if the expat would owe zero tax due to already paying income tax to their country of residence--makes it much harder for our expats to save for retirement, and has led many foreign financial institutions to refuse to let Americans, their family members, and business partners open accounts. Law professor at McGill University Allison Christians goes into more detail about this in this very excellent interview with tax notes:



I've tried telling my Dem Congressman about what we're doing to our middle- and working-class expats, but all I get back is talk about how he will incentivize corporations to bring their money home by lowering their tax rates. So they are happy to provide relief for American businesses abroad, but not our actual expats, actual American citizens--actual people--who have settled in other countries, apparently.

Realizing this about our tax policy back in October, and seeing everything else since then,--such as a candidate winning the election despite losing the popular vote by 2.5 million votes, the President-elect known for racist and misogynistic comments hiring a white nationalist sympathizer as his chief adviser, the President-elect known for climate change denial and conspiracy theories hiring like-minded people in the relevant positions, and now the President-elect possibly hiring someone to be in charge of our law enforcement who wants to imprison without trial up to a million dissidents and who is known for his transphobic comments and brutal handling of his jail system--it is clear to me that the U.S. form of government has become harmful, and is no longer able to contend with the realities of the modern world.

Everyone is evil to a degree. It's like the NT's are evil thing. I think the truth is somewhere in the "muddy middle" between good and evil regarding Clinton or Trump and whoever they are connected to politically. I think that the "racist, misogynistic, [whatever]phobe, climate change denying!! !" mantra I see all over the internet, is getting stale and losing its bite. I think one of the biggest upsets in Trump winning is he broke all the rules of PC policing and got elected anyways. And all the labels PC policing puts on people to control society through intimidation are losing their power. That's the real fear overall I think. That all the attempts at crating a society of forced acceptance is failing big time.

I think most everyone is racist to a degree because it's human nature and no system is going to be successful in forcing it away. It's interesting to me that so many I see crying "racist!" go on to trash a demographic of millions with pure hatred. But that's okay because that hatred is supposedly justified.

George Carlin does a pretty funny routine on the idea that humans are creating global warming and what a bunch of nonsense he thought it was. But this is just one more control tactic. If you don't accept our view of climate change, we will brand you as ignorant on a criminal level. Don't believe in global warming and don't recycle? How dare you! That makes you a horrible person!

I think a big chunk of America voting for Trump was saying F*** You to the whole PC policing liberals trying to control society.

Now as for the big bad cop goes, I'll have to research him. But my guess is that like everyone else, he's somewhere between good and evil. I do find it ironic he's black considering how racist Trump is supposed to be.

With Trump racism is the tip of the iceberg, he's maligned women, intellectuals, gays, conservationists, environmental groups, economists, foreign policy experts, US exporters, stock market people, university students (Trump University), employees (mass sacking and harrassment), rental tenants the list goes on and on....