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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
x6
Not particularly surprised there, I wouldn't expect the type of people who sign up to be border guards to be huge on accurate record-keeping.
How many illegal immigrants does America as a whole have, anyway?
Also that, although if you want to assess any possible effect on wages or unemployment/vacancy ratio or tax base or whatever I guess it's not a major deal how they got into the country in the first place. We know most of them don't bother with an illegal border crossing in the first place.
edited 20th Jun '18 9:50:03 AM by DeathorCake
Not that the loudest voices screeching about this in the USA actually give a flying fuck about this. They just don't want more brown people in the USA.
Hence why there hasn't been nearly as much whining about the Canadian border. At least not prior to this trade war bullshit.
Disgusted, but not surprisedYes. Custer was not an idiot. He wasn't a genius, but he was a perfectly competent general, with a solid Civil War record. He was also, by the standards of the day, a moderate on "the Indian Question" being neither an exterminationist nor a radical humanitarian.
The need to vilify Custer or portray him as a raging imbecile has never had anything to do with reality, and everything to do with the inability of American historians to come to terms with America's relationship to its Native populace.
edited 20th Jun '18 10:03:11 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
War with Mexico is something you could actually justify and be something that people have argued would be a good thing. Specifically, given the murder of 200 politicians by the cartels since November, there's a good argument a better President (say 3rd term Obama) could offer US military assistance against the Cartels.
I have no doubt that would be an EPIC clusterfuck but a smarter politician than Trump would make the offer and get boots on the ground there w/ Mexico's permission.
Mind you, a BETTER IDEA would be legalizing marijuana to help gut the cartel's businesses.
The need to vilify Custer or portray him as a raging imbecile has never had anything to do with reality, and everything to do with the inability of American historians to come to terms with America's relationship to its Native populace.
I think the attempt to repair Custer's military record is an exercise in wasted resources. Even if you argue he's not an idiot, then you fall into the fact he was outright evil since his strategy at Little Bighorn was to attempt to capture the noncombatants there and use them as hostages. There's also innumerable mistakes which even armchair military types can justifiably say they would have made like accepting reinforcements and using the gatling guns in their possession.
No, he was a trained military officer but he was an arrogant and foolhardy one who made an outstanding series of catastrophic blunders which a more cautious commander would not have. Which if it isn't an idiot then I don't know what is.
edited 20th Jun '18 10:08:13 AM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Legalization would only gut the cartel's business if done precisely right. Otherwise you've just handed these guys a legitimate business. Now, obviously, if one is pushing any policy, one should be hoping and expecting it to be done precisely right, but in the current political climate I don't see that happening.
Thank freakin' goodness! Not just that this putrid law is being stopped, but that Trump doing this means he knows he's out and out lost. It also gives him one less tool to use to try to get his putrid Wall.
It's still terrible, though, that thousands of children have been separated, and that many of them will never be able to be reunited.
I'll believe he signed it when he signs it.
RAICES might be able to help with the actual existing victims, though. They have the money for it now.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Re: Trump-as-Crassus conversation.
Alright, it was a bad comparison. In the interest of maintaining the intellectual standards of our discussion, I'll admit that this line of thinking was misinformed and that I was wrong to make the comparison.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."@eyebones. I think we established that most any comparison will inevitably demean the thing being compared to Trump
edited 20th Jun '18 10:28:16 AM by MorningStar1337
Charles Phipps: We already assist Mexico with the cartels. A full-on invasion of Mexico is pure fantasy.
edited 20th Jun '18 10:31:22 AM by archonspeaks
They should have sent a poet.Comparing Trump to anything is demeaning to whatever he's being compared to. At this point it doesn't matter what he's compared to.
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edited 20th Jun '18 10:33:58 AM by sgamer82

"The Parthians were quite a bit stronger than anyone believed at the time." That's the key part of your statement, and it's why trying to accuse Crassus of being uniquely incompetent is wrong. Nobody in Rome had a clear picture of Parthian power. Switch out Crassus for Pompey or Caesar and you'll see the exact same set of mistakes being made, because the information that the Roman Republic had to work with was flawed.
The decision made by Rome to ignore what had happened to Crassus and write him off as uniquely incompetent, is the whole reason why the Romans continue to repeat the mistake for decades to come. Rather than accepting that one of their better generals had been bested by these people, and that, for the first time since Carthage, they were dealing with a peer competitor, they declared him an idiot, and continued to act on bad information. Hence the disaster of Antony's Parthian campaign, and the many that came after it.
There is no figure in the Roman Republic to whom Trump can easily be compared, because any famous figure of the Roman Republican era will have had some competency in order to get where they are. Trying to compare him to Caesar or Crassus or anyone else, even a Mark Antony or Clodius Pulcher, is doing a disservice to those historical figures, and misunderstanding Trump. Trump is a product of an American political system that prizes both white supremacy and the "I'd have a beer with him" anti-intellectual attitude. If he's got any analogues they will come from similar systems.