Trump Distortion Field

By -
Crain's New York Business has published an editorial in which it claims that Donald Trump ran on a platform calling for "kicking out Mexicans."

Why do people feel OK about spreading such rubbish? Trump is proposing "kicking out" illegal immigrants who have committed a felony.

This seems like a no-brainer to me. Someone came here without permission and then committed a major crime? They should leave.

But in any case, the policy says nothing whatsoever about "Mexicans," and certainly will have no impact on the millions of Mexicans living here legally. Why spread a lie like this, when people are already panicked?

UPDATE: Just after I posted this, I find NBC claiming that "Trump... called Mexicans 'rapists' and 'killers.'"

The lies that didn't work during the election are going to be continued anyway, aren't they?

Comments

  1. Samson Corwell4:26 AM

    "The lies that didn't work during the election are going to be continued anyway, aren't they?"

    Yes. What the hell made you think it would be otherwise? Conservative outlets pulled the same stuff when it came to Obama seven years into his presidency.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Olivier Braun6:12 AM

    I am afraid it is because they want to scare the minorities who are supposedly a captive electorate, and to scare the feel-good liberal, or make him feel proud of his self-righteousness. The think I noticed, in my home country also, France, is that the left has an incentive to feed racism, for political advantage, and use lies to that effect.

    Just a recent example: in an TV interview with the far-right mayor of a small town, Robert Ménard, the TV anchor bluntly started the interview with that question: “for you, to be French is to be white?” To which he answered “It is also, as general de Gaulle said, to be European, white, but it is not only that (…)”.

    Here is the YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppPTLZD16jM&t=46s

    Immediate uproar in the mainstream media and political scene, including the center right Le Figaro, with headlines as “for Ménard, to be French is to be white”.

    The media wants to sell paper with fake sensationalism, and in the main time to relish itself in the position of righteous moral crusader.

    In a link you provided you can see a quote of the 1996 Democrat platform. In the paragraph on immigration, it is strange to read a statement about the drug trafficking, and criminality by illegal immigrants. So you see, it is not the issue that count, but the demonization of political adversaries.

    See :
    http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29611
    “Today's Democratic Party also believes we must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.
    “President Clinton is making our border a place where the law is respected and drugs and illegal immigrants are turned away. We have increased the Border Patrol by over 40 percent; in El Paso, our Border Patrol agents are so close together they can see each other. Last year alone, the Clinton Administration removed thousands of illegal workers from jobs across the country. Just since January of 1995, we have arrested more than 1,700 criminal aliens and prosecuted them on federal felony charges because they returned to America after having been deported.”

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Machine Learning"

By -
 The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more