Make America Hate Again

The US is a racist society: "race" has no valid biological basis, but is a salient social category which impacts social and economic interactions in a wide variety of ways, producing inequalities of privilege and injustice.

Whether or not you have bigotry in your heart is beside the point—no one can know such things. When you spend all your energy trying to prove that you are untainted and innocent of racism, it seems like you are missing the point: in a pervasivly racist society, discriminatory behaviors creep in the subconscious of everyone, black/white/antiracist/whatever, and we have to consciously struggle with them. The question is really more about how you interact with broader society racism, not whether you are a naif.

> They had no problem with airstrikes everyday that Obama was in office.

Speaking as a person who had a very, very big problem with Obama bombing civilians in countries we're not even at war with, I'll point out that what Trump is already doing with respect to immigration does go far beyond what Obama did.

Under Obama, there was never any doubt that a green card holder would be permitted reentry as long as they followed the same restrictions that have been in place for decades (e.g. don't get convicted of a felony, don't stay away for more than six months at a time). That is no longer true.

The same applies to someone who holds dual citizenship with the U.K. and Iran. Under the new policy (which is admittedly in flux and is being actively tested in court), a British Iranian cannot enter. That was never an issue before.

The US used to do many nasty things during the Cold War, in the name of blocking soviet influence, and the overthrow of the Mossadegh was just once. Then again, this was over 60 years ago. If we go by the same measure, Germany and Japan, both of which haven't fought a war for over 70 years, would be banned for life. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US is probably the most benign superpower in history. Yeah, it still went for war in Iraq, but really, countries with far less power have done worse things. We should criticize America when its due, but we should also keep things in proportion. Not everything bad in the world is America's fault.

As for Hezbollah, while I don't think it is primarily a terrorist organization, and they did have the right to fight back against the Israeli army while it was occupying South Lebanon, Hezbollah bombed several non-Israeli civilian targets, often for purely religious reasons (or how else you would describe an attack on a Jewish community center in Argentina?).

Besides, Israel has been out of Lebanese soil for over 15 years, aside from a brief, ill-conceived war (that was nevertheless a response to an unprovoked Hezbollah raid on Israeli soil). During much of that time, Hezbollah did very much the opposite of defending Lebanon, and went out of it's way to provoke Israel to attack Lebanon, knowing that that would gain them legitimacy. This includes targeting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria (I have hard time seeing how this can ever be seen as defensive).

Nowadays, they calmed down on the antisemitic terror front, and it seems like they're mainly occupied with helping Assad massacre his own people (and pretty effective at that). It's hard for me to see anything positive about this group.

I was listening to a commentator a few days ago mention how frequently discussions of identity politics are diverted from practical economic issues associated with identity to the virtue of the participants in the conversation.

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Person A: I'm facing discrimination in my industry.

Person B: I don't see color. Racists are bad.

Person A: Too bad I don't work for you. How can I deal with what is happening?

Person B: There's going to be more of this with Trump. I hate Trump.

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I related to this dynamic a lot.

edit: it was an interview of Asad Haider (editor of viewpointmag.com) on the last Behind The News (Doug Henwood's show) episode.

Nah. The barring of perminent residents from reentry is both illegal (evidenced by the fact that a circuit judge had no problem reversing the that portion of the executive order and the subsequent retreat the administration made on the particulars of that issue), a strong break from what has ever been done, by past administrations, something that goes beyond the rhetoric Trump illucidated on the campaign trail, racist though it was, and is, quite simply, un-American.

While I am pleased to see our justice system work vigorously to rollback what it can, the administration showed a strong disregard for the law with these orders. It is unclear yet whether the Deparment of Homeland Security is even complying fully with the stays (the TSA administrator for Dulles refused to meet with a Democratic congressional delegation that went to the airport to make sure the judge's ruling was even being followed).

The Department of Homeland Security's own press release was scary in its own right claiming that they were deciding "at the moment" to comply with the court's ruling.

It's important to remember how much our system relies on tradition to operate effectively. The law/government is not a perfectly reactive state machine. It assumes a certain level of good faith and judement from all the nodes, and the executive is a powerful node in the graph, it has the ability to clog up its edges and render a lot of the other nodes feckless.

I think a lot of what Trump has done has been horrifying, but I, like you have felt that it has been in line with what he campaigned on and legal. In this case I simply have to disagree. This is over the line.