You are engaging in a strawman. The merits or lack of is a different discussion.

You asserted religious morality as being in line with the objective, but there is no objectivity to it, as it is all based on one's faith in their choosen religion. Hench religious morality is relative and subjective. It does not rest on an objective foundation, it rest in which religious beliefs you decide to put your faith in. That is relative subjectivity.

In fact I would argue that in general the deeper one's faith in their choosen religion the less able they are to be morally objective. Just take the LGBT community for example, deeply religious people have had a much harder time accepting them, despite the fact there is no objective evidence at all that the LGBT community is at all harmful to society.

Last year, the Trump Administration shut down "the least restrictive alternative to detention available to asylum-seekers who have entered the US illegally". The service, "help participants find lawyers, navigate the overburdened immigration court system, get housing and health care, and enroll the kids in school" and "99 percent of participants 'successfully attended their court appearances and ICE check-ins.'"

And for those who are more considered with taxpayer spending than the lives of immigrants escaping abuse and gangs, "family case management cost the government $36 a day per family versus between $5-$7 per adult for intensive supervision. That compares to $319 per-person for a family detention center bed."

Again and again, the actions of this administration demonstrate that they view the lives of non-white immigrants as subhuman.

We can learn a lot from Trump. Painful every step, but a lesson learned is a lesson gained; an education payed for is an education for life. — tim wood

I'd love to watch you make that argument to the women he grabbed by the pussy.

What are you missing? Do you think they learned nothing?

Do you think they learned nothing? — tim wood

Is that what I said?

Here's what you wrote:

I'd love to watch you make that argument to the women he grabbed by the pussy. — Jeremiah

I have to figure you're referring to what I wrote:

We can learn a lot from Trump. Painful every step, but a lesson learned is a lesson gained; an education payed for is an education for life. — tim wood

The only sense I can make of your remark is that you think either a) there's nothing to learn from their encounter with Trump, or b) there's nothing for them to learn in their encounter with Trump.

Either way, nothing to learn. So I asked you, "Do you think they learned nothing? And your reply is a non sequitur. If I missed your meaning, what was it?

Where I was aiming - I guess I missed - was that Trump's psychopathy, as awful as it is, can instruct.

Trump's psychopathy — tim wood

I'm not entirely sure if this is just another ad hominem or not, despite me agreeing with it to some degree. I mean, Trump is just a puppet in all this and detracts to the fact that everything that's happening under his watch is all in alignment with what the Republicans have for a long time wished to accomplish.

Well, you are wrong.

Good to know. What is it I'm wrong about?

The only sense I can make of your remark is that you think either a) there's nothing to learn from their encounter with Trump, or b) there's nothing for them to learn in their encounter with Trump. — tim wood

You really couldn't figure out what I was referencing there?

You think he's a Republican tool; I think he's a Russian tool. As to ad homenims, they're fallacious when used in argument when they're not to the point. I'm not making an argument, and in saying that the right way to think about Trump is as a psychopath, I'm stating what I believe to be true.

I challenge anyone to argue that regarding Trump as a psychopath impairs anyone's ability to see him more clearly. Actually I challenge anyone to show anything good he's done anywhere, anytime. Except in his pardoning of the woman under a harsh drug sentence. That was a good thing; Obama did some of it, and there is a lot more to do, that Trump could do. Beyond that?

But there is much that is plain evil. And who knows how much of it has been planned. I do know that the American public is being whipsawed with a succession of crises, some large, some small, but all ultimately distracting. And guess what: it is all exactly the methods and techniques that Vlad the Putin practiced and worked out in Ukraine. I do not think the Russians are planning on invading Long Island or Cape Cod, but I do think it's their goal to tie us in as many knots as possible. Given Trump's attacks on law enforcement, I would not be completely shocked if murders occurred - as they seem to do in Russia, passed off as "accidents."

Trump joked about 2d Amendment advocates getting after Hillary. Trump is the real enemy, and he could become the poster boy for why there's a 2d Amendment. He's the butt of many jokes, but no one should be laughing: he is a very great danger to America and Americans. If you don't believe it, you're not paying attention. To see it, just look at the larger pictures.

To be clear, my thesis is that Trump is a bought-and-paid for Russian tool. They're way too smart to try to make an agent of him. But I'm sure they're besides themselves with laughter and glee at his lies and the chaos he causes, his attacks on American values and truths, and his ability to polarize public opinion. It dovetails nicely with right-wing insanity, racism and the white supremacy movement, and the perversion of Republican values that the Republican party has come to represent. And there is KellyAnn Goebbels, Stephen Himmler Miller, and everyone else who has sold his or her soul to Trump. Maybe a star turn for Pence a a kind of Eichmann. The next couple of years will be very interesting!

No, I didn't and haven't. What are you on about?

You think he's a Republican tool; I think he's a Russian tool. — tim wood

The guy can't speak proper English. He speaks American, according to Republicans. Anyway, I think there is a deep sense of cynicism apparent in saying Trump is a Russian tool. I say this because the amount of exposure that you get from running for president would almost certainly lead to such things being exposed.

I challenge anyone to argue that regarding Trump as a psychopath impairs anyone's ability to see him more clearly. — tim wood

I do think he has some traits of antisocial personality disorder, along with a strong sense of narcissism. I don't think its psychopathy, bona fide. I've actually begun to think that most rational psychopaths, who value hiding their secret more than anything, would actually be dissuaded from running for such positions of power and influence.

I do not think the Russians are planning on invading Long Island or Cape Cod, but I do think it's their goal to tie us in as many knots as possible. — tim wood

You might want to read up on the modus operandi of the Russian intelligence and counter intelligence agencies, like the FSB and so on.

Kompromat is one of the oldest FSB tool. At the beginning, I thought too that there simply couldnt be any truth to the Russian connection story, that at most, it profited Putin enormously to both have Trump in the WH and giving the impression he had put him there. Even if there had never been any collusion, Putin still stood to win by even just making a show of trying to meddle in the US affairs.

But the more everything goes, the more you have to accept that Trump is, one way or another, Putin's puppet. Directly or indirectly. Doesnt matter really, if the FSB has drawers full of pictures of Trump with russians ballerinas and bears, in the end, Trump has done absolutely everything Putin would have asked him to do anyway, had he anything sallacious on him. Assad, the G6+1, the trade wars, legitimizing the white nationalist base, shutting down trade in Asia, focusing solely on China and NK...

Yeah, I don't want to go down that conspiracy road. I just think it's ludicrous that Trump being Putin's favorite, as in many ways Bush was, is complementing his way of envisioning the current world order. It just smacks of the shit you hear from the crazy Alex Jones and other conservative news outlets.

In fact, I don't think I could live in the US if that were actually the case. So, yeah, here's me having high hopes for what Mueller discovers.

Bards dont sing about trade wars.

They simply dont get the girls. And very often, they just dont go the way you thought they would. Before tnis current trade war, and if we omit the Chinese, which have been economically belligerent for a while now, the latest venture the US embarked on was against Brazil, in 2016.

Yeah, shocker, guess most of you didnt know. I didnt either before yesterday.

So, since "trade wars are easy", I guess we didnt hear about the Brazil-US conflict because the Americans must have wiped the floor with the Brazilians. Right?

No. Turns out, trade wars arent necessarily easy. A trade war isnt a trade deal. Just because you can, in construction and real estate, for example, if you are much richer then your partners, just renege on your deal, or abuse the disproportion of power, doesnt mean you can do the same in a trade war. In a dematerialized world like ours, a simple signature from a government official, or even the threat of such a signature, can send vast economic backlash in distant countries. As such, the brazilian government floated the idea that they would simply stop all vetting processes for american pharmaceutical products. All holding patent requests from american pharmaceutical firms would be denied, and other countries companies would be allowed to pick up on them.

That sent the pharma lobby in Washington, one of the biggest ones out there, completely berserk. And so the Brazilian-US war never really flared.

This is what the Canadian government is now thinking about doing. And none, absolutely none of this, was necessary. This one is 100% on you, guys.

This is what the Canadian government is now thinking about doing. And none, absolutely none of this, was necessary. This one is 100% on you, guys. — Akanthinos

It isn't as bad as you think it is. In many cases the majority of the goods needed are supplied by neighboring partners or the tariffs aren't that destructive to the trade relations of both partners. Alot of this is just posturing and false signaling on both ends. Canada or the US wont suffer any economics losses due to their trade dispute. However, there is some substance to what's going on between China and the US. It's more of a concern with dealing with mercantilist economies.

You have zero creditably with me — Jeremiah

I don't regard you as my measure.

While Trump is making babies cry, here in Europe we have a more robust approach to the problem of immigration.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/the-list-europe-migrant-bodycount?CMP=fb_gu

While Trump is making babies cry, here in Europe we have a more robust approach to the problem of immigration. — unenlightened

So did Obama. He just handed the children over to human traffickers.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/did-obama-administration-children-human-traffickers/

Did you look at my link, Tom? Because my intention was to show the utter futility and offensiveness of scoring political points with other people's lives. Good Samaritans are always and everywhere in short supply, and almost always out of office.

To willingly and gratuitously harm children argues many things. — tim wood

I do not think that a policy change can be equated to the above. The policy of the Vietnam war, for example, got a lot of people killed, but I do not think that could be called an attempt to "to willingly and gratuitously harm".

Any policy, for example the invasion of Iraq, will hurt people, but if you want to call it gratuitous that is not correct. The attempt is once again made to link policy change to monstrous personality, well if you admit that this is what you are doing, that's fine. I don't think all people will accept that link.

Have you noticed the title of this thread? It's about Trump. You appear to want to make it about anything and everything else. Why is that? I suggest you consider what you're about and your motives. To me, you appear to be just a troll. Prove me wrong and address the topic of the OP directly. If you want to love Trump, show him as lovable. If you think he's a great deal maker, tell about some of his great deals. If you think him an exemplar of anything, show him as that. If you cannot or will not, then please desist from trolling. It does more harm than you might think. — tim wood

When the internet first started to go public, trolling meant something different from what it does now. Trolling was closer to a type of fishing, where you use a net or hook to troll for fish. The fish were analogous to new people visiting a web site. A hook or net was thrown into the water to catch these fish; new visitors, so they would stay on. The hook or net was often something controversial that would get people to respond and debate. The topic of Donald Trump is a good old fashion trolling net. The responses of the caught fish are predictable, based on political affiliation.

The term troll changed meaning, somewhere along the line. Now a troll is more like a mythological figure that lives under a bridge; the net. It can also be analogous to a Green Peace activists who treys to scare or diverts fish away from the trolling net. Some troll by destructive means, such as targeting certain people or by many ganging up against one. I do not do that. I do this by describing the holes the net, so some fish can escape. I don't do this to hurt the click through numbers of a web site. I do it more to help emotional thinkers approach their memory from the rational side. I try to keep the dolphins out of the tuna net, but not hurt tuna count of the fishermen.

For example, attacking the character of Donald Trump would fine, if there was a single set of criteria for defining character. But since character is based on a system of morality, and morality for many, is considered relative, modern character is subjective. Yet people act as though this is objective. This is a good old fashion trolling boat, but it never leads to understanding.

It is interesting how making morality relative, left wing thinkers, political leaders are now able to run a magic trick, that few people seem to see through. Relative morality is like a magnetic near a compass, where true north can be moved to where you want it to be. This fools people.

For example, many on the left, they feel some people have the moral right to break the law; illegal immigrants. Being lawful is a character flaw. This is heart felt and may have a inner logic, but it is really due to the hidden magnet that fools the audience to justify what it thinks it sees. The tuna will stay in the net but the dolphin will see the holes.

That you were wrong about your interpretations of my words. We don't need a bunch of children being caged to learn that it is a bad thing, we knew that well enough before hand.

Let's see you said your measure was evidence of which you have provided none, at all, for any of your assertions. In fact the only thing you provided evidence of is your hypocrisy.

EDIT: Much Ado About Nothing

Every time some right-winger here makes a comment and it's pointed out how they are wrong, they either outright ignore it, or shift goalposts. They can never ever ever admit they stated something untrue.

OK, I've just deleted all tom's trolling posts about Gaza. I'll get on to deleting the replies soon. Back to Trump.

Sorry everyone (including me) had their time wasted.

Paul Krugman's opinions in the NYT can be hit or miss, but I thought this piece really nailed it.

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.

What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.

And you know what this reminds me of? The history of anti-Semitism, a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide.

First, let’s talk about modern U.S. immigration and how it compares to those sick fantasies.

There is a highly technical debate among economists about whether low-education immigrants exert a depressing effect on the wages of low-education native-born workers (most researchers find that they don’t, but there is some disagreement). This debate, however, is playing no role in Trump policies.

What these policies reflect, instead, is a vision of “American carnage,” of big cities overrun by violent immigrants. And this vision bears no relationship to reality.

For one thing, despite a small uptick since 2014, violent crime in America is actually at historical lows, with the homicide rate back to where it was in the early 1960s. (German crime is also at a historical low, by the way.) Trump’s carnage is a figment of his imagination.

True, if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants — a negative correlation. That is, places with a lot of immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. The poster child for this tale of un-carnage is the biggest city of them all: New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million undocumented immigrants — and crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s.

And this really shouldn’t be surprising, because criminal conviction data show that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

So the Trump administration has been terrorizing families and children, abandoning all norms of human decency, in response to a crisis that doesn’t even exist.

The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications, that were systematically spread to engender hatred.