General Politics Three: But what is left/right?

[Akka]

I want to believe that you get the difference between population disparity making it possible for one country to be flooded by immigrants, when another would had been able to incorporate them.

Of course I do. I just wanted the explicit admission that there actually is a treshold after which there is "too many" migrants. You have been on these boards enough to know that such a point is actually contentious.

Simply put, if you don't see why Greece and France can't be taking the same number, it's not even worth being termed a bad faith discussion.

As I said above, I support fulfilling obligations. And don't worry, France and Greece have roughly the same numbers of immigrants and foreign-born population per-capita. And yes, I also support a EU-shared financial burden to pay and man the border patrols rather than letting Italy and Greece do most of the job. That's, again, being about respecting the democratic process.

Your opinions do have something to do with how one may expect you to interpret the data about immigration opinions. You have come up with numbers, which is pretty good, but is still plenty open to interpretation. This for example indicates that the divisions may be particularly deep in France and so polling inaccuracy may be particularly prevalent.

There is obviously stark differences between different socio-economical clusters, but I admit I don't really see how you can see a lot open to interpretation when you get massive (80 % answering "no" to "should France welcome more migrants ?", or 70 % considers that there are "too many foreigners") overall results.
I don't really get what sort of inaccuracies we're talking about here.

 

[Samson]

There is obviously stark differences between different socio-economical clusters, but I admit I don't really see how you can see a lot open to interpretation when you get massive (80 % answering "no" to "should France welcome more migrants ?", or 70 % considers that there are "too many foreigners") overall results.
I don't really get what sort of inaccuracies we're talking about here.

You see in the chart, which is asking "Allow some/many more migrants from poorer countries" has French "Old low education" at ~75% No and French "Young high education" at 20% No. I am afraid I cannot follow your links in French, but it sure looks like there are questions one could ask.

 

[AdrienIer]

Which country is Greece openly plundering ?

And how many asylum seekers does China take ?

The comment is about Europe in general. Greece in particular are having to address a situation created by us western europeans. Kyriakos's points are more than valid : we can't juste delegate dealing with the influx to 2 or 3 border countries, it has to be a collective effort.

Close to none probably. What does China have to do with anything ? I know some people want a race to the bottom on every subject, but I'm not interested in a race to the bottom in terms of how we treat human beings.

 

[Farm Boy]

we can't juste delegate dealing with the influx to 2 or 3 border countries, it has to be a collective effort.

Careful, that's a Republican stance in the US. It's gotten... adversarial.

 

[Lexicus]

Careful, that's a Republican stance in the US. It's gotten... adversarial.

This is such disingenuous bullfeathers as the Republicans in Congress openly refuse to touch the problem at the behest of Trump and for no other reason than Trump's political advantage.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, I get you're in DC. But not everyone is. Like everyone isn't in Illinois for the joy of the machine.

 

[Akka]

You see in the chart, which is asking "Allow some/many more migrants from poorer countries" has French "Old low education" at ~75% No and French "Young high education" at 20% No. I am afraid I cannot follow your links in French, but it sure looks like there are questions one could ask.

I'm sorry, but I honestly don't understand.
As I said in the previous post, yes there is large difference in what different clusters vote. But then what you're getting at from there ?

Kyriakos's points are more than valid : we can't juste delegate dealing with the influx to 2 or 3 border countries, it has to be a collective effort.

Totally agree here (as I said in the previous post).

Greece in particular are having to address a situation created by us western europeans.

This on the other hand needs more clarification.
Did Western Europeans do something that Greece had no part in and which led to large immigration toward Europe through Greece ?

 

[Arwon]

Careful, that's a Republican stance in the US. It's gotten... adversarial.

Most of the countries under discussion in Europe are republican after all

 

[Farm Boy]

Heh!

 

[Arwon]

So it turns out the numbers we are talking here aren't particularly notable, only about a tenth of France is even born outside France and a chunk of that is just the nearby EU, which has full free movement and can't be prevented, with most of the rest just from their former empire.

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, I get you're in DC. But not everyone is. Like everyone isn't in Illinois for the joy of the machine.

No, what you said is just bullfeathers, period. It's not really anyone's position that a mass influx of migrants should be left to individual states and localities to deal with, but the GOP is refusing any compromise on federal legislation to address the issue and the GOP in the states are openly defying the Constitution and the Supreme Court to try to physically prevent the federal government from doing anything about the issue.

Now, it's not totally clear what the GOP goal is here because their tactical consideration of not allowing Biden to have a win has shunted aside the strategic considerations for now. But Trump's first administration certainly gave us a preview of what a GOP border policy might look like. My guess is something like turning the border into a free fire zone and then running up concentration camps for anyone who runs the gauntlet. And you no doubt would view all that as a "pro-worker" policy...

 

[Farm Boy]

The Trump wing is definitely playing that game at the moment, but I've been jaded by watching these clowns flop like fish since way before the million immigrant march or whatever it was.

Neat that NYC whining got the wall going back up, I guess. But yeah. Keep the busses going, get them working, get barriers and checkpoints up. You know, the hard stuff. Work.

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, the racism of GOP primary voters has been standing in the way of immigration reform for something like three decades now.

 

[AdrienIer]

Did Western Europeans do something that Greece had no part in and which led to large immigration toward Europe through Greece ?

Have you ever heard of colonization ? I suggest you open a book someday. You might learn things. For example a history book aimed at middle or high schoolers.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Pro-Trump network OAN execs may have ‘engaged in criminal activities’ while promoting 2020 election lies, Smartmatic alleges​

In the wake of the 2020 election, the president of the far-right network One America News sent a potentially explosive email to former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, with a spreadsheet claiming to contain passwords of employees from the voting technology company Smartmatic, according to court filings.

The existence of the spreadsheet was recently disclosed by Smartmatic, which is suing OAN for defamation. CNN pieced together who was involved in the email exchanges by examining court records from three separate cases stemming from the 2020 election.

Lawyers from Smartmatic told a federal judge that the email, and the attached spreadsheet, suggest OAN executives “may have engaged in criminal activities” because they “appear to have violated state and federal laws regarding data privacy.”

The court records don’t say how OAN obtained the spreadsheet, or whether the supposed Smartmatic passwords were authentic. Nobody from OAN has been charged with any crimes. But it came at a time when OAN, Powell and others in their orbit were aggressively peddling false claims that there was massive voter fraud in 2020, and that Smartmatic was to blame.

According to court filings, the supposed passwords were shared around the same time that Powell, her associates and other Trump supporters were trying to improperly access voting systems across the country, to prove their false claims of voter fraud.

The January 8, 2021, email exchange between OAN President Charles Herring and Powell has recently emerged as a flashpoint in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit against the pro-Trump network. The email isn’t public, but Smartmatic revealed some of its contents in a public filing after obtaining the materials in the discovery process.

While Smartmatic’s public filings didn’t identify the sender or recipient of the email, court records from a separate 2020-related lawsuit confirm that Herring and Powell exchanged emails on the same date. The pair’s communications about the purported Smartmatic spreadsheet, which have not been previously reported, resurrect questions that have dogged OAN for years regarding its tendency to blur the lines between opinion journalism and brazen political advocacy.

More at link:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/business/oan-smartmatic-election-lawsuit/index.html

 

[Samson]

If an opinion is widely shared in a population, can it be considered "extreme" or is it just the actual social consensus ?

the far-right network One America News

This conclusively answers this question, right? OAN is not right of Trump, Trump has "wide" support in the US, and OAN is "far-right" which is definitionally extreme.

 

[Lexicus]

Have you ever heard of colonization ? I suggest you open a book someday. You might learn things. For example a history book aimed at middle or high schoolers.

Googled "French military intervention in Africa" and

 

[Akka]

Have you ever heard of colonization ? I suggest you open a book someday. You might learn things. For example a history book aimed at middle or high schoolers.

Ah yeah, that must explain why Greece started to get the biggest immigration waves around the 2010's, that must be because of colonization that ended 50 years before. And here I thought that it was because of the Syrian civil war.
I could throw back a lot of jabs at the middle-school level of education, BTW, but that would serve little point and only increases the acrymony.

This conclusively answers this question, right? OAN is not right of Trump, Trump has "wide" support in the US, and OAN is "far-right" which is definitionally extreme.

I don't really see how applying a label actually explain how that label is determined. That's just circular reasoning.
The question still stands : how do you determine if something is "extreme" without a reference to a "center" determined by social consensus ? If over time the overall opinion on a subject shift, doesn't that make the extremes shift with it too ?
(I already pointed that positions that would be considered "normal" today or in some places, would be seen as extreme/lunacy in some other times or places and vice-versa)
I'd say it's something worth to think about, especially as it seems that politics are becoming more and more polarized these days.

 

[Samson]

I don't really see how applying a label actually explain how that label is determined. That's just circular reasoning.
The question still stands : how do you determine if something is "extreme" without a reference to a "center" determined by social consensus ? If over time the overall opinion on a subject shift, doesn't that make the extremes shift with it too ? (I already pointed that positions that would be considered "normal" today, were seen as extreme/lunacy in some other times and vice-versa)

If this is circular reasoning all meaning is circular. Things mean what people what people understand them to mean. I have provided a definition that is not based on social consensus. That is proof that it is possible for such a definition to exist.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, the racism of GOP primary voters has been standing in the way of immigration reform for something like three decades now.

It's been a group effort. You know it and I know it.