Interesting Thesis

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by AngusJS

It's not aggression, it's crime.

The same people who say that crap argue that there is a difference between a "crime" and a "hate crime"

Crime DOES equal aggression... i have never heard of anyone being politely raped or robbed.



You're out of touch Angus... This would be war under several previous administrations.

Originally Posted by AngusJS

Are the drug runners scheming to hurt America?

It could in fact be argued that they are

Originally Posted by AngusJS

Anyway, I'm sure you think W is guilty of treason too, right?

in many ways it could be argued that "W" is in fact guilty of treason... yes.

this isnt about "W" or the problems we faced 6 years ago.

this is about our problems now.

border violence has gotten so far out of control and reached so deep into the southwestern united states that border states like AZ are actually BEGGING for federal help... and their plea is falling on deaf ears.

in fact the plea is NOT falling on deaf ears... deaf ears are incapable of hearing... Obama's are just unwilling to listen.

[GoldenRivet]

Angus,

you mentioned this paragraph in an earlier post as being off the crazy end of the right

"The contention is that at some point before the upcoming November elections, an “incident” of some violent but unknown nature will occur that will provide Obama with the opportunity to declare “martial law” across the country, which will involve the “cancellation” or “postponement” of the elections. This will enable the Obama dictatorship to take off its humanist mask and put its true agenda into play, part of which involves sending JRD up to Prudhoe Bay to feed moss to the caribou for the next ten years."

I made "the contention is" bold because this particular paragraph is what the author is responding to... this is what he is claiming certain people are saying, not necessarily what the author is saying... this paragraph is what he is writing about and then proceeds to DISPROVE it for the most part.

Did you even read the rest or did you stop there?

in other words - "here is what many of you are hypothesizing... now lets break this down and look at some facts"

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I would hazard a guess that even the founding fathers did not all agree on what it meant and they wrote the damn thing!

No need to guess. There is plenty of evidence. They were playing it by ear, and several of the most famous would be called flaming liberals today.

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

No need to guess. There is plenty of evidence. They were playing it by ear, and several of the most famous would be called flaming liberals today.

Fact




and a remarkable job they did!

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

The same people who say that crap argue that there is a difference between a "crime" and a "hate crime"

Are not some crimes committed without any ill will against someone? Are not other crimes committed directly because of hatred for a group of which the victim is a member?

I'm not in favor of added penalties for hate crimes as opposed to regular crimes, but that doesn't mean there is no difference - the difference is rather obvious.

Crime DOES equal aggression... i have never heard of anyone being politely raped or robbed.

So is mail fraud aggressive? Anyway, you're equivocating. Crime and aggression are two different things.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/crime

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/aggression

Trying to blend their meanings to be able to apply the charge of treason doesn't work.

You're out of touch Angus... This would be war under several previous administrations.

So when the mob threatened police officers, they must have been committing an act of aggression against the US, right? They must have been rebels then, correct? Or were they just trying to pressure the cops to allow them to more easily commit their crimes, while happily remaining citizens?

It could in fact be argued that they are

And those arguments would be crap. If we accept them, what's to stop us from stating that the goal of ANY criminal is to hurt the US first and foremost. There is just as little reason to think that is true, as with the drug runners.

in many ways it could be argued that "W" is in fact guilty of treason... yes.

So I assume you voted for a traitor? If that's the case, then you must be a traitor too, as by helping to put such a man in power, you were be helping to open America up to acts of aggression from foreign elements. For shame. And if you didn't vote for W, then you surely must know a traitor who did.

Bad reasoning is fun!

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

Did you even read the rest or did you stop there?

in other words - "here is what many of you are hypothesizing... now lets break this down and look at some facts"

Alas, I read the whole thing. My point is, it's ridiculous to even take the contention seriously, which is what the author did.

[GoldenRivet]

Originally Posted by AngusJS

So I assume you voted for a traitor?

Well lets see... if i voted for him before he committed any treasonous acts... does that count?

Originally Posted by AngusJS

Alas, I read the whole thing. My point is, it's ridiculous to even take the contention seriously, which is what the author did.

seeing as how he disproved the contention - i dont see how.



and yes i maintain that in any crime there is harm done to someone... there not being any truly "victimless crimes"

but harm and aggression are not the same thing are they?

so how does carrying a gun into the USA with the intent of killing police officers NOT constitude as an aggressive act??? i dont understand your argument of comparing cop killing to mail fraud

[Skybird]

On Angus and GR talking about migration, aggression, crime.

Crime committed by migrants must not always but can equal aggression between states, when the nation the migrants come from is governed by leader saying out plain and directly that for them migration is a way to gain influence in and over that other nation, and to raise a political powerbasis inside of it. Erdoghan on my mind, who said exactly this very clearly and unhidden and repeatedly. That makes the criminality of migrants an act of aggression in that the migration itself is an act of aggression, a policy of demographic "warfare". Even more so when the criminality of the migrants is of a kind that calls the office for protection of the constitution (kind of a German mixture of NSA and Secret Service) onto the scene.

We see the destabilizing effects of this policy in Germany very clearly. It destabilizes both the eeducational system as well as the social security system, because the offspings as well as the original migrants from Turkey for the very vast majority are uneducated and unable to succeffully compete on the job market.

Some longer time ago a speaker or official of the Turkish ministry for religion - which Germany has given the authority to select and send Turkish Imamas to Germany who in most cases do not even speak German, not to mention: knowing Germany and its culture aNnd history - fools we are to allow that! - also said very clearly, that this destabiloising effect of the growing Turkish subculture in Germany is wanted by the minsitry, since it helps to strengthen Islam.

So, both criminality of migrants as well as migration itself can be acts of aggression indeed. It must not be that in every case, though.Check the individual example. Turkey for example is a big problem. Japan, Korea, Spain, South Africa or America are not.

[GoldenRivet]

criminality issues, insurrection, aggression, racism, hurt feelings, stubbed toes, hang nails and bitter beer aside...

Whats happening to Arizona is wrong. - she is trying to address the problems on her own and being thrown under the GD bus by this administration.

Making an attempt to fix the problem is the right thing. - something this president has shown an inability or an unwillingness to do thus far.

any 4 year old has the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong.

she is trying to address the problems on her own and being thrown under the GD bus by this administration.

Is that because their attempt was rather dumb and despite all the headlines and knee jerk support the people who signed it into law said it wouldn't stand as law.
So should the administration support a dumb move that wouldn't stand legally or should it leave the idiots to willingly jump under the bus by themselves.

BTW have the people down Arizona way worked out yet how they are going to get out of having to pay to keep iillegal immigrants in the State forever?

[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

Crime DOES equal aggression... i have never heard of anyone being politely raped or robbed.

I have. I don't watch much TV, but I know that I've seen some polite robbers on those "world's dumbest criminals" shows. I only recall one, but the guy tried to help an elderly female gas station attendant after she appeared to be suffering from a heart attack. IIRC he even called 911 for her. And then of course we have these guys: http://www.irs.gov/. No shortage of polite thievery there.

I can only recall one incident of polite rape, from a Stossel segment on a rape at Brown University. Even though the defendant denied any sexual misconduct and the case didn't come up until months after the incident, there was a student movement to have the defendant kicked off campus and charged with rape. I can understand that part. Sometimes women won't come forward right away and nobody wants a rapist in their community, save for a few real oddballs.

Even so, I assume it was a very polite form of rape because she gave him her phone number the next morning! Either that guy has some serious skills or somebody is pursuing a particularly horrendous form of ex post facto personal justice. As it was, the guy left because of all the ridicule he recieved from student activists. Stossel got ridiculed as well for just asking questions about the case. He didn't leave immediately, but he did when students began damaging his equipment and yanked out his mic cord.

This post is supposed to be mostly light-hearted, but there is also a serious message here. The fact that crimes committed against certain persons have a classification all their own outside the usual judgement of criminal intent is worrisome. It only exists because there are people who have an idea and do not want others to be heard. Admittedly, I get pretty stubborn sometimes, but I would never stoop to censoring opinion or attacking a person or their property in such a manner. Damn activists need to start playing by their own rules.

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

Making an attempt to fix the problem is the right thing. - something this president has shown an inability or an unwillingness to do thus far.

On this, I have to disagree to some extent. Simply attempting to fix the problem is not always the right thing. It isn't that I think a fix isn't needed, I just don't trust the government to do it properly. Their track record for this sort of thing is awful. I would much rather that the government stop trying to fix things like illegal immigration and the drug trade and the plight of immigrants and just about everything else they do because someone thought a problem needed fixing. My rule of thumb for government intervention is that where there is one problem the state will fail to fix the first one and create at least two more.

At the risk of stating the obvious or preaching to the choir, I will say that the nature of illegal immigration is and will be almost exactly what we made of the system designed to deal with it:

1)Free-market state, check.
Result: immigration

2)Restricted immigration, check
Result: increased demand for illegal immigration

3)Tariffs, bans, and other market controls, check
Result: Massive demand for banned goods and smuggling

4)Social welfare, check
Result: increased demand for illegal immigration

5)State personnel with protected jobs entrusted with border enforcement, check
Result: This debate if it had a $10 billion price tag ($500,000 per mile, or $94.00 per foot of border), every year.

For $500,000 per mile per year, we could hire a border patrol force at the rate of $1,369 per day, per mile. Even if we assume that administrative costs and other expenditures account for half of the total expenditures and cannot be streamlined, we are left with $694.50 per day, per mile which leaves us with enough to hire 34 agents per mile, per day, at a rate of $20.00/hr, giving us one agent per 160 feet or so of border, with all non-even decimal points rounded down. I won't even bother trying to figure out what kind of fleet of vehicles they could and what kind of benefits they could establish with a one-time only budget increase of $10,000,000. They also have a $50,000,000 fence. As it stands now, however the entire border patrol for the whole country has only 20,000 employees, so at least we know that they could spend half a million per employee with that one-time budget increase. Kind of makes you wonder just what the hell they are doing, doesn't it?

I think we should retain the budget and let private companies or even qualified citizens handle all border security. They'd do a far better job and we could cut their budget somewhat after the first few years of absolutely obscene profits. Can you imagine what kind of companies we could attract with the aforementioned price tags? There would be thousands of them, and we would be free to choose from the very, very best. Screw having government do something about this, let's hand it over to the professionals.

[AngusJS]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

Well lets see... if i voted for him before he committed any treasonous acts... does that count?

Possibly, as he was governor of a border state and thus is partially responsible for the lack of security.

I was just trying to show how silly this situation is - if inaction or ineffective action on the border is a test for treason, then every single president, (Obama, W, Clinton, Bush...even Saint Ronnie) who was in office while these shenanigans went on, is guilty of treason. I was trying to show the absurdity of this, but if you agree that Bush has committed treason in this regard...I don't think I can convince you otherwise.

seeing as how he disproved the contention - i dont see how.

Take the Truther's claim that Bush was behind 9/11. If someone goes through a long analysis to debunk this claim but ignores the most obvious piece of disconfirming evidence - Bush gives no indication that he's a mass murderer - he does a disservice to Bush, and gives the impression that he actually does think such a thing possible. This is especailly the case when the author states that the violent destruction of an entire branch of government would be applauded by Americans - if he thinks the US government is that bad, how bad does he think the president is?

If at the end of the article, the author said SOMETHING to the effect of "...and finally, while Obama is a dirty pinko Kenyan, a would-be dictator he is not.", I wouldn't have such a problem with it.

and yes i maintain that in any crime there is harm done to someone... there not being any truly "victimless crimes"

I can think of situations where crimes are victimless - for instance, receipt of stolen goods where the original and sole claimant to those goods is dead.

so how does carrying a gun into the USA with the intent of killing police officers NOT constitude as an aggressive act??? i dont understand your argument of comparing cop killing to mail fraud

I never compared cop killing to mail fraud. You said

Crime DOES equal aggression

I provided a counterexample to show that crime does not equal aggression, because crime is not necessarily aggressive. In fact, I'm not sure what your statement means. You might as well say "table equals window."

And you're forgetting intent. Where is the intent among the armed drug runners to kill cops? If they intended to kill US cops, why don't they do so? It would be easy to draw some cops to the border, ambush them, and then flee back into Mexico. They don't do this because they DON'T intend to kill cops. They have guns to protect their shipment. If they can avoid killing anyone and see their shipment through, they will do so, as it benefits them the most. You can point to the threat mentioned in that news report, but listen to what is essentially being said - "leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone." Besides which, leveling a threat does not show intent to carry the threat out, but rather the intent to secure the results of that threat among the threatened party (i.e. cops thinking twice before messing with smugglers).

And do you think that the mules crossing the border are really considering their actions to be aggression? Do they really have a good handle on international politics, and have said to themselves "You know what? **** the US, I'm going to do everything in my power to hurt it." No, they're just supplying our demand. They're committing crimes, and not aggression against the state.

And you still haven't dealt with the implications of suddenly defining crime as aggression against the state. If we do that, then all American criminals are guilty of this as well, which apparently would make them rebels, I guess. Maybe we should just start charging criminals with sedition. You could say that's an appeal to consequences, but that doesn't apply here because the consequences are intrinsically wound up in how we define the words in question.

Anyway, I'm a bit tired after building this wall of text, so I'll sign off with this example of foreign aggression versus foreign crime.

Germany v. Poland 1939 = aggression

Hans Gruber's armed robbery in Die Hard = crime.

[GoldenRivet]

Look, I respect your position... I simply disagree with it.

It may or may not be a fact, but it IS my opinion that:

1. Drug cartels engaged in the trafficking of people, drugs, money, and illegal weapons across international borders is potentially detrimental to the state. Especially when the government is making parts of that the nation off limits to it's citizens.

2. Threatening to snipe police officers from concealed positions as they near *cartel controlled areas if the United States* is IMHO aggressive.
And tells me that it is the open intent of these cartels to take complete control of the area.

3. The border safety problem has grown so terrible in the past couple of years that it can no longer be ignored. And while I agree that it is treason for ANY president to ignore his duty to secure the borders from ANY foreign aggression... The problem is reaching a crascendo under this presidents watch and he is quite openly refusing to address the issue.

That's what my eyes see when I look at this situation.