White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon listens at right as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting in the White House on January 31. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
One of the uglier aspects of the ‘new’ Muslim ban is a focus on ‘honor killings’, even though that’s not a massive problem here in uStates, but it’s a convenient thing to rail about when you’re attempting to incite a racial panic. Just how much the Regime does not care about victims of honor killings is highlighted by the fact that the Violence Against Women grants are going to be eliminated, even though roughly 1,500 women are murdered as a result of domestic violence per year. It should not be ignored that both Trump and Bannon have been accused of domestic violence. Nor should Trump’s attitude toward women in general, which is incredibly ugly. The reasoning behind the ban is nothing more than slimy white nationalism, and there isn’t all that much to cover the shit over, they simply don’t care. Well, that’s not quite fair. They do care about any possibility of having this ban legally overturned as well. As usual the problem does not just rest with the Regime’s legislation and executive orders. It also lies on the shoulders of all those Regime voters and supporters.
I am sick to death of people wringing their hands over these poor, poor Trumpians who start crying when the chickens come home to roost. No, I do not have sympathy for them, because they have none for anyone, they were firmly and flatly in favour of bigotry, hatred, and misogyny, and any of them who claim they weren’t, they are liars. Trump’s whole fucking campaign was nothing but a constant litany of bigotry, hatred, and misogyny, as well as a paen to the might of white, and a psalm sung to the filthy rich.
The whole excuse of “well, some of them just wanted to throw a brick at the establisment” is a fucking lie, too. One Big Lie. If those people truly wanted to buck the establishment, Trump would have been dumped and Sanders would have ended up in the white house, and we would be moving towards a properly socialized government. That would have been tossing a brick at the man. Voting for Trump? For fuck’s sake, how could you possibly get more establishment? The excuse of “they thought he was a good business man!” won’t wash either. Trump’s constant failures over the years were not a secret. His incompetency was out there for all to see, during the whole campaign. The regime voters chose to ignore it. The excuse of “oh hey jobs”? No, doesn’t wash either, because what all those white Trumpians meant by that was “stomp all over those brown peoples!”. They never have anything to say when you point out that they don’t want to work cleaning toilets and peoples’ houses.
No, no more fucking excuses. The assholes who voted in the regime who are now crying? They’re only crying because they weren’t supposed to get bitten on the arse. They wanted all those others to get fucked over. Anyroad, back to the fucked up, shit-caked ban…
President Trump’s second Muslim ban, signed on Monday, includes a provision directing the Department of Homeland Security to collect and make public “information regarding the number and types of gender-based violence against women, including so-called ‘honor killings,’ in the United States by foreign nationals.”
According to numbers from a Department of Justice-sponsored study conducted in 2014, there are less than 30 such “honor killings” in the country each year. The killings — which are “perceived by the perpetrator to be a way to restore honor to the family in the face of a perceived damage,” according to the report — are sometimes “motivated by a radical and dark interpretation of Islam,” as Fox News wrote in late 2015.
The inclusion of the “honor killings” provision in the new Muslim ban marks the second time in a week the Trump administration has outlined a plan to use federal resources “to whip up as much racial panic as possible,” as Matt Yglesias of Vox puts it. The first instance was Trump’s vow to create the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement office, or VOICE, during his speech to Congress last week, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
In a similar vein, the number of “honor killings” in the U.S. stands in stark contrast to the roughly 1,500 women who are murdered as a result of domestic violence in a given year. But according to numerous reports, Trump’s budget proposal will eliminate the Department of Justice’s Violence Against Women grants. Those grants had a $480 million budget last year and funded 25 grant programs helping domestic violence victims, according to Mother Jones. Trump and chief strategist Steve Bannon have both been accused of domestic assault.
[…]
But the “honor killing” provision is just the latest example of Trump trying to portray Islam in a violent light. Despite the fact that a person in America is much more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim terrorist, the Trump administration has signaled it wants a federal counter-terrorism program to stop focusing on violent white supremacists and any other extremist groups not comprised of Muslims. And after the Department of Homeland Security released a report last month undermining the administration’s core rationale for the Muslim ban — “citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity,” it found — the administration tried to downplay the report.
“The president asked for an intelligence assessment,” the a senior administration official told the Wall Street Journal. “This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.”
Right. An accurate assessment is provided, but the Tiny Tyrant doesn’t want that, and neither does shadow tyrant Bannon. They want shit shoveled onto a platter, and shaped into the form of whatever they asked for, providing them with a basis for the regime.
Think Progress has the full story.
Also see: The mass deportation of African immigrants that isn’t getting media attention. Nobody noticed.
I get much the same impression. It’s hard to have sympathy for someone whose only complaint is that what they wanted to do to everyone else is now being done to them.
It’s basically like asking people to have sympathy for suicide bombers.
“Hey, look, I’m dying too! What about me?!”
… these poor, poor Trumpians who start crying when the chickens come home to roost. No, I do not have sympathy for them…
Yeah, let’s get even, do something that really wounds them. I know -- we can wish them “Happy Holidays”! forever!
Statistics tracking crime? Great idea when applied generally (and properly). Here’s another statistic that’s shamefully neglected in the US: Deaths by firearm. Also deaths by cop which are mostly a subcategory, I suppose. But that would upset the NRA (among others) so its probably not going to happen, right? When Trump said he was going to do without special interest groups he probably didn’t mean the NRA. So now I’m wondering what happens to ‘honor killings’ with guns. Are they included or excluded for fear of making the 2nd amendment look bad? Classic conflict of interest, the immovable object (NRA) vs. an unopposable force (Racism) -- or so they’d like to believe. (Ok, given the small scale the immovable object probably won’t even notice or care)
Re: Pierce R. butler (#3):
Well, for those who really enjoy their Schadenfreude and ‘I told you so’s this might just turn out to be a golden age. Well, gilded, anyhow.
“Oh, you’re in terrible situation X? Well, it’s a shame we don’t have Y anymore since your party did away with it. What, you never heard of Y? Look it up somewhere, it was there to deal with X and even Z, among other things. Would have been perfect in your situation. Oh well, that’s life under Trump, eh? Enjoy!”
Komarov:
Honor killings could have been tracked under violence against women / domestic violence. Pity they’re doing away with it.
I can’t be bothered, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to listen to people who want to lecture me on how sorry I should be for them.
I’m not experiencing Schadenfreude. I’m just out of fucks to give. My solidarity is with the people who are suffering who didn’t vote in favour of suffering and my support is with those who fight fascism.
Also, honour killings?
We all know that it’s just something scary brown people do*. When Nice White Guys kill their partner and or children it’S a “family tragedy” and we must ask endlessly what she did to make him do it.
*Funny enough, those female brown people at risk of misogynist violence are somehow still barred from entering…
Giliell, #7
They even kicked one out of a Trump rally for simply showing up and standing up silently.
Giliell:
Neither am I, nor do I see how anyone in uStates can be, because we are all in the “hey, you are fucked” boat. People outside uStates are at considerable risk. I’m done with listening to the damn near endless litany of excuses being provided by, and for, those who voted for the regime.
Pretty much what Giliell said, esp. re: honour killings. That’s all.
And I don’t have any pity or sympathy left, either (for white people who voted Trump, that is). I’m not sorry about that and I won’t be. Everything was laid out and they chose to look the other way because their privilege was hurting them, and they were perfectly fine with fucking over…. well, pretty much everyone. This isn’t people being tricked into a choice, this is people actively ignoring easily accessible information. So no, no fucks at all.
Comprehensive statistics must be a major pain when someone’s preferred domain is that of ‘alternate facts’. All that additional data floating about, distracting people from the picture that someone wants to paint for them, statistics about things you don’t want people to know, intolerable. Better to focus on the bits that fit the agenda, discard the rest.* Hm, domestic violence? Nah.
Domesticterrorism. Yeah, but leave the white supremacists out of it…I should clarify I’m not much into Schadenfreude myself. The point of this little monologue was mostly me wondering if people even know what they’re losing. The most obvious example would be the R-voter who didn’t know the ACA and “Obamacare” meant the same thing.
But with the social support being defunded and dismantled some might not even realise there are parts that are missing. That there used to be some kind of government-supported social aid, that it should be there but isn’t anymore -- this might not even occur to some people. Especially since US rhetoric, especially on the Republican side, is so heavily against these kinds of safety nets, to the point where some people in genuine need are routinely insulted as ‘parasites’ and ‘looters’.
There may come a point where US voters have to be reminded that certain social services and protections exist(ed), that they are an essential part of healthy and prosperous societies (as illustrated in other countries) and that it might be high time to vote out some of the selfish idiots who cut the US safety nets to shreds for their own gains.
*The money saved can be ‘reinvested’ into the military. Win-win! (Except for the wars, naturally)
Sixty fucking million people voted for the Angry Cheeto. These people will continue to be eligible to vote in future elections, and they will presumably continue to be susceptible to the Cheeto/GOP siren song.
This.
Demographic.
Is a.
Huge.
Fucking.
Problem.
For U.S.
Democracy.
The Trump-voting demographic is demonstrably not interested in fact-checking. The Trump-voting demographic demonstrably accepts information, not on the basis of how true or false that information happens to be, but, rather, largely/entirely on the basis of whether or not the source of that information shares their political alignment.
This is a huge fucking problem.
To a zeroeth approximation (that being an even rougher guess than a first approximation), it looks to me like any solution to said problem is going to have to include something along the lines of deprogramming on a massive scale (see also: 60 million voters). No idea how to make this happen.
Cubist:
There is no U.S. Democracy.
Also, 60 million in this country is a minority. It must be remembered that Trump did not legitimately win the election. Many more votes were cast against him. That remnant of the slave protection, the electoral college, got him in. The point being, there are many more people capable of forming and maintaining a solid resistance, which is so needed, because most of the government is made up of craven-hearted, evil, filthy rich fuckers who don’t give a damn about anyone.
The problem is not so much all those who have invested everything in hate; it’s not even the religious reich, who are a most serious problem. The biggest fucking problem to overcome is all those who take refuge in apathy.
How are foreign nationals defined? I assume this would exclude “honor” killings committed by US citizens. Stephen Harper (Trump Light) proposed a Barabaric Cultural Practices act so people could report Muslim misogyny while at the same time he refused to hold an inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous* women.
*for those who don’t speak Canadian this means first nations ie Indians, Inuit & Metis.
Off topic, but somewhat relevant, and I don’t know where else to put it:
Trump used to be very pro-Israeli settlers, but is changing his tune now. Among the pro-Trump crowd that’s anti-settler is our old pal Spencer Fist Face. His remarks on the subject were reported in a local paper and a heated argument emerged between people who think the entire administration is “anti-Israel” or only some outliers. One person (a Jew, and by his language a religious one) said this:
“Nah, it’s just this Nazi that hates us. The rest are our allies.”
—
When this administration finally turns on AIPEC members as it turned on the healthcare of its own voters I’m going to shed so many tears. I’ll be inconsolable.
How are foreign nationals defined? I assume this would exclude “honor” killings committed by US citizens.
It’s only honor killing if you’re brown. If a white man kills his wife for cheating, it’s totally not honor killing because… um… ah… Oh, look at the time.
And I forgot the blockquote tag. First line it quoted from militantagnostic.