>second week we've heard of the building of concentration camps for undesirables
Mind posting a reference for such a declaration?
Mind posting a reference for such a declaration?
Gitmo being used as a transit camp for deported illegal immigrants is not at all as say, Sachsenhausen or Dachau being used to illegally dumb german citizens and torture them there indefinitely because they criticized the ruling regime. When Trump starts trying to dump opposing intellectuals, Hollywood producers and "wayward" reporters or writers into Gitmo for indefinite detention, then we can make some firmer claims of literal dictatorship.
If anything, the use of Gitmo under Bush II, when actual U.S citizens were held there indefinitely under terrorism charges was closer to the mark than this now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_evacuation_and_ex...
They even plotted to forcibly deport victims to fenced-in zones on an island which they would seize from another country, putting it outside their laws at home.
Except it wasn't Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but:
None of anything from Trump's government is at all comparable so far and making such comparisons, aside from being a genuinely idiotic case of ideological exaggeration, is also an insult to real victims of real historical concentration camps and violent regimes.
For all the self-congratulatory patting on the back by many readers on HN about their "superior" intellectual reasoning, I see a remarkable abundance of largely failing at such reasoning when it comes to many comment threads and subjects on this site.
It’s been less than two weeks and you are already doing the groundwork to preemptively excuse it.
I am however personally pessimistic about the probity of a camp run on a remote island without any oversight. And I think insisting that everyone wait until after a dictatorship is fully embedded and engaging in retaliation against political enemies (after making open threats to do so) is strategically stupid, much like saying you need to let an asailant get in 4 or 5 punches just to be sure the first two weren't accidental.
They may been operated by hundreds of regimes, but the term is 100% identified with Nazis now. It's a rather daft statement to say that these are not equated.
The reason this is being discussed here is because it isn't.
You realize this is a democratically elected government whose leader was already president once without a dictatorship?
Just a couple of weeks ago a federal court stopped his plans to end birthright citizenship in its tracks, and what was Trump's response? "We'll appeal it in court".... Oh damn! all those dictatoring plans stopped by the monstrous hurdle of constitutionally mandated judicial oversight.... You'd almost think he's not quite.... a dictator.
This kind of tedious hyperbole not only ran rampant before and during the first four years, it also made it harder to make genuine criticisms of Trump gain attention. With so much hysteria about every bullshit little thing being touted far and wide as an example of a 21st century Hitlerism, it's easy for the critics to be viewed as a laughing stock except in their own little echo chambers of like-thinkers.
Because all I've been seeing so far were excuses, he won't do that's (that promptly were then done), contorsions to justify his insane dribble and complete disregard for the law.
This guy is going to destroy your country, and it's absolutely mind-boggling people are cheering him.
He was already president for four years, and the next four years were so bad for the world and the US that he was asked to come back overwhelmingly. Or it could just be because the Republicans run democratic primaries that party leadership can't just overrule or turn into a mockery, and the Democrats don't.
> insane dribble
"Drivel." It's a common error.
that and the Nazi salute at the inauguration.
Tell me, how many other governments can you list that planned to deport large numbers of people living in their country out to a special island they controlled in order to take advantage of its extraterritorial legal limbo separating it from the source country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
If I had a nickel every time that happened, I'd have two nickels, but it's weird that it's happened twice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Solution
Most famously on Nauru https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Ce...
Truly, at least use some basic bloody comparative reasoning to formulate arguments.
In a weird way the events of WWII saved the US from going down the same path because we were on it. Anything literally Hitler did became politically toxic and it's a bit worrying that this toxicity is wearing off. It kept us far away from the fence.
The thing that matters for concentration camps is large groups of related civilians detained to advance a political goal— to restore Germany to its former greatness or to make America great again.