Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon

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Tubey said:
Governments are populist by nature - they act to gain popular support for measures. The "Chinese Virus" slogan Trump is running with is designed to get domestic support and laser focus blame on China. He gets a personal benefit from doing so but there's also an international one because it enables him to exert pressure on China with public support. A threatened trade embargo that threatens jobs in the US is a lot more palatable if he goes into the threat with 80% public support for it.

So the blue highlighted sentence I completely agree with - of course it is. The red bit I don't.

China care a lot about public perception of this - why do you think they've tried to shift the blame to Italy and blame a US black ops mission for it? The thing they fear most is a loss of control and being seen as vulnerable - it's why they are an authoritarian regime; the population is so massive and economically disparate that they pretty much have to be due to their history.

Then to the green bit - exactly this. But for the threats of sanctions and the carrot and stick to work, the blame has to be pinned very firmly on their shoulders. "Close the wet markets, that'll be seen as lessons learned, and then we won't have to do anything else." But if they aren't blamed and there is no pressure, then there's no base for the other superpowers to push from and no reason for China to close them.
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...But was this ever at risk of not being a thing?

I mean most people in the West care an awful lot about animal rights. You add this whole thing and I feel like wet markets getting shut down, for real, isn't exactly a hard sell that requires inflammatory rhetoric.

In most places in the U.S. just show a video of a dog suffering and they'd be all set for embargoing forever.

I guess I just don't see where the need for this comes from except to benefit the optics of the mismanaged response.
 
RaleighBlue said:
...But was this ever at risk of not being a thing?

I mean most people in the West care an awful lot about animal rights. You add this whole thing and I feel like wet markets getting shut down, for real, isn't exactly a hard sell that requires inflammatory rhetoric.

In most places in the U.S. just show a video of a dog suffering and they'd be all set for embargoing forever.

I guess I just don't see where the need for this comes from except to benefit the optics of the mismanaged response.
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It's China mate, the wet markets are open already. It's actually much, much less likely they'll be closed down.
 
Tubey said:
It's China mate, the wet markets are open already. It's actually much, much less likely they'll be closed down.
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Eh. I'm off topic - I was mainly objecting to defending the logic that led to Japanese internment, and I stand by that argument both from a purely logical standpoint of learning from ones mistakes and from the humanistic standpoint of caring about other humans.

My argument is that if we actually care about shutting down the wet markets and need US/Western popular opinion behind it, calling this the China virus is wholly unnecessary. You only have to put a few exposes on the nightly news about the poor mammals (they gotta be cute) and this country will be frothing for war, nevermind sanctions.

This is a country that got so easily led into Iraq in 2003. If our government wants a thing done, it's pretty easy to get us to fall into line with a lil propaganda.
 
LinekersLegs said:
And many of us vehemently disagree not just from the benefit of logical hindsight (that overwhelmingly Japanese Americans were loyal citizens) but that irrespective of any perceived benefit it was morally wrong to lock up thosands of people including children based soley on their ancestry.
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I fundamentally disagree. You are of course entitled to that view but I think the logic of stopping a fifth column vastly outweighed the danger of allowing one at the time, and the protection of the entire country took precedence over the rights of the few in that scenario.

As said, where I profoundly disagree with the process was how long they did it for; once the threat was obviously non-existent, it should have been stopped.
 
RaleighBlue said:
Eh. I'm off topic - I was mainly objecting to defending the logic that led to Japanese internment, and I stand by that argument both from a purely logical standpoint of learning from ones mistakes and from the humanistic standpoint of caring about other humans.

My argument is that if we actually care about shutting down the wet markets and need US/Western popular opinion behind it, calling this the China virus is wholly unnecessary. You only have to put a few exposes on the nightly news about the poor mammals (they gotta be cute) and this country will be frothing for war, nevermind sanctions.

This is a country that got so easily led into Iraq in 2003. If our government wants a thing done, it's pretty easy to get us to fall into line with a lil propaganda.
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But then you'd have idiots targeting Chinese people in the USA for eating dogs. I actually think that's a much worse measure!
 
Tubey said:
Not at all. But I think of it in terms of the greater good. For me, at the outbreak of war, not interning Italians/Germans in the UK would have been absolutely ridiculous and an act of outrageous negligence by the British government. I'm not saying it wouldn't suck to be those people, but the overall logic of doing so overrides the downsides of it.
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Locking many of them up was ridiculous, though. In the UK, you had a very large number of people who had fled the Nazis, who had often fled after directly opposing them in Germany for years and we then turned around and said they were a security risk. There were 30000 German Jews interned at one stage!

Internment was the typical bureaucratic response to a problem that probably didn't exist.
 
Tubey said:
I fundamentally disagree. You are of course entitled to that view but I think the logic of stopping a fifth column vastly outweighed the danger of allowing one at the time, and the protection of the entire country took precedence over the rights of the few in that scenario.

As said, where I profoundly disagree with the process was how long they did it for; once the threat was obviously non-existent, it should have been stopped.
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"The logic of the Germans stopping the Jews from trying to overthrow the government outweighed the danger of allowing it to happen and the protection took precedence over their rights, but I disagree with continuing with it and turning it into a program of mass murder."

Doesn't sound so clever does it?
 
TheBigIguana said:
"The logic of the Germans stopping the Jews from trying to overthrow the government outweighed the danger of allowing it to happen and the protection took precedence over their rights, but I disagree with continuing with it and turning it into a program of mass murder."

Doesn't sound so clever does it?
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Well no, but it's also not remotely the same thing, as the base logic of it is obviously flawed - in that there wasn't a massive naval Jewish force that could foreseeably be about to invade after just orchestrating a massive aerial raid on a German harbour ffs.
 
tsubaki said:
Locking many of them up was ridiculous, though. In the UK, you had a very large number of people who had fled the Nazis, who had often fled after directly opposing them in Germany for years and we then turned around and said they were a security risk. There were 30000 German Jews interned at one stage!

Internment was the typical bureaucratic response to a problem that probably didn't exist.
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We actually tried a risk assessment system before war broke out proper but we ran out of time to do it properly, so we had to go with the blunt approach.

You have to look at it in the parameters of the time period.
 
Tubey said:
Well no, but it's also not remotely the same thing, as the base logic of it is obviously flawed - in that there wasn't a massive naval Jewish force that could foreseeably be about to invade after just orchestrating a massive aerial raid on a German harbour ffs.
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Basically, if I'm understanding correctly, you're ok with a nation levying a blanket accusation of espionage on a group of people with no evidence aside from their country of origin and think that taking the action of locking those people away in concentration camps is an acceptable course of action?

I'm sorry but that's morally reprehensible. I have nothing else to say about this.
 
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