Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

Your expectations are too high. If this bill got out in front of the public early, it would have been pounced upon as being soft on crime, same as with any bill that treats prisoners as anything more than cheap labor.
That fact that most Republicans agreed to come to the table at all on this topic, whether it was for 5 prisoners or 5 million, took some amount of political courage.

Did it? Why did Republicans in both chambers overwhelmingly support the bill of it was so politically costly?

What I'm telling you is that your posture sets our expectations dangerously low, like an uncle calling their 10-year-old nephew a math whiz because they correctly answer, "What is 12 x 12?" Just say "cool" and go on with working; blowing an accomplishment out of proportion isn't productive.

If this bill got out in front of the public early,

Also, interesting point - if this bill had "got out" in front of the public, it would mean that the media were prioritizing it as something to report on, something to invest prime time into. And if they were prioritizing it as a subject, it would be because the Republicans were prioritizing it. Because Republicans often set the media's agenda (e.g. Obamacare criticism, Benghazi, Ebola, Clinton emails, migrant caravans).

It follows that mainstream conservatives were not interested in opposing or bashing the legislation before the nation.

It's boilerplate, dude.

[Strike For The South]

The reform bill is a pebble in the ocean.

The United States criminal justice system is a failure and has resulted in this country having 1/4 of the worlds total prisoners. There needs to be a massive concerted effort to fundamentally change it. A black man in America has more than double the chance of being in prison than someone during Stalins gulag. That is not justice.

[Montmorency]

The reform bill is a pebble in the ocean.

The United States criminal justice system is a failure and has resulted in this country having 1/4 of the worlds total prisoners. There needs to be a massive concerted effort to fundamentally change it. A black man in America has more than double the chance of being in prison than someone during Stalins gulag. That is not justice.

There has been a talking point going around for a few years that the US imprisons more people now than Stalin's gulags did at their height. This is basically untrue.

HOWEVER

While accounting that Stalin's USSR had more or less half the population of the contemporary United States (WW2 = more or less), it is true that America's incarceration rate and absolute numbers are quite comparable to the Stalinist system, which is certainly scary.

From the link above:

The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens.

It is no hyperbole to say that the US prison industrial complex is unacceptable, especially for a country that purports itself the world’s preeminent democracy. But it is hyperbole because placing the US next to Stalinism (and Nazism for that matter) is inherently hyperbolic. The rhetorical move is supposed to provoke an emotional reaction not stimulate critical awareness. And as much as American liberals would like to think that the numbers of bodies ensnared in the US prison industrial complex is as bad, if not worse, than Stalinist Russia, the situation is far more complicated.

Here I don’t mean the quality of the Stalinist system No one is claiming that the US system is worse than Stalin’s forced labor camps. I only mean the quantity of humans in both systems.

The Stalinist penal system was a complex network of punishments and detentions: prisons, noncustodial forced labor, corrective labor camps, forced labor detention (katorga) special settlements, and corrective labor colonies. I won’t go into the meanings and various differences between these. Though experts make clear distinctions between these various units, to the popular mind, they all fall under the general name of gulag. The numbers of people, which also included children, in this penal machine at any given period remains partial. Up 20 percent of the gulag population was released every year, new inmates went in, corpses went out, some even managed to escape. But exactly how many people under Stalin’s correctional supervision is unknown.

Check the graphs in the link, as I won't reproduce them.

If the US has up to 2.5 million people incarcerated at some point in time, that is less - though only slightly less! - than the number of people in Stalin's gulag system in 1938-40, and a little more than 1935-7. If 6 million Americans are held under "correctional supervision", then the analogous number is not really know for prewar USSR, which may well be higher.

According to the straight numbers, the Stalinist system did not exceed the US’ six million during the years of the Great Terror. In 1938, there were 2.7 million people in the “gulag.” But this doesn’t include everyone under Stalinist “correctional supervision.” Therefore it doesn’t take account of prisons and released gulag prisoners who were forced to carry “Form A” which detailed their past crime, prison term, the deprivation of civil rights up to five years, and restricted where they could settle. There were roughly 2 million people released from the gulag between 1934 and 1940 which etches the Stalinist number closer to the United States.

Of course the Stalinist system reached its peak shortly before his death, upon which it was rapidly dismantled, and here the gulags were clearly absorbing more in absolute numbers than the American penal/carceral system ever has.

This means an estimated 7.4 million people were under Stalinist correctional supervision 1953, exceeding Zakaria’s and Gopnik’s 6 million for the United States. Again the numbers are probably higher since these numbers don’t include everyone in the Stalinist penal system.

Things get even more complicated when you consider the gulag population per 100,000 citizens. According to Eugenia Belova and Paul Gregory, the Soviet institutionalized population in 1953 was 2,621,000 or 1,558 per 100.000. When you include special settlements, the numbers jump to 4,301,000 or 2,605 per 100,000. This puts the 760 per 100,000 in the United States into perspective.

So the takeaway should be that, while the US has never really exceeded Stalinism's excesses (EDIT: Leaving aside the early years), it does come frighteningly close, at least in raw numbers. Which is bad. Real bad.

A more interesting comparison might be to Maoist China (which had about double the population of the contemporary US, as opposed to 50-60% like the USSR) and to contemporary China, which imprisons relatively few people but seems to have quite a lot in reeducation camps and the like, such as the notorious figure of up to 1 million Uighurs alone.

[Husar]

There has been a talking point going around for a few years that the US imprisons more people now than Stalin's gulags did at their height.

Why even go there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...rceration_rate

The US tops the list of per 100k, imprisons 3-4 times as many people (per 100k) as Venezuela and yet it keeps bitching about how oppressive Venezuela supposedly is.

The next decent country on the list is Luxembourg at 145 and that's a tax haven...
So the next decent first world country on the list is actually Germany at 172 with 75 per 100k.
(yes, British colonies, tax havens, baguettes that riot over environment taxes, countries with nazi parties in the government and incompetent Belgians don't count )

Ok, maybe you have the UK at 140, but they're Brexiteers...

Anyway, you don't need to compare the US to Stalin to see that it's either a country that breeds criminals or one that imprisons way too many people. Pick your poison.

[Montmorency]

@all above: Yes.


Meanwhile, Trump supporter reacts to government shutdown and attendant deleterious economic impact:

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

(Sorry ACIN, this might raise your blood pressure more than mine)

[a completely inoffensive name]

Listening to the speech right now. We don't build walls because we hate those outside, but because we love those inside. LOL

[Husar]

Listening to the speech right now. We don't build walls because we hate those outside, but because we love those inside. LOL

That incidentally also explains all the prisoners...

[a completely inoffensive name]

Did it? Why did Republicans in both chambers overwhelmingly support the bill of it was so politically costly?

What I'm telling you is that your posture sets our expectations dangerously low, like an uncle calling their 10-year-old nephew a math whiz because they correctly answer, "What is 12 x 12?" Just say "cool" and go on with working; blowing an accomplishment out of proportion isn't productive.



Also, interesting point - if this bill had "got out" in front of the public, it would mean that the media were prioritizing it as something to report on, something to invest prime time into. And if they were prioritizing it as a subject, it would be because the Republicans were prioritizing it. Because Republicans often set the media's agenda (e.g. Obamacare criticism, Benghazi, Ebola, Clinton emails, migrant caravans).

It follows that mainstream conservatives were not interested in opposing or bashing the legislation before the nation.

It's boilerplate, dude.

The reform bill is a pebble in the ocean.

The United States criminal justice system is a failure and has resulted in this country having 1/4 of the worlds total prisoners. There needs to be a massive concerted effort to fundamentally change it. A black man in America has more than double the chance of being in prison than someone during Stalins gulag. That is not justice.

In 2019 one of my resolutions was not to be so mad and stressed about everything. It is very tiring. I want to practice a more pragmatic reformist philosophy. Where I can push for the big goals but remain pleased with steps forward, no matter how small. I just can't sustain my political engagement if every act is to be judged against a criteria that will undoubtedly cause it to fall short of the target. And it is certainly worse to burn out and become numb to political events at this time.

[Montmorency]

In 2019 one of my resolutions was not to be so mad and stressed about everything. It is very tiring. I want to practice a more pragmatic reformist philosophy. Where I can push for the big goals but remain pleased with steps forward, no matter how small. I just can't sustain my political engagement if every act is to be judged against a criteria that will undoubtedly cause it to fall short of the target. And it is certainly worse to burn out and become numb to political events at this time.

You know I'm an arch-pessimist, but I'm only saying restrain the hoopla, which isn't the same as indulging in bitter and maudlin futility-mongering. But if you genuinely need to feel this rhetoric toward maintaining that "optimism of the will"... that's troublesome.

[Strike For The South]

In 2019 one of my resolutions was not to be so mad and stressed about everything. It is very tiring. I want to practice a more pragmatic reformist philosophy. Where I can push for the big goals but remain pleased with steps forward, no matter how small. I just can't sustain my political engagement if every act is to be judged against a criteria that will undoubtedly cause it to fall short of the target. And it is certainly worse to burn out and become numb to political events at this time.

I'm not mad or stressed. It simply is not enough. It really is not anything tangible. It is better than stasis, I will grant you that.

@monty There is a massive racial element to those numbers and it is one of the reasons why the majority still supports insane "tough on crime" measures. There is a whole cottage industry (since 1776) around convincing white people that black people are dangerous. That is a whole nother thread though.

A reminder for tonight, There is no crisis at the border. There is no need for a ridiculous wall. Trumps desire for one is equal parts vanity, base whipping, and racism. Any attempt to declare an emergency will be challenged and that challenge will succeed. Just one more norm that we will have to codify.

This obsession with illegal immigration is an effort to squeeze a group of people. It is not an to get rid of them (which would hurt the bottom line) so much as it is an attempt to strip them of their voice while the country extracts their labor. Fear is the goal here. It is unacceptable.