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[Reelya]

Wow, I hadn't realized that Trump had included a subtle "we'll nuke you off the face of the earth, asshole" bit in that letter. But dressed up in very showy "polite" language. It's basically Ghandi "my words are back by nuclear weapons" all over again. Threatening to nuke someone in fact undoes every single fancy word, indicating a love of peace and a wish to talk, in the whole letter, as pure lies.

Does Trump think he's a mafia don or something: "kneecaps get broken. That happens. I pray yours will not get broken". Trumpbot will probably disagree since he said he didn't want to do it, but it doesn't take a lot of reading comprehension to realize that saying "I pray I will not need to stab you in the face" is in fact a direct threat that you might stab them in the face.

[PTTG??]

Hey, let's not start with the namecalling.

Yes, let's not stoop to presidential levels.

[wierd]

Gentlemen Please! You can't fight in here, It's the WAR ROOM!

[Max™]

How do I stop worrying and learn to love the tweet?

[martinuzz]

By being aware of the location of the nearest Tweet shelters?

(or build your own personal Tweet shelter. Be aware it requires at least a metric crapton of pinches of salt)

[Kagus]

I'm kind of surprised no one is picking at that "[...]let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place."

Just kinda gives the impression that "okay, it pleases me to call this off, even though it's bad for the world at large. But that's fine, because I get to make a point."


Anyways, news agencies are reporting that North Korean officials said that the DPRK is still ready to talk peace "at any time, in any format". Exactly what kind of position that's supposed to indicate (either scrambling to contradict their perceived unwillingness, or egging Trump with a "we're ready when you are" statement) is somewhat unclear.

Entertainingly...

[Reelya]

perceived unwillingness

It's the Trump lot creating that perception. e.g. I mentioned in the DRPK thread that Trump needs to be seen to be the one willing to talk, the White Knight, even if he actually wants to blow DRPK off the face of the Earth or whatever. e.g. so you get passive aggressive bullshit that's all for show:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Trump: "I didn't want to destroy you, but you left me no choice" *wipes tear from corner of eye*.

It's an old trick, e.g. Bush Senior did the same to Saddam Hussein: The USA was beating the war drums, and Saddam kept asking for talks: Bush Senior wouldn't talk, but GOP-friendly media reported on Saddam as the man who "refused to talk". Similarly, you have another clear David and Goliath situation with USA vs DRPK. What are the odds that it's Goliath blocking the talks vs David? It's always Goliath, because the pissweak Davids of the world know that Goliath can stomp them to death in a second.

e.g. they were honestly thrown when DRPK actually agreed to the talks (literally a few hours after SK/US military drills were postponed), and since then the Trump side has actually tried a few times to derail the talks, e.g. putting the cancelled drills back on, to which DRPK complained, but still didn't cancel the talks. So the White House needed a "cassus belli" of sorts, to justify canceling the talks themselves that were never meant to occur in the first place (a fake olive branch that was never expected to be accepted), in a way that they could blame DRPK for. So finally it comes down to one DRPK official said that Pence is a "dummy" and they clearly over-react to that with "oh, yeah, well peace is off then, and it's all your fault!" using the sort of passive-aggressive tactics you get in a bad relationship break-up.

EDIT: In a further twist adding even more proof of a passive-aggressive bent from the White House on this matter, Trump has magnanimously thanked DRPK for their "constructive" message after the White House cancelled talks, but managed to give himself a back-slap in there:

Very good news to receive the warm and productive statement from North Korea. We will soon see where it will lead, hopefully to long and enduring prosperity and peace. Only time (and talent) will tell!

e.g. Trump slams door in person's face, person still willing to talk, Trump says that's very noble of them, also mentioning how great Trump is for eliciting that response.

However, Trump has further deflected, using a passive-aggressive line "but it was the Democrats trying to derail the talks the whole time". e.g. it was everyone's fault for the cancelled talks, except for Trump, the guy who actually cancelled the talks.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/05/25/trump-welcomes-productive-statement-from-north-korea-says-dems-rooting-against-talks.html

[Rolan7]

Shazbot, when Trump said " We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals." He definitely wasn't referring to just MS13, you're just plain cherrypicking your facts there. What he said caused a diplomatic meltdown with Mexico too.

I already laid out that quote plain as day, it's disingenous to act like it wasn't there, and that I was only referring to the MS13 statements. e.g. my post actually boils down to "trump referred to ms13 as animals, and nancy pelosi was labeled an ms13-lover for objecting to the word animals, but Trump also labeled basically all illegal immigrants as animals, carte blache, which is 11 million people and not just MS13".

~~~

When Trump wrote "We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.", Maybe you can claim he was "referring" to MS13, but that's just plain bullshit, because this statement doesn't contain a single reference to MS13. The only way you could "know" it was about MS13 is if you had additional information that's not contained in the message itself, e.g. the message's meaning is interpreted by each person who receives it, based on their own beliefs.

I don't see it.  He's talking about bad people (in a concerningly dehumanizing way), and you're just assuming he means all Mexicans.  He doesn't say either way, so yes it's ambiguous and open to interpretation, but shouldn't we avoid jumping to an extreme interpretation?

He's perhaps exaggerating the real problem of vicious cartel operatives in order to drum up anti-immigrant sentiment.  That's pretty gross, but why pretend he's calling all Mexican immigrants animals?

So, what does a right-wing racist think when they read that? They see it as Trump nodding to them that "all illegal immigrants are animals" or just "all immigrants are animals". Because, remember, he didn't say coming into the country illegally, he just said "people coming into the country". You can infer that this only means illegal immigrants, but someone who is anti-immigrant likely tars all immigrants "coming into the country" the same and reads this as meaning that Great Leader Trump is telling them all immigrants are animals.

I do agree that a lot of modern racists latch on to Trump as validating their prejudice.  That's a significant portion of his base.  But he gets that by *being ambiguous*.  Someone who wants a racist in the White House interprets him as a racist, whether that person's a neonazi or a professionally outraged liberal.

And then, since Trump is a big national leader, that's just the sort of thing that stirs up the support base to go out and commit violence against the group that Great Leader is against. And that's clear when you have e.g. video of some guy going apeshit in a coffee shop because the workers there speak Spanish to each other, god forbid, and he's threatening to call ICE on his phone, get them all deported. Followers hear a statement like "they are animals" then they're not gonna be extra-careful that they only treat the minimum possible amount of people as animals, they are going to spread that around to "people who don't look like like us or speak like us, they're nothing but animals".

I fully agree that it is dangerous to give these people even the appearance of support.  Trump's lack of substance isn't a sin, but he does have a moral obligation to stop "accidentally" validating racists.  And he refuses to denounce them, because they support him, and that's morally wrong.

[Reelya]

I don't see it.  He's talking about bad people (in a concerningly dehumanizing way), and you're just assuming he means all Mexicans. 

Well, the Mexicans certainly saw it that way.

But I'll also point out that he didn't start by clarifying he only wanted to stop "bad people". Reprinting the statement in question:

We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in, and we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country.

"people coming into the country" is just immigrants in general. "trying to come in" is still just immigrants in general. But then he says "we’re stopping a lot of them" which strongly implies border control: and in America that's almost entirely blocking Mexicans/Latinos at the border. He's not talking about Chinese Visa over-stayers or something here. Nobody would interpret it that way. Then, "we’re taking people out of the country" this is a reference to deportation. While it's possible he means here "deportation in general" it's fairly clear that the subtext is deported Mexican/Latinos, especially since he already referred to blocking this group of people from getting in.

e.g the first part is the part that defines which group he's talking about. He then says of that group:

You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are.

e.g. he already defined who he's talking about, and now he's saying they're bad. He's not only talking about "bad people" as the object in this statement, because that would be circular logic. e.g. that would be like saying if you define a "group X" then say "you wouldn't believe how evil X are" you're only referring to "evil Xs" rather than stating that "all Xs are evil". Which just plain wouldn't make sense.

e.g. sure Trump could have only meant specific people he's trying to stop, but if we e.g. remove completely the "Mexicans" assumption I made, then it looks even worse. He's just defining a group we normally call "immigrants" in general, then saying you wouldn't believe how bad they are, they're animals. Really good optics.

[Hanslanda]

"We got Untermensch coming into the country and we're sending them east. You wouldn't believe how awful these Untermensch are. They're animals."

-Godwin Invocation

Anyway, more seriously, I don't think it matters if he meant one racial group of immigrants. They're being dehumanized by the comment, Latin or not, legal or not. That is a dread and terrifying precedent to set.

[smjjames]

Hanslanda has hit the nail on the head there, so to speak.

[PTTG??]

There is no evidence that Trump puts half as much effort into constructing his speech as his apologists put into dissecting it to make it sound half-decent.

Moreover, the stated advantage of Trump from his supporters, is that he says what he means. Now we're supposed to believe that he's actually couching all his language with elaborate hidden meanings?

When trump casually describes a broad group of people as bad, he's doing no more or less than saying that that entire group of people is bad. There isn't room in his mind for more elaborate displays; if he wants to walk back the statements, he just ham-fistedly claims to like taco bowls. He's not a subtle person.

[Dunamisdeos]

Frankly, if we spent as much time as Trump spends thinking about his mouth-words as we do picking apart his every word to find things to be righteous about, we'd save ourselves a lot of embarrassment.

CNN outright says they took it out of context, and the original tweet has been deleted.

It's a good thing they take the time to remind you that Trump is a badguy, otherwise we would have done something wrong by settling for being angry instead of thinking. Again.

[nenjin]

One would think, with Trump going on and on about fake news, the news would tread more carefully not to prove him right. Goddamnit, media.

[Dunamisdeos]

I'm not knocking on anyone here, for reals, and Trump is in fact basically the worst, but they keep doing it because we keep going for the throat upon their command and then coming back for more.