I think you're making some weird point about how everyone on the right is supposedly being labelled as Qanon or something? By who, exactly? The liberal media?
Let me reiterate as clearly as possible:
The point is the left wing media (I refuse to use "liberal" media because they are not liberals) magnifies Qanon in order to specifically discredit their political enemies. It is guilt by association, meaning that they are specifically trying to make anyone who may have vaguely similar beliefs (concerns over election integrity, pointing out corruption in the Biden administration such as with Hunter Biden, etc.) in order to equate them with the most extreme fringe. The same tactic that McCarthy did, essentially, with Communists.
It's not that their argument is everyone on the right is Qanon, but that they use it to dismiss specific concerns to make them look unhinged and conspiratorial without having to address the point.
Pure unvarneshed nonsense. The 'Trump started kids in cages' thing is a strawman of the actual argument which is that he separated families (Steven Miller) and stuck a bunch of unaccompanied minors in privately owned warehouses in shitty conditions. A cage by any other name and such. To which you idiots respond "b-but Obama did the ACTUAL kids in cages! CHECKMATE LEFTISTS!" And so he did. Just not on the same scale. It's kind of like the drones argument. Obama killed a ton of people with Drones, and Trump ramped up the drone program by over 400% the day he got into office and never let up on it for his entire term. Obama=bad. Trump WORSE.
The reason for the separation of families at the border is simple: you can't know that the kids in question are related to the alleged "parents," or if they're being trafficked or kidnapped. The risk of whatever short-term effects of temporary separating families at the border (which in and of itself IS A CRIME, which is enough to separate parents from their kids to begin with) is trumped by the potential risk of human trafficking of a minor. It's all about verification of circumstances because you can not take their word for it without checking to be sure.
The "kids in cages" narrative is misleading because it's not cages but a chain-link fence and refers to one specific processing center known colloquially as "Ursula" in which they are kept for 72 hours. It is not representative of EVERY processing center, just the one in Texas. Not to mention it is currently closed and undergoing reservations, so the entire issue is mute.
I want to put this into perspective: we are fortunate to live in the first world, but if you're crossing from Mexico or a South American country in which you cover hundreds of miles of rough conditions in order to arrive in the US, and there's a good chance that you may be being abducted, being in an air-conditioned building with read access to clean food and water for a relatively short amount of time in order to verify whether or not they are actually who they say they are. But this degree of nuance is not brought up when AOC goes to cry for a photo op in an empty parking lot.
The idea for your later point (which is tangential at best) is that you can't criticize Trump without criticizing Obama, and the only reason you are aware of these issues is because the Media believed it could use it to bludgeon Trump, and the general hypocrisy around the situation. I readily criticize Trump for his shortcomings, but most of his worst policies are either continuations of other policies or outside of his control, meaning you have to be willing to criticize both Obama and Biden if you want to attack Trump from this angle.
Although I am not a sociologist, I expect we could both waste considerable time arguing about systemic racism. Could be an entire thread in and of itself where we spam links to research other people have done to each other and then both ignore whatever the other posts. Just blanket stating that it doesn't exist at ALL is fucking stupid, however.
My issue is that "systemic racism" is unfalsifiable, and is most often used to explain disparities, which then are used as proof of systematic racism. It's circular reasoning that cannot be tested, and most of the biggest issues that are assumed to be BECAUSE of race are most likely due to CORRELATIONS, rather than bias.
If you want to attack racial issues, it's more likely to be based in differences in class, which happen to overlap to race due to the past, but that does not validate the idea that systemic racism is happening NOW.
For instance, you can take any metric between two groups and have unequal outcomes, such as hair color, eye color, etc. but that is not, itself, proof of bias for or against a certain population, due to confounding variables. For instance,
hair color correlates with differences in IQ but that in no way is causative to whether or not there is inequality between hair color in terms of education or cognitive ability. Spurious correlations exist all the time, and trying to apply any statistic probability to any given individual is fallacious, specifically the "Ecological fallacy."
"Systemic discrimination" is essentially the leftist "god in the gaps" argument where any disparities between two groups as a collective is seen as proof of unjust policies which are never directly specified.
Probably the worst case is in terms of the narratives around police, which stereotype them as racist against blacks, when the statistics we have indicates that not only is police violence incredibly rare, but it is not disproportional to
the amount of violent crime.
For instance, in 2019, there were 470,890 violent crimes committed in total. Crime is exceptionally rare, it should be noted, meaning most people are not violent, however disproportionately poor communities are more likely to commit more crime, and Blacks are disproportionately poor, though that percentage went down under the Trump administration due how well the economy was doing. (For reference of a population of approx ~44.22 Million, only 172,980 crimes were committed, which does not differentiate between repeated offenders or overlaps in categorization, meaning we're dealing with a fraction of a fraction of the general population that deals with police or faces crime.) The Federal report for Arrest-Related deaths from 2016-2017 indicates that
only ~26% were black, which consisted of only 22 individuals. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than die from the police.
However, if the SRC poll is to be believed,
both Left wing and Right wing individuals are more likely to overestimate the percentage of blacks killed by the police. (This contains the 2019 data which has anywhere from 13 black individuals to 27 dying in the custody of the police, indicating its rarity, and not differentiating between armed and unarmed.)
Basically, police using force or violence is exceptionally rare if the statistics are to be believed, but because the Media cherry picks stories that cause the most potential outrage, they make it seem like there's this epidemic of violence against the black community by police officers, which is just not true by all the evidence and data we have.
And it is for similar reasons I cast doubt onto the claims of systemic racism because it seems that it lacks any kind of ability to be tested, and what evidence we have contradicts the narratives around racism and better fits around issues of class instead.
The Trump/Russia collusion is a liberal media thing. And damn did they love it, but it wasn't us on the actual left. Most of us didn't believe he colluded with Russia, we believe Putin favored him as a candidate, and that's pretty much it.
I think this argument is leaning a bit on the "no true Scotsman" fallacy as just because you don't agree doesn't mean they're not "actually" left.
I also should note that it's not like there's not institutional backing behind this message given that Nancy Pelosi, Hilary Clinton, et al. still perpetuate this lie despite the Muller Report basically vindicating Trump completely.
Even then, I would say this still supports my argument about the left focusing on narratives rather than the truth, as you seem to concede to some extent.
The Kyle Rittenhouse thing is interesting. Which narrative are you referring to? The right wing 'the victims were no angels' narrative? Or the stupid kid with gun goes to defend property he didn't even own and ends up killing people, narrative?
The "Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist that fired into a crowd of people unprovoked" narrative that began when the instance was first being reported on, and has gone on to be spread around like gospel by left-wing pundits like Vaush, Thoughtslime, and the left-wing media. (I specifically try to watch people I disagree with like these two, even though I despise both of them with a passion)
Really, it's irrelevant whether or not he owned the property or whether or not the people he shot were saints or not, (
though the information around Rosenbaum specifically indicates that he was going around looking to start an altercation) but whether or not he was justified in shooting in the first place. He fulfilled his duty to retreat, tried repeatedly to deescalate the situation, went actively TO FIND the police to turn himself in, and only shot in self defense when a mob of people got within arm's reach of him and seemed to be posing an immediate and present danger to him, indicating to me that it was completely within his rights of self-defense to do so. It also seems that the reason people originality went after Kyle was because he put out a fire near a gas station that they started.
So yes, the narrative that Kyle was looking for violence or hated black people is extremely flimsy and is just used to vilify him.
@Kaldrak
