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The [Muslim Ban] and other Trump immigration policies and actions
Kaputa
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This is some of the most blatantly bigoted and awful shit I've seen our government do in my lifetime. Last weekend we saw millions march around the country in the Women's March on Washington and associated protests throughout the country. It was widely covered by just about every media, even the right wing media (uncharitably), and people generally found it impossible to ignore. The GOP is pushing anti-protest laws in some states - proof that mass protest scares them, in my opinion.
Just on this forum I've seen people whose lives will be negatively effected by this ban, and countless others will share similar experiences. And for all we know this is just the opening salvo in a broader "Muslims/people from Muslim-majority countries are 2nd class citizens" policy.
This must be resisted. Let's not wait and hope for someone else to start; let's organize protests against this in major cities. I live in Maine, where Lewiston has a notable Somali immigrant population who will be hit by this order, as well as others from varying backgrounds. I'm going to try to get something going in Portland, our only real city (and a progressive bastion in this state). I'm going to reach out to my friends in Massachusetts to help organize something similar in Boston.
I know little of organizing. The last time I helped organize a protest of any kind was in 2013, when the Obama administration was threatening air strikes against the Syrian government. Those protests were pretty small. This needs to be bigger. I know there are people with more experience in these things here, and enough of us here are on the same page about this that we can help do something about it. We need to contact whatever organizations will be relevant and helpful, get the word out on twitter/facebook/elsewhere online, contact whatever media will possibly cover us, and do whatever else it is people do when organizing successful protests. Maybe a catchier phrase would help too (Women's March on Washington" has a better ring to it than "anti-Muslim Ban Protests," IMO, I have yet to think of something less clumsy).
Next Saturday? 2/4/17? I see no reason to wait longer than it takes to get the word out.
Thoughts? Advice? Action? I refuse to let this happen to my fucking country without a fight.
Just on this forum I've seen people whose lives will be negatively effected by this ban, and countless others will share similar experiences. And for all we know this is just the opening salvo in a broader "Muslims/people from Muslim-majority countries are 2nd class citizens" policy.
This must be resisted. Let's not wait and hope for someone else to start; let's organize protests against this in major cities. I live in Maine, where Lewiston has a notable Somali immigrant population who will be hit by this order, as well as others from varying backgrounds. I'm going to try to get something going in Portland, our only real city (and a progressive bastion in this state). I'm going to reach out to my friends in Massachusetts to help organize something similar in Boston.
I know little of organizing. The last time I helped organize a protest of any kind was in 2013, when the Obama administration was threatening air strikes against the Syrian government. Those protests were pretty small. This needs to be bigger. I know there are people with more experience in these things here, and enough of us here are on the same page about this that we can help do something about it. We need to contact whatever organizations will be relevant and helpful, get the word out on twitter/facebook/elsewhere online, contact whatever media will possibly cover us, and do whatever else it is people do when organizing successful protests. Maybe a catchier phrase would help too (Women's March on Washington" has a better ring to it than "anti-Muslim Ban Protests," IMO, I have yet to think of something less clumsy).
Next Saturday? 2/4/17? I see no reason to wait longer than it takes to get the word out.
Thoughts? Advice? Action? I refuse to let this happen to my fucking country without a fight.
So It Goes on
+31
This discussion has been closed.
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As for a name, maybe something like the Salaam March? Take ownership of your culture and faith, and demand that your humanity be recognised.
Good luck.
NNID: Hakkekage
If white people don't hold other white people to account we have no hope for freedom
I just got into a fight with my mom who called me to stop posting on Facebook and to keep my head down
People who might be affected are scared and want to ride it out. She doesn't understand that there may be no riding this one out. This is the first salvo in a clear escalation.
NNID: Hakkekage
countries affected by muslim ban; Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen
pink = trump commercial interests
green = banned countries
to emphasise the self-mutilating stupidity of this let us consider Maryam Mirzakhani at stanford, the 2014 winner of the fields medal, and a recent iranian immigrant. this entire process is not only terrible for those excluded - their quality of life would undoubtedly improve through immigration - but also terrible for the us, which is vastly favoured by acting as a drain into which (especially underserved female brains) in these countries can drain into.
It is an act of monstrous stupidity
NNID: Hakkekage
In this case, countries that face most islamist violence are of course the countries which (muslim) inhabitants flee abroad most. The trumpian essentialist logic "they come from countries with islamists, therefore they are islamists" means "you are what you flee from". No asylum seeker would ever be legitimate by this logic. Even at the time where asylum was glamorized (the cold war era with all its welcome dissidents) this logic would have meant "you flee from a stalinist country you are therefore stalin".
So, yeah. Abject at so many levels that we don't know where to start. But I'd start there.
Do others agree?
How the shit does this happen on Holocaust Remembrance Day? It's like they were angling for maximum outrage.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
This is in Portland, Maine. Only 1000 listed as "going" so far, another couple thousand maybes. It was tentatively scheduled for today but now is postponed, organizer says she wants it to happen next weekend (dunno why she switched the thing to "May 1st," probably just a placeholder).
Anyone here in Massachusetts? Know if anyone's talking about something in Boston? I'm going to call Mass's chapter of CAIR (edit - I figure they're likely to know if something's planned) after I pick up a new cheap phone at the store in a few, speaker is broken on mine.
also gonna call Maine People's Alliance, a progressive organization I spent a year working for. Sometimes I find them to be lazy but they'd better be on board with this one.
This is the frightening part, whether something he does is illegal has no consequence if the breaks in democracy aren't interested in stopping him. That's the biggest problem we've had with Trump, the GOP are fine to let him be unleashed - damn the people who get hurt along the way. I don't know how long it'll take for the country to recover form this, if it can recover.
It directly violates standing immigration law.
I think WhyNotBoth.jpg applies here.
All the more reason for the dems to stall out confirmation for SCOTUS until at least 2018.
We're already in a constitutional crisis and we will not get out of it by letting the hostage takers get their ransom. They have already shot the hostage.
NNID: Hakkekage
{I only know some Dari so I could only follow some of what they were talking to each other just I knew what one sentence ment
Calls I'm making on Monday!
I live in a suburban area of South Dublin in Ireland, which it turns out is ultra handy for having a shitton of people to annoy about this stuff, since Dublin is Ireland's capital city and all that.
My constituency has 3 TDs (our version of congress members or MPs or whatever.) One is with our current ruling party (Josepha Madigan, Fine Gael), one is Independent but thanks to the crazy, cobbled-together government we have at the moment which you can read all about in the Hiberno-Brittanic politics thread is ALSO our Minister for Transport (Shane Ross) and one is with our Green Party, who were all but obliterated two elections ago for being distinctly ungreenpartyish but have been slowly recovering (Catherine Martin.)
Usefully, Dublin also has 3 MEPs - Members of European Parliament - who have a say in how the EU does things. One is another member of Fine Gael (Brian Hayes) one is yet another Independent (Nessa Childers) and one (Lynn Boylan) is with Sinn Féin and will be top of my list of people to call because if you can't convince someone in Sinn Féin of all parties to stand up to religious persecution then who the fuck CAN you convince because that was LITERALLY their only excuse for ANYTHING they did for years.
Our Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade is a guy by the name of Charles Flanagan, so I'll be calling him and sincerely hoping he will have been fielding many similar calls.
Rather than calling our Taoiseach (Prime Minister) I'll be calling our Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) Frances Fitzgerald because, handily, she is ALSO our Minister for Justice and Equality.
*takes a breath*
I don't know if any of you live in political systems as weirdly convoluted and too-many-cooksish as mine, but I highly recommend putting together a list of people you can hassle because holy fuck does it feel a tiny bit better to at least have some plan to face Monday morning.
Once these calls are done? Sign up with Asylum Seekers Ireland, contact some local Refugee Centres, mention both this fucking ban and Ireland's home grown disgrace of Direct Provisioning every time I talk to anyone with the slightest bit of political and commercial power (work meetings will be fun) and fundraise, protest and volunteer like fuck.
Fucking hell. Two weeks ago I was thinking "I should get a new hobby!"
So expect pretty much EVERYBODY to mention this stupid ban on Oscar night. And his film to win.
FTFY. not sure how this will affect his films chance at winning though. depends on when voting closes and how many ballots have already been submitted.
Which, I have absolutely no faith in meaning ANYTHING right now.
Trump has made the media the opposition party, except for the ones he personally chooses to be the bearer of "legitimate" facts for his administration.
All negative news and opinion about anything team Trump says, does, or even insinuates is, to a not insubstantial portion of the country, cast as nothing but lies.
Not even the long standing, "this isn't real news/not focusing on the right thing/only for ratings" as it was for the last few years. But well and true "this is false".
And given that the Republicans rule the playground right now, they legitimize everything by letting it through with their approval, or simply not opposing it and let it slide.
Democrats can fight all they want, but they are seen as a bunch of sore losers who are just playing a political game.
The only way I really see forward is to get some Republicans in power (or at least with influence) to see what a complete disaster this is and start speaking (and acting) in the best interests of the goddamn country they are supposed to employed in the service of.
But I don't know how to get there. Yes, funding and supporting organizations to help all the people who are absolutely FUCKED by this administration is important.
But that's a bandaid over a festering wound,
How do we actually get things to change for the better, and not just get an occasional push back when the spotlight gets a bit too hot on an issue (that they can just try to push through later on)?
Google, Facebook and PayPal all have European HQs in Dublin. This means any of their green card holding staff born in the "wrong" country who happened to be working in any of these offices last week are now stranded here.
Jesus fucking Christ.
This will only increase anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. If anything, the risk of terrorist incidents will grow. Unfortunately, when the worst inevitably happens, Trump will blindly see it as justification of his actions and double-down.
America is in a spiral and I don't know the way out.
It was this attitude, so clever & ahead of its time, that enabled most of the U.S.'s superpower status.
"They don't want you? Come here, then; work for us instead. We'll happily take the extra GDP & surprise innovation,"
It may be worthwhile to tell people that (so long as Trump's administration doesn't entirely wind down the Doomsday Clock), what Trump is doing will probably result in the U.S. ceding its superpower status.
If they are anything like my parents? They don't care.
They don't have a clue what that actually means, or what it does for them. They only see us as "spending money on others when we should be taking care of ourselves".
The argument has become a 0 sum one. We are not spending money correctly here, which means we shouldn't be spending money anywhere else. There is no other argument they accept.
Not that it matters.
If we took care of everything here, the same people would argue, "everything is great here, why give them money? They should be able to do this on their own like we do".
It was never entirely true, though. We "tolerated" immigrants in the barest and most literal sense that we let them come (sometimes, not counting the Chinese Exclusion Acts or the practical ban on anyone who wasn't from Western Europe from 1920-1965), but have always heavily put upon them once they were here. It's another part of the American legacy that is aspirational more than real.
While true, they eventually were accepted to some extent.
The only real issue has been that generally it's been because a new group started coming over and was now the put upon group.
But that kind of behavior being put into law was something we were SUPPOSED to have left behind. The Japanese internment camps were something we, at one point, recognized as a really bad move, just like all the rest of them in our past.
We, as a nation, were moving towards being more accepting... even if that wasn't always a smooth road, and even if some were not willingly walking along it... they were simply set to be left behind as history moved forward.
What's happening now is a backslide of monumental proportions that I don't think anyone was expecting up until Trump won.
And even his victory, with all his negative and bigoted rhetoric, still had many expecting him to just be all talk.
Yet here we are, facing the President of the United States of America signing EO's that are fitting of an age we had hoped we had put behind us nearly a century ago.
In much shittier news, firefighters in Texas are responding to a fire that's engulfed a mosque.
God I don't even know what to do though
e: He's currently detained in an airport.
Not just America (the same trend can be observed in Europe), but yes. I'm fascinated by how islamophobes and islamists are on the same page about it. Both agreeing about an inevitable and desirable "war" between christians and muslims, and both hitting hard at whoever refuses to frame the world in those terms. Both working hard at making it a self-fulfilling prophecy, by silencing the "lukewarm", the pacifists, the moderates (in this context, those who don't feel particularly enraged at local or global diversity). Both agreeing to see ISIS as the archetype of islam. Both monsters validating each other, and purifying themselves of all humanity.
As always, the true frontline is between the decent humans, and the people who desire to hate/fight/kill each others. Between those who want to play war (no matter their side), and those who don't. The real stake is the definition of this axis of opposition, that warmongers wish to attach to national or religious flags. In that sense, Trumpists and ISIS have a common project.
It reminds me of the first stages of the genocidary process (up to "polarization"), except symetrical. For the record, I've heard neo-nazi militants (from the greek Golden Dawn) openly, explicitely wish for such a polarization, in order to trigger an open conflict, which, in their eyes, would allow them to "solve" everything through force and violence.
We live in a classroom full of toddlers wishing to fight, and joining against the teachers who try to split and ground them (to protect everybody, and especially the kids who play along fine). Except that the aggressive toddlers are in charge now.
retaliation from Iran is not a good sign can i can't see it having any effect other than cause Trump to go even further in his abhorrent policies.
Who the fuck do I give money to?