Donald Trump could barely have scripted it better. After a year of tormenting Mexico as a hostile foe, he stepped to a podium on Mexican soil — alongside the country’s leader Enrique Peña Nieto — and got a president’s welcome.
Trump emerged from an hourlong huddle with Peña Nieto and the pair delivered side-by-side statements, embedding subtle criticisms of each other inside enthusiastic declarations of mutual respect. But it was the precise visual Trump had hoped for: a bilateral news conference that amounted to a preview of what similar international trips might look like in a Trump presidency.
.. Peña Nieto even contended that Trump’s hot-blooded rhetoric about Mexicans has been, in some cases, “misinterpretations.”
.. He delivered a methodical dismantling of Trump’s anti-NAFTA arguments, noting that trade with Mexico supports as many as 6 million American jobs. He also reminded Trump that for all the undocumented immigrants and drugs flowing north, illegal cash and weapons are flowing south.
.. “Every year millions of weapons and millions of dollars cross illegally into Mexico from the North that strengthen cartels and other criminal organizations that generate violence in Mexico and receives earnings from drug sales in the United States. This flow has to be stopped.”
.. Later, Peña Nieto lamented that there’s been “misinterpretations and statements that have unfortunately hurt and affected Mexicans in the way he’s presented his candidacy,” but he added that “I was sure that his genuine interest was to build a relationship.”
.. Trump, who delivered his statement second
.. Vicente Fox said the visit simply legitimized Trump’s earlier harsh rhetoric. After the speech, Felipe Calderon called Trump a “hypocrite” for changing his tone.
“I don’t believe him. He is lying. He doesn’t mean what he says,” Calderon said on CNN. “He says we’re rapists and tomorrow he says we’re wonderful, smart, hardworking people. He is lying. And for that reason, I think, I was very, very sorry, I’m very sorry he came to Mexico. I think it was a very important mistake.”
The Political Philosophy Of Guns
Would America Really Be A Better Society Without Them?
What philosophical analysis can do is offer new perspective and argumentative resources by which a political debate such as this one might be improved from its toxic stalemate.
.. Both sides of the gun control debate know they are right. But only one side recognises it as a fundamentally philosophical dispute. The other has systematically evaded the real debate about values in favour of the faux objectivity of a statistical public health argument ..
.. The advocates of gun control need to take the political philosophy of the gun rights movement seriously and show that a society without guns is a better society not that it is a safer one... Gun control advocates rely excessively on a public health case that is not only much weaker than they believe it to be but also crowds out the kind of arguments that might actually win over their opponents. Their confidence that they are on the right side of history has blinded them to the fact that they have chosen to fight on the wrong ground. They keep harping on about guns killing people. As if guns were like cigarettes, and as if the numbers were big enough to matter... America is not 43rd in the world for life-expectancy because it kills so many people with guns, but, principally, because of the social gradient in health that follows from its shameful levels of socio-economic inequality.. the number of Americans who die in traffic accidents is now about the same as those killed by guns.. But a government cannot have the same confidence that a death removed from the gun statistics represents a life saved... Many murders presently committed with guns would still occur even if all of America’s 300 million civilian held weapons magically disappeared. Likewise for suicide... The mass killings by individual crazies that so dominate the news cycle are actually the very weakest part of the public health argument for gun control. It feels like there are a lot of them – 81 since 1982,.. The reason is that rates of violence have a lot more to do with social conditions and inequality than with particular technologies... mass killings matter not because they present a significant public health risk to our lifespans to be analysed like car accidents or cigarettes, but because they are deliberate attacks on our society to be analysed like terrorism... Mass killings are not interpersonal squabbles but deliberate attacks on the peace itself, and this is something citizens have the right to hold their government responsible for... the legitimacy of any state is its ability to provide its citizens with freedom from fear... In one political philosophy, government is there to help good citizens defend their rights and liberties for themselves. In the other, government is expected to guarantee security directly by removing the sources of fear... This is fundamentally a dispute about how citizens should relate to the state, and especially a dispute between the state as a guarantor of security (after the timid absolutism of Hobbes) or as a guarantor of liberty (after the rebellious Locke)... The gun rights movement seems to me to reflect a heroic vision of citizenship, and hence of society, that taps into an enduring strain of rugged individualism in America’s political psychology... just look at how Americans from all points on the political spectrum responded to 9/11 by demanding the federal government do whatever it took to make them feel safe again... If guns are sometimes used against society that may be a price worth paying to maintain a free society... By making citizens feel less dependent on the institutions of the state to guarantee their freedom and security, guns allow them to believe that they are in a position to bargain with the state rather than to submit, like frightened sheep, to its authority to decide what is best for them... The trouble with pragmatism as a method of politics is that solving real problems is difficult and produces many failures along the way. In contrast, campaigning for a law has a pleasing simplicity, even if it is as much use as a ban on cancer... The law and order approach that began in the 1980s and is now finally being rolled back was predicated on such a theory, a foolish one that divided the world into bad guys and good guys and assumed bad guys could only be controlled by deterrence... Gun rights introduce a new fear and distance between fellow citizens, whether they choose to arm themselves or not... Guns were supposed to protect society from threats, including from its own government. But instead they undermine its health from within, weakening civil society and leaving us unable to relate to each other except via the legalistic forms controlled by the state or else down the barrel of mutual suspicion, as in a spaghetti Western. The great irony of gun rights is that they actually make citizens more dependent on the state and less able to resist it because we lose the sense of solidarity that civilian society so readily supports.. Rather it is the relations between citizens that suffer most in an armed society. This is a harm that at least a large proportion of believers in gun rights could be persuaded to take seriously, since it undermines the very integrity and resilience of society, and thus its independence of government, that is central to their political philosophy.
Trump’s Speech Is Good. Really Good
I went to the gun range today. Thursdays in the early afternoon, around 2, is my usual range time. Usually there are 3-5 people shooting. Two weeks ago I was the only one. Today I was first in line when someone finished, which was 45 minutes later. Every alley was full, and there were groups of people in line behind me. One group had 8 people. Of those, only 2 had ever shot. The other 6 want to learn.
I talked to one of my buddies there, and [he] said Monday at 10:00, they open at 9:00, they were already putting people in line, and it has stayed that way all week. He said people are scared, learning to shoot, and trying to get their LTC [license to carry] as quickly as possible.
.. I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.
.. Whether or not Trump can or will do a thing about it is another question. But this is a really good speech on these themes.
.. Straight-up Nixon ’68. Henceforth, every incident of violence against the police, every left-wing riot outside Trump campaign stops, and every campus disturbance this fall, will be a Trump commercial.
.. Ross Douthat earlier today called it “Buchananism without religion.”
U.S. must atone for its original sins: Slavery, guns
Public television switched to re-runs of fireworks from cloud-free July 4ths of yesteryear. It all seems a grand metaphor for a country that is in a fog, squinting for clarity and the joy of color.
.. They are America’s original sins: Slavery and guns…and they have never been washed clean.
.. The necessity of a large and unified new nation to defeat Great Britain and create a truly independent United States meant massive concessions to the plantation owners of the South, including the notorious decision to count (non-voting, of course) slaves as 3/5 of a person, to boost that region’s representation in Congress.
.. But within the new nation, fears of an all-out slave revolt only grew as the population of black people in bondage eventually swelled to 4 million. It is here that the second vine starts growing: The American romance with gun culture. Remember the 2nd Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms in the guise of “a well-regulated militia”? By the time that amendment was drafted into the Bill of Rights in 1789,militias in states such as Georgia that were essentially slave patrols with the goal of putting down any blacks who dared seek their freedom.
.. As early as 1840, antebellum historian Richard Hildreth observed that violence was frequently employed in the South both to subordinate slaves and to intimidate abolitionists.”
.. As I mentioned here recently, invest two hours of your time at your local cinema to watch The Free State of Jones, which portrays how terror against freed blacks was launched in the South with virtually no gap after the war — white men trading their gray Confederate caps for the white hoods of the Klan.
.. But just as we ignore the horrors of the post-Reconstruction South, we also forget that the reaction to the civil rights era — especially when many American cities erupted into full-scale revolt — had arguably a greater impact on how we live today. Those uprisings led directly to the “law-and-order” administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and to “white flight” that left urban neighborhoods devoid of services, and created separate and unequal school districts.
.. The two most important developments were this: A draconian “war on drugs” that targeted urban drug use (while ignoring, largely, illegal recreational drugs in the suburbs); this in turn paved the way for stepped-up police activity and then so-called “broken windows” policing that led to the unprecedented and shocking mass incarceration of blacks — the New Jim Crow.
.. It was in the aftermath of 1960s racial unrest that the National Rifle Association went from a sensible, moderate voice for sportsmen to become the lobbying group for lucrative merchants of death that peddled fear and promised manhood until, remarkably, there were more guns in the United States than people.
.. Police in the United States are more likely than their counterparts in other nations to be killed by a civilian with a gun. That in turn makes police more suspicious and more anxious in traffic stops
.. Then think about how Castile — a working man with a responsible job caring for children in a school cafeteria — was pulled over and cited a remarkable 52 times by the police.
..Was he profiled and harassed because he was black? If so, it would fit the pattern of so many formerly middle-class towns that balance their budget by fining and harassing their citizens,