What If Donald Trump Jr.’s Bowl of Skittles Were Gun-Owners?
Fear mongering, despite the pretenses, is a bipartisan project.
TwitterDonald Trump Jr. took after his dad and sent out a tweet that's riled social media up. The tweet was of an image of a bowl of skittles. "If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?" the image, branded with the Trump-Pence logo, asked. "That's our Syrian refugee problem."
There are plenty of problems with it—people aren't skittles, there's more than a bowlful of them being admitted into the U.S. each year, a small proportion of them are actually from Syria, not even three are guaranteed to kill you, and the refugees go through a screening process.
Perhaps most importantly, some dangers are the cost of freedom. Countless real world phenomena could kill you, and it would be safest to sit under the bed in your bedroom and never go out into the real world. Progressives had their moment mocking Trump Jr. for his fearmongering, but it is a native language to the left as well. After any prominent enough incident of gun violence, progressive leaders will rile up their base by demanding vague "common sense" gun control and even demonizing law-abiding gun-owners.
So what if the bowl of skittles were made of gun-owners? Would those on the left mocking Trump Jr. "take a handful" then? Both gun ownership (self-defense) and freedom of movement can be considered natural rights, but neither the left nor right in this country accept both as such. When Trump insisted immigration was "not a right" (in the Constitution, it's not), many on the left mocked him. But not only does the left regularly deny that the right to bear arms is a right (in the Constitution, it is), but left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders have even claimed that open borders were a "right wing ploy." The response that "refugees are people but guns are not" is inadequate—gun owners are people too.
Hillary Clinton has touted immigration reform, but she has not offered anything close to making immigration anything resembling a right. All "comprehensive" immigration reform really needs to do is permit law-abiding individuals to cross the border freely, and perhaps a dismantling of the welfare state to remove perverse government incentives for immigration. But for the left, as for the right, immigration reform is about imposing controls and extending the powers of the federal government.
Trump's unapologetic anti-immigration stand (both the illegal and legal varieties) and overt fearmongering over terrorism certainly makes it easier for Democrats to claim the high ground, but it does not erase Democrats' poor record on immigration (they helped scuttle efforts toward immigration at the tail-end of the Bush administration and it was not a priority when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress) nor their history of fearmongering. Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012 on a platform that prominently included "killing Osama bin Laden." In Philadelphia last week, he insisted only voting straight-ticket Democrat would keep the U.S. safe, secure, and prosperous. And while his supporters tended to believe things in the U.S. were getting worse (why wouldn't they? Democratic politicians have been telling them so), at least Trump's success at parlaying pessimism in the future into popular support might cause Democratic politicians to reconsider the wisdom of downplaying an objectively bright future.
Photo Credit: Twitter
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The funniest thing here is that the "bowl of skittles" thing was originally created and used by radical feminists to explain why hating or fearing men was OK.
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Excellent.
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Damn. Nice job pulling that one out of the memory hole.
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So radical feminists and Republicans sound alike? Thank Goddess I picked up this shocked face at Michfest.
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The regressive left, LGBT groups, and feminists have long come full circle and turned into even more extreme versions of the conservatives they were created to oppose.
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Sort of like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
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It's totally different! One is M&M's, the other Skittles.
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This analogy is ridiculous. Everyone knows it would be the brown ones that would kill you.
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and perhaps a dismantling of the welfare state to remove perverse government incentives for immigration
Perhaps, but not necessarily eh?
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The important thing for Reason is that Democrats like them so don't hold your breath.
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So what if the bowl of skittles were made of gun-owners? Would those on the left mocking Trump Jr. "take a handful" then?
Way to get the Democrats on board with the Skittles analogy, Mr. Ed.
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1. Legal gun owners are actually statistically less likely to commit crimes than the general population. Muslim immigrants and Muslims in general commit violent acts of terror far out of proportion to their percent of the population. Indicates maybe not smart to go full Angela Merkel here.
2. Right to keep and bear arms right there in constitution and applies to US citizens, government may not infringe. There is no right for foreigners to immigrate to the US, government may set any rules it likes including ban.
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Oh, you and your logic!
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Just when I thought this election couldn't get any dumber... the media goes and totally redeems itself!
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This.
I predict not a day will go by before the Trayvon Martin dogwhistle bullshit starts up.
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Kind reminds me of Muhammad ALi's quote on white people:
"There are many white people who mean right and in their hearts wanna do right. If 10,000 snakes were coming down that aisle now, and I had a door that I could shut, and in that 10,000, 1,000 meant right, 1,000 rattlesnakes didn't want to bite me, I knew they were good... Should I let all these rattlesnakes come down, hoping that that thousand get together and form a shield? Or should I just close the door and stay safe?"
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The M&M analogy appeals to my love of brevity.
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Ali was evidently not into the whole brevity thing.
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I'm not sure I'd make too much of that screening process, given the 800 immigrants who were accidentally granted citizenship the other day.
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So, they're ... no longer ... *poisoned* Skittles?
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Look, government may be wasteful, arrogant, and generally incompetent if not downright malicious when it comes to fighting wars or enforcing laws or administering welfare or regulating trade or building literally anything, but we can totally trust them to secure the borders okay?
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By that logic you can't trust them to leave the borders free either.
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Um... what?
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Conscripting employers into enforcing immigration laws is totally okay, because muh welfare.
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welfarejerbs -
but we can totally trust them to secure the borders okay?
When I asked that question a while back, I was told "that's why refugees spend years in camps". I believe that response was "assurance" that the vetting was thorough.
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Look, government may be wasteful, arrogant, and generally incompetent if not downright malicious when it comes to fighting wars or enforcing laws or administering welfare or regulating trade or building literally anything, but we can totally trust them to
secure the bordersvet immigrants okay? -
Someone thinks vetting immigrants and securing the border are two different things. Oh.
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Is it not part of the process of letting people in?
Oh.
If it isn't, that's a much bigger problem.
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Yeah, even the heads of the FBI, CIA and NSA have admitted the refugees can't really be adequately vetted. And I see no reason to to bring them here when even Angela Merkel admits they are being used to infiltrate terrorists. What does the country gain by bringing them in? What do we lose if we don't? When did libertarians get so far away from the principle of some other country's conflicts and issues not being our problem?
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What do we lose if we don't?
The Unifying Power of Diversity™!
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Muh Diversity!
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"..it would be safest to sit under the bed in your bedroom and never go out into the real world."
Not for this guy.
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Is somebody asking you to pay to import gun owners? This doesn't translate over. Suppose 50 people in my neighborhood were great, and one was a killer. I wouldn't unlock my door, let alone drive them to my house and give them room and board. But I don't give a shit what they do elsewhere.
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I dont live in Dearborn, MI.
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Another reason why you should trust federal investigators to suss out the bad apples: Ahmad Khan Rahami's Father Told Police in 2014 His Son Was a Terrorist, Officials Say
Two years before the bombings that Ahmad Khan Rahami is suspected of carrying out in New York and New Jersey, his father told the police that his son was a terrorist, prompting a review by federal agents, according to two law enforcement officials.
The father, Mohammad Rahami, in a brief interview on Tuesday, said that at the time he told agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his concern, his son had just had a fight with another of his sons and stabbed the man, leading to a criminal investigation.
"Two years ago I go to the F.B.I. because my son was doing really bad, O.K.?" he said. "But they check almost two months, they say, 'He's O.K., he's clean, he's not a terrorist.' I say O.K."
He added: "Now they say he is a terrorist. I say O.K." -
This guy is all over the place.
A reporter asked, "Do you think your son is a terrorist?"
"No," Mohammad Rahami said. "And the F.B.I., they know that."I'd love to know just how many potential Islamic terrorists they are interviewing that they now have let two slip through after investigations. Just shows how futile it is to begin with.
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He doesn't seem to have a very meticulous grasp of English, and it sounds like he's hastening to distance himself from his son. He doesn't want to be seen as having been involved.
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He doesn't want to be a Skittle.
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O.K!
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Two? Did you forget the Boston Marathon bombers, at least one of whom was murdering folk?
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But enough about mooninite scandal.
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I think better than the gun-owner analogy is this:
There are a bunch of cars on the road, a few of them are being driven by drunks. Are you still going to work today?
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But the analogy is more like, there's a few drun drivers on the road, so we should we should pour liquor down people's throats and put them behind the wheel because IDK- love and happy or something. The fact that some X percentage of Americans has a risk of being killers hardly justifies importing another population with an even higher risk of being killers.
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Exactly.
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How about: There are a bunch of cars on the road, a few of them are being driven by
drunkshomicidal maniacs. Are you still going to work today? -
There are a bunch of cars on the road, a few of them are being driven by drunks. Are you still going to work today?
I"m driven to drink out of fear of other drunk drivers out there. Which in turns actually leads me to a drunken drive.
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I...don't really think the analogy can be saved.
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It's been skittled.
*** bites lip ***
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Vote for Hillary and then principled conservatives downballot. Ensure 4 years of gridlock until Rand Paul can ascend the throne.
Reason - tell us more about these fabled 'principled conservatives'.
Jill Stein trembles at the thought of this message.
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Where is the Gary Johnson word cloud?
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"What's a word cloud?"
*** ducks ***
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Kinda hard to make a cloud of of the word "pot".
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*** giggles uncontrollably ***
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You forgot "Aleppo".
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freedom of movement can be considered natural right[s]
This is where I part company with orthodox libertarians. I'm happy to let people in who demonstrate some sort of willingness to not lift the contents of my wallet, but no, I don't believe that everybody has the "right" to come here.
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My friends call me Skittles; wanna taste the rainbow?
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Ewwwww
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There's a bowl (or basket) of people exercising their constitutional right to bear arms. Some of them will use their guns to commit crimes. And not just cops, some of the people misusing their guns are regular citizens.
There's a basket of people exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Some of them will misuse their freedom of speech to recruit terrorist bombers, and to chalk "Trump 2016" on a college sidewalk.
There's a basket of foreigners with no ties to this country and no right to enter. Some of them will kill Americans if we admit them to this country.
Do you see how that last one wasn't like the others?
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There's a basket of foreigners with no ties to this country and no right to enter
That's called begging the question.
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Fair enough -
A basket of foreigners whose only claim to enter the country is a law giving the executive the discretion to admit refugees, and who have no natural-law right to wander from one country to another, only the treaty right not to be sent back to a country where they'll be persecuted. But they can exercise that right in any country other than the one where they would be persecuted.
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What fucking freedom, Jacob? The money I earn is taken away to be spent on things I have no control over. I must ask permission and pay a fee for almost every goddamn thing I do. The State has exploded, debt is off the charts and we are completely ass backwards about the meaning of liberty.
I will risk the dangers of freedom when there's actually some to be found. If we were really free, I guarantee you most libertarians would have no problem with immigration from anywhere.
Oh, and skittles suck.
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Ed, not Jacob.. Goddamit.
Commenting while trying to ignore a conference call is hard.
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Mmmmm, Skittles
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Yeahhhhhhhhhhh.
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Many of these terrorist acts can be better understood as a rebellion against the religion of the parents. In this case, the father pressured the son to get married. And this was the son's response. It's a very similar story as San Bernardino. "You want me to be a good Muslim, dad? Careful what you wish for!"
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Yet another reason to ban young men.
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It's amazing how progressives forget all about the precautionary principle once the subject changes from global warming to Muslim immigration--not that Krayewski is doing that here.
Trump has a number of principles on his side. For one, his primary concern appears to be about protecting our rights from foreign terrorists. That syncs nicely with the idea that if the government has any legitimate purpose at all, it's to protect our rights. If we have a military, an immigration policy, etc. to protect our rights from foreign threats, then they're doing their libertarian job by minimizing the threat of terrorism--so long as how they're doing it is in harmony with the Constitution.
The question MIGHT then become whether discriminating against people because they're Muslims is constitutional. The correct answer to that question is "no.
. . . but that isn't the question Trump is asking. Last I read, Trump's position was in his nomination acceptance speech:
"We must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism until such time as proven vetting mechanisms have been put in place."
Nothing in there about Muslims.
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Immigration from countries where anti-American terrorists are thick as flies and we can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys--is like a bowl of Skittles.
Screw anybody and everybody who says the United States government should discriminate against anybody on the basis of being Muslim.
But suspending immigration from countries that are rife with anti-American terrorists is not discrimination on the basis of being Muslim.
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The people who did the attacks in San Bernadino, Orlando and this last one were all naturalized citizens who at the time of their naturalization would have passed any reasonable vetting process. And all of them were economically fairly okay and were by any reasonable definition assimilated. The fact is some non zero number of Muslims are going to radicalize and do something awful and there is no reliable way to tell which Muslims will do that. Your chances of having an Islamic terrorism problem and the seriousness of that problem varies directly with the number of Muslims you have in your society. Have a lot of Muslims like France and you will have a very serious problem. Have a significant number but not a large minority like the US and you will have some problems but less than what France has.
That is just reality. That doesn't' necessarily mean that we should not let any Muslims into the country. It does, however, mean, that the price of doing so is going to be some amount of terrorism. Lying and pretending that is not the case and that we can somehow "vet the bad ones" or the Muslims we get will be different than the Muslims every other country gets doesn't help the matter. Whatever the solution to this problem is it isn't going to be found by lying and pretending reality is different than what it is the way Ed does here.
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Wanting to more thoroughly vet immigrants does not equal anti immigration