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I’ve observed Shroomy for about ten years on the Foro and he’s been one of the most level even keeled persons to be a part of this group. His judgment on character and who’s opinions to place stock in are very good.
I get it. I get what Shroomy is saying. I think by way of knowing his character even online he’s straight up correct, I also see he’s frustrated by pretty much being gaslighted by people he’s hung around with for ten years and lived fairly nicely with, and he’s not a quarrelsome guy.
Perhaps that is your view, but Schroomy brought all of this on himself. No one was arguing with Shroomy. No one was challenging him or his views on the Foro. It was Shroomy who out of the blue decided to take a comment I made in a previous thread, totally misrepresent it in order to create a straw man to criticize (and to criticize Ricardo in the bargain), and make some vicious personal attacks and accusations of racism and being anti-immigrant.
Level-headed and even-keeled? Very good judgment on character whose opinions one should place stock in? Not a quarrelsome guy? Let's review the bidding.
From his very first comment that initiated this thread:
"I am used to the knee jerk reaction from Americans like Bill when you criticize ANY part of the society or the country. It's the classic: "Well, if you don't like it, why did you come here in the first place!?" What an ignorant and ridiculous response! And to see Ricardo back some of these ideas up was the most surprising. I don't think you folks understand why people come to this country."
Knee-jerk reaction? Ignorant? ridiculous? Apparently that is his default position to describe those with whom he disagrees, after misrepresenting statements made in the first place.
From his next comment:
"And you just lost all my respect (if you had any to begin with that is). But of course, you won't care about the opinion of an immigrant that wasn't born in this country. 'Merica!'"
He now, with no reason to do so, charges me with being an anti-immigrant nativist, with a tinge of self-pity thrown in.
Then there was the little "cutesy" video from South Park, associating me with its anti-immigrant screed.
Finally, there is his sophomoric comment: "You guys done jerking each other off?" followed by: "All you gotta do is take the bag out of your heads. Bill particularly has a very outdated image of immigration in this country and in the world even though he should be the most sensitive to it due to his diplomatic career."
I have adjudicated immigrant visa applications as a Foreign Service Officer and continue to follow the subject with interest. I definitely know the subject well.
Level-headed? Good judgment? astute opinions? Not a quarrelsome guy?
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
I have adjudicated immigrant visa applications as a Foreign Service Officer and continue to follow the subject with interest. I definitely know the subject well.
Bill, with all due respect, I think you need to be on the receiving end of the immigration system rather than the one doing the adjudicating before you can really appreciate all of the nuances of the system. At the end of the day, these are human beings, not documents, that are interfacing with this system. Implicit bias and unconscious bias play a very significant role in these interactions, and unless the person doing the adjudicating has not been on the receiving end of the immigration system themselves, or one of their close family members has, then a major portion of understanding truly how this system works is missed.
I've worked with major law firms in the USA and at several major universities during my navigation of the immigration system, and I was able to appreciate very clearly how the folks who very well understand the system on paper do not understand the system in its impact on human beings and their trajectories in life. Several different people in this system with whom I've worked who were in very high up positions continued to behave in totally un-empathic and discriminatory fashions even though on paper and by the book they had it all figured out. What they totally missed though was that there was a person sitting in front of them or coupled with this packet of papers, not just a number. That may have nothing to do with the USA in particular, and is an important piece of this equation. Unless someone has had to deal with needing to get a visa to be able to experience "freedom" to live in the world, or to be able to maintain their vitality, then even if they wrote the entire immigration law / policies, then they really still don't understand how it works. It's not just paper, it's human beings that are involved... And again, this may have nothing to do with the USA in particular. This is the only system with which I've interacted, however, my parents and brother interacted with the Canadian system, and they were always treated with dignity and respect, FAR from what my experience was like. Perhaps just a coincidence...
My point, hastily made, was that I think people resenting condescension was also a significant factor,
I agree with both you and Ricardo on this point. Trump clearly solicited, and received, racist support. He encouraged racism in his campaign. But he also received support from those whites who felt marginalized by both the economy and the so-called elites. The studies done on those voters in counties I mentioned above in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then Trump in 2016 would seem to bear this out.
One of Hillary Clinton's major mistakes in the 2016 campaign was to publicly refer to Trump supporters as "a basket of deplorables." She played right into the view of those who felt marginalized that they were being condescended to, if not outright despised, by elites such as Clinton. It may not have made a difference had she not said it, but she certainly didn't gain any votes by voicing it.
I voted for Clinton in 2016 because I think she had a far better sense of the U.S. national interest than Trump. I thought it then, and I'm sure of it now. But Clinton was her own worst enemy, and we have to live with the result.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Bill, with all due respect, I think you need to be on the receiving end of the immigration system rather than the one doing the adjudicating before you can really appreciate all of the nuances of the system. At the end of the day, these are human beings, not documents, that are interfacing with this system. Implicit bias and unconscious bias play a very significant role in these interactions, and unless the person doing the adjudicating has not been on the receiving end of the immigration system themselves, or one of their close family members has, then a major portion of understanding truly how this system works is missed.
I appreciate your thoughts, Ramzi, and do not take them lightly. Nevertheless, When I was adjudicating immigrant visa applications and interviewing applicants, I was well-aware of the nuances of the system and that I was dealing with human beings whose immediate fate was in my hands. So did most of my colleagues. In fact we would often discuss that very aspect--we were dealing with human beings--in occasional off-hours conversations. This was many years ago when I was a junior officer in Manila, but it is as true today as it was then. Unfortunately, Trump has placed some heavy restrictions on the process today, but that is not the fault of the officers who continue to apply the law and regulations in their adjudications in as fair a manner as possible.
One of the tropes of people who observe the Foreign Service and Embassy officers adjudicating visas (and engaging in other activities as well) is that they just apply the law and regulations with no thought of its impact on the applicants. I can assure you that is a false view of how Embassies and Consulates operate. My modus operandi when I was adjudicating immigrant visa applications was to assume that the applicant was eligible for the visa unless something arose that required a denial.
And, of course, there were denials. The fact is we have to apply the law and regulations and must deny applicants who fail to meet the requirements. That is not a function of explicit or implicit bias. Nor is it a failure to understand its impact on the denied applicant. And a denial did not necessarily mean the applicant could never receive an immigrant visa. Some denials were because of lacking a required document, some were due to other factors that required obtaining a waiver.
I'm sure that there were, and are, Foreign Service Officers in Embassies and Consulates who brusquely handle applicants and appear to be unconcerned with their fates. But I am equally sure, based on my own experience and continued contact with younger Foreign Service Officers, that the great majority do their job of applying U.S. law and regulations while keeping in mind its effect on the applicants.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
Clinton’s infamous comment was taken out of context by Fox and Bernie bro journalists like Chris Chilizza- what she actually said was mild and it was completely true. I have the complete quote if anyone wants to look at it.
Paraphrased she said that the majority of people thinking about voting for trump are good Americans, but that there is an element of his supporters who are conspiracy nuts who are a sub group- “a basket of deplorables” amidst a majority of regular people. Fox News blew it up and the misogynistic journalists in the middle partook of 30 years of smears against Hillary that didn’t come out until she ran for president.
The left leaning media pundits backing sanders used it as a weapon in their support of his us against them framing of democrats. Sanders used framing to divide democrats by saying you’re either a neoliberal shill or you’re a righteous progressive. He used neoliberal in the wrong context to begin with, his overall framing was a lot like George W Bush saying you’re either for us or you’re agin is.
Sanders negative framing device was condescending by its very structure and set up an infighting dynamic within democratic ranks. Much of what he said about her was untrue ( check politifact) and this schism mentality was highly receptive to anti Clinton propaganda of the far right.
Hillary called it all correctly, yes there was interference from Russia, yes there is a right wing conspiracy ( trump admin election staff was investigated and there were over 30 indictments again them for election malfeasance- resulting in the conviction and imprisonments of high trump officials. More in fact than in the Nixon admin impeachment)
So factor in that James Comey announced that the email investigators found nothing wrong with the trove of emails, but couldn’t help far overstepping his station by saying there was nothing to indict her on, but that it was sloppy. Only to find out just about everyone in government in the FBI is sloppy. More Comey- again oversteps his boundaries by re opening the the email business 10 days before the election and then recants later as false alarm. ( That Huma didn’t murder her former husband over that was incredible)
Comey has the gall to write a book about leadership and promote it, after making a major move that legitimately could be cited as an instrument to throw an election.
Let me recount a dozen other things that amount to a perfect storm of slander, smears and media manipulation of facts against Clinton. But nah, you don’t have time. Let’s just go right to trump himself.
Trump on the stump usually, and still does, open his cult rallies with a chant of ‘lock her up’ - it’s beyond deeply misogynistic, it’s like Charlie Manson leading a chant. It’s demonic. It’s beyond deplorable, it deep mental illness on the part of trump, his surrogates and his cult following. And then the very sickest part is that people not involved don’t care enough to condemn his sick actions, and the way he’s modified what we used to consider criminal unacceptable behavior.
In light of all these horrible things it’s the average Clinton supporter who gets shat upon and blamed for being condescending.
Condescending for what? Standing up for what’s right in the face of if a deplorable piece of trash in the Oval Office?
I appreciate your thoughts, Ramzi, and do not take them lightly. Nevertheless, When I was adjudicating immigrant visa applications and interviewing applicants, I was well-aware of the nuances of the system and that I was dealing with human beings whose immediate fate was in my hands. So did most of my colleagues. In fact we would often discuss that very aspect--we were dealing with human beings--in occasional off-hours conversations. This was many years ago when I was a junior officer in Manila, but it is as true today as it was then. Unfortunately, Trump has placed some heavy restrictions on the process today, but that is not the fault of the officers who continue to apply the law and regulations in their adjudications in as fair a manner as possible.
One of the tropes of people who observe the Foreign Service and Embassy officers adjudicating visas (and engaging in other activities as well) is that they just apply the law and regulations with no thought of its impact on the applicants. I can assure you that is a false view of how Embassies and Consulates operate. My modus operandi when I was adjudicating immigrant visa applications was to assume that the applicant was eligible for the visa unless something arose that required a denial.
And, of course, there were denials. The fact is we have to apply the law and regulations and must deny applicants who fail to meet the requirements. That is not a function of explicit or implicit bias. Nor is it a failure to understand its impact on the denied applicant. And a denial did not necessarily mean the applicant could never receive an immigrant visa. Some denials were because of lacking a required document, some were due to other factors that required obtaining a waiver.
I'm sure that there were, and are, Foreign Service Officers in Embassies and Consulates who brusquely handle applicants and appear to be unconcerned with their fates. But I am equally sure, based on my own experience and continued contact with younger Foreign Service Officers, that the great majority do their job of applying U.S. law and regulations while keeping in mind its effect on the applicants.
Bill
I don't know what happens behind the scenes once the application is sent to the USCIS, but I assure you, my friend, that I was totally inappropriately treated by the attorneys at major law firms and local immigration departments associated with two major universities in the USA that take pride in being equal opportunity employers. Even so to the point that some of these lawyers / employees were fired after several of the immigrant, prospective faculty applicants complained. One main reason these folks behaved this way is because they had never had to endure nor be on the other side of the desk themselves, and they were indeed functioning totally ruthlessly because it was just a day job they needed to jadedly attend to make a buck at the end of the month.
This becomes a more general concept, of course, as this can apply to an engineer designing a building (who ought to do a good job and prevent it from collapsing), a physician treating a patient, etc.
I bring it up here because it is pertinent to this thread.
I don't know what happens behind the scenes once the application is sent to the USCIS, but I assure you, my friend, that I was totally inappropriately treated by the attorneys at major law firms and local immigration departments associated with two major universities in the USA that take pride in being equal opportunity employers. Even so to the point that some of these lawyers / employees were fired after several of the immigrant, prospective faculty applicants complained. One main reason these folks behaved this way is because they had never had to endure nor be on the other side of the desk themselves, and they were indeed functioning totally ruthlessly because it was just a day job they needed to jadedly attend to make a buck at the end of the month.
Ramzi--I don't doubt your experience dealing with USCIS, immigration attorneys, and local immigration departments associated with major universities in the United States. I can only say that they have nothing to do with the U.S. State Department and Embassies and Consulates overseas adjudicating immigrant visas. I can only speak to the function of Consuls adjudicating immigrant visas and interviewing applicants overseas. What happens in the United States--whether with USCIS, immigration attorneys, or universities--is another issue, one in which we in the Embassy were not involved.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
I agree with your take on both Sanders and Trump. Nevertheless, I stick by my contention that there was an element of voters who went for Trump because they felt condescension by the elites, in this case represented by Clinton. As I stated, I voted for Clinton because I thought she was by far the most qualified and had a greater sense of what was in the U.S. national interest. But I think she was her own worst enemy and made unnecessary, unforced errors. One of those errors was her public statement about the "basket of deplorables." She may have been correct, but to be correct does not mean it was prudent. It did not gain her any votes and may have cost her some.
Clinton is at it again. You may have seen where she unloaded on one of the top Democratic candidates, Bernie Sanders. Clinton said "Nobody likes him" in the Senate and that he accomplished nothing. I do not like Sanders at all. He thinks the game is "rigged," he is against free trade and was against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, thus ceding Asia to China, and he is an unlikable candidate. Sanders is also a misogynist. (In some respects he is a lot like Trump!) Nevertheless, once again Clinton may be correct but imprudent. I don't see where her savaging of Sanders helps the Democratic party. It seems to me she is just fomenting more unnecessary division.
In any case, enough for tonight.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
When I took the management job at Kwaj in 1995, almost to a man the field engineers and techs had a resentful attitude toward the engineers who made more money than they did, and who bossed them around.
I don't remember offhand what Hillary Clinton was up to in 1995*, but I don't think she had any influence whatsoever on the attitudes of the men. Their attitudes had been formed by ten, fifteen, twenty years of putting up with condescending engineers, who often knew less about the job than the field engineers and techs.
I tried to do what I could about the attitudes, both resentment and condescension. It had some local effect. I don't know whether it lasted.
For a few years before Clinton went for the presidential nomination, I often said that one of her disadvantages was that the Republicans quickly recognized her as a contender and had twenty years to blacken her name with fake scandals.
When the 2016 election came along, my four friends all voted for Trump, and they still support him.
These guys aren't dumb. Among them they hold a 100-ton All Oceans Master's License, a Master Electrician License, a Nuclear Power Plant Operations Supervisor License, a Shipyard Welder License...and a bunch more certifications. The one who just retired from working for Shell on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico was making $140K/year, 4 weeks on, 4 weeks off. Another is Master Electrician in a power plant in Tampa, Florida. When they worked at Kwaj my friends were making good money, had all their housing, food, medical, etc. expenses paid, and were getting the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion on their income tax. These guys are not economically marginalized.
They don't fear the extinction of the white race: one of them was married to a Samoan beauty, another is now married to a really sweet Filipina. They're no more misogynistic than the average American male, and a lot more tolerant of gays and lesbians, because they have worked with them in overseas jobs, where their sexual orientation became apparent long before it was common for people to reveal LGBTQ identity in the USA. As long as someone does a good job and is easy to get along with, they don't care. They don't want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade which established women's right to abortion. I'm pretty sure some of my highly educated and quite prosperous relatives do.
They were just sick of taking sh1t from people with college degrees who made more money, often for less work, and who felt entitled to boss them around. They identified Clinton with the boss class. I assume they put McCain and Romney in the same bucket. I don't know whether they voted for Obama, nor what class identity they assigned to him, if any.
Trump came along, the most victimized billionaire ever to exist, and not only promised to stick it to the boss class, but did it on live TV all through the primary and general election campaigns. My friends seem to me almost hypnotized by Trump's combination of malignantly inflated victimhood and defiance. It blinds them to his prodigious defects, or at least lets them excuse his lies and malfeasance.
In my view, the campaign details you cite were not significant to my friends’ choices, compared to Trump's fake persona.Well, it must have started out as fake. It's who he actually is now.
Recently, when Trump did something particularly egregious, one of my friends responded to a negative comment about him on Facebook, saying, "Well, that might be true, but at least he makes the Libs' heads explode."
As I said, these guys aren't dumb. It's just that their resentment overwhelms their perception and logic.
It happens to just about everybody at some point. When Bill Clinton went on TV, wagged his finger, sweated, trembled and said, "I never had sex with that woman, Ms Lewinsky," and went on to imply it was OK to lie to the grand jury, I lost it. I was so mad for 45 minutes that I couldn't figure out why I was mad. After I calmed down a little I realized it was because I had seen people lose their security clearance, their job, and eventually their family for a lot less severe offenses than lying to a grand jury.
And here was the Commander in Chief lying to the country about lying to the grand jury.
I calmed down fairly quickly and returned to whatever state of rationality I customarily inhabit. It was an acute attack of resentment. My friends suffer from a chronic version.
My friends don't have a negative attitude. The ones who are now retired are having a lot of fun, rehabbing a good sized boat, tuning up a Harley and taking long road trips, even posting memes bemoaning the USA's political and cultural polarization, and exhorting people to do better. They just support Trump--enthusiastically.
I hear and see a lot of chronic resentment, not only from my friends but from people in the small towns around here, from people who were Chief Petty Officers and Master Sergeants, the man who quickly diagnoses and fixes my air conditioning system....
I'm not saying chronic resentment is justified, righteous, ought to be forgiven or tolerated, I'm just saying it exists. It exists in much greater quantity than I perceived in the 1950s and early 1960s.
One of my father's first cousins was an Air Force Master Sergeant. The younger genration called him Uncle Bud. He was among the world's most skilled radar techs in the 1940s-50s, an Air Force pioneer in the trade. He set up much of the Air Force's training program. One of my uncles started out as a house painter and ended up as business agent for the painters' union in Houston, sitting at the table and negotiating contracts with the huge oil refineries and chemical plants.
Uncle Bud joked about General "Concrete Head" Mc Mullin's screwups. My uncle lampooned the big oil and chemical executives. Neither one went around with a low grade fever of resentment. I don't know what has caused the change, but something has.
As I said, I don't know of any political science papers or books that have tried to measure how many people are suffering from chronic resentment, or how important resentment of condescension was in the election. It seems to me it may have been significant.
RNJ
(Edit)
*In 1995 Hillary Clinton was the wife of the President. She had figured prominently as Chair of the commission that formulated the Clinton Health Care Plan.
The plan failed in Congress in 1994. The Clinton administration was widely criticized for the strategy of formulating the plan largely in secret, then presenting it to Congress as a finished product.
don’t be too proud by claiming we have extraordinary moral character simply because we have made a slippery modicum of progress.
By “we” you only mean WHITE America?
quote:
Condescending for what? Standing up for what’s right in the face of if a deplorable piece of trash in the Oval Office?
The humor here gets at all the points:
Ramzi said:
quote:
One main reason these folks behaved this way is because they had never had to endure nor be on the other side of the desk themselves, and they were indeed functioning totally ruthlessly because
How do you know this? They publicly stated this after being fired or they told you/colleagues this directly after apologizing for what they did to you/others?
How do you know this? They publicly stated this after being fired or they told you/colleagues this directly after apologizing for what they did to you/others?
I asked them, and they told me. Also, other employees apologized for the behavior of these fired people after I told them how they had behaved. The "other employees" got it because they had family members who went through the system (like adopted brothers, sisters, etc.).
Questions that I got in this thread, such as the one below, show that even in educated circles there is a pretty significant lack of historical knowledge as well as critical thinking.
By replying to me using a quote you know came from the post of "Pgh-flamenco," you are attempting to attribute the quote to me. Just another example of your attempts to misrepresent my position in order to create a straw man against which you can exhibit your self-absorbed sense of moral superiority. It won't work. You know full well that I did not state the quote you cite in your comment above. In fact, your entire series of postings in this thread cast you as a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
But good to know you have a sense of moral superiority to go with your racist agenda.
It is you who has the sense of moral superiority, as I stated in my comment above. And you cannot point to any "racist agenda" on my part, in this or any other thread. Not one, because there isn't any.
Most members of the Foro occasionally debate and agree to (agreeably) disagree on various issues. Not you. From the very beginning of this thread you have injected misrepresentations, falsehoods, and venom. No one challenged you at the beginning. No one made any derogatory comments about you. It was you, from your very first post initiating this thread and continuing throughout, who demonstrated venom and downright nastiness against me and other members of the Foro.
The last post of this thread until your latest was in January 2020. That you choose to resurrect this thread now, in July, six months later, just demonstrates your pettiness and lack of character.
I refuse to engage with you on any subject or level in the future, as you have shown your true colors throughout this thread that you initiated and apparently want to continue.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
I just clicked on 'Post Reply' on the main thread and it just so happened it attributed the reply to you who are the top poster on this thread page 3. You could have just scrolled up in the page and realized this, but you are so obsessed with yourself that you immediately assumed I falsely attributed it to you.
I don't know, man, I did at first assume it was Bill who had said this (which shocked me) because of the way the attribution (what post you replied to) was displayed. You gotta be careful with that stuff, especially with highly incendiary quotes. Glad to hear you didn't mean it and it was a screw-up (and also that they weren't Bill's words).
Also I would encourage you to stay (given your last post).
To pass on Escribano's good tips, if you're struggling with other members, there's always that "block" function over each person's avatar. I hadn't even realized it was there until this week, and I'm now rather happy that it is.
I hope you'll stay, but I guess everyone has to do what they have have to do. To be perfectly honest, this thread came out of the blue for me, and I still don't quite understand it. I seem to recall estebanana mentioning something similar when he dropped off the radar a while back, and I didn't understand it then either. I had just assumed you had left because you were busy with life. Hate to hear that it was because you didn't feel comfortable here. Not much I can add I guess, except to wish you well and say that I always enjoyed your posts when you were a more active member. Dunno if I'm one of the people you have trouble with, but, if ever I'm not, well, given the state of of the world right now it won't be any time soon, but if ever the world starts making sense again and you find yourself in Spain, drop me a line and maybe we can have a copa / play some music, or whatever. All the best.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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