Random NON FOOTY thoughts not worthy of a thread: Edition II

[Gasometer]

He was hellbent on stopping the book from being published. Too bad now, it was released today.

Pity the Donald Thread went to the back blocks on here.

One of the best and unexpected Threads of 2016.

 

[Gasometer]

I lold

 

[giantroo]

Pity the Donald Thread went to the back blocks on here.

One of the best and unexpected Threads of 2016.

The thread is still in the lounge. The mods could still move this stuff over if need be.

 

[Gasometer]

Must read:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html


Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President
One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administration’s shocked first days.

By Michael Wolff
Illustrations by Jeffrey Smith
Election Night: It “looked as if he had seen a ghost.”


January 3, 2018 11:53 am

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

The Postelection Chaos at Trump Tower

From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew, offered him an infusion of $5 million. When Mercer and his daughter Rebekah presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so ****** up.”

Bannon, who became chief executive of Trump’s team in mid-August, called it “the broke-dick campaign.” Almost immediately, he saw that it was hampered by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire — ten times over — refused to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Kushner that, after the first debate in September, they would need another $50 million to cover them until Election Day.

“No way we’ll get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.

“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.

“If we can say victory is more than likely.”

In the end, the best Trump would do is to loan the campaign $10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. Steve Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.

Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” Flynn assured them.

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears — and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon meeting on January 3, 2017. Illustration: Jeffrey Smith
From the moment of victory, the Trump administration became a looking-glass presidency: Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White House was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that Trump and his top advisers made in those first few months — from the slapdash transition to the disarray in the West Wing — set the stage for the chaos and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in office. This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trump’s inner circle — that they would lose the election — wound up exposing them for who they really were.

On the Saturday after the election, Trump received a small group of well-wishers in his triplex apartment in Trump Tower. Even his close friends were still shocked and bewildered, and there was a dazed quality to the gathering. But Trump himself was mostly looking at the clock. Rupert Murdoch, who had promised to pay a call on the president-elect, was running late. When some of the guests made a move to leave, an increasingly agitated Trump assured them that Rupert was on his way. “He’s one of the greats, the last of the greats,” Trump said. “You have to stay to see him.” Not grasping that he was now the most powerful man in the world, Trump was still trying mightily to curry favor with a media mogul who had long disdained him as a charlatan and fool.

Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was his appeal: He was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul. Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

The day after the election, the bare-bones transition team that had been set up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to Trump Tower. The building — now the headquarters of a populist revolution — suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue. But its otherworldly air helped obscure the fact that few in Trump’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had any relevant experience.

Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.

“Who’s that?” asked Trump.

As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the Executive branch — which employs 4 million people — will run. The job has been construed as deputy president, or even prime minister. But Trump had no interest in appointing a strong chief of staff with a deep knowledge of Washington. Among his early choices for the job was Kushner — a man with no political experience beyond his role as a calm and flattering body man to Trump during the campaign.

It was Ann Coulter who finally took the president-elect aside. “Nobody is apparently telling you this,” she told him. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”

Bowing to pressure, Trump floated the idea of giving the job to Steve Bannon, only to have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told Trump that Bannon would be a dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, told the president-elect that “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon became chief of staff.

So Trump turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had became the subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to have to deal with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it with the help of one of their own kind.

Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job. Priebus had his own reservations: He had come out of his first long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly weird experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.

“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”

But the Priebus appointment, announced in mid-November, put Bannon on a co-equal level to the new chief of staff. Even with the top job, Priebus would be a weak figure, in the traditional mold of most Trump lieutenants over the years. There would be one chief of staff in name — the unimportant one — and others like Bannon and Kushner, more important in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s independence.

Priebus demonstrated no ability to keep Trump from talking to anyone who wanted his ear. The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet him. Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the conversation, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had gone.

“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”

“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”

“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”

Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”

“What a ******* idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.

Trump berating Jared Kushner on January 29, 2017. Illustration: Jeffrey Smith

Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most powerful men, was running late. It was the evening of January 3, 2017 — a little more than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration — and Bannon had promised to come to a small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village townhouse to see Roger Ailes.

Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. But the 76-year-old Ailes, who was as dumbfounded by his old friend Donald Trump’s victory as everyone else, understood that he was passing the right-wing torch to Bannon. Ailes’s Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in annual profits, had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now Bannon’s Breitbart News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits, was claiming that role. For 30 years, Ailes — until recently the single most powerful person in conservative politics — had humored and tolerated Trump, but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.

At 9:30, having extricated himself from Trump Tower, Bannon finally arrived at the dinner, three hours late. Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the unshaven, overweight 63-year-old immediately dived into an urgent download of information about the world he was about to take over.

“We’re going to flood the zone so we have every Cabinet member for the next seven days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military, 1950s-type Cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Sessions is two days, Mattis is two days …”

“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch.
Bannon veered from James “Mad Dog” Mattis — the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of Defense — to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the Never Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.” Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as national-security adviser. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.

“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little ******. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson just knows oil.”

“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”

“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”

“If I told Trump that,” Bannon said slyly, “he might have the job.”

Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously. Great numbers of people, he believed, were suddenly receptive to a new message — the world needs borders — and Trump had become the platform for that message.

“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, looking intently at Bannon. Did Trump get where history had put him?

Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” he said, after hesitating for perhaps a beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”

Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all-in. Sheldon” — Adelson, the casino billionaire and far-right Israel defender — “is all-in. We know where we’re heading on this … Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying.”

“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, the clear implication being that Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.

“He’s totally onboard.”

“I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about,” said an amused Ailes.

Bannon snorted. “Too much, too little — doesn’t necessarily change things.”

“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes.

“Mostly,” said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”

Again, as though setting the issue of Trump aside — merely a large and peculiar presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide — Bannon, in the role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump presidency, charged forward. The real enemy, he said, was China. China was the first front in a new Cold War.

“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the ’30s. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Donald might not be Nixon in China,” said Ailes, deadpan.

Bannon smiled. “Bannon in China,” he said, with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation.

“How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Kushner.

“He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.

“He’s had a lot of lunches with Rupert,” said a dubious Ailes.

“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Since his ouster from Fox over allegations of sexual harassment, Ailes had become only more bitter toward Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward Establishment moderation. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.

“I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.”

Trump holed up in his White House bedroom in February 2017. Illustration: Jeffrey Smith

Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears. Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed.

The first senior staffer to enter the White House that day was Bannon. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now-vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite and immediately requisitioned the whiteboards on which he intended to chart the first 100 days of the Trump administration. He also began moving furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war.

Those who had worked on the campaign noticed the sudden change. Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower and become far more remote, if not unreachable. “What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. “I don’t understand. We were so close.” Now that Trump had been elected, Bannon was already focused on his next goal: capturing the soul of the Trump White House.

He began by going after his enemies. Few fueled his rancor toward the standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch — not least because Murdoch had Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: The last person the president spoke to ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.

“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” Bannon told Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. Yet in one regard, Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman — as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out — the media mogul warned Trump that a president has only six months, max, to set his agenda and make an impact. After that, it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.

This was the message whose urgency Bannon had been trying to impress on an often distracted Trump, who was already trying to limit his hours in the office and keep to his normal golf habits. Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. In his head, he carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. He had quietly assembled a list of more than 200 executive orders to issue in the first 100 days. The very first EO, in his view, had to be a crackdown on immigration. After all, it was one of Trump’s core campaign promises. Plus, Bannon knew, it was an issue that made liberals batshit mad.

Bannon could push through his agenda for a simple reason: because nobody in the administration really had a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, hire staff, and oversee the individual offices in the Executive-branch departments. But Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump had no specific responsibilities — they did what they wanted. And for Bannon, the will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.

On Friday, January 27 — only his eighth day in office — Trump signed an executive order issuing a sweeping exclusion of many Muslims from the United States. In his mania to seize the day, with almost no one in the federal government having seen it or even been aware of it, Bannon had succeeded in pushing through an executive order that overhauled U.S. immigration policy while bypassing the very agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it.

The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an inundation of opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! But Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between Trump’s America and that of liberals. Almost the entire White House staff demanded to know: Why did we do this on a Friday, when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters?

“Errr … that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: Make them crazy and drag them to the left.

Rupert after that celebratory first phone call...lol.

 

[Donkey Chop]

Regarding the North Korea problem, the reason past presidents haven’t done what Trump has done is because,
A- it’s the civilians of North that suffer from the sanctions. They’re the ones who are starving to death.

B- no one really wants a nuclear winter.

Trump doesn’t seem worried about either of those things.

 

[Gasometer]

The thread is still in the lounge. The mods could still move this stuff over if need be.

No. I mean it should never have left here. The thread that keeps on giving

 

[Donkey Chop]

 

[Firestarter]

Meh. If the world was going to end we wouldn't be here right now. Nothing will happen.

 

[ferball]

As is stated it's a crime problem in general. I'm not anti African. My wife's family are from Africa (and aren't white), my mum grew up in Africa for over a decade of her youth.

But to say that part of the crime problem is not due to recent (last decade) Immigration from Sudan and other African countries is finger in ears la la la denial.

And to equate two incidents from over 20 years ago where less than 5 people targeted cops for a specific purpose to the random, social media driven call for ethnic youth to target the police shows to me that you care more about not hurting people's feelings than about the reality of our city's new normal.

There was a lot more going on than "5 people targeted cops" back then. It was almost a war, and if social media had existed then very similar things would have been said. People actually died, on both sides, and one of the families involved in one of those situation - the Pettingill clan - was pretty bad and routinely did horrible things to people who crossed them. The cops shot multiple people, numerous others disappeared and there are plenty of people who claimed the cops took them away and they were never seen again. Other people were cut up, burned and died horribly on the basis of paranoid suspicions about associations with cops and/or rival crims by Kath Pettingals' lackeys.

Anyway my point is this. They always say this shit about the most recent ethnic arrivals to Australia and its always a beat up about how they are the worst ever, they'll destroy our world, wipe out our way of life and generally **** everything up. They've said that about every ethnic group that arrived here since before the first fleet and only one of them has actually managed to pull it off.

Yes any percentage of any ethnic population will engage in criminality and that percentage is fairly constant across all ethnic groups. New immigrants always have a degree of ghettoisation as they arrive in a country and before they really assimilate and this always tends to bring attention to the worse things they do - but how bad is it actually? And how much of it a media driven panic? The actual crime figures seem to suggest it isn't as bad as the Hun says it is.

 

[GarnerSmash]

I don’t mind taking in refugees. I think we’re obliged to. Can we do it better? Probably. Would doing it better lower the crime rate? Doubt it.

It certainly would.

Young refugees find assimilation difficult due to lack of language skills and because they are often well below the education level of their contemporaries. There are insufficient programs in place to speed up both English language and educational standards and as such these kids don't fit in at school. As such they band together creating an us vs them mentality. Identity is found there and what can happen with teenagers who don't fit in with society and don't engage with education is that they become delinquent. Now we have a whole raft of Sudanese kids who fit this criteria and within that group you have the more dynamic boundary pushers who end up 'leading' others futher down the wrong path. Recipe for disaster.

Parents are also ill prepared for how to deal with these kids as the environment they are in os vastly different to their own experiences and their is little in place to help them navigate this landscape.

There is also a gap in cultural integration, specifically when it comes to how shit gets done and the role of certain bodies within that, spcifically the police force. The existent experience for a lot of Sudanese refugees with police is that they are to be not to be trusted and are to be feared. Yet in Australia this causes a two fold problem. Firstly, the police don't hit back and won't kill you if you get in their way. Secondly parents generally don't trust authority as they ran here to get away from murderous police and armed forces.

Just cos they refugees doesn't mean that they get a free pass. These perpetrators need to be dealt with harshly. They need to learn that they cannot do as they please and lessons need to be made of this current batch who are leading this activity. Personally I think those who are significant reoffenders should be deported and the effect of this would be significant on the remaining group. This needs to be done in conjunction with better settlement services and significantly more funding. This was not the case when the majority of these refugees were initially brought in and now we see the consequences. As I have said previously this was always on the cards given my dealings with people working in the settlement industry over the last decade. They have been voicing concerns long and hard but there is no political currency in funding settletment services so **** all was done to help.

 

[GarnerSmash]

Snowflake

 

[Donkey Chop]

It certainly would.

Young refugees find assimilation difficult due to lack of language skills and because they are often well below the education level of their contemporaries. There are insufficient programs in place to speed up both English language and educational standards and as such these kids don't fit in at school. As such they band together creating an us vs them mentality. Identity is found there and what can happen with teenagers who don't fit in with society and don't engage with education is that they become delinquent. Now we have a whole raft of Sudanese kids who fit this criteria and within that group you have the more dynamic boundary pushers who end up 'leading' others futher down the wrong path. Recipe for disaster.

Parents are also ill prepared for how to deal with these kids as the environment they are in os vastly different to their own experiences and their is little in place to help them navigate this landscape.

There is also a gap in cultural integration, specifically when it comes to how shit gets done and the role of certain bodies within that, spcifically the police force. The existent experience for a lot of Sudanese refugees with police is that they are to be not to be trusted and are to be feared. Yet in Australia this causes a two fold problem. Firstly, the police don't hit back and won't kill you if you get in their way. Secondly parents generally don't trust authority as they ran here to get away from murderous police and armed forces.

Just cos they refugees doesn't mean that they get a free pass. These perpetrators need to be dealt with harshly. They need to learn that they cannot do as they please and lessons need to be made of this current batch who are leading this activity. Personally I think those who are significant reoffenders should be deported and the effect of this would be significant on the remaining group. This needs to be done in conjunction with better settlement services and significantly more funding. This was not the case when the majority of these refugees were initially brought in and now we see the consequences. As I have said previously this was always on the cards given my dealings with people working in the settlement industry over the last decade. They have been voicing concerns long and hard but there is no political currency in funding settletment services so **** all was done to help.

Makes Peter Duttons statement about families being scared to go out to restaurants in Melbourne because of African gangs a terrible thing for a MP to say. Only makes the feeling on both sides worse.

Don’t mind the #melbournebitesback response on social media

 

[Donkey Chop]

Meh. If the world was going to end we wouldn't be here right now. Nothing will happen.

I agree but I’d feel better if there wasn’t 2 nutcases playing poker.

 

[GarnerSmash]

Makes Peter Duttons statement about families being scared to go out to restaurants in Melbourne because of African gangs a terrible thing for a MP to say. Only makes the feeling on both sides worse.

Don’t mind the #melbournebitesback response on social media

He's purely spruiking for votes and kudos. Such is the state of political discourse in this country.

 

[Firestarter]

I agree but I’d feel better if there wasn’t 2 nutcases playing poker.

Poker or checkers with "improvised" rules?

 

[Donkey Chop]

He's purely spruiking for votes and kudos. Such is the state of political discourse in this country.

Come on mate.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve asked friends out for dinner only for them to tell me they can’t cause the African gangs will get em

 

[andana]

No. I mean it should never have left here. The thread that keeps on giving

There's a new drama every week. At least the 2 koreas seem to have side lined trump. Could get better.

 

[see see]

Not even that smaller button on the left can make his hand look big.

 

[Istanbul Roo]

There is also a gap in cultural integration, specifically when it comes to how shit gets done and the role of certain bodies within that, These perpetrators need to be dealt with harshly. They need to learn that they cannot do as they please and lessons need to be made of this current batch who are leading this activity. Personally I think those who are significant reoffenders should be deported and the effect of this would be significant on the remaining group. This needs to be done in conjunction with better settlement services and significantly more funding. This was not the case when the majority of these refugees were initially brought in and now we see the consequences. As I have said previously this was always on the cards given my dealings with people working in the settlement industry over the last decade. They have been voicing concerns long and hard but there is no political currency in funding settletment services so **** all was done to help.[/QUOTE]

Thanks B Tron, sensible stuff as usual. Not sure I agree with deportation though, seems a tad harsh, and pandering to the right-wing media beat-up that trying to position the Libera Party to run a law and order campaign next election.
But sure, prison sentences and rehabilitation as for anybody else.

 

[Istanbul Roo]

This is quite a good analysis of the coverage in the HUN ...

http://www.policeaccountability.org...derstand-about-the-media-and-crime-reporting/

 

[Gasometer]

This is quite a good analysis of the coverage in the HUN ...

http://www.policeaccountability.org...derstand-about-the-media-and-crime-reporting/

Was reading this a couple of hours ago...different perspective
.
Try listening to 3aw 10am to 12pm Sundays...usually have a listen to wat is hoing on during the drives down b4 the footy.

I would lol if it wasn't so pathetic..still ...thsts wat many think on a range of topics

 

[the big lebowski]

There is also a gap in cultural integration, specifically when it comes to how shit gets done and the role of certain bodies within that, These perpetrators need to be dealt with harshly. They need to learn that they cannot do as they please and lessons need to be made of this current batch who are leading this activity. Personally I think those who are significant reoffenders should be deported and the effect of this would be significant on the remaining group. This needs to be done in conjunction with better settlement services and significantly more funding. This was not the case when the majority of these refugees were initially brought in and now we see the consequences. As I have said previously this was always on the cards given my dealings with people working in the settlement industry over the last decade. They have been voicing concerns long and hard but there is no political currency in funding settletment services so **** all was done to help.

Thanks B Tron, sensible stuff as usual. Not sure I agree with deportation though, seems a tad harsh, and pandering to the right-wing media beat-up that trying to position the Libera Party to run a law and order campaign next election.
But sure, prison sentences and rehabilitation as for anybody else.[/QUOTE]

Why are u so desperate to protect repeat, dangerous offenders that hurt innocent people?

How is protecting the community "right wing"?

Is justice, community safety and a "fair go" concepts that only the "right" are willing to talk about?

 

[kangaspurs]

He's purely spruiking for votes and kudos. Such is the state of political discourse in this country.

The state of political leadership on both sides of the spectrum is a ****ing disgrace atm. It's not really a problem that's limited to Australia either. In this world where comments can cross states and borders in a matter of second and reactions are instantaneous without a great deal of research or critical thought involved it's whoever's rhetoric is loudest and the most shocking that dominates the debate.

The media, including social media companies, are just as culpable in this as well. I love the law passed in Canada and France (or maybe it's on its way in there and not enacted yet) banning the 'Fake News' headlines. I hope we follow suit to allow more considered, fact-based articles and headlines. If it's good enough for the home of modern democratic free speech then it should be good enough for us.

 

[Hearts to hearts]

Thanks B Tron, sensible stuff as usual. Not sure I agree with deportation though, seems a tad harsh, and pandering to the right-wing media beat-up that trying to position the Libera Party to run a law and order campaign next election.
But sure, prison sentences and rehabilitation as for anybody else.

Why are u so desperate to protect repeat, dangerous offenders that hurt innocent people?

How is protecting the community "right wing"?

Is justice, community safety and a "fair go" concepts that only the "right" are willing to talk about?[/QUOTE]
It wasn't me who said it, but id guess the issue is treating people differently because they look different or arrived at being Australian diferent ways. The deportation argument suggests one group of Australians should always hold their citizenship as conditional - where I'd have thought the ideal in this country would be for all offenders to be equal before the law.

 

[the big lebowski]

Why are u so desperate to protect repeat, dangerous offenders that hurt innocent people?

How is protecting the community "right wing"?

Is justice, community safety and a "fair go" concepts that only the "right" are willing to talk about?

It wasn't me who said it, but id guess the issue is treating people differently because they look different or arrived at being Australian diferent ways. The deportation argument suggests one group of Australians should always hold their citizenship as conditional - where I'd have thought the ideal in this country would be for all offenders to be equal before the law.[/QUOTE]

Mate if we could deport the 4th generation Aussies that have done nothing but commit crime their whole lives I'd be all for that.

But legally we can't. So we try and "rehabilitate" them knocking that they will just be back causing misery for families as soon as they get out.

If you're from the UK, USA, Ethiopia, Estonia, New Zealand, or Pluto if you commit a violent crime twice within arriving here, or once if it's particularly henious, u should be deported back where u came from if possible.

This has nothing to do with how you look. Black, white, red, green, emo, ranga, fat or skinny.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills having to justify this.

Are we that flush with funds that we are looking to import crime?