There’s a rather telling detail in a piece in Politico on the reactions of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to the attacks on 9/11.
In a television interview only a few hours after the twin towers collapsed in flames, Trump managed to work in a strange little boast about his real-estate empire:
“40 Wall Street,” he said, referring to his 71-story building blocks away from the now-collapsed twin towers, “actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan … And now it’s the tallest.”
Trump will always be Trump, I guess.
But the Politico story does note that aside from this little bit of brand-building, Trump was actually rather restrained in his response that day, at least by normal Trumpian standards:
A decade and a half before pledging to “bomb the shit out of” ISIS and proposing a deportation force and a Muslim ban, Trump didn’t talk about retribution or leap to conclusions about who was responsible. In fact, he avoided identifying potential enemies—any terrorist organization or Muslims in general.
We live in what is, in many ways, a much uglier America today, and Trump has been one of the leading enablers of this ugliness.
As Mic noted in a post yesterday, Islamophobia is much worse today than it was on 9/11/2001, and hate crimes against Muslims are on the upswing.
Immediately after 9/11, there was a significant rise in anti-Muslim activity.According to the FBI, in 2001 anti-Islamic hate crimes spiked by 1,600 percent with 481 incidents. CAIR noted another surge in 2006 — the reason for it remains unclear. Another spike followed the Park51 controversy in 2010, in which New York City considered building a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero.
But the highest concentration of anti-Muslim crimes came at the end of 2015. According to CAIR’s latest report, 78 mosques were targeted for vandalism that year — more incidents than they had documented in any one year since they started tracking in 2009. Compare this to 2014, when CAIR only documented 22 similar incidents, or 2013, when they documented 20. The 2015 spike came after the attacks at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris and around the same time Donald Trump infamously proposed that the country should ban Muslims from entering until we “figure out what’s going on.”
Similarly, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 2014 while the rate of hate crimes overall had fallen compared with the previous year, hate crimes against Muslims saw a 14 percent increase.
Emphasis mine.
The vicious attacks against Muslims have continued apace this year. The latest: an attack on two Muslim mothers in Brooklyn last Thursday. The New York Daily News reports:
A bigoted Brooklyn woman launched a sickening attack on two Muslim women pushing their babies in strollers — punching them in the face and trying to pull off their hijabs, prosecutors said Friday.
Emirjeta Xhelili, 32, hurled Islamophobic insults as she pounced on the two victims near her Bath Beach home about 1:30 p.m. Thursday, authorities said.
“Get the f–k out of here,” Xhelili, 32, allegedly yelled at the pair, according to prosecutors. “Get the f–k out of America, b—–s.” …
Brooklyn prosecutors said her attack included an attempt to knock over a stroller carrying a 15-month-old baby.
Happily, the baby (and both mothers) are ok, and Xhelili was quickly arrested.
The alleged attacker is, of course, a Trump supporter. The Daily News notes that
Her vile social media musings include several bizarre tweets cheering the candidacy of Donald Trump.
“America is the ark of Noah,” one reads. “Trump’s gonna win.”
Such is life in America fifteen years after 9/11.
H/T — Raw Story/Liberaland for highlighting the Trump quote.
My grandfather was an engineer, originally for the British Navy, then for the Canadian government. Of course, when you’re very young, some words, such as “engineer,” tend to have very specific connotations. I recall feeling somewhat disappointed when I learned that he didn’t drive a train.
I alerted a friend to Migg’s posts, and she said the same thing!
I love how All That Jazz doesn’t realize that he too is being supported by “government welfare”, paid for by the rest of us who work hard at our jobs and don’t demand a cookie for it. Clean air, safe water, safe medications, waste disposal, roads, sidewalks, lighting, public parks, buildings that are up to code, police and fire protection – all of that is paid for with our collective tax dollars, by everyone from CEOs to the hotel workers and fast food workers and janitors that All About That Bass looks down on.
Whenever libertarians start waxing euphoric about their amazing bootstrap selves, I wish we could ban them from using any of the above services. Have fun clearing, grading, paving, striping and maintaining your own roads, you lone genius, you.
Also love the assumption that having a “thing” to show for your work (a big tall building, a machine, a slain mammoth) is superior to working with people or ideas. You’d think electrical engineers would be more capable of abstract thought.
Re: jet fuel
The next time someone says jet fuel can’t melt steel point out that those planes will have also been carrying the mind control drugs they use in chemtrails and that stuff’s really flammable.
It seems a shame to interject facts into such an entertaining discussion, but just for the record, the highest minimum wage in the U.S. is $11.50/hr in Washington, DC. Over half the states stick to the federally mandated minimum wage of $7.50. Nowhere in the U.S. is the minimum wage remotely close to $27, although if it had kept up with inflation it would be over $20 today.
John Galt can rest easy; working-class Americans are in no danger of being paid a living wage.
numerobis:
Who mistypes their age, anyway? Perhaps someone who changed their mind about what age to pretend to be?
Someone so unbelievably angry that they’re operating largely from reflex twitches, I imagine.
If Mr Miggs comes back, maybe he can enlighten me. See, my cousin went to school for electrical engineering. But he wound up taking a job with the state. Is he A Very Important And Productive Man because of his education? Or is he a lazy moocher because government employees don’t work?
He’s a white cishet male, so not an affirmative action hire. If that helps at all.
I just want to know who is and is not a contributing member of society. That seems like important information.
I started laughing at my desk today about “I’ll have you know, I’m 329 years old!” I hope my coworkers didn’t notice. It’s still funny. It’s even funnier that our mockery about this caused him to tantrum even harder.
Honestly ,I think he was so angry when he was typing that message that he didn’t realize he hit a extra key.
Seattle recently voted in a $15/hr wage but our ridiculous bureaucracy has created this complicated phase-in plan that has it currently at $10.50 – $12.50 depending on the employer type (if I understand the plan correctly) and it should reach $15 in roughly 423 years. (I kid, but by the time it reaches $15 it will be too late to actually help the people currently being forced out of their homes due to gentrification and skyrocketing real estate values.) You can read more here: http://murray.seattle.gov/minimumwage/#sthash.G9d5vWDK.keyK2xAW.dpbs
Alan – But is a nym really the same as pretending to be someone?
Agnes/Perdita was a character I could identify with (and goodness knows there aren’t many of those!) because she was fat, had good hair, and could sing. And I was a witch back then* as well as being a two-faced Gemini. It was like someone told PTerry about me. As for Perdita as an alter ego, she never got out much and neither does my “vain, selfish and vicious side.”
*When I first read the book, that is. My birthday hasn’t changed, so I guess I’m still a Gemini.
Wow, this thread! At first I was just horrified by what Sinkable John described happening to his Muslim neighbours, but then it took a turn for the hilarious. “I am 329 years old” is just a classic, even if it almost certainly was a case of “I am 30 years old… oh, wait, no, not for another few months, I’m still 29”. And I knew we have plenty of people here with jobs that are commonly respected, so I expected him* to be thoroughly smacked down on his own terms in addition to having those terms taken apart, but POM’s urban planner response was just too perfect.
On the subject of Contributing to Society, I couldn’t agree more with what Anarchonist and Hambeast said about minimum wage earners. I’d like to address this part:
This attitude always really annoys me, because it never seems to have occurred to people who say this to imagine what the world would be like if no-one after them had any children. Many decades later, when everyone still alive is over 90, who is going to grow food and provide healthcare, not to mention all the other things which enable our quality of life? (I mean, it’s not that 90 year olds are incapable of any of this – my 95 year old grandpa still grows his own fruit and vegetables, for example – but it’s got to be harder for them and in any case, do they really want to be forced to continue full time jobs rather than being able to enjoy retirement?) Yes, I know that plenty of people have kids and work, probably not falling under these people’s definition of “useless breeders”; but I still maintain that if someone only brings up children (and/or gestates them) that is very much a contribution, and I am very happy for them to be publicly subsidised. (So long as they are doing it because they want to and not in order to receive the money, but I say that just to be clear and not because I think that is something that happens at all commonly. Even then, my issue with it would be that that probably makes for an unloving environment for the kids to grow up in, rather than fraud.) I say this as someone who still doesn’t know if she’ll ever have children (I don’t know if I want them, and I’m old enough, at almost 35, that if I don’t come to definitely want them soon and do something about it, the moment may have passed at least for conceiving my own children, though of course that’s not the only route), and is very glad that other people are prepared to take on the hard work involved.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants – LOL! I thought of Captain Haddock too. (Though he, for all his flaws, was definitely a much nicer character than the latest troll.)
Lastly, I’m a bit miffed because my dad’s a (mechanical) engineer. How dare the troll come here and make engineers look bad!
*I’m assuming he’s male, as I think he said he was a MGTOW? Or was it just that he, possibly ironically, referenced MGTOWism in his username, and I’ve fallen into the same trap as him? Anyway, apologies if I’ve got that wrong.
(Hooray, changing my name got me a new gravatar icon! I wasn’t terribly keen on the colour or pattern of the old one. I think it’s amusingly fitting that naming myself after a troll who opened with the claim that leftists couldn’t see shades of grey resulted in a black and white design.)
Regarding the troll’s meltdown, more serendipity ! [Totally NSFW]
Yes, I’m rereading a bunch of webcomics.
@kupo:
I… I think I might have Napstered or Kazaaed it off you? I cannot remember which song it was, that my sister and I downloaded, but remember it had something like that, at the beginning. Or maybe not a “d’oh” but an “uh-oh”?
No, wait, I remembered! It was a sneeze! Great big sneeze right at the start of the music. I wonder how that got there. Maybe the same way as your “d’oh”.
Gonna drive me nuts now, that I can’t remember which song it was. But if I ever hear it again, I know it’ll sound weird without that damn sneeze.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants gets, like, a billion points for referencing Captain Haddock from Adventures of Tin-Tin.
@Penny
I didn’t use Napster but I did send that file to a few people, so who knows? Though it was definitely a “d’oh” and towards the end of the song. Can’t remember which dong, though.
Movie:
I never know my age anymore. I need to recalculate it every time.
@kupo
No, I realised as I was typing that it wasn’t your “d’oh” but a sneeze. So probably not the same song.
Wish I could remember which song it was, though! Maybe my sister will remember.
@Alan Robertshaw:
XKCD got there first with your merging of two conspiracy theories 🙂
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/jet_fuel.png
@Alan, RE: Jet Fuel/Chemtrails
I can’t remember if I read it on here or another site, but I recall someone saying that their way of dealing with conspiracy theorists was to try to out conspiracy them. It back fired one day when the person came up with a weird lie (about the moon I think?) and the conspiracy guy sat down and wanted to know more.
I’d be afraid that by bringing up chemtrails I would start them into an even more weird and complicated story.
@TheGreatAndPowerfulMig
Come back! I’m only 267 years old, you have so much to teach me! I wonder if you think my job is a drain on society? Please feel free to speculate on my life, I’m very curious to see what you come up with.
(I’m posting from work instead of my laptop so I don’t know if the site will recognize me)
@ kittycartel
I was trying to illustrate to a friend the impossibility of the U.S. Government being able to keep a secret by referencing the fact that the New York Times reported on the Bay of Pigs invasion two weeks before it happened.
She took that as proof that the government does in fact brief the media in advance as to all its conspiracies and that’s why the BBC were able to report the collapse of WTC Building 7 before it actually fell down. 🙂
ETA: T-Rex (in cool shades) flying an F-14!!!!! Where’s that from?
@Alan
Your question wasn’t directed at me, but I recognize that T-Rex so I thought I’d fill you in. It’s from the second greatest comic strip of all time (the first being The Far Side).
http://rptd.ch/misc/funny/calvin_hobbes_trex_jet.jpg
@kupo
That’s actually a separate problem, only tangentially related to wages