Halloween Attack NYC

Since 9/11/2001, I can't believe the number of times my jaw's been on the floor in learning about irresponsible and utterly insane policies that have either been left in place, initiated or left unaddressed.

For the first time in 16 years New York City has fallen victim again to a terrorist attack, this one made possible by something I never heard of... a "Diversity Lottery."

Why do we have "lotteries" allowing people like this terrorist who murdered 8 innocent people with a truck to immigrate to America?

• Everyday I hear the ad on the radio about how 1 in 8 Americans don't have enough food to eat.
• We have unemployment, many Americans have been unemployed for years - unable to find work or discriminated against for being unemployed too long. Millions have fallen into a state of limbo where they've been unemployed so long that they aren't even counted amongst the nation's unemployed!
• We have homeless epidemics in many cities (one homeless American is one too many).
• We have poverty, we have pollution, we suffer from overpopulation in many areas.
• We have minority Americans who cannot escape poverty, feed their kids or find jobs.
• We bring millions of legal immigrants into the country every year.
• And there are millions more immigrants trespassing illegally and millions on top of that who are undocumented and that no one can even estimate or account for!
• We have hundreds of thousands stuck in a grey area where they aren't citizens, but were brought here as children by their families.
• We have been attacked countless times by Islamic Terrorists (one time being the single largest terrorist attack on a single day that the world has ever seen in modern times).

Why in God's name are we holding immigration lotteries in Islamic countries that enable Terrorists to come to a country where we can't even feed, house or employ our own people?

A lot of red herrings there. As if stopping a visa program that is responsible for a drop in the bucket of all immigration will make a hill of difference (or even has anything to do with) lack of food, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, pollution, overpopulation, etc. Nevermind that solutions for ALL those things you mentioned are routinely opposed by anti immigration conservatives when democrats call for funding to help the poor, the hungry, the homeless, etc. Just stick with the argument that you are worried that immigration "lotteries" will act as a short cut for terrorists to rain down on our country and kill people.

From what I understand the lottery simply allows folks to move straight to green card status without the need for a sponsor. They dont come waltzing into the country the next day. They still need to go through the normal process of immigration, its just their green card is now guaranteed and theres no line waiting. But they still have to go through the normal security checks and vettings that everyone else does. So the concept that getting rid of this program will stop all those nasty terrorists from getting in the country is just silly. Especially since it looks like this guy was turned by ISIS AFTER he got into the country. Not sent as some stealth terrorist operative. Of course, if you grant 50,000 visas a year, chances are some of them will commit a crime of some sort. But the vast majority are law abiding and we shouldn't punish future applicants because of one person's actions.

That being said we can certainly have a discussion about if this program is relevant in this day and age. Ill note that the program was originally supported by members of BOTH parties when it first went into law (and signed by a republican president). So I think Trump using this tragedy to jump on this program and try to make political points is pretty disgusting. Divider in chief strikes again. I'll ALSO note that in 2013 when a new immigration bill was proposed that would have ended this program it was defeated by the Nationalist Freedom Caucus, not the lefties.

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Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies...

Thanks for the info, I. Rex.
You make a lot of good points.

As I said, I never heard of this program before yesterday, so I have little knowledge of the details outside what I heard the last few hours.

My overall point was, we have enough problems in this country that we can't seem to fix for our own people - so bringing more people whose motives or potentials can't be confirmed (and none can be confirmed) from foreign lands (especially from those that largely hate western culture, do not seek to assimilate, or which embrace ideologies that include supremacism & genocide), is antithetic to establishing safety, security and an acceptable standard of living to our own citizens. The more stable, safe and secure our country is, the better able it would be to help others or invite them in through a more secure, legal process.

I've held this stance since 2001. First things first. I say let's get our own security completely under control. Let's secure our borders, ports and all points of entry. Let's get an accounting of who is in the country. Let's enact fair laws and uphold them consistently. Let's fix our immigration system to make it both simpler and more secure. As always, I am just dumbfounded that these areas were not completely addressed and revised immediately after 9/11/2001. It seems unfathomable, after what happened, that this country didn't devote every resource and however long it might take to focusing on totally repairing every single weak link in the only chain that protects us.

All I'm suggesting is taking time to focus on solutions rather than creating more problems with programs and policies that enable and empower more terrorists to come in and slaughter more innocent people. For those who argue, "no policies enable or empower terrorism" ... well, look what happened... and then look beyond it to a list that is too long to post of attacks that have occurred both on our shores and on those of other nations.

I find the argument that this one attack proves that the program is a terrible idea fairly ridiculous. After all, no matter how many people die in this country from gun violence nothing is done about guns. But if ONE immigrant is involved in a terrorist attack, the screams and cries of "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!" are deafening. Thats an enormous double standard to me.

But again, Im definitely not opposed to looking into updating it. I think it has issues probably for different reasons then you do (its supposed to promote diversity but most of those who have "won" this particular lottery have been white and/or from Europe. How is that promoting diversity exactly?) Plus employers seem to be taking advantage of it even though its supposed to be "random".

Tell that to the families of the people that were killed.

I personally am neither condoning nor condemning the program, I do not have enough information yet - but as always I think those adversely involved should have the first and last say about "arguments" like this.

Not saying they should ultimately decide, but they should definitely have the right to speak out before those of us not directly affected spout off.

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

I hear the "cries:" from both sides.

I do not want to go into my own personal thoughts because this is not the place to do so and not the point I am trying to make. I hear those "cries" all the time, hell it seems to be all I hear now and those damn "cries" seem to all be close-minded and doing nothing but echoing off sound proof walls into the ears of the deaf.

Compromise IS a word and one that has done much for us as a country - just not lately.

I'm screaming "SOMETHING SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE A LONG TIME AGO!"

A long time ago I was screaming "SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!"

And before that I was screaming "WE JUST SAW WHAT HAPPENED SO WE BETTER DO SOMETHING TO KEEP ANYTHING LIKE IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN!"

But even in the face of ongoing and overwhelming horror, in the face of a constant and growing threat that openly telegraphs and literally warns us of its next moves and intentions on exactly what methods it will use to infiltrate and attack us, innocent people are STILL dying in the streets. Political correctness is like mental ear plugs - those infected by it can't seem to hear the screams.

It all comes down to a simple question: what is the priority?
Potentially helping some foreigners, but in doing so, opening the gate to potential terrorists who can murder untold numbers of innocent citizens OR protecting our children and our people? Which is more important?

Horrific that this happened. RIP to the victims

On a side note I think without us all realising it has happened we have become desensitised to this cycle of attacks, it is no longer a shock. We now expect an attack somewhere in a European/US city every month or so. It is no longer "big" news or at least not as big as it was.

Lots of us were outraged when London mayor Sadiq Khan said "terror is now part of big city life" but I think he was/is right.

Not making any political point here it's just a very sad state of affairs.

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Learning to "accept" it is another symptom of the apathy that allowed it to get to this point. Our governments realize they are powerless to do anything about the PC apologetics that enables and empowers terrorism, so the only thing left they know how to do is to try to promote the attitude of apathy and get us to accept it. We've become a culture of zombies who've chosen to replace our brains and our wills with Smart phones.

More than half of us cannot even identify the difference between right and wrong anymore. A murdered body at your feet calls for an analysis of what societal & political factors traumatized the perpetrator to do such a thing and who is behind promoting those societal or political factors, rather than stopping the killer and making sure they can never do it again.

"SOMETHING SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE."
"SOMETHING MUST BE DONE."
"WE BETTER DO SOMETHING."

"Something" is not a strategy.

You seem to think the issue is one that can be solved by mere willpower. This is both unsupported by the evidence, and convenient. I pointed out that there's no real reason to think we can wipe out terrorism with political willpower in another thread: you acknowledged the argument without ever really addressing it, and then went right back to berating people for not taking terrorism as seriously as you do.

So here's my theory: this isn't about actually fighting terrorism, which is why there appears to be next to no interest in talking about the actual mechanics of doing so. This is frustration in the face of a mostly intractable problem, which is temporarily alleviated when you can blame other citizens for not confronting it. This sidesteps all the really tough questions, and shrinks the issue down until it's small enough to put at the feet of the naive liberal down the road, who is conveniently close enough to have to listen to you yell at them for it.

This is not to say that the attitude many on the left have towards terrorism is not myopic, because I think it often is. But they're not stopping some grand victory over terrorism that we could easily achieve if only they came to their senses, either. That's a psychologically comforting fantasy, and an excuse to avoid facing the tough questions the actual issue entails. But, by ignoring all those and focusing only on whether other people agree with you about the scale of the problem (even though at the moment they possess very little political power and are therefore not standing in the way of anything you're talking about), it allows somebody to feel as if they're fighting terrorism without actually doing anything constructive.

All the above is additionally supported by the fact that you don't seem to care who you're saying this about. This isn't a forum about politics or war, it's about movies, so it's an utterly bizarre place to decide to save society from itself. And you certainly haven't seen anything here (or anywhere, I'm guessing) suggesting that people respond to this kind of derisive venting, either. Yet it continues.

Both of these things are clear evidence that you don't care if you persuade anyone, which undercuts the entire premise of the argument. This is just blowing off steam. Because steam doesn't care where it goes: only that it gets vented out somewhere, so it doesn't cause an explosion.

well, not on this forum so much, anyway. after the Las Vegas shooting, @Captain Steel created this thread. here's what the original message said:

not exactly full of passion and agenda the way this one is. it wasn't created by a more left-meaning member that so they could push the gun control debate, either (even though there are several passionate ones on here much to your chagrin )

and speaking of the Las Vegas shooting - when the conversation about gun control was even mentioned we were told by our current, lovely administration that "now is not the appropriate time" to discuss it. but, like, 3 hours after the NY terrorist attack our commander in chief was on the Twitter horn talking about stepping up our Extreme Vetting Program. so, forgive some of us for feeling that this has more than a little to do with bigotry.

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letterboxd

Well, thanks for the psychoanalysis, guys.
Up till now I didn't realize this was all about ME and the way I post on the MoFo under the Miscellaneous Chat section.

You seem perfectly happy to psychoanalyze people on the other side of these issues: they have "mental ear plugs" or put their "heads in the sand."

I see what you're saying ash. The REASON the two threads are different is because the cases are different.

We don't know the motive for the Las Vegas attack, we only know that the ALLEGED person who carried it out ALLEGEDLY acted alone and was an American born citizen who doesn't fit any known profile of a mass murderer or terrorist. Currently my rail over the LV attack is at the authorities and the media for going silent when there are so many people coming forward with claims that contradict their narrative and so many questions left unanswered.

I began this thread talking about the policies that made it possible for a terrorist to be chosen AT RANDOM through a ridiculous lottery to bring more immigrants to a country that cannot feed, house or employ all of its own citizens. In this case we have a living perpetrator with a clear motive, proudly acting in the name of terrorists, who came here through a program that is very obviously irresponsible and dangerous in a post 9/11 world.

Hope that clears up any confusion.

Yes, I'm analysing group mindsets because it is that very mindset that is a huge part of the problem. It's that mindset that enabled this latest attack to occur.

Great. I'm analyzing the group mindset that thinks this other group mindset is the only reason terrorism exists.

I don't think you actually have any idea if this is true.

That's fine. I don't think anyone is saying a mindset is the ONLY reason terrorism exists. For any major social problem there is not usually one single cause, nor is there one single solution.

You spoke about strategies to address terrorism before, and I've laid out my ideas of multi-pronged approaches on several former threads. I realize there is no 100% solution, but I've explained ways to address terrorism, retaliate against it and prevent it from reaching our shores.

An obvious preventative, common-sense measure should have been not having a program that chooses people at random to come into our country on a lottery.

As I said before - I didn't even know such a thing existed and can't believe that it would be allowed, no less carried out, in a post 9/11 world. With that being the case, how many other suicidal programs are in place in the name of political correctness that I or we don't even know about?

We do know we're bringing in refugees by the thousands from countries where Islamic terrorism is rampant despite the fact that ISIS said they would use this as a means of infiltration and have already carried out multiple such infiltration attacks in Europe!

Talk about a place to start!

How do we start working on preventative & defensive strategies when we are constantly undermined by a government & country full of people who practice and indoctrinate others with an ideology (PC) that literally sets us up for destruction?

You may not be saying it literally, but your wildly disproportionate focus on it suggests it pretty strongly.

Please point me to them. But note well: if the "strategy" is just clearing away the supposed impediments and assuming things will be fine afterwards, that's not really a strategy.

It beggars belief that, a mere 24 hours after conceding this, you're ready to confidently declare not only that this attack wouldn't have happened otherwise, but that a particular "mindset" is to blame for its enacting, and--surprise!--it happens to be exactly the mindset you've been complaining about for years.

This isn't a real question: it's a statement which takes the very thing under dispute (whether the PC mindset "literally sets us up for destruction"), acts as if it's been established, and then asks a question based on that. In other words, it's talking right past everything I'm pointing out, and just doing more of it.

I'm not a fan of political correctness. I think in many cases it leads people to ignore clear and present threats, like terrorism. But that belief does not logically imply, by itself, that this mindset is stopping our ability to combat terrorism, or that terrorism wouldn't be a problem otherwise. You seem to make this assumption with no real acknowledgement or supporting evidence. And, as I've pointed out, this is a very psychologically convenient thing to assume, because it sidesteps the hardest questions about terrorism in favor of much simpler, more convenient enemies that you can berate personally. I don't think that's a coincidence.