Is Trump legally qualified to be a presidential candidate?

[Ken]

Technology gains mean that fewer people are required in the resource extraction jobs that are a far bigger part of rural economies than urban economies. So farming, mining, logging, fishing, oil drilling, etc. But technology also creates new jobs in other parts of the economy. Unfortunately for rural areas, those jobs are more likely to be in urban and suburban areas. For example, the number of people working in telecommunications today is vastly higher than it was in the days before cell phones. But those jobs tend not to be in small towns and rural areas.

But thanks to telecommunications technology, many of these jobs can be done by people who live in small towns and rural areas.

Yes, but it is usually not the same people. So that doesn't really address the economic dislocation that results from loss of farming/fishing/mining jobs. Techies moving in to rural towns with tech-related remote work jobs help keep small towns alive. But that doesn't really help 50-something miners who are losing their jobs due to technological advancements in productivity. Change is hard for individual people, even if on balance it ends up growing the national economy.

[Josh]

“Change is hard,” said the millionaire executive as he voted himself another bonus and wrote out another check to the PAC to make sure that “change” keeps happening.

[Ken]

“Change is hard,” said the millionaire executive as he voted himself another bonus and wrote out another check to the PAC to make sure that “change” keeps happening.

Change is also inevitable.

So the real political question is whether your policies spread out the benefits of change more broadly, or focus the benefits more narrowly upwards.

[temporal1]

It was still a travel ban. I am sure there are thousands of peaceful Muslims. But one thing that Trump did not do was whitewash a radical element of a religion whose Allah orders Muslims in the Quran to terrorize and kill non-Muslims on His behalf.

"Strike terror (into the hearts of) the enemies of God and your enemies."
Surah 8:60
Fight (kill) them (non-Muslims), and God will punish, (torment) them by your hands, cover them with shame." Surah 9:14
" I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. It is not ye who slew them; it was God."
Surah 8:13-17.

And it is just another example of Trump's failed attempts at immigration policy.

And yet those “failed” attempts curbed illegal immigration drastically compared to under Joe Biden.

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/is ... migration/
https://i0.wp.com/www.edwardconard.com/ ... C641&ssl=1

A hallmark of lib human reasoning is, “heads i win,” “tails i win.”
They organize and ferociously fight for minority rights, HOWEVER, when they sense they might be in the majority, they immediately declare, with self-righteous anger, “majority rules,” “democracy,” etc.

In distilled human reasoning, there is no actual right or wrong. It’s all about dominance, bullying, winning. Very primitive.

Establishing right/wrong requires moral responsbility, regardless of and beyond human desire or convenience.
Schools of human law exist to exploit the margins. They’ve enjoyed too much success.

A moral person will often walk away from amorality befuddled.
To have authentic understanding, the starting places need to have some commonality. Lacking that, mutual respect+tolerance.
Human reasoning ranks low on the latter. “It doesn’t make sense.” No. It wouldn’t.

[Josh]

“Change is hard,” said the millionaire executive as he voted himself another bonus and wrote out another check to the PAC to make sure that “change” keeps happening.

Change is also inevitable.

So the real political question is whether your policies spread out the benefits of change more broadly, or focus the benefits more narrowly upwards.

I don’t have any policies. The policies at force in the West have been a one way ratchet for my lifetime, though. And that spans both parties.

[Ken]

And yet those “failed” attempts curbed illegal immigration drastically compared to under Joe Biden.

What actually brought down immigration during Trump was COVID and Title 42 which was a once in a century (hopefully) black swan event. The whole planet was on lockdown and the US much less so than many other countries like China and Australia. I don’t think anyone wants to return to those days. Do you?

If you want to give Trump credit for COVID related drops in immigration then you also need to give Biden credit for creating more jobs than any other president in history. When that was also COVID related too.

There were also less immigrants sloshing around world wide in the years before COVID because many countries like Venezuela were not yet the complete basket cases that they are today. COVID also tipped some marginal countries completely into the abyss as did wars in the Middle East. That has affected the whole world not just the US.

Take away Covid and most of Trump’s other executive level actions were largely ineffective. Because he didn’t have the leadership to get any lasting bipartisan solutions through Congress.

[Robert]

Most of the past two pages have nothing to do with the topic. Good discussion, but please find the right place to have it.