Friday 3 February 2017

can numbers tell you if someone is racist?

I was looking at some numbers last night (l am always looking at numbers I find them easier than people).  As you might guess I don't like the emotion in politics and like to stick to the numbers - even with all this fake news l trust my skill in making sense from the numbers more.
I came up with some figures on US foreign policy, that I can't make a lot of sense of.
According to the Guardian, (and it isn't very often that l quote the Guardian - I generally stick to the Financial Times), a total of 26,731 bombs were dropped by America on a certain 7 countries in 2016.  This was an increase of 3,000 on the 24,000 bombs dropped by Obama the year before.   (In fact former president Obama is the only Nobel peace prize winner to drop more than 100,000 bombs in a career.)  Taken as a whole president Obama 'achieved' an eye watering level of bombing in 8 years - equivalent to dropping one bomb every 20 minutes every hour of the day for the whole of his presidency.
In the context of what is being said about Trump at the moment l find it odd that President Obama dropped so many bombs killing so many people in Muslim countries and yet no one is calling him a racist when this charge is being levelled at Trump. 
A certain other president just imposes a 60 day TEMPORARY travel restriction on seven counties  Obama bombed extensively, while he reviews US security arrangements and there are people rioting in the streets about Trump's racist behavior and he faces world wide condemnation.  
How exactly does this work? drop bombs on people (Obama), no comment!  Delay their holidays for two months (Trump) - absolutely outrageous attack on human rights and rioting on US streets!  (Personally, to tell the truth l would prefer to have travel restrictions placed on me to being bombed).
I find the security argument for the directive made by Trump plausible because places like Somalia and Yemen refuse to provide information about their citizens to enable proper US security checks.  I note that Pakistan does provide this information.  Hence, Pakistan does not face travel restrictions from the US.  So next time someone says the US travel restrictions are racially driven against Muslims and not to do with security ask them why there is no ban on people coming to the US from Pakistan?
To me anyway, all the rhetoric at the moment sounds like playing to the crowd that does not seem too well thought out.  Perhaps it is the Democrat controlled media in the US trying to undemocratically dethrone a president?
The proof of the pudding as they say is in the eating.  Trump has said he would have never got involved in Syria, Iran or Iraq had he been in charge.  We will have to see how many bombs Trump drops over the next four years and how many people get killed compared to Obama's track record.  The cruel hard numbers will cut through all the emotion.  Then we can decide which of the two has a better track record of reducing global strife.

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