This is tough to listen to. I’m a 60 year old geezer, for gosh sakes, and I was tearing up.
But apparently the kind of thug you hire to guard six year olds in cages is made of sterner stuff.
The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”
Motherfucker.
I have no illusions that the joker feels any guilt at all. We can only hope the whole lot of them is brought on trial for crimes against humanity — everyone, from dumbass guards to the scumbag at the top.
Dr. Colleen Kraft, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that she visited a small shelter in Texas recently, which she declined to identity. A toddler inside the 60-bed facility caught her eye — she was crying uncontrollably and pounding her little fists on mat.
Staff members tried to console the child, who looked to be about 2 years old, Kraft said. She had been taken from her mother the night before and brought to the shelter.
The staff gave her books and toys — but they weren’t allowed to pick her up, to hold her or hug her to try to calm her. As a rule, staff aren’t allowed to touch the children there, she said.
Look up Harlow’s monkeys. The inhumanity of what we’re doing to these children is unforgivable.
I know that every American administration, including the previous one, has exhibited this insensitivity — but this takes evil behavior to a level where it is an end in itself.
Every day I become more convinced that we have reached this point partly because, as right-wing transgressions became ever greater, the Left insisted on sticking it’s nose in the air and “going high” instead of taking off our belt and making the Right feel some consequences.
Not that I advocate political violence as a go-to tool (but seriously, punch Nazis). But by gamely engaging every bad-faith bullshit in debate (child crisis actors!) instead of putting our foot down and saying “this is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in our society” and ostracizing them, we’ve taught them that they can do anything and face no consequences.
Current calls for civility are calls for our doom.
A paste from my Facebook:
There’s a liberal tendency to default to argument about every thing. Republicans know this. That’s why they pull out ludicrous accusations like “child crisis actors” on Sandy Hook or child concentration camps. They’re counting on liberals to “well, actually…” it with a several-page fully documented with citations and footnotes rebuttal. No. Don’t do that. Every second that you’re wasting time chasing smoke and mirrors is a second that you’re not fighting the monster in front of you.
Plant your feet on the ground. You are not there to win an argument on their terms. It’s not an intellectual exercise for funsies. You know what the reality is, as does everybody else. You are there to assert your space, to project your power and declare how the system will be run when you run it, and that their way is intolerable. When the reality of what is true is plain, speak to the truth.
Thank you for the Harlow reference.
It is research that causes my insides to hurt to this day.
How is this different than state institutionalized torture?
@ whywhywhy, #3
It’s not. Torturing children and their parents is the whole point. The administration is willfully and gleefully engaging in crimes against humanity.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
When you have children, you learn to recognise the cries.
There is the “I hurt myself, but I’m still alive” crying.
There is the “I want your attention” crying.
There is the “I’m angry” crying.
And then there’s the “I’m inconsolable because the world just crumbled down” crying, which is what you can hear in this video.
They’re torturing children, they lock them up in cages (but don’t call them cages because that hurts the feelings of the people who put children in cages). Others have predicted that some of them will go “missing”, trafficked to work in the fields, others will be “adopted” for much of the same reason: cheap labour.
Dr. Myers,
What’s interesting to me is the analogy to, and I know Godwin’s law, Hitler. Psychopaths (by which I mean the 1% born without a functioning paralimbic system, which using Hare’s PCL-R Trump easily scores a 40 and the only hypothesis that explains 100% of his behavior since he became a public figure is that he suffers from NPD) are suckers for other con men. What leadership does is set the tone. Thus, while Hitler was the leader, he attracted overtime a group that were also likely to be towards, if not in, the neurobiology of psychopathy. Hence, it was Himmler who actually carried out the holocaust.
It is apparent the Jeff sessions has stayed as AG far longer than anyone else would. Why? Well, why was he rejected for federal bench and then became a senator? He’s a racist. And what he’s spearheading on our borders has touched me deeply for many reasons, it has shocked me the more I learn, but I’m not surprised. It’s just more evidence that supports the hypothesis that psychopaths can flock together. Sessions is our himmler.
Though it may seem a minor bit of evidence, psychopaths cannot process abstract words through the pathway in the frontal lobes and all words, whether concrete or abstract are processed via the concrete path. This, along with being incapable of empathy, means their ability to abstract is abnormal. My point is this: Trump said after manafort was jailed “he has never been associated with my campaign”. It’s not the lie I find amazing. That’s what lack of empathy does. It’s the complete lack of appropriate use of time. Trump is not campaigning now, manafort was his campaign manager for 144 weeks. This one sentence which contains a profoundly open lie (manafort didn’t work on campaign) has TWO time related errors, one in tense (has is wrong tense bc manafort was fired before the election) and one in context (the campaign has ended and manafort is not part of the administration and never has been.
This is why, being sentient (I define sentience as thinking plus empathy; thus psychopaths are conscious but not sentient; they are by definition thinking reptiles; that’s why birds are so cool: the went warm blooded and developed empathy to a significant degree) you can never predict how trump will lie but in hindsight you can see how it fits with his neurobiology perfectly.
Thus, the reason we are developing our big brains is empathy. ADD is the exact inverse neurobiology of NPD. Autism is the next step. Psychopath are the 1% knockout humans that prove the hypothesis. Primary anxiety DO such as OCD and OCPD probably arose as a result of our tool making ability which appears to have arrived soon after we came out of the trees and got foxp2.
Lastly, what this means is that evil is either purposely confusing reality for fun (psychopath) and lesser evil is committed by those of us that let our fear overcome our empathy so that we use faith to justify our false positives and get a bad Bayesian result. In other words, we are all in this together, we all have a role. Psychopaths are pure evil. The 20% anxiety disorders are ill and treatable.
That’s why, unless it’s a psychopath, using an ad hominem just wastes time bc it’s not the issue. The CBP agent I think may have been trying to lighten the mood. It’s less likely he was enjoying himself and being atrocious. Indeed, if he was a racist, I think he would have used a different tone and English.
We settled at Nuremberg the ethics here. We know 99.999% certainty what is happening is immoral and should or is illegal. I think child abuse is illegal regardless of citizenship status.
That is the issue. Not the person of the CBP agent. The person of Sessions and Trump are definitely the issue. By definition, mental illness occurs first when the person’s behavior affects interpersonal relationships. To point out that it’s 99.9999% NPD with trump and >95% NPD with sessions is just explaining WHY they are able to do what they are doing: confusing relationships.
Tom
Mr. R.P.Johnston
Thanks for the reminder, but I volunteer an additional something. Remember Monkey Wrench Gang and our pal Hayduke?
Of course, this is different from when somebody monkeywrenches a logging road just before they are going to clear-cut, and it’s far different from monkeywrenching the logging company’s equipment. . . . but it’s the same in a slightly different sense.
It is time to do more than just talk.
Tax cuts enacted 85% for our superiors that don’t expire compared to our crumb tax cuts that DO expire soon–that’s one thing; climate change denial and ordering the regulatory apparatus to do more for coal system is another thing; telling 3,000 whoppers down to simply misleading is still another; simply sitting on a Supreme Court nominee is still different.
Deliberately meeting asylum seekers then premeditatedly separating them from their children is new ground that the USA used to be better than. This is rotten, filthy, ugly, unchristian, and unamerican. I am hereby taking different “steps” as of this weekend and of course, would never be violent.
But it takes more than words.
I think the only thing anyone should call these actions is “torture” plain and simple. That’s what it is and that’s what I shall call it.
This is a year (decade?) that will live in infamy.
I’m a 74 year old bachelor who never had any children, and it tears at my heart too, PZ. I don’t think anyone who is sane could feel it differently.
Mind you, my country Canada tore first nations children from their families with the intent of making them into good little Canadians, and we had our prison camps for “japs” in WW2 as well. There is plenty of guilt to go around.
@7:This is rotten, filthy, ugly, unchristian, and unamerican.
Rotten, filthy and ugly – YES! Check American History for what was done to Native American children and slave children.
Is it even possible to patrol the border without scoring high on the PCL-R?
It is inevitable that some of those children will grow up and be radicalized. They will hate Americans/America. They will be 100% justified in doing so.
@7: I’ve called my representatives, and I’m volunteering on one of the committees of my local Democratic Party, looking for what I can do to be more involved. (a few days ago I went to the School Board meeting in support of LGBTQ+ inclusive language and prophylaxis education). If there is any mass action in my area I’m going to look into going, too. I’m still new to this and what direct action I can take but every day I remind myself – while helping control the peanut gallery is necessary, it will take more than that.
@whywhywhy, #3:
I’ve just written you an answer, but I wanted to put it up on my blog, so you can read it there.
Tomorrow around noon, depending on time zone, you will be able to find a post about the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, if you want your outrage mixed with legal nerdity and general wonk.
Ammianus Marcellinus, the last great Roman historian, holds up Roman generals Lupicinus and Maximus for particular condemnation. In 376AD they were in charge of overseeing Goth refugees trying desperately to cross the Danube (one side-effect of a mass displacement of peoples across all of Eurasia, which Ammianus blames on the Huns). In order to enrich themselves they sold dog meat to the starving Goths in exchange for their children as slaves.
This is not quite that bad, perhaps, but that nasty little episode on the Danube was certainly the first parallel that came to my mind. This is in no way a historical trend any right minded human being should want to buy into.
One can but hope that there is a powerful response to this atrocity and oppression, as there was in 378AD with the Battle of Hadrianopolis.
Xpost from Dispatches
We’ve been here before and not all that long ago.
Bush and Cheney brought back torture again for no good reason.
Even one of the torture leaders, Gina Haspel, said it was pointless and she wouldn’t do it again.
(I don’t believe she wouldn’t do it again. She did it in the first place without any reservations.)
This is the Trump’s version of the Bush/Cheney torture, with children rather than suspected Muslim terrorists.
This newest atrocity of the GOP and Trump is going to hurt them.
A lot of people aren’t too impressed by torturing children to torture their parents.
But probably not all that much.
Even after the Bush/Cheney Disaster in Iraq, a lot of their voters still favor the use of torture.
One of the head torturers, Gina Haspel, was just made head of the CIA.
That it was pointless and didn’t work doesn’t bother them at all.
I’m sure I won’t be the first Aussie to drop in to tell you all that this is likely to get a lot worse yet. I think the world should take a close look at how Australia has been treating asylum seekers for years. I think your government has. We’ve built Gulags in nearby countries, co-opted by economic bribery as accomplices in our crimes. Some of the most vulnerable people in the world have been locked up, deprived of timely and adequate health care, physically and mentally abused to the point of suicide, even murdered while in our care. Men, women and children. Our government has erected a wall of secrecy around their activities, banned media scrutiny and threatened criminal sanctions against whistleblowers.
It’s worked. As a nation, we have re-elected the same criminal politicians and governments, compartmentalised the human rights abuses as a necessary evil, and rewarded a largely compliant media.
I hope you won’t make our mistake.
#17 Raven
Is this the reason they’re pushing so hard to commit as many atrocities as possible? Because most of them know they’re out on their ass in November? I’m just trying to understand all this. I’m so emotional about it, that I cannot apply any real thought to it at all.
Dr Myers,
I posted this on the Atheist experience site for the 6-10-18 episode and I thought it complimented what I wrote above. Thanks for reading.
I’m listening to a replay of Brian’s call and now understand some of the talk above. My background is a bachelors in biology, then a medical degree, then training in medical oncology and laboratory research in immunology.
Broadly, the major mechanism for evolution is random mutations in DNA and/or RNA. There are some unusual sources of mutation that have been more recently found. In particular, check out stuff about cephalopods (octopi). Very cool. Also, there is very recent talk about mutations happening that appear NOT to be random that have been seen in E. Coli and a M.Tb species that MAY have been a mutation that happened via quantum tunneling in response to the extreme energetic situation in which these microbes were being grown.
Sex is just a way to mix up genes well. It’s one of the ways random mutations can occur.
This is where the theists get confused. Natural selection is the term for the process by which a mutation, 99% of which are random, confers to the population a benefit. Thus, the process by which evolution occurs is one in which a randomly generated piece of information is selected by the environment to be perpetuated bc it confers some advantage to the population.
Think about it and it makes sense. Logical. The mutation just happens. Nature just happens. Probability. Selection is the nuture. That’s not random bc it’s directly related to where the organisms live.
That’s why it’s survival of the fittest at reproduction. And please don’t forget the ‘at reproduction’ part. There is NO social Darwinism. There is NO survival of the fittest. I detest how low empathy people use that excuse, especially theists, to justify their actions.
And this is why evolution has done so well as a theory. Darwin didn’t know about DNA. There are billions of facts supporting the theory. And this is another reason theists waste so much time. You literally have to change facts about MATH let alone ask about atoms and chemistry as one commenter has, to start to dismantle evolution. And that’s why science doesn’t waste time. If you do manage to come up with a new datum that may contradict the theory, it’s the theory that will be modified and improved, not overturned, that will happen.
As an EXCELLENT example, note my comment about emerging evidence from PHYSICS that mutations may, under VERY SPECIAL CONDITIONS, NOT BE RANDOM but actually occur in response to the environment. SO COOL. Why? Bc it means that at least in single cell prokaryotes that a mutation AND natural selection CAN POSSIBLY occur in ONE STEP. Plus, if one was to find such an intriguing EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE THEORY, for evolution you would expect to see it in more primitive life and via a mechanism like quantum tunneling.
So, this then leads to ADDITIONAL HYPOTHESES doesn’t it? Like, I wonder if we stress out a virus will it mutate in this way? What about DNA vs RNA viruses? I’d hypothesize that RNA viruses would be more likely. And then you experiment. And I bet we find something. Why? Bc of occam’s Razor. It makes too much sense that if we say grow an RNA virus that needs an amino acid in the absence of that amino acid there’s a chance that the virus that has an RNA gene that encodes for a structurally close amino acid to the deficient one, and if we put a gene in the RNA virus that is one base pair off for encoding for the amino acid it requires, we may catch a point mutation happening where eg an adenine changes to a thiamine via an electron quantum tunneling leading to the gene mutating so the virus can now make the amino acid it needs.
And does that result throw out evolution? Of course not. It just makes the theory that much stronger by using observations to generate new hypotheses that lead to results that just further modify and strengthen the theory of evolution.
Anyway, the reason Darwin is so well regarded is that his theory has held up so well. And the fundamental reason is his idea that it’s natural selection that over time leads to the survival of the fittest at reproduction. What we are learning is that it’s not really reproduction per se that’s important. It’s information. And by information I mean entropy. In other words, Darwin’s ideas have been so good bc it’s survival of the fittest at MAINTAINING INFORMATION IN A USEABLE FORM FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.
And that’s our purpose.
It’s also parenthetically why the 1% of us who do not have a functioning paralimbic system and thus have no empathy which means they are thinking reptiles are what evil is. The medical term for these people is narcissistic personality disorder but the preferred term is psychopath. They are the extreme of what religion is. Which is just making shit up. They just do it for fun. And the result is they waste time and energy. They waste information. They abuse entropy. And that’s why president trump is like he is.
The purpose of it all, from the Big Bang to the end is to maximize the use of information. And when you have a system with a ton of energy coming from a sun, a ton of energy coming from the planet core, and a huge water bath full of elements, what you get is, INEVITABLY, the abiogenesis of structures, then INEVITABLY the development of RNA (see Jeremy England MIT website) which leads inevitably to the central dogma of biology: DNA encodes RNA translates into protein.
The only difference between us and a rock is the rock may maintain its information for 4 billion years and us only 70. But the fun we get is our brains where we can manipulate time and energy and mass. We can build things.
And that’s why we get confused about a designer. The designer is the nervous system that responds to trying to store info for as long as possible. The dinosaurs didn’t design oil. Sweet isn’t a property of glucose. We add the meaning bc that’s why our brain evolved.
It’s about what empathy is. That’s why ADD. And, it’s why autism. And the human knockouts that prove this are the 1% of us with no paralimbic system and we call them psychopaths.
Anyway….our purpose is, to be poetic, is love. And no god is needed.
Or wanted.
Tom
I guess I will drop this link here, people might find it interesting, Neil Macdonald’s opinion piece on the CBC, “This is not America? Oh, yes, it is”.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/trump-immigration-1.4711365
Good question.
I don’t really know.
It could just be, as some people say, that they are mean people and they torture because they can.
That remains to be seen.
Despite all the craziness and sickness of the Trump regime, it still has a lot of support from the people who voted for them in the first place.
It’s going to be hard to switch the House and Senate from GOP control to Democratic control.
The Democrats are going to have to not just win but win big.
Yeah, me too. It’s mind numbingly appalling. Made worse because there simply isn’t a whole lot I can do about it.
Raven @16:
Could this phrasing be avoided? It implies that a good reason for torture actually exists.
@twarren1111, #6, 18 June 2018 at 5:49 pm
Having been diagnosed with moderate ADD (DSM-IIIR) at age 52 while married to a diagnosed NPD case and subsequently diagnosed with probable Asperger’s Syndrome, I find these ideas hit close to home.
Can you point me to further information on them? I’m still able to read research reports and the like, even at my age, but my puny Social Security and distance from a decent library means I can neither pay much, if anything, for access nor “just go read it”. Even search terms for Google Scholar would be useful.
Thank you.
As on most other issues: Trump is doing what American leaders have been doing for years, but he’s doing it in an ugly, deliberate way so that there can be no excuses made and no pretense that “we didn’t mean for that to happen”. We went from doing terrible things while proclaiming “we’re not doing terrible things” under Reagan to doing terrible things while proclaiming “sometimes we have to do terrible things” under Bush to “some of these terrible things need to be excused because we say we want to do some non-terrible things” under Clinton to “contrary to popular worldwide opinion and the consensus of history, these things aren’t terrible at all” under Bush/Cheney, to “okay, we’re doing terrible things for our own benefit, but the terrible things have such momentum that it’s unrealistic to expect us to stop” under Obama. This was just the next logical step.
@#19, lakitha tolbert:
Don’t be too sure about that. It’s true that the Republicans, post 2016, have shown an amazing aptitude for choosing candidates who are so terrible that they repel even the Republicans who voted for Trump. (Roy Moore, and then there’s that out-and-out pedophile who got the nomination elsewhere, name eludes me for the moment.) But the 2018 elections are mostly going to involve incumbents running for reelection, and incumbents win more than they lose.
I’m betting: the Democrats get a majority back in one or both houses of Congress, but not enough of a majority in either one to proceed against Trump. Following their earlier behavior against Bush and during the Obama administration, they will not even make a symbolic serious impeachment effort against Trump, and they will claim that the high proportion of Republicans in Congress means that they are unable to pass anything, so they won’t try — but they will pass most of the bills the Republicans come up with, because Bipartisanship! And We Don’t Want To Rock The Boat Before A Presidential Election! And also We Can’t Let The Government Shut Down Even If It’s Totally The Republicans’ Fault And The Alternative Is Outright Disaster!
In 2020, they will run a right-of-center, pro-war, pro-1% creep, who will have a history of supporting bad policy but claim to be a technocratic policy wonk. This candidate will be a woman, a minority, or both, and any criticism of their history will be deflected by the party by claiming it shows bigotry on the part of the critic. Trump (or, if Trump has a heart attack or something, Pence) will steamroller this candidate because they will run on a pro-corporate (can’t upset the corporate donors!) pro-war platform which the base doesn’t actually like very much. After all, it worked so well in 2016. They will not only lose the Presidential election but lose most or all of the gains they made in 2018.
I further posit that the current situation is actually ideal for the current crop of Democratic leaders. They get to pretend to be against the Republicans without having to do anything at all to prove it because they don’t control anything so all actions would presumably be futile; in 2009, when they controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and in 2011 when they had a majority in both houses of Congress and the Presidency, they were running out of excuses to not even try. Now they can phone it in and nobody seems to even notice.
Trumpists are masturbating to these recordings. They must be stopped by any means necessary.
#25 The Vicar
*Sigh*
Depressing, but likely. American voters keep finding brand new ways to disappoint me, along with all the old ways they used to.
And the proud pedophile’s name is Nathan Larson. Ten years ago I expected whole new levels of shittery, on the part of straight white men. I knew they were going to start showing their whole ass, and it would get worse and worse, but I could never have predicted anything like this.
twarren1111 and The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs)
I bet that if you sent applications, you could jobs as Border Patrol Agents.
#27 lakitha tolbert
Nathan Larson is running as an independent. The Republicans can be blamed for lots of things, but not him.
“Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”
was delivered in Spanish
People need to follow Trump around to all his public appearances and play the audio of those children on loudspeakers.
Searching YouTube for talks on neurobiology of ADD, and NPD. KENT KIEHL RECENTLY PUBLISHED A BOOK (2014) that’s in paper back called the psychopath whisperer. You certainly can find YouTube’s about his research. There’s a 5 part series on CBC (Canadian broadcast co) called “I, psychopath” that is awesome. This is a fascinating talk about language in psychopaths. Really well done. I think from Cornell. https://youtu.be/6vF5PtdiiCo
https://letmereach.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/npd.pdf
The above link is an excellent book written by a child of a psychopath. She committed suicide. I’ve seen every behavior she talks about in the psychopath I was in oncology practice with. Imagine trump being a cancer dr!
https://youtu.be/_7_tVgtto7c
Excellent panel discussion from neuroscientists at a recent world science festival talk. Very worthwhile to watch whole thing.
3
I too was a late dx at age 47. Wife severe OCPD (self hating perfectionist). My dad was npd and a partner was npd. I feel so for you. Read the free book. It’s excellent. Then read Sam Vaiknan stuff but be wary of him bc as an npd he’s unreliable. But you can then watch him on the CBC special. Read the psychopath whisperer published 2104 by Kent kiehl. Paper back. There’s a book called women who married psychopaths. I found it excellent bc it describes the type of people who fall prey to npd whether wife, husband, child, coworker. You see, what makes you such a loving, highly empathic person ADD is what makes you like heroin to a psychopath.
I don’t understand chigau why you suggest I become a border agent
Please explain
twarren1111
This thread is about injustice and the video/audio of crying children.
This thread is NOT about you.
twarren1111
Would you maybe consider the complete inappropriateness of you posting your pages long essays about whatever in a thread that is about babies being literally torn from their mothers’ breasts and thrown into cages?
+++
Oh, and look, it’s the Vicar telling us why Democrats are still not pure enough so it’s totally ok that he helped to get Trump elected because we all know fuck those brown children, their suffering is a price he was willing to pay.
I have nothing but contempt for you.
I can’t watch the video, just the thought of it makes me sick to my stomach. I wish I was in a place in my life where I could take in one of these kids. If they’re going to be ripped from their families, the least we can do is give them places to stay that aren’t fucking dog cages. I donated to the RAICES family reunification bond fund, but what else can you do.
@ twarren1111
Good and evil are what we do, not what we are.
Tearing children away from their families to score political points? That’s evil. Really, taking children away from their families and traumatizing them for any reason outside of abuse/neglect is almost certainly going to tip the scales towards evil, but the administration extra points for wickedness with their racism and nationalism.
Putting people in concentration camps? Pretty damn evil.
Imprisoning refugees for having the audacity to hope for a better life? Yep, that’s definitely evil.
Possessing atypical brain function? Not evil. What’s more, as chigau (違う) and Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- have pointed out, not the purpose of this thread. That being the case I will refrain from delivering my own pages long lecture about how catastrophically wrong it is to imply that the people who are acting like bloody Nazis are doing so because they ‘aren’t right in the head,’ what with the mentally ill being one of the groups targeted by Nazis, and all that. And yes, I realize that you’re not precisely saying that ‘Nazis be crazy,’ but you’re walking damn close to that line.
Choices are being made to put children in cages. What Jeff Sessions’ and Donald Trump’s and smug BP asshole #3’s brains look like is not relevant here.
Greetings… you ask “What else can I do?”
You can keep contacting your US representative and keep calling/writing until you get an answer you are satisfied with.
You can keep talking about this regardless of any opposition you encounter.
One aspect that I see overlooked is this is only happening to brown people at the southern border, there are no white children being taken away at our northern border.
It is racism, pure and simple.
I point at the Trumpers, look at them squarely eye to eye and tell them they are responsible for this.
There are a lot of things we can do, never forget you are not alone.
There are more of us out there, let us make some noise.
heard a guy on the radio today being interviewed say he was afraid that we were being overwhelmed by I think he said south americans my mind wont recall the actual words. so what they are doing to them is OK.
anyone know where the manure cart is?
uncle frogy
So Charles Stross came out with some predictions recently. TLDR Drone technology, a panopticon singularity, and global warming are going to see refugees quietly euthanized at the border out of sight of the hoi poli. I don’t entirely buy it as the panopticon leaks, and governments should start assuming that all of their dirty laundry will be aired sooner than later.
But this separating kids from parents, this feels like everything he wrote is coming true.
What will be the next step?
The “showers”?
Seems too far out.
OTOH, Stross is very smart and you ignore him at your peril.
I might not agree with him but I would never not take him seriously.
It strikes me that what we are seeing everywhere, with our southern border problem and in Europe with their African/Mid-East problem is the fallout from one simple fact.
The earth is now at 7.3 billion people and going up.
How many people can the earth support with climate change and depleting resources.
No one really knows.
But it might not be 7.3 billion people.
In fact, it might be a few billion people less than that.
We’ve really pushed the life support systems of the earth hard, and they might well be starting to fail.
fernando, #42
And what would be the American people’s reaction to them?
I think the next step (maybe it’s already happening) is gonna be using the children for labor while calling it “activity time”.
@Mike Smith #12
And when they do, they can be used by the right-wing propaganda machine to justify another generation’s worth of treating people like shit. I don’t think that’s an accident.
@twarren1111
Err.. You do understand that “quantum tunneling” only effects “subatomic particles” not individual atoms, never mind entire molecules right? There is no shrodenger’s cat that can walk through walls. You don’t get “gene level” changes as a result of an electron, or something, “quantum tunneling” between cells. It would take having whole atoms change places, and that… just doesn’t actually happen, like, at all, based on everything we know on the subject.
@Raven #43
I wondered how long it would take for the Malthusians to come out. The global West uses far more resources than the Earth can sustain, but most people in Africa and Asia don’t. We could afford to clothe and feed every human on Earth if we shared those resources more equitably. It says something that people are prepared to sacrifice billions to save the System, rather than the other way around.
@Saad #44
“And what would be the American people’s reaction to them?”
Based on the reactions I’m seeing even incomment sections even in liberal papers like the Guardian, a complete lack of compassion and a shrug that the parents shouldn’t have entered the country illegally *throws up a little*
Families Belong Together and a large coalition of groups announced last night a planned rally in DC on the 30th, with other rallies and events across the country on the same day. If you want to get on their mailing list, you can sign up at the link.
So when, exactly, does it become torch and pitchfork time? I’m not sure I (or this nation for that matter) can last until November.
Ragutis, #50
When the people who own torches and pitchforks are affected.
Monday’s episode of Democracy Now included one part where they interviewed a youth social worker that had been employed at one of the detention centers were separated immigrant children were being kept. He had been disturbed by what he had seen, but ended up quitting over one particular incident.
Three siblings had been brought to the facility. Not only had they been separated from their parents, but now the facility was separating the siblings. Distressed, the children clung to each other. The social worker was trying to talk to them, calm them and reassure them. A manager came over and ordered the children to stop hugging. There was to be no hugging at the facility.
These people have no empathy.
Oh, and last night I heard a new “argument” justifying the detention of children separated from their parents. The kids might become members of MS13.
Silly question. We already know that.
The current GOP leadership would just…quote the bible!!!
It’s not as stupid as it sounds.
Jeff Sessions and many others have just done that.
And the bible is full of genocide.
The OT is the charming story of the Israelis overrunning the Canaanites and destroying their cities, stealing their land and stuff, and genociding them.
Ever met a Canaanite? You won’t.
They have all been dead for 3,000 years.
FWIW, while the bible is indeed a story of genocide and its consequences, the Israelis themselves were then overrrun by numerous people, it is just a story.
As I sarcastically noted, ever met a Canaanite.
In reality you have.
We now know the OT is fiction and the Jews were and are…just another tribe of…Canaanites.
There is no such thing as the Canaanite language.
It’s a collection of closely related languages, one of which is…Hebrew.
Logical fallacy. Assertion without proof or data and may be dismissed without proof or data.
You are wrong.
And also an irrelevant fantasy.
The day you get Trump and the GOP to share anything is the day hell hits absolute zero.
In reality, you don’t know the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth.
I don’t either.
No one does.
We won’t know for centuries until there is a die back or there isn’t a die back.
PS I’m not a Malthusian so save your insults for someone else.
The point I made which you ignored, is that the world is showing signs of severe stress just about everywhere. It isn’t just wars, migrations, and refugees. The climate is indeed changing rapidly and that is going to effect everyone.
Jon Podhoretz, yesterday: “Stop already with the Nazi and Hitler analogies. Really. Stop. What’s happening is its own kind of bad and you court discrediting the seriousness of your complaints about it by overstating things so tastelessly and wrongly.”
Mike Godwin, last year: “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.”
A year ago I posted on Twitter that if Trump built concentration camps for children, the response from his supporters would be, “But what about her emails”. I thought I was engaging in hyperbole. I guess I wasn’t.
From the first comment:
Ann Coulter pulls out that exact accusation on the crying two-year-olds the OP is about, and implores the Deplorable One to stay inside his bubble of make-believe.
No, I don’t think she actually believes that, I think she’s trolling; but that doesn’t make a difference.
Other topics:
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Looks more like archosaurs as a whole: it’s possible to be friends with a crocodile.
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Europe is having a milk surplus again. Just saying.
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Quantum tunneling is true random as far as anyone can currently tell. Please explain, perhaps in an appropriate thread, what you’re talking about.
Of course it does, just not quite as often. :-| Indeed, one common mechanism of mutation is known to be that a base flips by 90° or so by means of quantum tunneling.
Not exactly 100% accurate, lyrics/situation wise, but about as appropriate as I could find, and P.B. really drives the emotion and pain home during the last third. And who else was singing about child abuse 25/30 years ago?
Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, Magdalena, 1972, comes to mind…
Also Suzanne Vega, Luka, and 10,000 Maniacs, What’s the Matter Here.
Stone me, but you really are a complete fuckwit, raven. You made such an assertion @43:
You gave no proof or data showing that the earth’s total population, or its current rate of growth, or climate change, has anything whatever to do with people needing or wanting to move from poor, often war-torn or tyrannised countries to rich, comparatively peaceful ones. The flow of refugees and other migrants is not, primarily, from countries with particularly high population densities, and in the case of Europe, it is to countries with greater population density than the source countries.
@#21, Travis:
And remember that Neil MacDonald was the Washington correspondent for the CBC for twelve years. He’s pretty familiar with the internals of U.S. politics.
@#62, What a Maroon:
Gah, Luka. I remember when that song came out, back when I was just entering University. It made quite an impression on me at the time.
@42
“Listen folks, we can’t have these camps. They look bad, so bad. No good. They’re bringing down property values, bringing crime. It’s no good at all, at all. Where are these kids gonna go? Well, I don’t wanna say it but, listen folks, we have to be real here, we have to be real. I don’t wanna say it but people are saying, I hear it all the time, people are saying listen, what if we just gassed them?”
Are there going to be protests against this? There have to be, Americans can’t just let this slide.
@66
There have been several protests at both detention centers and ICE offices in the last few days. The local news is covering them but there’s been near-silence on the televised national news, from what I can tell.
forodrim@66, Families Belong Together — Attend a June 30 Event!: “On June 30, we’re rallying in Washington, DC, and around the country to tell Donald Trump and his administration to stop separating kids from their parents!”
MSNBC & CNN have been covering it.
I do not know about network news.
All of us have a responsibility to make some noise.
Stockholm syndrome is quite likely settling into these children as a matter of survival.
@raven
Well… Technically, if we had some way to use the best farm methods, instead of relying on local governments to implement (or more like to wreck, ruin, or steal them), then I would give the “feed” one a major maybe. Whether its sustainable over the long term, on the other hand… But, we could definitely end hunger for our own bloody country, if we gave a damn.
As for clothing.. Thought we had a blog post a while back on this. Or… No, it was Tits and Sass that had one. But, basically, we produce so much bloody clothing in the US, just by ourselves, that we actually have companies with 2-3 sub-companies, that cycle clothing they didn’t sell, and still have enough left over that we can ship a mess of it to varied foreign after markets, and **still** have enough, after that it done, to be forced to shred thousands of pounds of the stuff, because it was unsellable
*in any market*. I don’t remember the exact estimate, but it was some huge amount over and above what would be necessary to place a copy of every fashion garment every made, in every closet, of every home, in the entire country, and still have clothing left over.
One example of this is Forever 21, which is a resaler for another company. The first one sells the thing “in season”, then ships the stuff to Forever 21, who then run a BOGO scam, which includes a return policy that requires you trade item for item, and sometime you can’t get a direct trade, without “taking” the BOGO item that came with it, so you go in to return one item, and come out with two, instead of money back. And, when they need to cycle things out… it goes to yet some place else which does a similar game.
A, here was the article: http://titsandsass.com/threadbare-clothes-sex-trafficking-2016/
Sigh. Hit post before I was done. Point is, we could “clothe” the planet probably twice over, but feed them….
“Logical fallacy. Assertion without proof or data and may be dismissed without proof or data.”
That isn’t a logical fallacy. And using your own argument I can dismiss your claim. Which I have done.
“You are wrong.”
Assertion without proof or data and may be dismissed without proof or data
“And also an irrelevant fantasy.
The day you get Trump and the GOP to share anything is the day hell hits absolute zero.”
What has that got to do with anything? I stated that we COULD feed and clothe everyone IF we changed the system. Leaving trump and the GOP in charge does not change that system.
2In reality, you don’t know the sustainable carrying capacity of the earth.
I don’t either.
No one does.”
So why are you spouting off about it?
“PS I’m not a Malthusian so save your insults for someone else.”
My apologies, I simply assumed that if someone was making the arguments of a Malthusian then they’re probably a Malthusian
“The point I made which you ignored, is that the world is showing signs of severe stress just about everywhere. It isn’t just wars, migrations, and refugees. The climate is indeed changing rapidly and that is going to effect everyone.”
Yup, so let’s look at ways of changing the systems of governance we have to alleviate those stressors. Simply throwing our hands up and declaring ‘nope, there’s too many people!’ isn’t helpful.
Saad @44
To immediately and forcefully buy shares in whatever chemical firm makes Zyklon-B.
Holy Freud, that merits the biggest LOLSOB ever.
By the way, the firm that made Zyklon-B?
Bayer (the company that makes your aspirin), which, by the way, just merged with Monsanto, but they’re retaining the Bayer name so as to escape the negative associations with the Monsanto corporate name/brand. What a fucking laugh that they went with Bayer.