Divisiveness

I am pleased to be divided from the lovers of death and destruction, from the people who enabled the murder of 17 in Parkland. – Tweetstorm finale

One More Step Through the Gates of Hell

(Tweets written in exasperation.)

With its advocacy of widespread deployment of battlefield weapons, the Republican Party, influenced by the NRA, is supporting widespread stochastic terrorism, which perhaps will do in the stead of the paramilitaries which have been part of the historical fascist movements. – Tweetstorm

A Vision of Violence

This seems a good time to run this, from 1969. Some of it is dated, and the full book is even more dated, but look at what the author got right.

Take the fine expensive home you live in, with its automatic defenses and its mines sown under the lawn like daffodil-bulbs. You shut yourself up behind armor-plate, you shut your mind, too. You advertise Guardian traps on your show, don't you—those steel bands spiked like an iron maiden? What's the mentality of someone who's prepared to come home from visiting neighbors and find a corpse hung up in the doorway? I say he's already insane when he commits himself to that course of action, and you don't have to wait for him to lose his marbles under an overdose of [psychoactive drugs] before he stops thinking as a responsible mature person ought to! And what's the reason that's advanced for acting this way?

[Individualism!] And what's this been twisted into? The biggest Big Lie in history! It's no use making your life so private you refuse to learn from other people's experience—you just get stuck in a groove of mistakes you need never have made. We have more knowledge available at the turn of a switch than ever before, we bring any part of the world into our own homes, and what do we do with it? Half the time we advertise goods people can't afford, and anyhow they've got the color and hold controls [analog tech] adrift because the pretty patterns are fun to look at when you've bolted and barred your mind with drugs. Split! Divide! Separate! Shut your eyes and maybe it'll go away!

We mine our gardens, we close our frontiers, we barricade our cities with […] lines to shut off black from white, we divide, divide, divide! It gets into our families, […], it gets into our very love-making! Christ, do you know I had a girl student last year who thought we was having an affair with a boy back home and all they'd ever done was sit in front the comweb and masturbate at each other? Twenty miles apart! They'd never even kissed! We're going insane, our whole blasted species—we're heading for screaming ocholophobia! Another couple of generations and husbands will be afraid to be alone in the same room with their wives, mothers will be afraid of their babies, if there are any babies!

And for what purpose? Why are we encouraging the spread of this lunacy? I mean we here, in North America. I don't mean […] the richest people in the world battening on the poorest. That's just greed, which is a comparatively clean kind of vice. I'm talking about perversion, horrible, disgusting, systematic, deliberate perversion of the power of reason to destroy people without killing them, to strip them of their initiative, their joy in life, their hope, […], their last ultimate irreducible human resource, hope. Out of sheer desperation millions of people are abandoning the use of reason, bankrupting themselves to buy [new age junk], in a last puerile attempt to outdo the bastards who've made "reason" a dirty word.

They've done it, you know—it's the dirtiest word in any human vocabulary right now. And it's been brought about in my own lifetime, almost entirely. Cold rational decisions, every step leading to them perfectly logical, underlay the wars in Asia […] and at every step we lost. Not just the wars, but bits ourselves. Compassion. Empathy. Love. Pity. We systematically chopped ourselves down to the measure of a machine.

How could you expect a man to be a good neighbor when he's spent years shooting at shadows, moving tree-branches, silhouettes on window-shades? How could you expect him to be a good citizen when he's seen his government authorize the killing of thousands, millions of other human beings? How could you expect him to be a good father when he's spent his early twenties torturing children to get information about enemy troop positions? That started as far back as the seventies, wasn't it? – John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit, 1969.

Dealing with Trump

In dealing with Trump, it may help to remember that he says what will persuade, but keeps returning to his own agenda.

Do not trust his promises.

Todays Bad News

Facebook's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad two years or, how the victimized right wing won again and Facebook made a ton of money from it. Facebook seems to have replaced television as the yuge media source not to watch if you want to be well-informed. Link.

The New York Times gives op-ed space to discredited firearms researcher and advocate John Lott. (No link. The NYT's publishers have gone fascist. F– 'em.) I like political scientist Henry Farrell's remarks on Lott:

"Why yes indeed. You could say that More Guns, Less Crime drew heated criticism. But then, you might prefer to ask why John Lott became a public laughing stock before you got into detailed back-and-forths about the econometrics. Mysteriously disappearing surveys. The wonderful Mary Rosh, a former ‘student’ of John Lott’s who went after Lott’s critics on the Internet, and gushed about [Lott] before she was revealed as a sockpuppet for John R. Lott himself. And finally, the famous lawsuit against Steven Levitt.[…]

"What we can’t check is how many specifications Lott tries and discards before coming up with those that suit his prejudices. But we can observe that he bats 1.000 in this respect. On a vast range of subjects, his econometric analyses always come up with the same conclusion: The Right is right."

And, finally, the Department of Agriculture proposes replacing SNAP, which allows desperately poor people to buy food for their families with a government-funded debit card, with a monthly box of agribusiness-selected preserved foods. "Poverty sucks," say the rich people.

What will mass deportations be like?

So, let's say that (as seem depressingly likely) the Democrats do not successfully manage to get any form of DREAM act passed. So, what happens then?

Does Homeland Security already have a plan in place for mass deportations? How would they be implemented? What is the impact? Here's a few thoughts on the Mexicans, who are perhaps half of the DACA recipents; 345,000 people.

Some 76% of DACA recipients are from Mexico or Central America. That is perhaps a half a million people, most of them probably Mexican. Let's suppose that Homeland Security attempts to apprehend these people as their authorizations expire. Some go underground, some are apprehended and deported – to where? Mexico is a big place, and Mexico City, deep in the mountainous interior, is very different from Monterrey in the Northern border state of Nuevo León, and that, in turn is different from Mexican border cities like Tijuana and Juarez. Without family in Mexico, they likely will find their way difficult.

What happens in the USA? Undocumented Mexicans are a significant population in the USA. Does Homeland Security start running sweeps? How does their neighbors react? What is done when US citizens are swept up in this wide net?

And on, and on.

A General Reaction to the News Lately

They're all crazy! Nucking futz!

(Regular blogging will return tomorrow after this interruption.)