The photos of the "crowds" at the tank parade remind me of when Bill Hicks would come on stage in an almost-empty club, scan the room slowly, and announce "I've had more people in bed than this" ...
When the president sends a cabinet member on TV to announce "We are using the military to liberate an American city from its elected leaders," where do you go from there. What is left to say. The idea of that being anything short of a near-universal "Wait, what the fuck is going on" moment proves how far we've backslid.
This is from 2022 but it was absolutely right. The practiced buffoonery of Trump 1, all the "just kiddings" and "seriously but not literallys" absolutely succeeded in desensitizing people who are hardly paying any attention to the harder stuff they always intended to do next. ...
The basic fallacy in chasing votes by being "tough on immigration" is that the modal American's position on the issue is "Deport the Bad ones and keep the Good ones," and they alone know who is which, and that simply does not translate into workable policy. So this kind of gestapo stuff horrifies some of the same people who cheered when Trump promised to do it. There are true sociopaths who love this, but "No, I meant only the BAD immigrants! Not my coworker/friend/neighbor!" is as likely a reaction as enthusiasm. You cannot do immigration policy that satisfies these people because what they want is nonsensical.
So by the time center-left parties fully commit to chasing the far right by "getting tough" on immigration, the backlash has already begun to build and they walk right into it. "I thought you people wanted this!" No, they want something impossible and convinced themselves they'd could have it - the "eat whatever you want AND lose weight!" of immigration policies.
It is hard to grasp but large masses of Americans are both racist/xenophobic AND not racist/xenophobic enough to applaud what Trump is doing. It's goldilocks shit, they want a level of racism/xenophobia calibrated exactly to their personal preferences, and you just can't make that policy. Don't try. ...
AP: Trump extends olive branch, invites Musk to White House cellar to taste some brand new amontillado ...
Matthew says:
This post is hardly of a broad, sweeping, or intentionally provocative nature at all! Just more news. Good luck getting 13 comments on today's post, Ed!
JDryden says:
The Manhattan Project has been so thoroughly documented in a library shelve's worth of history books that, yeah, I think it's safe to say that the genie's out of the bottle on this one. A nuke is actually fairly easy to put together–it's the ingredients (well, *ingredient*) that're really, really, really, really–and thank God there are so many "really"s–hard to come by. But even there, every third-year physics major knows how to make them. It's simply not that tricky. Just time-consuming and hellaciously expensive and you really can't do it in secret in the age of satellite imagery. Which is plenty good for us. But for Bush to frame this as a matter of ignorance rather than inopportunity is just…well, I suppose I'd call it hubristic, in the sense that he thinks we can control what other people can learn/know. Which is like thinking that we can control the weather. But I'm sure that he thinks we can do that, too, which is why he's still not sure why Katrina happened.
Ed says:
This really is a terrible form of negative reinforcement – people only comment when I say things that are poorly thought out and belligerent.
More of that to come, I guess. Huzzah!