…Bricker: when you are ready and willing to address either the subject of this thread or even the substance of my post then let me know. I honestly don’t have a fucking clue what you are going on about now, but I’m sure it all makes sense in your head.
I’m entirely confident that what is happening now at the borders is a direct result of directives that have come from the Trump administration. I’ve just finished explaining to you exactly why the use of the word “policy” is problematic here. You’ve can’t just snip that from your quote and pretend I didn’t say it.
He’s arguing in support of the placement of children into tent cities. In the middle of Texas. In June. AND attempting to argue it’s not inhumane, though he believes it to be the textbook definition of the word.
And asking that liberal Dopers fix it, while Republicans in Washington sit on their asses.
The bigger and more complex the system, the more likely things will go wrong, and the more controls are needed to stop things going wrong the next time.
The entire purpose of the report you cited was to " launch an investigation of HHS’s process for screening potential UAC sponsors and other measures to protect UACs from trafficking." Its how you keep chaos under control. You look for problems in the system, you investigate the problem, you put new controls in place to fix the problem. This particular instability in the system cannot be directly attributable to the President, because the President is not the person who created the instability.
That isn’t the case here. The instability in the system is directly attributable to the Trump Administration because they issued the directives that have resulted in the people at the borders having to make procedures up on the fly.
I didn’t agree that a useful synonym for “inhumane,” is cruel, but I will certainly concede that to the extent you believe the terms are synonymous, you have every right to use the word. And I will also concede that it’s not simply your belief: you have a good dictionary source.
So I think the problem here is mine. In my view, “inhumane” represents several orders of magnitude beyond merely “cruel,” or “lacking compassion.” But it looks like that’s my idea, and not the dictionary’s.
“Lacking compassion” is the passive form of “inhumane”, “cruel” requires a willful and positive effort. Like how fretting the fine distinctions between synonyms is kinda dumb, but doing it seriously is totally retardo with awesome ranch sauce. That’s, like, an analogy.
Speaking of ridiculous fights over essentially synonymous words and phrases, apparently the big semantic fight going on over the past day is whether these things can be called ‘cages’ or whether that’s too loaded a term so you should opt for ‘chain-link partitions,’ ‘chain-link holding areas,’ or some such.
There’s really no better use of the miracle of the Internet than to start and then carry on a protracted debate on the point at which chartreuse needs to be called green, and identify all the idiots who don’t agree.
But seriously, do you need it explained why nobody needs to seek asylum in another country in order to escape the violence in Detroit or Chicago? And how those reasons might not be applicable to Guatemala or Honduras?
That Secretary Nielsen is denying this is even a policy is a hopeful sign that the pressure on this issue really is getting to the White House. And while my faith in my fellow Americans has received some body blows over the last couple of years, I’m hopeful that the sight and stories of crying and purposefully-temporarily-orphaned children will move more of my fellow Americans to find some decency within themselves that has been lacking as of late.
I’ll feel a bit more charitable towards her if she ‘denies’ the policy by refusing to implement it. Until then, she’s just as in deep with this abomination as everyone else involved.
Republican Congressman Hurd of Texas was on NPR this morning practically calling her a liar – the host quoted her and asked if that were true and his response was that the US is in fact separating kids from their parents. He didn’t say she lied, but rather immediately contradicted Nielsen.
I can’t find a transcript or audio file. Maybe it will turn up later on the NPR site.
Maybe Nielsen is saying that DHS doesn’t have that policy (it’s probably actually some other department’s practice (ICE?) to separate the kids), but once they are separated, it’s up to DHS to do something with them. So, it’s possible that she’s technically right that H&HS doesn’t have that policy.
Congressman Hurd also said that this policy is creating a new and larger unaccompanied minor problem (since once the kids are separated from their parents, they become unaccompanied), and the administration isn’t ready for that either.
I don’t feel charitable towards her at all. For one, she’s lying, and for another, she hasn’t resigned rather than institute this monstrous policy. I’m saying that the fact that she feels forced to lie shows us how weak they feel defending this policy.
