I agree. But you miss the point. Language which was intended to be used as a cudgel for trivial things for transient political advantage had been devalued. This situation was predicted. Hysterical folks on the left have ruined a lot. Including the proper employment of language such as concentration camp or that’s literally Hitler!!1!.
So, if you want words to have meaning you need to work on getting folks to stop being unnecessarily shrill. I think someone wrote a book about this. Something about a boy and wolf.
Now there are effective approaches to alleviating the poor conditions on the border. One is to stop encouraging the idea that the US is defacto open borders. The second is to vote for some funds to provide better facilities.
If the US goes full Venezuela and my family and I have to flee with our gold bars to a more sane nation we wouldn’t expect the absolute right to enter. We sure as hell would try though. So I don’t blame the migrants from doing what they feel they need to do. It’s a terrible situation and is going to be an order of magnitude worse as the sea levels rise. Mass migration is going to be apocalyptic.
The poor conditions exist because of a deliberate policy decision to make immigrants suffer, and your solution is therefore to…increase funding to the entity that is deliberately making immigrants suffer???
Clearly yours is the sort of penetrating political insight that desperately needed to be posted. I just have one minor followup question: do you think you’ve given an appropriate level of thought to what exactly they’ll do with that extra money?
Lol. Keep raging impotently at the machine and let’s see how much difference you actually make. But to answer your question what does the government usually do with extra money? Waste 7/8ths of it. Which should leave enough money for some off brand toilet paper, diapers, and tooth paste.
I completely disagree. As used by the academics and others, it is essentially a clinical term for an ethically terrible policy.
Let me use an example for you. If you want to call a certain segment of Trump supporters “brownshirts,” that’s a reference to Nazism, of course. But if you want to call them fascists, that isn’t a specific reference to Nazis; it’s a reference to a universe of extreme right wingers that include Nazis and many other groups. One can call the Proud Boys etc. “fascists” not merely to be provocative and associate them with the Third Reich, but because that’s the accurate word to describe what they are regardless of who has been affiliated with it in the past.
The term “lynch mob” has a negative connotation, but when a group of angry people are approaching you with a hangman’s noose you don’t refer to them as a “Community action group” in an effort to keep things calm.
So when the guards at these camps are telling the inmates to drink out of the toilet when they’re thirsty, that’s just The Left Being Hysterical. O-kay. :dubious:
Really. “Unnecessarily shrill.” From the side of the isle whose shouts of “BENGHAZI!! EMAILS!! VINCE FOSTER!! WHITEWATER!! LEWINSKY!!” have deafened us for the past two decades?? You’re breaking my heart, snookums. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the wolf has arrived and is chowing down on the boy’s small intestine. Are you just going to stand there and cluck your tongue or are you going to do something productive?
No one is advocating “open borders.” Stop beating that dead horse, it’s stinking up the place. And I’ll be damned if we’re going to throw MORE money at these contractor SOBs so they can line their pockets even deeper.
Pro tip: don’t drop one of those gold bars on your foot. You’ll hop for a week. :rolleyes:
I think both yours and Ambivalid’s points are true. The term “concentration camp” seems to be used by some in order to provoke a reaction. The term is also being used by those who feel it’s an accurate descriptor.
Japanese internment employed concentration camps. People being forcibly removed from their homes that already live within the country and being imprisoned in a small area. But there is a vast difference between rounding up people already in the country and holding them against their will, and detaining people who are voluntarily attempting to enter the country that may or may not have a right to be here.
It certainly is terrible what is going on, horrible conditions and implementation. But at some point, there is a limit to the number of people that can be handled and past that point conditions will deteriorate. It seems more like a refugee camp, or an overcrowded prison/detention center than a concentration camp. It strikes me as materially different if the people are in the camps because they traveled to the country and are attempting entry or seeking asylum, than if they were being forced into the camps against their will.
It’s true that at some volume of people, conditions will become inhumane. But this administration has explicitly argued that harming migrant families is useful and valuable for deterrent purposes, as well as various other indications that they place little value on how migrants, and even migrant children, are treated. Does that warrant critical language that more explicitly highlights that these conditions are by choice, and not by necessity or are otherwise unavoidable?
There were half a million apprehensions at the border last year. Recently, that has spiked, so that we’re on a pace for roughly 1.5 million apprehensions this year. Yep, that’s a big increase.
But it is on-par for the number of apprehensions throughout the 1990s and most of the 2000s.
Customs and Border Protection employs 60,000 today, as opposed to half of that during that time (roughly).
I submit to you that the most likely cause of such conditions under a similar workload but with twice the workers is malevolence. Buttressing this claim is that Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. have openly talked about policies like family separation, zero tolerance, deterrence, and so on.
Further, Congress approved something like $1.7 billion in aid to the Northern Triangle countries to try to get a handle on the rampant violence that is causing people to flee. Trump decided not to spend the money there, even though anyone with half a brain can see that addressing the root cause of the migration is far, far smarter than locking people up.
I suspect the “drink from the toilet” claim was most likely a case of third-worlders not understanding how American toilets work and guards trying to explain to them that they can drink from the spout above the toilet, plus perhaps some nuance being lost in translation, both between the guard and the immigrant, and then the immigrant and the activists / reporters.
I suppose it’s possible: I hear Spanish-speaking fascists are in short supply in Texas.
ETA: AOC says the water fountain part of the fixture was not working. Maybe the CBP officers suggested that the inmates yell at it in English for once?