I’m complaining that the media are not doing a good enough job. I don’t understand how the media who hates Trump would not be broadcasting the horrible conditions everyday in front page stories.
I absolutely believe that human beings are being treating horribly.
…this smug editorialfrom Chuck Todd should give you an idea where (generally) the media have priorities. As Cortez says in response:
Trump isn’t bad for the media. He makes them money. And its easier to attack someone like AOC than it is to acknowledge what is happening in the camps. This is just history repeating itself. I’m watching from afar with quiet detachment, punctuated by moments of utter despair.
Maybe they have limited access. Maybe they’re reporting the abuses and people don’t take the reports seriously.
I fear it will become that bad.
The repetition of “it will never be that bad” and the belief that it couldn’t be that bad is what will enable the conditions for it to be that bad.
Oh, I think the details will differ… these things never happen exactly the same way twice. And sure as hell I don’t think the next round of atrocities will be so lovingly documented as the Nazis documented their crimes.
Why do we have to wait for it to be American citizens before we care?
On top of that - “Operation Janus” is taking a look at 700,000 current naturalized citizens with the power to revoke that citizenship. Which has some very disturbing parallels with the Vichy regimen revoking citizenship prior to shipping “undesirables” like Jews, Romani, communists, homosexuals, and others off to oblivion.
Refusing to call things what they are doesn’t help, either.
Got it - you aren’t going to call them concentration camps until they are extermination camps. You aren’t going to call them what they are until people start dying in numbers.
People are already getting inadequate food and there are already problems with disease in these places. But hey, if these folks aren’t being asked to work, too, it doesn’t count - is that what you’re saying?
Well, for one thing, the press has limited access to these facilities.
And then we have the problem of people not believing that concentration camps are concentration camps.
They are; it was news a year ago.
Detainees at the Stewart Detention Center in south Georgia generally make between $1 and $4 a day for tasks such as preparing food, mopping floors and doing laundry, according to the lawsuit, which describes the practice as a “deprivation scheme” and alleges it’s a violation of human trafficking laws. Detainees who work double shifts can earn up to $8 a day.
Part of the scheme, according to the lawsuit: Depriving detainees of basic necessities like food, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, so they have to work to pay for those items from the detention center’s commissary.
Agreed. I don’t think it matters what you call the camps – if the media aren’t covering what’s going on, no one is going to care.
Of course, maybe that’s backwards – the media aren’t covering the camps because they already suspect no one will care. 40% of the country will say the detainees are getting what they deserve, and 40% will have their disgust-o-meters ratcheted another notch fast capacity.
But that crucial 20% in the middle will find it very hard to care, because seeing such atrocities perpetrated by their own government will trigger not outrage but cognitive dissonance.
And cognitive dissonance is bad for ratings.
Question: Is the objection that migrants are being held in camps that are inhumane, or that they are being detained at all in the first place?
Speaking just for myself …
**If **the appropriate agencies saw a major influx of people who wanted to immigrate and/or seek asylum, and **if **they determined that the only safe and efficient way to handle that influx was to detain those people while their applications were assessed, and **if **they built clean, safe, reasonably comfortable facilities to house those people temporarily, and **if **those facilities kept families together, and **if **the agencies in question devoted sufficient resources to processing asylum applications so detainees could either be released into the US or back into Mexico expeditiously, **then **I would not necessarily object to the whole operation.
But none of those if’s are realities, and members of this administration have flatly admitted that the entire operation is meant to be punitive, not administrative. So – kinda like the SCOTUS once ruled that “separate” was inherently unequal – I would say in this situation detention is inherently inhumane. Plus fucking evil.
To the OP, this will not move the needle appreciably in either direction. The kind of people who DO care about unnamed strangers’ suffering enough to let it sway their votes are, I am sorry to say, not only few and far between, but probably already voting against Trump for lots of other reasons. For every one that might be compelled to vote against him because of this, there will be another he’ll get with a “See why we need my wall?” argument. I’m sure there are some leftover thoughts and prayers laying around ready for mass shooting victims, so maybe we could send a few of those…
As to the appropriate terminology… Yes, it fits the textbook definition of concentration camps. It certainly does not fit the popular definition. If the question of interest is whether the election outcome will be affected, then the only definition that’s important whatsoever is what the voting public is going to use when they evaluate the news they hear. By an astoundingly huge margin the public is not going to read lengthy historical papers on concentration camps; they are going to hear CNN and Fox News talking about it in small sound bites and 3-5 minute segments. When they hear the phrase “concentration camp” they will equate it with Nazi death camps whether it’s technically accurate to do so or not. It’s not an emotionally neutral term, so the choice of whether to use it shouldn’t rest on whether it’s appropriate in some pedantic sense, but whether it serves the aims of your argument. While some few people might be “woken up” or “shocked enough to look into the matter” or some such, others (and I think this number would prove much greater) will see nothing but partisan spin and hyperbole and dismiss you out of hand without listening to the rest of what you have to say. I would hazard the opinion that it would be more productive to present the case of inhumane treatment without the loaded terminology and maybe get people to listen, than it is to be technically correct and lose the opportunity.
Edit: Case in point-> A huge chunk of this thread is about the term, far more than the actual conditions, policies, etc.
…does the term “concentration camp” bother you more than the constant stream of propaganda and lies that are being disseminated by the administration, and if so why? Do you think a single word is more problematic than an obviously staged photo-opportunity of transgender prisoners?
You do realize you are contributing to that right? You’ve just written a massive paragraph about “why its a problem.” You could have chosen to have written something else. You can, if you like, write about something else. What would you like to say about the actual conditions, policies, etc? The floor is yours.
You really believe that?
I think calling them ‘Concentration Camps’ is a mistake, and will actually have the opposite effect to what was intended, as well as to further erode the term and will only play well for the faithful…which I think we can see in this thread.
It is, again, trying to use charged language to make a connection but that doesn’t actually do anything to look at the real issue, what can be done and what should be done. Instead, to me, it’s another example of people trying to score points, not really deal with the issue. This is essentially the same effort to paint Trump et al as fascists or Nazi’s or whatever, and basically just erodes those terms and muddies the waters, detracting from the real bad shit the guy does and actually giving him cover since it’s so ridiculous.
Stop doing this. Not that any of the faithful here are likely to listen, but you are fucking up. Again. So, to answer the question, what effect will this have on the election? None. Worse, it will muddy the water, make folks ignore the issue and dig in their heels and basically not a fucking thing will get done on something more important than the election…the actual issue and it’s root cause, which is that there is a domino effect happening in Central America and the entire region is melting down. But, you know, by all means let’s say they are Concentration Camps so we can try and associate Trump with Hitler and the administration and Republicans with Nazi because there are points to score!! :smack:
…and probably as a result of that editorial:
Well done Chuck.
“Weaponizing” certain phrases can be extremely effective in politics – see Frank Luntz’s workand the largely successful way the word “liberal” has been demonized. I think the Democrats should use similar tactics in some circumstances, and this might be one of them. It’s a dirty game, and fighting dirty is sometimes the only way to win.
If you think this is a winning strategy, then all I can say is…I disagree. This will basically only be effective on people who already believe, and will cause people in the middle to basically not take anyone saying this serious. The faithful on the other side, of course, aren’t going to be reached by any evidence, assertion or phrase that goes against their world view.
I don’t think this is on par with making ‘liberal’ a dirty world…the analogy would be making ‘liberal’ associated with Stalin, ACTUAL death camps and the deaths of millions. Note, by and large this isn’t what the right or conservatives actually tried to do. Instead, they made ‘liberal’ associated with fluffy headed and pie in the sky intellectual types who don’t know shit about economics or ‘the real world’.
…oh for fucks sakes this has nothing to do with the fucking election. We can’t just stop doing stuff because there is going to be an election in two years. We can’t just stop speaking out because a random person on the internet thinks “speaking out” **might **affect the way people will vote. There is no magical correct course of action here that will guarantee a Trump loss in 2020. You can’t stop people speaking out. If you are worried about the next election then worry about voter suppression, worry about getting people out to vote, worry about voter machines, worry about the security of the next election. All of those things will have infinitely more effect on the next election than a single word.
Calling them concentration camps changes the conversation. It correctly describes the conditions of the camp and the purpose of the camp. The only people who are associating the use of the word with “Trump with Hitler” are people like you who have no hesitation in propagating that narrative. So just stop doing that already.
The OP was asking about the effects these camps would have on Trump’s election. I’ve already chimed in that I think it will basically be nada, (regardless of the terminology.) However, I could be wrong and, unless I really miss my guess here, I believe that most of the people oppose the camps, Trump’s policies, and ultimately his re-election. To that end, I advise for purely practical reasons not using a term which is going to cause a whole bunch of people to stop listening to your arguments.
Basic communication includes not just what you say, but how you say it. Knowing (and we all do by now) what the differences between the historical/textbook meaning of “concentration camp” is vs the colloquial meaning is should determine whether it’s a good term to use given the aims you are trying to achieve. If these people would rather be correct than persuasive, if they’d rather continue to argue about the language instead of the policies that motivated them in the first place, or if they’d just like to vent spleen and rage against injustices to the like-minded, then by all means carry on. On the other hand, if they want to reach out to people and possibly change some minds, than maybe they should rethink the way they present their arguments so that people don’t dismiss them as overwrought cranks out of hand.
I’m not sure what is so hard to understand. You can call them “concentration camps” as much as you want. As soon as you say “concentration camps” to someone you are trying to convince, they are immediately going to think of Nazi concentration camps. Not extermination camps. The concentration camps where people worked until they died, or starved to death, or were shot or whatever.
At that point, you can go a long historical journey about Britain and Boers and the Japanese or whatever camps at whatever time in history. You can totally do that. But people are not going to listen. And why aren’t they going to listen? Because the situation at the border is NOT Nazi-level concentration camps. And that’s what people think when you say it. Know your audience. The people you need to convince are stupid enough to not already know what is going on. They are not going to care that some academic says “They so totally are concentration camps!”. So they are going to stop listening to you. And isn’t that your goal? Getting people to listen? If not, then WHAT is your goal?