Immigrants are surging across the border, as even they admit. If admitted, those children are going to need to go to school, those emergency rooms are going to have more people with previous poor care to deal with (and the C19 infection rate is apparently high), the local police and sheriff's offices are going to need to deal with this and the states and counties are going to have to pay for this.
But what does the Washington Post focus on? The political fallout for people in Washington, especially Biden and Congress. I have stated many times that the events around the world, and even in their own country, are not real to them. All that is real is the power movement in DC. Everything else is counters on their board. Wars, people dying, genocides, oppression, famine - none of these are real.
I mentioned recently the sad but frightening separation from reality that young people and those who also live in online culture are experiencing. I had forgotten that we have seen this before in different form: the lure of the Imperial City and its claim to be the only reality. I'm not big on forcing any American to do anything. But perhaps our federal politicians and permanent civil servants down to some level should be forced to hike the Appalachian trail with no more than two other people, or sail on the ocean for a month with only emergency contact so that they are alone in their own head except for a book or three*, or work in a foreign orphanage or clinic with no cameras or reporters allowed, or live on a family farm or help run a small business (in disguise) for a few months - every couple of years. We no longer have Cincinnatus, twice dictator for a year in crisis, who returned to his family farm when the crisis was past. When George McGovern retired from the Senate he tried to start a business. Within a couple of years he was saying he wished he'd known what it was like while he was in the Senate. An honest man, and those are in short supply these days.
They simply don't think we are real. Children on the border are only pictures that can be leveraged by one group or another.
*All books older than 50 years, and at lest one older than 100 years.
14 comments:
We've got a limit of approximately 150 friends(*); maybe we've got some limits on how many different environments we can feel to be real, and not merely theoretical.
(*)I know it's disputed, but it seems to accord with experience.
You must mean acquaintances instead of friends? I can count on two hands, the number of friends I have now. And by friend, I mean someone that will help you out and you them, no questions asked.
"the sad but frightening separation from reality that young people and those who also live in online culture are experiencing."
This implies that those who control that online environment have immense power.
The technology seems to bring its own power, and the owners and operators of it certainly have a lot of that. Yet it is also power that we give them, or that human nature gives to them. They didn't create that, they are just reading that and exploiting it to make a buck. Along the way, they have discovered that these technologies not only enable but influence people, so they think "Hell, if there's going to be influence, it's going to go in the direction I want it to."
"Everything else is counters on their board."
There may be something of that in even the best-intentioned. I wonder if that contributes to the temptation to WANT the worst to be true of people who disagree politically.
@ Korora - I think that is so. People who want to arrive at the best answers view their opponents differently from those who need to win the game, and it doesn't matter what the best answers are. I used to look with some disdain with the modern European, especially French system of arriving at a plan of making sure that everyone's preferences are reflected in the final answer, even if that's not the best plan. But that is at least a protection against the current winner-take-all woke system, and that may be why the French intellectuals are warning us against the modern American CRT approach.
People who want to arrive at the best answers view their opponents differently from those who need to win the game, and it doesn't matter what the best answers are.
That reminds me of a recent online disagreement I had with a woke relative. I wanted the best answer, and went to a primary source to get it. The relative responded with snark upon snark. Conclusion: more concerned with winning instead of the best answer.
Sometimes the “compromise” position, with everyone’s preference reflected, is the worst of all worlds. In NH, when they were planning the Seabrook nuclear reactor site, the utility proposed two reactors on the site, and the anti-nuk crowd protested furiously for none. They drove the cost so high, we ended up with one reactor. We still got the horrors of a nuclear disaster, and we got only half the power at twice the price.
Great example. But these days wouldn't someone have to be forced to resign for even proposing a nuclear plant?
Though that doesn't seem to be the fashionable issue this year, so maybe not.
Assistant Village Idiot: But what does the Washington Post focus on? The political fallout for people in Washington, especially Biden and Congress.
Well, keep in mind that the Washington Post is the hometown paper for Washington D.C.
Here’s the equivalent view from 9th Avenue:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png
James: We've got a limit of approximately 150 friends(*); maybe we've got some limits on how many different environments we can feel to be real, and not merely theoretical.
While human contact is necessarily limited, network theory shows that most people are separated by only a handful of connections. So, for instance, the guy (1) you know who met Springsteen (2) who met Clinton (3) who met Kennedy (4) who met Marilyn Monroe (5). Network theory also suggests that the policy of thinking globally, but acting locally can be effective.
Assistant Village Idiot: But these days wouldn't someone have to be forced to resign for even proposing a nuclear plant?
After a number of accidents, including at Fukushima with a cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars, nuclear plants are nigh uninsurable.
Z: Read what I wrote a little more carefully.
Only two "connections" separate me from Muammar Gaddafi, but that gives me no insight whatever into the late dictator's world. There's no information flow, much less emotional connection--and I was writing of the latter.
james: Only two "connections" separate me from Muammar Gaddafi
Interesting.
Not all connections have the same bandwidth. Some people don't ever talk to the next door neighbor, but some information will flow through the network even if it takes a circuitous route. In any case, people do have more in common than they do differences, though it is often the differences that lead to barriers.
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