8mo ago

Here Come Trump’s Concentration Camps

thetyee.ca

Here Come Trump’s Concentration Camps | The Tyee

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Can we do anything about this at all? This is not how a civilized nation acts. We are barbarians.
- It would require acting outside the confines of the law, because fascists aren't bound by the law either. And the more the US government is made obvious to be a joke, the more people might finally get the fucking clue that institutions are meaningless when they don't actually enforce the rules or provide meaningful support for what the working class actually needs, and they might eventually decide to do something about it.
  That is, of course, hopeful thinking on my part, but I think it's the only correct answer to "what can we do when an overt fascist has power".
  Additionally, on an interpersonal level, you need to find communities IRL if you don't have them, and be defiant together. Don't let these evil fucks normalize anymore bigotry or conspiracies than they already have. Even if social norms would dictate otherwise, call that shit out when it happens.
  And don't preemptively give up or resign your position if you hold some sort of influential role in society. Don't make it easy for them. Every single bit of defiance makes it that much harder to impose the hell which they intend to inflict, which is in and of itself valuable.
- All you can do is aid and abet any targets of these grossly immoral and illegal actions. Not sure on the specifics of how yet given we don’t know how they’re going to attempt to do this…but once they do, that’s when we figure that out.
- Well if you get 50 of your closest friends and show up with rifles when police come to abduct these people in their homes or workplaces then you can prevent it from happening
  Every leftist who doesn't own a gun should be getting one right now before they start blocking gun sales to non trump loyalists
  
  Why does everyone go straight to guns and riots? Make a fucken People's PAC. Play the corpos and elites at their own game. Then if that doesnt work we can get the pitchforks.
- I prefer the term "shithole country". That way we can still blame it on other people and not collectively own any of the barbarity ourselves.
- They're taking over. We aren't powerless. But its about to get bad.
- I mean, you CAN, but you won’t.
  
  ☝️ He's out of line, but he's right.
  But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
  And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
  — Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
  
  Found the GRU agent.
I have a problem with this:
“Undocumented immigrants also play a large role in food processing,” Krugman writes. “For example, they account for an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of workers in meat-packing.”
The predictable effect, Krugman says, would be less food production and distribution, unless employers started paying far higher wages to attract new native-born workers. That in turn would boost the cost of groceries, when current prices are already too high.
The plain and obvious subtext here is that we're all exploiting undocumented workers already. I wish that when one of these articles talks about the "predictable effect" of deportations, that that would be mentioned out loud.
- Throughout the last 30-50 years Democrats are exclusively the ones who acknowledge this problem and push legislation to get them on naturalized citizenships, while also giving the subsidies needed for farmers to pay their workers fair wage.
  Republicans block these bills every single time.
  Putting people in camps is not a good solution to any problem.
  
  You'd think that'd be true judging by the modern republican party, but IRCA in 1986 under Reagan was about the only large scale amnesty program ever done in the US. It legalized 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, which was about 75% of the undocumented at the time. It required that they pay back taxes, had been here 4 years, and had "good moral character", evidenced by no criminal history. Reagan was well aware of how critical immigrant labor was.
  Modern dems talk about these issues but are either unable to get it done or think along much more limited goals. The Dream act and then daca were targetted at minors who entered the US undocumented, not the general undocumented immigrant population.
  Reagan also appointed the first woman, Sandra Day Oconnor to the supreme court. He was full of paradoxes (he hated unions) and his personal life was an awful mess, but in some areas he'd be to the left of Biden.
- This has been brought up over and over before the election. Immigrants also pay Billions into social services they can't use every year, and deporting them will impact them as well.

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