Concentrating on the Border | The Weekly Sift

Testing a bit of WordPress’s functionality; in this case, the “Press This” widget I installed in Firefox that allows me to share just about anything. Here’s a blog post shared by a friend of mine on Facebook, whose judgment I trust more than most. At least, in terms of her politics, historical and contextual understanding, and her humanity.

With respect to historical and contextual understanding, as well as (perhaps, most especially wrt) humanity, I would argue the Trump administration possesses none of these admirable qualities.

Additionally, what comes across loud and clear is that most of the media is fucking clueless. Their quest for clicks and profit has made it impossible for the majority of them to pay attention to what’s really happening or to help do something about atrocities such as this. Link to the full post at the bottom.

This week America’s talking heads argued about a label: Should the places where the Trump administration is detaining immigrants be called “concentration camps”? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term (she wasn’t the first), and then pundits inside the Fox News bubble began demanding she apologize: to Trump, to Jews, to history, and so on.

As so often happens, the perpetrator became the victim. The media hasn’t devoted nearly as much time to the real victims — the immigrants (many of them asylum-seekers who have followed the law and done nothing wrong) being herded into camps of dubious safety and hygiene — as they have to the Trumpists howling with outrage. Instead of “What is happening on the border?” our focus has been on “Is it fair to call them concentration camps?”

I will not get snarky about this, because Alexandra Petri has already done that very well. (“If we do not use the right words for this, we might think that something terrible was happening.”) But I will point out that we had a very similar debate (including some of the same people, i.e., Liz Cheney) during the Bush administration: Should “enhanced interrogation” techniques (water-boarding, beatings, stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme heat and cold — sometimes resulting in death) count as torture. Instead of discussing exactly what our country was doing to people we had captured, we argued about a word. Those who felt injured by that word often got more sympathy than the people they were (or were not) torturing.

Source: Concentrating on the Border | The Weekly Sift