Thread by @dakami

Banning kidnapped children from hugging isn't even Nazi shit.

It's Dolores Umbridge shit.

There's a reason she's the most feared and despised character @jk_rowling ever created. Kids know Voldemort isn't real.

"Well you see, it's not really kidnapping, their parents shouldn't have..."

You take a baby, you take a toddler, you take a seven year old, you drag him away from his mom, he doesn't know what bullshit you tell yourself to sleep at night. He knows he's being KIDNAPPED.

Banning a kid from hugging?

He knows he's being KIDNAPPED by people who MEAN HIM HARM.

We're not even dumb enough to do that to prisoners, because prisoners know how to riot.

And here's the thing. I know this is an administration *built* on the non-obvious benefits of making people angry, *designed* around the sort of performative rage in this very tweet.

I know it demonstrates how powerful they must be, if they can ignore dissent this widespread.

Power is what you take, minus what others take back.

The idea in democracy is the more you overstep, the greater the alliance forms against you, and so the easier it becomes to restore normal order.

In reality, it only takes the solid support or indifference of a few to win.

There's an awful lot of people who have decided surely somebody else is going to stop Trump from kidnapping children, that they didn't get where they were today by losing everything "for a good cause".

And hell, if your guiding belief is "Government is evil", "Look how evil we can make Government" does have some sort of logic to it, doesn't it?

Then there's that other logic, "We can do whatever we want, we got away with kidnapping children in broad daylight, didn't we?"

If you can take enough power quickly enough, our system can't take power back fast enough. Mueller is clearly doing solid work, and is slowly picking off bad actors, but it's not that many Congressmen and Senators needed to flip leadership tomorrow, and they won't. Just not done.

It's not that banning hugging is "worse" than torturing children to death like the Nazi's did. Evil is not so constrained that it can only operate on a single continuum.

It's that it's so damn *creative*. You really have to *think* about how to achieve that level of horror.

To understand the horror of banning children from hugging, you have to really *get into the mind of a child*, be some fucked up alternate universe Fred Rogers.

And then know you'll get away with it. Fucking monsters.

Fred Rogers. Dolores Umbridge. Jesus.

This is how minds work, we encapsulate philosophies in characters who may or may not even have existed. At the end of the day *other people* are characters to all of us, and honestly I can model fictional characters better than real ones.

You know, the interesting thing is that @realDonaldTrump won’t own this. He’ll lie about it, blame the dems, but he is not letting pro-kidnapping words come out of his mouth.

He’s not actually that stupid.

Lots of people could stop this. Who will, at what cost, I don’t know.

Jeff Sessions just got America to rally round the Bible, so you know, they’re pretty good at this stuff.

The new way to win arguments is not to argue well, but to bait your opponent into arguing badly.

(It’s not really that new, but it’s the dominant strategy now.)

A debate.

Me: "These kid camps should not be run by for-profit companies. Red Cross?"
Also Me: "Are you crazy? I don't care who is taking care of a kidnapped child, STOP KIDNAPPING CHILDREN."
Also Me: "I thought you liked Harm Reduction."
Also Me: "Not here. Moral Hazard."

I've roughly landed on "it's not some law of the universe that these children would be kidnapped in the first place, and we just need to adapt to reality". They didn't used to be, so we either can stop, or our governance is so weak that we cannot. A bigger problem, maybe.

The "moral hazard" conclusion applies pretty accurately to "Should we pay for a wall just so they stop taking these kids hostage". I mean it's not like they couldn't just get back to the 'nappin next time they needed some more unpopular billions.

Think of the children, eh.

It's an uncomfortable point, but I can't deny it. "Don't touch the kids. DO NOT TOUCH THE KIDS. DO NOT LET ANYONE ELSE TOUCH THE KIDS." might BE the primary rule for guards. I don't know if ethicists have spent years writing best practices for child management post-kidnapping.

Protective custody this ain't.