The fundamental problem with this is neither immigration nor immigrants. It is that “immigration” has become one of several pseudo-sacralized Higher Causes justifying democratic governments’ refusal to consider the welfare or wishes of their own citizens, and everyone knows it.
It is instructive to note the way justifications for immigration shift fluidly back and forth between top-down moral commandments (“we can’t be racist! Nation of immigrants!”) and pure knob-twirling technocracy (“immigration will produce economic efficiency and growth.”)
The conflation of morality and practicality, means and ends, in service to a goal which is justified by both and neither and ultimately driven by unexamined and unchosen group dynamics, is the raw substance of elite culture in this era. Immigration touches the heart of it.
If you’re defending this man at this point, going through convoluted loops of reasoning to explain why a man who’s spent the last year with a TV camera in his mouth is just a poor scientist who never wanted power, just shut up. Stop talking. Quit your job, go live in the woods.
Flashback to the set of lies we were told AFTER the “15 days to slow the spread” lies, back when an effective vaccine was something we wanted and not, as Fauci now has it, an ineffective and pointless waste of time. This was less than a year ago. Does he think no one remembers?
And if you trust that getting the general caseload down is going to get this creature to allow anything to go back to normal, you’re a fool. That’s a lie like everything else; the goal will move to “well the virus still exists in other countries, we can’t let down our guard.”
Listening to this, and much of the talk has been about the dynamics of television, television bookings, and the tendency of people to double down in partisan ways in the face of the mob. This matters, but it takes the position that information flow is preeminent; I’m not so sure.
One alternative view is that the growth of radical and fringe views and the rapid expansion of the audience for them is downstream of burgeoning awareness that things have gone wrong in many aspects of society in concrete ways, ways which are absent from prior narratives.
It’s a question of whether you regard “misinformation” as a supply or a demand problem, a message or a reality problem. Is the problem with media that it has too much emotive nonsense, or too little attention to issues which matter, and people notice?
I agree with the thrust of this, but this one is not strictly speaking HR’s fault I suspect. Rather, because divorce can only be conducted through the courts and the courts must have jargon and categories and classifications by which to know the world, this sort of thing results.
Bureaucracy is like a gun: in order to function reliably in its task of disposing of things, it must be kept strictly clean and provided with operating material kept to within strict tolerances. Deviations from expected norms will only produce malfunctions, and are thus rejected.
“Your honor, every night I damn the name of God for destroying the only thing which ever mattered to me. I drink constantly. My children are fading away in front of me.”
“Mr. Everyman, I’m going to ask you to control yourself and stick to the subject matter of this proceeding.”
