People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It's tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don't talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it's very brief, I just say that I think he's a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven't really tried that, but I guess it's an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They're just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump's base - the more or less 27-ish percent hard core - are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I'm gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn't carry firearms to a protest. If there's one thing that might pry some of his base away, it's any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren't going away.
In early 20th century photographic evidence was challenged because photos were easy to fake. Arthur Conan Doyle famously fell for fake fairy photos (alliteration coincidental) and in turn used the argument in 'The Lost World' (where the claim that the dino photos were fake gets countered by presenting a living pterodactyl; movie adaptations tend to replace it with a T-Rex for effect).
I think we face a double danger: 1) people believing convincing fakes and 2) people not believing reality taking it for convincing fakes.
The 'filling the zone with <semisolid digestive final product>' is based on exactly that. They recognized that they can win by making people believe nothing is real anymore (just 'opinion') or making it near impossible to find the truth in a deluge of untruth (and meaningless garbage for further dilution). Some will believe anything said loud enough, few will seek the actual truth and a majority stops trying and turns away disgusted but passive. One can run the show with that mixture.
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI 'evidence'. I believe that this is just a matter of time and would guess that it will first be tried on a (surviving) ICE victim by using AI doctored footage 'proving' that the victim tried to assault ICEistas with a deadly weapon first.
It comes down to this, social media is a communications technology that we are only just starting to adapt to. AI is another technology we will have to learn to use properly. Eventually, we will figure out how to use them without them being used abusively. The operative word being eventually.
Unfortunately, it will take us a while. Those of a historical bent might look at how our (great) great grandparents eventually dealt with "yellow journalism". Then, as now, a new technology for distributing information blossomed while distributing lots of misinformation. Over the course of decades, most (by now means all but most) people figured out that the tabloids were not reliable sources. Amusing, perhaps, but not reliable.
The challenge, once again, will be surviving while we figure out how the adjust and then roll out those adjustments across the population.
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn't have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs' departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, "All my crews are legal, but I'm not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff's asshole deputies." The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they're ripe. It's migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can't harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can't afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
The Department of Homeland Security data undercuts a central, load-bearing mythdeployed by right-wing media and the Trump administration to justify its nationwide crackdown on immigrant communities — namely, claims that ICE and Border Patrol are going after the “worst of the worst.” In fact, nearly 40% of people in ICE custody have no violation other than a civil immigration infraction.
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates - a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration's "open border policy," during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners' problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
looking the other way might be the only way to keep construction and ag sectors afloat.
Which was obvious. But the folks in rural areas across the Midwest (and elsewhere, e.g. rural California) managed to avoid noticing that they were shooting themselves in the foot. Using a gun rest on the knee for better aim actually.
If you raise crops like vegetables, which need to be harvested by hand, how do you not realize that all your workers are speaking Spanish? If you're raising animals, how do you not know that pretty much all the workers in the slaughter houses are illegals?
But they managed. And now, they have crops rotting in the fields. And they can't sell their animals -- slaughter houses aren't going to buy animals when they have no workers to butcher them. Even if you aren't prosecuting the employers for hiring illegals, their businesses are getting trashed because they can't hire anyone else -- turns out that those folks complaining about "illegal immigrants taking our jobs!" aren't willing to do those jobs.** (Don't have the skills either, but that's a separate discussion.)
The construction industry doesn't have the same immediately-trash-the-economy-of-the-whole-community impact. The company owners are still in trouble because they can't get workers with the skills they need. But the impact on other businesses is, as a percentage, lower. Which only means they will take linger to be felt.
** If you've ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
That laser focus on the ‘illegality’ of brown folks doing the back breaking labor but total inability to consider that the people who are hiring them are doing something illegal is amazing to me.
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
Well, a couple of straws in the wind indicating that, while we probably won't catch up with you UK folks real soon, we may at least start moving in the right direction.
Today both CNN and the New York Times have multiple front page articles on the Epstein saga. I'd like to think they've decided there's blood in the water and (to horribly mix the metaphor) they don't want to miss the boat. I'd like to think that we're close to shifting from "slowly" to "and then all at once" -- or at least an approximation of the latter.
What I don't understand is why more people aren't put off by the sheer chaos and conflict that a tRump presidency brings. I get that some people are fine with it. It's more a matter of how many people are fine with it that confounds me.
Things were far more dull, in a good way, when Biden (or anyone else in my lifetime, for that matter, in varying degrees) was president.
We veer from one stupid, unnecessary, and destructive whim to the next with barely a breath in between. Somehow, a significant minority of people in this country, roughly 40% of them, don't seem to mind.
Even GWB looks like a f**king teddy bear by comparison.
On the Archie Bunker front, my impression from being a child when All in the Family was on TV was that kids got the correct impression of the character and "old people" were caught up in their pasts (just like that theme song). We all knew adults like Archie, but they had no cool factor. It was a decently effective inoculation against bigotry - not herd immunity effective (obviously), but it did keep bigotry isolated to pockets.
It probably looked a lot less definitive to adults, but those childhood impressions have staying power.
If we can win popular culture, we can influence a generation. Right now the RW are winning parts of that (young men and misogyny), but I don't think their grip is as firm as they wish, and people like Bad Bunny are giving them an alternative masculinity that doesn't put them in opposition with the young women whose approval they so desperately wish to receive.
Re: Archie Bunker - when All In The Family first rolled out, some folks saw the Archie Bunker character as a bigoted clown, and some other folks (and not a small number) saw him as their kind of guy. A sort of folk anti-hero.
Plus ca change.
My own sense of what will make folks step away from supporting Trump is that there are two likely avenues:
1. Bad things are done to somebody they know and care about.
2. Discomfort with the egregious violence of the immigration stuff
It's possible that Minneapolis will be Trump's Selma. We'll see.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
People support Trump for reasons that have little to do with matters of fact in any social or economic or even political sense. It's tribal. They are on Team Trump.
I don't talk with Trump supporters about Trump. Or if and when I do, it's very brief, I just say that I think he's a crook and an asshole, and leave it at that. Oddly enough, they are also generally happy to leave it at that.
I have a friend who suggests talking with Trumpers about what motivates them, but without bringing Trump into it. For example, why is it necessary to deport people who have been here for decades. I haven't really tried that, but I guess it's an option.
The mason in the article has a valid complaint. People who live in southern border communities have valid complaints. People who were concerned about inflation had valid complaints. Whether they are looking in the right places for either causes or solutions is a different story, but the things they are unhappy with are not always unreasonable. They're just (IMO) looking at the wrong villains.
So, talking to the mason about undocumented labor and how that affects him could be useful. Etc.
But I really do think that Trump's base - the more or less 27-ish percent hard core - are basically unshakeable and there is nothing I'm gonna say or do that will move that.
If bad things happen to them, personally, or to someone in their family or close circle of friends, it could make a dent. Other than that, it ain't gonna happen.
Oddly, the nearest thing to really undermining his base support that I can think of was Trump et al saying that people shouldn't carry firearms to a protest. If there's one thing that might pry some of his base away, it's any hint of weakness around the 2nd A.
The paranoid style has always been a significant factor in the US. They aren't going away.
On “What fresh hell is this?”
In early 20th century photographic evidence was challenged because photos were easy to fake. Arthur Conan Doyle famously fell for fake fairy photos (alliteration coincidental) and in turn used the argument in 'The Lost World' (where the claim that the dino photos were fake gets countered by presenting a living pterodactyl; movie adaptations tend to replace it with a T-Rex for effect).
I think we face a double danger: 1) people believing convincing fakes and 2) people not believing reality taking it for convincing fakes.
The 'filling the zone with <semisolid digestive final product>' is based on exactly that. They recognized that they can win by making people believe nothing is real anymore (just 'opinion') or making it near impossible to find the truth in a deluge of untruth (and meaningless garbage for further dilution). Some will believe anything said loud enough, few will seek the actual truth and a majority stops trying and turns away disgusted but passive. One can run the show with that mixture.
What (to my knowledge) has not yet happened is the administration getting someone (a major politician of the opposition in particular) convicted in a court of law based on fake AI 'evidence'. I believe that this is just a matter of time and would guess that it will first be tried on a (surviving) ICE victim by using AI doctored footage 'proving' that the victim tried to assault ICEistas with a deadly weapon first.
"
It comes down to this, social media is a communications technology that we are only just starting to adapt to. AI is another technology we will have to learn to use properly. Eventually, we will figure out how to use them without them being used abusively. The operative word being eventually.
Unfortunately, it will take us a while. Those of a historical bent might look at how our (great) great grandparents eventually dealt with "yellow journalism". Then, as now, a new technology for distributing information blossomed while distributing lots of misinformation. Over the course of decades, most (by now means all but most) people figured out that the tabloids were not reliable sources. Amusing, perhaps, but not reliable.
The challenge, once again, will be surviving while we figure out how the adjust and then roll out those adjustments across the population.
"
AI video is going to destroy civilization.
i'm 80% serious about that.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
One thing about doing farm work. Nothing else you will ever do qualifies as "hard work."
"
If you’ve ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
Makes me recall a now-humorous memory. One summer my father sent me to spend a week with one of his cousins who owned a family farm. What did I get from that week? A life-long determination to acquire skills that would let me work in a climate-controlled environment where I didn't have to lift heavy things. Or put my fingers in the near neighborhood of rotary machinery with blades and no safety cover.
"
These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
Combines, like cars, are computers on wheels. Or tracks. And almost autonimus. Though the custom cutters may not have cutting-edge equipment, their customers may not have digitized field layouts.
"
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
Many years back now, the Colorado General Assembly was considering a bill, introduced by rural Republican members, that was basically a license for the sheriffs' departments in rural counties to hassle short brown ag workers. Once word got out, the eastern plains wheat farmers began getting calls from the custom cutters** saying they were just going to skip Colorado if the bill passed. Typically something like, "All my crews are legal, but I'm not going to put them at the mercy of your sheriff's asshole deputies." The bill died.
** Custom cutters are groups with one or more big combines and a bunch of trucks who harvest vast wheat fields when they're ripe. It's migratory work, starting in Texas and moving north as the summer progresses. Really erratic work. If it rains you can't harvest, and sometimes getting the job done in time means working by headlights all night long. Farmers, or even small groups of farmers, can't afford big combines. These days, some of them go for $500,000 or higher.
"
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
"
loved this phrase:
"
environmental regulations?
Republicans are on it !
"
Another neat trick is justifying an intrusive and violent crackdown on immigration based on the purported criminality of immigrants while at the same time taking credit for declining crime rates - a decline that preceded the crackdown and was ongoing during the previous administration's "open border policy," during which all the rapists, murderers, human traffickers, and drug dealers were supposedly flooding into the country.
"
Gutting consumer protections, environmental regulations, and financial rules to benefit your billionaire donors while blaming the commoners' problems on poor immigrants is quite the trick. PT Barnum would be proud.
On “What fresh hell is this?”
The vast resources of the world's most powerful nation (just ask them!) devoted to crafting ever more persuasive lies.
Orwell would be amazed.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
This is another one of those cases where it seems to me that our biggest problem is not one of immigration enforcement, but rather one of how we structure and regulate the economy and distribute the value generated by the work.
Thinking in terms of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economy schema, these sectors are unsustainable because they are violating the floor conditions of an economy built to protect both people and the environmental limits that we have to take care not to exceed. In this case it's the human side. Record profits should not be accompanied by declining standards of living for the majority of the population. If it is, then start questioning the model and working to rebalance things.
It's no wonder that so many other forms of justice are being eroded when economic injustice has been normalized as the proper functioning state of a capitalist economy.
"
Which was obvious. But the folks in rural areas across the Midwest (and elsewhere, e.g. rural California) managed to avoid noticing that they were shooting themselves in the foot. Using a gun rest on the knee for better aim actually.
If you raise crops like vegetables, which need to be harvested by hand, how do you not realize that all your workers are speaking Spanish? If you're raising animals, how do you not know that pretty much all the workers in the slaughter houses are illegals?
But they managed. And now, they have crops rotting in the fields. And they can't sell their animals -- slaughter houses aren't going to buy animals when they have no workers to butcher them. Even if you aren't prosecuting the employers for hiring illegals, their businesses are getting trashed because they can't hire anyone else -- turns out that those folks complaining about "illegal immigrants taking our jobs!" aren't willing to do those jobs.** (Don't have the skills either, but that's a separate discussion.)
The construction industry doesn't have the same immediately-trash-the-economy-of-the-whole-community impact. The company owners are still in trouble because they can't get workers with the skills they need. But the impact on other businesses is, as a percentage, lower. Which only means they will take linger to be felt.
** If you've ever done farm work (I have) you can certainly see why not. Not that it makes me sympathetic.
"
hsh beat me to it! That's what I understood it to mean too.
On bamboozled, I always thought it meant thoroughly confused, but I see that both meanings are possible. You live and learn.
"
GA tried making it actually illegal to hire illegals, and it was a disaster.
looking the other way might be the only way to keep construction and ag sectors afloat.
"
lj:
In fairness to the interviewee, I took this to be referring to the people doing the hiring, not the workers.
And I couldn’t hire an illegal alien. It just didn’t seem right. And it’s illegal, by the way, but people are getting away with it.
On “Separated by a common language”
Adding to what cleek is saying: I think the chaos is causing them pain, but they are convinced that the people being targeted by Trump's cruelty deserve that pain, and they are more committed to seeing that pain subjected than they are to avoiding their own suffering in the process. They believe that they will be restored in the aftermath, and they get to witness the righteous retribution in the mean time as consolation for their own pain.
"
Well, a couple of straws in the wind indicating that, while we probably won't catch up with you UK folks real soon, we may at least start moving in the right direction.
Today both CNN and the New York Times have multiple front page articles on the Epstein saga. I'd like to think they've decided there's blood in the water and (to horribly mix the metaphor) they don't want to miss the boat. I'd like to think that we're close to shifting from "slowly" to "and then all at once" -- or at least an approximation of the latter.
"
>What I don’t understand is why more people aren’t put off by the sheer
>chaos and conflict that a tRump presidency brings.
they don't hear about it as chaos. they hear about it as "Trump does another wonderful thing, stupid Democrats freak out as usual".
"
What I don't understand is why more people aren't put off by the sheer chaos and conflict that a tRump presidency brings. I get that some people are fine with it. It's more a matter of how many people are fine with it that confounds me.
Things were far more dull, in a good way, when Biden (or anyone else in my lifetime, for that matter, in varying degrees) was president.
We veer from one stupid, unnecessary, and destructive whim to the next with barely a breath in between. Somehow, a significant minority of people in this country, roughly 40% of them, don't seem to mind.
Even GWB looks like a f**king teddy bear by comparison.
Am I repeating myself repeating myself?
"
On the Archie Bunker front, my impression from being a child when All in the Family was on TV was that kids got the correct impression of the character and "old people" were caught up in their pasts (just like that theme song). We all knew adults like Archie, but they had no cool factor. It was a decently effective inoculation against bigotry - not herd immunity effective (obviously), but it did keep bigotry isolated to pockets.
It probably looked a lot less definitive to adults, but those childhood impressions have staying power.
If we can win popular culture, we can influence a generation. Right now the RW are winning parts of that (young men and misogyny), but I don't think their grip is as firm as they wish, and people like Bad Bunny are giving them an alternative masculinity that doesn't put them in opposition with the young women whose approval they so desperately wish to receive.
"
Re: Archie Bunker - when All In The Family first rolled out, some folks saw the Archie Bunker character as a bigoted clown, and some other folks (and not a small number) saw him as their kind of guy. A sort of folk anti-hero.
Plus ca change.
My own sense of what will make folks step away from supporting Trump is that there are two likely avenues:
1. Bad things are done to somebody they know and care about.
2. Discomfort with the egregious violence of the immigration stuff
It's possible that Minneapolis will be Trump's Selma. We'll see.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.