Comment by totallygeeky
11 hours ago
The US seems hellbent on destroying its own economy, immigrants have always played a key part in it. Looking forward to Trump yelling about how the radical left has somehow undermined the US economy in a few months.
Looking forward? He never stopped. It's been 10+ years of narcissistic scapegoating, even for times when he was President, even while Republicans controlled congress, and even over trade-deals, policies, and laws that he took-credit for and bragged about. (e.g. USMCA in 2020.)
> Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work!
-- 1984
The parallels between Emmanuel Goldstein and Trump Derangement Syndrome are impossible to ignore for anyone who's actually read 1984.
To borrow from Baum (The Wizard of Oz): today there's not only a curtain with men behind it, but a man in front of the curtain that everyone is pointing to (a la Goldstein). And if he stops being useful they'll replace him. This has happened several times already while the men behind the curtain and long standing policies he people hate remain unchanged.
Donald Trump: Billionaire in one of the top government roles of one the most powerful countries in the world; puts enormous banners of his own face over buildings; runs a personal distribution network to announce what he hates every day to his followers; regularly "jokes" about being a dictator; triggers perpetual wars with other countries; etc.
Emmanuel Goldstein: An exiled academic in hiding with a death-sentence over his head for criticizing the despotic government.
You: "People like myself who actually read 1984 know that Trump is basically Goldstein! Not any other character. The parallels are impossible to ignore."
If you really read the book, then that's tragic, because all you learned was how to embody doublethink.
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Most damage will be realized after he's dead
And in the interim he's positioning his family and cronies to benefit from any rebuilding. Just as he literally sat in the White House and said, verbatim, "My children insider trade all the time".
Everything is someone else's fault. The buck never stops with him.
I’d guess Miller is the main driver of this given what we know about that loser (and freak).
Huge freak
I often think about how far the Republican party has fallen from Truman with his "The Buck Stops Here" plaque on his desk to Trump's "I don't take any responsibility at all" response to poor Covid testing in 2020.
Truman was a Democrat.
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Meanwhile, just this week, he's taking credit for Biden's legislative efforts on cost reductions for pharmaceuticals that every single Republican voted against, and Trump campaigned against.
Well, others can bent in other direction and boost their economy by taking in all immigrants that were US bound.
And they are. I read somewhere a few days ago that France is vacuuming up academics and advanced students that have been displaced by various recent policy changes that have proven to be hostile towards academia and research.
As a former academic scientist, I suspect it's not gonna work out like they think it will--the process will self select for mostly lemons.
Ah, vacuuming academics and advanced students is same as taking million immigrants for low skill jobs.
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I don't know about vacuuming good students ... you probably have no idea what kind of students get hired in the USA nowadays.
The recruiting at a typical research university has an woke dimension to it - and I am reporting my personal experience, not hearsay:
Out of five scores each student was graded on, three were basically pure wokism like: describe how you overcame a difficult prejudice in life, or talk about how your presence will contribute to an inclusive environment ... only one was probing actual skills ...
PS: I have nothing against immigration - I am an immigrant myself ... a former immigrant student at that ...
I am against the selection process that ignores talented, skilled people and replaces them with mediocre people with some (probably made-up) nice woke story.
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