Mastodawn

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

In recent days, fascist Republican state governors and genuine pieces of garbage Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have been engaged in a bit of light human trafficking, for funsies.

Abbot even decided to get his laughs on Christmas Day.

It’s like this: the most vulnerable people in our country are asylum seekers and immigrants fleeing political and economic upheavals, many of which we—by which I mean our nation and our economic and political structures—helped cause.

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/sabotage-part-6-the-natural-human

Sabotage: Part 6 - The Natural Human Instinct

The process of repair is being sabotaged. The second step of the process of repair is conviction. The second sabotage is complacency.

The Reframe

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

Our country’s policies toward these people once they arrive here are broken and cruel and unjust, leaning deeply into our blameless society’s supremacist foundational lies; lies that insist some people simply do not matter.

DeSantis and Abbott and the fascists who support them have a big problem with these policies, to wit: they aren’t nearly cruel or broken *enough,* and they have recently seen disturbing signs that these policies might become marginally less cruel and broken and unjust.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆

As it happens, there are people here in this country who actually believe our policies should be more open, welcoming, and accommodating; who even believe we share some collective responsibility for creating a world in which we enjoy stability and wealth from policies that have created instability and collapse elsewhere, who want to make our policies less harsh, more just, less broken; who are, as a result, opposed to the current direction, and say so, and some even do something about it.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

These governors/total pieces of garbage are enraged about this opposition; enraged about this persistent belief in and expectation for repair of what is broken, and so they have decided to demonstrate their rage.

They demonstrate their rage by bussing and flying refugees to various places where their opponents live, in what they frame as a punitive act against those places—a stunt which among other things reveals their assumption that they do not see refugees as people, but as punishment.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

Months ago, DeSantis did so in a maximally cruel way: deliberately lying to refugees, deliberately offering no advance notice of what they intend to authorities and orgs at the chosen destinations, deliberately transporting human beings under false pretenses to unknown locations.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

DeSantis sent them to Martha’s Vineyard, home to the sort of wealthy liberals that total pieces of shit like DeSantis insist are the traitorous socialist globalists who want immigrants to come to America, a nation of immigrants, in order to destroy it.

That's their story.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

The governors’ idea appears to have been to create as much chaos as possible, in order to use the chaos they created to demonstrate that refugees and immigrants cause chaos, which they then offer to justify their cruel attitudes toward other human beings.

The idea appears to have been to make the situation as systemically failed as possible, to demonstrate that migrants are not people but a disruption and a cost, and that systems built to support and aid them are always costly failures.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

The idea appears to have been to manufacture a problem, and then to take people’s reaction to the problem they manufactured as evidence that everybody actually agrees with their grotesque beliefs about immigrants, which is that immigrants are not people, but problems.

The idea appears to be to demonstrate that people who despise immigrants and other kinds of refugee should be allowed to go on not caring about their fellow human beings without the consequence of being understood as inhumane.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

They want this—not because it is good to be indifferent to human suffering, but because they have furnished themselves with adequate proof that people who claim to care are just pretending; that all other people are secretly indifferent about human suffering, too.

DeSantis and Abbott and their supporters don’t want to be good. They just want to reassure themselves that everyone else is similarly bad. And then they rejoice at any slight hint that this might be true.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

As it's been pointed out, these actions should qualify as human trafficking, a crime against humanity. In DeSantis’ case, almost certainly a crime of misappropriation, since the migrants he flew over weren’t even from his state. And probably it was criminal obstruction as well.

So, once again, we have multiple open crimes committed by powerful sitting Republican office holders.

I am told there’s an Attorney General for just these sorts of things.

Oh well, I guess.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

I’ve been talking about repair as a process with sequential steps, moving from awareness to conviction, that is: imagining what repair looks like, with an expectation that repair should happen, and knowledge that we each hold a measure of the responsibility for fixing it.

It all ends with the actual work of and cost of repair, but it begins with awareness (the thing is broken) and proceeds to conviction (the broken thing should be fixed).

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

It's progressive. It's sequential. It's self-renewing. It's a process—the process of reparation.

And it's *natural*, this process of repair.

When someone is in trouble, if something is broken, if something is wrong, there is a natural desire to help, to fix it, to set it right.

Mostly, we all want to see broken things fixed.

There is a natural human instinct to give a shit.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

If you don’t want to help, you’re going to need to overcome that natural instinct, by finding a reason to not give a shit, and providing that reason to those who support you, and by projecting that reason onto those who oppose you.

You need to sabotage the process of repair.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

And I've been talking about a blameless society, opposed to all natural costs of repair, including the cost of blame (that is, the cost of being exposed as people aligned toward maintaining brokenness), making others pay its much higher costs—which requires sabotaging our conviction.

You sabotage conviction by taking the problems caused by brokenness and making them endemic—that is, simply the way things are.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

When a problem can’t be solved, you don’t have to solve it. So it becomes very important to demonstrate the problem as inevitable.

You sabotage conviction by insisting that repair isn’t necessary, or desirable, or even possible.

You sabotage conviction by making brokenness the way things are.

And it’s all to maintain blameless supremacy; all to avoid paying the lower cost of solutions.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

And, as we see, even open crimes by Republican lawmakers has become an endemic problem. It’s assumed, yet also somehow unknowable and unfixable and inevitable, framed not as a legal problem for Republicans, but rather a political problem for their opponents.

If you don’t want the natural process of repair, you’ll need to neutralize and disrupt that process with an oppositional process—an regressive, sequential, unnatural chain of actions that makes brokenness inevitable.

A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Dec 26, 2022

If you are aligned against paying natural costs, the first thing to sabotage is awakening to awareness of what is broken, and the next thing to sabotage is the conviction that it should change.

You sabotage the natural human instinct to give a shit.

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/sabotage-part-6-the-natural-human

Sabotage: Part 6 - The Natural Human Instinct

The process of repair is being sabotaged. The second step of the process of repair is conviction. The second sabotage is complacency.

The Reframe

Rabbi Jill Zimmerman Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat you nailed it. It’s essential that we keep caring, keep working to repair what is broken.

pcarlson001 Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat !!! Yep. Wow.

Grandpa Don Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat
much as I continue to hold out hope for this AG, I keep thinking of RFK - Bobby - and thinking what might have been.

Ç'thûłhů👾Rants! 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 🇨🇦Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat
They create a Hell on earth so that they may rule unimpeded.

MollyNYC Dec 26, 2022

“The idea appears to have been to manufacture a problem…”

Manufacture, indeed.
For decades, Texas has been handling immigrants so well that 36% of Texans are Tejanos. And Florida has been dealing with “surprise” immigrants—successfully and without much drama—since Castro took over Cuba.

But under Abbott and DeSantis, it’s suddenly a problem—
—the problem being their need to divert attention from the fact that they’re both lazy, corrupt and incompetent.

Kansas Grant Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat A couple of years ago,I learned from @Teri_Kanefield that the broad term for this sort of thing is "sado-populism" - in which you make things worse so you can blame the opposition for things getting worse.

onecaliberal Dec 26, 2022

@KansasGrant @JuliusGoat @Teri_Kanefield except when it’s so easy to demonstrate who is making it worse:

Kansas Grant Dec 26, 2022

@Tbsa @JuliusGoat @Teri_Kanefield In that regard, DeSantis simultaneously highlights what easy marks his own supporters are when they lap up these stunts, as a dog laps up its own vomit.
(sorry for the gross mixed metaphor)

onecaliberal Dec 26, 2022

@KansasGrant @JuliusGoat @Teri_Kanefield They’re not even human, imo. I’d be hard pressed to spit on them if they were ablaze.

Angry Centrist Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat The biggest failure in the system appears to be that we can't chain up the governors and throw them in a hole for causing wasteful chaos and damage for their own entertainment and advancement...

JR Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat after the “season” was over because DeSantis is really a coward and didn’t want to offend members of the donor class.

Willard Dec 26, 2022

@JuliusGoat And some who want to end all borders... and all STATES. However long that might take...
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