Hit harder until success is achieved
I think what Trump is doing with the ban order is a variation on the availability heuristic – on looking for your keys under the lamp post even though you dropped them 20 feet away, because the light is better under the lamp post. I think he’s thinking, stupidly, that if you’re just harsh enough, you will have Great Success in preventing terrorist incidents in your vicinity.
He’s also reasoning backward while dropping a slew of relevant details in the process. He’s reasoning from “people whose parents immigrated from Mooslim countries have blown people up or away in Paris and Brussels and London” to “therefore if we ban people from a few Mooslim countries, even though they’re not the relevant Mooslim countries, then we will be safe.” The holes in the argument are rather dramatically obvious. Just for a start, there are a lot of majority-Muslim countries, and funnily enough Trump fixed on ones from which shooters and bombers have not originated. He must be thinking of “Mooslim countries” as a kind of soup, such that doing something to a few spots in the soup will spread out to affect the whole soup.
But also, of course, the shooters and bombers are a tiny tiny minority of whatever demographic they come from. They’re a tiny minority of people whose parents came from Pakistan, and those whose parents came from Algeria, and ditto all the other countries on the list of Mooslim countries, with Trump’s chosen seven down on the bottom. Also? They’re already here. Most of the shooters and bombers have been second-generation – a ban on new arrivals can’t touch the second generation, and is in fact very likely to motivate many of them to become shooters themselves. It might motivate me if I were one.
Yet Trump keeps grunting, like an idiot, that he’s doing this to Make Us Safe. He seems to think that Will and Force and Determination and Grit are all that’s required to get good results. He also seems to think that brutality works – that severity is somehow accurately pegged to effectiveness, so that the more severe we are, the better the outcome will be.
And he has the power to put his incredibly sloppy thinking into effect.
It’s not only sloppy thinking, it’s small thinking. It’s as if Trump and other Republicans are dealing with problems in the United States the same way they would deal with something remotely similar happening in their own home. If last time you invited the family down the block to a barbecue one of them — you don’t know who — broke some valuable Precious Moments figurines, then by golly THEY aren’t coming over anymore! It’s just that simple. Let ’em cry — serves them right.
Knock complicated issues down to the size with which you’re familiar, and then bluster about as if you’re the head of the family and demand respect (“My house/my business;My rules.”)
You’re making the mistake of assuming rational motives, other than perhaps playing to his base.
This whole thing reeks of simple-minded vindictiveness.
Sastra – God, yes.
Of course I’m not making the mistake of assuming rational motives. I’ve been doing the exact opposite ever since July. I’m pointing out the total absence of rational motives.
And yes, of course it reeks of simple-minded vindictiveness, which is what I said.
Yes I know. But it just seems so beside the point to criticise the thinking behind this mess when there doesn’t seem to be any thinking going on in the first place.
He’s not really looking for keys under the lamppost so much as beating his chest and flinging faeces around under the lamppost.
Sigh.
I keep posting non-stop news items because I feel I have to keep track of the fascist takeover…but I miss argument. I like argument. I did one brief argumentative post. I don’t really need to be told it’s beside the point.