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[Folly]

I have two theories...

Melania was trying to say that she does not care about fashion when there are children in crisis, or...

Melania really does not care about immigrant children, but Trump is forcing her to pretend that she does care to make his office look sympathetic to the situation. Since this whole mess began Melania has been growing increasingly frustrated at being used as her husband's tool, so she is acting out in the only part of her life where she still has some control, her clothing.

Either way, I'm somewhat irritated at the claim that she does not care while simultaneously asking if other people care. If she really didn't care, she wouldn't need to ask. It stinks of angsty rebellion which she is far too old for.

[hector13]

I’ll just +1 PTTG’s bit. She is much too experienced with the media spotlight in various capacities to have done this without thinking about it.

There is a message in there somewhere, but if she doesn’t say what it was, ain’t nobody going to know what it meant.

[PTTG??]

I have a third interpretation. Trump (or whoever) wants to whistle to his dogs, and his idea of subtlety is picking a jacket for the first lady with a message that, in context, is callous.

[nenjin]

It had its intended effect. It's bait and a successful troll.

[PTTG??]

This is Insane Clown President in action, yes.

[Reelya]

Holy shit, this is the kind of stuff I was dreading before the election.

Four children at one shelter died of asphyxiation because of physical restraints
...
Shiloh forced children to take psychotropic drugs
...
Children are handcuffed and kept in small cells, receiving just one hour outside each day

“Youth in secure facilities report being handcuffed, locked in cells, and pepper sprayed … Children strapped into chairs, and bags placed over their heads; one youth thought, ‘They are going to suffocate me.'”

Empowering the type of people who pull this shit without blinking an eye is the literal way you end up with Nazi type atrocities, unless the higher-ups keep them on a tight leash. Sure, only a small number of children have actually been murdered by these animals, but many more children have been permanently scarred. The line between what's going on and things much, much worse is a very thin line indeed. This type of work attracts sociopaths and psychopaths - sane people tend not to be able to cope, and either don't apply or leave the line of work sooner - and only the fear of punishment from above restrains them from inflicting far worse atrocities.

[smjjames]

And apparently the abuses there have been going on for decades without it being shut down hard, which is pretty unbelieveable in itself.

I have two theories...

Melania was trying to say that she does not care about fashion when there are children in crisis, or...

Melania really does not care about immigrant children, but Trump is forcing her to pretend that she does care to make his office look sympathetic to the situation. Since this whole mess began Melania has been growing increasingly frustrated at being used as her husband's tool, so she is acting out in the only part of her life where she still has some control, her clothing.

Either way, I'm somewhat irritated at the claim that she does not care while simultaneously asking if other people care. If she really didn't care, she wouldn't need to ask. It stinks of angsty rebellion which she is far too old for.

It's also funny that she chose something cheap (by her standards that is, $39.00 isn't particularily cheap by middle class standards) when she generally wears stuff that cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

I’ll just +1 PTTG’s bit. She is much too experienced with the media spotlight in various capacities to have done this without thinking about it.

There is a message in there somewhere, but if she doesn’t say what it was, ain’t nobody going to know what it meant.

Same here, she's just too aware of the optics and subleties of fashion to not do something intentionally. It's entirely possible that she made a miscalculation here since in her position, wearing something with words on it is going to mean something and is open to interpretation if she doesn't explain it.

[redwallzyl]

And apparently the abuses there have been going on for decades without it being shut down hard, which is pretty unbelieveable in itself.

How is that unbelievable? It is exactly what I expected. Like seriously, we built a massive apparatus, dehumanized massive amounts of people, put them under the power of people with a distinctly adversarial mindset, and turned a blind eye for decades. This is the most obvious outcome ever. All you have to do is ask the people who have been experiencing it but as a rule most people never bother unless they can use it for their own agenda. I'm reminded of an observation from an ethnographer upon observing a news anchor in a border town. The anchor was trying to find sob stories, he did not care about the people, only the story to use for his own gain and said as much. Went find the crying traumatized ones and milk them more that sweet money making story. The every day constant suffering of the people just gets ignored for that one shock story. So one scandal happens on the one story and perhaps something is done. No one ever addresses the constant abuse.

[Max™]

Calling her 'semi-literate at best' is pretty dang disrespectful of you Max.

Fatboy is semi-literate, she could get by on the "oh I didn't know what  it  said" sortof chinese tattoo that reads strange excuse but if not  then it's really fucking tonedeaf.

If I'm gonna be slinging shit at her then my biggest issue is gonna be complicity for not slitting that big orange turd up the belly and letting him scream until the blood stops.

[SalmonGod]

And apparently the abuses there have been going on for decades without it being shut down hard, which is pretty unbelieveable in itself.

How is that unbelievable? It is exactly what I expected. Like seriously, we built a massive apparatus, dehumanized massive amounts of people, put them under the power of people with a distinctly adversarial mindset, and turned a blind eye for decades. This is the most obvious outcome ever. All you have to do is ask the people who have been experiencing it but as a rule most people never bother unless they can use it for their own agenda. I'm reminded of an observation from an ethnographer upon observing a news anchor in a border town. The anchor was trying to find sob stories, he did not care about the people, only the story to use for his own gain and said as much. Went find the crying traumatized ones and milk them more that sweet money making story. The every day constant suffering of the people just gets ignored for that one shock story. So one scandal happens on the one story and perhaps something is done. No one ever addresses the constant abuse.

I think the bigger problem is general population's perception that our shiny modern society somehow lacks the same capability to perpetrate the horrors that they read about in history books.  That sort of stuff happened in the past when science thought mercury was medicine, education was mainly for the wealthy, the world was smaller, less connected, more dangerously bored, younger legal system, etc.  Surely because we've advanced on all those fronts, the horrors of the past can't resurface, right?  Our institutions have better checks and balances.  The populace is more informed.  We've made those past mistakes and learned from them.

And on some fronts, it's true.  But in so many others, our institutions take advantage of that sentiment to do whatever the hell they want.  Conspiracy and secrecy aren't even necessary anymore.  Popular denial does the job on its own.  We can be barraged on a near daily basis with video evidence of police murdering people who didn't deserve it, and the most common response will be 'Few bad apples/they must have deserved it somehow'.  Information about the epidemic of war crime in the middle east was available for years before Manning brought serious attention to the issue.  It was known that mass surveillance was happening on a ridiculous level of intrusion and scale long before Snowden did his thing, but anyone who tried to talk about it was labeled a conspiracy theorist.  I've heard so many times "If such bad things were happening, everyone would know about it, because we live in the information age.  They can't hide those things anymore."  But we do know about it.  The information is out there.  But it's always tucked neatly behind all the dozens of other daily headlines about celebrity culture, the minority of senseless acts by random crazy people the world is sure to provide daily, the daily school shooting, etc.  So nobody sees what's right in front of their faces and refuses to believe when someone tries to actively point it out to them until that one sob story hits just the right chord at just the right time and goes viral.  Then suddenly everyone's an activist for 5 minutes, and a week later goes back to believing there's no way our institutions could be engaging in the same behaviors we villainize in history books.

[wierd]

I was in the middle of writing a reply on exactly that same vein, but you beat me to the punch (because I am overworked tonight and getting pulled every direction except toward my chair to do my god-damned charting, and rounds took 2x as long because of people constantly needing to freaking pee. Sorry, needed to vent there.) and spoke it more eloquently than I am currently capable of articulating.

The basic feature is that it is unpopular in the US to acknowledge that it is human nature to be a douche canoe, and to do the least actual work possible in a vocation, including those centered around caring for others.

The other part of that, at least concerning vocations centered on caring for others, is that complacency in the general population that "things are taken care of", coupled with a general lack of persons with the right aptitudes, ends up in a glut of people who need care, only so many warm bodies with the right heart to provide it, and those people have only so much compassion inside them before they burn out, and start instinctively lashing out, usually on the most helpless persons around that are tied to their emotional meltdown: The people who need the systemic care.

This is true of both "permanent child care", and of elder care. 

It is a REAL problem. It's called variously "burnout", or "Compassion fatigue."
http://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-16-2011/No1-Jan-2011/Compassion-Fatigue-A-Nurses-Primer.html

It is very easy to proclaim, in anger, "Those people are evil-- abusing those children placed into their care! What monsters! they should be fired!", however, that is an intellectually lazy thing to say.

As you may have gathered from my parenthetical above, I am a bit overworked, and am beginning to suffer the early effects of "compassion fatigue" tonight.  Without much explanation, it is because a woman who has dementia has returned from the hospital today-- on the same day that a co-worker, who's presence is SEVERELY needed to maintain adequate staffing for the increased nursing load we have had lately, has called in "sick." Really, he is just dead assed tired from being overworked by taking too many double-shifts, and is physically unable to continue at that pace. As a consequence, this shift is now understaffed, resulting in dangerous/severe workload for the remaining staff, that is at skeletal levels.  This is a recurring problem, because of the "Profit motive" driven nature of elder care in the US, (staff pay is abysmal, work demands are very high, and the number of people with the proper heart to do the work properly is only a tiny fraction of the population) and so-- we all take the "compassion fatigue" roller coaster in a downward spiral as we each start wearing out, and or-- reaching our limits and having to take sabbaticals from work, stressing our barely adequate staff to the breaking point, and causing an escalating cycle of bitterness, contempt, and and resentment, both to each other, and to our residents who never relent in their endless need for care.  I am about 6 days away from taking a 10 day sabbatical that I planned in advance 5 months ago, and which is sorely needed.

Where am I getting with this rambling?

It is very easy to condemn people who are entrusted with care, when they hit their limit hard under sudden increased load (like the fucking state dumping thousands of children on care systems that are not staffed to handle that load, and being TOLD to LIKE IT, because it is what is fucking politically popular with some fucking idiotic xenophobes in power) where the charges are upset, and likely to act out because they have been take out of loving and caring environments, and thrust into an environment that in all likelihood was already at or very near the staff's breaking point, and when that staff becomes "fight or flight" because of the stress level, and some go into "fight" mode and take it out on the children (who are the immediate cause of that stress), it is OH SO EASY to denounce those people, who under more ideal circumstances, would bend over backwards for those children.

(I can say that with some degree of authority, as that is basically what happens in elder care, and if the state started suddenly dumping more elders on us than we could handle, it would not be a pretty sight.)

So-- The things that are OH SO FUCKING POPULAR with the GOP-- like "FREE MARKET SOLUTIONS!" and "DETAIN FOREVER TO SEND A MESSAGE!"  result in a severely toxic environment where:

1) Pay for caregivers is forcibly maintained at absolute bare bottom levels, to assure profitibility of the facility
2) Number of caregivers is naturally low due to a rare aptitude being needed
3) The facilities in question have a recurring problem with burnout on a GOOD DAY because of the above two
4) The state has started dumping in WAAAY more charges to care for, demanding they receive care indefinitely, while of course
5) Refusing to account for staff needs, faclility needs, or increased costs on both human and financial levels for their increased demands on those systems and--
6) "Any problems that might arise, will be MAGICALLY FIXED by the fucking FREE MARKET fairy."

Rather than, you know--- being proper statesmen, realizing that they lack the infrastructure to properly undertake an action like this, being realistic about their problem, and acting accordingly to what is actually fucking logistically feasible.

And of course, the negative backlash of the public when caregivers are pushed, forcibly, past their breaking points in full public view of society only makes that bitterness much more permanent, and actively REDUCES the total number of people willing to undertake that kind of work, making the problem systemically worse.

The public does not want to actually understand or appreciate what actually happens with those "AMAZINGLY INEXPENSIVE FREE MARKET SOLUTIONS!" that they just fucking love over those "Dreaded SOCIALIST plans where the state pays for things with taxes, OH MY!", and so do the people in government, because they get to demand the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky--- then throw people in jail when they fail to provide.  The public is fully gung-ho on jumping on that bandwagon.  Most cases of nursing home abuse/neglect can either be directly attributed to being chronically short-staffed and taking in residents with excessive care needs, due to profit motives-- or to people just burning the fuck out when facility admins admit YET ANOTHER person who needs constant, 24/7 1-on-1 care to avoid them literally killing themselves.

I would wager a fair bit of money that the same is mostly true for child care facilities like Shiloh. (with the obvious caveat that there are perverts out there that would take a job at such a place because they could possibly get to bang the kids in secret, rather than because they have an earnest interest in proper child care---- but with the obvious statement that with the shortage of care givers, the employers are not looking that closely.)

[PTTG??]

@SalmonGod

Wait, how should people have acted?

You can say that Americans are sheeple all you want, but what exactly did you want them to do? Because unless it was "build the guillotines and start the fires," someone's been doing it.

[Dunamisdeos]

@Redwall @Salmon

That's exactly what I was saying, but I tend to angry-suplex the blame squarely onto our political leadership. That rage-fest I did earlier does not help convey ideas rationally.

I guess I feel like nothing has changed in the last 2000 years, and that the fanatical tribalism in regards to political affiliation is just currently most popular tool in humanity's quest to never admit it has a problem under any circumstances. Death before admitting fault, as it were.

@Weird
Weird is a teller of truths. My wife is a nurse, and has worked in multiple nursing homes / assisted living etc. She describes exactly that kind of environment in multiple institutions. The place she is now is brand new and has not yet fallen into those practices, which is nice.

She's also one of those people with that special aptitude, so she often ends up picking up that slack and coming back for more. I sure as hell couldn't do that, and I don't personally know anyone else who can. It's a ridiculously special and a very rare talent. She's dealt with some cartoonishly evil management, such as one woman who outwardly fired her because she was pregnant and threatened to lie to the nursing board to get her license revoked if she did anything about it. (Before anyone gets upset, we achieved victory and that lady got fired, but we almost lost our home in the meantime and she had to find another job even tho the corporate folks offered to hire her back.)

[misko27]

I can totally get behind building a few guillotines. Not to overthrow the government, I just think it'd be a more humane way of killing people.

[Starver]

That sounds like a capital idea!