A tale as old as human civilisations, yet ever present ’ ^ _ ^
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I guess switching from “let’s throw all the imigrants from central america back over the border” to “let’s extend our borders to include central america” would be a bit much even for Trump’s base…
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The problematic word is “mandate,” which implies some overwhelming support. Most presidents never have a mandate for their policies.
Trump uses the term to suggest that he has overwhelming support for his extreme actions. He does not. Some of his ardent supporters now regret their vote. Too late; apply good judgement before you vote!
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If he is paying people to leave their jobs voluntarily and willing to spend millions shipping out immigrants, maybe he will offer money to anyone wants to leave and a free ride on a military transport.
Of course, it could be that about 100 miles into the Gulf of America is actually the drop off point.
It would be a gamble.
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You know, I have suspected for some time that might be Trump’s long-term plan. Maybe not for him, but for his successors.
I think he sees the world in terms of three power blocks - The United States, Russia, and China. And I think he believes that eventually those three will divide the world between them. I think that’s why he’s not too bothered about NATO.
I think he has a vision where the United States will rule the whole of the Americas, Russia will take Europe, and China takes Asia. Africa will be divided between them.
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Only people who want to stay will be deported. The rest of us would be well served to remember the USSR, and that walls work both ways.
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I can’t help but think of all the sci-fi movies that predicted so much of this. Won’t it be ironic if we need to escape the US, like The Day After Tomorrow and find the Mexican army at the border (which they already are) and we can’t get out.
One of my favorite King of the Hill episodes is where they vacation in Mexico and end up smuggling drugs. Once they realize what they have done, they are left trying to re enter the US by avoiding customs and sneaking across the border. I remember Dale’s underwear gets hung on barbed wire… 
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…trapped & locked in like cogs in the industrial machine that screams like a runaway diesel until it inevitably detonates or grinds itself into silence.
It’s painfully surreal, watching the world gradually become the distopias of the sci-fi fiction novels I read in my childhood.
I spent so long typing this @sheralmyst beat me to my point
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Great minds and all that 
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I swear the only ads I get on YouTube now are for Amazon audibles audiobook for 1984. And the advertisement is too short to skip, and it just says “I am big brother, and I am always watching” and at this point, it’s no longer an ad, it’s a regular audible reminder that we are heading straight for it 
it’s literally serving the function it does in the novel, in my reality 
The irony that it’s an advertisement for Amazon is also not lost on me.
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1984 yes. But I am thinking Animal Farm should also be featured
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Let’s not forget Huxley’s brave new world, where the masses are too busy distracting themselves with entertainment to bother noticing or doing anything about the shit we find ourselves in. We invited the brain rot into our homes 
(I’ve never read it but this is my best recollection from a guy who explained it to me at a gig once 
)
I’m just going to point out, ever since the wrong gamers got mad at hello games in summer 2016, a LOT has gone wrong. I think the release of NMS and the fury felt by a thousand incels throwing a collective hissy fit threw us into an alternate, and worse timeline.
It’s gamergates fault 
which I say as a joke but now I remember who works at DOGE and OMFG gamergate has infiltrated the government 
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“classic dystopian trinity” is the name historians will also use to describe the coming era we find ourselves facing.
This is always a handy visual go to
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What goes around, comes around.
I started this thread because there was nowhere sensible to report the fact that rioters had burned the library I used when I was growing up.
It was from this library that I borrowed “Brave New World”. I suppose I was 15 or 16 years old. I found it such a depressing book that I never read it again. So my apologies if my memory of the story isn’t as accurate as it should be. It’s been more than 55 years.
I think one of the crucial elements of Brave New World was that natural pregnancy and childbirth are no longer allowed. Children are grown in tanks and incubators - and during this artificial development, their mental abilities and social class are predetermined.
Unskilled manual workers - the “Epsilons” - are poisoned whilst still in their foetal stage, to limit their mental abilities. They are deliberately made to be stupid.
It’s a crucial distinction to make. The working classes of Brave New World don’t choose to exist on a diet of drugs and low-grade entertainment. They don’t choose not to read books. They’ve been engineered to be that way. They have no choice.
And the library that was burned out? Well that’s been re-built, and is now open again. And it wasn’t done with government funds. Local people volunteered to do much of the work, and local fund raisers (with some help from high-profile celebrities) provided the cash.
So there’s still hope.
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What people miss about Brave New World is that the Epsilons are happy. In the land of the renegade Alphas everyone has agency, but the labor still needs to be done and the Alphas that are stuck with getting it done are presumably miserable. Possibly, choice is overrated.
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That does seem like a crucial detail to leave out of the illustrated comparison I provided. Artistic license bias 
Thanks for bringing us full circle to the Liverpudlian library, Huxley.
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