Earlier on, I called America’s frontier self-governance “football hooligan democracy.”  “Baseball team democracy” is better, because baseball is a metaphor for America.  (Since it seems we must do the Ken Burns thing, here’s a sepia-toned photograph of old ballplayers.  You’ll have to provide the goopy music yourself, and read this in Morgan Freeman’s voice).

Everything that happens in the game is individual.  The batter, of course, is all alone — it’s just his talent, training, knowledge, and experience versus the talent, training, knowledge, and experience of the opponent’s nine guys.  But everything else that happens is also the sole result of individuals’ talent, training, knowledge, and experience.  Simplifying just a little: The catcher is solely responsible for the type of pitch that’s thrown.  The pitcher alone is responsible for the quality of the pitch (velocity, movement, location).  If the pitch is hit — the sole responsibility of the batter — then the fielder alone is responsible for fielding it.  All of these are individual actions, performed by individuals.

And yet… as anyone who has ever played Little League knows, a baseball team is more than a collection of individuals, doing individual things.  The catcher must know his pitcher.  The right pitch in this situation might be a curveball low and away, but maybe the pitcher doesn’t have it tonight.  The catcher who calls for the curve low and away anyway — because all else equal, the pitcher is capable of throwing that pitch — won’t be a catcher for long (and the pitcher who can’t throw all his pitches consistently, on command, won’t be a pitcher much longer).  The best catch-and-throw in the world from the third baseman is meaningless if the first baseman can’t get to his base in time (or can’t handle the throw when it arrives).  Even the batter — the loneliest guy on the field — has other responsibilities than just trying to hit the ball as hard as he can.  He, too, must know the situation and swing accordingly… or even not swing, as the situation demands.  Here too, even the best hitter who swings away without reference to his team won’t be a hitter for long.

And yet… selfless, team-first guys won’t last, either, unless they’re individually very skilled.  All the euphemisms for selfless, team first guys — “field general,” “player-coach,” or the dreaded “veteran locker room presence” — all decode to “this guy stinks.”  A good manager can work with a certain level of “veteran leadership,” but a team full of great locker room guys will be as bad as — honestly, probably a lot worse than — a team of me-first prima donnas.

I hope this digression into baseball arcana (and I hope foreign readers followed ok) hasn’t obscured two important facts about baseball:

1. There’s a minimum skill level involved; and
2. The team has a clear, obvious goal.

The higher up the ladder you go, the more 1) applies.  A small town high school team might have to put the only 9 guys it has out there, regardless of skill level.  Even low-level professional teams, by contrast, are full of top-tier talent.  Every single guy who makes even a low-minor roster was the best player on his team in Little League, in high school, in the whole school district, in fact, if not the entire state… and often the best player on his team in college, too.  There’s nobody playing pro baseball, in other words — no matter how “minor” the league — who isn’t really really really really really good at baseball.*

The political parallel is obvious, and it’s the reason I keep banging on about this “human biodiversity” (HBD) stuff.  Representative government, too, requires a certain “skill level” from its voters.  Are we a small town high school team, or are we the Major Leagues?  As we have enough nuclear weapons to incinerate the solar system, I really hope we’re the Majors.  Which means…..

But let’s not forget 2).  What is our goal?

The political parallel is less obvious: It’s legitimacy.  A baseball team exists to win baseball games.  “Winning baseball games” is the one thing from which all others flow.  No matter how great the team is for the community — and I’m sure the good people of Boonton really loved their ball club (pictured above) — they can’t continue to exist without winning games.  Whatever else our government does, then, it’s core function is….what?  Identify that, then see if the government is actually doing it.

If it is, no problem.  If not… well, ask the guys from Boonton.

*One of the advantages of going to a third-rate state college, I’ve found, is that you get a much broader experience of people.  My school was full of folks who were “just giving college a try” — lots of ex-military, lots of older folks who were taking classes for self-improvement, etc.  And lots of former minor league baseball players, who went straight from high school to the minors and didn’t make it.  These guys were the ringers on intramural softball teams, and holy guacamole.  I remember playing against a guy who wore huge, clunky braces on both knees.  He’d been a prospect, but suffered one of those horrific injuries that show up on ESPN.  He was still ungodly compared to the rest of us, even the former high school athletes among us — he played shortstop, for instance, even though every single guy on his team could beat him in a foot race.**

**For foreign readers; “Shortstop” is the toughest position to play in baseball.  Even most guys who play shortstop throughout their minor league careers can’t handle it in the Majors.  You need to be very, very fast, with fighter pilot reflexes.

The question in the last post was: How did 19th century America, which had all the Old World’s beefs and the most disgruntled Old Worlders themselves over here stirring things up, end up becoming America?  Why is, say, Greektown a charming place to get some good souvlaki and not a hotbed of ethnic tension?  The former Frontier is full of towns with names like “New Krakow;” why aren’t they feuding with the “New Konigsberg” just down the road (as they would be — still are — back in Europe)?

The last post suggested an answer: Imagined communities and invented traditions.  Or, put simply: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.

“Traditions” are easy to invent.  Current Year America is full of examples, from the smallest to the largest.  Consider Liberals, and their vanguard party, the SJWs.  These people baffle anyone who passed Psych 101.  Isn’t there this thing called “cognitive dissonance?”  Isn’t it supposed to hurt when you believe obviously contradictory things?  Unless it’s only the “woke” who are driving the opioid epidemic, there’s either something wrong with our understanding of CD, or our understanding of Liberals.  (It’s the latter).

We normies look at Liberalism as a set of… well, ideas is stretching it, so let’s say “propositions.”  Propositions like “race is a social construction.”  Taken in isolation, that’s not so strange.  It might even be functionally true*.  But it directly contradicts one of Liberalism’s other dogmas, that race is the only thing that matters.  The only way those two things could possibly harmonize is if we’re getting all worked up about something we know doesn’t exist… which contradicts a third pillar of the Leftist faith, that they’re The Science People.  Does “The Flying Spaghetti Monster” ring a bell?  Ruining people’s lives over made-up crap we know is fake is something only Godbag Christofascists do, amirite?

Instead, look at Liberals as an imagined community.  The “community-based reality” was a fun joke back in the W. Bush years (read the first sentence of that link for a meta-example), but it’s true for all that.  Maybe Millennials missed out on the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah high school experience — too traumatic for the campus ferns or something — but the rest of us remember Friday nights at the stadium.  We weren’t gonna win, and our team wasn’t number one, but there we were anyway, filled with something close to bloodlust.  I can’t stress this enough — nothing is dumber than high school football, but look at how well it works.  Your parents chose to move to the same arbitrarily assigned district at some point in your past, and you’re supposed to be best buddies for life with a large group of random people, because — and only because — their parents also chose to move within the same arbitrarily-defined district at some point in their past.  But… but… but…. Class of ’85 rules!!!!

All the stuff we call “virtue-signaling” is just policing up the boundaries of the imagined community.  Chanting “race is a social construction!” or “there are 37 genders!” on social media is exactly the same as chanting “we’re number one!” down at the stadium.  That race isn’t a social construction, and that there are only two genders, is exactly as relevant as you’re team’s real record (0-8).  The chant — NOT the words of which the chant is composed — is the point.

Which explains all their behavior.  To Liberals, your team’s 0-8 record is irrelevant, because it is irrelevant.  It means exactly nothing that you didn’t win a game, including the big rivalry game to the evil school across town.  For them, politics works exactly the same way.  If it mattered — if the parents of everyone from the losing school got beheaded, Aztec style — then Massachusetts Liberals would take high school football as seriously as Texas conservatives do.  Liberals don’t have to live with the social constructions, which is why they vote how they do.  So long as it’s possible to keep imagining — and facts can intrude a long, looooong way into the fantasy — the imagined community will be more important than any real one.**

The trick, then, is figuring out how to make this work for us.

_____

Baseball is a benign example (European readers, please feel free to substitute “football,” as I suppose the process was the same).  Something like “professional sports” would’ve happened anyway — the leisure class and all that — but baseball, specifically, became the “national game” through savvy marketing.  It was pitched as a “sandlot” game than anyone could play anywhere, at any time, even though that’s not true — soccer and basketball, just to name two, are far less space- and equipment-intensive, plus baseball can only be played in summer (Naismith specifically invented basketball as a year-round sport that could be played with small numbers).  The first baseball heroes were portrayed as everyday joes, even though they weren’t — as several different players point out in The Glory of Their Times (a must-read for any fan, btw), there were proportionally far more college grads playing pro baseball than in the general population.  For every Shoeless Joe Jackson there was an Eppa Rixey, a University of Virginia graduate who was a high school Latin teacher in the offseason.  In an era where the only other popular sport, football, was strictly a college boy’s game, the Shoeless Joes and Dizzy Deans and Honus Wagners were working class heroes — by design.

Once you had that, the rest was easy.  Just as Rixey and Shoeless Joe could’ve peacefully coexisted on the same diamond, so America’s class and ethnic divisions could coexist peacefully in the stands.  You can cue the gooey Ken Burns music here if you’d like, since moron socialists like Burns have been getting moist over the class-leveling effects of baseball since the Gilded Age.  They’re marxoid dopes, but they’re not wrong about this one.

________

You’ll have noticed, of course, that baseball is scalable…. but only if properly done.  It could’ve easily gone the way of English football hooligan culture*** — Pirates fans attacking Phillies fans in the streets whenever their teams play (yeah yeah, I know inter-league play started in 1997; the point still stands).  Why do you think Civil War retrospectives all feature the Blue and the Gray playing baseball (as if it were the same game everywhere), and Union Gen. Abner Doubleday gets the credit for “inventing” it?  Why did the Presidential first pitch start in 1910, just in time for the Civil War’s 50th anniversary?  Why, of all the shots of G.I.s relaxing that photographers could take, do they invariably take pictures of baseball?

“Phillies fan” (or whatever) is constructed as a subset of “baseball fan,” which is constructed as part of American-ness.  Or do you think it’s a coincidence that all the diabetes-inducingly saccharine portrays of baseball — in the movies, in books, on TV — ended early in the Clinton era?  You think Robert Redford would make The Natural (1984) now?  How about Kevin Costner and Field of Dreams (1989)?  Ken Burns’s Baseball was 1994; Major League, The Sandlot… all late 80s or early 90s.  The only Current Year “baseball” movies anyone has heard of — scan that list; ye cats! — are either sappy rom-coms to which baseball is incidental (Summer Catch; Fever Pitch), or glorifications of nerd culture (Moneyball), in which handsome jock Brad Pitt is helpless without a fat dork and his computer.****

You’ll have noticed also, I hope, that this is a possible solution to the legitimacy problem.  That’s the other great thing about baseball — every team has a superfan kid whose fandom is the only thing keeping him going.  He’s excluded from all other forms of social / political participation, but his fandom is reciprocally legitimizing — being a team fan keeps him going, and simultaneously his fandom makes the random collection of mercenary millionaires wearing the jersey this season seem like a meaningful unit……

*Stipulating, for argument’s sake, that the “superstructure” (as Marxists would say) of culture can override the genetic “base” of behavior.  I personally don’t believe this, but I don’t have the bioscience classwork to argue against it with someone who does.

** Cf. Magic Dirt Theory, Liberals’ explanation for why a horde of 80 IQ Aztec subsistence farmers will turn into 110 IQ customer service reps just by stepping on our side of the Rio Grande.  If America is only an imagined community, this makes sense, since it’s all pretend anyway.

*** Or, at least, the caricatured American understanding of football hooligan culture.  I’ve read Among the Thugs, but I didn’t get the impression this was a mass phenomenon (i.e. that the “firms” are quite small).  Recusant et al, please clue me in here.

**** SJWs are still too busy shitting on Star Wars to go after baseball again, but since white people play it and normies enjoy it, it won’t be long.  Is there a BALCO movie in the chute yet?  They’ll have to cast a white guy as Barry Bonds, but that’s no challenge for the makers of Girl Luke Skywalker (and besides, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens are whiter than mayo on wonderbread).  I bet we’ll be seeing it by 2020, right in time for the Democrats’ white privilege whining for the election.

The question now becomes: Can an “ethno-state” be made?  I think so.

Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, and Benedict Anderson were all dirty Commies, but their work on “invented traditions” and “imagined communities” says something profound about human group interaction for all that.  It’s actually pretty easy to weld a disparate group of people into a tight unit, zealous for a collective goal.  Boot camp is an extreme example, but it’s easier than that — think of your high school.  The mascot, the fight song, “our” hated rivals from the school across town, all those invented traditions create an imagined community, loyalty to which can span a lifetime.  Check your Facebook account — how many old high school buddies are in your friends list?  Of them, how many still belong to groups like “Class of ’85 Rocks”?  We laugh at Al Bundy telling everyone who will listen about the time he scored three touchdowns in a game back in high school, but the joke only works because everyone knows someone like that.*

In the grand scheme of things, nothing is more meaningless than a high school football game… but there are people who define their whole lives by it.  Imagine what a flag and a national anthem can do!

See, for example, Japan.  Meiji Japan was an imagined community, built on top of an actually existing community.  The genro took the incohate sense of “Japanese-ness” that existed throughout the realm and gave it symbols — the Charter Oath, the Army, the imperial Rescript on Education, the Rising Sun flag, the Emperor himself.  It was astonishingly effective.  In a generation or two, “loyalty to the Emperor” simply was Japanese-ness, despite the fact that Meiji, like all Emperors stretching back into the remote medieval past, was a powerless figurehead.

Of course, Japan was full of Japanese at the time.  But it can be done elsewhere, with a much more heterogeneous population — e.g. the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Forget the huddled masses at Ellis Island, yearning to be free.  Think about the former Confederacy.  North and South were, in 1861, different enough to get into a shooting war with each other.  By 1871, most of the former CSA states were back in the Union, and by 1881 the country was welded together tighter than it had ever been… such that, by 1898, veterans’ groups on both sides were loudest in demanding war with Spain.  40 years after a war that killed more Americans than all the previous wars combined — with hundreds of thousands of veterans still alive (and the most vital voting block in American politics)! — and it was like it had never happened.  Behold the power of the Lost Cause!

Turning Irish, Jews, Italians, Poles, whatever into “white Americans” is child’s play compared to that.  All you need is baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.

This is the secret to American History that baffles the imagined community of the ivory tower (see footnote below).  Think about the source material.  Europeans are famously fractious — when Groundskeeper Willie says that brothers and sisters are natural enemies, like Englishmen and Scots, or Welshmen and Scots, or Japanese and Scots, or Scots and other Scots (damn Scots! They ruined Scotland!), he’s summing up 19th century Europe…. and we got the worst of the lot (folks who are happy with the way things are going at home don’t emigrate).  The French went to the barricades every time someone invented a new kind of cheese, but despite every conceivable source of friction — national, religious, class, clan — going back hundreds of years, Americans, to the perpetual bewilderment of professional historians, never came close to another revolution.  For every Haymarket Square or Pullman Strike or Pennsylvania Coalfield Strike, there were hundreds of incidents that could’ve spiraled out of control, but didn’t.  Something kept all that in check.

What was it, and can it work again?

*The imagined community “academia” is an ironic meta-example.  Hobsbawm and Ranger were historians, Anderson was a political scientist.  In other words, these were guys who made the study of human interaction their life’s work; they, of all people, should’ve been rock-ribbed conservatives.  But they were Marxists, of course, because they were Professors, and Professors by definition are left wingers.  No matter what their “research” said, in other words, their political commitments to their imagined community always came first — in Hobsbawm’s case, actually admitting, on live TV, that 15-20 million dead would’ve been worth it had Stalin succeeded in creating a real Workers’ Paradise.

I got nothin’, so here’s this.

A Honky in Newark.  “Freelance urban sociology,” as we might call it, is pretty interesting.  I grew up in a major Southern metro, so I got to see all the hyphen-Americans without the hyphen — Chinatown, Little Saigon, Caracas del Norte, and, of course, the 100% Black enclaves.  It’s quite a show.  Cruising through the all-Black areas, it’s hard not to sympathize with Liberals’ “poverty causes crime” mantra.  If you haven’t had this experience yourself, watch a season of  The Wire.  Minus a few regional variations — “lake trout,” snow — The Wire’s Baltimore could be any urban Black area in America.  Season 4, especially, is heartbreaking — what chance in hell do those poor kids have?

And yet…. race.  Always race.  Black Americans are just different, in ways that are obvious to everyone when it’s politically convenient to notice them (e.g. in any African-American Studies program, where this is the bedrock premise).  As your second pass around the block will prove, they’re not Africans — Africans-from-Africa tend to be openly contemptuous of American Blacks, especially when forced to live among them — but they’re not White Americans, either, even when forced to act approximately like them.  The fact that they were forced to act that way, for a full century, pushes folks who know their history pretty far into the “race realism” camp.  Culture isn’t genetics, and genetics isn’t culture, but they have a dialectical relationship — American Blacks are the way they are, one is increasingly forced to conclude, because they can’t be any other way.

And this is where the keyboard warriors of the HBD crowd jump into the comments with things like “end the welfare checks, close the freeways, and the problem takes care of itself.”  And you wonder why you get called Nazis.  You do realize you’re talking about genocide, right?

There’s really only one way to get very different groups to coexist peacefully.  It’s incompatible with a whole bunch of seemingly fundamental-to-Americanness stuff like “representative government.”  This is not the world we want, but it’s the world we have.  Give me a realistic plan to keep the peace when the credit bubble bursts — as it must — that doesn’t involve dictatorship, or you haven’t thought this “HBD” thing through.

Revolt of the Revolting.  Speaking of not thinking things through, here’s some half-assed Nietzsche for you:

The entire social justice/aggrotolerance/equalism movement is a revolt by the ugly and freakish against the beautiful and normal. The ideology has no morality nor purpose and exists only to substantiate in political radicalization the aggrieved spitefulness of life’s losers.

True enough.  This is “slave morality,” and ol’ Friedrich wrote about 100,000 words on it.  Which makes us — “the beautiful and normal,” oxymoronic though that is — the ubermenschen, I suppose.  But Nietzsche was obviously wrong about a few important things, starting with that whole “ubermensch” bit.

The transvaluation of values he preached has already happened.  It’s impossible to be more overtly anti-Christian than “Social Justice,” and SocJus — “Cultural Marxism” is far more accurate — is the law of the land.  Nobody turns 19th century European values further on their head than transsexuals, for instance, and look where questioning them gets you.  Nietzsche’s 19th century “slave morality” brought us the prosperity from which “social justice” is an organic outgrowth.  But then again, Nietzsche, a philologist by training, thought Socrates turned the Athenians into a bunch of girly men.  I doubt he’d be much of a Pickup Artist.

Teacher stops having sex with high school sophomore who wore MAGA hat to class.  Satire, I realize, but satire only works when it’s true.  I guess it’s Nietzsche Day here at Rotten Chestnuts, as the feminists, via bargain-bin Nietzsche-wannabe Michel Foucault, actually got this one right.  Sex outside of a monogamous, procreative relationship — let’s call it “marriage,” for convenience — really is exploitative* (the more thoughtful PUAs, like RooshV, admit it**).  As our social dilithium crystals overload and the sexual polarities reverse, you see women acting like men and men acting like women.  Why do grade school teachers, some of them quite attractive, go for their students instead of guys their own age?

Simple: They get off on the power imbalance.  Sex isn’t about the sex act for lots of men — see Elliot Rodger, Alik Minassian, Nicholas Cruz, and suchlike losers.  If all they needed was to get laid, they could’ve hired a professional, who would look exactly like they wanted, do anything they wanted… but none of them even considered it.  Rather, they felt they deserved a certain type of girlfriend.  That type, obviously, is high status — hot, blonde, a cheerleader — which would mean they, Rodger et al, had the goods to merit that type of girl.  Google up pictures of these losers.  They weren’t so fugly that a girlfriend, possibly even an objectively attractive one, was out of reach.  The point wasn’t the girl, much less sex with the girl.  The point was the type of girl, and the validation that provides — i.e. the power imbalance, because, as everyone knows, the head cheerleader only goes out with the quarterback.

Same deal with the reverse-Lolita teachers.  The quarterback may rule the school, but he still has to ask his teacher for permission to go to the bathroom.  If she seduces him, her dominance is complete.  It’s twisted, obviously, but if you assume that modern women act more and more like how they think stereotypical men act, it all makes perfect sense.

UPDATE: Secondary boycotts.  This is the kind of thing I was trying to get at in my Chamber of Commerce Republicans post, below.  I no longer believe it’s possible to fix SJWs.  Their brains are broken, and short of a total amygdala replacement they are forever lost.  But SJWs are actually a small minority.  The professional Left uses them as useful idiots, knowing that the professional “Right” would never dare push back against them.

What I suggest, then — hypothetically, of course, since I disavow all this —  is a kind of “secondary boycott” of the GOP.  All it would take to defeat the Democratic Party is for the Republican Party to stop enabling them.  Stiffen the GOP’s spine, and “antifa” collapses.  But, I’m told, the GOP only does what it does because it’s in the Chamber of Commerce’s pocket.  Well then, let’s stiffen the Chamber of Commerce’s spine a little bit.  We can’t bring any pressure to bear on the big boys in Washington, but your local CofC?  Them we can get to.  If “boycott” — or, heaven forbid, “pressure” — sets your delicate heart aflutter, we could call it a Concentrated Niceness Offensive or a Coordinated Civility Campaign or something.  Just say hi.  A whole bunch of nice, normal Americans saying hi, at their work, at their places of business, on public streets, near their homes…. that would concentrate their minds wonderfully, one would think.  After all, it works like gangbusters on us.

But of course, I would never suggest such a thing.  I disavow it all.

*Sure it is, if you think it through.  Sex without love — “hookups,” “pickups,” whatever — are purely transactional.  You want it, she wants it, it’s an all-but-capitalistic exchange (this is the starting point for all those feminist arguments about how all heterosexual sex is either prostitution or rape, I realize, but that’s for another day).  “Getting more than you give” is the cornerstone of capitalist exchange.  Ergo — Latin!! — hookups are exploitative.  QED.

**Read your Nietzsche, Roosh.  Then read the Christian critiques of Nietzsche (G.K. Chesterton has a good one).  Then come on over to the Light Side of the Force.

If, several hundred years from now, our descendants want to consider giving representative government another go, they’ll need to figure out a better way of picking leaders.

I don’t mean things like “restricting the franchise to stakeholders” and “IQ tests,” though those are great ideas in themselves.  I mean they’ll have to overcome systemic selection bias — a kind of Peter Principle that promotes people not just to their level of incompetence, but based on a completely different set of skills.

Football coaches are a good example.  Chances are good that a brilliant coordinator will flame out as a head coach, simply because the skillsets are so different.  Head coaches have to “coach up” — their day-to-day jobs involve handling the owner, general manager, the media, and his subordinate coaches.  Their relationship to the day-to-day, X’s and O’s of the game that’s played on Sunday is usually pretty tenuous.  Coordinators, on the other hand, “coach down.”  They do the nuts-n-bolts stuff, handle the players and their issues, devise the specific schemes and match-ups.  There’s almost no overlap between those two areas of responsibility.

(The less said of college head coaches who jump to the pros, the better.  College kids aren’t pros, the boosters aren’t the owner, and you don’t get the ridiculous recruiting advantage bigtime college programs do.  Examples are numerous, but my favorite is Steve Spurrier — in his brief tenure with the Redskins, he really did seem to believe his “huck it downfield and let his five-star receivers blow past the opponent’s two-star DBs” would work in the pros.  But everyone in the pros is a former five-star recruit).

Either way, though, there’s simply no relationship between the two skillsets, and thus no way to judge.  A brilliant X’s and O’s guy, who gets the most out of limited athletes, might be great at schmoozing the owner and handling PR…. but then again, he might not.  The point is, there’s no way to tell if or how his X’s and O’s work will translate over to schmoozing and PR, and — given the demands of the business — there’s no way to give him a trial run.  Yet coordinators always get promoted to head coach, because… well, how else are ya gonna do it?

Politics works the same way.  The traditional cursus honorum — state legislature, national legislature, state governor, president — selects for a very different set of skills than those the President needs.  A dull-but-clubbable party man makes a great Senator, but a lousy President.  It takes some real skills to be a state governor, but high among them is the ability to massage entrenched local elites — you have to be wired in, but in a totally different way than a Senator does.

The system, in other words, is set up to produce dull-but-clubbable party men.  They were quite open about this in the 19th century, in case you think I’m making it up.  That’s why “nominating conventions” were real things back then — the wheeling and dealing was brutal, smoky back rooms weren’t just a metaphor, and sometimes it broke down spectacularly and you ended up running Franklin Pierce or someone like that.  This was because the 19th century actually believed in that “federalism” stuff, and the savvy operators avoided national politics for state governorships.

Trump is a huge anomaly who has exposed just how systemically flawed our process is.  We need to figure out how to overcome this selection bias effect… or, at least, our great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren do.

I saw this making the rounds on social media.  It’s a “fact check” of this:

As you might expect from Snopes.com, it’s as much lying leftwing tripe as the original “news” story.

Starting with the headline:

Is This a Photograph of a Children’s Concentration Camp in the U.S.?

No.  It’s an overcrowded ICE detention center.  The only people calling it a “concentration camp” are the deranged Leftists in the Media (BIRM), who, by calling it a “concentration camp,” are trying to A) keep readers from wondering just why our ICE detention centers are so perilously overcrowded, and B) blame Donald Trump for something.

Debate continues over how temporary holding facility and processing centers for undocumented migrant children should be described.

That’s the very next line — note that we haven’t even gotten to the actual “fact check” yet! — and it’s another lie, because the only “debate” going on is between Leftists who don’t want to admit that picture was taken during the Obama administration, and Leftists who think it’s “fake but accurate” to say it’s Trump’s fault anyway.  Given the overlap in those Venn diagrams, you’ll see more actual debate at the next North Korean Politburo meeting.

This photograph dates from 2014 (during the Obama administration) and was not directly related to a mid-2018 controversy over Trump administration policy of separating children from undocumented migrant parents at the U.S. border.

Emphasis mine, because “not directly related” in this case means “completely unrelated.”  Again, DONALD TRUMP WAS NOT PRESIDENT IN 2014.  He wasn’t even a Presidential candidate in 2014.  In 2014, Donald Trump was just some orange guy with bad hair that all the Smart people in the political class made fun of.  The only relationship between that photo and Donald Trump was that both of them existed on Planet Earth in 2014.  More astute readers (i.e. folks who don’t read Snopes.com) will also have noticed a nifty bias twofer: “Trump administration policy of separating children from undocumented migrant parents.”  For you see, children of undocumented migrant parents are themselves, by definition, undocumented migrants.  Oh, and by the way, are those children in the photo not separated from their parents?  What are they doing there, do you think, all the way back in the Obama administration?

See, Snopes?  Now that’s how you insinuate.  Oh, wait:

They are undocumented. They entered the country illegally. And when they were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they were shipped to Nogales from overwhelmed processing facilities in Texas.

So the Obama administration DID separate children from their undocumented migrant parents and hold them in separate facilities.  But they did it in Texas, not “at the U.S. border,” which makes it all better.

Some might argue that the pictured facility was in fact a detention center where children were held in conditions that were woefully inadequate for their numbers, and thus it was concentration camp-like in those aspects:

Yep, that was the problem with Auschwitz, all right: Too many Jews for the available resources.  The self-correcting nature of this resource imbalance is not, apparently, a “concentration camp-like aspect.”

However, others maintained that — despite the difficult conditions — the facility was not comparable to a concentration camp in that the children kept there were treated humanely, were provided with medical care, and were held only until they could be placed with relatives or other caretakers pending adjudication of their cases:

Yes, humane treatment, medical care — free medical care, let us note! — and temporary detention are conspicuously absent from concentration camps.  Forget the “others” who say ICE detention facilities aren’t concentration camps; I’m really curious about those who say they are.  Are we seriously debating what levels of medical care (free medical care!) and humane treatment qualify as “not concentration camp-like?”  Where’s the cutoff, Liberals?  Or maybe it’s just that the guys in Auschwitz had it coming?  Zionism is racism, amirite?

See, Snopes?  Now that’s how you insinuate!

Still, in 2016 the conditions of similar detention facilities were being described as “deplorable”

So “similar” facilities, according to an unnamed somebody two years later, are “deplorable.”  Yes, that totally justifies claiming Donald Trump puts children in cages.

Oh, no, wait: The “deplorable” somebody is named.  It’s Judge Dolly Gee, a Clinton appointee whom Obama promoted to a California federal district court in 2009.  The full Snopes quote is worth quoting in full:

Although [Texas] detention centers had been used long before [2014], that year the Obama administration made them key to its immigration policy. [The center in] Dilley was built that year, and Karnes was greatly expanded. Immigration advocates fought back, and last year in the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, Judge Dolly Gee made a ruling that helped their case. In her decision last July, the judge said the centers were in “deplorable” condition, and that they failed to meet even minimal standards. Gee pointed to a 1997 ruling that determined the government cannot treat a child in detention as it would an adult. She ordered the Obama administration to release the migrant kids from both Texas centers.

That didn’t happen. The Obama administration appealed, and for the past year has tried to figure out how to get around the ruling

Did you follow that?  The detention centers in question — the ones we’re comparing to concentration camps — were the key to the Obama administration’s immigration policy.  Indeed, these “deplorable” centers, which fail to meet even minimal standards, were crucial to Obama’s policy.  So crucial, in fact, that Obama didn’t release the kids — the kids in concentration camps — despite a judge’s direct order to do so.

So, yeah, I guess “debate continues” about whether or not these are “concentration camps.”  Obama‘s concentration camps.  Trump has nothing to do with anything.

Debate continues about how undocumented migrant children who come to the U.S. (whether alone or with their parents) should be dealt with, and where and how they should be housed until their status has been resolved. No approach is likely to satisfy critics at both ends of the political spectrum.

So, you know, the photo’s link to Donald Trump has been completely debunked.  But it’s still his fault.