Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Reality's Trump-et

Is this Washington Post article trying to imply Donald Trump's recent comments on Sweden's Muslim problem provoked Muslim rioting afterwards?
Just two days after President Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of Sweden's capital, Stockholm.
It's unlikely the Post writer's opening with "[j]ust two days after" is an affirmation of Trump's larger point after all. Would that it were. I wonder if he considered just how much better it works as such. I've given up hope on his ilk recognizing how absurd their defenses have become: we're to believe that Sweden's Muslims being provoked to riot over the gaffe of a US president--despite Sweden's own establishment coming so quickly their defense--isn't in itself cause for alarm. They've been spinning so long they don't know whether they're coming or going.

I don't think Trump is playing "4-D chess" with the opposition, beyond placing himself in position to get lucky by being right on the larger point--here, Muslim immigration degrading Europe--while being imprecise enough to leave himself open to "fact checking" and spin that has to wrestle openly with that broader point and wither under the inevitable dramatic refutation such as Sweden's most recent Muslim rioting.
Because Trump is right about an ongoing catastrophe the opposition press renders itself plausibly accurate and comically irrelevant (here, nothing major or dramatic happened "last night in Sweden", but just wait a couple of days). Trump isn't playing the opposition press, reality is.

As for "widespread consternation", in the US it's no wider than the Acela corridor. In Sweden, if the Post's somewhat cravenly implication is to be taken seriously, "consternation", for Sweden's Muslims, is expressed by burning cars, attacking police and general rioting. The source of their consternation leading to "bouts of anger" (phrasing designed to prevent further consternation, perhaps) can be attributed to that universal constant, the inadequacy of the host population to integrate newcomers.

At the very least these efforts to refute by pointing out an irrelevant lack of precision force the opposition press to expose that which it would rather leave completely in the dark. Optimal for them would be complete ignorance; the mere act of "fact checking" Trump's latest constitutes a severe degradation of their position. Emphasis added below:
The neighborhood, Rinkeby, was the scene of riots in 2010 and 2013, too. And in most ways, what happened late Monday night was reminiscent of those earlier bouts of anger. Swedish police apparently made an arrest around 8 p.m. near the Rinkeby station. For reasons not yet disclosed by the police, word of the arrest prompted a crowd of youths to gather.
In 2015, when the influx of refugees and migrants to Europe from Africa, the Middle East and Asia was highest, Sweden took in the greatest number
per capita. By and large, integration has been a success story there, save for incidents such as Monday night's, which have taken place in highly segregated neighborhoods.
Integration has been successful except where it isn't (here, and there, and over there...) and where there is segregation which is all over (notice how assimilation isn't even mentioned any more--that failure is no longer even recognized as such--you're a racist for even thinking it's a failure). It's gotten so they can't even get out a coherent sentence. "Protests were peaceful until some started rioting" is the template.
Trump is Br'er Rabbit, reality is the briar patch.

1 comment:

Lothrop Stoddard said...

I wonder if major newspapers had less heavy-handed subjective partisan editorializing injected into their news stories twenty years ago, or if I just noticed it less.

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