There are plenty of cases where there isn't a need for balance, because the 'other side' of the argument is just obviously wrong, or just too odious to contemplate, or just totally evil. Nobody wants to hear a paedo's sick justification for what they do, nobody wants to know why genocide ain't that bad, nobody wants to be told that one race is better than the other. And nobody needs to hear that locking children up in giant concentration camps has any fucking merit at all.
The United States isn't the only place causing this kind of industrial-strength misery in this sad, sick world - there are plenty of other countries whose leaders inflict misery on the weakest and most vulnerable members of their society for their own personal gain. But it's the hypocrisy of the US that is so vomit-inducing. You just can't call yourself the land of the free and the home of the brave when you're locking away children and losing them in a vast impersonal system because you're scared of brown people.
This isn't fucking rocket science - if you're causing mental or physical harm to children, you're the fucking bad guy. You're fucking evil. There is no justifiable story where you bravely cause harm to kids to make yourself feel safe, it's just wrong. This is the easiest test of a person's morality, and the fucktarded leadership in the US right now are failing that test with honours.
And there is also no place here for a 'well, actually", or any desperate attempt to justify this bullshit. Any attempts to excuse the institutional racism that leads to deplorable treatment of people fleeing horrific circumstances is part of that institutional racism, and must be stamped out like the fucking cancer it is.
There will always be fucksticks who try to point out that other nations do worse, or that previous administrations also split up families, (which is an awful fucking argument - nobody can get away with murder because other people have been killers in the past), or that some of the details about individuals involved in this systematic fuckery have been erroneous, or even that, god forbid, some of the journos who are reporting on this shouldn't talk about the government's actions because they're divorced, and have "abandoned their children". If these bullshit attempts at moral equivalency are all you've got, you've got nothing worse saying, and less that is worth reporting on.
Anybody who gets into journalism for fortune and glory is a fucking idiot, because there isn't a lot of either for most of us. But there are actually a few reasons why we do it, and exposing unmistakable cruelty and injustice is definitely one of them.
We have to expose this shit, so that somebody can be accountable for it. Journos don't have any real power, they can just reveal the truth to the public, and let those with power do the right thing. If society doesn't do everything it can to stop the things now happening at some of these awful detention centres, that's on society's head. (And no, kicking somebody who defends this trash out of a restaurant isn't enough, these fuckers should count themselves lucky nobody has brought out the goddamn guillotine yet.)
We've got to expose this stuff, especially when it's got the power of the state behind it. This kind of malignant awfulness only spreads in darkness and intentional confusion.
This is why journos really, really hate fuckwits like the various Fox news arseholes more than anybody, because they're all about the obfuscation for political and financial game - right wing commentators can twist themselves into self-righteous knots trying to explain why treating kids like scum is okay.
Nobody needs to have a balanced view of the fight against racism - racism is objectively fucking awful, and if you're a racist on of a bitch, you shouldn't be surprised when fewer and fewer people don't want to listen to what you have to say, because it's both worthless and genuinely harmful. If you can't see that - if you can't feel some basic goddamn empathy, or that they shouldn't shit on people below you, or can hear the stories about crying children being shovelled onto flights - than you're part of the fucking problem and can be safely ignored.
Here in NZ, we've been more focused on our PM having a baby in the past week, and the reports coming out of the States have only made us more glad we've got the kind of leadership we have in this country. Because anybody who would do that to thousands of children, just to make a political point, is evil as fuck, no matter how they try to spin it.
- Steve Lombard
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