History blindness.

 There are people who lack a sense of history. I'm not even talking about a lack of education: somebody who only watches TV can still grasp that there was a time before TV when people had to watch plays instead. I'm talking about people who don't seem to grasp that an era ended before a different era began.

Here are examples that I have observed from just talking to people. These are adults who are at least mentally sound enough to have gainful employment, and did not seem at all sarcastic when they said what they said.

1. I joked to a coworker that a different coworker was so old that she had a Confederate birth certificate. He looked at me and said "Really?" as if I was telling him a weird fact instead of a joke. A high school graduate should know when the Civil War happened and the limits of a human lifespan.

2. I was chatting with a coworker who was a Vietnam veteran. He told that he shook hands with a general and got rifle grease on his hands, and the general just laughed it off. I asked him if it was General Westmoreland. The vet confirmed that it was Westmoreland. Another coworker overhears this, looks at me, and asks "How old are you?" with a confused look on his face.

3. At a party, I was talking about a place that I used to work at. At that location, uranium was rolled into bars for the Manhattan Project, and workers had no idea that these bars were being used to develop the first atomic bombs. A woman asked "But you didn't have anything to do with that, right?"

4. A friend of mine was telling me about a guy in her gaming group. She said that he was in his 50's and had served in World War 2. This is especially egregious because I met her grandfather who raised her and had actually served in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ruthlessness doesn't work

 So I see a lot of posts on Threads where MAGAhadeen are celebrating the destruction of boats. A couple thoughts. 

1. The war on drugs is an expensive mistake. If you actually care about saving addicts from themselves, focus on treatment and harm reduction, not incarceration.

2. Sinking a boat is only justified if that boat shoots at our people. Boats that try to run can be incapacitated by shooting the engine.

3. The only way to tell if a boat is a drug boat or a fishing boat is to board and inspect it. Because any commercially produced boat can carry both drugs and fishing gear. If you think a boat has illegal goods, you can signal it to stop, shoot the engine if it tries to run, arrest the crew, and seize the boat and its cargo.

4. Ruthlessness is a bad strategy in general. Imagine if a future Democratic president issued an executive order that required police to shoot anyone flying a Confederate flag or wearing a swastika. Most of these people cheering for exploding boats might squawk at the idea of 21st century Nazis being shot in the street. Because they already know where that slippery slope is headed: if I say that all fascists should be shot and I get to decide who is a fascist, then I can just say that anyone who says negative things about me is a fascist.

There are real world examples that prove my point. Germans who surrendered to the Soviets could expect to be sent to a gulag and possibly freeze or starve to death. Germans who surrendered to Americans could expect to sent to a camp in the US and get fed and even take correspondence courses for credit with German universities. So of course they fought hardest against the Red Army, and that's a huge reason why the USSR suffered more military casualties than all of the Axis powers combined. So even when you are fighting the most evil regime in history, it still pays to show compassion to men who can't fight back anymore.