Month: September 2015 (Page 5 of 14)

By now, it’s clear that creating refugees is Assad’s strategy, so short of military intervention or, you know, asking Putin politely to stop selling Assad missiles and nerve gas, the world has a moral obligation to do something about the millions of now-homeless people flowing out of Syria.

The American government has floated a trial balloon via an anonymous source that perhaps it might begin to form a blue-ribbon committee to look into the possibility of formulating a plan to take a few dozen families that look sufficiently non-terroristy.

This is not enough: the United States has the wealth and space to take our share of Syrian refugees and failing to do so will be to our shame.

The question, of course, is where to put them. Let me get this out of the way: do not put the refugees anywhere near me, please. No offense, refugees; traffic is shitty enough here without swarthy dudes having PTSD freakouts on the Turnpike.

(It should be mentioned that the demographics of these refugees are actually fairly desirable: this is Syria’s middle-class currently walking through Europe being told that there’s no room at the inn.)

TotD has done some research–

LIAR.

–and come up with some possible places to house the Syrian refugees.

• Every American town has a fairgrounds; they could live there.
• Except if the fair was in town.
• There are many abandoned army bases around the country with pre-existing housing for single people and families.
• There’s probably some loose unexploded ordnance, too, but they’re used to that by now.
• Ghost malls.
• Haunted tennis courts.
• Zoos.
• There might be an optics problem with housing refugees in zoos, if I’m honest.
• Also, there would be an incident involving a drunk Syrian guy and a grizzly bear the first or second night.
• Also also, while most of the refugees are educated and whatnot, Syria has rednecks just like every other country: the petting zoo goats would be eaten.
• Let’s just leave the zoos off the list.
• Aquariums, too.
• You couldn’t even fit that many people into an aquarium, and we would still have the chance of an exhibit being turned into dinner.
• One of the abandoned casinos in Atlantic City
• In fact, let ’em fix the place up and buy it with sweat equity: everybody’s happy.
• I solve problems.
• If anyone knows Donald Trump, pitch him this idea: we take ALL of the refugees, ship them down to the border with Mexico, and force them to build that wall he’s been promising us.
• There are issues with that plan, obviously.
• The fact that it’s slavery, for one.
• I guess you don’t need any other reasons to abandon a plan if the first argument against it is, “Isn’t what you’re suggesting forced human servitude?”
• Doesn’t America own a little town in Cuba?
• How about Queens?
• You could toss forty or fifty thousand Syrians into Queens overnight and absolutely no one would notice.
• That would not work with Staten Island, though: people in Staten Island would notice violently.
• Wyoming.
• There’s no one there, man.
• Just John Perry Barlow, the Cheneys, and Mother Nature.
• Of course, the paucity of inhabitants means that there’s no infrastructure to handle the sudden influx of people; everyone would most likely die the first winter.
• You could Hunger Games them.
• Likewise, the Syrian refugees might be Thunderdomed for our entertainment.
• Those refugees with training in computer programming, and who have ideas about disrupting things, may go to Silicon Valley.
• (If a Syrian refugee found his way into a Silicon Valley tech billionaire’s office, told his story, and then said to the billionaire, “Now let me ask you: how do we disrupt war?” then that refugee would have a hundred-million dollars in seed money that afternoon.)
• You could put them in Philadelphia, but these people have already been through enough.
• Is there any way that the Syrian refugees can defund Planned Parenthood?
• Perhaps through some sort of procedural vote?
• Josh Lyman would have figured out a way for the Syrian refugees to defund Planned Parenthood, so don’t tell me it can’t be done.
• Let them enlist in the Mobile Infantry.
• Service guarantees citizenship.
• Seriously, though: maybe we could conscript them into the army and order them to go back and fight the very war they were running away from.
• That would be funny.
• How long has it been since the US fucked over an Indian tribe?
• And not subtly, through intentional systemic poverty and isolation: I’m talking about a good old-fashioned Injun-fucking?
• Been a while, it seems.
• Give the Syrians the Indian Reservations.
• You could put the Indians on cruise ships.
• Not the real nice ones with the rock-climbing walls and the ice-skating rinks.
• The okay ships.
• I actually did two small pieces of research.
• There are perhaps 200,000 foreclosed and unoccupied homes in America, 90,000 in Florida alone.
• Wow, I thought: let’s put them in those houses!
• And then I read that there are ten million refugees.
• I abandoned any hope for the future of mankind at that factoid.
• The Hamptons during the winter.
• Palm Beach during the summer.
• Just keep shuttling the refugees back and forth: you could just walk ’em right up 95.
• We could hire cowboys to herd them north and south.
• “YAAAA! Move along, little doggies!”
• That would be a terrible YouTube video; many, many people would have to be fired if that was allowed to happened.
• What if–and we are COMPLETELY in the land of the hypothetical here and no one here advocates what is about to be suggested–we bred them to create a super-refugee?
• Hear me out.
• Humanity has always needed, on occasion, to get the fuck out of town.
• When presented with the choice between fight and flight, most people are halfway down the stairs before you’ve finished the question.
• Which is the smart thing to do, but–and this is seemingly universal, in a cultural sense–we privilege fight over flight: the robust, the muscular, the powerful, the violent.
• I say we use the Syrian refugees as genetic stock in an active eugenic experiment to create a super-refugee: someone who’s in Sweden with a new girlfriend pretending to send for his family before the first shot is fired.
• Also, as long as we’re doing genetic experiments, we should try for some super-people and/or freaks.
• Mer-people, hairless giants with eyes for testicles, that kinda thing.
• Detroit.