Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
No bio...
User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
I find Nate's arguments pretty compelling here, assuming you actually want woke democrats on the Supreme Court, which I don't. But setting aside my personal feelings on the matter, he's basically correct.
Your arguments can basically be boiled down to the following:
- Seniority is important for judges to gain respect through judicial rigor.
- Democrats shouldn't bother thinking tactically since they should just win more elections by appealing to more people.
- Sotomayor would be more left-leaning than any candidate the dems could nominate now.
The first argument is the strongest, but it only has a marginal impact. The respect of judicial rigor that comes tenure is non-negligible. Further, other people in the thread added to the point that more senior justices get selected first to write opinions. But neither of these are that important. Even if they nominate Dumbo McGee, they're still locking down a lifetime appointment in one of the most consequential positions in America and the world. As a counterexample, Anthony Kennedy had pretty terrible reasoning in many of his opinions, but he was ultra-powerful by virtue of being a swing justice. So while you're making a good point, it'd be a lot stronger if you had some evidence of how much it actually matters in practice.
The second argument is just goofy. The senate has a heavy bias towards rural states, and it's been a minor miracle that Dems have remained competitive thus far, but as blue senators in red states retire or are defeated the bias will become undeniable. Nate has argued many times that Dems should stop pandering to the woke crazies, but he doesn't control the entire Democratic party. Abandoning positions will always come with a ton of pushback and there's no guarantee others will be on board, and the Dems would need to cut extremely deep to appeal to rural conservatives. The "tanking" argument doesn't hold a lot of water since there's a big difference between a 9-0 conservative majority vs a 5-4 conservative majority, just like how there'd be a huge difference between a 51-49 senate split vs a 100-0 split. Doing an end-run around the SCOTUS would be far, far harder than just fighting tactically for a justice now. Dems might end up uncompetitive in the senate in the long run, but they can still delay that for a bit.
The third argument is disproven by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was recently confirmed in the same environment that a replacement for Sotomayor would face. Jackson is a female equivalent of Ibram Kendi, so no, I don't think the Dem pick would be guaranteed to be some moderate.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
Your posts always seem interesting. I wish they were comprehensible (to me), at least without really digging into them.
I'd really recommend a full paragraph of summary at the top, with no rhetorical flourishes or weird words (like "blahaj and leekspinners") that only make sense in the context of someone who's been following the situation. This screenshot that you linked does a fairly good job. You have that first sentence saying someone linked to the Linux community got banned, but you need more in a place like this where all the topics get jumbled together. I want to know if a topic interests me before I read any further, and you typically only have a single paragraph to hook people like me before my eyes glaze a bit and I scroll down.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
This story is a great encapsulation of two important phenomena:
- How utterly asleep at the wheel most Europeans were in regards to Russia, especially post-Crimea.
- How much more dangerous Russia could be if they got a handle on corruption. But alas, no dictatorship can really solve corruption since it's too beneficial to the leader at the top for maintaining his position.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
This post really gets my troll senses tingling. An account that's less than a week old posting about HBD, which is probably the most offensive topic a leftist would come across. Then starting said topic with "as a black person". Then not really saying much but vague agreement. I could easily see this post being the result of a leftist forum user from some other site saying "Hey guys, I'll go to that place where Nazis justify racism, and pretend to be a black man agreeing with them. Then they'll show us what they REALLY think!!!"
If this isn't the case then I'd suggest posting that essay type post sooner rather than later, as you'll get more interesting answers that way.
The time when Trump sabotaged immigration restrictions, and the alt-right cheered
I’ve long held that most of politics is overwhelmingly dominated by some combination of 1) direct self-interest, and 2) vibes. Any notions of ideological consistency should be regarded as mere “happy accidents” rather than the norm. In the US, this issue cuts roughly equally across both parties. One particularly stark example happened a few months ago with immigration. In short, Trump sabotaged the most conservative immigration reform bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. This directly contradicts what many of his more hardline alt-right supporters want, yet instead of punishing him for doing this, they actively cheered him on. They simply like Trump’s vibes far more than they like Biden’s vibes, so they convinced themselves that the bill was akin to “surrender” through extremely strained logic.
This episode is rapidly fading from public memory given that the bill didn’t pass, but it’s such a great encapsulation of vibes-based motivated reasoning that I feel it should be highlighted before it’s forgotten completely.
Illegal immigration so far
The chart here shows migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border. While some slip through the cracks and are not counted, this still gives a good sense of the contours of illegal immigration over the past few presidential administrations.
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Migrant numbers were quite high during the Bush years, with yearly peaks corresponding to agricultural labor needs.
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Obama was quite hawkish on illegal immigration. Numbers were already decreasing from the Bush years, and the economic turmoil from the GFC brought numbers down further. Importantly though, Obama’s enforcement was instrumental in keeping numbers down even as the economy recovered.
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Illegal immigration fell to its lowest point at the beginning of Trump’s term, but rapidly increased after that to meeting, then exceeding the numbers under Obama. Numbers crashed again at the onset of COVID.
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Illegal immigration has exploded after Biden took office.
There are a couple of points worth noting here. The first is that while enforcement has an undeniable impact on illegal immigration numbers, exogenous factors should also be considered. Periods of economic prosperity in the US act as a “pull” for migrants, while recessions do the opposite. Likewise, civil turmoil in immigrant-sending countries can act as a “push” for migrants, while relative stability again does the opposite. That peak in May 2019 under Trump was due in part to a period of turbulence in Northern Triangle countries.
The second point worth noting is that Trump wasn’t really much better than Obama in countering illegal immigration, contrary to popular belief. This point deserves some elaboration.
Trump and Biden’s border policies
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, immigration was frequently at the forefront despite the historical lows of illegal immigrant activity. Upon ascending to the presidency, Trump at least tried to keep his promise. He signed the infamous “Muslim Ban” in his first week, suspending entry for citizens from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days. He would continue with additional policies throughout his presidency, including preventing sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants, phasing out DACA, implementing a zero-tolerance policy and family separation at the border, creating new restrictions for who could apply for asylum, and many others.
The problem with all of these was that they were executive orders. Executive orders require less political capital to implement since they don’t have to go through congress, but they’re far more brittle and subject to legal challenges or revocation when a president of a different party comes to power. Indeed, practically all of Trump’s EO’s on immigration faced stiff legal hurdles. The Muslim Ban was rejected by courts twice, and only a watered down version passed on the third attempt. The family separation policy and restrictions on asylum were similarly watered down heavily. The policies on sanctuary cities and the phaseout of DACA were basically killed entirely.
Another issue with Trump’s implementation is that it was done with little tact. Any sort of reform will encounter pushback, with bigger changes tending to lead to more of a backlash. This can be mollified somewhat by a good PR campaign. Indeed, the ability to push through substantial reforms without angering huge swathes of the country can be seen as one of the key skills of a successful politicians. Trump and his team did not do a very good job of this. Few efforts were made to get buy-in from moderates. Instead, Trump’s modus operandi was typically controversial unilateral action, followed by doubling down with rhetoric like “shithole countries” that may have flattered his base, but was very poorly received among Democrats and independents. Trump had this problem in many more areas than just immigration, as Scott Alexander noted in 2018.
The end result was that while Trump certainly talked up his immigration policies as successes, most of them were little more than PR stunts. Illegal immigration surged substantially every year for the first three years of his presidency and peaked in 2019 at a level far higher than what Obama ever had. Likewise, legal immigration measured by the number of lawful permanent residents added per year was basically the same as during Obama’s presidency, only dipping substantially in 2020 with the onset of COVID. Furthermore, all of the hostile rhetoric Trump used created a backlash that (at least partially) helped propel Biden to the White House in 2020, and ensured he had a clear mandate to roll back Trump’s policies.
And that’s exactly what Biden did. In his first day in office, he axed the majority of Trump’s executive orders with the stroke of a pen. The first 100 days of Biden’s presidency were defined by “undoing Trump” in practically every area, and in terms of immigration that meant less hostility, fewer rules, and a more welcoming attitude. Cracks began to show almost immediately as illegal immigration soared, and then kept soaring month after month. It surpassed Trump’s worst month, and then kept climbing even higher before settling at a rate unseen in at least the past 3 administrations. December 2023 marked the worst month at nearly 250K encounters, with several preceding months having >200K encounters. For reference, Obama’s second term only saw a brief period above 50K encounters before declining to a steady-state of around 30K-40K encounters.
This rapidly became a political liability for Biden. Despite deploying Kamala Harris with her infamous “do not come” speech, illegal immigration kept increasing and Biden seemed helpless to address it, effectively getting himself caught between a rock (giving fodder to Republicans) and a hard place (alienating his base, reneging on promises, etc.). Ominously, things only seemed to be getting worse. Biden tried to use Trump-era COVID restrictions to limit some immigration through Title 42, but COVID couldn’t be used as a justification forever. What’s more, Biden’s actions significantly worsened a loophole in the system through abuse of a particular asylum designation. This article discusses it in detail. To summarize:
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When the DHS encounters an illegal immigrant, it has two options: standard removal, or expedited removal.
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Standard removal requires a court case with lawyers present to give evidence, while expedited removal is a streamlined, unreviewable process meant to reduce the burden on the DHS and the court system.
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Illegal immigrants can indicate they intend to apply for asylum by establishing “credible fear”. While the threshold to asylum is fairly high, the “credible fear” threshold is very low, which at least starts the process towards asylum and thereby prevents use of expedited removal.
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While standard removal is ongoing, the US has 3 options for where to keep them: (1) Parole them out into the US, (2) keep them in ICE detention centers, or (3) kick them back to the country from which they entered from, i.e. Mexico.
Obama did (1), but apparently the loophole wasn’t well-known enough to be a huge issue yet. Trump tried to go after asylum directly, but those efforts mostly fizzled in court. He then tried to do (2), but this caused a huge overcrowding problem as detention centers weren’t built big enough to accommodate the huge influx. After some bad press, he tried to do (3), which sort of worked when courts weren’t throwing spanners into the works, which they did frequently. Biden reverted back to (1), but now it was well-known that you could come to America illegally, utter the magic words “credible fear”, and you’d be let out into the community. Some derisively referred to this as “catch and release”. From this point, some immigrants simply didn’t show up to their court hearing, while others received court dates so far in the future (up to a decade or longer in some cases) that it didn’t matter. This became a vicious cycle, as more immigrants abused this loophole it clogged the courts further and further making the loophole more effective, which further incentivized anyone who wanted to come to the US to give it a try due to this One Crazy Trick ICE Doesn’t Want You To Know About.
The Senate compromise deal
After a few years of spiraling migration problems, it became clear that the center could not hold. Biden capitulated and signaled that he was willing to give concessions to Republicans to get immigration back under control. This willingness coalesced around the same time that an important foreign aid package was being discussed, with some Republicans stretching credulity a bit when they claimed that illegal immigration was functionally indistinguishable from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the idea of a “compromise” bill was born, where Biden would give in to Republican demands on immigration in order to get his foreign aid passed. This came to the fore in late January and early February of 2024.
You can read the full text of the bill here, but non-lawyers trying to read actual bills written in thick legalese is like trying decipher jabberwocky growls. A much more scrutable summary is available here.
Division A is all about the foreign aid. This chunk would eventually be passed in April in a standalone vote.
Division B is the immigration part. This was primarily negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Notably, this would have been the first major immigration reform bill (NOT executive order!) passed since Reagan. Everything else since then has been done through unilateral presidential action or the courts. Since this would have had the backing of Congress, its provisions were quite sweeping compared to the piecemeal efforts that came before. It:
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Includes billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, including money for detention centers, 2700 new border agents, asylum case officers to break the vicious cycle, deportation flights, etc. It’s hard to understate how much money this bill would have ladled on to border protections, with the biggest increases going to the usual agencies like ICE and CBP, with smaller chunks going to ones that I wasn’t even aware were part of border enforcement, like FEMA and the US Marshals Service. It also gives case officers a permanent 15% raise over the standard GS schedule of government pay.
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Gives a bit of money to USAID for stanching immigration at its source, in the Northern Triangle countries and elsewhere.
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Restarts and funds building of Trump’s wall, which Biden canceled early in his presidency.
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Modernizes border infrastructure generally, such as adding more sophisticated monitoring equipment and accepting fingerprint cards or biometric submissions for use in immigrant processing. You know, things that would be nice to have given the last major immigration bill is almost 40 years old at this point.
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Raises the threshold on “credible fear” substantially to actually close the loophole. Currently, credible fear is evaluated using the lower “significant possibility” standard.
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Raises the threshold on asylum generally even after they pass the first hurdle, and it funnels as many cases as possible into the expedited removal process.
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Ends “Catch and Release” and formalize the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Those who arrive at ports of entry are placed under government surveillance, while those who arrive between ports of entry are detained outright, with funding provided for new detainment beds.
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Establishes an additional asylum bar if there are reasonable grounds to believe an individual could have internally relocated in their country of origin or country of last habitual residence, in lieu of seeking protection in the United States.
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Creates a Border Emergency Authority, a “break in case of emergency” power if the border became overwhelmed. This requires the DHS to ignore all asylum requests except those that fall under the Convention Against Torture, which has a high bar. It also further streamlined the expulsion process, allowing for immediate deportation in a range of scenarios. There was to be no public notification for this authority to be enacted, so an immigrant arriving would never be sure if it was active or not. This is the closest the US would come to “closing the border” for an extended period of time that wasn’t due to a national emergency like what happened after the JFK assassination or 9/11. To prevent this emergency tool from simply becoming the new normal, the Authority could only be activated if border encounters exceeded 4000 over a 7 day period. Conversely, it also prevents abuse in the other direction, i.e. a president deciding never to activate it, as it would be required if there were 5000 border encounters over a 7 day period. Note that border encounters were far higher than 5000 when the bill was being debated, so Biden would have had no choice on the matter.
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Does NOT include any significant amnesty, even for DREAMers. Almost every serious attempt at reforming immigration had previously settled on the compromise of amnesty for current illegal immigrants in return for enforcement at the border. The most recent major attempt at immigration reform under the Gang of Eight did exactly this. Trump himself acknowledged this political reality in his first State of the Union address in 2018 when he came out in favor of giving amnesty for DREAMers. The fact that this is nowhere to be found in this bill is a significant implicit concession.
There are also a handful of concessions to the Democrats:
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Allows processing and conditional permanent residence for Afghan collaborators.
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Authorizes an additional 50,000 immigrant visas each year for the next five fiscal years.
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Establishes a carveout in some of the rules above for unaccompanied minors, which in 2024 have made up <5% of all encounters.
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The Border Emergency Authority requires a lower limit of 4000 encounters per day as discussed above, so a future Republican president wouldn’t be able to use it as the new normal unless there was an actual emergency. It also sunsets after 3 years unless renewed.
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Republicans likely wanted restrictions on all asylum claims, but Dems kept a carveout for the Convention Against Torture.
Those concessions are really tiny. The last 3 bullet points are just minor restrictions on the new powers that would be in place. Only the first 2 bullet points are concessions in any meaningful sense. Helping Afghans who collaborated with the US is a one-off now that the war is over, and is a good idea since the US doesn’t want to get a reputation of abandoning those who help it. The 50K new legal immigrants a year is time-limited to 5 years, and is much, much less than the status quo of 200k+ illegal immigrants per month that is happening now. Heck, it would have only been 2-3 months worth of illegal immigrants encountered under average Trump or Obama years, so it’s a very small price to pay.
The bill received endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, endorsed the proposal and said it would drop illegal border crossings nationwide. The group in 2020 endorsed in Trump and has been highly critical of Biden’s border policies.
It’s also interesting to compare this bill to the Border Coalition Letter that was submitted to Congress in 2022. This letter was sent on behalf of a bunch of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Conservative Partnership Institute, and several that I’ve never heard of, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the SPLC classifies as a hate group. The letter demanded exclusion of amnesty of any type, creating an Authority to immediately expel illegal immigrants, increase restrictions on asylum, mandate resources for the border wall, increase funding for the CBP and ICE, end the abuse of parole authority. The bill shares a striking resemblance to this letter. Granted, it doesn’t do everything, as there are a few carveouts for stuff like asylum under the Convention Against Torture, and the letter also asks for states to overrule the federal government when it comes to border enforcement (something that Texas has been motioning towards recently). But overall, the bill does the vast majority of what was asked for by some of the most conservative immigration groups in the country.
Trump swoops in
So yeah. Trump blew it all up.
The reason he did this was as obvious as it was cynical: he didn’t want Biden to have a “win” on the issue. He wanted to keep the issue in the news as a liability for Biden so he would have a greater chance at winning in November. He didn’t exactly keep his motivations secret. Nor was this the first border bill that Trump sabotaged. The overturning of Roe v Wade is instructive here, as it was a major “dog catches the car” moment. Republicans loved to campaign on restricting abortion, but when the Supreme Court actually handed them the chance to do so, they quickly realized the costs it would entail. What had once been a rallying cry for conservatives turned into a liability, and now the Democrats have the wind at their back on the issue. Why do the same for immigration by actually enacting favorable policies?
Of course, it’s not helpful to be openly cynical to your supporters, so the official reason that Trump, Gaetz, and many others trotted out to oppose the bill related to the Border Emergency Authority. In essence, they boiled the entire bill down to that upper limit threshold of 5000 illegal immigrants per day. The extra enforcement, the money for border agents, the restarting of the wall construction, the closing of the asylum loophole, the end of Catch and Release? None of that mattered. It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
Obviously the bill isn’t perfect. There are legitimate criticisms that could be levied. For instance, Republicans could say that Democrats shouldn’t get any new legal immigration in exchange for fixing the law, even the paltry 50K number that the bill would mandate. But actually analyzing the bill to any serious degree would quickly show how conservative it is, so Republican leaders mischaracterized the bill so heavily that I’d say most reasonable people would classify it as “outright lying”.
In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.
There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file. Trump’s uncompromising vibes in 2016 is a large part of what won him the Republican primary. He sustained those vibes through his presidency with his bombastic executive orders that drove news headlines but did little to fix the underlying issues. Trump used those vibes again to kill this bill, as all he had to do was vaguely point to the 5000 number in the bill, imply that was a concession, and the bill was effectively dead no matter what it actually would have done.
Other concerns with the bill
While the misrepresenting the 5000 number in regards to the Border Emergency Authority was the most frequent criticism by far, there were a couple other, less goofy criticisms that deserve examining.
The first is that Biden already had the tools to solve the border crisis, and therefore this bill wasn’t necessary. This is typically paired with vibey “Republicans cooperate, Democrats defect” arguments that I detailed in the previous section, i.e. that the bill must have been a “trap” of some sort. Vibes aside, there is some degree of truth to this. As we saw earlier in this article, Biden’s policies were indeed principally responsible for the recent explosion in illegal immigration. Probably the clearest remedy would be reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy that has been shambling along, half dead. Biden attempted to kill this policy early in his presidency, and courts initially agreed he could do so, until they didn’t, so the policy is technically still alive. Reimplementing this would take at least some of the wind out of the vicious cycle in regards to the asylum loophole, although there would still be the omnipresent specter of legal threats, and now Mexico has said it will refuse to cooperate.
The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.
Another criticism that was sometimes levied is that Republicans should simply hold out for Trump to become president to truly fix immigration. Again, this typically came packaged with vibey concerns that any deal with Democrats must necessarily imply some ratcheting of concessions, and thus the only way to address the issue is unilateral Republican action, headed by a true-believer like Trump. To steelman this idea, the idea that the political capital to solve illegal immigration would evaporate if the issue was successfully mitigated is a sound one. Democrats were only willing to come to the table in the first place due to the extremely tenuous position they found themselves in with the surge of illegal immigration. This bill almost certainly would have solved that surge, which would give Trump less of a mandate to take drastic action if he wins in November.
The most obvious retort to this idea is that Trump is by no means guaranteed to win in November. As of the time of writing, prediction markets give Trump a 47% chance of winning, which we can round up to 50%. This essentially means the Republicans are gambling on a “double or nothing” approach, but even this prospect is unsteady. For starters, how much more could Trump deliver in excess of this bill, even under the best plausible conditions? HR2 is instructive here, which passed the House in 2023 but is not likely to advance any further in the current Congress. As such, it’s essentially a conservative wishlist on immigration. It is indeed stronger than the Senate bill, but it’s not massively stronger. I’d say instead of “double or nothing” it’s more like “10-20% more or nothing”, which has decidedly less of a ring to it. Furthermore, Democratic willingness to capitulate has an expiration date. If the moment isn’t gone already, then it’d definitely be gone when Trump takes office for a second time, which would mean he’d require control of both the House and the Senate to push through a stronger bill. Prediction markets currently give a 74% chance for Republicans to clinch the Senate, which we can round up to 75%, and a 44% chance to win control of the House, which we can again round up to 50%. If results from the races were perfectly independent, simple statistics shows us that Republicans only have <20% chance of achieving a trifecta. Granted, the races almost certainly won’t be uncorrelated with each other, but this still establishes a lower bound of likelihood. In essence, Republicans are gambling at 20-50% odds that they’ll be able to get a bill that’s 10-20% better. Even this is still underselling it, since it would have to go through one major final hurdle: Trump himself. Republicans already had a trifecta from 2017-2019, yet Trump chose not to prioritize immigration other than through flimsy executive orders. Who’s to say he wouldn’t choose to do so again?
The upshot
I’m sure some people will dismiss everything I’ve written here as concern trolling. They’ll assume I’m secretly a Democratic operative who wants to sow discord amongst Republicans. In reality, I’m just someone who actually wants to get immigration under control. Immigration can be a source of strength, but it must be harnessed very carefully to not cause major problems.
This bill represented the most conservative major immigration reform in a generation that actually had a chance at passing, and Donald Trump killed it for purely cynical reasons. This single bill would have done more than every one of Trump’s executive orders put together. Anyone who’s been seriously watching him knows that he’s utterly self-serving, but what was truly revolting was how the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party not only let him get away with it, but actively cheered him on. It’ll likely be totally forgotten too, wrongly dismissed as nothing more than another Democratic trap.
The worst part of the bill was that many of its provisions weren’t permanent. Some parts like closing the asylum loophole were, but the funding for extra agents would eventually run out. Similarly, other provisions like the incoherently reviled Border Emergency Authority were due to sunset in 3, 5, or 10 years. But the correct response would have been for Republicans to reach out at this golden opportunity with both hands and grasp as hard as they could. Then, they should have fought future battles to ensure the provisions were made permanent. Instead, they squandered a period of maximal Democratic vulnerability on the issue, when the Dems were not only willing to give concessions but were actively asking for them.
Illegal immigration has cooled a bit since its apex in December of 2023. In the CBP’s most recent report from March, encounters are down by 45%. This is still massively elevated from where it was before, but it will at least allow Biden to claim he’s on top of the issue. It seems he’s doing this with ad-hoc fixes, like making deals with intermediate countries that are unlikely to really solve much long-term. In killing the bill, Trump has likely undercut one of his attack vectors against Biden somewhat. When pressed in a debate about the issue, Biden can say “I tried to fix it, but you wouldn’t let me”. In the end, few peoples’ minds will be changed, and the most likely outcome no matter who becomes president is that the US continues muddling along with the status quo on immigration, which means more bandaids and can-kicking. In the off chance that an immigration reform bill actually does pass, it will likely be far less conservative than this bill would have been.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
6mo ago
Is it rational to care or even know about propaganda in otherwise good media?
Responding to this statement directly, I think the answer is "obviously yes". Even if it's not pervasive or all-encompassing, it still impacts society by reinforcing the notion of what's acceptable, who's on top, etc. Symbolic cultural statements push the Overton window. It goes like this:
Motte: Symbolism can be ignored if you don't focus on it too much.
Bailey: I'm creating an excuse for this symbolism because I like it and agree with it.
A recent example was Starfield having pronoun selection in the character creation screen. Reddit deployed the usual motte and bailey in the comments, but would almost certainly have had a much different reaction if it was symbolism they disagreed with, like "it's OK to be white".
(Not saying you're personally guilty of the bailey here by genuinely asking the question, but it's clear many people are on other sites like Reddit.)
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9mo ago
Hanania can't be "cancelled" in the traditional sense since being a public intellectual in the age of Substack makes that more difficult than it used to. He won't lose his job or be completely shut down or be forced to stop writing or anything like that.
However, a big part of Hanania's appeal was that he was published in more respectable outlets and signal-boosted by Boomer conservatives who have institutional power. The Boomer conservatives agreed with his message but are totally, utterly terrified of being considered "racist" so these attacks do meaningful damage. There's already some signs that Hanania's name has been severely damaged in respectable circles. A lot of the impact going forward will be hard to measure since it'll likely be outlets just silently refusing to interview him, but these are lost opportunities all the same.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
10mo ago
This post is an interesting little mirror to this sub's CW leanings. Imagine if the positions were reversed with a left-leaning interlocutor instead of a right-leaning one. Say you told a story where they were making snide passive-aggressive remarks implying you were racist. The response you would have gotten would almost certainly be cheering alongside you. I highly doubt they would be as unanimous in their scorn, claiming this post breaks rules, that your previous compromises means you somehow deserve this, or that snide remark essentially saying "we're not your therapist, bro".
The fact that Christianity's cultural side is inextricably linked to the superstitious side is clearly causing some amount of cognitive dissonance. But instead of resolving it (either by severing the two sides, or by rejecting Christianity entirely if doing so is infeasible), this sub... tries to ignore it as much as possible. This sub pretends it doesn't exist, and then gets really conspicuously oversensitive whenever someone reminds them of it.
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw?
It's continually baffling to me how the majority of this forum thinks that defending your own lands from a hostile foreign invader somehow makes you a puppet. At least this thread isn't as bad as the one yesterday that explicitly called them an American puppet, and when pressed for evidence they produced several articles relating to Boris Johnson, apparently entirely unaware that he was the leader of the UK and not the US
Further, the idea that Ukraine is doomed and should just surrender now to prevent more bloodshed is only ever really advanced in bad faith. It's clear a lot of people on the right hate the woke left so much that they end up hating the entire West for having given birth to wokeness. Instead of specifically targeting the excesses of wokeness, they do the oikophobic thing and say the West itself must be destroyed. Since the invasion made the West seem more unified and righteous, they've been earnestly hoping for a Ukrainian defeat. They post as concern trolls similar to this, claiming they just want to stop the bloodshed of the Ukrainians, who after all are really just misguided mini-Russians.
The eventual resolution of this war is still very much in flux. It's looking more negative than it was post-Kherson, when there had been 3 big pushes liberating land. Now, Ukrainian leadership seems unable or unwilling to resolve the conscription issues, and House Republicans have sabotaged the compromise bill that would have provided aid (and limited immigration) at Trump's behest. That said, more aid could arrive through a different aid package or through Europeans boosting their own efforts. Ukraine could very well be forced to give up land in an eventual peace agreement, but how much and whether they have real security guarantees afterwards is still an open question. I'd go into it more, but this forum isn't particularly great for that so I'd just point anyone interested to the daily threads on /r/credibledefense.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Putin ordering Navalny to be killed doesn't make a ton of sense given he posed no immediate threat and was safely rotting in prison. But obviously being in jail could have hastened Navalny's death by quite a bit. I think there were reports that he was denied needed medical care. There shouldn't be much of a question that Putin is certainly willing to assassinate people he views as a threat, as he almost certainly did with Prigozhin. Also, other dissidents like Girkin fear being offed as well.
Whether Putin directly ordered Navalny to be killed doesn't really matter that much, nor will it likely ever be definitively answered.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
9mo ago
I will say that building your masculinity on the attention of a particular woman or women in general is cuck behavior, and needs to be discouraged wherever possible. Even the MGTOW dudes still construct their whole identity around women, you gotta stop that shit.
All evolutionary pressures ensure that men absolutely should care about what women want. The men who don't... will just not reproduce and die off.
But appearing to care, or caring in the wrong ways (e.g. being subservient to women) are both unattractive to women and unfashionable to other men. The secret is to care enough to entice women, while pretending not to care.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Richard Hanania thinks Desantis should challenge Trump to a boxing match. Desantis's campaign so far has been pretty pathetic. He's been afraid to really push back against Trump despite Trump lobbing almost daily attacks against him. Desantis is great on paper, with his victories against woke institutions in Florida, but he's failed to appeal to the Republican id so far. Many Republican voters care far more about appearance and physical vigor than policy positions, good governance, intelligence, etc.
I don’t think Trump can lose a Republican primary at this point. But if I were giving DeSantis advice, it would be to do the opposite of what Abernathy suggests. Republican voters love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that Rubio and Cruz tried rolling around in the muck with him and failed, Rubio’s most vicious personal attacks in 2016 didn’t come until after Trump had won the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses, that is, pretty late in the game. And Rubio wasn’t the guy to do it.
Instead of seeing Republican primary voters as concerned citizens seeking a voice, try to imagine them as chimps laying around under a canopy. They’ve chosen the alpha male. He’s the loudest, most obnoxious member of the tribe, and his power depends on the degree to which other apes are afraid of him and give him symbolic displays of respect, which in this case has meant saying, for example, that he actually won the 2020 election. What could break this spell? Not reasoned arguments, but signs of weakness. And no, not weakness in the sense that he might not be the most electable candidate — that’s counting on a level of thinking that is far too abstract for this population.
Rather, one needs to emphasize literal physical weakness. Notice how obsessed Republicans have been with the real and imagined physical and cognitive shortcomings of figures like Biden and Hillary. In many corners of right-wing media, “our opponents are old, fat, ugly” seems to get at least as much attention as actual issues, especially during election season. In 2020, we saw doctored videos of Pelosi slurring her words go viral on social media, and this shows not only how susceptible the Republican base is to fake news, but also how obsessed they are with physical and physiological correlates of health.
The Dylan Mulvaney hysteria is another demonstration of the red tribe being driven by the most base and primitive instincts. These people started shooting beer cans with assault rifles because a company sent a six pack to a guy who acts like a sissy. Good luck explaining to them the importance of going after higher education accreditation agencies.
You might think it’s strange for a group like this to have chosen Trump as their leader. But when he posts memes of himself as an Adonis or says things like he’s in better shape than Obama or Bush were while they were in office, and no one corrects him, that serves to only cement his dominance over the party. Trump’s perfect body is like the unreliability of Dominion voting machines. Shirtless Putin has a similar effect in Russia. Educated Westerners roll their eyes at his primitive demonstrations of vigor, but I suspect that, like Trump, he’s a much better student of human nature than they are. The conspiracy theories might have been false, but the Trump-Putin bromance was real, and no accident.
This means that DeSantis’ best shot is trying to emphasize that Trump is physically weak and he no longer intimidates others in the party. You can’t do this with words alone. DeSantis can call him fat, and Trump can reply everyone is saying that I’m in the best shape of any man who’s ever lived, and the voters will eat it up. The Florida governor needs a way to clearly highlight that he’s younger, stronger, and more physically courageous.
DeSantis should therefore challenge Trump to a boxing match. Trump will almost certainly refuse, at which point he can say that this shows what a coward the former president is. Or, DeSantis could say that, on further reflection, maybe it wasn’t fair to challenge an 85 year-old man (yes, lie and exaggerate, Republican voters love that too), and he understands that his opponent is too feeble at this point in his life to get into the arena.
DeSantis shouldn’t do this out of the blue. He could start by trying to bait Trump into saying something particularly nasty about him, or preferably his wife or kids. Then he can play the role of the justifiably angry patriarch. Every time Trump launches a personal attack, DeSantis can reply by saying that his opponent is a pathetic coward, and if he has a problem with him he’s already made clear that they can settle their differences like men. If he’s not willing to do that, then we can stick to the issues, at which point DeSantis can go on about whatever he did in Florida. At the very least, a challenge to fight will eat up all the energy and make sure no other candidate gets any attention, as one of the main things DeSantis needs to do is make the primary into a two-man race.
Right now, the DeSantis strategy is to try to get the Republican voter to ask questions like “who is more electable?” or “who has shown more focus in fighting woke?” Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place.
There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong, and it probably wouldn’t work. But I think people are still yet to truly understand that, if things proceed as normal, Trump is going to be the nominee. Making sure he’s not would require meeting Republican voters where they are, instead of continuing to wish they were something else.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
Market forces will kill any initiative like this. There is no demand for role models that don't teach young men what they want to learn (at least from the young men themselves).
The same thing happened with injecting progressive politics hamfistedly into tv, movies and video games. The market will just flow around and find what it demands elsewhere.
Market forces are not all-powerful. For example, video games are an utterly male-dominated hobby, and most men would prefer to look at beautiful women ceteris paribus, yet large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases to appease their loud contingents of leftist female employees. It's not a total ban, indies and Japanese games still have attractive women albeit with large pushback from woke forums like Resetera, but the difference overall is still quite notable.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
If you're talking about social bullying, e.g. kids calling each other names, excluding each other, talking behind each others' backs, etc. then that's never gone away and never will.
If you're talking about physical bullying, e.g. kids punching each other, that certainly has gone away mostly but I'd say that's a good thing. A small amount can be neutral or maybe plausibly beneficial in some circumstances, but it's usually overwhelmingly a bad idea to try to teach kids through uncontrolled physical harm. There's a reason most parenting guides say "don't beat your kids". It really screws them up.
That said, I presume this is in regards to things like "safe spaces", cancel culture, "crybullies", etc. Those aren't the result of a lack of bullying, but rather they come from women gaining political power. Hanania has a good overview of this. Women prioritize maintaining social harmony (not hurting people's feelings) over factual accuracy more than men do, evidenced by women consistently scoring much higher in agreeableness than men. Additionally, some women resort to crying (or claiming "abuse", or whatever else) when their points are disproven in an attempt to win the argument anyways. This is the female equivalent of a man losing the argument and resorting to physical violence, but whereas society has had millennia to come up with ways to deal with renegade males' outbursts, it is wholly unprepared to deal with the female equivalent.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
McConell had a scary moment which looks like it could be the onset of dementia or Alzheimers. He froze up for a solid 30 seconds just staring aimlessly when a question was asked of him as to whether he would run for re-election in 2026. People have been saying similar things about Biden, although Biden has had the same verbal tics for his entire career so it'd be harder to know for certain. Dianne Feinstein only just recently announced her retirement despite being over 90 years old. Trump is hardly a spring chicken himself at 77 years old.
Some have advocated for age limits on politicians, as older people can have cognitive decline and are presumably out-of-touch compared to younger counterparts. How much of a real issue is this? How long can aides keep cognitive decline out of the spotlight for before it becomes too obvious to ignore?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
As someone who likes watching US presidential elections as if they were a sport, this has been by far the most boring election season we've had since I started watching in 2008. Primary season plus the ensuing general election used to guarantee at least a year and a half of interesting coverage, with the primaries in particular being full of drama, ups-and-downs, and upsets.
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In 2008 we had Obama vs Hillary, a classic for the ages. The R side wasn't that bad either, with McCain's come-from-behind victory.
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In 2012 was the most volatile primary we've had, with the polling frontrunner changing no less than 11 times as Romney's weak lead was tested by Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and Santorum before they all imploded one after another.
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In 2016 was the rise of Trump, another classic for the ages. The frontrunner didn't actually change that much, but the sheer ridiculousness of Trump's unprecedented run made it hard to turn your eyes away. Hillary vs Sanders was also somewhat interesting, albeit far less so than Hillary vs Obama 8 years earlier.
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In 2020 things were somewhat less interesting with Biden's lead enduring for most of primary. But at least that lead felt tense, like the floor could drop out with a few missteps, which is indeed what happened when Biden lost Iowa and New Hampshire, although it became obvious that he would win after Super Tuesday. This election also featured the worst (best) presidential debate in US history when Biden faced off against Trump for the first time.
By comparison, what does this election season have? Biden is running as an incumbent with no credible challengers. That only leaves the Republican side, which isn't much better. Trump's lead is commanding, and that doesn't show any signs of changing. The most credible threat is DeSantis, but he's been far too timid at attacking Trump. The pitch he should be making is something like "Trump's ideas and energy were great, but he lacked the follow-through to enact lasting change and was easily distracting by people like Kushner". Alternatively, he could have done something like Hanania suggested and challenge Trump to a boxing match. Instead, he's barely attacked Trump at all, creating the bizarre situation where a man is running to be president but refuses to directly tell us why we should prefer him over the frontrunner. In the end, it might not have mattered in any case. Negative partisanship is the driving force in American politics more than anything else, and Trump's ability to make liberals seethe apparently earned him so much goodwill that Republicans will vote for him no matter how many elections he loses.
It seems like Trump isn't going to appear at the Republican debate, which will likely turn the thing into an irrelevant snooze fest. Christie will probably attack Trump and the other candidates will likely rush to his defense, which will only further solidify the current dynamics. At this point the most interesting thing that's happened is Ramaswamy's mini-surge to third place which really shows how boring this whole affair is. Him, Scott, and and maybe Haley are essentially just running to be vice president, while other candidates like Pence, Christie, and the rest are doing the old presidential-campaign-as-glorified-press-conference thing, or have too much of an ego to see they have no shot.
The only thing that could make the current race entertaining is if Biden or Trump randomly drop dead, or if Trump is convicted of sufficiently serious crimes. Those would certainly be shockers, but the ramifications are hard to forecast before they actually happen.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Presidential aspirants are highly incentivized to run whenever they see an opening. Losing a primary is not a political death sentence by any means. Romney lost 2008 before winning the R nom in 2012. Biden flamed out twice before winning the D nom in 2020. On the other hand, staying out could mean they miss their shot forever. Plenty of people said Obama should have sat out in 2008 with the logic that it was basically "Hillary's turn". There's a good chance Obama would have never been president if he didn't run in 2008. Chris Christie lost his best shot when he didn't run in 2012
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
This is giving me some gamer boycott energy. There's no other real Reddit alternative with nearly the same amount of content thanks to network effects, so while a handful of users might drift away, the majority will eat the changes no matter how much they might dislike it.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
What a goofy post that seems like it's straight out of 4chan. But given that this account just started posting 12 days ago, I presume it's a ban-evader who will just make a new account.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
5mo ago
Israel hasn't been able to impose its will because the conflict is ultimately a fight over PR. Western democracies "hold themselves to a higher standard" (or "hamstring themselves", depending on your POV) by refusing to do population transfers that autocracies do routinely. Pakistan recently announced it was deporting 2 million Afghans and nobody cared. Azerbaijan just ethnically cleansed Nagorno Karabakh and there was barely a peep. But if Israel threatens to do something similar to the West Bank, the entire world freaks out. Palestinians have long recognized this double-standard and have maximally abused it by being very plugged-in to places like the NYT and other outlets.
Not that Jews as a whole are entirely blameless in this regard, as many of the Diaspora have been key players in the social justice crusades. The double game that organizations like the ADL play is mind-boggling.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8mo ago
Participants in every category—men and women of all races, ages, and social classes—were quicker to associate positive attributes with women and negative attributes with men.
This seems like the Women Are Wonderful effect in action.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
It's kind of weird for Brazilian leftists to criticize Bolsonaro so harshly for being authoritarian, then have their guy Lula turn around and start feting the leaders of the most autocratic countries like Russia, Venezuela, and China.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2mo ago
From the study, about half of the negative effect of porn is just gay men watching more porn and being more depressed in general (model 3 on page 50). Also, the study suspiciously says porn usage imparts a massive uptick in violence, which leads me to believe there's just other factors not being controlled for. One of the authoritarian right's attacks on porn is that masturbation leads to men essentially "leaking their manna" and becoming passive and less likely to pursue their goals, which is the opposite of what this study finds.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
5mo ago
Nothing about Kissinger was particularly impressive apart from his longevity and his post-tenure PR team. He's galactically overestimated by both his proponents and his critics. He just didn't do that much that any other normal StateSec wouldn't have done.
Nate says in his footnote that Morris wants to move 538 in a more explicitly progressive direction, so I expect more woke advocates like Clare Malone to be the norm. Without Nate's models or his push for data-driven rigor, the site will likely devolve into having an occasional statistical chart here and there, but otherwise being functionally indistinguishable from Vox. A sad day indeed.
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