Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
You avoided the question regarding your own position.
What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?
Your response of the practicality, please.
Well, that's not what I want. I would like more, but softer, policing.
Your desires are as irrelevant to the consequences of your proposed policies as they are irrelevant to the intended consequences of the partisans your are borrowing the arguments of.
More local beat cops who know everyone by name, fewer Stormtroopers.
Local beat cops in California are legally prohibited from conducting immigration enforcement by multiple legal obstacles, including accountability to the state of California whose politicians oppose enforcing immigration laws, and the policy engineering of that political leadership coalition to revoke that authority from even other, willing states.
Hence, your preferred policy would lead to less enforcement, and fewer actors legally authorized to enforce laws. This is, not coincidentally, the intent of the progressive anti-ICE coalition, for whom the 'stormtrooper' accusation is a useful lie to deflect blame for escalating tensions that are justified on the grounds of such lies.
That your preferred additional policy of demasking would make it even easier for malefactors to escalate targeting of those fewer authorized actors, thus creating a moral and pragmatic obligation on the part of those authorized actors to protect themselves, thus leading to further accusations of being totalitarian oppression used to advocate for even fewer people more easy to target, is a symbiotic feedbackloop coincidence.
I'll grant you that the mainstream Democratic messaging doesn't actively advocate for this, but for what it's worth, that's what I want; I don't think there's a binary switch between "defund the police" and "goons in balaclavas".
It is worth nothing when you perpetrate the false and accusatory framings that are used to justify the political violence of those who very much do advance such binary switches through political violence.
And a lot of people would not get wet if rain reversed direction mid-fall. However, the laws of material physics are already in play for rain, just as the laws of emotional politics were already in play for the ethno-nationalist political actors and the autocratic monarchies trying to resist/suppress them in thee 1910s.
Were the European statesmen above emotion, relative positioning, and realpolitik, they wouldn't be the European statesmen of the hour, because their states would not exist and they would not have been elevated to the statesmen of such states without such characteristics.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
If police officers manage to work without masks, why shouldn't ICE agents? Leftists have raged against police officers as much as they have raged against ICE agents.
Police officers who work in fields with a higher risk of targeted retaliation routinely wear masks.
This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.
Why would you think something demonstratably untrue?
A lack stormtroopers hardly impeded significant parts of the broader left from accusing anyone to their right of being fascists, something that has been in the political water for nearly a century since the first fascists diverged from their socialist influences. Just in the last decade, after convincing themselves that there were multiple orders of magnitudes more police shootings of unarmed black men than were actually occuring, efforts to reduce the 'goon' surface vector by reducing police presence and proactivity saw a substantial increase in violent sentiments carried out against fellow residents and citizens.
Nor did a lack of goons or stormtroopers hinder the political left from formalizing itself as the plucky underdog rebels of the anti-fascist or Jedi variety, and years of not-actually-oppressing the opposition, rather than decrease violent sentiment, led to the Democratic Party's political-media alliance championing the fiery but mostly peaceful protests that caused insurance market warping damages.
'Accountable' law enforcement, as framed by the Democratic officials and political left opposed to ICE, has repeatedly corresponded with more, not less, violent sentiments over time when political control has enabled the removal of police who were an obstacle to executing the violent sentiments. This is not exactly the first time this has happened either, hence the multi-decade cycle of in US politics of progressive advocacy to depolice various communities and issues, and then the subsequent issues leading to waves of re-enforcing laws, the enforcement of which becomes justification for new violent opposition.
Given that the perception of oppression can be based on lies, or even distortions taken magnitudes out of any bit of truth, there is no meaningful change in hostile sentiment to be had. The inclination is demonstratably not based on on truths, and so its level does not depend on irrelevant independent variables such as truth..
(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)
What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?
Nah, just posturing as if he were, while letting someone else later pay the cost.
It doesn't do anything unless there's an attempt to enforce it, which Newsome won't, but Newsom can point to it for his democratic bonafides. If/when someone else tries to play that game and gets silly prizes, Newsom has one less rival for the spotlight.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
What are concrete ways to stop this type of behavior?
About 15 years of electoral disasters for the perpetrating ideological coalition, such that a sustained political incumbency on the part of the targets can initiate, prosecute, and carry out sustained prosecutions of malefactors, logistical supporters, and moneyed backers without a partisan flip and abandonment of enforcement. This, in turn, leads to an entire political generation of the legal survivors ingrains in their follow-on generation the importance of both legal and political distance with violent extremists, even as the legal survivors in some respects owe their rise in the opposition- and thus have a personal stake in the status quo- to the willingness of the ruling party to prosecute their inner-party rivals.
Political violence is not good, but it's not exactly new, even in the US. The social media coverage is new, the visceral, overwhelming awareness that there are [many] people who support it is new, but the existence and even implementation of it in democracies across the last two centuries are not. There are reasons that we don't typically remember or bring up the violent extremists movements of yester-century, and that's because they died on the vine. Few people talk about violent labor protests, for example, because the violent labor movements largely had their backs broken in many states.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
It's been happening on bombs and missiles for more than a century, so...
But yes- though for the moment, it appears to be an left-wing meme tradition. Hopefully it stays that way, though I wouldn't hold out any hope.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
The gunman committed suicide, but left behind bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them.
Clearly the man was a rightwinger who was pro-global warming. Who else could possibly have the means, motive, and media cultivation to hate ice?
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Pretty standard terrorism justification structure too. Very few advocacies of ideological terrorism are direct calls for terrorism. Part of the advocacy process is to frame it as a necessary response to the other side's obstinance/extremism/oppression, which includes the allegations of the outgroup suppressing the group who is being urged to more radical resistance.
This works even when allegations/belief of suppression outstrip the supply, or even if one's own side is responsible for the overall trend of raising the temperature / starting the defect tit-for-tat defect spiral, and so on. It doesn't actually matter, for example, if Donald Trump actually is to blame for raising the temperature- merely by fighting back, this can be claimed to be defect back behavior and thus [audience being appealed to] should make no apologies for.
Part of how the framing works as a radicalization tool is that it leads the audience towards a desirable conclusion, but without making the argument completely. This keeps it on the legally correct side of 'not a call for action,' even when it shares significant structural overlap. This allows intended/successful audience conversions to reach the conclusion, at which point no explicit call for action is required, while sympathetic-but-not-converted audiences can deflect on grounds of Exact Words rather than addressing leading arguments or the soundness of the foundational assumptions being used to frame the leading argument.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
More the later. Kamala was given high-visibility opportunities to act in areas of high public interest, such as her time as Migration Czar, but preferred to ditch publicity with anything that might be controversial. Keeping her profile low was part of her VP strategy, so that she could present herself as heir apparent when Biden would move off the stage, though likely not intended in the way it ultimately happened.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
I don't keep links to past Motte arguments, but I loosely remember such arguments climaxing around the time of the first Biden-Trump debate. Beforehand it was a deflection to accusations of Biden's mental fitness, and immediately afterwards it was a cope argument. In both contexts, it was an equivocation defense against accusations of Biden's fitness.
Where specifically do you think I'm misrepresenting what the Right is doing?
In your selective conflation of unlike categories via gerrymandered definitions, such as the one Jiro quoted.
This was not particularly ambiguous in the post you responded to, nor is it a point that needs your concession or concurrence to be valid.
Thank you for summarizing it so succinctly.
Arguments built on gerrymandering definitions and framings are tedious. Doing so to re-re-litigate the aftermath of a political assassination is... I'm not sure what the right term is.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
There's a grammar nazi joke to be made here, but I fear it wouldn't translate.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
You could add the 'ICE is disappearing people like gestapa!' -> 4th of July attack on ICE in Texas.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Sounds like there could be an interesting effort post there to share. Something something how the early 2000s video game industry evolved?
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Greater (>10x), since you can pack a helicopter into the largest ones, and yes (mostly), but also not necessarily.
The larger issue is more the relative precision of drops. You can not only greatly increase the survival / receipt of food delivery when doing it via helicopter rather than plane, but you can also even manage a loose idea of who will receive it. Such as, say, a clan enclave that has defensible positions against a Hamas seizure/retaliation group, as opposed to airdropping into Israel or the Mediterranean. So you could absolutely carry X ration packages cheaper in the plane, but you'd also need to carry far more than X packages on Y planes to get the same effect.
High-air drops aren't really effective, and tend to assume you have relatively free mobility across the land area being dropped upon. There's a reason the Berlin Airbridge was overwhelmingly land-unloads while the airdrops were propaganda.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
I'm half tempted to ask you for the meanest cowboys jokes you can come up with, and half-worried that you'd deliver.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
Unironically, you could probably also figure out a way to shoot them out of a canon. Or a literal trebuchet.
Wouldn't be the best way to do so, obviously, but if we're looking for cost-efficient airdrops, why not blimps and zepplins?
Maybe we could get steampunk zepplins after all.
More celebrity, sure, but less controversial? Eh...
Jon gladly flipped between 'most trusted newsperson' and 'you can't take what I said so seriously, I'm just a silly comedian' whenever it suited. He was never balanced, and was a significant cultivator of the 'Democrats may be inept, but Republicans are stupid-evil' smug-superiority of the 2010s progressive cultural zenith.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
But this has been the case for at least ten years, and the so-called "fascists" remained remarkably unshot until about a week ago.
Widespread, public, and celebratory cheering by left partisans also remained absent until about a week ago. Now it is here, and it is public knowledge that there is a non-trivial degree of revolutionary chic and social support for shooting the evil [capitalist]/[fascist]/[etc.].
One of the noted points of the rise of the Columbine Shooting copycat school shootings was that even unambiguously evil things can be popular/inspirational in their own right, and that popularity (a) isn't degraded by official condemnation, and (b) spreads memetically to copycats. Almost every school kid knows a school bully, or an oppressive school system, or some other grievance, and getting to get even and go out in a blaze of glory is still echoed to this day. Including, not so long ago, the trans-student shooting a christian school.
Charlie Kirk's assassination is far more likely to be part of a trend than an outlier before a return to the status quo. Anti-fascist political violence is a cultural artifact of the further-left ideologies, and cultural artifacts tend to be iceberg dynamics where far more mass is hidden below view, as opposed to potholes that are soon passed.
You avoided the question regarding your own position, again.
Your response of the practicality, please.
Because they are not Stormtroopers. They are not stormtroopers in the military context (ICE are not dressed as the origin of the term of trench stormers), or in the fascist context (ICE is not fulfilling a fascist police state supression role), or the in the young adult novel dystopian government context (the demand of which is exceeding the supply).
It is visibly not true, since vision allows people to observe actions, and even reasons for actions. Visibility also allows the comparisons, and contrasts, with other ascetic representations of things of a category (the variety of what Stormtroopers might be, which is too broad to be encapsulated by ICE), and things that are not of a category (the global examples of face-obscuring wear of not-Stormtroopers, to which a Stormtrooper accusation would be a lie).
Aside from your contention of a fact being a non-falsifiable hypothesis rather than a fact, this claim entails a notable omission of the 'short-to-medium' term, which is when law enforcement activity would occur. It has no attempt to address the relevant possible hypothesis second-order consequences of current political violence trajectories both for enforcement over the mid-to-long term (such as trends to non-enforcement from successful terrorism), or compensation efforts (which would be accused of being authoritarian abuses).
The wider population already support immigration enforcement and standard force protection measures for police. In turn, the current enforcement wave is the pushback for years of systemic non-enforcement, which did lead to predictable and predicted consequences both in terms if migrant crimes and ideological blind eyes to migrant perpetrators of crimes against normal-looking dudes (and dudets).
You are already in the context of the pushback. You, specifically, are opposing the pushback.
More options
Context Copy link