EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
A guy with the job to count votes comes under national scrutiny for if he counted them well or not. He's very publicly accused of counting them badly. He is up for reelection, now a known quantity to voters, and they can ditch him for someone who also claims he counted votes badly. He is chosen by a significant margin. The assumption is, therefore, that voters must agree that he actually counted just fine. That's a fair conclusion, given how public the whole process was and the wide news coverage.
In other words, I'm claiming the opposite: if a politician does something very public and very controversial, and then afterwards is reelected, then YES, the people either agree with the controversial thing or think it wasn't that big of a deal.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10mo ago
However you have completely and utterly failed to demonstrate your main point:
But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end.
Unless you have anything else to introduce, this statement is just as absurd and plainly false as before.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10mo ago
Location of birth mattering or not is, yes, a unique cultural concept that differs across time and place. The simple fact however is that the parents did not give birth, move back to Rwanda, raise their child there, and then bring him back to the UK right before the murders. Much of the conversation in this thread makes it sound like this is the case. No, AFAIK, he spent all 17 years of his life in the UK. That's 100% of his life, and also, a pretty substantial chunk of time. So if we're playing the blame game, we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree. That's why I bring up assimilation. You can't just ignore it. Insofar as it makes sense, there's a reason that sometimes in for example a legal examination of a car accident, we sometimes go so far as to talk about "percent of blame" due to different parties. That's the broad idea I'm getting at here. He, himself, is not an immigrant in most meaningful senses of the word. He must be understood as a second-generation immigrant, a term which exists as its own, different "thing".
Please note I was fairly careful in my wording, and for good reason. I talk about counterfactuals as applied to individuals, because there's a big risk of bias interacting with numerical/scientific issues in latching on to the wrong thing. We can still have a conversation about counterfactuals, but they need to be grounded in larger, more visible, and more real effects, perhaps using statistics. To say nothing of the fact that making conclusions about large populations from the actions of one or a few child murderers is already a bit suspect. Again, we can have this conversation. Your last paragraph even starts one! But it requires nuance. And it requires at least some degree of rigor which I'm not seeing. A point you make quite clearly when you dismiss counterfactuals so easily without an understanding of why they are problematic in any sort of evidentiary or logically consistent sense.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I agree, but it's also true that a lot of local attempts at change have been stonewalled. Does that mean going national is the logical thing to do? I don't really think so, but I somewhat empathize. It happens with things like housing too, right?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Described a bit more in another reply, but it was not only unpopular but felt like a violation of common sense for most Americans. Thus, theoretically avoidable and a candidate for a classic SC "punt" to the future, which have their place.
Dude, don't move the goalposts. I was very, very clear.
[Trump] started trying to dissuade his supporters as soon as it became clear they were breaching the capital [sic]
Was the claim in question. I even quoted it out specifically. It doesn't mention violence, only breaching the Capitol building. If you'd like me to break it down even further, according to its two logically prominent parts:
As soon as it became clear they were breaching the Capitol (I gave a good timeline for when this was the case, and it was obvious Trump was watching TV during at least a good portion of this time) -> Trump started trying to dissuade his supporters (I listed the two tweets out which do NOT in fact dissuade the supporters of "breaching the Capitol" at any point, they only encourage people not to get hurt which is NOT the same thing, and furthermore there was almost an hour and a half gap between when this was first plainly evident and when he first said anything resembling "go home", meaning when he started recording the video at 4pm (and even then chose the video and not a tweet))
More broadly, in the preceding sentence, the user claimed "Trump did not support J6". I think a more fair answer is that Trump wanted some political pressure, but didn't have any specific desire to breach the Capitol or do something beyond a massive protest. At least, there's little to no evidence of this being the case. However, once a breach happened and was obvious, he didn't really disapprove very strongly -- or else he, like virtually every other political figure, would have made some plea for it to stop right away, which he did not. He dragged his feet about it for quite a while. So at best, you can claim, supported by the facts, that Trump mildly disapproved of J6, on the day it happened. That's the strongest permissible claim that matches the evidence we have. Painting a narrative that he actively disapproved of J6 is not at all consistent with any of his actions.
Now, moving on from the realm of straight facts and near-certain probabilities into opinion... A narrative definitely exists on the left that he was some super-plotter and wanted the whole thing to happen. I did not say this. I don't think it's correct! I don't think he was really happy about it happening either. I think he was exactly the most likely case -- he wanted some big protest to happen, it got bigger than he thought, but he was pretty apathetic about it getting bigger than he thought. He definitely wanted Pence to take a specific action and not certify. I think that apathy in the face of the Capitol break-in is plenty enough to be upset with Trump about and consider it in the broader context of throwing shit against the wall to see if it will stick and undermining the election in the process was a breach of his oath of office, in my personal opinion. I think reasonable people can come to different conclusions about that whole aspect, narrative-wise.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
There probably used to be some path where a two-state solution was okay or even preferable. Where there were probably other solutions that involved practical solutions and probably some compromise. I sadly think that time has passed.
Right now, regardless of morals, the simple fact is that Israel destroyed Gaza, Israel controls Gaza, and therefore Israel has a moral responsibility to rebuild and improve Gaza. To the tune of billions, quite frankly. You break it, you buy it. What is the path to peace? A lot of kumbaya shit, love everyone and embrace a multipolar state is the only remaining actual option. Note that in my opinion, this requires probably more effort on the part of the Palestinians overall but also crucially, it requires initiation from the Israelis. They have both the moral and practical requirement to be "first" when it comes to displaying love. Probably some sort of truth and reconciliation type thing is needed. Execute Israeli soldiers who committed war crimes even. Forgive a good number of lesser evils on both sides. Build some trust. This will at some point require ending the apartheid-adjacent, second-class treatment of Palestinians. The settlement sniping back and forth has got to stop. At some point, Palestinians might want to consider becoming more (traditionally) politically active. They have 20% of the population and 10% of the Knesset.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
#1 is striking in its naïveté. A free market, one that is functional annd competitive, actually requires a certain amount of governmental regulation to remain free, functional, and competitive. It does not happen by magic. Even the holy texts of capitalism make this point explicitly. For example, companies can do a number of things to stifle new entries to existing markets, which breaks the system. There are clear mechanisms that keep the system going, and they are somewhat easily circumvented with lax enforcement. Companies can temporarily collude or take other related actions to undercut a rising newcomer’s prices (the Walmart strategy), blanket them with legal fees (the IP/copyright route), contractually freeze them out (the Microsoft strategy), deceptively manipulate popular perception, or even outright lie, snipe key hires, unleash massive financial war chests, the options go on and on.
Walmart for example should not have been possible. They deliberately bankrupted thousands of companies if not more in their rise to the top. Do you remember this era? They are like the classic case of using their financial heft to artificially lower prices, drive local grocery stores out of business, and then raise the prices again. (And cheat countless suppliers and business partners along the way). And the scandals don’t stop. Why, even just yesterday I saw a story about how Walmart enriched itself by ignoring massive fraud and even lied to the government in the process. Note that Walmarts are too physically entrenched in various communities for much meaningful action to be taken, and boycotts just don’t work very well anymore.
I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative". As discussed up-chain, that seems to be the only sin of a large portion of the DOGE-cancelled stuff. I mean I agree that there's some moral failing involved, but you're literally calling this thinking typical of "cretinous rat bastards" and I'm just saying that minor compromises like this are eminently human. It's like being forced to use pronouns in your email signature at work or something. Like, sure, maybe it is compromising your principles. I'm Mormon, I get it, we went through some shit with Prop 8 and gay rights and such and I absolutely admire those moral stands. However, I'm not going to act like that kind of minor moral failing in a flawed system is actually such a huge betrayal that anyone who adds pronouns in their company profile deserves to lose their job... That's just vindictiveness, and of the small-minded variety.
In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness in a society where you have reddit threads telling people to cut off their family for the slightest thing in the liberal space, and calls for unrestricted lawfare on the right. I think it is something both parties need, especially on the granular and individual level. And many NSF grants are for a small handful of professors and grad students each, it's not like all of them are multi-million-dollar boondoggles. And even this moral stuff aside, it's still stupid self-sabotage on a simple practical/pragmatic level.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I kind of feel like his comment is such that it could be copy and pasted and dropped anywhere, and that makes it highly suspect. The original comment was talking about economic trends that could be argued to be recent and about unskilled labor more broadly, and how it relates to perhaps a reduced need for migrants. The response was a condensed polemic making approximately zero attempt to engage with the conversation. Consider for a moment the use of the word "they" which is in itself a blaring warning light too. Who the hell is "they" and why on earth would they benefit from such a plan if it even existed? Would foreigners even vote as a bloc? For that matter how do we know this is anything knowing rather than the result of larger macro forces? The comment again does not even begin to gesture at these points. It's, simply put, consummately "waging" the culture war rather than discussing it, which is at least in my eyes the 'red line' of the law here. It's just reddit behavior from a different ideology and so it sort of feels like a deserved ban in that respect, yeah?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I don't think that was necessarily malicious because we know that Facebook fact checkers are just way underpaid people working terrible jobs. And honestly that photo was almost too perfect, I saw it first on twitter and not national media, so I actually did wonder for a little if it was doctored! I was quickly corrected, so I'm curious how long it took Facebook to correct course. Was it minutes, hours, or over a day? The article doesn't say. Was it actually AI detection (which we know for a fact often can have bad accuracy), a malicious worker, corporate suppression, or a random mistake? Hard to know but that's a lot of plausible failure modes. I don't see anything in your link about fact checkers deliberately reposting the same image. Do you have a source for that?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I don't think you even need to squint to see some potential grounds for profiling and unequal treatment going on here (such as their decision to keep investigating, and how they treated her which was not really very compassionate), though I'd attribute more of it to, like, I guess classism rather than racism, so I don't think it's really a great fit for BLM claims beyond the surface level. Just to be clear.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
Zooming out just a bit however, don't you think it's actually a good thing we are seeing greater emphasis on examining these non-official but still influential groups and what they actually do to policy within governments? Perhaps not, of course, panicking over it and we need to view it all in context, but isn't this still preferable to ignoring the whole thing as is historically the case? For example, if people had paid more attention to the Federalist Society's influence, they wouldn't have been as "surprised" about some of the actual Supreme Court picks that came out of the Trump years. While it's always tricky and potentially unfair to lump non-official positions in with official ones, the simple fact is that these non-official positions that are nonetheless strongly associated with one of the two major parties, and that's relevant info for a voter.
An analogy would be: you don't just marry a person, you marry their family too (in-laws). Factoring in what their family is like into a marriage decision might feel a little unfair, but it's eminently reasonable, because it's actually pretty hard to ignore the family in practice (and, even beyond that, this is the family that raised your potential spouse, so at least some of their ideas and values will have rubbed off).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Somehow Tea Party Republicans got it in their head that Obama was the anti-Christ, but he both ran for election and governed as a fairly center-left technocrat and leaned on very main-street rhetoric that wasn't too charged. As an example, he didn't support gay marriage until a good chunk into the presidency. He mostly tried to ignore us-vs-them, at least in 2008. He got bogged down a bit into more partisan warfare later in his second term, but frankly I think the Tea Party really did "start it". Hillary at the end was pretty night-and-day culture warry in comparison, though some of the shift in rhetoric was visible for a few years beforehand in some left-wing higher-ed type circles. At least that was my impression.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Notable that much gnashing was indeed had, but Kerry himself did not talk about it very often on the campaign trail, and "true winner" rhetoric was mostly confined to the fringes and/or typical media hyperbolizing. While "true winner" rhetoric is still mostly confined to GOP fringes today, (and hyperbolized in a different direction by the media) Trump himself is one of the most extreme proponents, despite the clear (and VERY inconsistent) logical gaps. That's worth mentioning.
I'm a compromise-first kind of guy, and when it comes to all the massive unknowns and ethical issues when it comes to fetuses and personhood, splitting the difference and saying "well too early is obviously more fine, and too late is obviously less fine, and in the middle these clash and it's super subjective, so let's just cover the basics and let the states do the fine details" is a fairly intuitive approach. It leaves people only mildly mad, and plenty distracted by the middle-fights, which means it only becomes partially an existential battle of core values/principles. Very practical, since personhood is hella NOT defined for us. Yes, in principle, it really should be a states thing because states get the non-specified situations most of the time in those cases. I merely point out that states already had a big say in the process, so to upend that and go "all right, we murdered the referee, go to town" seemed to me just a little... irresponsible.
ninja edit: minor wording changes in first paragraph
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Uh, yeah, so Gen 4 nuclear reactors have some factually very great promise, such as increased safety, ability to reuse waste as fuel, and lower maintenance costs, but have struggled for consistent funding. It's not some pie in the sky, ultra left wing liberal conspiracy. I'm not sure what on earth nonbinary people have to do with anything.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I possibly need a new, but probably related, username and need ideas.
People here keep giving me shit and assuming priors of ironclad strength along with deliberate shit-stirring due to my username EverythingIsFine, which was only partly foreseen. As I explained elsewhere:
I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior.
Spoiler: people think I'm some sort of status-quo warrior.
So far I don't think anyone has gotten the reference to the meme either, which was meant to be at least partly tongue in cheek and self-deprecating, and have taken the whole thing very seriously instead. No, actually, I'm just a pretty consistent centrist, who thinks more accurately that rather than everything being fine, that everything will work itself out and be fair-ish in the current system. In fact there are a few things I'm decidedly un-fine about. But... I am sort of an old school constitutionalist in the sense that I think the US political system was deliberately designed to be some balance of slow to respond to public feeling, but also fast enough to reasonably reflect what people seem to actually want and care about, by revealed preference. And it does just that! Actually kind of well! As evidenced by its long-term stability and good outcomes for most Americans. With some partisan combat that happens along the way, which is fine to participate in. I lean probably just slightly right on a more traditional values spectrum, but slightly left in the current political environment. I've volunteered for both two Democratic campaigns (2020 Biden, and a local candidate) and two Republican ones (two state candidates), all of them moderates in their fields. I tend to go for the most moderate primary candidate in national presidential primaries, though I probably have a soft spot for Bernie, and I also generally tend to be relatively dissatisfied by the field as a whole for a decade. I have changed my stance on a handful of important issues over the years. Right now Pew puts me (though not very strongly) in the Democratic Mainstays, make of that what you will. Maybe a cross between that and Ambivalent Right and Outsider Left, though I am much more politically active than the norm.
My original idea is that it is in fact helpful in a discussion to have a rough sense of someone's priors beforehand, but I didn't want it to be this ironclad thing. I don't consider my beliefs above to be stuck, just strong. Do you think I was wrong about a username like this? Does having an opinionated nickname help or hurt dialogue here?
So yeah, ideas welcome. Should I keep the general format so people know it's still me? Or just go for something way different?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I put more in my comment above, but to me this actually reinforces how important who we elect as a President is. The government actually did a wonderful job echoing Trump's own tone, and even came up with programs on their own along those same lines. While the President might not have direct control over everything, clearly messages actually do trickle down into the bureaucracy. Even unintended effects of the message. Whether you find this hopeful or depressing might be a matter of opinion and what you think of the massive civil servant bureaucracy in the first place (i.e. how responsive do we want the normal apparatus to be)
I dug up some facts and brought the receipts. In the Colorado court that heard this play out, their decision you can see starting at the bottom of page 95.
It indicates that exactly once when the Amendment was first debated in Congress (not yet law) the issue was briefly mentioned. Mentioned as in we have literally only this one tiny and brief exchange. From the section summarizing the key points made in the Colorado case:
The most compelling testimony to that effect was an exchange between Senators Morrill and Johnson during the Congressional Debates over Section Three, where one Senator explained to the other that the Presidency was covered by “office, civil or military, under the United States.” Professor Magliocca also testified it would be preposterous that Section Three would not cover Jefferson Davis—the President of the Confederacy— should he have wished to run for President of the United States after the civil war.
So the brief worry was that Davis, as an insurrectionist, was obviously barred from running for most offices, but maybe he could run for President only? Morrill thought no, he was barred from basically everything including President.
No other court cases, legal opinions, or even history is cited. Meaning they couldn't find anything else. There's other arguments too both for and against listed in the decision, but overall the decision says there is "scant evidence" and most of the other arguments have to do with the text of the Constitution in other places.
So yeah. In my opinion, if a legal theory is mentioned exactly once, and back in 1866, it is for most practical purposes "novel". It's not novel in the sense that literally not a single person ever had ever thought about the concept (clearly at least two people had, if extremely briefly), but certainly was novel in the sense that we had gone 150 years and no one had ever brought it up again as such.
It might also bear noting, when it comes to novelty, that this conversation formed a legal theory (if you can even call it a theory, it's not like they went into big detail) claiming the President WAS in fact an officer. Trump's team did not advance this theory! They advanced the opposite! It wasn't even the same claim! So it wasn't so much a "legal theory" as "one person worried about it once 150+ years ago and then decided it wasn't a big worry". And then over a century later someone came out and claimed the opposite thing. Sounds pretty novel to me!
Edits: last paragraph.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Haha, it's definitely not always true. But my general political background view is that working within the system works a lot of the time, with enough time. I think it's pretty evidence-supported by US history. I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior. As I noted, there's a specific story of Menendez' political upbringing and it's far from being some "regular senator we thought was a saint turns out to be corrupt" -- a major needle-mover if true -- it ended up being "senator from corrupt state with sketchy personal history ends up being corrupt" which... just isn't all that surprising?
Please refrain from wasting space with a low-effort personal attack (the very definition of rule-breaking, I might add) if you don't have anything to contribute. Would you care to outline what your percentages might be, or at least of a particular category? Part of the point is to get a read on people's priors and see if I'm wildly divergent (or if they are).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I mean, I agree with you it feels a bit like a scapegoat, politically low hanging fruit — but the arguments in favor of Confederate fetishization being a thing of actual harm rather than a cute Southern quirk I think actually do have some internal merit. That’s why it happened so quickly. I think we shouldn’t be so quick to write the whole thing off as a naked power play rather than a sincere effort to right a wrong, long ignored.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I am curious and confused why you have lumped “white people” in with Confederate history. Surely most white people in America were not Southern rebels, and there’s more to that culture than Robert E Lee? I realize that as a Southerner yourself it feels a bit more personal but… again, I really feel the Confederate issue doesn’t generalize. And part of it is just that Southern primary education more or less lies to its own people about this part of history. Not only do many texts outright lie about the causes of the Civil War, the South may have claimed that slavery would die out, but their actual actions reveal an active attempt at spreading it. A lot of these “reasonable complaints” just boil down to economic issues, made worse because the South didn’t want to take steps to rebalance their economy away from slavery. And they certainly didn’t want to treat Black people like the humans they are. That’s not something you can just glaze over.
Not all quote marks are really quotes, even if people in the forum like calling people out with them a lot. I like using them to draw attention to phrases or words that people use (or I am about to use knowingly) with particular baggage or specific connotations. In this case, I'm referring to Rubiales' own word in his Friday speech.
I read the news a lot and could watch things sort of develop. The furor got absolutely worse Friday after the statement. Want at least some evidence? Look at Google Trends and you can see things start to die down on Wednesday/Thursday, and spike Friday and double Saturday when he's actually suspended by FIFA, an action that to me seemed to be rushed out to satisfy public outcry (considering it had only been Thursday they announced a look into it). The search interest clearly indicates that traffic about the topic actually surpasses the original news bump Friday/Saturday. This is true for most all phrases I plug in having to do with the news. The curve can even be more dramatic. I know that Google Trends isn't a perfect examination method but it does reflect a bit how much people care.
This isn't the result of an "SJW mob" out to fire him (to use an actual quote of yours), and coopted by internal enemies. It's real people being upset about Rubiales, for example, alleging that anyone upset about the kiss is actually a (another actual quote from Rubiales) "fake feminist", and an implicit allegation that he blames Hermoso for not supporting him more, and the fact that people are fucking applauding someone who is showing zero contrition and instead going on the attack. Why is he being applauded?? Actually why? This guy just brought an absolutely massive embarrassment on the entire organization singlehandedly, even if it was totally innocent, so how on earth is he somehow a hero? Those things rightfully triggered disgust and though I cannot prove it, I can certainly make a valid claim that his post-kiss behavior is a worse problem than the kiss.
Now, does all that imply that I'd be happy with FIFA or the government or someone else giving him a harsher punishment because of his post-kiss behavior and lack of contrition? That's a harder question to answer. I'm not really sure, to be quite honest. On its face, that does seem to be an unequal application of justice. But practically, it would make sense. That's partly why I brought up the point about how there are apparently lots of other problems and mistreatment that has been swept under the rug that he might deserve to lose his job for.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not really about the kiss and what's an appropriate punishment. It's more about the culture surrounding it and how it's dealt with that is highly problematic. The first instinct of the federation and of Rubiales is to lean on Hermoso to make a situation that Rubiales caused go away, and to try to guilt trip her and her friends and family into doing so (the coach apparently tried no less than three times on the plane trip). The second backup plan is to make the bare minimum apology, where the subtext is extremely loudly insisting that not only is the infraction so small, but also that people are just being jerks to insist on ruining the moment, and that his only true crime was being "too good at his job" or something. He likes to talk about the moment having "bad faith", but that's bad faith right there. At no point does Rubiales say something like "I made her uncomfortable", or talk about respect, or display any remorse. It's all "oops I guess I was caught". And then the Friday speech. Oh boy, the speech. It's throwing water onto a grease fire. I cannot understate how shocked I am that he's being applauded loudly by so many people in the room. At this point he has faced honestly very little actual repression. It's mostly online. People (rightly) think he's insincere.
But making such a fiery speech and claiming his own victimhood as more important and real than the victimhood of someone else, while behind the scenes him and his bureaucratic, domineering friends are the ones laying it on? Hypocrisy. He's the one that worsened the situation again further. The situation looks even worse for him if they did in fact fake the Monday quote from Hermoso (source here) which seems more likely than not. Hermoso herself and her family didn't seem to want it to be such a big deal based on Monday alone, or even during the week, refusing to be baited out by reporters on multiple occasions. Now of course the media might have been making things worse, but the only official action was FIFA beginning to look into it. It's important to note again that he's only actually suspended on Saturday, after he ignites the firestorm. I don't think that's a coincidence.
And of course the thing underlying it all: As Hermoso alludes to, and apparently a LOT of other players on the women's team believe, there were and are actual big issues going on behind the scenes in Spanish soccer that mean that it's not actually a given that Rubiales deserves to have his current job. The tip of the iceberg, as it were. In particular, there was a whole heavyhanded incident back in September where a group letter from 15 players resulted in the federation going public first and accusing the players of blackmail and trying to pull a coup on the coach, with bad feelings all around. For what it's worth, those tensions didn't appear to involve assault or anything like that.
Trump Says He Wants to Deport Millions. He’ll Have a Hard Time Removing More People Than Biden Has (archive here)
Thought this might contribute in an interesting way to the current talk about deportation, expulsion, and the election. So we all know Trump is talking a big game right now about mass deportation. Interestingly, the article mentions that at least in theory, 42% of Democrats also support mass deportation (and slightly over half of Americans overall). Of course, like the wall, it's of some question whether and how much it would happen, and of course we haven't talked at all about who would pay for it this time. Not only are there legal hurdles a president can't fix alone or even sometimes with legislation, at least not easily, but there's also diplomatic considerations -- a lot of countries literally refuse to take people back, planes are expensive, and there's a pilot shortage anyways. The closing quote considers mass deportations more of a general rallying cry on the seriousness level of "defund the police".
Basically the article points out that under existing deportations, there appears to be a cap based on ICE's funding and priorities and infrastructure of at most 30,000 deportations in a month, and this seems to be a roughly hard cap across administrations. Please take a look at this chart or it might lack context. The article talks about how under Title 42's implementation, which was started by Trump in March 2020 and kept in place by Biden when he took office in 2021 and continues through today, you were allowed to more effectively expel migrants (note the phrasing - this is not deportation!) and at high rates, usually at or near the border (unlike deportation, which is usually the culmination of a longer process and involves courts usually).
Largely due to this, the Biden administration actually expelled millions more migrants than Trump did!
That's quite a quote. Two years of Biden was more than four years of Trump? Yes. Of course the Biden (and now Harris) campaign probably didn't want to talk about this so explicitly, but there you have it. ICE was surged to the border and prioritized that over internal searches, so that was part of it, and remember that currently, actual deportation is kind of at its limit, in addition to costing thousands of dollars per case, which likely wouldn't change substantially even under the most rosy of Trump deportation plans (though it's possible the time per case might drop with more resources the time to train and prepare the bureaucracy and infrastructure would be significant). The article notes that claims of using the National Guard to do deportations isn't very realistic -- it would take a decent amount of time and training to get them set up to do so, and so using their manpower is far from a panacea.
Anyways, definitely look at the chart. Is this good evidence that threats of mass deportations are indeed political theater more than an actual proposal? Or should anti-immigration voters actually consider a vote for Harris?
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