Glassnoser
17d ago
the administration that flew in a million illegal immigrants under temporary exemptions while only requiring them to put a name and email in a fucking phone app.
Do you have a source for this claim?
Everyone involved in the CBP One program needs to be in prison or deported to a prison.
For having broken what laws?
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two.
That is not the argument. The argument is that if they deport people without due process and then once they're deported, claim they have no jurisdiction, then there is nothing stopping that from happening to American citizens. The argument is not that there is no difference between Americans and non-Americans. The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
Suppose someone pointed out that Americans can have heart attacks just like non-Americans. Your argument is analogous to saying that this amounts to saying there is no meaningful difference between Americans and non-Americans. Just because two things are similar in one respect, that doesn't make them similar in all respects.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
The problem is not that there is no legal obstacle. The problem is that there is no practical obstacle. It's not a slippery slope argument. They admittedly deported him by accident without any due process. There is literally nothing to prevent that from happening to an American citizen. It would be a slippery slope argument if they were saying they would target American citizens next. But the problem is that they are deporting people without regard to their legal status.
On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
It doesn't matter if they are two morally distinct categories if there is no due process to determine under which category a given person falls. What do you even mean by morally distinct categories? I understand they are distinct legal categories, but to say they are morally distinct suggests they have different moral worth based on their citizenship, which strikes me as callous and absurd.
The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible.
The US government is paying El Salvador to take, imprison, and abuse, not only its own citizens, but Venezuelan citizens as well. Of course there is a limit to what the US government should be obligated to do prevent such abuse, but it is totally reasonable to ask that they stop spending resources make the abuse happen for no benefit. The US government's treatment of its citizens (or non-citizens for that matter) is not actually unconstrained by law, but even if it were, that would not excuse its taking advantage of that fact to abuse people. One thing I find so shocking about this is, setting aside the legal questions of its responsibilities, the US government seems to have no desire to correct what it admits was a mistake. I don't understand why they are even taking up the position that they are taking, regardless of its legal merits.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
I'm highly skeptical of this, but even if true, then the US government should not be deporting people to countries where it knows that people will be sent to prison without charge, nor should it be considering sending American convicts to prison in foreign countries. It's one thing to deport illegal El Salvadorans immigrants to El Salvador. It's another to deport citizens of other countries, legally resident in the US, who could be sent to a number of other countries or kept in the US. It's another to do this when it's known that they will be sent to a torture prison filled with gang members without charge. It's another to pay the El Salvadoran government to do this. It's yet another to invite them to come to the US from a safe third country and then send them to the El Salvadoran torture prison.
If you are going to argue for separation of powers, you should remember that the whole point of a democratically elected president is to avoid tyranny and to have certain powers reserved to an institution that represents the will of the people. They should be held to some kind of moral standard, if not a legal one. The point of the separation of powers is not to give carte blanche to the executive branch to do whatever it wants in its area of jurisdiction.
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed.
This is a bad system though. The US is supposed to follow the rule of law, not mob rule. That's the reason there are courts. That's the reason the law can only be changed through the legislature.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable.
I know it's not a legal document, but I'll quote the declaration of the independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This is clearly inconsistent with the principle that some people are fair game to be lured into the country and then kidnapped and sent to torture prisons. The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people. You will not get near-univeral agreement that the US government exists to deem 96% of the world's population to be without rights and free to be abused should they make the mistake of entering the reach of the US government.
Glassnoser
17d ago
when putting that on Chronometer you were obviously really high on saturated fat, but also missing out on magnesium and vitamin C and on Omega 3s (the main one I'm pretty oof on)
According to my spreadsheet, this diet has 414 g of magnesium, most of it from the potatoes (you probably have to eat the skins). There's also a good amount in the milk.
It also has 99 mg of vitamin C, also mostly from the potatoes, but a little bit also comes from the kale.
The milk and eggs have a lot of saturated fat, but it's under the 30 g limit I put for saturated fat.
I don't have a omega-3 requirement in my spreadsheet, because it wasn't included in the nutrition dataset I'm working with. I plan to add that later.
Did you know that Canned Salmon per gram of protein is actually cheaper than soybeans? Canned salmon is actually really cheap.
That's surprising. I don't have all types of food added to my spreadsheet yet, but so far, the cheapest source of protein is actually flour.
it's about $3.15 a can and 1 can has about 330 grams of actual salmon in there, so it's literally 2-3x cheaper to buy canned salmon compared to fresh salmon.
The cheapest my grocery store sells is a 418 g can for $6 ($4.33 USD) which would be equivalent to $3.42 for a 330 g can. That works out to 16.5 g of protein per CAD. Lentils, split peas, potatoes, and pork are all much cheaper sources of protein.
However, canned tuna is cheaper than canned salmon at 19.0 g of protein per CAD (I used the drained weight, not sure if that's correct). Fresh salmon would be 5.1 g of protein per CAD. Flour is 68.9 g.
What doing math really shows is that most of the price of eating comes from fruits and Vegetables and other food groups are a distraction. Oats/Beans are basically free per calorie
Flour is an extremely cheap source of calories. If all you cared about was getting enough calories, you could live on less than a dollar a day. I find that that starchy foods are very cheap sources of nutrients in general, but you would have to eat huge quantities of them to meet your requirements and you'd consume too many calories. Consuming foods that are nutrient dense is what makes things expensive, as that means eating vegetables.
This is an expensive diet. Fish and berries are very expensive and I don't think a person trying to save money would eat much of them.
I have a spreadsheet I've been working on to find the cheapest possible diet given various constraints. My current diet costs $5.95 a day. That's CAD, so it's only $4.29 USD a day. All subsequent numbers are in CAD.
As part of a challenge, I got it down to about $2 a day by relaxing some of the nutritional requirements that would take a very long time to cause any problems. However, this was a diet where almost all of the calories came from potatoes, so it would be pretty boring.
The cheapest possible nutritionally complete diet according to my spreadsheet (which doesn't yet have all food types) would cost only $4.29 a day. But I used a minimum protein intake of only 60 g a day, and allowed the saturated fat intake to be as high as 30 g (it ended up being 28.4 g) a day.
The diet is:
- 978 g of milk
- 350 g potatoes
- 106 g of split peas
- 78 g of corn oil
- 75 g of eggs
- 24 g of honey nut cheerios
- 8 g of kale
- 4 g of almonds
Note that milk is twice as expensive in Canada as it is in the US.
Glassnoser
20d ago
The point is it's a tiny share of the budget and much of it is not frivolous spending. If you want to reduce the deficit, these cuts are definitely not necessary, while cuts to social security Medicaid, and Medicare are unless you want massive tax increases.
Glassnoser
20d ago
It's more like four-twenty-eleven.
Glassnoser
20d ago
If a judge prevented an American citizen from being expelled from the US because it was illegal, would that be a good thing or would it be a problem because it undermined the country's ability to decide who to keep and who to expel?
Glassnoser
20d ago
Why do people say "half a dozen" instead of "six"?
Glassnoser
21d ago
The lockdowns caused a massive plunge in the stock market. There was a recovery, but I don't see how that could have been caused by money printing. Printing money doesn't affect the real prices of assets.
Glassnoser
21d ago
Opposition to free trade and a belief that it has cost Americans good jobs.
Glassnoser
22d ago
One of the many problems with this is that if investors think that tariffs will be reversed in two years, then you won't accomplish any reshoring. You'll just slow down the economy for two years.
Glassnoser
22d ago
How is China more of an adversary than Russia?
Glassnoser
22d ago
I think you're underestimating the extent to which people can fail to accept that Trump's trade policies are the cause of any bad economic effects and the extent to which they can fail to accept that the bad economic effects are even happening.
Glassnoser
22d ago
How many politicians were assassinated during the COVID lockdowns or during the Great Depression?
Glassnoser
22d ago
It might take more than that because there is actually a fair bit of support among Democrats for what Trump is doing.
Glassnoser
23d ago
Glassnoser
23d ago
I don't see how they're relevant. The law prohibits abridgments of freedom of speech. This abridges freedom of speech. Therefore, it is unconstitutional unless someone can explain how it falls under one of the established exempted forms of speech.
Glassnoser
23d ago
Controlling what language people speak is abridging freedom of speech. People are not free to use whatever language they want to use.
Glassnoser
23d ago
They disallow English in employment offer letters and promotion letters.
Glassnoser
23d ago
Yes. They specifically have a law prohibiting students who do not have a parent who was not taught in English at a school in Canada from being taught in English at public schools.
Glassnoser
24d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_v._Nebraska
Not necessarily a first amendment violation in this case, but still unconstitutional.
Glassnoser
24d ago
The first amendment prohibits state governments from passing laws abridging the freedom of speech, unless it falls under a few exempted categories of speech restriction, such as laws against obscenity, defamation, and threats. Forcing people to speak French is not in one of those categories. So you explain to me why those other concepts are relevant and why this is a case where abridging freedom of speech would be allowed.
Glassnoser
24d ago
I'm not sure what the 1A argument is, though.
It's a law that controls what people say and write.
Do such laws prevent store signs from also having other languages, or do they just mandate that French must be present?
It can have other languages, but French has to be more prominent.
If just the latter, it's not so clear to me. There is some compelled nature to the speech, but the standards there are different, especially if it's just commercial regulation or gov't-run schools. So yeah, I'd really appreciate if anyone could put out at least a sketch of the argument.
You and I are talking. You are my employee. That means you can demand that I speak French and it is enforced by the government, so the government is controlling what I say. I cannot send an email to you in English if you have asked that I speak in French to you.
I'm a doctor and you're my patient. The government can force me to speak French to you if you want.
I'm an engineer and you're my client. The government can require that I speak to you in French.
I want to hire you for a job. We both speak English. We both want to speak English. The employment offer letter has to be in French.
I have a business and I want the name of the business to contain an English word. The government will force me to translate it to French.
This isn't human trafficking.
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