Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
27d ago
My impression is that they think the deficit/debt is both less immediately important and less tractable than dealing with immigration. The attitude is something like "Let's kick out 10+ million illegals and then see where entitlement spending is at". And without giving details, I'll just note that I see people who don't speak English interacting with expensive government benefits every single day. I would be very surprised if they weren't mostly right, in that mass deportation was de facto the largest cut in entitlement spending in history.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
It was fun to channel John Oliver for a minute.
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1mo ago
Really? That? It's kind of exactly my problem with him. Very much a "written for Twitter" piece. It could have been a single snappy-if-kinda-vacuous sentence, but instead it's putting just enough vague wordiness into pretending to be an essay, so you can imagine there's some real knowledge and insight there, if you already wanted a reason to think badly of Putin.
How does that post not trigger your bullshit detector? The person who wrote it clearly doesn't actually know anything about Russian or Ukranian history. If they did, they would have actually worked it in in a meaningful way.
But I'm sure it was great for engagement farming. People can both dunk on Putin and argue about the history.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Why, because he looks weird?
Yes, that's definitely part of it. Hanania has gone off about how he hates the Republican masses because they're fat and ugly. Meanwhile, he's more visually repellant than any Person of Walmart I've ever seen. He's like the Platonic Ideal of what generations of fantasy writers have been groping towards, when they want you to know a character is a contemptible pussy you should hate just from the initial description. Every time I see that PFP, my lips curl into a feral snarl. I feel like a dog that is sensing that the stranger knocking on the door is a corruption demon in a skinsuit.
Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt.
I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.
"Combatative" is all he is. The man is a LOLcow, farming engagement by using his own idiot takes as bait. Even before I saw what he looked like, he gave me a consistent impression that he was the human hardware equivalent of AI slop. I don't think I've ever seen something he wrote that made me feel like a concious mind was having thoughts and trying to communicate them. Even on topics where I did, or used to, agree with him, there was something off, some failure of the intellectual Turing Test. If we could get a Neuralink installed to observe the process, I would bet money that Hanania goes vibes->wordcel vomit. "Mexican twinks are hot, therefore yay immigration." "Fat daddies are yucky, therefore boo Trump."
And that's what Hanania comes down to: vibes. He's junk food for people like Trace, who want to imagine that they're ivory-towered, neutral intellectuals, but can't shake the vibe that makes them heavily tilt the scales. His "feistiness" lets them get that ArrDrama hit of being a total bitch while pretending to be chaste maidens. His appeal is entirely a function of aesthetic preference for pseudointellectual slop in a sweater vest. Which is hilariously ironic coming from a viscerally disgusting creature whose entire oeuvre consists of LOLcow vibes-posting.
Iconochasm
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1mo ago
Richard Spencer had no organic relevance to the first wave Alt-Right. That short-lived moment coalesced out of things like GamerGate, rather than the irrelevant swamp where Spencer lurked. Functionally none of them knew who he was, and if told, would have called him stupid and crazy. But after Trump started gaining momentum in the early 2016 election cycle, CNN dug Spencer out of a landfill because he had once used the term a decade earlier, and practically gave him his own show called "FACE OF THE NAZI ALT-RIGHT WITH NAZI ALT-RIGHT KING RICHARD "NAZI" SPENCER".
Rather like exactly what you're doing here.
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1mo ago
Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.
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2mo ago
>Be Pope
>Latin American
>live in walled city-state with strict immigration
>criticize Trump administration for deporting members of gang famous for Satanic black mass human sacrifice initiation
>drops dead
What did God mean by this?
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2mo ago
How do you know I didn't?
Exactly. I don't know that you did. Because you're a new account with no history, and nothing you've said makes me think you're being honest, based on my own unhealthily expansive experience on this topic, which you can double check since I've been discussing these things on this account name since two site migrations ago.
And at what point did a court ever charge the Biden admin with contempt? There were plenty of rulings against them so it's very hard to imagine they're willing to rule against him but not enforce it. More likely you just misunderstood the specifics of the rulings or the response to it by the administration, as most people often do. Law is complex, there's no shame in not understanding the intricacies.
See, this is the exact kind of shit I would expect from a smug ideological child, not an experienced civil libertarian. The civil libertarian would have immediately thought of multiple egregious incidents, such as the eviction moratorium or student loans.
well known conservative minded Republican aligned judge who was appointed under Reagan and on a short list of SC nominees for Bush.
Again, this strongly predisposes me to think you're college aged at best, and deeply embedded in ideologically progressism. "Well known", because Politico and NYT described him that way last week when you and everyone else heard of him for the first time. If you'd actually been adult enough to be politically minded for longer than your account existed, you'd be expected to be aware that there's a wee bit of friction between the Bush Republicans and the Trump ones.
Even Garcia had multiple ways the Trump admin could have done it without violating the withholding of removal order, including seeking to get it overturned.
Oh, good, you did eventually, inadvertently, acknowledge that all this furor is over a minor paperwork mixup.
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2mo ago
When you put a bird-feeder in your yard, you don't get to complain when it attracts birds.
People often complain when they get squirrels.
Iconochasm
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2mo ago
Yeah, this is back to not understanding the concept. Genuine non-partisan concern for the rule of law is costly because it pisses off everyone, eventually. If you're going to be big mad about due process for deportations now, that pisses off conservatives. And if you were actually principled, then you'd have already pissed off the progressives by spending the Biden administration writing scathing critiques of their utter disregard for the law. You'd be criticizing at least some of these activist judges for overreach. You'd be carefully mindful of all the laws and evidence demanding that Garcia must be deported.
The fact that you don't recognize this, the fact that you seem totally unaware of the tribalism that infuses most political discussions, the fact that you don't have a gut-level appreciation for how progressives treat heretics and enemies are very strong signals that you've never actually insisted the law be applied to them, too.
FWIW, there are members of this community who do have such a track record, and I highly respect them for it.
If you want your partisan arguments to gain extra consideration because you claim to have a costly non-partisan virtue, it is completely reasonable for other people to ask you to prove you've paid that cost.
And when you appear to struggle to grasp what that would even entail in the first place, it is completely reasonable for people to notice that, and adjust their impressions of you accordingly.
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2mo ago
If your standard of evidence was so lax as to take "Just take me trust bro, I believe X and Y", why were you seemingly unwilling to accept it beforehand?
Because you wouldn't even give a single example.
If you want an example where I criticized progressives, I believe Biden's covid era eviction moratorium was a bad thing. While not on the exact level (such a thing was not ruled against yet), Biden had previously suggested he knew it was likely to get struck down and proceeded anyway.
See, this is a reasonable and good example. Thank you. Was that so hard?
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2mo ago
You really can't imagine how to reference such a prior belief/argument without doxing yourself?
FFS, just briefly paraphrase.
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2mo ago
but if I fretted over everything I wrote I'd never let anyone read anything.
Remember, your boos mean nothing. I've seen what makes you people cheer.
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2mo ago
I honestly don't think that's the relevant label. I think the guy comes off as very provincial and inexperienced. My whole point is that I suspect he's never been in a situation where being a pussy vs being brave would even come up, to an extremely unusual degree.
I'm suggesting he check his privilege, while actually bothering to explain why that's relevant. But there's no reason to continue belaboring the point.
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2mo ago
I very much agree, as a personal idiosyncrasy. In most cases, I just mentally replace all liberal->progressive whenever it's used by someone who isn't e.g. Glenn Greenwald.
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2mo ago
slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists
The guy wasn't "disappeared", he had multiple days in court, this whole thing is about accidnetally missing a page of paperwork that would have had no material impact on the sequence of events.
By comparison, we crossed the "murder American children by drones with no due process" threshold over a decade ago.
Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.
Yeah, that would have been a decent example for anyone in this thread to bring up as an example of the non-partisan civil libertarian bonefides.
Instead of what they've actually provided.
Which is literally nothing.
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2mo ago
I've been arguing about politics online for seven presidential administrations. If called to task for being a partisan, I can reference my old flame wars about the war in Iraq and W-era abortion laws as evidence that I am at least historically willing to be angry at Republicans. Can you really not think of a single time you made a post or comment or argument or shower tirade in which you were upset at progressives for some violation of procedure?
Cause that seems kinda telling.
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2mo ago
A better analogy: You are committing tax fraud. The IRS catches you. They apply a totally legal and 100% justified garnishment of your wages, and then afterwards discover that they missed a piece of paperwork they were supposed to sign making sure you didn't have prior mandated child support obligation.... which you don't have.
I simply don't believe you are holding this position in good faith. If the sacred processes are so important to you, then go up thread at rip the NY governor a new asshole.
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2mo ago
He is the one arguing for ‘the ends don’t justify the means’ non-consequentialism whereas you seem to be arguing that dropping the murder rate by 99% justifies an awful lot.
I understood his argument as being upset about anything beyond the absolute bare minimum quantity of harm being done in the prevention of a greater evil, via the trite rationalist framework of "bad things are bad, and I'm free to criticize everyone else for being less perfect than my pacifistic ivory tower ideals". Maybe he's not the kind of person who doesn't want to punish criminals because of a shallow "people experiencing bad things is bad!" moral understanding... but that's certainly the impression I was getting, especially with him citing Thing of Things like it's a fucking Gospel.
And you know what? We can have that conversation. But you have to be able to justify the claims of unnecessary cruelty, and have to make at least some effort to weigh the pros and cons, and to account for cultural differences, too. And unfortunately, bro seems to be incapable of even attempting a serious effort at that. It comes off like an Eloi asking why the El Salvadoran's just don't notlet bad things happen. It's the "let them eat cake" of criminal theory.
you seem to be arguing that dropping the murder rate by 99% justifies an awful lot.
Yes. And I can support that stance under any moral framework you like, from consequentialism to virtue ethics. But the secondary part is that there doesn't actually seem to be an "awful lot" to justify. People in this thread keep going off about EL SALVADORAN TORTURE PRISON, but none of the people I've asked have offered any evidence that's it's even particularly bad as far as prisons go. Hell, they haven't offered any evidence at all. And my own brief searching seems to suggest that the prison in question is less brutal than a normal American prison, because the prisoners are kept so locked down that they can't brutalize each other. There was a multi-day meltdown over the presumption that Garcia was being tortured and probably murdered... and he just met with a Senator and seemed pretty comfortable and fine, and didn't seem to have complaints of that nature.
So... maybe some people should grow up and at least try to justify any of the horseshit they're peddling. Alternatively, I'm free to point out that they sound like spoiled children.
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2mo ago
OK. So, I'm going infer from this response that you've never personally experienced a threat in your life, and your entire understanding of evil/harm comes from reading other extravagantly comfortable, myopic nerds playing sterile word games. On top of that, you have the classic complete absence of second order thinking, and refuse to even notionally entertain utilitarian calculations with more than one variable. Non-utilitarian considerations are quantum physics in Klingon.
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2mo ago
You mean removing people to a country for which they had a legally binding order withholding removal.
That's not a "step in the paperwork" kind of mistake.
Yeah, it is. There's a process for removing that order based on obviously changed relevant facts. AIUI, it doesn't even require a judge. The basis for his withholding order was no longer valid. Ergo, it's a step in the paperwork.
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2mo ago
You never answered that question the other day about exactly how incredibly privileged and sheltered you are. Why do you believe that you have shared values with the murder-cult warlords who were terrorizing a nation less than a handful of years ago? Why do you think that you know better the exact line that can be drawn on exactly how rough one must be to repress the murder-cult, compared to the politician who actually accomplished that? Have you ever successfully spearheaded any kind of harm reduction effort comparable to reducing a nation's murder rate by 99%?
And once again, please explain what the purportedly inhumane conditions are. When I looked, CNN said it was "spartan rooms" and the machismo-fueled murder-cult prisoners were made to kneel while their heads were shaved, which probably didn't make them feel very good.
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2mo ago
Will you concede that it's unacceptable to be 1/5k?
Nope. I don't find the actual error in question to be particularly meaningful. This dressing down to ignorant children who didn't do their homework sums up the state of discourse fairly well.
If you're going to say 1/5k is unacceptable, then I hope to see you advocating for burning down the entire government. The error rate for Medicaid payments seems to be something like 1 in 20. The Child Care & Development fund is bouncing between 9 and 13%. Apparently our own government can't even retire employees in a reasonably timely manner because almost 30% of the applications have errors
The IRS makes mistakes when taxing people less than 1% of the time... which is still 50 times worse than your "unacceptable" rate for "deporting people who were definitely supposed to be deported, but missing a step in the paperwork".
There's too many cites to bother linking them all, but I'm seeing false conviction rates ranging from 1-12%... including a purported 4% rate of executing innocent people that is in a paywalled National Geographic article I can only see a preview of.
Want to talk about drone strike error rates?
So, no. I'm not going to concede that a functionally irrelevant-to-outcome paperwork snafu happening in 1 in 5000 deportations is "unacceptable" in any meaningful way. That's actually wildly better than anything else I expect from our government and everyone who cares so, so, so deeply about processes apparently ought to be worshipping Tom Hooman and begging to put him in charge of other parts of the government, too.
I'm eagerly waiting for all the deeply sincere civil libertarians who were minted on January 6th, 2020, to come forward and angrily denounce these insurrectionists. I expect calls for Palantir to have them all IDed and then rounded up and fed into a woodchipper of a prosecution storm, including random grandmas who just happened to be at the protest, but too close to someone obstructing federal business.
Trump sends in the National Guard, Newsome looks like a pussy.
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