Shakes
1d ago
Well I guess I mean that Trump is sort of ridiculous, which makes his enemies even more ridiculous when they take his jokes seriously.
Shakes
1d ago
Look, if you want to insult me, just tell me to go fuck myself, that's honestly more polite than this smug indirection. What exactly are you expecting here? We elevated extremely grainy and vague footage into national importance, don't insult my intelligence by pretending that it's oh-so-clear and I'm the dumb one. He had a gun, something happened as it was being confiscated from him, and then ICE shot him. From some angles it appears very plausible that the gun went off and spooked everyone, which is a thing that happens. The benefit of my suggestion is that it requires neither that Alex Pretti was actually secretly trying to shoot ICE agents, nor that ICE is actually a fascist rogue police state. Accidents happen!
Shakes
1d ago
Who cares if they were novel? What difference does that make? The government tried to have millions of us fired because we didn't want to take a vaccine that didn't even work. Imagine for a second that the vaccine cured homosexuality or made everyone white. Imagine that the government wanted to make everyone get their bodyfat percentage calculated. ?
Shakes
1d ago
The weaponization of the justice department without even a pretense that things aren't political.
Manafort, Bannon, Roger Stone, George Papadapolous, Pete Navarro, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Trump himself, etc. etc. etc. The idea that the last DOJ had a "pretense that things aren't political" is doing a lot of work here, come on now.
Augustus never disbanded the Senate; he didn't just disband everything Star Wars style and declare himself emperor. But nonetheless he ran over previous norms and altered the constitution of Rome forever, becoming the quintessential (pre-modern) authoritarian.
Is authoritarianism just whenever the executive isn't constrained from doing things?
Shakes
1d ago
Shooting someone who was at that time unarmed in the back because you thought they were armed looks bad.
He did have a gun. The likeliest explanation seems like it went off as it was being confiscated from him.
The ICE deployment to MN is not in itself a milestone on the path to fascism. Nor is them killing two people in error. The fact that both of them were slandered as domestic terrorists by Trump officials is much more concerning.
Well, they are part of antifa signal groups explicitly creating checkpoints in and out of the city, harassing journalists and private citizens, obstructing the police, and organizing to seize the state's monopoly on violence. They are all knowingly several steps past peaceful protest.
If you want to steelman the rise of fascism thesis, you could instead focus on Trump undermining elections, as he did in 2020 when he flat out denied the outcome.
Talking past the sale? I've still yet to receive a good explanation for why several swing states stopped counting votes simultaneously at 3am and then, when counting resumed, it turned out there were hundreds of thousands of ballots more to count than there had been before, that all magically went for Biden in the needed ratios.
Likewise, Trump's recent call to nationalize the election seems dangerous.
Noted fascist countries Japan, France, Pakistan, Iraq. Taking elections out of the hands of Cook County, Illinois is a dangerous step on the path to fascism. (?)
Shakes
1d ago
https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/border-patrol-statistics-on-illegal-crossings/
Skepticism about basic observable reality -- I can clearly remember a year ago when Biden's administration had a monumental border crisis -- is a little tiring. It's a simple google search, it's not a complicated question, unless the theory is that the Trump admin is systematically covering up a crisis at the border, come on. Who really denies that the border is more stable now than it was under Biden? Is this under dispute?
Shakes
2d ago
I assumed these facts were common enough to not need citation.
Trump's deportation numbers are trivially higher when you remember that Obama and Biden counted "turnbacks" at the border as deportations
Shakes
2d ago
The right got so tired of losing that to some extent it redefined winning to mean “a Republican president doing anything”.
Republican victories post-Trump that would have been seen as Republican victories pre-Trump:
- Largest deportation wave in fifty years
- Most secure border in a generation
- Major tax cuts
- Destruction of several federal government agencies
- Mass federal government layoffs
- Deregulation
- DEI Rollback
- Three supreme court justices, first conservative supreme court in generations
- End of Roe v. Wade
- Ending affirmative action
These aren't even ambiguous, these don't require us to argue about complex economic data, these are not things that would have happened under a Democratic president, and these are (mostly) things that did not happen under the last Republican president. If you want to argue that Republicans gave up on their old ideas because nobody ten years ago cared about Greenland or tariffs, you have an unconvincing argument. You might not be a Republican, but Republicans are happy with Trump, have consistently awarded him very high approval ratings among Republicans throughout both of Trump's terms. What's the argument? Republicans don't know their own interests?
Shakes
2d ago
And this poor reasoning is what leads to things like Trump pardoning literal cop beaters. It's easy to say that he must just support political violence if it's done in his name, but it's more likely the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies since the start simply can not fathom that some people who support him might be bad.
That's just what loyalty is. You don't only reward people who are loyal to you when they're good people. Otherwise loyalty doesn't mean anything. You can't really pathologize that as "the man who has shown tribalistic tendencies". We're all tribalistic. That's what tribe means, it's inherent in the definition of the concept. You're just professing that your tribe requires you to misunderstand Trump's tribe.
Trump is incredibly petty and targets people with his hate and insults all the time for minor disagreements or push back and this has a genuine silencing effect. Like there's only a handful of Republican politicians who have pushed back openly on tariffs or stuff like his price controls and expansion of the executive power and and this is from the historic "free trade party" and "party of small government", and those politicians are mostly the libertarians like Rand Paul and the retiring ones like Tillis.
There is probably no politician in modern times who has been criticized as much by his own party apparatus as Donald Trump has been. To the extent that that isn't obvious in the year 2026 it's because we've now had ten years of Trump fighting and winning with officials in his own party.
Shakes
2d ago
Whatever distinction you're drawing isn't supported by any of your examples.
Trump demands absolute loyalty from his servants.
Yeah, that's what it means to be a servant. Your lord is greater by you, what you have to offer is your loyalty and faith. That's literally how that works. This isn't unique to Trump -- the Clintons demanded loyalty, the Bushes demanded loyalty, the Bidens demanded loyalty, Truman demanded loyalty. How else is it supposed to work? The world runs on mob logic.
But people on the right are permitted to believe almost anything at all.
No one "permits" the right to believe anything. This is a political coalition, made up of adults, adults have separate bodies and separate wills. This is a silly framing.
Trump himself believes in almost nothing.
This sounds nice if you never listen to any of Trump's speeches where he propounds the same ideas now he was propounding thirty years ago, as if Trump is just this kind of cipher where we never know what he's thinking. Huh?
Democrats get absolutely no loyalty from their servants. Bernie Sanders can have his rally commandeered by random loud black women.
Voters and random protesters are not Democrats' servants. Bernie Sanders absolutely has loyal servants, he's been in politics for fifty years, he has staffers and allies. You are not keeping a job working for Bernie Sanders on the Hill if you are demonstrably disloyal.
Obama and Biden can be decried as war criminals for carrying out ordinary presidential duties.
I know right-wingers who call Trump a race-traitor and cuck for the same.
Biden can have his entire presidency undermined by professional staff who think they know better than him. He can have the entire blue team apparatus flagellate him for exercising the presidential pardon for his own son.
Is your argument that this never happened to Trump? That the red team apparatus has never flagellated Trump?
Shakes
8d ago
You are not for democracy or rule of law if you are against deporting criminal illegal aliens
Shakes
8d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city
A sanctuary city is a municipality that limits or denies its cooperation with the national government in enforcing immigration law.
In the United States, municipal policies include prohibiting police or city employees from questioning people about their immigration status and refusing requests by national immigration authorities to detain people beyond their release date, if they were jailed for breaking local law.
In July 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle was fatally shot by an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported 5 times. The shooting took place in San Francisco, a sanctuary city, sparking national debate over immigration and sanctuary city policies.
Shakes
9d ago
Liberalism and democracy is deporting tens of millions of illegals, as the law says we will, as voters repeatedly affirmed they wanted. That’s why it’s called illegal!
Shakes
9d ago
That’s what sanctuary cities do — convicted criminals sit in jails that are not allowed to coordinate with ICE. That’s the whole policy. When their sentences end, they’re released. The federal government is not given notice or record. On top of that you now have liberal judges and jurisdictions considering immigration status as a condition for leniency in sentencing — you can’t give illegals the same sentences as Americans because that could lead to them being deported.
Shakes
9d ago
We couldn't deport them to Venezuela because Venezuela was run by Maduro, who refused to accept them.
Moreover this framing of El Salvador's prisons as a "torture prison" is inherently a little dishonest. Define "torture". In Sweden they would call American prisons torturous because we don't give criminals Xbox and weed. Singapore still uses the cane. El Salvador had a massive gang problem, the highest murder rate in the world, they put all the criminals in jail. That's bad, apparently. Now we're not allowed to deport gang members there because liberal journalists say it's inhumane, we're more enlightened than that. Why do I have to accept this characterization of Bukele's jails as "torture prisons"? It's a prison, it's not supposed to be fun.
Shakes
9d ago
Yeah that's how they get you, first they say it's just about basic due process and preventing torture, then suddenly we're not allowed to deport convicted pedophiles and murderers. The bleeding hearts who let in tens of millions of illegal immigrants are now concerned about the rule of law. We're not acting out this inverse morality play anymore. Let's deport this shadow society of tens of millions of criminals who are outside the rule of law first.
Shakes
9d ago
Sorry, your enemies were never going to just let you do it. "Bleeding hearts have a veto so we have to do what they want!" You'll do things the "moderate" and "humane" way and then they'll say it still isn't good enough and you need to do better. This is how you lose before you even try.
Everything Trump is doing right now is the moderate option. This is all right and just. We are going to deport illegal aliens and criminals no matter how many blue voters say we aren't allowed because it's mean.
Shakes
10d ago
It’s hard for me to have any sympathy for this position.
Tens of millions of illegal immigrants came into this country over decades, then President Biden enabled millions more. They made an app so anyone could apply for asylum and wait in the US while their claims processed (designed to take years if they ever even happened). Welfare, work authorization, no verification. Crime, gangs, murderers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, the works. People came pouring into this country. The worst of them are now sitting in jail cells across the country, known to local authorities. And we can’t deport them because bleeding heart liberals think it’s mean. We want to deport all the criminals, we want the murderers and pedophiles gone, and your actions are preventing us. You don’t want to cooperate with ICE, ok, then we are going to have to focus on deporting the illegals who aren’t sitting in jail cells. And some of them, I assume, are good people.
And we’re not going to give them all trials, they’re here illegally, deportation is their due process. Maybe in a gentler time we could have been nicer. That time is over because our immigration process was abused by the same bleeding heart liberals saying we can’t deport criminals. Cry me a river, give me a break. I don’t care if a few hundred Venezuelans with gang tattoos get deported to an El Salvadoran jail. It’s fake news of the media to suggest that we’re just kidnapping random legal immigrants and putting them in death camps.
Can Trump be trusted to deport immigrants humanely? No, because you made that impossible. This is what you wanted, this is what sanctuary cities are. We don’t have law anymore. We let in millions of immigrants and millions of criminals then said we aren’t even allowed to deport the ones who were so bad they still ended up in jail. Ok, what’s your next move? You can protest and riot in the streets and incite more bleeding hearts to pick fights with cops until more people get shot. Humane! As long as the bleeding hearts feel good.
Shakes
10d ago
"ICE doesn't have any credibility because I believe in fake news"
That's more or less how that parses to me. "Sending innocent people to a foreign torture prison?" El Salvador was the murder capital of the world until Bukele locked up all the gangs, so now ICE can't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele will put some in jail? Ridiculous, realize your own part in escalating this conflict because leftist rioters think we aren't allowed to legally deport people the easy way. ICE could be deporting convicted criminals straight out of jail, it would be the easiest thing in the world, all it takes is local officials cooperating with ICE -- oh, but that hurts leftwing bleeding heart feelings so we can't do that.
Shakes
10d ago
ICE has deployed approximately 3000 federal agents to Minneapolis. Supposing ICE is in fact, after the bad guys, they should probably be done by now, because they only had to arrest five people each in order to get all of the highly criminal illegals out.
ICE can't arrest anyone efficiently when they're being obstructed and protested. Isn't that what you're asking for?
Why don't they hang out outside the county jail and question people on their immigration status there on their release? Why don't they hang out at the courthouse - recall, a judge was just convicted of obstruction for preventing ICE from arresting someone at a hearing, they can sit in the gallery and question everyone's immigration status at the end of every hearing! You would be much more likely to arrest people guilty of criminal acts if you did this, than going door to door and getting into fights with protestors.
Because dragnet enforcement is very legally fraught when local officials won't cooperate by providing access to records, defendants, warrants, etc.
Like, I don't get it, you're asking why ICE can't act more moderately while supporting the very protests that are obstructing them from acting moderately! Why is my steak so overcooked, I only asked for it well done.
Shakes
12d ago
In for a penny in for a pound, you can’t back down now or leftists internalize that they have a veto over Trump policies. They can make anything “not an effective way” by protesting loudly enough.
Shakes
14d ago
I don't think "gymbro" is anti-woke, it's a pretty common archetype in the culture now. "Gymbros" are harmless. They're even a little cute. They're not quite on the level of "goofy TV sitcom Dad" or "that whiteboi can dance," but they're largely a safe idea. Guardian-Vox hitpieces on "The alt-right lifts weights and eats meat" mostly failed and didn't permeate neutral corporate space.
Unrelatedly, I hate the new cultural obsession with "protein". What the hell is protein? Chicken, I know what that is, beef, pork, shrimp, but everything is "protein" now. We've idealized this raw macromolecule into being a good in and of itself, it can do no wrong, it's healthy! Slather it up in sunflower oil, bread it and fry it, shove the cow in a pigpen and bathe it in its own shit, feed the salmon corn and lock it in a cage, whatever, it doesn't matter what quality it is, it's protein, and protein is good for you. I'm not making a moral objection here -- aesthetically, I think the whole "category" of protein is gross. I don't care how high chicken measures in protein per calorie, diced burrito chicken is gross, I don't want it. I don't need to protein-load my quesadilla or milkshake, I will take however much is pleasing to eat. I don't condition my enjoyment of a steak knowing that it's protein, it fits the right ontological category, it's one of the five basic elemental categories, it's the good one. No, I enjoy steak because it's delicious. And if it's not delicious I'd rather just eat some mashed potatoes or pineapple juice or chocolate cake or pasta, quelle surprise, even without meat.
Profiling obviously works, when we abolish it cops can't stop teenagers in the hood while we all pretend it's fine that the TSA gives extra pat-downs to grandma. You profile everyone relentlessly every day of your life, it's drawing patterns from observations, it's how cognition works. Throw infinite quantities of money down a blackhole because AI keeps profiling and the principled anti-racists say it shouldn't be allowed to do that. I think this attitude is anti-civilization, if we have to jump through hoops to act on information everyone obviously knows is reasonable, what are we even doing here? We know where the illegal immigrants are coming from, we know what they probably look like. Sorry for anyone mistakenly detained for five minutes while ICE works through the exceptions, it's a minor inconvenience we promise, until the lawyers get involved. Along similar lines, we can't kill criminals anymore, because activists made the death penalty so expensive, so now they say we should just get rid of it entirely. No thanks, let's profile all the illegal immigrants so we can deport them faster and have a country again, I can put up with a little racism in the process.
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