Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The Border Patrol didn't have toothbrushes or toothpaste or blankets or sheets on the border either. You might not have noticed, but they were reduced to herding people into pens under freeway overpasses for lack of places to put them.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
And how should I react in a way that would satisfy them? Donate money or time to organizations that provide aid to illegal immigrants?
Enforcing immigration law by turning away in a prompt and timely manner migrants not entitled to enter the country. Deporting those who manage to evade law enforcement and make it into the interior of the country. Cooperating with federal authorities to do so, particularly in the case of illegal migrants who abuse the host country's generosity by committing further crimes such as driving while intoxicated or battery. Improving migration-control infrastructure on the border, such as via the construction of walls or other significant barriers. Cracking down on NGOs acting to subvert U.S. immigration law. etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The tens of millions of undocumented, predominantly Latin American economic migrants living in the U.S. are not the result of refugee resettlement agencies and it is disingenuous to conflate the two issues.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Lawyers are enforcing the rules of the game.
Yeah, no, and being a regulatory lawyer in private practice is my day job. A lot of regulatory law is deliberately contorting and poking the process as hard and as wildly as possible, often in manners completely disconnected from the actual equities of the case, to achieve some sort of preferred policy result or outcome for the client.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
A significant portion of the border is extremely hazardous Sonoran desert where almost no-one lives on either side, so enforcement in those locations is quite difficult. A non-trivial number of migrants die every year attempting to cross the border in these sections.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This looks to me like a 2002 Democratic governor pulling some stunt regarding gay marriage while their own state hasn't legalized gay marriage.
You mean like how lawfare got national gay marriage invented by the Supreme Court while 31 states, including California, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Tennessee, Colorado, Washington, and Hawaii had state constitutional prohibitions on it?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I've always preferred "Run Away With Me" when it comes to the Jepsen ouevre, though for my money the best version is the Adam Neely arrangement...
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
"The federal government is either too incompetent, under-resourced, or ideologically-opposed to its own laws to enforce them! Mad about it? Clearly the solution is to impose a massive regulatory compliance burden on everyone else!!"
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
We have very little idea how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S., and estimates range from 10-11 million to 20 or 30. We know there will be approximately 2 million more than whatever the previous total was after this year, so it's safe to say that the number is dynamic. Also, it's unclear how many first-generation children of said illegal immigrants there are, who arguably ought not to be citizens either because Wong Kim Ark isn't exactly a paragon of judicial reasoning, and ius soli is not exactly an internationally-favored citizenship model.
Lastly, just because economic migrants from latin america have been coached by NGOs and cartel smugglers into "claiming asylum" at the border does not make their disingenuous cases anywhere close to the same as the cases of Iraqi or Afghani translators, or populations in danger of genocide like the Yazidis.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What makes you think Florida isn't? It took me all of a couple seconds of googling to find recent press releases trumpeting partnerships between florida state law enforcement agencies and ICE. Do you think that ICE isn't doing workplace raids in Florida? Do you think that Florida cops aren't referring individuals without immigration status to ICE? On what basis?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Ah yes, clearly we don't care about murder either, because people keep getting killed!
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I will often have a stream going on a second monitor as background noise while doing more mindless tasks like collecting and sibmitting billing records, or drafting "cookie cutter" documents that are 95% template.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This seems seriously confounded. Personally, I would put money on the size and reach of the "shy MAGA" effect increasing, rather than decreasing this election. Further, midterm elections are always odd in terms of mobilization and turnout. Further further, the Democrats do a very good job of goosing enthusiasm in certain places at certain times through the use of pop-up NGO/activist movements. I would hesitate to draw a conclusion about the effect of voting integrity measures from this one election alone, especially given that the most recent comparator elections - 2020 - were extremely irregular in terms of voting mechanics and enthusiasm and thus not likely a useful comparator for anything
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Man, your comment made my heart swell three sizes. In a world without culture war and racial spoils this take would be wonderful. But we do have culture war and racial spoils, so I can't take this optimistic a view of it.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
A world order may have cultural components, but at root it is about economic and geostrategic relationships. The American-led global order was created in order to (a) allow for American and capital to access all the resources of the western-aligned world, (b) to permit complex supply-chains to link America and its allies together into economic mutual interdependence, and (c) permit America to forward-station forces to keep the Soviets contained.
A China-led global order would not have the same motivations, so absent some forecasting of what the Chinese's politico-economic goals would be, cashing out what their system would look like is a fool's errand. I don't speak Chinese, so I can only tell you third- or fourth-hand what the current government's public-facing objectives are, and can't tell you at all what their public sentiment is, or what the Chinese version of "the Cathedral" is thinking. Absent that information, I don't think any discussion of this question is going to be all that fruitful, but ymmv.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Thank you for the good work, Trace.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
You can't "ensure" an absence of skin-color discrimination any more than a 7-Eleven can ensure that their minimum-wage, bored clerks never get lazy and sell a beer to an underage purchaser. All you can do is make clear that you don't like it, and refuse to deal with people who engage in it.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Criminal law is absolutely not a "method of knowing." It is a method for sorting through socially-disapproved conduct. The jury is not engaged in an epistemological analysis; they're exercising raw judgment. "Do we want to put up with this?" "Is that excusable?" "Does he seem like a person who should be expelled from civilization?"
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I wrestle with this a lot. The problem is that I cannot imagine a society in which the justice system is functional and honest and honors the spirit of the law as much as its letter...but also has to deal with the crime, disorder, and lack of public trust problems that our current governments do. Corruption, decay, and criminality feed ravenously on idealistic purity until everyone's down at their level just to survive. So paradoxically the society which needs the judiciously and wisely-administered death penalty the most, is precisely the one that one ought to trust least with carrying it out. I don't have a good answer for this.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Wait, wasn't Matteo Salvini of Lega (which, iirc, used to promote Northern Italy seceding from the dysfunctional south) basically in control of the Italian government for a while during the last few years? Wasn't the other major party involved in that government the M5S, which I've heard described as "Italian Bernie-bros, but led by Italian!Jon Stewart"? Seems like antiestablishment populism of both the left and right has been the name of the game in Italian politics for a while, no? Why would Meloni be a significant departure? Is there some reason to think she's going to better at marshalling the Italian state to actually get right wing things done? Will she prosecute or sink the migrant flotillas/NGOs helping them? Will she engage in mass-deportations? Does she have some particularly-populist financial plan to boost native TFR? Is she going to stage mass weddings like Alexander with his generals and the Persians? What?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It is if your audience is American, and needs a translation and/or some context-by-analogy. It's definitely vulnerable to bad-faith mischaracterizing or misunderstanding, but it beats just throwing out a random name that no-one knows much about and providing nothing...
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I don't think it's people on the bottom who espouse the idea of "knowing one's place"
I don't think there's any particular juncture to fascism here, but the Vendee was a poor region in France and fought back hard against the Revolutionaries (though there appears to be a large historiographical debate over the degree to which the Vendeans were ideological as opposed to just pissed about conscription and/or taxes).
A second, different piece of evidence might be taken from the awful reception the Russian narodniki received during the "Going to the People" attempted uplift of peasant and communal livelihood during the late 19th century - the poor peasants reacted very badly to ideas of overturning society, even to their alleged benefit; they also reacted badly to modern agronomy, medicine, religious skepticism, and literacy. Quite invested in "their place in the world," at least to hear the narodniks write about it.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What happens if/when China calls our bluff and finally invades Taiwan? Will we have blown our load too early?
What load? The deniable, old stuff we're sending poor Ukrainian dirt farmers to fight a trench war on the black-soil steppe is different from the material we've already sold and cross-trained the Taiwanese on. Remember a few months ago that big controversy over whether we would assist the Poles in transferring old ex-Soviet MiG and/or Sukhoi fighters to the Ukrainians? Yeah, we already sell the Taiwanese F-16s, which we most assuredly have not depleted our stocks of over the Ukrainians. Etc., etc.
That's even assuming the Chinese have the capacity to load a couple million people on boats and drop them off in Taiwan without having them starve 12 hours later, which I doubt.
Ah yes, that's why they're comparing this to literally hitler.
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