TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
24m ago
The left broadly owned up to screwing up over Biden's age. Could you imagine MAGA doing anything remotely similar, i.e. saying "yes our enemies were broadly right about this particular issue, and we have no choice but to change our strategy"?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29m ago
Hard agree with Scott here: MAGA's refusal to try to rein in Trump when he does something silly is not a fluke, it's an essential part of the cult of personality that MAGA has become. The fact that the usual suspects are working backwards trying to justify it from nearly any angle (many of which are mutually conflicting, but they broadly don't bother trying to rationalize their defenses) should update the priors of anyone who thought MAGA was an ideological movement rather than a cult built around aggrandizing the whims of a single capricious man.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
46m ago
The US could have told the Europeans to more firmly eat shit when they suggested intervening, and it likely would have proceeded in the same way that many other African insurrections have, i.e. it would be over quickly... or maybe it wouldn't, but in either case it wouldn't be our problem. Unless of course it became another power-vacuum that allowed a proto-ISIS to rise. In any case the US was probably more deferential to European calls to intervene given how they helped the US to some extent in its wars in Afghanistan + Iraq, and there were a lot of people wondering if NATO had any purpose any more, so they probably hoped to kill multiple birds with one stone and ensure NATO didn't look like "all for me, none for thee".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
51m ago
Libya was already in what could only be classified as a fullblown civil war well before the French pushed NATO to intervene. The country had already functionally split in half, with pitched battles between the rebels and state forces.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
My prior is that Congressional Democrats, State Department Bureaucrats, White House staffers, DNC operatives, and Democrat-controlled media all move more-or-less in lockstep.
The best counterexample I can give is how Biden handled Israel-Palestine. Much of the leftist base along with some true-believer DNC operatives and parts of the media are very much pro-Palestine, and wanted Biden to basically say "fuck Israel". He didn't do this, and it was an ongoing point of tension within the Dem coalition for most of Biden's presidency.
Another counterexample would be to read up on Matthew Yglesias' take on "The Groups", and how during the Biden admin it seemed like on many policies (with the exception of things like the aforementioned Israel issue) the base got to functionally overwrite what the President wanted. Furthermore, it seemed like Harris would have liked to pivot harder to the center if she could have, but the base was fractious enough that there were concerns about wide defections, so Harris ended up being a mealy-mouthed "something for everybody" candidate.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
It sounds like we agree that "shall" implies a requirement from the POV of the courts then, and it's really a question of whether or not it's enforceable. Note that the specific types of legal challenges we're talking about are mostly a Biden-era thing. Bush and Clinton were before my time so there may have been something there that I'm unaware of, but during Obama's tenure there wasn't really any serious challenges in the vein of "hey can you enforce like any immigration restrictions at all?" The major Republican legal challenge that I remember was against DAPA, which functionally would have led to Obama not enforcing immigration laws on a certain category of people, but Obama lost and DAPA died. During that time we were still in the era where Presidents followed the orders of courts without additional enforcement needed from plaintiffs alleging harms, so when the courts ruled against DAPA that was functionally the end of the conversation.
With that in mind, the courts ruling against Republican plaintiffs during Biden's tenure look less like "courts will always just find ways to screw Republicans on immigration", and more like the laws just weren’t prepared to handle these types of situations since they weren’t the anticipated issue when the laws were written. This is just an argument for writing better/updated laws. The AZ v Biden case you cite has the court saying “shall” doesn’t always necessitate action if certain discretion is required or implicitly left to the Executive, but again, this is just a matter of writing well-worded laws that don’t have that issue. When Congress couples “shall” with a detailed statutory scheme that leaves no gap for agency choice, the courts have consistently treated those duties as legally enforceable, and even gone so far as to vacate rules and enjoin the Executive when it violated them.
Your insistence on me producing cases that prove all the points I’m saying in one package is putting the cart before the horse. I can prove the individual points, like:
• The courts are willing to rule in favor of Republicans on immigration generally (e.g. DAPA)
• Well-written “shall” rules are interpreted as requirements by the courts (Nielsen v Preap)
• The legislature can explicitly give litigants the standing to enforce “shall” rules
And all these points taken together would logically imply that well-written immigration legislation would materially help Republicans enforce the law even if there was a Democratic President. But if you want me to give you a court case that does all of those together at the same time, then I really can’t since those laws haven’t been written yet, and I do not possess a time machine.
Do you want me to give a list of your behaviors in this thread and the last thread that are "just obnoxious"?
If you think I've behaved in an unreasonable manner, then yes I'd like to hear it so I can improve. Note that I draw a pretty strict line between talking about public figures + political movements generally, and talking about people participating in the conversation right now. Criticisms of the former are granted significantly more leeway both to understand priors and as an acknowledgement of the innately heated nature of political discussions, but there's a much higher level of decorum expected (from me) and required (to generally have productive debates) for the latter. E.g. calling Trump a buffoon is fine, but if I called you a buffoon that would not be fine. Calling MAGA broadly a Trump cult of personality movement is fine, but if I called you a Trump cultist, that would not be fine. I think I've done a pretty good job abiding by that distinction in these conversations. Again, if you think I haven't feel free to point it out. I think you're not observing the proper decorum with statements like "Do you think it's a coincidence that you keep conveniently making this class of mistake?" and I don't think I'm forcing you to "bend over backwards in the interests of politeness" here. I've said nothing like that to you, and I ask you extend the same courtesy to me.
The conversation you linked where I posted that was a particular case where they functionally said "I think you're meaning to say , but you actually sound like , and with that in mind can you make points to clarify", where I replied with "well, I think you guys sound like , and with that in mind can you make points to clarify". I wouldn't have started down that line of my own volition, but I found what they said had some usefulness so I gave them my own perspective.
MAGA would generally refer to the political movement of Donald Trump along with his supporters, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism. Most people readily understand what I mean when I use the term. Again, your line of argument very closely mimics the old debates we'd have against wokes/SJWs/social justice leftists/political correctness/identity politics. If you truly think another term is better, please state it rather than further charging out into the bailey of "because you use this descriptive term I don't like, that ought to give everyone carte blanche to ignore everything you're saying". This new term would need to fulfill the following conditions: 1) people intuitively understand what it means without having to define it every time I use it; 2) the rest of MAGA could get behind the term and would see not see it as just another step on the euphemism treadmill; 3) the term is short enough that it flows nicely. I could find + replace every time I use MAGA with "supporters of Donald Trump, especially those who strongly identify with his policy agenda, style, and brand of populist-nationalism", but that would be extremely tedious and wouldn't flow well at all.
Wokes could never find a reasonable term that satisfied all 3 conditions, and I doubt you could in this situation here either.
Yeah, that's approximately correct.
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