TheFooder
1mo ago
Becky Burke, British Comic Book person returns home after 11 day ICE detention https://comicscene.substack.com/p/becky-burke-returns-home-after-us
The link isn't the best link, just the first. I googled the story and found dozens of articles that all say the same basic thing.
- 28 yo travels America since January; ~50 days on a 90 day visa
- At some point she tries to cross into Canada to go to Vancouver; The Canadians say no--you have the wrong visa and send her back
- Upon returning to the other side of the border, the Americans say, "You were working on a guest visa, that means jail and deportation." Becky + Lawyers claim she was only doing 'chores' with a host family. 'Chores' are never defined, detailed or discussed.
- 11 days in an ICE detention center; trauma for life and some great comic book material.
- Red, red meat for Europeans looking to make hay with Trump. This story is (apparently) all over the UK right now.
I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.
Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?
I'm confused by this. On one hand, Trump wants ICE to be extra hard-core and now naive Zoomers are getting swept up with bad Visas. Ok, that sucks. Shit happens. Perhaps in a kindler, gentler America we would have given them a tongue lashing and sent them home, now we jail them for a week and a half. Seems...unnecessary, but I guess the message is sent: don't come here and try to get away with doing work. Very bad!
On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place? I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.' I've heard of this happening with musicians or DJs who fly into Canada as tourists only to play a gig and get busted for working. I don't think it's great, but I get why it happens. Was Becky sketching the family as part of her 'chores'? Was she doing farm work? Was she cleaning dishes and sending Instagrams about it? Did she tell ICE she had been working? Like, what the heck happened? Is this another case of "lying to cops is the only rational response," and she got swept up in a dragnet fishing for gormless fools?
A separate article mentioned this recently happened to two other people (both females...coincidence?) who were arrested because they were possibly working on travel visas. One was a German tattoo artists, who, based on the scant evidence provided in the article, seems to have been travelling with her inking gear and also worked on a prior trip to the US. The third lady is an actress who somehow didn't have the right visa either and ended up in ICE detention for a few weeks. For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.
My instinct is that these are the horrifying yet rare circumstances that sell news copy but don't really say much about American immigration and customs enforcement. At the same time, I dunno...Trump, man. Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud? The information I accessed is so vague and so focused on the 'horrible treatment' I can't really get a picture of what happened, so I presume there's more going on and that if I knew what it was it would make me less sympathetic to the victim.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed? I'm hearing a lot about the Dept of ED because of my sister who worked there, and she has told me that everyone else she's talking to says they are going to be let go soon, but I can't tell if that's true or just people trying to make her feel better. For what it's worth, I live in an area replete with Federal workers--like every other person, it seems. There is a lot of anger and frustration, but not much clarity. So far, it seems like Dept of ED and USAID have had the most dramatic cuts, but people from DHS and Transport are claiming they will lose their jobs 'any day now.'
I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.
Curious if anyone has any good sources on the bigger picture of how many cuts there have been in total.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Demanding rigor in a rhetorical cage match is a fatality. OP's statement was clear and google-able at a copy/paste, first-result level. The off-handed claim about Alabama sucking didn't help either, some around here might call it a dog-whistle. Anyway, save your battles.
Claim: it's dangerous for different states to adopt different standards from each other.
- Would state A risk an invasion by an entire state-B population of underachieving morons--with no economic, political or militaristic boundaries between states as protection?
- When do states have the right to fight each other?
- Should we expect that all of our elites will eventually be foreigners because we've dumbed down our back bench?
- How do you prevent bad localized ideas, un-scientific methods, and fads from chewing through the populace?
- What are the controls?
- What happens to national culture?
- How will we get people to continue to drink milk?
- What will we do if we suddenly realize we've made a bad national decision? Dept. II: Edu-harder?
- How will we recognize or measure the impact of losing the department/relying on individual states?
- Is it all just money--or lack thereof?
- How will the universities--and by extension small communities supported by such schools--survive without a government college grants program? Is it like moving a highway?
- Does all of this work to raise the prestige of the Ivy's, Stanford, etc.?
- Will it be a boom-time for community colleges and State universities?
- Like...worst of all...what if it works?
TheFooder
1mo ago
I guess we're talking about state's rights here and it reminded me that by finally settling Roe v Wade and forcing it to the states, not only have we found most states are able to find a position fairly quickly (and I'd guess more favorable to the left overall) but it has completely annihilated it as a presidential campaign issue. I would expect that Education now moves off the table as something a candidate can run on...
UNLESS...people can tally the cost. This is hard because the data that tells us how schools are doing comes from Dept of ED and now those reports will just be gone. Or perhaps haphazardly and randomly tabulated by the states. Another pseudo-metric washed away into the swill bucket with CPI, Jobless claims and GDP.
The good news is that you won't even know if it fails.
TheFooder
1mo ago
https://www.newsweek.com/math-reading-scores-us-states-2022836
1 second of googling.
TheFooder
1mo ago
Well, I used to live in Illinois. I'm not sure they could figure out how to bake an ice cream sandwich.
TheFooder
1mo ago
My problem with it is they never once question the mission. They believe deeply in it and they are (were) efficient at it and scientifically minded (my sister is one of the hated PhDs that was just fired, FWIW), but they simply never question the deeply held belief that every child must be educated and every person should go to college. And these two big beliefs are stressing the hell out of schools and individuals respectively. Schools are bogged down in lawsuits and budget constraints while they try to make sure even the most disabled people get a HS diploma and we have a saturated market for grads and post-grads who are simply not realizing the financial 'promise' of their degrees. I read that post and thought...so what? It changes nothing.
TheFooder
1mo ago
You probably need to start off with a secret or higher security clearance.
TheFooder
1mo ago
I was absolutely sincere, very confused why you thought it was threat. I think Doxxing is about the most evil and dishonorable thing you can do with the Internet. I consider Swatting a form of doxxing.
What other argument--aside from "moral high ground" is there to not dox people?
TheFooder
1mo ago
It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.
I, as a person who hates and argues against the act of doxxing--regardless of who is involved, have just met an argument I can't defeat.
"Moral High Ground?" Fuggedabout it.
TheFooder
1mo ago
I just re-opened my Everquest2 account. So...yes?
I don't play many modern video games anymore, probably for all the reasons. I thought Diablo 4 was absolute dog shit, No Man's Sky was boring, Gloomhaven was fun but ridiculously time consuming and pretty much every other game I turn on turns me off in the first 5 minutes. I just figure I'm getting too old for this stuff and now I just want to piddle around for an hour or two harvesting resources and grinding stupid, pointless quests for crap gear.
I think the single thing I hate most about all games in the past 10 years is the pathological need to turn everything into a story. I don't care about the plot, I don't care about the NPCs, I don't care about voice actors or dialog or the poetry of the stars. I want decent mechanics and an interesting gameplay, maybe hidden stuff or puzzles. I think the last game I really liked was Fez, though I played the Conan MMO for untold hours. I was playing Hogwarts Legacy with my kid, which isn't bad, but even that can't seem to hold our attention. All she wants to dink-donk around in Roblox and build little towns in Minecraft.
TheFooder
1mo ago
If you deport someone they're off the books. If you Gtimo someone you have to pay for feeding tubes for life.
TheFooder
2mo ago
It seems to me that Musk might be one of the only people with a positive vision of the future, even if one finds it totally ludicrous. Everything else is rear-guard action and accomplishes very little.
TheFooder
2mo ago
Arent there active campaigns coming up in the next few months? Like to replace congress people and governors? I'd presume they want cash for that stuff.
TheFooder
2mo ago
Wholeheartedly agree. I don't know what happened but I can barely even finish an article these days and I stopped paying him after the first year was up. It seems like there's a lot of "own-side" bias creeping in but also just some amount of laziness. Your point about straw-men hits, that's something I see a lot of lately. Maybe it's bad incentives? A different type of audience and audience capture? I'm really at a loss, but I've definitely lost a lot of interest in what Scott has to say these past few years.
TheFooder
2mo ago
I would have to imagine if they can apy 5 million dollars they will be relatively high quality.
That's funny because I would presume they're drug kingpins, grifters and mafiosos.
TheFooder
2mo ago
I feel like that would fit my theor that the Dems have been hoisting flags and wearing belief that force them into ever smaller corners. They can't act because they, through their own speech, have outlawed the beliefs needed to act.
exactly
More options
Context Copy link