daezor
1mo ago
This necessarily means that any rival ideology claiming to be conservative is actually at best regressive or at worst wholly unrelated to conservatism, since the de-facto conservatives hate being called conservative.
To elaborate on this point: The accusation of LARPing is most pertinent when it's "LARPing as trad", which is a sort of performative contradiction. The original sense of "tradition" (from Latin traditio) is "that which has been handed down", and not (as in colloquial usage) "the way things were at some point in the past" - but this equivocation is significant. The value of tradition qua tradition is in the Lindy effect, but if that's what you care about, a "tradition" that must be "RETVRNed" to is really no tradition at all, but a LARP. If the tradition (as in, the organic chain of transmission) was broken, such that you have to learn about it from old books rather than from your elders, then in fact it did not stand the test of time, and so it can't claim the Lindy effect to its credit.
daezor
2mo ago
The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
See this comment in response to this point.
The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people.
Whatever one may think about universal rights in an abstract philosophical sense, the fact remains that the US government is not an all-powerful deity sitting above humanity in judgement thereof, but is a collection of finite human beings who live in a particular time and place and have only a limited capacity to impose their will on the world. When the US goes around the world trying to spread democracy and human rights by force, it has generally not been very successful. It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
daezor
2mo ago
due process afforded to US citizens to do things like prove they're a citizen in court
This equivocation on "due process" is a motte-and-bailey because the amount of process required to establish whether or not somebody is a citizen is far simpler than, and falls far short of, the due process (trial by jury, assistance of counsel, confrontation of witnesses, right to appeal, etc.) which is constitutionally required in criminal trials. The fact that Abrego Garcia is not a citizen (and is an illegal immigrant) has never been disputed by him or by anyone else, even though he has been through several administrative hearings (which, again, do not count as "due process" in the legal sense because of the lack of jury etc.) at which he could have presented proof of citizenship if he had it.
I will start to worry about my own safety and that of other US citizens if it comes out that the "administrative error" that led to Abrego Garcia being sent to El Salvador was one that was just as likely to have caught up an American citizen. However, that doesn't appear to be the case here. The government picked up a bunch of people from a list of deportation orders from immigration judges, not realizing that in Abrego Garcia's case the order specifically excluded El Salvador. If he were a citizen, no such order would've existed and so he would not have been deported.
And they're already making mistakes mixing up citizens with illegal immigrants
Again correct me if I'm wrong (since this is not purely academic but a matter of immediate self-interest for me to know correctly one way or the other if I'm in danger of deportation) but this has the appearance of a software bug where immigrants listed this attorney's contact info as their own and so a message meant for them was instead sent to the attorney. I don't think there's any realistic chain of events by which this attorney ends up being deported because of this.
daezor
2mo ago
The crux of the Abrego Garcia controversy is a dispute about who "morally" counts as an American citizen.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
But the thing is, this is already the case. The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible. (The US government must be able to value the citizen's return at less than infinity, or else they lose all negotiating leverage.) On the other hand, the government can drone-strike a citizen abroad without due process, and while that may stir up political pushback here at home, there are effectively no legal repercussions.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
To which the pro-Abrego Garcia camp will gesture around at the crowd of protesters they've assembled, waving "Free Abrego Garcia!" signs, and say "Great, come join us. Here's your sign!"
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed. For them, it is simply obvious that the failure of the Abrego Garcia advocacy has no implications whatsoever for the success of the hypothetical advocacy on behalf of a fellow citizen, and this is no cause for cognitive dissonance because citizens and illegal-immigrant non-citizens are two entirely separate categories.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable. If there is factional dispute over this basic question, then morally speaking there is no nation, but multiple distinct nations that happen to find themselves all mixed up in the same land. But I'm sure this is no great surprise.
daezor
7mo ago
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/us/ballot-box-fires-oregon-washington/index.html
The boxes are about 15 miles apart. The one in Vancouver is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where one of the most competitive House races in the country is taking place.
This seems to point to #2 - this was coordinated across state lines and not some spur-of-the-moment thing. But I can only speculate as to what the local anarchists think they're accomplishing by doing this. Maybe it's a far-left accelerationist thing: "We want Trump to win while Kamala supporters think it's rigged, so that the system will be discredited in the eyes of liberals and they'll realize that since voting D won't change anything, radical action is needed."
daezor
7mo ago
If the joke had been about Haiti I could see it being a boost for Trump, following the pattern where he dog-whistles racism shortly before elections in order to get racists to vote for him, even though he doesn't end up implementing any of the policies they support. But Puerto Rico was a non sequitur because nobody had been making a campaign issue out of anything related to Puerto Rico. I don't see it having any effect IMO.
daezor
7mo ago
Thus, females who fought back would not be passing genes on to the next generation quite as often.
Then tie that into the need to filter partners for 'Fitness' (as defined by prehistorical norms), and a male being strong enough to overpower and take a woman without her cooperation is an imperfect but not entirely incorrect proxy for a male who can produce and protect strong offspring.
Aren't these two factors contradictory? If the woman does not fight back, then there is no fitness filtering. Meanwhile, a rapist who kills his victims won't pass on his genes either.
It's a distinction of Sense versus Reference. The California hippie who travels the world in search of spiritual wisdom and winds up adopting (say) Tibetan Buddhism is not doing the same thing as the Tibetan layman who practices Buddhism because that's just what their people do.
Which is all well and good, since Buddhism has a core that is (purportedly) true regardless of how one arrives at it. But the irony of "trad-LARPing" comes in when the ideology has no substance or justification other than its supposed traditional status, i.e. tradition-qua-tradition, something of the form: "This society has lost its way because there are too many individualists, people who think they know better than they did in the good old days. Therefore it falls to me, the lone heroic seeker, to forsake mainstream society and devote my life to poring through the ancient tomes (the more ancient the better) in search of the one true ideology." This is the same mindset as that of the wandering hippie, a mindset which (I claim) is more persistent and fundamental to one's character than any particular ideology which one may adopt.
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