gattsuru
1mo ago
Hm.
... any discussion that veers in the direction of "What happens when the other side does this?" will get a hundred stories about how the other side is worse anyway, the other side has been defecting forever, and only after we crush them and make them lick the soles of our boots might they learn to behave and restore a kind of equilibrium...
Do you think that the post I wrote above is just slapping into that category? If so, do you understand why I'd be uninterested in trying to go into deeper discourse, or expect it to be unproductive?
gattsuru
1mo ago
I don't know what fucking script you think I'm following
I dunno what you're following, but you literally gave a list of what analysis and response you expected here, which me very uninterested in discussing the actual facts on the ground.
No, I do not think Trump refraining from literal shitposting would make things better. You're right, the brakes are off and it's too late. Congratulations, you win. I am not arguing for pragmatism. I am describing what I see. I do not expect "Who started it and who was worse?" to be a relevant question in the future.
That's a much more straightforward answer to the question:
what do you believe the Democrats will do as a consequence of particular Trump actions that they would not do otherwise? In short, what concrete effect on Democratic legislative or activist actions or priorities do you think a less-crass Trump administration would have?
I'm not seeing any undue delay here, just the normal operation of the judicial system.
A year ago, that was a plausible argument. It's not longer a plausible one. The normal operation of the judicial system now has the highest court in the land intervene to defend absolute randos in overnight on a holiday weekend. It means something when that happens then, and literally never here.
First, the ATF made it clear that it recognizes the court's decision and does not intend to enforce the prohibition within the geographic boundaries of the Fifth Circuit. That's the general consequence.
They only claimed that they did not plan to begin enforcement actions of an unconstitutional law as of September 2nd -- again, nearly eight months after the Circuit decision. There is no guidance issued to vendors, even today. And, unsurprisingly, vendors are not in a particular hurry to trust the ATF pinky swears.
And while the Plaintiffs made good arguments overall on this point, the most they could have gotten by my admittedly brief reading was an extension to members as of the date of the judgment.
Do you think that standard will be consistently applied to other causes?
I think that what happened in the end is that, in light of the CASA decision and that nether party could provide anything that was really on point and not possibly overruled by CASA, the judge was disinclined to grant any specific relief to any parties beyond those absolutely necessary to resolve the case, and gave the government more or less the order they asked for.
Yes, the judge gave the government exactly what it wanted (and then a little more), after the government had spent long years infringing on the rights of. And that's just how things go, when it comes to civil rights that progressives don't like. And I'm spelling it out.
(one suggested that the ATF form be amended to ask if the buyer was a member of a Plaintiff organization; aside from the impracticality of the government amending its forms to account for a small subset of purchasers, I doubt these groups want their members undergoing a guaranteed ATF investigation to verify their memberships)
It's a violation of federal law to lie on a form 4473 -- you may remember some high-profile schmuck with a neopotistic background getting a pretty weird pardon after a big criminal lawsuit on this matter -- and this would leave a lot of valid ways for anyone with a brainstem to think of ways for the ATF to validly prosecute violations only where they had reasonable belief, without first having a full list of the org's membership, that a specific member did not belong to the org. You know, if they weren't also claiming that they were not going to prosecute this particular unconstitutional offense to start with, making the whole question moot.
Now, ATF, so they'd probably still shoot someone and their dog while politely serving a subpeona for membership records specific to a named individual against a third party. But not because of this proposal.
There's ways to solve these problems. There's ways to solve these problems even under the most expansive reading of CASA imaginable, the way that's never getting applied to a single left-wing cause. But you know, and I know, that's never going to happen here.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Even in places famous for promoting non-heterosexuality, there's a lot more guys who like woman-and-people-who-have-boob+dick than who like men-and-people-who-have-boob+dick, even before adjusting for demographics. The former category isn't universal or even common among otherwise-straight men, but if I had to guess, there's probably more of it than there are attractive trans woman in the real world. The latter category does exist, but it's really small, and most of the examples are more on the AGP or trans side.
There's some fun argument-about-definitions going on -- the tops are still fucking XY-chromosoned people some of the time, yes -- but whatever the resulting category is called, it's somewhat interesting that it's around. If even a small fraction of this population fit the stereotype of just wanting some breasts around to keep their other attraction toward the male form deniable, you'd expect to see some outputs fitting that, and it's really just not.
(by comparison, that's absolutely a category that shows up in bi porn: Corbin Fisher's a little infamous for having their main talent literally throw the women into the background or out of the camera frame to focus on the real action.)
I'll skip over the 'what's actually happening and who's done what' debate, since I don't think we'll make any progress if you're already decided on a script, but:
What, precisely, is the proposed mechanism, here? Over on Earth Beta, do you think the Butler County assassin would have held back because his tyrant hadn't made a poop joke while wanting to deport millions of thousands of illegal immigrants? Would a state judge not have ordered already-cast primary ballots to be left uncounted, because not!Trump only 'started a riot' and didn't make fun of a disabled journalist? Is their goatee'd Charlie Kirk still breathing, because even if he still wanted to shove trans people back into boxes, at least he didn't punk on a particularly goofy student before the media reporting mangled his quotes to make him into a turboracist?
There's serious policy disagreements, approximately zero people in power in politics are interested in actually persuading or compromising on those policy disagreements, and even the virtues of an opposing side are being twisted into vices... and the poop joke is what people are going to remember? I'd like a world where professionalism was important, again. But leaving aside the many ways I could argue we've not been in that world for a long, long time, I just don't think the pragmatic argument holds water, or has held water for much of our adult lifespans.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Santorum also, notably, still has his last name associated with shit on a google search.
gattsuru
1mo ago
That's not true. The court will answer that question as part of the case, but whatever test and reasoning they use to answer that question will be precedent. Whether or not lower courts ignore it is a different story.
... not really? In normal courts, that's the rule, but the Ninth Circuit specifically has a unique relationship with stare decisis: simultaneously, even pure dicta from within the court may be binding, but to overrule a past case:
Yes, there's also the problem of lower courts ignoring SCOTUS as a matter of practice, but specifically the Ninth Circuit as a matter of open policy does not merely require the holding be part of the question raised for the case, or even that the holding be essential to the determination in the case, but that its logic be clearly irreconcilable. Otherwise, only an en banc Ninth Circuit court may overrule one of the many copious Ninth Circuit en banc opinions holding the Second Amendment to mean nothing.
Not quite, in the link you provided yourself, the only two questions formally presented in the petition are about the vampire rule and the question about historical analysis.
Fair. They were not Questions Asked in the sense of showing up in that section of the pdf, just questions brought up with a full exploration of their factual and legal background.
gattsuru
1mo ago
On the surface level, there's an immediate problem where this case's question is just astonishingly bad for that purpose. Its holding can only be whether "Hawaii may presumptively prohibit the carry of handguns by licensed concealed carry permit holders on private property open to the public unless the property owner affirmatively gives express permission to the handgun carrier?" Anything more specific will be dicta, and the Ninth Circuit will ignore dicta they don't like, and this case only exists because they already ignored SCOTUS saying specifically you can't just declare a whole island a sensitive space.
At the deeper level, there's so much else going on in this case, both in the other question the plaintiffs brought up, and in the other questions relevant in the appeal. If SCOTUS just wanted to a case to nail down a test for sensitive places, it's nonsensical to exclude the Ninth Circuit's bizarre. And the law in question here separately blocked "all parks and beaches, playgrounds and youth centers, bars and restaurants that serve liquor, and places of amusement and libraries", questions squarely presented in the petition. There's so many better and wider questions if they wanted to apply a rule to solve the sensitive places flat.
I'm... a lot more pessimistic on worst-case scenarios. I don't think it's likely that SCOTUS gives a full thumbs-up to the vampire rule, but it's painfully plausible that they'll end up with an explicit test that's either so vague or so broad that any remotely specific ban can pass it, and then punts for eternity as lower courts take that to permit more expansive bans than the 'overturned' one SCOTUS ruled on. Wouldn't be the first time.
gattsuru
1mo ago
I am not a SCOTUS-bar lawyer and this is not legal advice, but from understanding, no, contempt can only attach to parties. SCOTUS can answer a petition for writ of mandamus with a direct order to lower courts doing things, and that's been mentioned in a particularly egregious case, but eventually there's not much the justices can do but order a change in trial judge, and for process reasons they don't actually have that much power there, either, when a majority of a full circuit is flipping them the bird.
And, like The_Nybbler says, I think they just don't want to. It'd be one thing if we were only talking machine gun cases or the hairy edge of convicted criminals, but SCOTUS isn't even enforcing its own precedent when it comes to stun guns, or to whether the fourth amendment applies to people who own a gun. They just don't care.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Obviously, I'm not a gun guy but this seems eminently reasonable to me, is this particularly onerous?
Yes. This statute might look reasonable from first glance, but it's extremely broad and very difficult to actually comply with it short of not carrying anywhere.
Private property is really broad, as it was used in this statute; it doesn't just mean houses or even businesses closed to the public, but businesses generally open to the public, lawns, outdoor areas of strip malls, even some sidewalks and roads. This is worse than average in Hawaii because of its generally anti-fence culture (for similar reasons as the open/closed range stuff in the Southwest), but even parts of the country with clearer deliminations would leave it really hard to tell where property lines start and stop without a deep survey dive for every single location you were visiting or even passing through. It wasn't until fairly late in oral arguments at appeal that the state claimed it wouldn't apply to all parking lots, and then only to exclude large parking lots, and only so far as you trust their nonbinding claims.
Even where the line for a specific private property is known, it's not always clear who could give permission. Even for the standard example of "I'm already CCWing, but I need to pick up some eggs and milk on the way home", if you want to run by a WalMart, what happens? Do you have to park outside of the WalMart's property line, lock your gun, go into the store, track down a manager, and then can they give you permission? Can you call ahead, even if the agent you'd get on the line near-certainly won't be at that specific store? For more complicated ownership situations, it might not even be clear to the people on the ground who could give permission: if you're visiting a friend in an apartment building, is it enough if they're okay with you CCWing, or do you need to call the property manager? If you're a tenant, do you need explicit permission to go through a public area on the way to your own apartment? Does this change whether the shared walkspaces are indoors or outdoors? If you're going through a strip mall, is it enough that you're going to a pro-carry gun store, do you have to call up whoever owns the strip mall, or do you need permission from every tenant?
((And then there's the social side of things. Antigun groups have routinely coordinated dox and protest campaigns against pro-gun establishments in anti-gun states, they've openly called for pro-carry businesses to face ruinously higher insurance premiums, and they've recently called out for civil plaintiffs so they can support lawfare against pro-carry businesses regardless of what connection any real or perceived harms had to the permit policies.))
Does it allow for a business to put up a sign saying "guns welcome" that serves as a blanket permission?
California's version only recognizes permission through a posted sign (of a specific size yada yada), which seems to be part of why it was too much for even the Ninth Circuit (though in turn it also only applied to private businesses open to the public). Hawaii's allows wider breadths of affirmative consent, though there's a lot of legal questions about oral consent that never really got answered.
Just speaking for myself, I would be outraged if someone carried a gun into my house without notifying me, like if I saw that my plumber was carrying a gun I would be angered by this and would definitely favor a law of this sort.
There's policy versions that focus on private homes or houses that's more reasonable, even if it might still raise constitutional questions if anyone could get standing/redressability, to an extent I wouldn't expect the groups like SAF to be willing to put the effort into a challenge. But this isn't that law, or even close to it.
(re: constitutional questions, by contrast, the same Ninth Circuit has held that blocking door-to-door salesman except where homes have "Solicitors Welcome" sign up was unconstitutional (Project 80s v. Poctello). And that law was much more restrained.)
SCOTUS picks a couple Gun Cases... kinda
SCOTUS has granted cert on two separate firearms-related cases, Wolford v. Lopez and US v. Hemani, for the upcoming term, and they're a bit night-and-day.
In Wolford, plaintiffs asked to block a law after Hawaii had put an effective ban on carry in almost all of the state. This is the 'Bruen says you can't just declare the entire island a sensitive space, Hawaii asked how about five islands then' case. While a couple goofier parts of the law did receive a temporary injunction, the lower courts notably did not block a requirement that CCW permitees get explicit and specific permission from any private property owner before carrying on their property; even the Second Circuit found this sort of requirement (nicknamed a "vampire rule" by opponents) as so likely unconstitutional as to mandate a temporary restraining order against it. Worse, the 9th Circuit did so under a chain of logic depending on very recent laws and sometimes even private company restrictions to justify Hawaii's rule, with little actual relevant to the rule in question here, while simultaneously promoting the historical analogues to such wide spread of generality as to permit any law. For the "vampire rule" specifically, Hawaii was only able to find two analogues even under that widely expansive standard, one an anti-poaching statute and one a literal post-Civil War racist Black Code, and the 9th Circuit still found it close enough despite the explicit text of Bruen that "[W]e doubt that three colonial regulations could suffice to show a tradition..." This is, yet again, plain defiance of higher court rulings.
Which makes the actual cert grant weird, because it's not really getting into all of that. The only question SCOTUS granted cert on was the "vampire" rule itself; the petitioners also asked about the 9th Circuit's fishing expedition into more recent laws (and non-laws), and SCOTUS punted on that despite a wide and clear circuit split. SCOTUS can and has granted cert for broader questions that petitioners asked, before, and without doing so, this seems near-certain to result in a decision good for one case only; even a Thomas-level dicta won't actually have a holding that applies even to other vampire rules, nevermind other 'declare an island a sensitive place'-style laws.
Hemani is more complicated. A lot of media coverage focuses on a comically bad set of claimed background details -- the US government claims Hemani is not merely a drug user or a jerk but a literal Iran-tied worshipper of terrorism -- and to a large extent, those claimed details overdetermine the near-certain resolution of this case. Like Rahimi, SCOTUS wants the case with the worst possible optics so as to give the thumbs-up to expansive gun control regulations; there's even a lot of tea leaves to suggest that the Biden-era DoJ put some effort into tailoring this case, given that the government conceded the case as covered by a different case they thought wrongly decided. A naive reader might hope that this is going to result in some broader rule that, even if bad for Hemani himself, leaves stricter rules for merely incidental drug-and-gun users, but you'd have to be really naive.
Which makes the actual cert grant weird. The lower courts put a lot of analysis on how poorly the government supported a blanket ban and how expansively they held it to apply to cases far more unreasonable than Hemani's, but ultimately it leaves the prohibited person rule in place so long as the government show the drug user wasn't sober while possessing the gun. Indeed, there were other earlier cases with the same constitutional question, answer, and far more palatable facts: the government just didn't request cert for Connelly; they don't seem to have been important enough for SCOTUS to care. Nor, frankly, does this case even seem to leave things unsolvable even for the constraints of its specific people, since not only does Hemani have a bunch of other things going on worth a lengthy prison sentence, it's not even clear why the government couldn't prove or at least present evidence toward the Connelly intoxicated-while-possessing standard.
There might be some schadenfruede to watch the left side of the bench throw away due process rights in favor of gun control (or, conversely, Thomas and Alito throwing gun rights under the bus because eww pot), but only to the extent anyone has any shame left.
On its own, these would not necessarily been that offensive as selections, but they are on their own. The court's selection of other recent cases has not been quick to grab every marginal or borderline case. There's no small number of other, broader cases going up before the court and only getting the punt. Duncan and Viramontes are both up for cert, now, and in Duncan's case both for final judgement and for all the marbles: failing to grant cert does not merely encourage more broad gun control, but actively will claw back a lot of previously-lawfully-owned property with a happy finger-flip to the Takings Clause, too. There's no law saying the court can only take so many gun cases, but if you had to put a bet about whether the court would pick two or four, the over/under is pretty clear.
Vullo Is Back... kinda
lol jk, there's basically zero chance of a cert grant on these facts
Adamiak had his day in the Fourth Circuit... kinda
A jury found Defendant Patrick Tate Adamiak guilty of receiving and possessing an unregistered firearm, possessing and transferring a machinegun, and three counts of receiving and possessing an unregistered destructive device. The district court sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment. On appeal, Adamiak contends that at least one of his convictions violated the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment. He further objects to the adequacy of the indictment under which he was charged, the sufficiency of the evidence against him, the district court’s jury instructions, and his sentence...
Adamiak was accused and found guilty of posessing machine guns. The SAF has more details on both the charges and the convictions, but to be as a tl;dr: they weren't actually machine guns, or even guns. The ATF argued, under the Trump admin, that disabled (sometimes to the point of being cut in half) and inert pieces of a firearm were still machine guns or rocket launchers, because they could be brought to real functionality... by long efforts by skilled experts bringing in sizable parts, in some cases including everything that actually functioned.
Only his Double Jeopardy argument succeeds. Having thoroughly reviewed the record and carefully considered the briefs, arguments, and materials provided by the parties, we discern no other reversible error.
Where the court says "thoroughly reviewed", that's got a bit of an asterisk. The Double Jeopardy clause gets a bit more than a page; the other constitutional arguments get...
Adamiak’s Second Amendment challenge is squarely foreclosed by this court’s holdings in Bianchi v. Brown, 111 F.4th 438, 453 (4th Cir. 2024) and United States v. Hunt, 123 F.4th 697, 704 (4th Cir. 2024), and the relevant statutes are not unconstitutionally vague.
Yes, that Bianchi. Happy Fuck You Too Day, Justices, this is what your punts have bought; this is the nonconsentual volunteer VanDerStok demanded. And it's going to go nowhere. Malinowski is still dead, his widow's lawsuit is going nowhere, and no one cares that the agents involved gathered more bodycam footage of his widow pissing than they did of the actual raid. Dexter Taylor's still in prison, and in the unlikely situation his case ever gets to a court that actually recognized the Second Amendment as existing in their courtroom, he'll have served a majority of his unjust sentence first.
Reese v. ATF Wins... kinda
Reese is one of many lawsuits challenging the federal prohibition on sales of handguns by FFLs to people between the age of 18 and 20. Most of these have died quick deaths to mootness; prospective plaintiffs can only bring a challenge for three years after the matter becomes ripe on their 18th birthday and before it becomes moot on their 21st, court cases making decisions in that time frame (and not involving illegal immigrants) are rare, and they're rarer still in Second Amendment contexts. Organizational plaintiffs have thus had to prepare a consistent parade of young adults willing to sacrifice a lot of potential negative attention in trade for benefits that likely won't include them, while also ducking other procedural hurdles.
But Reese pulled it off. A complaint filed in November of 2020 eventually made it to a January 2025 appeals court decision which held:
And even more surprisingly the federal government did not appeal to SCOTUS. Perhaps that's downstream of a change in administrations, perhaps it's just caution about setting broad jurisprudence against a law, perhaps it's just about incompetence. But finally, a major change that could drastically impact a lot of people could apply to jurisdictions too wide for legislatures to just file the serial numbers off and try again, even if it's just one circuit.
Why am I only writing about it now? Why hasn't been newsworthy that a whole Circuit has let 18-year-olds buy handguns?
Well, the circuit hadn't; for various procedural reasons the appeals court does not issue mandates, and the trial court was in no hurry. October 7th finally (finally!) had a final judgement issued. And that judgement came with a massive caveat:
The Court enters declaratory judgment, as described in paragraph 3 below, with respect to (a) Caleb Reese, Joseph Granich, Emily Naquin, and (b) individuals and federally licensed firearms importers, manufacturers, dealers or collectors who were members of Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Second Amendment Foundation, or Louisiana Shooting Association at the time this action was filed on November 6, 2020.
The Court hereby declares that 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and (c)(1), and their attendant regulations, are unconstitutional and violate the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution to the extent those provisions prevent the sale or delivery of handguns and/or handgun ammunition by and to persons identified in paragraph 2 on account of the buyer being 18 to 20 years old.
That's not even a "if you were a FFL and a member of these orgs before November 2020, you can't be prosecuted under this unconstitutional law". Only where the buyers are under-20 and were members of the groups a half-decade before does the declaration apply. This judgement might not be literally absolutely toothless -- someone might have bought their thirteen-year-old kid a membership in the SAF five years back -- but it's so close that the distinction is meaningless. Forget "old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit", we've got young men making serious sacrifices for shade that covers nobody, ever.
The judgement was revoked for other even dumber reasons -- the judge demanded each org provide a verified membership list within 21 days, which wasn't going to fly at SAF for a variety well-formed objections and the government (claims to) have never asked for or wanted in the first place. So now we're waiting til October 27th to even start planning on how to have a final judgement in a case whose appeal opinion issued on January 30th, and I can accurately joke about how a healthy woman can make a baby faster than Robert R Summerhays, a duly-appointed honorable member of the federal court system, can make a decision protecting the real rights of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. And assuming the judge in question is not excessively overdue, in a month I can even joke about how, no, the courts don't do that for normal people.
(Additional bonus: no attorney's fees for the plaintiffs, so they probably spent between 50k and 150k on a case that means bupkiss. Why? Because fuck you that's why.)
gattsuru
1mo ago
Which invites the obvious question: what will the next Current Thing™ be? ... Playing the game on Easy Mode, and the answer might be that something which was a secondary issue for the last two years now jumps forward to become the pack leader in the Pareto distribution.
Immigration is the duh example, and I'd expect that we'll continue to see a parade of real and imagined oversteps by the Trump admin, along with real and imagined bad behaviors by protestors or state governments in response.
On this side, I think you're going to see trans stuff become much more prominent, quickly. Republicans see a lot of options as 80-20 issues, and a large part of the Dem activist branch isn't willing to Sister Souljah even the clearest nutjobs. But a lot of the political activists have very strong opinions and/or investments in this matter, they've got a massive amount of logistical and big corp support, and there's a lot of things that look like low-hanging fruit to social conservatives that are either hard problems or unacceptable compromises to even moderate Dems.
From the other direction, I expect that we'll have a Mass Casuality Gun Incident (a la Los Vegas) or targeted assassination (... that Dems care about, a la Giffords), and gun control will show up as a major political discussion again. There's a lot of Dems and self-described moderates that are absolutely sure they've got a vast majority of the population on their side, here, and they just need the right salience/terms, and while some of that reflects badly-run poll manipulation and huffing their own farts, it genuinely is a space that a lot of Republicans shoot their own feet.
In this light, do any of you have candidates in mind for dark horse black swan events which could dominate the discourse for the next two years or so?
Serious domestic infrastructure attacks by a coordinated and uncaught adversary. We've seen them in warfront environments, a few nutjobs using them for publicity, and a few dry runs (aka Metcalf) by uncaught (and thus presumably serious) actors, and maybe some arguable cases (aka Florida Oranges), but there's Moore's Law of Mad Science reasons to suspect it to hit in the next ten years. It's bad when 'someone kills dozens at multiple subway stations and gets away with it' is the optimistic version of the problem, but the pessimistic one is much worse, and either version will have obvious direct culture war ramifications as increasingly broad conspiracy theories drop. More critically, it will also have a ton of 'obvious' and wildly contradictory solutions with large-scale impact on the innocent.
gattsuru
1mo ago
If you're doing TCP, even small amounts of latency can have bizarre impact when you're dealing with relatively large bandwidth compared to the underlying MTU size, window size and buffer size (and if going past the local broadcast domain, packet size, though getting any nontrivial IPv6 layout to support >65k packets is basically impossible for anyone not FAANG-sized). I can't say with much confidence without knowing a lot about the specific systems, and might not be able to say even with, but I've absolutely seen this sort of behavior caused by the receiving device taking 'too long' (eg, 10ms) to tell the sender that it was ready for more data, and increasing MTU size and sliding window size drastically reduced the gap.
gattsuru
1mo ago
AB 1127 has passed the state legislature and is going to Newsom's desk, where he's expected to sign it
gattsuru
1mo ago
My impression is that the stuff about voluntary vs involuntary search is that it mainly has to do with what evidence is admissible in court - law enforcement agents are going to be able to go where they want whether or not your cooperation is voluntary.
The California bill has absolutely zero to do with what's admissible in court -- not just because immigration courts are federal processes where it can't apply, but also because it includes a fine aimed at employers who voluntarily cooperate with federal agents, or voluntarily provide documentation to federal agents.
And in terms of documents, documents that are actually relevant to work eligibility are already covered as things that employers should cooperate with if there's an administrative warrant.
The law requires employers to ignore administrative warrants for personnel records. It's in the FAQ you're quoting!
My understanding is that what you can't do is hand over the Workday login to ICE and invite them to go on a fishing expedition unless you are compelled to do so.
Or access to a nonpublic area of a workplace. Or specific employee records. Even if given an administrative warrant, you can not do so without risking tens of thousands of dollars per instance. Or to reverify existing employees, such as, just as a theoretical exercise, an employer isn't quite sure if they did that initial eVerify check.
gattsuru
1mo ago
It looks like people here were pretty close to universal in saying the ATF was incompetent, malicious, or most likely both here.
Would you like to demonstrate where, exactly, Rov_Scam said that, rather than moe about gun owners not wanting to compromise?
Yeah, it is an unfortunate truth that "someone did an unambiguously terrible thing and now the world is worse :(" doesn't get nearly as much engagement as "someone did a thing, maybe it's very bad, maybe it's not so bad, but everyone has an opinion and thinks anyone who disagrees with them is an evil mutant".
Oh, if everyone agreed it was awful, then there must be a whole ton of sympathetic coverage from mainstream and even progressive sources, right? I must be able to find some Honest Gun Control Advocate who talked about how they wanted enforcement, but Not Like This, rather than just memory hole or completely ignore the matter? President Biden, who was willing to speak out personally about an immigration officer using reins on a horse, must have spoken on the matter: it was the middle of election season and an excellent opportunity to Sister Souljah nutjobs. Or if his brain was too applesauce at the time, perhaps Kamala "I own A Glock" Harris did so? The officers in question -- who unquestionably did violate policy, and near-certainly violated a lot of constitutional protections in addition to the not-getting-shot-in-head-bit -- must have been fired or at least demoted, right, even if they couldn't be prosecuted?
Ah, no.
In (to pick an arbitrary Biden year) 2022, ICE deported about 70,000 people. Not more than a handful of those people were cause celebres. Likewise in 2018 (to pick an arbitrary Trump 1 year), and likewise this year.
Did you follow the link? Because a good part of the complaint here is that those 2018-2019 period did get a massive amount of often-not-honest outrage, even when the some of photos predated Trump. Yes, no one cared about Biden deportations, that's the punchline.
That's the joke, and that's why the outrage here is a joke.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Illinois prohibits employers from using eVerify to any extent not mandated by the federal government, prohibits local jurisdictions from doing anything not mandated by the federal government (even for their own employees!), and requires employers to notify employees within 72 hours of receiving notification of an i9 audit.
California prohibits employers from complying with federal administrative warrants ("Documents issued by a government agency but not issued by a court and signed by a judge are not judicial warrants. An immigration enforcement agent may show up with something called an “administrative warrant” or a “warrant of deportation or removal.” These documents are not judicial warrants"), and from voluntarily providing any employment information. If you're willing to call the current state of eVerify a fishing expedition, that's on you, but I'm not going to take it seriously.
The eVerify mandate [edit: sorry, not eVerify, but a card check] is old enough to vote; while it doesn’t apply to literally every business, it applies to almost all of them. Even outside of the error mode where every other Presidential administration unlawfully issues bulk work permits and mugs about standing to the courts, or shut down compliance audits, several Blue states have undermined it by the letter of the law and destroyed it in practice, and it’s biggest impact has been a burst of SSN fraud.
gattsuru
1mo ago
It looks like ICE solved that one just fine.
...
Shortly after Monday’s court hearing, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the other drivers who followed and boxed in agents.
An FBI statement says about 10 vehicles were involved in the chase that Martinez and Ruiz were allegedly part of in the 3900 block of South Kedzie. The statement also describes the “ramming” of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle repeatedly in the 3700 block of Kedzie, allegedly by the driver of a black Chevy Tahoe with Illinois license plate EM 62829. That driver is still at large, the FBI said.
Now, perhaps the defendant's lawyers claims of the ICE officers just calling someone a bitch and opening fire are tots honest -- stranger things have happened than an immigration-related lawyer lying their pants off, albeit not often -- and the ICE officers in that specific case will be going to jail themselves. We can review it in a week.
Either way, I can think of several reasons why local police department support would help develop these cases toward the results truth demanded, rather than whatever random coincidences and biases occur in a fog of war.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Eh... DNA evidence proved a sixth person raped the victim, but there's a lot of evidence for the CP5 themselves being guilty too, of the crime they were convicted for. Maybe there's some doubt, but I don't think Reyes' confession is anywhere near enough to be certain or even very confident they were not guilty.
gattsuru
1mo ago
If Democrats believe what they claim to believe, then their actions are in line with those values. ICE agents look like an angry paramilitary that a dictator would deploy against his populace. People believe what they see. Democrats are cherry picking, but the cherry picked images are still real images.
Does this rule apply to any other political cause?
Because we had a debate about a predawn raid where masked and unidentifiable men broke down someone's door and shot the guy in the head over some simple paperwork crimes -- complete with defiance of long-standing policy and only-by-the-text compliance with a warrant -- and people here defended it as all acceptable because He Broke The Law.
For some reason, the cherrypicked image of his ventilated skull wasn't a cause celebre nor a moment for deep retroflection on the costs of a cause; at most, it was reason Those Damned Republicans Should Want Police Reform (that won't apply here). Nor, for that matter, were the dozens of other examples going back decades, sometimes with far greater casualty counts, which, to skip the charcoal briquettes rant, did nothing to sate progressive efforts to The Cause.
Ah, well, nonetheless.
Perhaps there are clear examples of immigration enforcement that weren't cause celebres for the Left? The Nicer, Kinder, Cruelty Isn't The Point 2018 policies were not tolerated and accepted -- even when some of the outrage was based on photos dating to the previous Democratic admin, or entirely made up, it still became The Worst Thing Ever at the same time it didn't work, only for all of those problems to get shoved back in the box as soon as something was (D)ifferent in the Presidency.
Do you think my posts above are about -- or even discussing! -- who was the wrongest wrong in wronglandia? Or did you just decide that's what everyone responding to you could only possibly be discussing?
Because I'll point out, to be extremely explicit, that I did not actually say that Republicans hadn't done anything bad, that there's no remotely charitable read of "approximately zero people in power in politics are interested in actually persuading or compromising on those policy disagreements, and even the virtues of an opposing side are being twisted into vices" that would exclude Republicans. You might even notice that I pointed out, to be extremely explicit, some things that Democratics were peeved about, and some of them could at least be described as reasonable differences of opinion.
I think there's a deeper discussion, on that matter, and if you don't care, I'm not going to waste my time or yours any further.
More options
Context Copy link