magicalkittycat
4d ago
Should Republicans accept the legitimacy of a state AG who explicitly and sincerely advocated that they and their children are scum who it is morally obligatory to exterminate in a campaign of revolutionary terrorism? For the next four years, if any serious episode of left-wing political violence occurs in Virginia, Jay Jones will be in charge of prosecuting it. Will Republicans trust in the process of such a prosecution?
I assume republicans can trust in the process at least as much as the Dems can trust the DOJ and Trump admin to not be openly partisan now. But right now at least it will remain to be seen if Jay Jones actually behaves in a biased manner (even if it's reasonably expected) so technically there's more trust there currently.
A state-level actor - Russia, China, hell, North fucking Korea - could easily arrange for some culture-war-bait crime to happen on Jay Jones' doorstep that Jay Jones and company can't solve. Remember, Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk's assassins almost got away, and as far as I can tell they were just random idiot dipshits
A foreign country doing a random hit on American citizens does not sound very likely, things would go south quickly for them if they got caught.
It's not really the poor subsidizing the rich, as much as it is that the stupid (people who borrow money without paying it back per their agreement) "subsidize" the smart (and even the smart in general are likely profitable in some way or else why would the CC companies have them at all?)
The main reason for the poor/smart divide here would be that dumb people tend to be poorer and vice versa that poorer people tend to be dumber. They're bad with money. Of course some rich can be dumb and some poor can be smart, but it is a general trend.
Really, many of these dumbasses are quite lucky in some way because if they had stolen the money they aren't paying back, their ass would be in jail or dead. Instead, as per the agreements, they just have to pay fees and interest on the amount they refuse to return. If the goal is to stop idiots from being allowed to borrow money they can't pay back, then it would be more direct to just bar lending entirely to dumb heavy categories like high school dropouts, low credit scores, manual laborers, etc.
magicalkittycat
6d ago
It should be obvious from basic efficient market processes that every measurable category of people the credit card companies can subdivide people into is internally profitable without needing subsidization, otherwise they wouldn't serve those people at those interest rates.
There are scenarios where this wouldn't necessarily be true. For example, very rich people tend to be politically influential so a little bit of loss on them might be a strategy for looser regulations elsewhere. It doesn't even have to be bribery, just hoping for subconscious good will.
Another way would be that the very rich people are often major business owners, they're slightly biased to picking the card they mainly use personally for their companies too and the CC companies determined the increased chance of making a small fraction of billions of dollars of transactions is worth a small loss on the CEO's class personal spending. This would not be unreasonable, the very rich elites get lots of free gifts and goodies from various companies for that exact reason after all.
magicalkittycat
7d ago
Would you agree that most poor people have a revealed true preference to invest most of the money they receive into credit card payments and similar fees, and that the people who receive those fees are benevolent actors working tirelessly to help such poor people live their very best life?
Yes, they decided to borrow money under a preset agreement. If they fail to pay it back, it's their fault.
No. There is a fellowship in an ethnos that goes deeper than economic relationships.
Good news about a free market, it would also allow the people participating in them to properly weight their "ethnos fellowship" preferences against their "economic relationship" preferences. If the American people weighted heavily against immigrants to the point of sacrificing some economic wellbeing, then we would see it in the market activity, economic opportunities for migrants would decrease accordingly and there would be less immigration.
But in the same way that prediction markets help to reveal true beliefs, free economic markets reveal true preferences. Just like people who whine about big supermarkets like Walmart "taking over local businesses" still go there, because in actuality they prefer lower prices with higher variety over the inefficient highly local grocery stores, people generally prefer their economic wellbeing over racial collectivism. There's a reason why even Trump on this major anti migrant crusade won't actually prioritize (and has often exempted) the farms, construction sites, meatpacking plants and other similar major industries and instead focuses on high publicity acts like in Minnesota right now.
1, 2 and 3 are obviously problematic, especially cause we shouldn't put up with anyone immigrant or native. Criminal behavior, welfare fraud or working with foreign.goverments isn't acceptable.
Undercut local labour so that everyone (except big businesses) is poorer
But this is just untrue. You're not just a worker selling your labor to a business, you're a customer buying other people's labor from a business too. Lower costs for businesses is lower costs for consumers, which you are one. This logic suggests that more people = poorer conditions, and yet it doesn't seem to pane out much in real life. In fact the opposite seems to be true and larger populations seem to be such an advantage that China, despite being ruined by socialism for decades, still manages to be a major economic and political player in the world. And despite the world population being 4x bigger than the 1920s we'll all significantly wealthier on average.
The same logic would also argue for cutting birthrates (after all, those children will want jobs in 18 years) and even eliminating fellow natives who also compete for your job. But in the same way you don't have to worry about it because each worker is a consumer and creates demand for new jobs.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
That is no longer true in the current world of extremely progressive taxation and extremely profligate social welfare spending.
It would be the exact opposite for businessmen under your argument, as progressive taxation and social welfare spending hurts them more as they bear the cost of these programs.
Treating America as a store where you can “buy” jobs with your promise of labor,
I don't understand what you mean here, it doesn't matter how many jobs they work or how many jobs they "create". What matters is the utility actually being created. In a proper market, people get rewarded for providing goods/services that others want and you get more rewards by providing them in better quality and/or higher amounts than others do.
Take Jensen Huang for example. He's not rich because he created some number of jobs, he's rich because he's an intelligent CEO who created and runs a major tech company supplying excellent computer chips and other electronics to customers who want them. Or Sergey Brin, who cofounded Google which manages tons of different services from maps to YouTube to android OS. There's a good chance you've used many Google products today.
And to have the “customers” pushing us out is untenable.
You are a customer along with every other person in existence. You participate in the exchange of goods and services. You benefit when Jensen Huang or Elon Musk or Sergey Brin create awesome things for the world. While lesser, we also benefit in trade when a Santiago helps build a home or when an Isabella at a local cleaning business helps tidy it up.
My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs.
Isn't doing things in your own financial self interest > doing things for the "common good" a part of traditional American customs and values? Capitalism > socialism, individualism > collectivism, libertarian hands off government > nanny state, and similar concepts are a strong part of the American cultural core historically in my eye. The "American Dream" is precisely this idea of an opportunity to work hard and be rewarded for your own success in a free market. So I'd contest that coming to the US "because they see dollar signs" is in opposition to American values, because I believe seeking personal economic success is an American value.
I think it's especially funny to see this coming from the "conservative" side of things now. Not so long dismissing people as "too greedy" or claiming companies are "exploiting immigrant labor" and other such concepts were a predominantly progressive view. Famous conservative voices like Reagan, Goldwater, Friedman, Thatcher, William F Buckley Jr, Ayn Rand etc etc (you can find tons of examples of old school conservatives with similar views) were supportive of immigrants coming to their countries and working for a better life for themselves. A lot of this stemmed from the capitalist views these voices had, that economic self interest is a good thing for society as a whole and that people who make money through business are not "exploiting" society and greedily stealing from everyone else, but contributing to society through providing goods and services. If they were to look at things today, many of those classic conservatives would focus their blame on the welfare state and big government handouts rather than immigration. As Friedman said “There is no doubt that free and open immigration is beneficial—so long as it’s not combined with a welfare state.”
One great example of this being Reagan's whole speech where he basically says that immigrants of the time are in some sense more American than actual native born citizens with the argument that the immigrants (especially the ones fleeing the communist countries) understood this and held a love for the US and our economic freedoms and embrace of working hard for yourself and your family.
It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world -- the last, best hope of man on Earth.
And it's true that at this moment in this grainy low-resolution footage, it does look like the agent is being struck by the SUV. But when we synchronize it with the first clip, we can see the agent is not being run over. In fact, his feet are positioned away from the SUV.
It's not "in this carefully analyzed footage, was he at severe risk of being injured?" that should be asked, it's whether or not he reasonably would have feared the SUV coming at him within the short period of time he had to react.
And he was close enough to the front and in a short enough period of time that I personally believe many reasonable people in that same scenario would be filled with a similar fear, even if in actuality it wouldn't have hit.
And to be clear here, I'm not defending the Trump admin at all! I think ICE takes the majority of the blame in this situation. He should not be standing so close to the front of a car as a general matter of policy, he should not be distracted trying to multitask filming on his phone, and most importantly the other agents should not have acted so aggressively, but Ross himself I think deserves to be in the clear from what I have seen at the present.
This was a preventable tragedy, but not because of a guy who freaked out and feared for his life as a car headed at his general direction. It was a preventable tragedy because ICE and the admin have bad and unprofessional policy that escalates situations, tenses people up, and creates panic. Having a bunch of masked men carrying guns rushing at you and reaching into your car suddenly is fucking terrifying to even imagine happening, and is inevitably going to be responded to with panic and fear even if they're "legally in the right" or whatever to arrest you.
Go watch some of the British policing shows (that I've been recently binging after a visit to the UK) and you'll see the difference between professional cops who try to defuse a situation, and the animalistic behavior we see on video here. I've rarely seen a time one of the Police Interceptors had to use force on and the main one was on some man who was really really drunk and would not get out of the car so he had to be pulled out. I'm sure it happens other times especially with violent criminals but they're overall so much calmer.
It's impossible to say whether Good would still be alive if ICE, instead of acting like terrifying goons and bumrushing her window screaming at her had instead walked up and had a deescalating conversation that pivots into a calm and professional yet authoritative "Ma'am I'm gonna have to ask you to step out of the vehicle please" tone and arrest her in a calmer manner but I can certainly say it would be less likely. They are agents of the state and should be held to high standards, not acting like barking dogs trying to show whose dick is bigger. Law enforcement is granted great power, and with great power comes great responsibility. We should expect professionalism as the baseline.
And yeah, random citizens aren't always going to be professional in the same way. It's unfortunate, but it's the responsibility we should expect from our law enforcement. And most cops do it just fine anyway, so there's no reason we can't expect it from ICE too.
magicalkittycat
15d ago
She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders.
According to witness reports, she was also being told to leave. It's hard not to resist lawful orders if they're contradicting themselves.
It's also of course hard to know what is a lawful order if you don't even know who is giving them. Masked men popping out of an unmarked vehicle would not indicate police to me, nor many others.
magicalkittycat
15d ago
Looking at the case, it's unlikely. Fields plead guilty and admitted to intentionally driving into the crowd with hostile intent, striking dozens of people before fleeing the scene, which even if the hit is accidental, hit and runs are still illegal. He was also found guilty on all charges by a jury.
These don't seem to be directly comparable cases, he had his due process and the public found him in the wrong.
It is unambiguous that the officer was in the way of the car, it is not unambiguous that it was done with the intent to hit him. In a stressful panic filled moment where her attention was on the guys directly to the left of her, it is quite plausible she just didn't notice him get into that position to begin with.
This slowmo is probably the best thing for it yet. Where do you think her attention was focused? Probably on the masked man trying to reach into her car, and not the guy who was walking in front.
Likewise, he probably wasn't thinking of "revenge". He is just walking there on his phone, sees the car start to pull towards him and he panics too and pulls out his gun and shoots. Because if he wasn't panicking and was thinking through every movement, then he's an idiot for thinking shooting the driver would slow down/stop a car instead of using those precious seconds moving his body out of the way.
Edit: Actually, turns out there is video evidence from the front of it now too https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794?si=JPc0rc7f7RQbuIf1 the guy literally just walks in front of the car as she's already pulling away and her wheels are turned towards the right away from him.
Yeah, I don't think was this intentional from her. She was distracted and in panic by the men grabbing at her and he seems like an idiot too busy focusing on his phone to think "is it stupid to walk in front of a car?"
It just seems to be an unlucky tragedy caused if anything bad policies and stupid positioning rather than anyone involved acting bad.
A car passes in front of her (showing the way in front was clear) right before one of the unmarked ICE vehicles stops and two unidentified masked men with guns walk to the car screaming orders at her. While this is happening and her focus is on the approaching people from the left, two others who were originally behind the car circle from the right and end up to the top right of her.
One of the masked men grabs her door and she panics, pulls back and then starts going forward to the top right with her focus still likely on the two men to her left. There's a very good chance she didn't see the guys who moved in front at all. It's inappropriate driving, but it's also understandable when in a panic considering how bad normal drivers are even when not having masked men trying to open your car.
Meanwhile the guy who moved in front that shot the gun saw a car moving towards him and panicked in his own way. What he did is also moronic and inappropriate, shooting a driver with their foot on the gas isn't going to stop the vehicle very well. If anything, it's likely to accelerate. But again, it's understandable in a panic that someone with a gun would start shooting and it doesn't seem to be an intentional murder.
It's unfortunate and the real problem seems to be in policy/training. It's not a great idea to circle around a car without making your presence known, and it's not a great idea to just have a group of masked men grabbing at car doors and panicking the person inside. Preventing these dumb situations from happening requires more than just playing the blame game. As we learned in aviation
Humans are fallible creatures who make poor decisions, misinterpret data, and forget things. In a system where lives may depend on the accuracy of a single person, disaster is not only probable but, given enough time, inevitable. Barring cases of anomalous recklessness or incompetence, it won’t matter who is sitting in the controller’s chair when the collision happens. And the only way to fix such a system is to end the reliance on individuals by putting in place safeguards against error.
This happens all the time with shit like this. People on the internet love to roleplay the epic things they totally would do in any given situation, but it's imaginary. Heck they even do it to criticize actual heroes so they can be "yeah I'd be even cooler and more epic if it was me". Mark Wahlberg's claim he would have stopped 9/11 is just one example of this stupidity, but you can see it everywhere. Bragging about the bullshit awesomeness in their fantasy when in reality people panic and do dumb shit in stressful situations, and you want policies and training that help to minimize the adverse consequences of this. An easy general rule being, don't just walk out in front of cars and assume that you are noticed. People get injured/die constantly from not being noticed by drivers.
Edit: Actually, turns out there is video evidence from the front of it now too https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794?si=JPc0rc7f7RQbuIf1 the guy literally just walks in front of the car as she's already pulling away and her wheels are turned towards the right away from him.
Yeah, I don't think was this intentional from her. She was distracted and in panic by the men grabbing at her and he seems like an idiot too busy focusing on his phone to think "is it stupid to walk in front of a car?"
magicalkittycat
1mo ago
By those standards, a fent dealer is closer to someone aiding and abetting a genocide. Someone selling weed and coke at Burning Man is not. That's my two cents.
By raw numbers, junk food companies kill and injure way more citizens a year than fentanyl does. They have massive lobbying arms to get themselves into schools (where they clog our childrens arteries and make them unable to exercise well and ugly), remain on programs like SNAP, and get funneled government money.
And Google says
Tobacco use is responsible for over 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,
In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.
Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.
Alternatively, you believe that it is my tribe that should adhere to norms, and your tribe that should adjudicate exceptions. It hardly matters which is the case; you cannot now argue that Reds should not do a thing, because otherwise Blues might do the thing they've repeatedly done and are currently doing. One cannot endorse a compromise that has already been repeatedly violated.
Politics is not so simplistic that there's just "red tribe" and "blue tribe". Political parties may coalesce around it as compromises, but political philosophies don't. Also "person disagrees with me on topics" is not "person is in other tribe and should not be listened to and inherits the sins of the outsiders"
This black and white thinking helps to underline how your argumentation here is backed by emotion. You push your grievances with others onto me.
At no point do formal legal mechanisms determine this process; we already know that the Constitution and the laws supposedly based upon it are a sham.
This is actually a great example of how political philosophies aren't so tribal. Try saying "the constitution is a sham" to your average Republican and they'll firmly disagree with you. There are lots of proud and patriotic conservatives who believe in the constitution and traditional American classical liberal values.
Most citizens are not in some cultural war obsessed "burn everything down, fuck the constitution, we're at war" mindset.
It seems to me that the fewer valid uses a buyer has for the thing being bought, the more this logic obtains, and the more valid uses they have, the less it obtains. Guns have numerous valid uses to the degree that, if we are currently pretending that it matters, legal ownership of them is specifically enshrined in the Constitution. "getting super high and physiologically addicted" is not nearly so valid a use as "defending myself and my family from illegitimate violence."
Ok here's a big example then
Google says
Tobacco use is responsible for over 480,000 deaths per year in the United States,
In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl in terms of how many people die a year! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.
Why aren't we drone striking the tobacco companies? They kill half a million citizens a year, and there's not a "legitimate use" for cigarettes.
magicalkittycat
1mo ago
Let's specify "illegal ghost guns" just to highlight the faultlines.
So is harm only harm if it's been designated illegal? Seems like we could solve all the drug problems just by legalizing them then.
Wait no, that would be stupid and the distinction drawn here would be equally stupid.
magicalkittycat
1mo ago
If by "laughed out of society", you mean an opinion fervently held and actively implemented by half the country, in which pursuit they have proven willing and able to violate black-letter federal law and support the murder of innocents.
Luckily they haven't been able to implement such laws well. Enshrining the same logic however is a great step to helping it happen!
Drugs are not equivalent to guns. Drug dealing is not a victimless crime.
Well yeah, people who choose to use drugs in a bad way hurt others/themselves. The same thing happens with guns and bullets.
Some people sold a gun by a gun shop will go home and use the gun to kill themselves or another person. That is not victimless, people died from the gun being sold. But is the gun shop responsible for that? Apparently yes, according to this logic, the seller is responsible for what the buyer chooses to do!
, I am confident that you personally would be willing to offer people like them significantly more protection from the law than people like me no matter what I or my side says or does now or in the future, so I do not recognize value in preserving some hypothetical form of detente here. You will never be willing to treat me and mine with the care and respect you steadfastly insist must apply to narcoterrorists.
There is no discussion to be had with such a victim complex. If you're so emotional about it as to actively admit you're making up your strawman ideas about me, then it's not gonna be productive. You don't change emotions with rational arguments, "no, I support due process with you as well and believe in personal responsibility for everyone" would not change a single thing that comes out of feelings.
If South American cartels were running guns into the US that were used in the deaths of over 100k Americans per years, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun runners?
If US manufacturers and gun shops were selling guns in the US, and the guns they made and sold were involved in the deaths of ~48,000 a year and used in untold numbers of robberies and other crime, would you be ok with the government using lethal force on the gun shop and manufacturers?
It seems like the difference here is
American: Perfectly good, not responsible for anything. Foreigner: Evil, full responsibility
Even if they're doing the exact same thing and selling the exact same products.
magicalkittycat
1mo ago
I don't find this convincing, for the same reason that a gun dealer smuggling weapons into Somalia is, as far as I'm concerned, killing people. Sure, they didn't shoot anyone. "Guns don't kill people, people do, unless it's a Sig" etc etc.
There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.
But how about the other examples then? Are sugar companies terrorists? Are the tobacco and alcohol companies terrorists? They're all dangerous unhealthy products that get misused and abused, causing health damage and even death.
They're not as dangerous as most drugs sure, but they are pretty dangerous. Alcohol just off a quick Google search is estimated at "approximately 178,000 deaths per year are linked to excessive alcohol use.". That's 178k lives annually, some of them course not even the drinkers own life like people hit by drunk driving. Were the teens in my high school hit and killed by drunk drivers years ago victims of Alcohol-terrorism by the store who sold the drunk a dangerous product? Kids died because of it, so using the same logic it seems like a yes. I'm sure the alcohol manufacturers were well aware that some of their drunk customers go on to drunk drive and hit other people at times.
But none of that changes the simple fact that at the end of the day if you compare 65 year old senior with a million dollar home and 25 year old kid from a renter family without any major assets, just the house alone puts the senior a million dollars richer in value.
The senior's total value here is Renter + 1 Million
The difficulty in liquidating their holdings is only because they are actively using the one million dollar house, a choice the latter does not have unless they spend a million.
anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.
You know that's not the actual argument being made right? There's a lot of room between "just blow up boats because we said they had drugs" and "do nothing"
Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.
But ok, let's say that they are drug boats. Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people. Drug deaths are suicides by the irresponsible drug users, whether on purpose or on accident. People may feel shameful if their father or brother or daughter or whoever ends up as a druggie and ODs, but blaming the person who sold them the drugs is like when leftists blame gun stores for shootings.
That doesn't mean we should or have to be legalizing them, there is no constitutional right to either use or sell drugs but the argument being used currently by the Trump admin is one of poor victims who aren't responsible for their own drug additions, and they need to be protected from the "terrorists" who provide the druggies the goods they want. An easier way to think about it is with a lesser harm, like if someone were to proclaim we should start rounding up Nestle and Coca Cola shareholders for victimizing poor Americans with obesity, because offering high sugar snacks and drinks is damaging their health. It's the same logic, they provide an addictive product that Americans use to hurt themselves with so are they not corn syrup terrorists?
We could ban high glycemic index products and we could punish people who kept selling them anyway because likewise there is no constitutional right to them. But calling the sellers terrorists for something the "victims" choose to do to themselves is nonsense. We ban those products so people can't hurt themselves from their own stupid decisions.
But if the home you live in goes from $200,000 to $1,000,000, you are not wealthy, because the replacement home also costs $1M. You are trapped. You cannot sell the house and take the profit, because you still need a place to sleep, and the house across the street also costs $1,000,000.
You haven’t gained purchasing power. You have simply experienced a revaluation of your Cost of Living.
This is obviously false simply by glancing at the alternative.
Person A: No income but has a million dollar house
Person B: No income, and also no house.
Person A is a million dollars of value richer. If people B want a home too they have to give the people A a million (or build their own, which is becoming increasingly not allowed).
Nothing here is negated because A bought in early or because A wants their current situation of having a home instead of B's situation. They still have a million more dollars of value.
Ironically, Trump did this exact thing with the pardon power.
It's not uncommon to actually not know every single pardon being done in high levels of detail, the president is supposed to have capable and trustworthy staff to do the nitty gritty shit for them after all. They're presented with the general idea, the summaries, and then sign off on it. You can't expect them to have intimate details of every Tom, Dick and Harry. Of course, I think most can agree that the executive should do a proper job like not presenting cop beaters, or drug traffickers or smugglers, or fraudsters wiping away the debt they owe to their victims but that's part of why you're supposed to have good trustworthy staff that won't present those to you.
But still, it wouldn't matter if Trump personally knew who Chengpeng Zhao is and the specific details of how Binance under him intentionally avoided rules to help stop the laundering of money for Hamas, drug trafficking and CSAM materials on Binance because his staffers just referred to it as a "Biden witch hunt" if it wasn't in the context of trying to say pardons don't count.
The real irk here is that it makes him unpredictable in ways that no one can even expect. If you went back to 2024 and told everyone that in the first year alone Trump would start threatening to invade other NATO countries so seriously that they put tripwire troops in Greenland and Canada was looking towards China for diversifying their options, and one of the main motivators is his tantrum over not getting the nobel peace price despite already coercing it out of the actual winner already, even the most insane TDS drones would have looked at you a bit crooked.
If you told people back before the election that the winning candidate was going to try to implement price controls, take state ownership of private enterprise, and blame housing prices on big corporations being too greedy and became phone pals with an unabashed socialist you'd assume it was Harris who won or maybe even that Sanders pulled off a miracle.
And yet here we are.
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