wlxd
8d ago
I am not worried about my daughters getting pregnant as teenagers by itself. I would be overjoyed to have grandchildren while I’m still young and energetic. What worries me is them getting pregnant with inappropriate man. But, then again, I think it’s less bad when it happens when they’re teenagers than when they’re 30+. They still have a chance (though, of course, much reduced) to put their life together with someone more appropriate. When it happens to you while you’re middle aged, the pool of appropriate men that are interested in you is really tiny.
wlxd
1mo ago
Of course there is, just like there is a difference between donating $100M to Mar-A-Lago, and donating $100M to IRS.
wlxd
26d ago
Do you genuinely not understand it? The beauty of the lawn lies in its neatness and uniformity. Random weeds in random places break that uniformity. The result does not good even when the dandelions flower (which is a relatively small fraction of the year).
wlxd
2mo ago
The problem is not with the withholding order. The problem is that apparently everyone expects infinite process before you’re actually able to execute any removal.
In the Garcia case, the government made a mistake by not complying with that withholding offer (I’ll assume that it was indeed a mistake, and not deliberate flouting of the order, because otherwise the below argument doesn’t apply). Liberals, moderates, and centrists seem to believe that the outcome at hand means that the Garcia’s right to due process was not met, and district and some appellate judges seem to believe that too. There is an implication here that if Garcia’s due process rights were met, he would not have been deported to El Salvador. This is not so. There is no amount of due process that will prevent government from ever making mistakes of this sort, and excessive efforts of judiciary and activists using the judiciary to prevent mistakes meaningfully detract from the Executive’s ability to execute its core function.
The simple fact is that there is absolutely no existing process that could have prevented this mistake. Garcia had final, confirmed on appeal order to be removed. He had no further ability to appeal it. If the government removed him to a different country, that would have been it. This is how the process works, not just in immigration, but in every case.
For example, imagine you’re a tenant who stopped paying rent. Landlord goes through legal process to get you evicted, you appeal, but since you’re clearly in the wrong, ultimately you get a final eviction order. Accordingly, you get a notice from sheriff’s office that you’ll get evicted on May 1st, approved by court. However, on April 30th, the sheriff looks at the calendar wrong, and thinks that your eviction date is today, and evicts you. A clear mistake, in violation of court order to remove you on May 1st. However, is it a violation of your due process? No, there was absolutely no judicial process that you were not given access to, that would have prevented your too early eviction. What is the legal remedy that you should be accorded after the fact? I actually don’t know. I would actually be fine with no remedy or damages at all: the government does extremely detrimental things to people all the time that have no remedy whatsoever, the sovereign/qualified immunity and all that, but if you insisted on some damages, I’d accept the sheriff reimbursing you for any actual cost caused by too early eviction, like eg. one night hotel stay.
Now, imagine a judge ordering the sheriff to kick the landlord out of the freshly vacated home, and effectuate your return to the home that you were about to get evicted from anyway. It just so happens that you were also a wanted fugitive on federal charges, and as you were getting evicted by state officers, federal officers use the opportunity to arrest you and throw you in federal prison. The judge then require the state sheriff to somehow “facilitate” your release from federal prison, without specifying in any way whatsoever as to how exactly you are supposed to do it, or what that even means. Lastly, it issues a statewide injunction on any evictions unless you get one more hearing after final (already appealed) eviction order, with another ability to appeal the outcome of that hearing, to prevent additional future eviction mistakes.
Most people would see this as a mockery of justice, an excessive concern for the rights of someone who is clearly in the wrong, and meaningful making it even more difficult for people who are in the right to have their rights enforced. And yet, here we are.
wlxd
1mo ago
Taleb is the most overrated intellectual alive. Tried one of his book, it was literally non stop half-coherent self-aggrandizing rambling. I guess this is a good strategy to sound intelligent to mid-wits: if you don’t fully understand what’s being said, and you’re not smart enough to see that there is nothing there, it might indeed sound like something above your head, rather than drivel.
wlxd
1mo ago
You are trying to imply that in that world, lives of regular innocent people would be ruined, and I just don’t think that this is the case. This is how law enforcement actually worked in US before 1960s, before Miranda, Brady etc. Crime rate back then was much lower, largely because cops harassed no-gooders in the exact way you consider scary and atrocious.
To put it simply, for me the precondition for discussing whether police power are excessive is low crime rate. I worry less about excessive police power than about excessive criminal powers. I worry less about a cop being able to intimidate and search me at will than about a hoodlum being able to intimidate and attack me at will. Only when I have nothing to fear from criminals, I will start thinking about fearing cops.
wlxd
1mo ago
You are not arguing against how this law would be typically applied (because obviously police cannot search a typical person every time he steps out of his home), but against some extreme overapplication, highly unlikely in practice.
I don’t think it is a particularly strong objection, given that we already have plenty of laws today that, if applied to such extreme degree, would be just as annoying, they just are never used like that.
For an explicit example: if you operate any radio station (including CB radio, so that’s not limited to holders of amateur radio license), you are legally obligated to allow FCC employees to inspect your radio station. They don’t even need any sort of warrant. They just show up at your door, and you must let them in, under risk of penalties. Theoretically, they could reinspect you every 3 hours. In practice, this just never happens.
The point is that the government that feels that it’s fine to inspect or search you every 3 hours is not the kind of a government that would be prevented from doing so should the words on the paper said it couldn’t. Tyranny is about the government desiring and executing its abilities to keep inspecting and searching normal people continuously, not about their legal ability to do so.
This is a bad analogy. This email is not HR department going rogue; it’s HR department executing a project that was mandated by CEO, and under a clear and explicit coordination with said CEO. Your senior management would not resist the HR in these circumstances.
Also, only a small fraction of government employees have security clearance, and if you lie to your employer about your work being classified when it’s not to obstruct them, it is grounds for disciplinary proceedings.
wlxd
2mo ago
Looking at this, I wonder if it’s not some kind of reverse rug pulling, where insiders buy on the dip, knowing reversal is coming.
More seriously, I wonder how aware Trump is that this constant flip flopping is destroying his ability to make credible threats in future.
wlxd
4mo ago
He makes sure to tax the wealthy more so they can't afford to raise an army against him and become the new king.
This confused me, because feudal monarchy worked on pretty much opposite principle. It was a duty of the wealthy nobles to raise and fund their armies when needed. This was something the king required them to do, not inhibited from.
wlxd
2mo ago
Now, if she had learned in her function as a judge that there was an investigation against her defendant and then proceeded to warn him about that, this would be a textbook case of corruption.
“Corruptly” there just means that she is doing that willfully, with improper purpose. It does not have anything to do with corruption as in misuse of the office. See eg this. This charge clearly applies given the allegations.
wlxd
5mo ago
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
wlxd
5mo ago
You are correct about the first three, and wrong about the fourth (renaming obviously works, failed attempts are exceptions, not the rule). But so what? My enemies keep doing it. How do you propose to get them to stop it? Tit for tat is the only strategy I can think of that has any chance of success. Got any better ideas? Unless you do, I support renaming, and I think Trump should keep doing it.
wlxd
2mo ago
The problem is not with these immigration “judges”, but with actual Article III judges like Boasberg or Xinis, who override the determinations of Article II examiners at will, making it effectively impossible to enforce law at scale. If every illegal gets Article III judiciary proceedings before finally getting removed, we will never be able to actually enforce the law. Imagine if military had to get a court decision before being able to kill an invading soldier.
wlxd
5mo ago
Consider, for a minute, the perspective of a person who is willing to wait an hour in traffic, but is not willing to wait 15 minutes plus pay $9. In a world of rational actors, this person should not exist. But in the real world, this person in fact does exist in great numbers.
I think you forgot to actually make an argument why this is irrational. I can imagine many pretty natural scenarios where this is perfectly rational. For example, if you are working a full time job with no ability to work overtime (i.e. most jobs), and you don’t have anything all that valuable to do that you’d rather spend extra 60-90 minutes a day, but you could really use extra $2k/year. If you were planning to spend this saved time on scrolling TikTok, why not just spend it sitting in a car and put a podcast on?
wlxd
3mo ago
It has only partly happened, which is even worse. We are full on papieren bitte, except where it would help deporting the illegals.
wlxd
2mo ago
Americans are in the right to want to deport tens of millions of illegals, and excessive concern for the rights of illegals make it meaningfully more difficult to enforce the right to remove them.
wlxd
2mo ago
At the very least, the executive ought to dissolve its own order.
No, because they were not aware of that order. They should have, but they weren’t. That’s why it was a mistake. If they were aware of this this order, they would have either followed it and deported him elsewhere, or seeked dissolution before deporting him to El Salvador. Your retort only makes sense under assumption that they knew about the order but chose to ignore it nevertheless. In my previous post I explicitly assumed this to not be the case, and said that if it was the case, then the situation and the analysis is completely different.
There is no amount of due process that will prevent the government from not following its own orders?
Yes, exactly, because after following all the due legal process, someone can still make a mistake. Think about my example of sheriff looking at the calendar wrong. I’m not saying that what they did was right. It was wrong. However, it was not a wrong that could have been prevented by scheduled due process.
I feel like "there is a reliable central database run by a group half as competent as the dude responsible for delivering burritos" isn't even an amount of due process, it's a basic measure of government competence.
I actually think that the US government does not have nearly enough databases of its citizens and present non-citizens, but yes, I fully agree that what happened here was incompetence. The point is, incompetence will occasionally happen, due process cannot and will not prevent all incompetence-induced errors, and it is not possible to prevent every case of incompetence before the fact with some pre-defined process without significantly compromising effectiveness in executing basic functions.
If anything, a kick in the ass might actually help them realize that in order to execute their core function, they first need to achieve operational competence.
Maybe, but I suspect that what happened here is that they wanted to actually execute their core function before activist judges tarpit them, and rushed things so much that they missed an order that someone failed to input properly into database back in 2019, or something like that. This is not meant to imply that they didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just operating in hostile legal environment will cause mistake rate to be higher.
wlxd
3mo ago
Putting parking lot in the back makes little difference. It only matters if you’re already on the street with the front entrance. If you’re a block away, you need to cross the parking lot anyway.
More generally, without a car you are effectively disabled, in the literal sense: not fully able to participate in society in the same way the majority is. Most societies make some accommodations to the disabled, but there are real limits and trade offs involved. For example, people who have trouble walking (which in US is I suspect a bigger group than people without access to a car) typically appreciate a lot being able to drive right to their destination, and park right at the entry.
Point is, it is not clear to me why we should cater to your disability, to the detriment of the majority.
wlxd
4mo ago
Yes, DOGE efforts are highly irregular, and massively disruptive to government agencies. That’s kinda the point. Your analysis of the email thing is somewhat superfluous, because we already knew that the DOGE exists precisely to get the government out of the ruts it’s been stuck following. And, of course, nobody is surprised that many employees don’t like it.
wlxd
3mo ago
The fruit from the poisonous tree doctrine as applied in the US is pretty stupid. It is beyond retarded that good faith procedural errors can allow obviously guilty men go free. Most of the rest of the world does not have it, or does not have it to the same extent as US does.
wlxd
3mo ago
They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.
wlxd
5mo ago
There is one more benefit of punitive justice: satisfaction for the victim. If you suffer, or people you care about suffer, it is satisfying to see the perpetrator of suffering to suffer in return. It’s a restitution of sorts.
You don’t see this argument being made though, even though this is extremely obvious and natural to most people (you can find millions of examples on X of people, both on left and right, full of glee from people being punished by criminal system), because it is obviously invalid in the enlightened liberal framework under which the discussion is happening.
That’s not the case here at all. NIH, NSF and the like have enormous amounts of discretion where they allocate funds, even if it appears to be earmarked.
For example, huge chunk of NIH funds are earmarked for cancer research. The result of this is grant applications for this money have to include some section about how their research is related to study of cancer, and this is enough for it to qualify. I learned this from some of my friends doing biotech research. Literally all of them work under cancer research grant, but their actual research has very little to do with cancer per se.
How to study AIDS on cancer grant? Easy: AIDS causes cancer, so AIDS prevention reduces cancer incidence. Done. No need to reallocate anything in Congress.
Please, do the math. Get some data on how many wealthy people are there, how much you expect to get from each, multiply one figure by the other, and get surprised about how paltry it is.
As it happens, US already has the most progressive tax system of all developed countries. In US, it is disproportionately the wealthy how pay the bulk of the taxes. In contrast to that, in Europe, the bulk of the taxes is paid by the middle class. For example: in US, you only enter the 32% tax bracket once you’re above $192k/year. In France, and I shit you not, you start paying 30% tax starting from 27.5k EUR. On top of that, when you actually try to spend whatever you’re left with, you pay 20% VAT, whereas in US, the highest sales tax rarely exceeded 10-11%.
The result is that people making 60k EUR/year are the backbone of French budget, whereas in US, if you make $60k, you barely pay any tax at all, considering deductions, EITC, etc.
Seriously, just do the math.
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