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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37376 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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So Trump had a fun day on the golf course.

While golfing yesterday, he got the news that Colombia will not be accepting two jets full of repatriated criminals. So he goes on TruthSocial and posts that, immediately, Colombia will get slapped with 25% tariffs, as well as visa revocations for ruling party members.

This causes an immediate reaction from Petro, the unpopular socialist leader of Colombia, who offers to fly convicts back to Colombia in his Presidential jet.

There is much celebration and dunking from Trump supporters.

Not so fast. It turns out Petro might have been drunk, because he later goes on to post this insane rant on Twitter and then threatens the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs.

Now the Democrats are celebrating (because obviously it's good to hurt Trump even if it's bad for America). We are driving Colombians into the arms of China! Who will work our coffee fields? That kind of stuff.

The evening goes on. Trump finishes golfing. Petro sobers up and probably gets some, um, interesting phone calls from prominent Colombians who will have to pull their daughters from American finishing schools. Petro apparently caves, as the White House posts this, announcing that Colombia will accept unlimited flights. No tariffs for now, but the visa restrictions remain in force until Colombia follows through.

It's hard not to see this as a massive win for Trump and for America as a whole. He accomplished more in a few minutes, while golfing, than a normal administration would in weeks. Sometimes you can just do stuff.

MSN reported it like this: Donald Trump starts massive diplomatic crisis with Colombia while playing round of golf.

Sometimes you can just do stuff.

That was my main take away, and probably where all the substance lies. That, and pondering how much time Petro wasted penning his reply. 20 minutes?

I highly recommend giving it a read. Its fairly beautiful. A chiding message from a particular kind of nationalist/ humanist who clearly thinks highly of himself. Delusional in parts, but oh so delicious to read knowing that all Petros hot air was rendered into farts when he capitulated a few hours later.

That this was always possible, that deporting criminal migrants is simply a matter of pushing a fucking button saying 'do your jobs like what you joined the ICE to do" is what infuriates this entire conversation about migration so much. Democrats instated a sense of fatalism (the migrants will come anyways so theres nothing we can do to stop them) and then crippled the ICE to stop even border deportations, much less deportations in the interior, because there was no point anyways. Then the Democrats expanded asylum to include feeling sad, so every fucking border trekker was saying the same thing about gangs. Only after that was in place, where aspiring migrants see a big sign above the USA saying 'come over we wont stop you and we will stop ourselves from stopping you', did the Democrats turn around and say 'yup this is our reality now diversity is such our strength isnt it look at the fruit pickers and ignore the literal cartels claiming asylum'.

That Trump comes in and in less than a week starts deporting criminals that have decidedly negative expected value to the US population just makes the Democrat failure that much worse. If Trump can strike a deal where Bukele or Meliei accept unrepatriable US illegals for cash and then leaves the illegals to the tender mercies of those 2 leaders, the Democrats will be lost in the political wilderness for at least 3 cycles.

El Salvador and Argentina are active examples of "just do the thing" and so far it has turned out really well for both, esp. compared to their status quo before.

I wouldn't have quite believed it before, that the whole "violent crime is a nuanced problem that you can't fix in one fell swoop with blunt instruments" mentality was just an excuse, or worse a piece of propaganda to psychologically block actual solutions.

Nope. Just arrest the known violent elements of your society and stick them in a cage.

My most charitable take on the liberals was that they were just trying to delicately thread the needle with a technocratic, data-informed approach that solved certain problems while minimizing second order impacts and collateral damage and ensuring the solution stuck for the long term.

They failed, obviously, but this at least grants that they wanted to solve the problem.

Otherwise, the continuing refusal to pick up and use the obvious solution looks intentional.

What happens when your data goes against foundational principles of your guiding vision? Thats where liberals fail. Using data we can better ensure that blacks are not actively or passively discriminated against in employment, education and law enforcement availability, thus bringing their achievements back up.

Well, turns out that all the free grade 1-12 tuition for URM (another phrase tortured into existence to exclude Asians) doesn't work if they don'y show up at all. DEI hiring initiatives to hire more black candidates of equal capability to white ones don't work when the black candidates simply don't exist. Restorative justice and sentencing reform doesn't work when blacks fundamentally commit more crime to begin with.

Same thing with homelessness and drug addiction and crime. Housing first won't work if the bottom 3% of permanent homeless trash all housing offered continually and just act as violent nutcases to drive out neighbors. Harm reduction does not lead junkies into care services just because they feel 'loved and seen'. Restorative justice (again) doesn't work when the light sentences just keep criminals on the street to reoffend endlessly.

Technocrats adjust their principles to fit the reality of data. Liberals pretending to be technocrats adjust data to fit their preferred reality. Scratch a liberal and a p-hacker appears. The continuation of such p-hacking despite repeated failures is what convinces me that liberals are captured: they hate the reality that creates this data outcome in the first place and actively strive to destroy the obstacles to their preferred reality. If blacks can't be assed to go into special ed programs, then just get rid of them entirely.

Edit: get rid of the special program, I mean.

What happens when your data goes against foundational principles of your guiding vision? Thats where liberals fail.

Technocrats adjust their principles to fit the reality of data. Liberals pretending to be technocrats adjust data to fit their preferred reality. Scratch a liberal and a p-hacker appears

Slight disagreement on the technocratic point, I think. The liberals who are technocrats might think "Well the data isn't where we want it to be, but through a combination of social policy, technology, and spending tons of money for years or decades... we can change the data!"

If the temperature in the house is too high or low, you can adjust the thermostat. Problem is for social problems with 100 variables and chaotic systems, you can't easily map the inputs to the expected outputs. So you adjust society's thermostat and one room of the house catches on fire and water starts flowing out of the upstairs toilet and the kitchen lights start blinking various racial slurs in morse code.

Housing first won't work if the bottom 3% of permanent homeless trash all housing offered continually and just act as violent nutcases to drive out neighbors.

Yup. But perhaps they can thread a needle that prevents having to admit that homelessness is intractable if we aren't willing to jail or institutionalize people, and instead spend money on a delicate balance of programs and housing initiatives and somehow fix everything without having to admit that those dirty rightwingers have a point!

Meanwhile, as we've seen: the rightwinger just does the thing that solves the problem, and then moves on to the next thing.

One thing liberals are very good at is definitional warfare and data abuse. Redefine genocide to include cultural appropriation, racism to include every instance of disparate outcome by subconscious bigotry, poverty to include not having an apartment in a T1 city. Include low-crime Nigerians Chinese and Indians in the denominator of 'migrants' to make it seem like deporting Salvadoreans and Guatamalans is increasing the net crime rate of USA, include sexting into the definition of child sexual abuse so that White British remain the greatest numerator of child sexual abuse perpetuators so as to hide the dominance of Pakistanis committing group anal rape, exclude Asians and now Latinos from the definition of Minority to keep claiming that systemic racism is still a Thing.

By changing the presentation of reality the liberals keep justifying why even MORE help must be given for their interpretation, as opposed to what you see with your own lying eyes. To trust your own eyes, your own judgment, your own experience, is to deny the reality imposed by your intellectual betters.

There has been a new reality based adjustment away from liberal orthodoxies. Definitional warfare and rights lawfare need to hold the tough men with guns back from exercising their own agency. Turns out your fancy human rights law paper means nothing if your enforcement authorities decide to deport first and ask never.

See this is sanctions, the smart way. Targeted immediately at the elite. I’m not sure why wealthy Latin Americans are so invested in their daughters going to American colleges but they are. Favela unemployment or a higher price of rice and Coca Cola has much less pressure to bear on the regime.

I’m not sure why wealthy Latin Americans are so invested in their daughters going to American colleges but they are.

To give them the easiest route into elite, wealthy society in the most powerful nation on Earth?

I'm not sure what use 'soft power' is if you can't do something as simple as returning a country's citizens back to their homeland.

That's what all the liberals are whining about on twitter and reddit, about American international standing.

Not like they already hold America in contempt, and blame them for all their problems. Dumb South American leftists.

It feels like international relations majors are jerking themselves off to the concept of a rules based international order.

When you govern for results instead of the approval of an international global elite, the difference in outcomes is obvious.

Speaking of rules, we have several. Of particular interest are “Write about specific groups” and “don’t just boo your outgroup.”

For your third offense of the exact same thing, three day ban.

I mean I think most liberals see standing and power and prestige as a dinner party kind of way. They see it as popularity, being invited to cool parties, and so on. It’s a false view of power and prestige in my view. You can like someone and laugh at them at the same time. You can think of them as wimps and fools and still invite them to parties.

Power, prestige and standing instead has to do with getting things done, and especially getting things done that the other party doesn’t necessarily want to do. If you have a boss who wants you to stay late, even though you wanted to go home, his power can compel you to stay, because he’s shown that defying him can put people in the doghouse. You don’t have to be mean about it, but you have to back up the words with consequences. I’ve seen this a lot because I have a lot of teachers in my family. If you don’t back up your words with consequences, the kids might like you, but you really only have control as long as your agenda matches with theirs. If you do, then you’ll have control and you can go on to maybe have fun or whatever you need to get done. But the minute a ten year old realizes there’s no bite behind the bark, he’ll just ignore the bark.

I mean I think most liberals see standing and power and prestige as a dinner party kind of way. They see it as popularity, being invited to cool parties, and so on. It’s a false view of power and prestige in my view. You can like someone and laugh at them at the same time. You can think of them as wimps and fools and still invite them to parties.

I kind of get this with a lot of European countries/Canada. They're just not as powerful as the US so I suppose they should lean on moralism and their alleged values-based leadership, especially when dealing with the States.

It's an odd thing for the American left to have internalized though. But I guess it comes from their unrelenting critique of American power and the use of force.

It's an odd thing for the American left to have internalized though. But I guess it comes from their unrelenting critique of American power and the use of force.

It stems from their unrelenting obsession with copying Europe and Canada.

The mighty emulating the feeble.

I’ve noticed this before too. I’d go further and say it’s not just the dinner party metaphor but a fixation on formal power.

This mainly manifests in my experience when discussing power dynamics between men and women. The idea that a pretty intern could have “power” over her boss simply does not compute. It’s a form of mistaking the map for the territory I think.

I agree with your definition as the ability to get things done, but that doesn’t yield as readily to systematic analyses and also I suspect doesn’t quite align with the story they want to tell.

I think there’s a category of error of reading too much into how things look on paper. Like another example I use is to ask whether or not an infant has power over her parents. To me the answer is obviously yes, but if you’re caught up in systemic analyses and legalism and dealing with formal “power structures” you will struggle to explain why or might even deny it outright.

I think its kind of crazy to think that we would need "permission" to return Columbian citizens to Columbia at all. What choice does the Columbian govt. realistically have? Risk an international incident by shooting down a plane full of thier own people? Cut off Hunter Biden's supply of Cocain?

The Colombian government wasn't rejecting deportations outright, but the specific way, wanting the US to charter seats or such (which is generally cheaper, too) hence the president offering to fly them with his own plane.

This is really interesting. I'm not pro-Trump and I'm not anti-Trump, but I am anti-anti-Trump. But I will say that this sort of thing unnerves me a little bit.

Trump is clearly used to wheelin' n' dealin' big business, callin' the shots, callin' the bluffs, making bluffs, making quick decisions based on gut instinct and an innate knowledge of human behavior and (company) politics. People just aren't used to this in the POTUS. For most politicians, everything needs to be carefully carefully considered, because the cost of a mistake could be not just that quarterly profits are down, but rather global catastrophe.

I admire that Trump is willing to try this out for the US, and maybe it's what we need in some ways to get us to prosperity, but I also fear this and the consequences of what happens when a nation who's more dangerous calls his bluffs and his tactics. He could be doing the right thing by trying these tactics, or it could be sheer insanity and the result of putting someone in a position they're not really the right person for. I guess we'll just have to see what happens.

Most of the great events in world history happened because people made decisions based on gut, and put personal negotiation above political correctness. It obviously has the possibility of causing instability — but the love of stability over significance and valor is the stuff of the neoliberal consensus, which is collapsing.

All things considered, I would prefer to live in interesting times to boring times, and I’d argue the revealed preferences of human beings are the same. Note the way veterans obsess about their service, or the way pledges go through humiliating rituals only to be bossed around and corralled by half-sober frat brothers, and then remember the situation fondly! And moreover: note how inside Russia there’s immense nostalgia for the rule of Stalin of all people, and note how pumped up the Chinese people are to take Taiwan. People would rather, especially in hindsight, live through a time that will go in the history books than one that will be forgotten. People would rather fly high, and end up too close to the sun, than swing low and drown in the deep. Would you rather be Abraham Lincoln, or James Garfield? Both were shot, but only one was shot because he was historically important.

There are a great many interesting places on Earth right now should you so desire an escape from the oppression of peace and stability.

The motte is "peace and stability" while the bailey is a smothering, devouring-mother managerial state where nothing happens too fast or slow and all the sharp corners have been sanded off of every political decision. There's a spectrum between the smothering hospice-care managerial state and biker gang anarchism, and just because someone would like to move a little further away from the former does not mean that they want to bring about the latter.

Fair enough, it was a dumb comment.

How much of this is stated vs revealed preferences? Would many modern day Russians actually go back to communist living standards?

Economists usually say it's 20-60-20: 20% of Russians have greatly improved their living standards, 20% of Russians have it much worse, 60% have about the same living standards. For the nitpickers, they are comparing extrapolated living standards, not 1975 with 2025.

So about 80% would not protest against switching to a planned economy.

Were living standards rising for the average Russian actually rising in the tail end of the soviet union? Like obviously factory workers in 1989 were much better off than in 1950 but were they better off than in 1980?

In the 80s? Not really, I'd say they stagnated. The oil glut really upset the economy, which relied on trading oil and gas for food.

The whole idea of perestroika was to reboot the industral sector and turn it into a profit center, but it backfired spectacularly.

but I also fear this and the consequences of what happens when a nation who's more dangerous calls his bluffs and his tactics.

Which is the strong nation whose elite will be ok with not being able to travel or transiting the US and using the US banking system. I am fairly sure that even Russian elites are thinking of coup every time that they have to make a connection trough Istanbul.

Russian business elites have their Maltese and Cypriot passports, Chinese their Canadian ones. You would need to sanction by country of origin to target them, which nobody has yet really done.

Owning a non-Russian passport does not change the fact that virtually all flights between Russia and EU are gone

What indication is there that he would try the same tactic with a nation that's more dangerous? I don't see any reason to believe that there was any bluff involved - being willing to impose tariffs that would be inconvenient for Americans but catastrophic for Colombians is a powerful tool of economic leverage that Trump seems willing to exert on a country that really has nothing they can do to meaningfully retaliate.

He is already trying this tactic with our allies, which is making them upset, and he doesn't care. Why should our allies care about what we want when we demonstrate such hostility?

Why should our allies care about what we want when we demonstrate such hostility?

Because they're completely and totally dependent upon the US economically and militarily. They have no hand they can play without being wiped out, and the previous administration has done far worse to them - preventing the Europeans from buying Russian gas is a hundred times worse for them than whatever Trump is doing.

Why do you think being hostile to our allies that are dependent on us with no regard for their reaction will not result in them gaining independence, not so very much unlike the origins of North America?

I honestly hope it does - I am not a supporter of the American Empire by any means.

But right now America has the whip hand, and the desperate circumstances of the ruling classes means that they're going to abuse the Europeans until they grow a pair (and a complete replacement for SWIFT, US financial markets etc). That might be a big problem for the America of the future, who will potentially regret this hostility when the Europeans break away, but that's not something the incredibly short-sighted people running the empire care about.

I agree with your opinion that Europe needs to gain further independence from North America, if only to aid in reducing its hostility. It’s dismal how many short-sighted people are able to effect America’s future at the moment.

I don't strictly mean this in particular was a bluff. But it's all a part of these types of big business tactics.

Would he try this on other more dangerous countries? I don't really know, but it is worrisome. He went further with North Korea than most others have, but that was probably overall a win. Still though, it's a much bigger risk than most presidents would be willing to take.

There isn’t some magic power line beneath which going full power play on another nation suddenly goes from very smart to very dumb. Trump forced his will on Colombia. On balance, that was probably good. But there are scenarios in which exerting this kind of pressure on a medium sized ally nation could, in fact, be very bad.

I mean what indication is there that Trump would do this to Turkey(more or less alone among middle powers in having multiple options for backers)?

I don't understand how this is a meaningful reply or what you're intending to reply to with the magic power line reference. That there are imaginable scenarios, which have not happened, where this would be a bad play does not suggest to me that the individual making said play would just run it back in the imaginable scenarios where it's a bad play.

Fair point, but I don’t think - in that case - we have had enough time to judge whether this was the right play. To be sure, I think it was probably the play I would have made, but I think it’s important to stay humble.

I think 'move fast and break things' is something applied to Silicon Valley but is also something that should be applied to government as well. Bureaucracy slows things down so significantly, it's refreshing to see someone like Trump just go ahead and do it, damn the pearl clutching of teams of lawyers saying he shouldn't or can't.

That's how Chinese governance works. The different regions are all allowed to have their own (radically different) policies to experiment with what works. After a bit, the winning method is spreads to the rest and they try a new experiment.

In the US we call these "laboratories of democracy".

“It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system,” Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in 1932, “that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Conservative and liberal justices have quoted Brandeis’s dictum in some three dozen cases.

I think you missed a "used to". This is from before the New Deal and seven zillion federal departments that were formed in the second half of the 20th century.

Hey, that sounds like a good idea. We should try it in America.

My sister is a bureaucrat and she moves fast and breaks things...most of them are mine. I don't like it at all.

In all seriousness, I work for a start-up with just this sort of mantra, but I think the idea that anyone is moving so fast they haven't considered first or second level consequences is not really representative of how stuff actually gets done. I don't love the meme because I don't think it's accurate. In our case we literally can only move at the speed of the CFTC and our customers, so 'moving fast' is extremely relative.

On one hand I agree with you, but on the other hand when established practices are proven to be increasingly ineffective, breaking them to try something new can be an important tool for innovation and hopefully more effective governmental tools.

You're preaching to the chaos choir over here.

Was there ever any non-fake disagreement between Colombia and the US here?

Per centrist Twitter, deportation flights to Colombia had been running smoothly in civilian planes, Trump switched to using military planes without asking permission, Colombia turned the planes round due to lack of permission, Trump asked for permission (impolitely), Trump got permission, and everything will continue in an orderly way, apart for both sides spending the length of a round of golf trolling each other on social media.

Whether this is a win for America depends on whether you think being gratuitously boorish when you can get away with it is good diplomacy (because it makes you look tough and dangerous) or bad diplomacy (because it makes you look like a boor). This is a point of genuine partisan disagreement in 21st century America.

Fake disagreements are Trump's go-to for domestic performances. He likes to present himself as a tough, ruthless dealmaker, but like much of Trump's image that is mostly kayfaybe. E.g. during his first term he renegotiated NAFTA, supposedly to get a better deal for the US. This produced the USMCA, a trade agreement that looked an awful lot like NAFTA with some minor tweaks.

This might be a 'win' for Trump domestically insofar as he gets to say he won a pissing match and a certain kind of voter eats that up, but as far as Trump being an effective president this seems like further vindication of the view that he is all hat and no cattle.

bad diplomacy (because it makes you look like a boor)

As somebody who is solidly on team "don't be a dick", the position is more substantial than trying to avoid looking boorish. It's the view that the US derives a great deal of its power/influence from its network of allies, and gratuitously alienating friendly nations for the sake of tough guy posturing degrades US power by making them less likely to cooperate in the future. (And more generally that shakedown diplomacy is extremely short-sighted and signals that you're an untrustworthy partner).

The view, expressed elsewhere in this thread (not by you), that the naysayers are simply being prissy is a remarkable failure to model the thought processes of people who disagree. We may, of course, be wrong, but the core complaint is not that Trump is being uncouth. The US has neither the interest nor the ability to force everyone to fall in line, so cashing in goodwill in order to entertain domestic audiences is hurting America for minimal benefit.

Strong agree. I think the actual cost to US-Colombian relations is small because Colombian elites were able to participate in the kayfabe - my guess is that Petro gained rather than lost in his domestic politics as a result.

If there is a cost, it is that it makes it harder for the rest of the world to take Trump seriously when he isn't running kayfabe, which he mostly shouldn't be.

Maybe. I'm skeptical of that framing.

For one, how many planes have arrived since Trump took office? Presumably this was the first batch. Colombia might have been okay taking a plane every once in a while. Will they be okay taking 100x as many planes? These will be just the first of many, many flights.

And, of course, the correct response to rude behavior from an ally (sending the military planes, although I haven't verified this was actually abnormal) would be to accept the planes and politely ask for clarification. It would not be to make the leader of the free world lose face.

The bigger issue, of course, is the message this sends to Mexico and other countries that would refuse to take back their own citizens. Trump will immediately escalate and win. Despite what many people on this forum claimed, he is serious about mass deporting hundreds of thousands of violent criminals.

It's not a winning issue for the Dems either. Wait, you are upset that a country doesn't want to take back its own citizens? You are upset that violent felons can't stay in the US? They will just keep losing if they make this an issue even if they say its really about breaches of diplomatic etiquette or whatever.

It's not a winning issue for the Dems either.

No - it isn't. That's why I find fakery plausible - the whole thing couldn't have been stage managed better if the goal is to make Trump look good domestically.

Will they be okay taking 100x as many planes?

If it is 5x, I'll eat my hat. My guess is that Trump puts in comparable numbers to Obama ("removals" is the best approximation to "immigrants deported from inside the US, not turned back at the border" and the number peaked at 432k in 2013) but both the MSM and right-wing Twitter make a lot of noise about it as if the number was unprecedented. Mostly because that is what happened in the first term. That delivers the best possible results for Trump politically - he is seen to be clamping down on immigration, which is popular, but nobody's nanny or landscape crew gets deported.

I'll agree that the Trump admin is grabbing the low-hanging fruit right now.

There are an estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons who can be deported without much blowback. Most of these came over in the Biden wave, and conveniently, the federal government already knew where many of them were. So it was pretty easy to grab and deport them once we got a competent administration.

Going after nannies and such is a different game altogether and I doubt they will.

But that doesn't matter much in my mind. Because Trump's words and actions will prevent millions of people from entering the country, and will result in millions more self-deporting. This is greatly superior to forced deportations.

estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons

That number can't be right. CBP says about 20,000 per year:

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/criminal-noncitizen-statistics

Which would be about 2 months of Trump deportations at current rates.

So an immigrant with a criminal record in US databases is arrested at the border, and then gives the border patrol his real name, birthdate, national ID number, etc... so they can look up his crimes in their database.

Yeah, I can see that number being less than 20,000 per year. It's remarkable that it's that high, but criminals be dumb. Or maybe they (accurately?) believed that previous felony convictions wouldn't matter and they'd get released into the US anyway.

Oh right. My bad. Let's do an estimate instead. The violent crime rate in the US is 380 per 100,000 (Wikipedia, 2022), with the most violent "state" being DC at 812 per 100,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate

Assuming deportations have not been enforced for four years and no multiple-offenders, it would take a population of 65 million illegal aliens to generate 1 million violent criminals at the US average, the base population of illegal aliens would be 31 million illegal aliens at DC's violent crime rate.

The standard estimate of illegal alien number in the US was 11 million in 2022. However, 'alien encounters' were three times higher between 2021 and 2024 than between 2021 and 2017. https://homeland.house.gov/2024/10/24/startling-stats-factsheet-fiscal-year-2024-ends-with-nearly-3-million-inadmissible-encounters-10-8-million-total-encounters-since-fy2021/

But as we learned during the VP debates, asylum seekers were not considered illegal under the Biden admin. In 2022 there were 1M applications for asylum, in 2023 there were 1.1M, and in 2024 there were 1.5M asylum applications. So that might be another 4M people.

So if I had to guess, there are 15 to 20M illegal aliens in the US at the end of 2024, which implies much less than 660k violent felon illegal aliens.

You need to correct for the fact that Latin America has a violent crime rate that is multiples of the US. Also what percentage of illegals are young males?

I will concede that even if, statistically, we can estimate that 1 million illegals are violent criminals, we don't know exactly which ones they are. Fortunately, we don't have to. We can deport the 22 year old with face tattoos even if we can't prove he committed a crime.

There are an estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons who can be deported without much blowback.

Source on this figure? This feels kind of high, considering the total number of annual violent crimes in the US is also of the same order of magnitude.

You got a source for that?

My memory from a JD Vance interview. Please feel free to provide an alternate figure, but consider that they may have committed their crimes in their home country. I'm spending too much time doing source hunts for people.

How many illegals entered during the Biden admin in total? It's difficult to say. They provided stats on "border encounters" which I think is a good floor, assuming that all the people "encountered" were given court dates and sent on their merry way inside the US. But they don't give stats on that either.

I think 15 million is a reasonable total of total illegal immigration during the Biden wave, disproportionately consisting of military age males. And of course crossing the border illegally is going to select for high criminality. A ballpark of 1 million violent felons seems reasonable, especially considering the extreme rates of violent crime in Latin America.

But if you're looking for a nice little stat in a peer-reviewed paper or a government bureau, you probably won't find it, given their extreme ideological bent.

The whole issue is dumb because they’re only deporting Colombians on these flights, who make up only a tiny percentage of illegal migrants to the US. The big issue is Colombia as a transit hub for people from countless other countries, and those people aren’t being ‘returned’ to Colombia, or anywhere else, any time soon.

The big issue is Colombia as a transit hub for people from countless other countries

It is?

If you intend to get to the US overland from South America, you pretty much have to go through Columbia.

Are there significant land migratory flows to the US from anywhere in South America but Colombia and Venezuela?

Haitians and eastern hemisphere types seem to like flying into Ecuador to walk to the border for some reason.

Yeah, I'm not going to pretend to have a strong mental model for the President of Colombia but this seems like a stunt to push the line and see how much you can get away with. And that sort of thing spreads.

If the military planes were the issue why approve and then suddenly cancel while the flight is in mid-air except to make a point? There must have been a bunch of less visible ways to do this.

I think someone got high on #Resistance copium and didnt realize this isn't 2016.

People can spew whatever line they want about migrants not being criminals in their own country, but it is a bit optimistic to expect to scuttle a US Presidential priority without consequences.

That said, now that Trump has his "Day 1" photoshoot maybe some discretion is advisable. As you say, if he actually gets his druthers the planes won't stop. The smoother it goes the better.

I’m not sure what the internal political situation in Colombia is at the moment, but I expect there’s lots of pressure on the president to “stand up to Trump” in some way. Hence the aforementioned Spanish-language Twitter rant.

It reminds me a bit of ritual tribal warfare. Everyone gets dressed up, lines up on opposite sides of a valley, shakes their spears and yells at each other for a few hours, then everybody goes home satisfied that they really showed the outgroup who’s boss this time.

As I said - looks and quacks like a worked shoot. Trump upsets an arrangement which is working just fine (120 deportation flights to Colombia in civilian planes in 2024) in order to look tough for a domestic audience (the military! deporting illegals, handcuffed!) and get noisily applauded by friendly media, Petro noisily defends the dignity of his citizens (the point of sending Colombian planes at his expense is that the particular group of Colombian deportees who have attracted media attention are not handcuffed, so his friendly media can nosily applaud him for that), and then things carry on as usual.

I don't think anyone actually cares about the military vs civilian planes issue, although the Colombians get to stand on their dignity about the US needing permission to operate military planes in Colombian airspace.

the point of sending Colombian planes at his expense

I'm pretty sure this happened after Trump made his threats, which would make it a face-saving measure.

I think he just overplayed a bit. Trump is odious to many so they want to stand up to him, anyone familiar with American politics saw he was very constrained in 2016 both within and outside his administration so I suppose you can be forgiven for thinking you can make hay of a symbolic issue to get a win.

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