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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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"Adolescence"

As I was giving my brother a lift on Saturday, he asked me if I watched anything new recently. He told me that there's a new netflix series that everybody's talking about, about a murder in a high school, and that in typical netflix fashion there's been a race shift. However since the character in question is a murderer, the shift has been in a direction opposite from the often memed one.

Later that day, my wife told me that everybody's talking about a new series, and it's about a teenage boy getting radicalized by the far right. I acknowledged nearing about it, and she gently mocked me, saying that she can hear from the tone of my voice that I instinctively recoil at the premise.

Yesterday, I saw my high school geography teacher, now the headmaster of said high school, recommending the show on facebook. This was my final cue that it in fact reached some critical mass of normie recognition. I started reading up on it, saw that it was an UK production, and that gave context to the tidbits that I heard while jumping channels in the car on the weekend, with people on the (Polish) radio talking about violence against women in England.

I won't paste the whole synopsis from Wikipedia, but the tl;dr is that it's about a 13 year old who gets radicalized by The Manosphere, asks out a classmate who had her topless photos revenge-posted about someone else earlier (thinking that she'd be easy), she rebuffs him, later insinuates that he's an incel, the boy get cyberbullied, eventually he finds a kindred radical, and stabs the girl. The plot proper is in the aftermath of this, with various authorities questioning the 13-year old Jamie, and parents wondering how it all went wrong. In the end, Jamie decides to plead guilty.

Adolescence has been widely praised by critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Adolescence has an approval rating of 99% based on 72 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 9.3 out of 10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Stylistically bold and beautifully acted from top to bottom, Adolescence is a masterclass in televisual storytelling and a searing viewing experience that scars." Metacritic calculated a weighted average of 90 out of 100 based on 25 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan stated that Adolescence was "the closest thing to TV perfection in decades", singling out the acting by Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty for particular praise. Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph found the series to be "a devastating watch" and the acting to be "phenomenal", although she said that the single-take filming technique could feel "like a gimmick". However, Sophie Butcher of Empire praised the continuous shooting, stating that it was "the most dizzying TV feat of the year" which served to enhance the on-screen emotion.

Anneliese Midgley, a Member of Parliament, called for the series to be screened to Parliament and in schools, arguing it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed the call.

I tried to find something about the inspiration for the series, to corroborate my brother's info, and it turns out it was inspired by three cases of stabbing. The only one named by showrunners is the case of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old transgirl stabbed by two 15 year olds, white girl and white boy. Possible speculation about the other two cases include Ava White (12 year old stabbed by a 14 year old "not named for legal reasons" 🤔) and Elliane Andam (15, black girl stabbed by 17 year old Hassan Sentamu). The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.

So, my first, second, etc. thoughts on all of this were unbecoming of this forum.

My nth thought can be summed as: the absolute audacity of them.

Yes, knife crime, and other violent crime, and crime in general is on the rise in the UK youth. But the unacknowledged elephant in the room is that the current UK teens are a dramatically different cohort from teens. The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".

Cf. "stop asian hate", where assaults perpetrated by other demographics were also presented as if it were the whites' fault. We get the usual kvetching about radicalization, Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American) and whatnot. Are white boys in the UK actually radicalizing? I don't know, probably not, the first pass suggests that in every place that isn't South Korea the boys/young men stay roughly where they were politically, while the world shifts from under them. But if they are, that's a reasonable reaction to the world that tries to scapegoat them for things outside of their control and treats them only with suspicion.

(Yes, I am aware that the perps ih Ghey's case were in fact white. But even there, the girl perp was probably the main instigator of the murder, a far cry from the fictionalized version.)

P.S. (From the synopsis: "Katie used this form of encoded language to accuse Jamie of being an incel". At age 13? I sure hope he was.)

The Manosphere hasn't been a thing for quite sometime. It's like referring to Suffragettes rather than Feminists. Once it became clear that the term had outlived it's usefulness, individuals splintered into a decentralized ether of male self interest and self development.

Adolescence is just another focus for the usual groups to assign blame for anything and everything to white boys men. Red pill knowledge is framed as something that causes murder, hate and involuntary celibacy. If only boys behaved more like.. well, girls, then we wouldn't have this problem. Lets force boys in schools to watch this series so they can feel even more demonized. I'm sure that this won't have the complete opposite effect of that which the Karens would wish.

I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.

I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.

Always have been.

I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.

In addition to @DiscourseMagnus' reply, consider the following: What is an attack on men if not an attack on boys? For what else should boys aspire and expect to be?

Well now they have the option of becoming women.

I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too

Arguably the primary targets are boys just becoming men. From an example published a few days ago:

not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

(after similar anecdotes about 9 other prestige outlets)

The chief editor of the New Yorker is still a white American man, mind you. He replaced a woman in 1998 (back when that was still more unremarkable than Problematic) and he's probably still safe there today. If you try to take away an old man's job then you're certain to engender conflict with a powerful man. If you take young men's jobs before their careers really get started, the young men tend to just go away and find a different career. It might take a decade before people even start to notice.

Arguably the primary targets are boys

I'd even just stop it here. Feminists like other critical theorists have done their own march through the educational institutions. I haven't really seen any pushback in Western public school systems and when I do it ends up as a cautionary tale..

The Manosphere hasn't been a thing for quite sometime.

How would you describe Andrew Tate? What subculture is he a part of?

Some kind of fractured derivative of the Red Pill. Not that he would identify as that (which is kind of my point). Do you think Tate would go 'I'm part of the manosphere'?

Andrew Tate was able to make a name for himself precisely because he obviously took detailed arguments that were posted on Manosphere sites that have been defunct for many years, repackaged them and dumbed them down, and presented as his own in short videos and whatnot. His followers believe him because they don't know any better, because again, those sites are no longer accessible. He's exploiting the death of the Manosphere.

Once it became clear that the term had outlived it's usefulness

I'd add that the Manosphere was clearly able to exist as long as it did due to a very peculiar cultural milieu where Blue Tribe feminists were ramping up the culture war, but the Trump phenomenon, the alt-right, the meme wars, Gamergate etc. did not yet exist.

Yeah this is just another piece in the endless stream of propaganda blaming all social ills on violent white boys and men. Not even very interesting or a new take.

Fails to have any nuance into the root of the problem it seems, basically just blaming the kid for being gullible enough to fall for evil propaganda. Boring.

The real crime here is that this agitprop tripe is being celebrated as art and forcibly shown to highschoolers. But even that is as old as the trees.

Im very curious about the people who rant and rave about the show. What psychologically is the source of their enjoyment? Obviously it does not conform to some previously unexpressed trauma of white boys murdering classmates. Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.

I don't know if you remember being a kid, and had somebody fuck with you (steal your toy, punch you, cheat off you during a test) and then to add insult to injury they also successfully lied and got you in trouble for it?

That's all this is. It's virtually inconceivable these people don't know who's really committing the rapes and knife crime in the UK. This is just the victory lap of their conquest, presaging how'll they'll write the history of the genocide of the Anglo-Saxon's.

I don't think it's that deep. I think the normies, especially internationally, don't have the first idea about the state of the UK. Mentioning the crime discrepancies between demographics is the taboo in the west right now, so no, they're not freaked out about "POC violent youth", because they hardly have a concept of it. Fwiw, it might be a well directed show, possibly tugging at heartstrings of the parents in a "this could happen to you[r kid]" way. I wouldn't know.

Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.

The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.

If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.

White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.

It’s pretty clear they aren’t all that concerned with BIPOC knife crime since their government just released sentencing guidelines that call for different “tiers” of sentences depending upon the race of the offender

The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways.

Going by the murder rate data from the government, black overrepresentation is actually slightly worse than the famous 13/52 in the US. The issue as a whole is way less pronounced because there are fewer murders per capita from any ethnic background, sure, but the relative differences are pretty much the same.

And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.

That's most likely not an inherent property of crime though, but of geographical racial segregation, at least in the US. That's obviously a fairly trivial observation, as an environment gets more diverse you'd also expect the ethnic backgrounds of murderer-victim pairs to be more random, but the discrepancies are still pretty stark, e.g. in 26% black South Carolina about half of all white murder victims are killed by a black perpetrator. Since roughly 2020 this holds across most states in the South too, with Hispanics chipping in in states like Texas with fewer black people, while interracial murders are rising as a share of the white total nationwide as well.

In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups. As places like Newcastle or Leeds become more demographically similar to today's London, even Northerners living in their supermajority native towns and cities might get caught up in that.

In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups

Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.

Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.

Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.

The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.

Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.

I described something similar here, a Straussian reading of a novel I haven't read and don't intend to.

...the iron fist in the rainbow glove

I like this. I'll probably steal it and use it the next time I get in a political argument.

Thanks, an interesting read

I agree with some other replies, most likely the fans think white boys are a concerning problem. They probably have a blind spot preventing them from seeing it any other way. Other fans likely hate low-status (white) men and the show is like a minstrel show - legitimately entertaining as a sneer.

But, the writers could have more principled worries and know this is the only way to express it. By comparison, The Handmaid's Tale is actually inspired by Muslim theocracy, not Christian theocracy. The two stories are not completely comparable since THT I think is more of a cautionary "it could happen to us" and AFAICT this show is not meant to be a hypothetical -- it seems to be a show about current social issues.

I agree with some other replies, most likely the fans think white boys are a concerning problem.

In the vein of my previous comment, that maybe there is more similarity between me and the liblefts than I previously thought, I wonder if there is an aspect of racism of low expectations here. Maybe liblefts have essentially given up on shaping POC boys, and they view decent well behaved white boys as a last bastion that cannot fall to the distinctly vulgar and uncivilized Andrew Tateism. Maybe they view conservative whites as a part of a functioning political ecosystem, and see it collapsing with their slow disappearance.

My completely baseless speculation based only on reading the OP and skimming the Wikipedia page:

The series isn’t actually about violence, at least not thematically. The series is about sexualization, and the violence of the framing narrative serves as a grand metaphor. The series is cathartic because it validates the “ick” that women feel at unwanted sexual attention as being homoousian with physical violence.

IIRC when women are surveyed about what they mean by 'the ick' it's typically behavior in wanted or desired parters which falls short of an ideal.

These people are very concerned about Andrew Tate. That’s it. They’re concerned about sexism spreading among adolescent boys(and to be fair, I don’t like the spread of Andrew Tate sexism among adolescent boys either- even if it seems to be much less pronounced than the literati like to claim). That Andrew Tate fans are almost certainly less white than the general population is immaterial; specifying ‘white’ just makes their concern socially acceptable to themselves.

They believe it captures the lived experience of young men who enter the alt-right/manosphere/incel pipeline for whatever reason and thus provides the antitode to that way of thinking. It doesn't for a whole host of reasons, the primary one being that the main character is 13 years old and most fears young men have about their social status and manhood kick in from around 15-16 onward after maturity has hit.

The plot gives me 'progressives talking about sex instead of having it' vibes. I mean you also see that with progressives addressing lots of other things, it's not a super-specific problem. But progressives live in a world with functionally no one under about 20; not understanding what would be normal-if-bad behavior for a teenage boy and what would be extremely abnormal is expected behavior. The 'plot to get laid' aspect seems like something out of an eighties movie about actual highschoolers, not the real behavior of thirteen year old boys(who are much earlier in puberty than people who only deal with adults tend to believe).

To add a point of anecdata, when I was thirteen I wanted to touch some tits. Getting laid, let alone constructing a psychological profile of a potential "weak" girl to do so, was somewhere in the realm of strange vaguely gross things that didn't seem so appealing.

Yeah, when I was 13(maybe more like 13 1/2) I probably would have had sex if suddenly confronted with a willing woman, but going out of my way to get some seemed like weird alien behavior. There were girls I liked but picking one on the basis of ‘more likely to be willing to have sex’ wouldn’t have occurred to me.

"Men and boys, from a very young age, are influenced by hardcore online pornography and The Manosphere(tm) to [among other things] see women merely as sex objects" is a vital component in the origin story progressives tell themselves.

And indeed, most men have "been exposed to hardcore online pornography" (translation: they, or someone they know, typed "boobs" into the Internet) by this age. They're not going to tell you that, though; it's one of those things adults are weird about, and they know that.

No mechanism for how this actually happens is ever expanded on beyond mumble mumble sexual novelty, but whether or not it actually makes sense is generally irrelevant.

So, one thing I keep wondering about, is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?

Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification. Liberals seem to be low key against this? At least I've seen liberals like Krystal Ball act like Republicans are harming people's sexual health by "banning" pornography in her state of Virginia. It's not exactly a hill they'll die on, but they'll spend some breath on it from time to time. Like liberals seem to be pro pornography, or at least in some sort of weird hyperposition between being pro some abstract form of pornography that's good for sexual self discovery, and against some abstract for of pornography that degrades women.

I know... I know... just.... moving on.

So anyways, a lot of US left coded Narrative following shows seem to be very laissez-faire about pornography, especially with lots of "safe horny" scenes of diverse peoples and sexualities having sex on screen.

A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.

Is this actually a view that the UK public holds? Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?

British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this. And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there. So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain. Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight. And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result. In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.

Liberals seem to be low key against this?

Which liberals?

If you mean progressives, they hate it. The claim it devalues women is trivially correct and everything progressives do is downstream of this.

Actual liberals are generally too busy watching porn to comment.

Just generally, non-US serious feminists have a dim/skeptical view of pornography because it’s not exactly politically correct.

is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?

Both.

Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification.

Mindgeek (i.e pornhub) doesn't oppose age verification for pornography. They just oppose that they've not been given a lucrative monopoly on age verification via a law perfectly designed to match the system they've already made for it. It happens to be strategically useful to blame this on Rethuglicans to rile up Democrats in opposition, but there's no political commitment here.

A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.

The problem is, the cultural divide isn't genuinely over pornography. It's over censorship of the internet in general, because, rightly or wrongly, the current and prior British government, and their client media, view free expression online as a major threat to their continued rule. They are obsessed with introducing laws to ban it, and will reach for any tool available as a justification to do so. Porn is on the weapon rack, so it gets used. It would be trivial enough for governments to introduce legislation specifically banning porn. In practice, it only tangentially hits porn as part of laws that fire broadsides at online dissidents, who are the true target. Anti-porn activists get rolled out in situations where, before, they'd have been shut out as too religious and too conservative, because they are temporarily useful.

It would be illegal to operate this website in the UK post the Online Safety Act, for example, because it doesn't meet Ofcom's takedown requirements for content our government doesn't like.

Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?

The UK public simultaneously doesn't specifically oppose porn, but loves randomly banning everything. A significant percentage of people will support permanent bans on all kinds of activities for no discernible reason.

The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.

I saw more than one meme claiming that Adolescence was Netflix's adaptation of the Southport stabbings, but assumed that couldn't possibly be the case given how recent it was. Good to know I was right.

I had a pretty surface level comment about this kind of narrative pushing in the last thread. The scope of my comment leaned more into journalists latching onto stories that fit their narrative, but your comment talks more about these streaming services pushing a narrative which I find to be just as important, maybe even more important. A lot of these newer shows produced by these platforms are really just delivery mechanisms for socially approved moral instruction, particularly when it comes to social issues. It's a pipeline of content designed (whether intentionally or not) to reaffirm progressive narratives, not challenge them.

I haven't seen the show, but I just read the CNN article about it. Like you said I think there is a recognition that there is a problem. They really try to explain its roots being mostly due to social media, which I agree is a major contributor, but they sort of leave out the passive, yet continued attempts at the feminization of the males in our society so that their violent tendencies can be increasingly shifted to the more indirect emotional and psychological kind. In this show, the female utilizes her ability to maximize psychological harm without being too direct, while the male causes direct harm. One is socially accepted and media-protected, the other is criminalized.

What is the message? Based on the article, it seems like the show creator is trying to strike some balance between the two types of aggression (direct-masculine and indirect-feminine) and how social media (which empowers feminine aggression) is a major problem. No disagreement there. He really does seem to want to help the younger generations, but seeing how we all have to tip toe around certain realities, it makes addressing the male "problem" a difficult one.

The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it.

I do believe this except I find this delivery method to be unacceptable, and, based on Western countries' current voting trends, I'm not the only one. People are becoming quite tired of whitey being the face of certain negative trends, and that has been expressed many times (see Brexit and the elections of Donald Trump).

Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan stated that Adolescence was "the closest thing to TV perfection in decades"

This statement alone should make everyone rather suspicious about the series.

On a different note I'd like to mention that Brianna Ghey's murder had nothing to do with either transphobia or misogyny, as the Wiki article makes it clear.

Also Matthew Shepard's murder had nothing to do with him being gay. People tend to get mad if I say that. Don't drop that fact on reddit.

I must admit, as an English Lit guy, it irritates me quite a bit that all of the commenters on this forum feel comfortable judging an artistic work by reading a basic synopsis and reviews from people they dislike (if anyone actually watched the show I'm happy to be corrected but it doesn't seem that way from how people are talking). I haven't seen the series either and I can't say that it's good, but there's a reason why we have the saying about the book and it's cover and all that. It's lazy and can hardly be called analysis at all.

The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)

I often read or otherwise experience works that I know I won't get along with! I have much to say about e.g. Glass Onion's excellent lighting and camerawork, even if describing its plot would take me another 800 angry words. Last year I've read Babel just so I could critique it fairly. (And I hardly ever see it reciprocated, there aren't many leftists queuing up to read, I don't know, Camp of Saints.)

And then the Charybdis to your sentiment's Scylla is that I'm getting asked by wife and friends why the hell am I doing it to myself, why read something only to rant about it. Can't please everyone.

And then there's often a conclusion from lefty social media users that if someone reads/watches an Important work, but doesn't take the intended moral lessons from it, that it's a failure of Media Literacy on part of the reader. And this one makes me even more disinclined to bother. If the conclusions are supposed to be preordained, if it's all just a morality play, can we assume that I've taken all the lessons and skip the 'experiencing' part?

(Just to be perfectly clear, because this kind of sarcastic hypothetical often transfers badly across writing - yes, what I'm proposing here is a horrible way to engage with art, but reducing works to one-dimensional anvilicious Messages welcomes it.)

In that case I commend you for practicing a forgotten art. I also read Babel last year (not knowing much about it going into it). I actually quite liked the historicity and worldbuilding of the book, it was pretty different from what I normally read in that sense and a good change of pace, but ran into a headache with the sections that were maybe to the most unsubtle degree I've come across in modern fiction so overtly didactic and earnest about the reader getting the point. Like, we get what you're trying to say, you don't have to try so hard. Still glad that I read it.

I agree that there's no way to please everyone, but there's also no reason to attempt to. Read what you want and comment however you like on it. If someone thinks you missed The Point or are wasting your time but you found it a valuable reading experience, they can get bent. If it wasn't, then you can reevaluate whether you want to continue those reading habits. It just irks me when people will dismiss something so completely out of hand because the wrong people like it. It's one manifestation of the brainrot you see everywhere these days where people don't want to bother taking the time to form their own critical opinion of something, so they'll regurgitate what some content creator said about X or Y or judge it on the most surface level of details.

Though on that note, I also agree with you that works which are striving to be summed up into one didactic surface level message invite bad takes. Still, I don't see how (from the summary that was given) this show would qualify necessarily. The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?. But without watching the show, we have no idea what the message of the show might be, what conclusions it might draw about how much race/social media/drug use/gender dynamics/parent responsibility or anything else play into the narrative.

The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?

And here we see the problem with the disparate cultures. My reading of the op, ideologically aligned as I am, is that it is fine to make tv shows about paths to radicalisation and youth crime, but ALL of the media that does this suggests the problem is little white boys and that doesn't reflect reality at all. That there is nothing brave or courageous about telling a story about the path to radicalisation and knife crime when you refuse to confront the ethnic reality of who actually falls onto that path and who actually commits most of the knife crime. And this is taking place in a media environment where being white and male is already setting you up for antagonist status, so it is no wonder the (ideologically aligned) media is lauding it and will do so regardless of its quality. That is not "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." it's "you are still crying wolf".

For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.

The primary focus I see here is the propaganda angle, we don't need to watch the show to know little white boys aren't The Problem. Also this criticism would sting more if woke media wasn't always so fucking generic. If safety and inclusivity and ad-friendliness didn't dull creator's creativity even before they get around to making the story advance the same insipid globohomo agenda every fucking thing else is advancing.

Also that attitude privileges positive criticism over negative criticism. Nobody gives a shit if you gush about a show before watching it, in fact that is a significant part of most media's promotional strategies. And you can spin up all kinds of lies about a movie you haven't seen if it codes right wing. Therefore it is the duty of every good, right thinking person who doesn't want globohomo corpo-friendly slop jammed down their throats to loudly and repeatedly badmouth anything that even looks like it. This is the world progressives apparently wanted, it would be unkind not to give it to them.

You do need to watch the show to know if the show is saying little white boys are the problem. Anything else is laziness disguised as politics.

Is any show that depicts a young white male murderer implying that young white men are The Problem? I want an actual answer to that, because it seems like you're saying yes to that if you feel this comfortable shitting all over something you have the barest passing familiarity with. If no, then I don't understand your reasoning.

My attitude privileges nothing, it is simply the fact of the matter that people will spend hours and paragraphs shitting all over something they have no idea about. The reverse is usually not true. When it is, I also find that distasteful.

Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. I prefer analyzing things on their own merits. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.

Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.

Then you simply aren't paying attention. It is not the world I want to live in, it is the world I fought hard and impotently against, and I remain adamant in my belief that the only way out is consequences. One side of the debate - whether you accept it or not - spent the past 15 years shoring up their vise like grip on the zeitgeist to the point they now control not only coverage, but to a large extent distribution of all non-independent (in the classic sense, not the neoliberal sense) media. They block media they don't like politically from being seen or purchased. They flood the news with negative reviews before a right wing product even launches, because they gatekeep the authorised critic pool. When people complain they declare them nazis or incels or gamers. When people watch it and write their own reviews for metacritic or opencritic or Google, they call it review bombing. When people then stop watching they double down on blaming the audience. Or they blame 'fatigue', which is a mod on blaming the audience. Funny how dumb nerds like me talked about star wars and comics all day every day from 1985 to 2015 and then suddenly got fatigued huh?

And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage. That's why review bombing exists as a concept, why every now and then we get think pieces about how you can't trust user scores, and why we have the 'don't yuk someone's yum' meme. That wasn't the case before marketing executives realised they could game user impressions that hard. Positive reviews should be treated as dishonest by default these days, as they are part of the machine and thousands of people's livelihoods sometimes rely on the product scoring a high enough percent on review sites to count as success.

And so the answer to your question is no of course not. It's a Venn diagram of overlapping concerns, like adjacency too globohomo, where and by whom it was produced and the marketing campaign used to push it. And while white boys is one of the two main ones in this instance, the other necessary element is the chattering class thinking it's very important and we need to put it in schools. I doubt we'll see anything that important and iconoclastic (because that would be a necessary component, you don't need to show school kids shit they have jammed down their throats all the time) from a traditional media source ever again. Setting aside there being nothing new under the sun, there are too many competing and conflicting interests involved for nuanced arguments to take hold and far too many ways for people to pass the buck.

There is of course an experiment we can do here that will settle whether adolescence thinks little white boys are The Problem or not. You could watch it, and you will immediately be able to rub my face in how wrong I am. I would genuinely appreciate it if that was the case, because I have met Stephen Graham and he is really smart and friendly and just all round awesome, but I have kicked at that football way too many times to trust Lucy now.

I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. I am not a faceless representative of the political side that you so clearly despise. I am an individual who has provided my personal view on how media should be commented upon.

You are conflating a ton of things. There are some things people will call review bombing, will flood with negative reviews, etc. There are also people (like you) who will do all of the same negative behaviours and think they're justified for some reason? Sure, those things happen (I also think review bombing is a term that points to a distinct phenomenon, albeit with a negative connotation) and are sometimes bad. How much water do you think the 'I'm going to blame the general audience for my show being unpopular' argument really holds with the public? Is this a thing you think all "globohomo woke" people believe, or is it something you saw a few people say on twitter and now you're repeating in your deluge of spite?

"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage. And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?

Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.

This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.

For my part, given the topics involved and the kinds of people insisting it's Very Important, I'm pretty much willing to let my assumptions ride. I'm not turning off my pattern recognition ability because you think it's unfair.

This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.

Lmao ok, well given the way you talk to me I don't give a shit what you think. You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave. You demand empathy from me even as you insult and misrepresent me, you dismiss everything I say as not even worthy of consideration, and yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect, you are simply uninterested. But I am intellectually lazy for my lack of interest you say, based on three posts, the first of which was clearly playing on the irony of just desserts, and the second one you seem to be ignoring because it's too nuanced to sneer at. But I know I'm right, so I have nothing to prove. The only reason I engaged you is because I like talking about this.

Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.

It doesn't matter if you think I'm lazy, I know I am simply avoiding demoralisation and adding a straw to the camel's back that is mainstream media, and that's good enough for me. I am perfectly content to let others who feel compelled to discover the actually important and iconoclastic stuff - remember how I said that to you and asked you to watch the show and tell me it was good so I could go watch it? Word of mouth is my method of discovery, it's actually worked well for most of human history.

"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage.

No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage.

And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?

Yeah, it works even from people who don't know what they are talking about and from random strangers the audience doesn't even know. That concept is a core part of advertising. And I don't just mean in the age of tik tok (although even more so now) it has been known for decades. And almost any kind of advertising can work for any product, but different types can work better than others. For gadget advertising you want a spokesperson to provide the product with authority. For appliance advertising you want an extra who looks like a classy but normal person to imply the user will gain prestige from owning the appliance. For car advertising you want sexy people to imply the car will make you sexier and get sexy people to hang out with you.

And media advertising comes in two prongs - you want famous people attached promoting it and you want regular people gushing about it. It used to be that you just wanted regular people talking about it, good or bad, the point was to ensure it is part of the national conversation. But after the 2011 writer's strike that changed and advertisers were given a lot more power during production as producers needed the additional funding provided by sponsorships and product placement. People were only really tolerating product placement in reality shows though, so they had to pivot, but they learned they could get similar gains through hype. That was when the astroturfing began in earnest. Now it's all about promoting positive engagement and chilling negative engagement. But since you won't believe me, ask an advertising executive. They'll dress it up in convoluted obfuscating language, but they are usually happy to talk about it.

If you don't give a shit what I think, I recommend stopping the engagement. This will be my last comment given this fact. I do find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the "way you talk to me" when you like to throw in some "LMAO"s and "Bud"s and openly don't care about what I say, yet accuse me of condescension as I clearly state my opinions, but alas.

"You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave." You think that's how I behave, because you seem to have flattened everything in the world of cultural and artistic appreciation that you either have no interest in understanding or cannot understand into the bucket of 'globohomo woke' and the cultural left. Case in point, my argument, which you have repeatedly misunderstood, as below.

"yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect". Yes....if you read my last paragraph, i stated that this was the case and that that wasn't my point. It is very tiresome to have your argument misunderstood over and over again despite stating it in plain terms.

Yes, I do in fact believe your practice of consuming artistic and cultural objects is intellectually lazy. Writing some text about why you think this is not laziness doesn't change that fact.

Am I supposed to take your comment regarding "irony of just desserts" as saying that your first comment wasn't serious? Or was it? If the former, then it seems a mistake to engage on this forum in that way. If not, I don't see why this should be some new understanding for me if you still support what you said there in earnest. That's not irony. I think calling it the irony of just desserts when the the behaviour in question is really just trusting negative reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about to spite people you dislike is dressing up the behaviour a little bit to make it more presentable and sound more sophisticated than it really is.

So you say word of mouth is your method of discovery. That would be fine, except for the fact that your word of mouth supply chain seems to also consist of people who don't consume or know much about the things that they positively or negatively recommend. So you're not getting much value there if the posts in this forum were sufficient evidence to stay away from this show. I stand by the fact that if there were something important and iconoclastic in this or other shows, you would be extremely unlikely to come across it given your artistic consumption habits.

"No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage." So I said essentially a synonym of what I said that I did, with about the same meaning, and you have chosen to not believe me. Fair enough. Again, the only reason you seem to think that my attitude privileges positive coverage is that you think other faceless people do this and that I'm one of them. That's what happens when you treat individuals (and artistic objects) as if they're all in a bucket that you despise.

I will disagree that this concept is a core part of advertising. I stand by what I said, if someone admits ignorance of the thing they're reviewing, they will be roundly mocked. Reviews rely on the perception the reviewer knows what they're talking about. These people may in some cases be paid to say those things, but the outward message is that they have consumed the thing and are recommending the thing. Advertising from the company that makes a product itself or makes money off of it can be heavily discounted, and indeed I think most consumers understand this and are not deceived that the sexy person in a Lexus commercial has some intimate knowledge about cars and prefers a Lexus. This does require some intelligence and intuition on the part of a consumer to separate what the company wants your perception to be of the product and the reality of the product given marketing expenditures, but that's why there is a vast information ecosystem you can use to make this determination, and independent reviewers exist. Refusing to do this legwork and instead throwing out the baby with the bathwater is what I would call lazy.

I didn't speak down to you until you started doing so to me. That's what I do when people speak down to me. And you are still conflating refusing to stop talking about media I haven't watched with refusing to watch media I don't agree with politically. Ideally I would prefer the motte not acknowledge that kind of show at all, but since it was brought up, talking about it is the point of the forum. By your standards the only way to have a conversation is after giving the media the views they need, but hate watching pays just the same as watching in earnest.

That was what I meant about the irony in my first comment - you assumed I was seriously insisting we should all be loud dicks about anything we suspect we won't like, but I was exaggerating for comedic effect. I was actually the first person on the motte to vociferously argue for watching everything - even propaganda if you are in the right state of mind, although I have been reconsidering that lately. But you don't have to watch it in ways that profit the lazy and unscrupulous. Stereotypes only have significant value in impersonal interactions - for seeing the shape of the world, the pattern. When you are directly interacting with someone stereotypes can point you in the right direction, but individual elements of the pattern can and do behave erratically.

This is the culture war thread after all. If there wasn't a culture war angle to this, it wouldn't even be here as a post - it is relevant because UK media and government figures are obsessing over the show, insisting it is vital to understanding young men and should be shown in schools, etc.

I saw someone make a comparison to the film La Haine. That film provoked plenty of discussion in its native France, was shown in a government meeting (IIRC), much like Adolescence. La Haine is now widely regarded as a classic film, but I don't think this reputation would have any bearing on a talk of whether it was relevant for the French government, or whether it had any lasting impact on policy and so forth.

That's well and good if that's what you want to talk about, but the OP has 2 sentences which relate to the series being discussed by MP's. The rest is their own analysis of the plot, its supposed real life references, and some non sequiturs about knife bans and asian hate, which as far as I can tell have nothing to do with the show, they're all just getting lumped in as things that people that OP dislikes are promoting.

If the culture war angle relies on what the message of the show is and not just who is talking about it, then I would simply repeat my comment that I find it irritating that people will decide what the message of a show is based on a review from someone they dislike. It is simply lazy.

I think that this is being used as the reason du jour to Have a Conversation about teenagers and social media. Back in my day it was personal information, sexting, and cybersecurity. We didn’t have the words ‘revenge porn’ and ‘doxxing’ but the designated cool grownups giving us talks about responsible internet use would have recognized the concepts quite easily.

I haven't watched it, but is this your brain on partisanship? Incel violence isn't right coded, and manosphere also isn't beyond the fact that it rejects feminism. Numberically it may be true that underclasses commit the most stabbings, but people don't care about those. On the other hand there are high profile incel cases such as Elliot Rodger that people know about.

Also for this kind of thing, the perp/hero is also supposed to be sympathetic to the audience. If it's a gangbanger or jihadist who doesn't look like you, then the killer just becomes a flat boring character that nobody will care about. Anyways incel violence is categorically different from thug or secretarian violence.

the case of Brianna Ghey

If you really wanted a partisan story, adapting this more directly would do the job. Two seemingly ordinary white kids are actually sadistic, cold blood killers and they murder a trans just for fun. The killers are just plain evil and they kill someone at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.

The killers are just plain evil and they kill someone at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.

That's the motte; "man bad" is the bailey. If you have the power to fight in the bailey, why retreat to the motte?

Incel violence isn't right coded

It isn’t? Online on Twitter it seems to be. That’s the go to insult among the left for a right wing guy. Even Elon Musk got called incel by his estranged son. Jordan Peterson is supposed to be king of the incels if my TikTok comment section is to be believed

"Incel" is just a catch-all term for "dissident"; it makes far more sense in this context.

Incel violence isn't right coded

That's news to me. I believe it is right coded, in the minds of the kinds of people who dunk on incels.

In the minds of everyone who unironically uses the term, I think.

The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".

The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).

Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American)

Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.

What happens when you age adjust? There are notably few boomers following him, after all.

Black and Asian people will be overrepresented regardless of the population distribution, because of those surveyed, a greater percent viewed him positively. As for whether there's still a white majority or plurality among those who view him positively, that's what I mean by I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell.

Yes but are they overrepresented in the age group that likes Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate fans skew young and younger generations in Britain, as elsewhere, are more minority heavy.

When you adjust for this, are white youths more pro-Andrew Tate than minority youths?

No, you misunderstand. It's already been adjusted because the raw figures of how many people they surveyed aren't included.

The survey asked X black people, of which 0.41X said they viewed him favourably.

The survey asked Y white people, of which 0.15Y said they viewed him favourably.

When you adjust for population, by dividing by X and Y respectively, you get 41% and 15%, so minority youths are more pro-Andrew Tate.

The political and educational establishment and those who share their views fail to adequeately diagnose the problem. This is primarily because they can't understand the experience of being young men and have zero interest in doing so. Indeed, every "men are doing badly" talking point is always discussed from perspective of its negative second order effects, mostly in relation to women. Starmer's gushing over this is indicative of naive confidence. He thinks the essence of the problem has finally been captured, and so do all the left of center opinion pieces on this show that were written shortly after its release. Frankly, it all feels a bit coreographed...

I have written about this before, once three years ago and once last year and I haven't seen anything to suggest that they've learned a single thing since then. There is nothing new to write about under the sun. I want to volunteer myself as a consultant to the government on the manosphere and how its influence might be curbed, purely because I cannot handle the unending nonsense coming from my computer screen and I would like it to stop.

I do think they want to fix the problem. It’s really hard to find a group of people who insist on doing the exact opposite of what everyone who works with young men is screaming for them to do and not eventually come to the conclusion that the problem is “they just can’t figure out what to do.”

What has worked for pretty much all of human history is a purpose, a sense of responsibility, and feelings of competence. There are ways to do this, it’s not even that hard. Get them out doing useful things, competing in sports or other activities. Give them male only spaces. They’ll be fine. And if you pay attention to what kinds of messages young men gravitate to, it’s messages exactly like that— calls to purpose, to doing hard things and building something worthwhile. They eat up Jordan Peterson, Jocko, and other similar figures.

With the correct direction so obvious, I find it weird to think that all of the phDs worried about young men have absolutely no idea how to make them healthier. I don’t see it, I see people who look at boys as failed girls and men as failed women and goes about trying to turn the young men into women. It’s doesn’t work, but I’m not convinced it was ever supposed to make men more mentally healthy. It seems more about making sure men are in a sense as domesticated as women are by nature— willing to sit down, shut up and do as he’s told.

Get them out doing useful things, competing in sports or other activities.

But that is not Safe.

Give them male only spaces. They’ll be fine.

But that is not Equal.

And if you pay attention to what kinds of messages young men gravitate to, it’s messages exactly like that— calls to purpose, to doing hard things and building something worthwhile.

But that will mean men will think themselves entitled to the fruits of that labor rather than paying women their fair share.
That is not Consent.

If you worship these things as Goddesses, and many do- you don't generally get elected without professing your belief in these things- you cannot fix this problem. Only by rejecting these Goddesses can you solve the problem.

Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed? I'm hearing a lot about the Dept of ED because of my sister who worked there, and she has told me that everyone else she's talking to says they are going to be let go soon, but I can't tell if that's true or just people trying to make her feel better. For what it's worth, I live in an area replete with Federal workers--like every other person, it seems. There is a lot of anger and frustration, but not much clarity. So far, it seems like Dept of ED and USAID have had the most dramatic cuts, but people from DHS and Transport are claiming they will lose their jobs 'any day now.'

I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.

Curious if anyone has any good sources on the bigger picture of how many cuts there have been in total.

Psychological torture also is effective in breaking someone's spirit. And I think that the resistance know in their bones that this time the price they will pay will not be symbolic.

I think that part of Trump strategy is just to teach them learned helplessness

Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed?

The amount matters less than the distribution. Some departments (Education, USAID) are getting hit far, far, far, far more than others. Even in others, cuts are often occurring more at the new-employee level more than the old-employee level, where alternate tactics- such as the early-retirement offers- are being used.

The key point is to look to the employee's relevant secretary. Since DOGE's reigning-in from the 'all employees say what you did' email, the Secretaries appear to have been given primacy in deciding how to approach their workforce.

The IRS announcements were a few weeks ago: a bit under 10% of their current staff (the "probationary" employees) immediately (or at least when the lawsuits shake out) laid off, with a target more like 50% in the long term.

If ever there was a tax season to attempt shenanigans...

I always keep taxes pretty clean because paying a bit more is worth avoiding the stress of fearing an audit, but this did occur to me as well. Even so my expectation is that within the next few years the IRS gets a big upgrade through AI agents and I don't want those digging into my dodgy filed returns down the road.

... its not this one. All of those IRS agents are now looking to pump up their numbers in order to keep their jobs. Busting Average Joe for some transparently obvious evasion is an easy win for them.

Next year, when the turnover is settled however...

Volunteer with your local Republican Party first. Can’t hurt, might help.

I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.

A lot of this is the psychological shock for government workers to find themselves unsure about their futures. Government work has long been understood as a bargain* for the employee: the employee gives up significant salary and upward mobility, and receives in turn a relatively easy job and close to complete job security. You don't make as much money, but you'll never get fired. Current government workers have built their lives around that bargain. They "knew" they were giving up other opportunities, but in exchange they were getting job security.

Now that bargain is being shaken up. Whether anyone has actually been fired or not, they know they aren't wanted, and that their firing might be only a matter of time. This is devastating if you thought you would never be fired.

*One can dispute the accuracy of this bargain, some government workers seem very well paid, but it probably turns into dueling-nit-picking about what the same workers' potential earnings in the private sector would be. Regardless, this bargain is still understood as being in force even if it has factually decayed. Most government workers will tend to compare their careers to the best of their peers in the private sector and find they made less, not to the worst, so even if a government salary is higher overall it still will be perceived as middling.

Yeah, this seems to be largely the case. As a fin-tech worker, the idea of job security is one I can hardly process, but I've been told that easy job and lifetime job security were top reasons for moving to DC. I think also, "there's not actually much work for a PhD in linguistics," is up there. I'm sympathetic to the claims of being terrorized--it seems like the firings are extra confusing and malicious--but I'm a little-shoulder shruggy in terms of losing one's job. It makes me seem like a demon around here. I have to keep up the pretense that I'm sorrowful for all the people. That said, I don't know who's getting fired, so I don't know who to call to make a big scene about how terrible it all is. I've been accused of not being 'curious enough.'

I have a family member working in HHS. From February:

well as of right now, I have not been fired. So it could be worse
However, yesterday they fired probationary [Agency A] employees, and today was [Agency B]’s turn. We are expecting the same for [our Agency C] next week. I've been told I am not probationary (typically a 1y period) but I am still "conditional", not "permanent" on my employee docs, so I will be first on the chopping block if they continue after removing all probationary ppl
Lots of us know people at [Agency A] who were fired - they got no severance and were fired because of "performance" and because they were "not needed". Surely illegal, but that hasn't stopped Musk/Trump yet

The prediction was correct, and they put all their probationary employees on admin leave for a month. Apparently switching from a contractor to an FTE spot still confers probationary status, so this included some 10+ year former postdocs who are now being asked to come back.

These probationary firings may or may not have been legal depending on the statutory requirements of firing “for cause.” Some of them have been reversed. Others are still in court. I don’t expect you’ll find good numbers about the number of people fired, because even the government doesn’t seem to be sure.

Either way, supervisors were immediately required to draw up a RIF plan which presumably allows smiting the rest of the workforce. Here is the OPM directive. Plans must be designed to finish by September 30th, though I notice the example plan could be done in June.

This was all before the “5 things” email, which has apparently become a weekly thing now. I assume it’s an attempt to identify “cause” since that’s been a sticking point in the lawsuits. Whether or not it collects any useful information, it’s definitely reminding employees what they have to look forward to.

I don’t know if you’ve ever worked for a company which did a RIF. It’s not fun. Even when you know the date, you still aren’t told any details—even when the next few rungs above you are feeling just as frustrated. The plans are approved at a higher, less personal level.

That’s where almost all federal employees are standing. Anyone hired in the last year has been ambiguously cut, so everyone knows a few. By September 30th, some fraction of the rest will go, too. And that’s if the top management doesn’t think of some other way to move fast and break things.

I have been part of an RIF...a few times, in fact. The difference was they just said, "you're fired. Sign here." There wasn't any will-they/won't-they/when-they. I feel like the "shit-show" part of this is largely on purpose. Make everything so horrible no one will ever come back. Salting the Earth, as it were.

At my company, there were rumors of a date but no confirmation. When the date came around, they were walking people out one at a time all morning. So there was enough window for speculation.

I agree that it is intentionally slapdash. The uncertainty helps a strategic goal. Everyone who quits is one that doesn’t get severance.

Everyone who quits is one that doesn’t get severance.

Is that so?

As I understand it, yeah, severance pay is for "involuntary separation."

I'm not sure how that interacts with the administrative leave applied to the probationary hires, though.

My suspicion is that the part you call a "shit-show" is mostly necessary opsec in an adversarial environment. The bureaucrats are fighting administration goals and if they were made privy to the administration's plans, they'd use that information to defeat the plan (or try to). So there's will-they/won't-they/when-they.

Becky Burke, British Comic Book person returns home after 11 day ICE detention https://comicscene.substack.com/p/becky-burke-returns-home-after-us

The link isn't the best link, just the first. I googled the story and found dozens of articles that all say the same basic thing.

  • 28 yo travels America since January; ~50 days on a 90 day visa
  • At some point she tries to cross into Canada to go to Vancouver; The Canadians say no--you have the wrong visa and send her back
  • Upon returning to the other side of the border, the Americans say, "You were working on a guest visa, that means jail and deportation." Becky + Lawyers claim she was only doing 'chores' with a host family. 'Chores' are never defined, detailed or discussed.
  • 11 days in an ICE detention center; trauma for life and some great comic book material.
  • Red, red meat for Europeans looking to make hay with Trump. This story is (apparently) all over the UK right now.

I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

I'm confused by this. On one hand, Trump wants ICE to be extra hard-core and now naive Zoomers are getting swept up with bad Visas. Ok, that sucks. Shit happens. Perhaps in a kindler, gentler America we would have given them a tongue lashing and sent them home, now we jail them for a week and a half. Seems...unnecessary, but I guess the message is sent: don't come here and try to get away with doing work. Very bad!

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place? I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.' I've heard of this happening with musicians or DJs who fly into Canada as tourists only to play a gig and get busted for working. I don't think it's great, but I get why it happens. Was Becky sketching the family as part of her 'chores'? Was she doing farm work? Was she cleaning dishes and sending Instagrams about it? Did she tell ICE she had been working? Like, what the heck happened? Is this another case of "lying to cops is the only rational response," and she got swept up in a dragnet fishing for gormless fools?

A separate article mentioned this recently happened to two other people (both females...coincidence?) who were arrested because they were possibly working on travel visas. One was a German tattoo artists, who, based on the scant evidence provided in the article, seems to have been travelling with her inking gear and also worked on a prior trip to the US. The third lady is an actress who somehow didn't have the right visa either and ended up in ICE detention for a few weeks. For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.

My instinct is that these are the horrifying yet rare circumstances that sell news copy but don't really say much about American immigration and customs enforcement. At the same time, I dunno...Trump, man. Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud? The information I accessed is so vague and so focused on the 'horrible treatment' I can't really get a picture of what happened, so I presume there's more going on and that if I knew what it was it would make me less sympathetic to the victim.

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud?

Speaking as a somewhat lefty, artist-adjacent type, who could not be described as an activist but has lots of Trump-critical words published under my real name, I am much more reluctant to come to the states under a Trump administration and probably won't visit my extended family members there during this administration (I normally come every year, and normally turn up for remote work duties at least a bit while visiting). Whether most Motte readers would see that as constituting evidence of damage to international relations, or a welcome impact of the new anti-foreigner vibes, I don't know.

To add my anecdote to this, I am vastly more likely to come to the states under the Trump administration. This is because the Biden administration made it illegal for me to visit as a non-citizen non-immigrant from October 2021 to May 2023 via Presidential Proclamation 10294.

The reason this didn't negatively affect US international relations should be pretty obvious. Our home countries also wanted to discriminate against us, so why would they get upset at the US joining in on the hate?

I was also banned from going to the US but no one would wrote up my sob story, but I also didn't break the law by entering the US so no real story to write up.

Couldn't you just go in June 2023 or September 2021?

Yeah, if I had a time machine I could use to send past me information about when Biden is going to randomly shut the borders to me, I could go in September 2021. But I don't have one.

What about June 2023 to November 2024?

Sure. Still leaves me more likely to visit the US under a Trump administration than Biden, since the latter still came with extended periods of time where it's illegal for me to visit when I might want to. A lot of people, including me, want to visit a country at a specific date, for a specific thing, not just plan to do so at any time including years later. If I want to visit in 2022 but can't, the most likely outcome isn't that I'll delay it until June 2023, it's that this visit will just never happen.

That might be true for you, although I'm unsure about the vagueness of "a lot of people." Obviously we're talking about larger trends for the general public - if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.

if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.

Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.

More comments

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs.

If we wanted to write a law saying "you can use a non-work visa to work, as long as the industry or the quantity of work makes it laughable that they're taking someone's job", we could have. I hope the reasons why not to have such a law are obvious.

Yeah, this is about how I felt about the tattoo lady too. Charging people money to tattoo them is obviously work, it should not have been permitted.

Then again, I'm kind of a bleeding heart type and so I would probably not throw these folks in an ICE detention center if they agreed to just fly back where they came from. Certainly not for 11 days.

Charging people money to tattoo them is obviously work, it should not have been permitted.

Was she charging people? OP just said she was carrying her gear. I don't see why she should be forbidden from doing it for free, as a hobby, even if she gets paid for it at home. I feel like the line here ought to be "did they get paid", not "were they doing things that other people might get paid for in other circumstances", particularly when it comes to artists.

Sure. That is the applicable standard, but it's not the right posture.

At the same time, the decision has to be made on whether she is to be allowed entry, so we don't know with confidence what she will do after being admitted. Some CBP guy has to, on the balance of available evidence, figure out if she is likely to violate the law or not.

So you're right about the line, but wrong about the tense.

I think the text of the laws in question largely date from a time with well-defined "work" and "not work" life spaces, but they're hardly unique to the US. If you're a laptop-class worker, can you "check your email" while on vacation somewhere? I can appreciate that there is a line somewhere before your host country should at least expect you to pay income taxes and such, but a small amount of de minimus work seems pretty harmless.

I follow a number of professional artists on social media, and at least once have seen a post lamenting that following the letter of the US tourist visa meant they couldn't paint a canvas, even for fun, while visiting (a high profile makes legal scrutiny more likely to appear too).

On the other hand, I don't have a specific threshold of "reasonableness" in mind. I'm open to hearing ideas, but "no" is at least a clear answer, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to personally leave work at work when I'm on vacation.

Not an immigration lawyer, but I am fairly certain you can come to US for business purposes on the waiver program. You just can't be paid paid or compensated by US entities for your time and services.

otherwise everyone coming to the US as a conference attendee wouldn't be able to use the visa waiver program

It is worth noting that for short-term travellers the US has "visa waiver business" (VWB) and "visa waiver travel" (VWT) programs. VWB can accept honoraria (montary payment) for giving guest lectures (limited to 5 presentations in a 6 month period). VWT cannot enter the country with the goal of receiving payment, but they can still give guest lectures and accept payment if the honorarium was offered and arranged after they entered the US.

I was under the impression that honoraria were a small deal, maybe $300 for a seminar (the legal limit in Korea), but the University of Washington has procedures to cover honoraria of over $10,000, and host visiting scholars for up to nine days. Maybe I need to get on the professional seminar circuit.

Wouldn’t the line be some sort of contractual obligation for some sort of pay? If I’m doing chores to be nice, then there’s no obligation to do so and no expectation of getting anything in return. If she’s watching children and keeping house in return for something— education, shelter, or money, that’s pretty clearly work. Making something you sell is work, making something and giving it away isn’t.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

Given how 'chores' were equated to labor, emotional and otherwise, and thus unfair/uncompensated wage disparities in past media epicycles, I am unclear if I am supposed to be upset that that this does or does not conflict with a worker visa on grounds of work.

exactly

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place?

"Canada sent you back, did we miss something?" seems like a straightforward trigger for additional scrutiny.

Or maybe the border agent had just read that story about the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK and was exceptionally paranoid about what "chores" might mean.

the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK

The what

Associated Press: UN judge from Uganda is convicted in the UK of forcing a woman into slavery

A British jury on Thursday convicted a United Nations judge of forcing a young woman to work as a slave after tricking her into coming to the U.K.

Prosecutors said Lydia Mugambe made the Ugandan woman work as her maid and provide childcare for free.

Mugambe, who is also a high court judge in Uganda, was studying for a doctorate in law at the University of Oxford when the offenses occurred. According to her United Nations profile page, she was appointed to one of the global body’s international courts in May 2023.

Prosecution lawyer Caroline Haughey told jurors during the trial that Mugambe “exploited and abused” the victim, deceiving her into coming to the U.K. and taking advantage of her lack of understanding of her rights.

Prosecutors said Mugambe arranged for a contact in the Ugandan High Commission in London to get the woman a visa, under the guise that she would be working in the household and office of the diplomat. Once she arrived in Britain, she was taken to Mugambe’s home and made to work as an unpaid nanny. Her passport and visa document were taken away from her.

The victim eventually sought help from a friend, which led to police becoming involved.

Mugambe, 49, denied the charges. Jurors at Oxford Crown Court convicted her on all four charges she faced, including an immigration offense, forcing someone to work and conspiracy to intimidate a witness.

There were gasps from the public gallery as the verdicts were read out, and the court was cleared after Mugambe appeared unwell. She is due to be sentenced on May 2.

“Lydia Mugambe used her position to exploit a vulnerable young woman, controlling her freedom and making her work without payment,” said Eran Cutliffe of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime Division. “Thanks to the victim’s courage in coming forward it has been possible to bring Ms. Mugambe to justice and be held accountable for her actions.”

Reuters: Ugandan UN judge convicted in Britain after 'slavery' trial

Lydia Mugambe was appointed in 2023 to be a judge of the U.N. International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, which performs functions of previous tribunals relating to war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Holy shit, wow.

Everyone is lying constantly about the purposes of all immigration laws and law enforcement all the time. Debating it in public is more or less completely pointless.

These kinds of public displays of gratuitous kafka-esque cruelty are meant to scare current immigrants and potential immigrants, as they realize the power that the Federal Government has to fuck with them at will. This is leading a lot of green card holders I know who are from non-shithole countries to "jump before they push me" and consider moving home.

This kind of "enforcement" will have no impact on the job market, but it publicly displays to people that they aren't safe from stupidity and cruelty, and that they should rethink immigrating to or remaining in the USA. Deport 50 criminals and you deport 50 criminals; imprison one rando for doing the dishes and you terrify dozens into self deportation.

Both sides can play anarchy-tyranny.

So your friends had no problem with the previous administration going after and locking up people for explicitly political reasons, even keeping some in prison without trial for years, but stricter enforcement at ICE leading them to lock up one bpd girl making sad pictures about her arrested development for a week and a half and that's gratuitous Kafkaesque cruelty justifying moving country?

Did the previous administration do that to random travelers and immigrants, or are you referring to something else?

Because, yes, if I were an immigrant, stricter enforcement at ICE would be a bigger concern for me than virtually anything else when deciding where to live.

Right so their opposition to Gratuitous Kafkaesque Cruelty is entirely who whom.

I never even said they opposed it. Merely that they were frightened of it happening to them.

I might or might not oppose Stop and Frisk but I know it's not happening to me either way. If it started happening to me in my town, I might consider moving, whether or not I opposed it in principle.

Secondly, What are these 'chores' and how is there a debate about whether it was work or not? How does ICE even know that said 'chores' even happened?

I'm going to guess she was doing au pair or nannying work. If she didn't go through an agency and wasn't approved, then that's a no-no. It could be that the host family tried to claim the wages they were paying her as expenses, or some other thing that triggered "hey this person is working on a tourist visa". Reading the family's claims, I'd bet that back in 2023 she did get in to work legally as an au pair (the host family in San Francisco) and this time round she thought she knew the ropes and could do it without going through an agency, as she wanted to work while on a tourist visa (after all, if you're just visiting as a tourist, why would you need to research about what does and doesn't count as work?):

Did she break the rules of the ESTA?

The ESTA is for tourists only. For work or study a specific visa is required. Becky did a lot of research before she went and what she had planned was classed as tourism. This was accepted when she entered the US on 7th January. It was also accepted in 2023 when she spent two weeks in San Francisco, with a host family. On the 26th February, US border officers suddenly decided staying with host families and joining in with household chores was now classed as work. Our US Immigration Lawyer said they got their definition of work wrong.

This is how most illegals from these parts end up in the USA; go on a tourist visa, find a job, deliberately over-stay and hope you won't be picked up. She was just unlucky (or dumb).

Ciara, who arrived in the U.S. before President Trump took office, said she was on a J-1 visa, which allows for educational and cultural exchange, but working illegally on the side. "There is a bit of a safety net" for Irish people in the hospitality industry, she said.

...But immigration attorneys have told CBS News that it would be naive for Irish undocumented people to believe that they may be immune to deportation.

"When Irish people come here, they come on what we call the visa waiver program, so that allows them to come to the United States without going to the consulate in Dublin, and they can come in for 90 days and stay for 90 days, and so most of them [who are undocumented] overstay," John Foley, a Boston-based immigration attorney told CBS News.

I'm surprised no-one has pointed out that if ICE are going after white European illegals, then the Trump directive can't be called racist 😁

I think it was Au Pair work too; eg chores, babysitting in exchange for under the counter 'pocket money', room & board and cultural exchange. Western governments have traditionally turned a blind eye to this sort of thing for a while, to the point were people doing it expect that it won't be targeted. Unfortunately for them, the current political climate happened.

Also, I agree with others that both: A - the rejection from Canada triggered additional US BCP scrutiny; and B - there is a possibility that either her artist work or political views didn't work in her favor.

Something that isn't really focused on is why Canada rejected her for 'au pair' work. Details are (deliberately) vague.

She seems to have tried to cross the border on an American tourist visa, got told "no you need one specifically for Canada" and was sent back, and maybe that triggered ICE as looking like "someone trying to enter US from Canada without proper paperwork".

I could then see her getting questioned about how she was supporting herself, giving an answer about working for host family/families, and then oops but you're not here on an au pair visa, you're here as a tourist, and that sets the ball rolling.

But so far we're only getting her family's side of the story, and of course they're not going to say "yeah actually she intended to overstay her visa and be there as an illegal", so who knows what the real story was? Maybe when she came as a tourist, she was also trying to scout work as a comic artist there and that's what got her in trouble also, if she was selling art or doing commissions or looking for freelance work from publishers.

Lots of things could be behind the scenes, we don't have all the information yet.

On the other hand, how did she set trigger ICE in the first place?

She was caught by cbp at the border. The part where they ask you a bunch of questions and you know if you answer wrong you're gonna have a real bad day.

The fact that she got denied entry to Canada of all places probably meant that the CBP agent asked her extra hard questions.

I don't understand how doing 'chores' even registers unless she's been watched the whole time with an eye to catching her in the act of 'doing work.'

She self incriminated by admitting she already did work in USA, and planned to do more. The conversation might have went like this:

Agent: So what do you do on your typical day?

Illegal: Just hange around, maybe draw some comics, and help out around the house a bit.

Agent: How you you help out?

Illegal: Clean up, do the dishes, tend to the garden

Agent: You're about to have a real bad day.

Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud?

This happens all the time in tons of countries. Go watch one of those border security shows in canada, uk, australia. They dramatize it but pretty much this is an open and shut case.

Of course getting forcibly deported in chains is probably new trumpsauce, but everything before that has been standard SOP for decades.

Illegal: Clean up, do the dishes, tend to the garden

Agent: You're about to have a real bad day

If that would actually count as work when caught then I think we have an issue with the definitions being used. I had a friend over from the UK myself last year for about 2-3 weeks, he stayed in my spare bedroom and I made him clean up after himself (obviously) and he helped me with a few chores like doing dishes and vacuuming throughout because he was temporarily living there and when you're living with someone you help do the things. I made meals sometimes, he did sometimes. Sometimes I did the driving, sometimes he would. And hell I left the house at one point to get groceries and left him in charge of my niece when she was spending the night over. Because again that's all just part of being with a person living in their space.

I don't think any reasonable person would hear "you can't work on this visa" and understand it to cover basic chores like that.

Vacuuming and babysitting are both things that people often hire workers to do. It might be ok if it's incidental, but if you had a routine where he did these things, it could easily be seen that you are accepting the labor in kind in exchange for the room.

Remember that your friend is a guest and you are the host. You are not roommates from the perspective of the law, as he is simply on holiday and staying over at your house instead of a hotel. Personally, I would never ask a guest to do something like vacuum the house.

Other activities such as driving a car and making meals are likely fine as they are acceptable leisure activities to do under the visa, and the fact that you benefited from them is incidental.

Vacuuming and babysitting are both things that people often hire workers to do. It might be ok if it's incidental, but if you had a routine where he did these things, it could easily be seen that you are accepting the labor in kind in exchange for the room.

Remember that your friend is a guest and you are the host. You are not roommates from the perspective of the law, as he is simply on holiday and staying over at your house instead of a hotel. Personally, I would never ask a guest to do something like vacuum the house

I get the logic but I still believe that to be way too broad. We split basic home living tasks because he was occupying the space for the duration. When I went to visit him a few years ago I did the same there and we split the chores because I was occupying a space and leaving behind the typical household mess of dirt on a rug or dishes needing to be cleaned. This is what we see as polite, we're best friends and we don't want to impose as a guest just as much as we want to be a good host for each other.

Other activities such as driving a car and making meals are likely fine as they are acceptable leisure activities to do under the visa, and the fact that you benefited from them is incidental.

Doesn't that apply to other tasks like vacuuming or dishes? You benefit from cleaning up the space you live in so you don't have to be in a dirty space. I don't see how driving a car or making meals is any different when those are both also potential jobs people pay for.

Doesn't that apply to other tasks like vacuuming or dishes?

You have to keep in mind that the system (which includes but is not limited to the law) exists to target a particular kind of behavior, and in this case, it's importing maids without paperwork. Driving doesn't have that connotation, but if you said "gardening" or "picking fruits", that would also be eyebrow raising to the trained border agent whose entire job is to pattern match you to the bad categories.

I've been in countries where it's good advice not to disclose you have a local girlfriend over at a rental, not because sex out of wedlock is strictly speaking illegal, but because it's how local law enforcement prosecutes prostitution.

If you don't want trouble, avoid having the shape of a criminal in the eyes of bureaucracy, and doubly so when crossing borders. Otherwise you'll end up in some column about "upstanding citizen slipped on the 'I am a terrorist' button and is sent to misclicker jail".

Is that fair? No, not really, but when borders are involved you may often have no recourse because false negatives are much worse than false positives.

There's also the anarcho-tyranny angle: If the official definition is so broad that no one would use it this way in good faith, yet they may use it this way in bad faith, the government can pick and choose violators.

got denied entry to Canada

I was denied entry to Canada some years ago. The border guard filled out the opposite of the answers I gave, gave me a paper with them, ignored my protestations along with coworkers, then locked me in a room for 4 hours before denying me entry. There were 3 y/n questions on a paper, whether I knew anyone and I don't recall what else.

Why, do you know?

Border police is what happens when you have police with almost no checks. It’s often pure anarcho-tyranny for its own sake. You can wave through literal millions of third world immigrants enough to cause total demographic change. But as long as the police makes one random English backpacker suffer for minor procedural violations (and often not even that), everyone feels good.

I'm having a hard time establishing some of the facts, primarily, what comic works has Becky created. I can't find anything and none of the articles I've looked at link to anything. The closest I saw was that she has an Instagram account. So, is she a comic creator or just someone who lists it as her profession? I have no idea.

I believe her portfolio is here. It helped that a bunch of news articles described her both as "Becky" and "R.E." with the latter being what's on her site.

I think the reason for her deportation is much simpler: the administration's quotas for deportations and arrests are sufficiently high they cannot be filled with criminals alone. It turns out that finding criminal gang members who are here illegally and don't want to be found is hard. Finding otherwise law abiding folks who might have committed technical violations (or for whom pretexts can be manufactured) is much easier!

When I looked for R.E. Burke, I found this and this.

Interesting. I went and tried searching "R.E. Burke" (without the quotes) on all of Bing/Google/Startpage (my default) and all returned stories about the cartoonist.

Yeah, I had to dig deep just to find the wrong people. I couldn't find anything about Burke's actual books until y'all posted it.

For some reason, my mind automagically starts wondering if perhaps these artists (that's a dogwhistle for lefty activists, btw) had some Interwebz posts that somebody didn't like.

That's not impossible, but it seems more likely that these are people that are motivated to assume that any negative interaction at the border is proof that Trump's america is fascist, and would be calling the news immediately if it happened.

I'm not going to assume that these people also made this happen on purpose so that it can be used against the administration and/or raise their public profile, but I'll point out that it's also possible. Couple of weeks in detention to become internationally known is a deal many people would take, especially since the left tends to reward its martyrs and turncoats handsomely (though we'll see if perhaps cuts to some organisations might make them less free with the rewards).

The Venezuelan gang members deported to a for hire prison in El Salvador with no judicial review (or in defiance of judicial review) is honestly a lot more frightening than this story. This Becky story just sounds like something that can happen in any country. When visiting our offices in Asia, HR would counsel me very carefully to say I'm not "working", I'm "meeting". I doubt if I slipped up at those borders I'd have a very pleasant return flight experience. Especially if I was already inside for months and got refused a weekend getaway to a neighboring country.

The El Salvador prison thing though. You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying. The only cover they have right now is that most of them probably were gang members.

You could imagine the Trump administration just disappearing people they find annoying.

We could also imagine Trump wearing just a tutu, which would also be unseemly. Is there any particular reason to substantiate imagination?

Well, According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio El Salvadore President Bukele has offered to hold American Citizens. From a BBC article quoting Trump on the deal:

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he would embrace the idea but questioned its legality.

"If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat," he said during an executive order signing ceremony in the Oval Office. "I don't know if we do or not.

"We're looking at that right now, but we could make deals where we'd get these animals out of our country."

Which would seem to indicate Trump's willingness is conditional on legality, not merely annoyance. And legal deportations are typically not considered just disappearing people.

Given the many unlawful actions the Trump admin has already taken I see no reason to treat his legality concerns as anything more than a fig leaf.

There are many types of illegal things, of which I am fairly sure you would concede are neither equivalent to or predictive of other illegal things. I am also fairly sure you would even concede that Biden did some illegal things as well. I am not convinced you would take them as evidence of specific accusations of willingness to disappear political annoyances... and Biden actually was part of (at least) two administrations that targeted political opponents.

Ok, but in this specific case the US government defied a court order to deport people. It is also the government's stated position in that lawsuit that their authority to declare someone a deportable alien enemy under the AEA is unreviewable by a court. "We are allowed to deport anyone we declare a deportable alien under the AEA and no one is allowed to say otherwise" is a recipe for government deportation of American citizens without any due process. They've even got a country lined up to deport them to!

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Is your argument that dispensing with due process is fine because Trump has only rendered bad people to an El Salvadoran prison AFAWK?

My position is that you are still crying wolf, and replacing 'racist' with 'fascist.'

Any bayesian update?

https://abc7.com/post/president-trump-suggests-tesla-vandals-should-face-20-years-jail-sent-el-salvador/16064219/

Stronger thanks to your expectation that that a story in which Trump is not dispensing of due process should provide a bayesian update that Trump is dispensing of due process.

Particularly given the form of delivery is the common TDS failure mode on the taking Trump seriously versus literally divide, which has been an archetypical form of crying wolf about Trump intents for a decade.

Wait what. If you don't think due process was already dispensed with in the first batch of people who were deported directly to a foreign prison without judicial review I'm not sure what continuing to exchange information here will accomplish.

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Maybe general distrust of government and (healthy?) paranoia that once a government has some capability, it will eventually find a way to use it in evil ways. I'm sure all five principled libertarians that exist in the world have been doing that kind of thing long before Trump, so it's not like it's unprecedented.

Because the history of government shows that when it has the powers to disappear people, it tends to use those powers against those most annoying rather than those it was intended to disappear.

There are literally thousands of years of human governance to pick from, but I will confess being curious which four under which government you think are most relevant for judging Donald Trump's inclination to disappearing people.

To be clear, I don’t think Trump is particularly likely to start disappearing journalists to an el Salvadoran gulag, and wouldn’t particularly mind it if that was where it ended. But establishing this as a power of the president will likely end with democrats doing it to people I do care about.

wearing just a tutu,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_H%C3%BClsen-Haeseler

During a formal evening function, (General) von Hülsen-Haeseler appeared dressed in the pink tutu and rose wreath of a ballerina, dancing for (Kaiser Wilhelm II) and his assembled guests. ... the general bowed, collapsed and was pronounced dead after hasty medical attention

Mostly stories like this are reassuring. Any crackdown on abuse of the immigration system is going to produce false positives. If there were no stories like this, then that would be an indication that it's all fake. The ICE agents involved in egregious cases of bad judgement should be reprimanded appropriately, but I applaud their zealousness.

The scale of the problem in many Western countries is so severe that at this point there is no appropriate response that won't look extreme and even tyrannical. That is an unfortunate byproduct of the last 3 decades of wholly extreme and reckless immigration policies and enforcement sabotage.

Why is it a problem at all?

It is not false positives. Nobody could possibly mistake an European tourist for a central example of the kind of illegals Trump voters want out.

This rhymes with revoking permanent residency for foreigners who use speech in a way contrary to the goals of the Trump administration. The message clearly is: We might not get rid of all the woke snowflakes with US passports, but it is open season on any lefty foreigners who are only allowed to be here at the pleasure of wise King Donald.

I’m not inclined to take the story charitably simply because in a lot of cases where lawyers are involved and the terminology in vague, it’s because it’s not particularly helpful to the client. If she were helping with farm work, or cleaning the house or something of that vein, even if she’d instagrammed it, it’s something that you could explain. If she uploaded a comic or a piece of art from America, that’s something you can’t easily get away with because you are a professional artist uploading art sample for purchase. I can’t say as to what the ICE officer saw, but given that the defense is extremely vague on the point, it’s probably more than just washing the dishes twice a week.

That's certainly how it reads to me as well. I might otherwise be sympathetic, but maybe she really did do some work for money.

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs

If so, I am fine with this. Working on a visa that doesn't allow it? A few days in detention then deported with a ban on returning. Good riddance.

Overstaying a tourist visa to work and live in America indefinitely is a common method of illegal immigration. She's (presumably) doing the popular illegal activity of violating her visa terms.

Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working". It seems the letter of law may prohibit it, but that's absurd and clearly not the same thing as people who sneak in to get actual paying jobs. The standard for deportation should be proving that the individual received wages for something, not just that they did vaguely work-like activities in their free time.

Doing housekeeping in exchange for room and board is "working", even if no wages are received.

This seems a very silly way to look at it. Say I travel to Canada, and I have a cousin there. He lets me crash on his couch because he is my cousin. We have dinner together. I offer to help with the dishes, because, after all, I'm the one who got half of them dirty so it's only fair. Am I "working" for my cousin? Is he paying me by letting me sleep on his couch? Of course not. My cousin would have let me stay over even if I'd bailed out on the washing dishes; in fact he wouldn't have needed help with the dishes if my presence hadn't gotten extra dishes dirty. Even to the extent that my track record of being a helpful houseguest might be a factor in him allowing me to stay, it's not as if he'd let a perfect stranger come to his house in exchange for that minimal amount of "housekeeping", or as if there's some citizen he would be paying normal wages for that work if I hadn't stepped up. Come on. In no universe should this be any kind of violation. It's pure chicanery.

(Or are you saying that, while the above is innocent, we need to outlaw it anyway in order to 'catch' some rampant problem of criminals who are in fact becoming unauthorized housekeepers for perfect strangers in exchange for room and board in the US? I suppose that would be less insane. But also, fuck it. Letting some people functionally enslave themselves on the margins is worth not outlawing basic politeness as a houseguest. To the extent it might be happening, I still don't believe it's a blight on the economy that warrants making regulations such a PITA for ordinary people who want to pull their weight with their hosts.)

Nah. Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working".

This one is so conceptually difficult. It's super easy to let the economist's mindset take over and view everything as "exchange" or "working". When we got married, my wife lived in the US with me but was not legally able to work for a period of time. I was also required by the government to support her. Of course, since I was working and she wasn't, she's not going to just sit around and drink mai tais all day. She made some meals, did dishes or laundry or whatever. Just stuff around the house to keep herself occupied, while also obviously doing other things, too. Is that "working"? Should we deport every single one of those people who legally come here, on a legal path to being authorized to work, if they so much as lift a finger to put their spouse's dishes in the dishwasher one time? I have to imagine that most people think obviously not.

On the other hand, there are obviously schemes in place where people essentially hire a housekeeper under the table. Distinguishing between different types of situations and what "counts" as "working" is extremely hard in general.

Nah. Washing dishes at the house where you're holidaying, as a guest's courtesy, is not "working".

No, it's not, which is why you don't need to extensively research before you come if "washing dishes" is tourism or working. The fact that Burke. by her own family's admission, was trying to find out the loopholes around working versus tourism makes me suspect she was working for a 'host' family and getting money in exchange, e.g. au pair or something similar. I'm guessing here, but she may have gone legitimately on a visa for au pair work back in 2023 and this time round decided she could skip all that paperwork, do some 'guest work' for a 'host family' on the side and get spending money while on her tourist visa, and if questioned then fall back on "oh I'm staying with friends/friends of friends, and I just help out round the house as a thank-you'. Except the plan didn't work out for her.

The ESTA is for tourists only. For work or study a specific visa is required. Becky did a lot of research before she went and what she had planned was classed as tourism. This was accepted when she entered the US on 7th January. It was also accepted in 2023 when she spent two weeks in San Francisco, with a host family. On the 26th February, US border officers suddenly decided staying with host families and joining in with household chores was now classed as work. Our US Immigration Lawyer said they got their definition of work wrong.

We are on a few layers of speculation at this point, but I believe the issue is she may be an illegal maid or nanny. If she admits to past illegal work on a tourist visa then CBP may be skeptical of her story about staying for months with people she never met before and also ""helping"" out around their home.

I get that we don't want law enforcement dragging your European friend to a detention center because they helped clean up after hanging out with you. But we do want them identifying illegal nannies and deporting them. Such as probably this woman.

The British reaction to the Becky Burke story is driven by some misconceptions about US immigration law and policy which are widely shared among PMC Brits (and, I expect, PMC citizens of other 1st-world countries which are traditional US allies) because they reflect the way the US has actually handled travellers from rich, friendly countries over several decades.

In particular,

  1. PMC Brits think that they have a right to travel to any friendly country as long as they have the correct paperwork. (PMC Americans are the same, except that we are somewhat more likely than you to grok that we do in fact need to meet local paperwork requirements and obey local laws while travelling).
  2. "Working" in America is completely normal for young PMC Brits. Either engaging in legal work-like activities in WB (business visitor) status, or working legally on a F (student) or J (cultural exchange) visa. BUNAC is a long-standing scheme allowing (among other things - it is broadly reciprocal among several Anglosphere countries) British students to spend a summer working in the US on a J visa while only nominally complying with the rules for J visas. When my parents were students, they basically used BUNAC to travel across the US for a summer in a beater car picking up odd work like hoboes - and this was legal. (And in those days it was dead easy to get pick-up work if you were an experienced waitress with a posh British accent). The rules have been tightened up since then, but there is still an expectation that if you want to spend a summer working in the US, making it happen is just a matter of paperwork.
  3. There is no clarity about what work-like activity is legal in WB status and what requires a working visa. I worked, for pay, at Brookhaven National Laboratory for a summer in WB status - it was legal because academic visitors can receive per diem even in WB status, and the allowed per diem worked out to more than a British grad student stipend. A friend was refused admission for trying to do the same thing interning at a think tank - what he was doing didn't qualify as "academic", and therefore he couldn't receive per diem.
  4. Accordingly, we see working illegally as a paperwork screwup similar to trying to travel on an expired passport, not as a crime of moral turpitude. We expect that if we get caught it will be laughed off as we get the next plane home. And a lot of people have stories that confirm this - I know two people who were refused admission (the aforementioned intern, and someone who failed to declare a minor drug conviction), and in both cases they were on the next plane home after a few hours in the secondary inspection area, and never saw anything that looked like a prison cell. As far as I am aware, both had the event paperworked as a voluntary departure so they didn't become inadmissable for future trips as deportees.

So from this perspective, it looks like

  • Becky didn't know precisely what was legal in terms of chores-for-lodging, and didn't feel the need to check
  • She thought the worst that could happen when she got caught was being put on the next plane home
  • Throwing her in the general population of an ICE detention centre for 11 days is an insult to both her personal dignity and our sense of our rights as a US ally because it is treating a Brit like a random third world peasant.

And of course the story has legs because it fits into the (accurate) narrative that the Trump administration is no longer treating the UK as an important ally.

ymeskhout: Bootlicking Millionaires with Severe Tongue Abrasion - Sad!

In the discussion of the Skadden thing, 2rafa wrote "I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list." and I replied, "How could Trump do that? I can't think of a stick to use, and the only carrot I can think of is being hired as outside counsel, but any firm worth hiring as outside counsel presumably already has every former appellate clerk they can get."

I had seen the headlines about Paul Weiss, but I had hoped it was a weird overreaction, on their part, and could be ignored. But should we worry about the possibility that the Trump administration takes it as a sign they could continue to bully - or even outright extort - law firms? Is this a viable strategy, for the Trump administration? To what extent is Executive corruption limited by POTUS's scrupulousness and Congress's willingness to impeach and convict?

I feel like the Paul Weiss thing is extra embarrassing because the Perkins Coie TRO was issued two days before the executive order targeting Paul Weiss. Paul Weiss already had a pretty good indication that if they fought the EO they would win and then they decided not to do it anyway!

I actually clicked the link and read it.

It's bad. Really bad. So bad that quoting it would reveal how bad it is.

It's just seething resentment disguised as righteous outrage, gratuitous profanity shot though every paragraph, bragging about his wife, and never any admission that what Trump is doing makes sense* for him.

In this case, the topic is the retribution Trump is visiting on the lawyers that tried to prosecute him. Or, in the words of our author,

So nobody should be surprised that Trump is a vengeful petulant baby.

Vengeful, yes. Petulant baby, not exactly. "When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.

What sniveling cowards, seeing the stacks of cash wither away in front of their eyes.

What pathetic fucking bitches for them to fold.

My crimes for calling Dear Leader the dementia patient that he is have been relegated into tens of thousands of words

Funny we already had a dementia patient as President, and he wasn't as active as this one. Alas, contempt for Trump excuses everything, especially hypocrisy.

what makes me a man is my valorization and adherence to higher values

No, what makes you a man is violence, and power, and the capability and willingness to use both. What makes us all gelded is the inability and unwillingness to simply do, to impose your will on reality, whether it be nature and wilderness, or other people and institutions, or least of all your own vices and base desires, like fucking your hot wife.

This is what he misses in his paean of wealth after spitting on those richer and more successful than him:

There’s an AutoZone general manager right now barely cracking a six-figure income, arriving home to a bland palette of suburban luxury that would wring envy from the richest of all medieval emperors. Endless feasts of unspoiled food, garnished with delectable flora scoured from across the globe, all available on command and on demand. Troupes of dancers and musicians, all that have ever lived or existed or contemplated, available on command and on demand virtually, with a narrow selection available personally. Infinite bards of whatever language, recounting stories of whatever genre, available on command and on demand. Bidets, burbling with infinite crystal clear clean water, irrigating the shit out of your ass. On command. On demand.

The GM doesn't have the ability to change his reality. He is less free and less manly than the poorest pioneer, the most wretched and miserable explorer dying thousands of miles from his home of strange foreign diseases, the count or duke or king who never dreamed of central heating or refrigeration or indoor plumbing.

It's a bad post, and I wish I hadn't bothered reading it.

*The image is the only part of this that's relevant to my post.

It's bad. Really bad. So bad that quoting it would reveal how bad it is.

It's just seething resentment disguised as righteous outrage, gratuitous profanity shot though every paragraph, bragging about his wife, and never any admission that what Trump is doing makes sense* for him.

On the other hand, the title really is appropriate for it.

When you strike at the King, you must kill him.

The whole point of America is that the President is not a King. The whole problem here is that Trump is acting like one.

If FDR, or even Obama, wasn't a problem for America, then neither is Trump.

I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.

I think liberals agreed, and continue to agree, that nobody should have as much power as FDR did. The standard pro-FDR view is that only reason why FDR was not more of a problem for America (the left agrees that he engaged in at least one egregious abuse of power - the internment of Japanese-Americans) was that he was a man of exceptional virtue in a way that you can't afford to rely on. There were two major bipartisan changes to the system post-FDR intended to stop anyone having that much power ever again - the APA and the 22nd amendment.

FDR's contemporaries thought, correctly, that running for a third term was a breach of the mos maiorum. The only reason historians forgive him for it is that he went on to be an effective wartime leader.

FDR died in office at 63. I do not think the alternative history where he lives to 75 works out well for American democracy.

This effectively means that liberals don't care for America having a president, not a king. They love having a king as long he's a man of "exceptional virtue" (steamrolls checks and balances to implement liberal policies).

The liberals supported the 22nd amendment too. "We should never have another FDR" was not a controversial position once the war was over and the Japanese internment camps stopped feeling like a good idea.

His abuses of power didn't start with WW2, so "we should never have another FDR" after he reshaped the entire country, setting the tone for next century, is awfully convenient.

Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.

Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.

KMC, while posting in favour of Trump, compared him to a King and applauded him for punishing lese-majeste in the way a King would. I think that is a problem. You brought up the comparison to FDR, not me. Although if we are going to run with it, I note that if FDR had put out an official portrait of him crowned and enthroned (something Trump did - on @WhiteHouse and not @RealDonaldTrump so it was official government communication) then even his supporters would have objected. If FDR had announced sanctions against law firms who represented his political opponents (which he did not), his supporters should have objected.

FDR's supporters did object to Japanese internment as soon as it was safe to do so. FDR's supporters did object to Court-packing, which is why it didn't happen.

The MAGA base support administrative detention legal immigrants with the wrong tattoos - in peacetime, which makes this worse than FDR. They support various plans to neuter opposition to the administration through the courts. And when Trump talks about running for a third term, they insist he is joking while selling Trump 2028 T-shirts and putting up Trump 2028 banners at CPAC. Trump is already running for a third term in plain sight, or at least maintaining strategic ambiguity about doing so - the correct response from non-fashy Trump supporters would be "This is stupid and I wish he would stop" not "Yay libs so trolled. Trump 2028 for great lulz!!!"

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"Never have another FDR" practically means "nobody can fix what FDR broke."

I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.

Their concerns were ignored for generations. They tried to soldier on in any case, but ended up entirely discredited as FDR-descended systemic changes continued to snowball. And now they are effectively extinct, politically speaking. If their political perspective was valuable, perhaps those who now consider it valuable should have put more effort into preserving it when such effort might have born fruit.

Alternatively, once Trumpism has entirely run its course, secured all its victories, crushed all opposition, and set the bedrock rules for the coming century, there will probably be many who will agree that "We should never have another Trump."

Not that everyone here is friends or anything, but this seems a rather hostile post towards ymeskhout. Am I missing lore?

I don't follow, it doesn't seem personally hostile against him, even if it's very critical of the post's contents.

Did you read ymeskhout's post? what a pathetic flail! What a flagrant red cape of blatant insecurity, advertised loudly to the entire world. What a fetid reflexively pathetic snarl of a response. What a belly cry of a scorned goat.

For those not getting it, everything after "Did you read ymeshkhout's post?" is a contiguous direct quote from the article.

This is your brain on Substack, kids. Like I said, don't do Substack, or at least stay connected to neiche pseudonymous internet forums where your friends will make fun of you when you get too full of yourself.

No lore other than that made some good posts, and hosted a podcast, and was a mod on reddit, and an admin here, and then moved on to substack to post things like this.

Many such cases.

At least TW and Kulak seemed to improve when they spread their wings. They each managed to accumulate quite a twitter following, too. I see no such improvement here, and his twitter is kaput, but who am I to talk? I'm destined to be a reply guy, never an Actually Quality Contributor. Here I go replying again.

"When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.

To be fair, the Democrats throwing the book at him was downstream of him denying the election result and vaguely encouraging his goons to stop its certification. So one might equally well say: "Try to occupy the Capitoline Hill, expect to end like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus".

Except that DC did not actually go all Nasica on Trump. The SCOTUS decided that presidents have immunity from treason, and that was the end of it. Sure, the DAs tried to get him for every technicality they could, but given him the kind of sentence his supporters got for J6 was not on the table. Nor did Biden use his newly cemented immunity and veto powers to drone strike Trump (which probably would have been a bad thing -- normalizing political murder has its own downsides).

I will also grant you that Biden was part of the rising nepotism, preemptively pardoning his son for all crimes he might have committed.

But the attitude displayed by Trump and put into words by you is 100% that of a tinpot dictator or warlord. Likely every US president likely needs a bit of a narcissist streak -- "I am the one who can serve his country best as the president" is not a very modest thought. But with Trump there is not even a pretense for doing the job for the common good, it is all ego with a side of kleptocracy. I would say he is half-Lannister: he can only be relied to pay his debt to people who wronged him, no matter how petty the grudge.

It might be illustrative to constrast Trump with GWB. Both were reviled by the left. The policies of W were actually a lot more damaging than the policies of the first Trump administration. W used torture as a matter of national policy and started two different wars which achieved little beside killing a lot of people and fattening the military-industrial complex on the taxpayers dime. The Swedes gave Obama one of the most ridiculous Nobels ever simply for not being GWB. The phrase war criminal was frequently heard on the fringe left.

But when Obama came along, GWB faded from media attention. No AGs were especially keen on getting him whatever way they could. He remains a welcome guest at state funerals.

I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency. He did not incite McCain to take over DC to continue the Republican rule. Nor would he himself pulled any J6 shit if the SCOTUS had awarded the presidency to Kerry instead. In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.

Trump does not. His instinct is to flip the game table if he loses. And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.

I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency.

This is not even close to the same. First, he was term limited. Second, he was an insider whose father was CIA director, VP, and President. Third, he was never at risk of being prosecuted and he knew it.

In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.

He was in the club, and Trump wasn't, and isn't. There are no rules to a crooked gave, or at least none worth respecting.

I said before and will say again, Trump's original sin for which he cannot atone and will never be forgiven is that he's an outsider. He steamrolled through the Republican party and then bowled through the anoited Hillary in the general. He laid waste to the carefully curated options that were supposed to limit American choices in our elections.

And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.

His impeachment came well before 2021, and from day zero he was hounded by bogus claims and fabricated narratives. Trying to explain everything that happened before by what happened after is exactly backward. The lawfare was a continuation of everything from the Steele dossier, the Mueller report, and his first impeachment. It was nothing new in response to the 2020 election.

It also had nothing to do with NY passing a law to extend the statute of limitations to drag him into court and call him a rapist.

The insiders literally bragged about fortifying the election in the immediate aftermath, which helps explain the six million missing voters the Democrats lost from 2020 to 2024. The sheer arrogance still boggles the mind.

It's insider vs outsider, and now Trump is withholding benefits from those insiders and their organs, as is his right as executive. This is against the unwritten rules, but it's well within the written ones, and it'sthus far tame and bloodless. Nobody is in jail, nobody is being prosecuted, nobody is dying in the streets or falling off balconies (except Michael Hastings and Trevor Moore).

Finally, it's tyrants that we should be worried about. Dictators have always been necessary on occasion, and America has had its fair share of muscular Presidents.

Ooof two paragraphs in and I remember exactly why I stopped reading Meskhout's blog. All heat, no light.

So Trump says the government can't work with some firms and their security clearances are revoked. And...So what? Oh one of the firms sued and one caved. Ok...Some lawyers are only interested in money? Some guys who don't look cool also happen to be lawyers who don't roll over for Trump?

If this is supposed to tell me something bigger about how the government interfaces with civilian law firms I missed it. Is the problem that now the people in the government who hired the law firms to prosecute J6 (and Trump too?) have to work with what they got? That other law firms won't want to work with the USG because they might someday get hamstrung by not having security clearances? That uh....conservative lawyers, er...um, are going to be more in demand?

I honestly can't figure out what the claim is in the article, but I'm also too hung up on the shite writing to really try and dissect it. ELI5 please.

What I still wonder is why the heck that law firm had a security clearance in the first place. I mean, I can see why people in DOD and CIA have security clearances, ditto Boeing and Lockheed-Martin and whatever random contractor gets the contract for making bits of the radar for the F-35 etc., but why does some random law firm need a security clearance?

To work on cases involving classified projects.

To work on cases involving classified projects.

Also to work on cases where the government claims to be relying on classified evidence.


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