site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34008 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom New Old Controversial
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Not to blackpill too much, but the country is basically doomed. When judges can override issues of national sovereignty - literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel - the illegal immigration issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. The millions who came in will never leave.

Every time I read something hysterical on this forum I always flip what is being talked about in my head:

Not to blackpill too much, but this country is basically doomed. When cabinet appointees can override issues of human rights violations - literally there is NOTHING more important than a government being forced to respect the rights of its citizens and residents - the social justice issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. There will always be a subjugated class of people in the US.

Less tongue-in-cheek, it seems like the firebrands on the topic of immigration on the US are pretty much cheering for the suspension of habeus corpus: deport by any means necessary, due process be damned. It's unfortunate that it's gotten to this point. But I also dread the unintended consequences / friendly-fire. I guess at least if you're on the conservative side of the political spectrum you don't have any fears of political persecution under this administration.

Man, if only we had a third branch of government, not just the executive and judicial branches.

Are you under the impression that object level considerations matter? We're looking at a power struggle not a high school mock trial. It's zero sum. One side will win and the other will lose. One side has a lot more soldiers. How many divisions has Roberts?

At this stage in this country's political evolution, which rhymes with the end of the Roman Republic, the executive is absolutely justified in crossing the Rubicon, just as Caesar was.

At this stage in this country's political evolution, which rhymes with the end of the Roman Republic, the executive is absolutely justified in crossing the Rubicon, just as Caesar was.

He was not, and the executive will not be if they do.

Forget object level considerations. There are only narratives. There are no moral facts. No timeless principles except the laws of mathematics and natural selection. Whatever is, is right.

If the right seizes power, it will have factual raw material sufficient to build a "power narrative" sustaining its rule, just like every power structure has. It's impossible to say whether Trump "is" justified: there's no objective righteousness evaluation function. What matters is that if he tries something and wins, he's able to post hoc rationalize it in a way that allows the losing side (or enough of them) to internalize the change and operate within the new power structure.

Google after all did change Google Maps to read "Gulf of America".

You might be content to choose nihilistic "might makes right" philosophy, but I'm not. There is a moral order, and actions can be wrong even if they succeed. If Trump finds cojones, as you put it in another comment, and defies the supreme court, it will not be a righteous act of a brave man standing up to villains. It will be a naked power grab by a man who doesn't like that he can't just get his way. It will, in short, completely vindicate all the people who have claimed that Trump is an existential threat to democracy. I am not going to embrace such a path. But you do you.

There is a moral order

Is there? I find myself unpersuaded by assertions of morality divorced from their effectiveness in achieving real world aims. Moral statements are nothing but polite fictions for aiding collective action. If this collective action amounts to escalating protection and promotion of falsehood, of what use is the polite fiction? Democracy is "good" because it's worked (better and for longer than it has had any right to work) for solving collective action problems. Now that it's stopped working, is it still good?

More comments

Still says "Gulf of Mexico" from non-US IPs. Still called the "Gulf of Mexico" by everyone who isn't trying to pass a retarded loyalty test. I don't think the workers of the world were united in Havel's Czechoslovakia either, regardless of what the greengrocer said.

Are you under the impression that object level considerations matter?

Yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question?

We're looking at a power struggle not a high school mock trial. It's zero sum. One side will win and the other will lose.

I predict that neither the judicial nor the executive branches are going to be sufficiently defanged that the other no longer needs to compromise with them after this conflict.

One side has a lot more soldiers. How many divisions has Roberts?

I don't anticipate that soldiers will play a significant role in the conflict over the TDA deportations. Do you?

Legislature to the white courtesy phone, Legislature to the white courtesy phone please.

What would be the point of legislation? To make unauthorized economic migration double-secret illegal?

There's a lot to be clarified!

  • To clarify the process and rights of those claiming asylum.

  • To clarify the appropriate standard and process for those claiming protection from removal under 241(b)(3) as Garcia did.

Heck, they could just repeal 241(b)(3) which restricts the authority of the government to remove aliens to certain countries. Or they could strengthen it.

What does the phrase "Manipulation of procedural outcomes" mean to you?

It implies that no one is exercising supervisory authority over the process and procedures to ensure they are aligned to a goal.

In the particular case of US immigration policy, that supervisory authority would be Congress .

To "break the tie" by making whatever it was we were going to do anyway legal or illegal.

I think there’s a separate question, which is a factual one about specific cases.

We're well on the well-trod path of democracies experiencing escalating norm violations that spiral into physical violence and the breakdown of traditional understanding of power divisions within the government. No country can operate solely according to a written constitution. Functional government always requires tacit understanding of proper rules and order of subordination. When a figure within the government tries to exercise merely textual or positional authority in violation of these tacit agreements, then (even if he's in the right by the rest of the law) the result is strife, unpredictability, and retaliation. Norms break down. The Overton window widens. Eventually, it widens to include physical violence, which starts with street thuggery and ends with proscriptions.

We are on Mr. Gracchus 's wild ride and there is no way off. The only thing that matters now is which faction wins. The norms are broken and can't be fixed. Sulla couldn't restore the norms and we can't either. There's no point getting nostalgic about them. The only goal now is to win.

Yep. And each time power changes hands, even more norms will become irrelevant. The process will escalate until there's one final undeniable rupture of the old system and a new one emerges.

So why risk the other side winning? Why wait? The rupture is inevitable. We're inside the event horizon of political chaos. The only thing accomplished by adhering to the remaining rules is risking ultimate and permanent defeat. Better to act decisively, now, and win.

Even if the downward spiral from Democracy to Caesarism is unstoppable, if you act too soon or too rashly (e.g. if Caesar took the crown from Antony and declared himself Rex, the Gracchi brothers holding on to the tribunate at all costs, etc.) you run the risk of the masses and the old elite uniting to tear you down. As such, if you want to seize power you must still occasionally demonstrate obsequious adherence to the rules while working to keep the bulk of the population on your side as you slowly push the Overton window in your preferred direction (for the record, I think Caesarism is bad and this would not be a good outcome).

Also, if you are using the fall of the Roman Republic as an example, the impact of the so-called Marian reforms (I am not qualified to engage in the ancient history nerds' argument about how much Marius is actually to blame) is fundamental, and has no US equivalent. The Roman Republic became vulnerable to military coups (of which Marius' re-election as consul was the first de facto and Sulla's was the first de jure, and which continued even under the Emperors) because the citizens' army (with military service linked to voting rights in the centuriate assembly) was replaced with a long-service professional army drawn from the proles, with legions which were in practice personally loyal to their generals.

The US armed forces swear their oaths to the Constitution. While there is considerable debate about whether the Constitution is living or dead, we all agree that even if alive it lacks the necessary skills to command troops. So if the downward spiral continues much further the question becomes "Who do the troops actually take orders from?" To pick a topical example, Col Meyers thinking she could get away with her insubordinate display in Greenland suggests that there is a broad consensus among the officer corps that an order by President Trump to launch a surprise attack on an ally would not be obeyed.

FWIW, it remains an unsolved question to what extent the President can bypass the Congressional power to declare war by simply ordering a surprise attack.

Congress has notionally stuck by the War Powers Act, no President of either party has conceded its constitutionality. The courts would punt this as a political question.

So I really don't know -- officers swear an oath that puts them in an impossible place. Certainly the practice of the country for 50-60 years has been that the President can launch some amount of limited military action without Congress, but not larger actions.

FWIW, it remains an unsolved question to what extent the President can bypass the Congressional power to declare war by simply ordering a surprise attack.

Should be may. Regardless of what the Constitution says or means, the President can do that if and only if the armed forces will reliably obey the order, which was what I was thinking about.

If the political feelings of the officer corps were such that the armed forces would reliably obey an order to launch a surprise invasion of Greenland, I suspect Meyers would not have done what she did.

More comments

This is a common problem in many countries. Sometimes I think people living in failed states and dictatorships and banana republics have a better idea of how political power works than citizens of stable first world countries. People in first world countries tend to the think of the law and the constitution like the laws of physics, or a magic spell. You just say it and if it’s constitutional and legal it magically happens. People living in the more rickety countries are painfully aware that laws and political orders are something that various people have to actually carry out, and they aren’t always going to.

The Texas border standoffs were another example on the other side of the aisle. Quite literally, the Texan troops who took control of the border were technically US soldiers and the border patrol was not supposed to let them just do that.

proscriptions

What exactly did you mean by that? Banning political parties?

we can’t either

Why not? Obviously the norms keep arising in the first place.

I think he means proscription in the sense of “here is a list of people that all TRVE ROMANS have a civic duty to kill on sight”

The most fundamental authority of a sovereign entity is determining who is permitted within its borders. The US government has, fundamentally, unconditional authority to expel a foreigner.

There's this argument I once came across in a book on Christian apologetics. The book isn't interesting enough to name, but I remember one argument it made. The book largely endorsed the standard view of cosmology while attempting to complement its position with various applications of the teleological argument. One was based on Earth's magnetic field. The argument goes, the field has a measurable rate of decay, so if we look back, at some point in natural history we would find a period when the field would be as strong as that of a neutron star.

I see this, the "neutron star fallacy" everywhere. Racism, sexism, religious bigotry. If we were so racist, so sexist, so bigoted, if we were so tyrannical for so many, then how were we ever liberated? And yet I know slopes are slippery. It's our world, when "indulgent" behaviors of any variety are made easier, we slide right into them, and we keep sliding. When the federal bureaucracy had its small departments with narrow scopes, soon enough they became massive departments with broad scopes. But there was a point when we could deport foreigners with minimal hurdle, and now we can't.

The power hasn't been reduced, it's been redistributed. The judge exercises greater authority than the President, and where the judge is seen as a check, who checks the judge? A structure by all impressions designed to eliminate such methods of account, for the requirements of censure and removal. It is the system turning a tyranny upon itself, because the judge involved here didn't order the deported's return because they care so much about the law, they ordered it because they hate so much the man behind the deportations.

"It's a slippery slope to mass deportations of undesirable citizens." That never happened here. "They're due habeus corpus" no, not for expulsion.

Slopes are slippery, yeah, but if you're like me (up until this moment) you might visualize the slope as starting at the left and falling to the right. I feel the last century can be neatly explained by visualizing it as starting at the right and falling to the left.

The power hasn't been reduced, it's been redistributed. The judge exercises greater authority than the President, and where the judge is seen as a check, who checks the judge? A structure by all impressions designed to eliminate such methods of account, for the requirements of censure and removal. It is the system turning a tyranny upon itself, because the judge involved here didn't order the deported's return because they care so much about the law, they ordered it because they hate so much the man behind the deportations.

How do you know the judge's motivations? And isn't this begging the question of how the Executive being check-free would be better? Do you also dislike checks and balances, when you disagree with Executive policy?

"It's a slippery slope to mass deportations of undesirable citizens." That never happened here. "They're due habeus corpus" no, not for expulsion.

The WH Press Secretary says they're looking into the legality of deporting undesirable citizens. Have a legal citation for expulsion being an exception to habeas corpus?

The nicer interpretation is they hate Trump. The thoroughly evidence interpretation is they hate the US and are actively working to destroy it.

I've had a problem with the operations of the judicial branch since well before Trump. I oppose any judge below SCOTUS issuing any federal injunction for any reason. The essential structure of the sovereign United States is Executive, Congress, SCOTUS. Executive appointments have no authority to check SCOTUS, it follows circuit courts have no authority to check POTUS.

The WH Press Secretary says they're looking into the legality of deporting undesirable citizens. Have a legal citation for expulsion being an exception to habeas corpus?

Sovereigns owe foreigners no rights. A foreigner has no claim to habeas corpus, let alone any appeal for their deportation, as sovereigns may unconditionally expel foreigners. Citizens are owed due process, which is fulfilled in trial and verdict. I agree that a state should not be able to remove citizens who are otherwise-non-criminally-undesirable, but the conflation of deporting foreigners or banishing violent criminals with latter tyranny is historically baseless and at best maudlin idealism and at worst fearmongering weaponized in service of preserving the tremendous numbers of illegal aliens in this country.

The UK practiced transportation for centuries, now they won't deport serial rapists.

Sovereigns owe foreigners no rights. A foreigner has no claim to habeas corpus, let alone any appeal for their deportation, as sovereigns may unconditionally expel foreigners.

If a foreigner has no claim to habeas corpus, how should claims of citizenship by individuals/non-citizenship by the state be adjudicated?

Ideally:

  1. SCOTUS rules states have no authority to issue identifying documents to illegal aliens except those that expressly mark them as here illegally
  2. Pursuant to this ruling, IDs from the following would be considered null and void and ordered reissued in adherence to the ruling: Washington DC, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington
  3. After period of reissuance (perhaps 3 years, certainly no longer than 5), suspects confronted by ICE must produce documents proving legal residence
  4. Failure to provide at stop results in temporary detention
  5. Failure to provide after a period of time not to exceed 1 week results in summary deportation

Alternatively:

  1. Suspects stopped by ICE are given opportunity to produce valid ID
  2. Those who produce valid IDs from states that do not issue ID to illegals are free to go
  3. Those who produce no IDs, or valid IDs from states that issue identification to illegals, are detained
  4. Those who produce no IDs are given a period not to exceed 1 week to produce documentation; those who produce IDs from compromised states are given a period not to exceed 1 month to produce further documentation (birth certificate, US passport)
  5. Upon failure, summary deportation

In practice, any individual who fails to produce such documentation is a foreigner and present illegally (note: foreigners are legally required to carry ID). As foreigners may be expelled unconditionally, the court has no jurisdiction over the sovereign exercise of the right of deportation, and so foreigners have no legitimate claim to habeas corpus specifically in the matter of their deportation. That "precedent" says they do, and that we do in practice afford them habeas corpus, does not make it legitimate. The sovereign right of deportation is a first principle authority, it cannot be legitimately reduced or abrogated. That is, a state may, without qualification, always and in all cases legitimately remove foreigners from its borders.

As foreigners may be expelled unconditionally, the court has no jurisdiction over the sovereign exercise of the right of deportation, and so foreigners have no legitimate claim to habeas corpus specifically in the matter of their deportation.

Do you have a citation for this? I want to be make sure I understand which of your statements are factual and which are policy preferences.

Can this crime be punished without trial?

(e) Personal possession of registration or receipt card; penalties

Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d). Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.

In your "ideal" adjudication, what prevents ICE from deporting citizens in bad faith and/or due to its demonstrated incompetence? (Even if you think the risk is low, the hazard must be addressed.)

That "precedent" says they do [have habeas corpus], and that we do in practice afford them habeas corpus, does not make it legitimate.

Which precedent and why should we question its legitimacy?

The citation is pure reason.

Definitions:

  1. (A) Supreme control of territory
  2. (B) Sovereign/sovereignty
  3. (C) Ability to enforce borders
  4. (D) Define/maintain geographic boundaries
  5. (E) Determine who may pass boundaries
  6. (F) Establishes/enforces laws
  7. (G) Border control authority as a priori
  8. (H) Unconditional expulsion authority
  9. (I) Conditions exist on deportations
  10. (J) Control limited
  11. (K) Limited body

Premises:

  1. A body that possesses supreme control of territory is sovereign: (A) → (B)
  2. Supreme control of territory requires the ability to enforce borders: (A) → (C)
  3. The enforcement of borders includes the definition and maintenance of geographic boundaries and determining who is allowed to pass those geographic boundaries: (C) → (D) ∧ (E)
  4. The establishing and enforcement of law requires sovereignty: (F) → (B)
  5. Supreme control of territory and the authority to enforce borders grants a priori authority to border control over all other laws: (A) ∧ (C) → (G)
  6. A priori border control includes unconditional expulsion of foreigners: (G) → (H)
  7. Conditions on deportations are limits on control of territory: (I) → (J)
  8. Limited bodies are not sovereign: (K) → ¬(B)

Conclusion:

A sovereign's supreme control of territory grants a priori authority for the unconditional expulsion of foreigners:

(A) ∧ (B) ∧ (C) ∧ (D) ∧ (E) ∧ (G) ∧ (H)

In your "ideal" adjudication, what prevents ICE from deporting citizens in bad faith and/or due to its demonstrated incompetence? (Even if you think the risk is low, the hazard must be addressed.)

I disagree. The leftist establishment uses such fringe cases to demand individual full trials for every deportation while they work ardently to increase the number of illegal aliens in this country. As with those states' issuance of IDs to illegals, the point is not the sanctity of the law or interest in a better-functioning state. The interest is in making it impossible to remove the tens of millions of illegal aliens in this country.

In practice those who cannot provide documentation are here illegally. The remaining edge cases of even several hundred homeless or otherwise profoundly socially detached citizens accidentally deported by ICE do not justify the requirement of millions of trials. But that's another excellent example, as if the homeless were institutionalized as they ought to be, there would be no concern, and then it would be well and truly an extreme minority of citizens who could not prove their citizenship. Regardless, it is not in the interest of a functional state to delay (and, given the above, ultimately fail) at the needed millions of deportations because once in a blue moon a homeless person or Kaczynski-ite is accidentally included. And of course, this would never have been a problem if politicians and billionaires didn't open the doors to millions of illegals in service of gaining future voters and cheap labor. They're causing the problem, they don't get a say in its solution.

Which precedent and why should we question its legitimacy?

See top. Border control is a priori to courts, habeas corpus requires court jurisdiction, courts have no jurisdiction in matters of border control. Again, they literally do, but from fundamental theory of sovereignty, they do not, and thus all actions taken by courts to limit the sovereign exercise of border control are inherently illegitimate.

The most fundamental authority of a sovereign entity is determining who is permitted within its borders.

I don't necessarily disagree with this. I was literally just mocking ("tongue-in-cheek") the hyperbole of the OP that was brought forth without much forethought: reactionary doomposting.

When the federal bureaucracy had its small departments with narrow scopes, soon enough they became massive departments with broad scopes.

The world has changed significantly. People used to show up on our shores with nothing more than a name on a ship manifest. Now passports with electronic components are ubiquitous and traveling without one is unimaginable. Bureaucracy must exist to manage this, no? Or do we simply turn away all foreigners based on a "vibe check" from the current executive? Bureaucracy shouldn't be judged by its size, but by its outcomes (I'll touch on that later in this comment).

Racism, sexism, religious bigotry. If we were so racist, so sexist, so bigoted, if we were so tyrannical for so many, then how were we ever liberated?

This feels like a non-sequitur so I'm just going to ignore it after quoting it...

But there was a point when we could deport foreigners with minimal hurdle, and now we can't.

What days are you hearkening back to? I struggle to think of any notable mass deportations in the modern era. Japanese Internment Camps with FDR? Trail of Tears with Andrew Jackson? Or even further, when you were simply accepted into or rejected from based on skin tone and accent?

who checks the judge?

The legislature, which originally ceded its power for short-term political gains (thanks Newt Gingrich), but has now ceded its power for reactionary political revolution (thanks Mike Johnson).

I'm not defending the current asylum system, as the impression that it can be abused has brought us to a less-than-optimal political "middle-ground" where a few hundred judges are assigned to hundreds of thousands of cases to determine whether someone's asylum claim is authentic or not. Conservatives are on record opposing legislative immigration reform for more than a decade. Progressives do not have political power at the federal level, even if you can find soundbytes on YouTube of them getting "owned". The neoliberal Democrat centrists have never been opposed to immigration reform, and have brought forth multiple bills delivering exactly what their conservative counterparts have asked for (thanks again Newt Gingrich, who needs bipartisan legislation when we can just swing a massive pendulum between 2 shitty alternatives every couple of years).

To go even further: I do think there are going to be really difficult pills to swallow in the coming decades regarding mass migration, not even outside of borders, but within our borders as well. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there is some potential future where we will be watching masses of people starve through binoculars across the Rio Grande. It'd be great to figure out how we can, as a nation, navigate those turbulent waters without regressing to animalistic authoritarianism, but over the past 10 years I have lost faith more and more that that's even possible.

All of this is just a play for more executive power. I don't trust that executive power won't be abused, especially given that the current executive seems to get off (sexually?) on flaunting abuses of power. But maybe there's where you and I differ in concerns about real dangers to our freedom in the coming years.

Good comment.

I invoke my "neutron star fallacy" at your reframing of the top-level comment. It's not a human rights abuse to send foreigners back to their home countries, even if they may face punishment or death. The argument goes that such "abuses" will inevitably snowball into greater tyranny but we know this never happened. It is directly analogous to the identitarian concerns I name.

What days are you hearkening back to? I struggle to think of any notable mass deportations in the modern era.

Operation Wetback.

The legislature

Voted removals aren't checks. A judge overrules the executive or congress, congress can vote to remove, while it takes another judge to overrule the first. The judicial checks itself. At a minimum it should be that if a judge is overruled by a superior court X instances in period of time Y, they are automatically and immediately removed from office. This maintains protection from a nearly-even congress politicizing removals (and the reciprocal gaming that would invite in a change of control) while making their accountability structural. But this also is not a check. We can remove judges ,stuff courts, the power remains, what do we do? Limit it as much as possible. The judicial effectually has authority that supersedes all others, so its authority must be the most strictly regulated, starting with all judges below SCOTUS losing the power to issue injunctions on government activity.

To go even further: I do think there are going to be really difficult pills to swallow in the coming decades regarding mass migration, not even outside of borders, but within our borders as well. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there is some potential future where we will be watching masses of people starve through binoculars across the Rio Grande. It'd be great to figure out how we can, as a nation, navigate those turbulent waters without regressing to animalistic authoritarianism, but over the past 10 years I have lost faith more and more that that's even possible.

All of this is just a play for more executive power. I don't trust that executive power won't be abused, especially given that the current executive seems to get off (sexually?) on flaunting abuses of power. But maybe there's where you and I differ in concerns about real dangers to our freedom in the coming years.

From 1900, every single bloodthirsty non-socialist non-communist nationalist movement emerged as a response to no less than equally bloodthirsty socialist and communist movements. No milquetoast conservative government sat by only to be taken over by reactionaries. So while I am also concerned about what horrors may lie in our future, I know they will only rise as the last reaction. My beliefs align with preventing that from happening by bringing about the people's current, eminently moderate requests. The district judge ordering the executive to bring back an illegal alien does not reduce the possibility of tyranny, it sharply raises it. Because again, the judicial branch checks itself, but these judges invite a check on power from a much different, far older structure.

Operation Wetback

Thanks for the link and jogging my memory, because I am loosely familiar with this and very familiar with Harlon Carter (amazing how history rhymes so much: parallels to be drawn between modern figures and historical figures).

My takeaway from (admittedly, briefly) reading about this operation is that the "success" wasn't strictly that the executive was able to act with impunity absent judicial oversight, but also that the Mexican government was equally enthusiastic about stemming the tide of migrants.

I still hold the position that the legislature is where the solutions to immigration should lie, and that any interaction between the executive and judicial is fundamentally suspect. I appreciate your comment, but I'm not certain that I can be convinced otherwise.

The most fundamental authority of a sovereign entity is determining who is permitted within its borders. The US government has, fundamentally, unconditional authority to expel a foreigner.

  1. The US government is sovereign and has fundamental authority over matters of immigration and removal
  2. The US government is constituted by the US Constitution, which grants Congress authority over immigration explicitly.
  3. Congress passed 8 USC 1231 241(b)(3) forbidding removal in certain cases, and providing for the AG to set up the process for so adjudicating
  4. The AG does, this process then finds this guy not removable

This is an an exercise of US sovereignty and its authority, as manifest by the above.

The craziest thing is that not a single person upset about this has proposed that Congress just repeal or limit 241(b)(3) and say that everyone that got withholding of removal under it expires in 3 months.

NOTHING more important than a government being forced to respect the rights of its citizens and residents

“Residents” you could have stopped at citizens but then I suppose your whole argument falls apart then doesn’t it?

I’m sorry but this asylum farce is just that. Almost none of the applicants for asylum face any real danger to themselves back home. All of them travelled to through safe countries to get here. What due process is owed to a liar seeking to exploit our goodwill?

The rights of "Residents" versus those of "Citizens" is kind of the whole debate.

Is it? Had the government accidentally deported a US citizen to an El Salvadorsn prison I don't see why they can't make the same exact argument: the courts cannot dictate to the executive how to retrieve them, it's completely up to the executive to do it or just kind of half heartedly try or just blow the whole thing off because they're too busy.

This is a pretty disturbing precedent to set if it stands.

I'd question the precedent the other way too, for the courts to dictate specific international relations outcomes seems a pretty slippery slope as well. If the court orders "return them by any means necessary" then I suppose we're all in for judicially-mandated ground invasions. If only Cheney had been aware of this One Weird Trick.

Agreed, that would also be a bad precedent.

So where do we stand? If the POTUS disappears even a US citizen to a foreign prison we just have to trust their best effort, which may be no actual effort, to bring them back? Any consequences for the POTUS here would be judicial overreach?

The US has accidentally deported citizens before. Apparently, they've been so embarrassed they tried hard to fix it on their own, with no court order needed. That's just because the executives have thought this an important norm to uphold?

To be a bit glib, we could establish a third branch of the federal government with a nebulously-defined capability to charge the other two branches (and their agents) and remove them from power as necessary when a sufficiently-large group of geographically-distributed representatives find their actions to be sufficiently out-of-line with the general consent of the governed.

As to how you'd get Congress to stop napping and actually become accountable for things again, that seems much harder. You'd think "do a bunch of questionable stuff to draw their ire" might work, but I've seen quite a bit of questionable stuff in my lifetime, and it hasn't yet.

More like “illegal residents” and fake asylum claimants. Let’s use accurate language here, as it helps to shed light on what’s truly at stake

How does one define a "fake asylum claimant"? Looks to me like anyone claiming asylum is, by definition, a real asylum claimant. Whether the US chooses to grant them the asylum they claim, and what criteria it bases its decision on, is its own business.

Asylum is when someone fears they be killed if they return home.

It’s pretty simple to tell. Oh we have X number of people saying they will die from this country. How many people are actually dying in that country? How many safe countries did they walk through to get here?

Simple, but proceduralism is a weapon of the left, so in practice what happens is none of this basic common sense gets applied, as can be seen in the courts decision

Sure. I was just making the admittedly slightly pedantic point that the phrase "fake asylum claimant" is misleading and I hate it and it needs to die. Anyone claiming asylum is - by definition - a real asylum claimant, whether or not they actually deserve to have their claim recognized. They might very well be a spurious asylum claimant, but a spurious asylum claimant is still a real asylum claimant, in the same way that in a spurious lawsuit, a spurious plaintiff is still a plaintiff.

A "fake asylum claimant" properly defined would be someone who, say, faked paperwork about having recognized asylum-seeker status without actually submitting a request to the government. That kind of fraud might exist, for all I know. But it's not the same thing.

(Does this matter? I think so. A fake asylum claimant, in the proper sense of the phrase, would be willfully committing fraud. In contrast, many an asylum-seeker whose request should be turned down might, nonetheless, be acting in good faith; we can tell them no without lumping them in with the actual criminals. A toy example would be a guy suffering from pathological paranoia, who sincerely but irrationally thinks there are people after him. A serious example would be the scores of claimants who correctly believed their case met the criteria which have applied in recent years. It's not their fault our recent standards have been bullshit, and even if we start turning them away now, we shouldn't treat them like fraudsters.)

literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel

Citation needed. I mean, I would agree that it is very important, but vast swathes of the Western populace would not.

Vast swathes are wrong. Boundaries are what makes things exist. A country with no borders is not a country, it's an economic zone.

That said, this also works for rule of law. A US without its silly due process traditions would not be the US.

Still. If you can't prevent yourself from being undermined you deserve to fail.

A country with no borders is not a country, it's an economic zone.

I don't think you can mix these two metaphors popular on the right. Some economic zones have actual walls around them. Not to mention that the conditions of the economic zone obviously don't apply outside the zone, otherwise everything would be in the zone.

not A implies B does not necessitate that B implies not A

Cool, but the point is that Bs have As, so if something doesn't have an A, it's not a B.

Some Bs have As. Not all of them however, have As. So this does not follow.

Beyond formalities however, what my argument is at core that a government that does not control who it administers ceases to be one properly speaking because it is easily gamed by outside actors. And therefore decays into some administrative or economic denomination of the larger structure that puppets it.

The fact that zones have boundaries in some sense that isn't this one is equivocation that isn't relevant to this particular instantiation of the concept. Except insofar as to show that boundaries that are artificial (in the purely administrative lines on a map sense) do not create this particular sort of meaning immediately. Time does tend to fix that, however. As many wars including some current ones can attest.

SSRs were important and historically significant administrative denominations or economic zones, but they were not states in any proper sense of the word.

Some Bs have As. Not all of them however, have As. So this does not follow.

They do, of course, as you admit yourself. It's merely a "no true Scotsman" of what constitutes a border.

Beyond formalities however, what my argument is at core that a government that does not control who it administers ceases to be one properly speaking because it is easily gamed by outside actors. And therefore decays into some administrative or economic denomination of the larger structure that puppets it.

It's not clear to me why this is true except that you feel strongly about this particular issue. Like if you were a leftist telling me about how governments that don't control inequality cease to be a government "properly speaking" because , I'm not impressed.

The current immigration regime is not unprecedented. There was much more freedom of movement before the latter part of the 20th century than there has been since. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the foreign born share of the population was comparable to what it is today. Was the USA not a government, properly speaking, but merely an economic zone? I don't think so, but if it was, it seems being an economic zone doesn't really mean much for the future trajectory of your country.

For what it's worth, I don't believe that the US has no borders, or didn't have any during the Biden administration.

It had and still has badly enforced ones, which still produce part of the dissolution effect I describe, but not nearly in the total sense that totally open borders do.

It's not clear to me why this is true except that you feel strongly about this particular issue.

People conquered by the Mongols probably found it clear that despite being allowed to maintain their own self government, the ability for the aforementioned Mongols to sack them or collect tribute at will was the dissolution of their statehood.

Perhaps there is some future hypothetical state of humanity where people wandering in and out of your territory is as consequence free as the microbes living it up on top of our skins are to us (and even then those are not in truth consequence free), but since we live in a present where the content of a population has important political consequences as humans always exert political influence of some kind where they live, we have to acknowledge this reality in our political models.

I'm sure that if the US truly had no borders, as the far west once did, and Mexican cartels were allowed to roam free and pillage at will, or some imperilled population could simply install themselves on your neighborhood overnight you'd properly understand your condition as stateless.

In the meantime, I maintain and am not alone in doing so that a proper definition of statehood requires an exclusive territory.

Counterpoint: the US is full of these entities called "states", which are closer to countries in their own right than they are to mere administrative districts.

For a lot of practical matters, state regulations are more relevant than federal regulations. There is a difference between California and Texas. Still, the entity which is a state controls almost nothing about its borders. If five millions of Californians decided to move to Idaho, there is nothing Idaho could do about that. But despite this, states are a thing, and are not rendered irrelevant by their lack of border control.

You are confusing nations and states. The US has no internal states since the civil war (except for native tribe exceptions), it's a unitary federation. Not a confederation. US states are now functionally closer to lander within Germany than states within the EU.

There are some nations inside the US that could be their own independent entity. But that's true of many states.

I don't believe quiet_NaN was trying to claim that US states were fully sovereign, the point they were making is that their control of their internal policy was not made irrelevant by their lack of control over inter-state migration.

I disagree. And I always will so long as Californians can de jure just turn up to Texas and change how it works and vice versa. If you can dissolve the people and elect another, you don't have government, just administration.

I hear “a country without borders isn’t a country” all the time, but clearly a country with open borders still has borders. The border still delineates where the police and military can operate, it determines jurisdictional issues, etc. States have open borders, but nobody is suggesting there’s no difference between California and Texas.

So if by “no borders” you actually only mean “open borders,” then the claim “a country with no borders is not a country, it’s an economic zone” is plainly false.

Agreed. I would argue that the most important thing about a society are its constraints on applying force. The rules about that are different in a feudal society or the USSR or the contemporary US, and they tell you a lot about what the society is like.

Historically, the bad thing about getting invaded is not that you have a bunch of people speaking in funny accents in the streets, but that the invaders would claim a monopoly on violence to the detriment of whomever previously had such powers.

Some illegals in the US might do a bit of gang violence, but they do not control the US though it. The entity which controls the US (ultimately through violence) is the US government. The next two relevant political entities engaging in violence -- very much also-rans compared to the US government -- would be BLM and J6.

Historically, the bad thing about getting invaded is not that you have a bunch of people speaking in funny accents in the streets, but that the invaders would claim a monopoly on violence to the detriment of whomever previously had such powers.

I would say that the really bad part of being invaded is that you are dispossessed and ruled by people who at best aren’t like you (and therefore inherently make your country less hospitable to you in the course of improving their own quality of life) and at worst despise and actively persecute you.

Bloodshed is very bad, obviously, but if the invaders killed five percent of the population and then settled down to rule it in precisely the manner that the original inhabitants would like best, I don’t think the bad blood would last. Whereas a bloodless coup that made the natives feel like strangers and inferiors in their own country is resented in perpetuity.

Why is this judge's decision not simply part of the process by which "the country" decides who to let in and who to expel? Are the president's desires the sole legitimate expression of the national will? We have a government of laws, not of men, or at least that's how it was intended.

Repeatedly spamming the same comment at multiple points in a thread is obnoxious; please do not do this. Consider this a warning.

To be fair, this platform does not permit a single comment to include responses to multiple comments (as, e. g., Xenforo and 4chan do), and which workarounds for that limitation are best is not immediately obvious. Maybe you should clarify what your preferred workarounds are—e. g., one long response with a bunch of username alerts at the end, or a combination of one long response and a bunch of short responses consisting of links to the long response.

I generally post substantive replies in one spot, ping the other people the comment would also be directed at, and add a "see here" with a link to the big comment in other places.

I would like to note that it's not a rule or requirement. The OP was modded for being obnoxious; copy-pasting a tweet is only one part of his offense.

Aaand we've got another poster deleting their top-level and comments - same person as before?

At this point the first and second top level comments are deleted by author.

Whenever I hear German politicans speak about international relations, there recur phrases like "democratic rule of law". In public discourse in general, democracy and rule of law seem to be considered much the same, or at least inseparately linked. I feel like this is a lumping-together of two very different concepts, and the two are at least as likely to be at odds with each other as they are to be mutually supportive. In my personal estimation: Far more likely to be conflict than otherwise. Western liberal societies have perhaps managed to have both, to some extent, for a while, but it's always been an unstable compromise. As the cracks show more clearly and people learn how to exploit and subvert these systems, I will not be surprised if the US or any other Western country needs to decide between either rule of law or democracy.

I think some people certainly conflate "rule of law(s), which happen to have been established by a democracy" and "rule of law(s), which are by their nature inherently democratic", with the latter paving the way for tyranny. This intersects with disagreements over the definition of democracy, where one side claims it means "following the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government" and the other claims it means "the majority get to dictate policy with absolute unconstrained authority (at least whenever I agree with the majority)".

Agreed, with an important addendum to recognise that the “we” from “ the set of prescribed rules we have established for maintaining a representative government” is often a very specific and not-at-all representative group: the secular army in pre-Erdogan Turkey, or the powers running postwar west-Germany, or (in many ways) Tony Blair in the UK.

I would add that "rule of law" is worth little when the laws do not preserve freedom, which I consider a much more terminal goal than democracy or rule of law.

It just so happens that in large polities, enshrining freedoms in laws is the best way to establish them, and that democracies are less terrible about preserving such laws than the other forms of government that have been tried. This is how we get freedoms, rule of law, democracy as a package deal.

No, but there is asymmetry.

The Supreme Court orders "wrongly" deported man to be returned to the US

That's a gross exaggeration of the order's actual text.

(1) The district judge ordered the government to "facilitate and effectuate" the alien's return by the end of April 7. The government appealed.

(2) Chief Justice Roberts issued an administrative stay so that the Supreme Court could consider the appeal.

(3) The April 7 deadline expired and became moot. The Supreme Court refused to reverse the rest of the order, but instead merely vacated and remanded so that the district jude could clarify what "effectuate" means, since it "may exceed the District Court's authority" (by forcing the US government to negotiate with the El Salvador government).

The April 7 deadline expired and became moot. The Supreme Court refused to reverse the rest of the order, but instead merely vacated and remanded so that the district jude could clarify what "effectuate" means, since it "may exceed the District Court's authority" (by forcing the US government to negotiate with the El Salvador government).

What prevents the WH from endlessly appealing in bad faith, alternating between claiming the District Court is either being unclear about the meaning of "effectuate" or being prescriptive in such a way that violates the separation of powers? Something along the lines of "Stop paying El Salvador to imprison him; claim him as the USA's ward, upon release from prison; and put him on the next flight to the USA, once he's in custody" should be a reasonable process to follow, but the Trump administration isn't especially reasonable.

Same thing that keeps the District Court from actually being unclear about the meaning of "effectuate" or being prescriptive in such a way that violates separation of powers: the limits of John Roberts's patience. Either the Supreme Court eventually affirms an order for Trump to do something (at which point Trump can either obey or cause an acute constitutional crisis), or it eventually says enough has been done and dismisses the case, or it keeps the case going until 2028.

If the Chief Justice were someone other than John Roberts, who is very sensitive to the incentives to punt thorny questions, their patience might be a limiting factor. Given Roberts's history of punting thorny questions, how is this a limitation?

Then the case keeps going until 2028 if both Trump and the District Court remain intransigent.

And if only the WH is intransigent?

They win.

Cheating is apparently a good checkers strategy.

Thank you for this summary; the clarity is extremely helpful.

I am usually not a fan of mootness games, or of Roberts' dodging underlying issues, and I have mixed feelings about this one too. But I have to admire his cleverness at avoiding constitutional crises.

Roberts is rather pragmatic, and I'm somewhat inclined to believe that at least part of the motivation here is that the judiciary shouldn't be issuing orders that won't actually be followed. Better to issue a stay then find that his orders won't (or can't, given international relations) be followed, and fight a better battle some other day.

Read literally, the original order requires the government to send in SEAL Team 6 to perform an extraction operation at CECOT in the event the Salvadorian government doesn’t hand him over in time.

I suppose a court could order the government to request Abrego Garcia back and to stop paying El Salvador to detain him, but beyond that I’m not really sure what they can do.

Judges should always be have the authority to override the government in favor of individual freedoms. A few gang members being on the loose is nothing compared to the threat of a tyrannical government. Far from a blackpill, rulings like this give me some hope that checks and balances will actually work in practice.

If ICE detention facilities are full, then via the pigeonhole principle any foreigners being required to enter the country increases the number of people on the loose.

There is quite a difference from refusing to admit an alien (which is solely the discretion of the executive, without any judicial review whatsoever -- see Knauff v. Shaughnessy) and deporting an individual already residing in the US to a place that same executive had determined he could not be deported to.

So your only issue with what Trump did is that he didn't pack the court yet?

He didn’t have to, he was just so incredibly dumb that he hired three judges solely based on their views on abortion instead of any other conservative principle. By Trump’s standards, Pope Francis would be a conservative SCOTUS judge because he’s anti-abortion.

Gorsuch and to a lesser degree BK have both been generally strong against the admin state. Most conservatives, Bostock aside, have been pleased with both. ACB on the other hand…

I'm not that optimistic. It reminds me of The Simpsons:

The judges are empowered to help criminals. You thought judges were empowered to help? Empowered to help criminals, not you.

It'll take a good action to move my opinion in a good direction. Not just "they can do something; good things are 'something', therefore they can do good things."

Far from a blackpill, rulings like this give me some hope that checks and balances will actually work in practice.

It depends on your definition of checks and balances. The question here is who is checking and balancing court decisions. Somebody can say that it can be executive by ignoring them. It is also not without a precedent such as when Andrew Jackson simply ignored court decision of Worcester v. Georgia (1832) stating that executive branch also has ability to interpret the constitution. Another example was Lincoln ignoring ruling regarding suspension of habeas corpus

The current SCOTUS were the ones who torched Roe v Wade and gave Trump immunity for J6, so they are not exactly all bleeding heart wokes.

I think this is a matter of rule of law, primarily. The gist of the case was there was a court order against deporting him, and ICE ignored that court order through incompetence or malice. Then they were like, "oops, honest mistake, but now it is out of our hands, and he was never allowed to be here in the first place, and now he is not, so everything is good, right".

If you let Trump's goons get away with ignoring due process, they will ignore more of it. So instead, you set a warning example: if you disobey the courts, we will make you undo everything you did, even if you claim it is disproportionate.

Trying to reverse outcomes through exceptionalism (“these cases are too urgent for due process”) invites mission creep fast. If you jettison due process for gangbangers, it won’t take long before that logic gets used on political enemies more broadly. The left has shown that too.

You can argue that the current “law” is functionally illegitimate—but that doesn’t mean lawlessness restores legitimacy. It usually just accelerates collapse. Procedural justice that enshrines substantive injustice will eventually be seen as a mask, not a shield. But burning the mask doesn’t make you noble, it just means you’re no longer pretending.

I’m not opposed to some sort of internal process. What im concerned about is those motivated to prevent deportations weaponizing tge process to basically grind tge whole thing to a stop by lawfare. I’ve said this a million times, but a good lawyer can absolutely abuse procedure to make what should be a hour long case into a month long slog through endless motions, frivolous witnesses, long discovery processes, and so on. Th3 end result is grinding everything to a halt as we now spend 6 months per detainee trying to defeat the lawfare. And of course this leads to over crowding which forces us back to “catch and release” and people staying for decades because the system is ground to a halt.

Procedural justice that enshrines substantive injustice will eventually be seen as a mask

You describe the system that allowed Garcia to stay here in the first place. He had no right to be here, yet he was here. All of the procedural justice applies to keeping people with no rights to be here in the country. None of the procedural justice applies when they break in. We have a system where anyone can waltz on in, and it takes a herculean effort to remove them.

Not waiting for someone to their day in court is own thing. Contravening a court order is quite another.

But why stop there? After all, there are also tons of gang members with US passports. But can you really be a US citizen and a member of a gang at the same time?

Criminal trials are long, have high standards of evidence and often end in acquittals due to a lack of compelling evidence or because of "police misconduct". In fact, you have to show the criminals the evidence against them, have the snitch take the stand or disclose that you had tapped their phones or whatever. Naturally, criminal organizations learn from this crazy practice, and prosecuting them within the law becomes even harder.

Would it not be much easier if we could just round up all the bad persons and ship them to some megaprison in El Salvador, without all of this "but I am a US citizen" or all that due process imposed by the woke legal system? And once we have taken care of the gang members (or "alleged gang members", as the woke lawyers would call them), we can take care of other undesirables. The domestic terrorists burning Teslas. The people cheering for them on social media. Et cetera.

I don’t think this is accurate. He couldn’t be removed to El Salvador. If the government returns him to the US embassy in El Salvador and then deports him to another country that would be kosher.

Without endorsing the idea, I have to wonder if the US is calling up Rwanda to see if they could get an agreement like the (unused) one they had with the previous UK government. "As legally required, this is not El Salvador."

Maybe they will. I don't think the SCOTUS decision prevents them from doing that.

Interesting article. Let's read it.

The big picture: The Trump administration fought a lower court order to return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian national who the government erroneously deported, arguing the judge's order imposes on the president's foreign policy powers.

Okay. "Erroneously deported". Maybe this is liberal media slander. Let's see where the link goes.

A Salvadorian national living in Maryland legally was wrongly deported to El Salvador, the Department of Justice has admitted in court papers filed Monday.

They admitted it? Maybe this is spin from the ... biased reporters at ... Axios? Well, let's click.

It's a filing by the government, defending their position. From the "Statement of Facts"

Plaintiff Abrego Garcia is a citizen and native of El Salvador, and his coplaintiffs are his U.S. citizen wife and five-year-old child, who reside in Maryland. Compl. ¶¶ 4–6, 42. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife work full-time to support their family.

During a bond hearing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) stated that a confidential informant had advised that Abrego Garcia was an active member of the criminal gang MS-13.

Although Abrego Garcia was found removable, the immigration judge granted him withholding of removal to El Salvador in an order dated October 10, 2019.

On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error. Cerna Decl. ¶¶ 12–15. On March 16, a news article contained a photograph of individuals entering intake at CECOT.

Okay ... so he was protected from removal, and ICE should not have removed him and admits so, but did so anyway due to an error.

And he was not merely "removed" to another country, but sent to a notorious prison for gang members, where it's unclear if he'll ever be able to leave. Due to an "administrative error". Without any due process to determine, for instance, whether he was actually a member of MS-13, whether this confidential informant's claims were true. When previously he was married to a US citizen and raising a five year old.

Let's read your second paragraph again:

Not to blackpill too much, but the country is basically doomed. When judges can override issues of national sovereignty - literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel - the illegal immigration issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. The millions who came in will never leave.

What?

How did this sequence of thoughts occur to you?

Most illegal immigrants are not protected from removal. For those that are protected, there are ways to remove the protection, whether that be via executive orders (as trump has revoked TPS for many groups of illegal immigrants), laws (Republicans, in theory, have a trifecta, and could nuke the filibuster at any time for something of such great importance) or proceedings in courts. Even then, if the administration simply wanted him gone, they could have expelled this person to freedom in a foreign country, instead of a prison that El Salvador advertises as a hellish place you can never leave, and perhaps gotten a friendlier ruling.

The Trump Administration is not getting similar orders to return the over 275 other people sent to CECOT, because they weren't sent because of an "administrative error" like this one.

How does an order demanding this man return have anything at all to do with the ability of the Trump administration to deport illegal immigrants in general?

I think you misread. He was subject to removal but not specifically to El Salvador. If they removed him to any other country it’d be fine.

I re-read my comment and I don't think I implied otherwise?

You stated:

“Okay ... so he was protected from removal, and ICE should not have removed him and admits so, but did so anyway due to an error.”

He was not protected from removal. He was protected from going to El Salvador; not removal per se.

Ok I see, that was worded weirdly, and I should've clarified that, but this supports my main point that this ruling does nothing to prevent Trump from carrying out deportations in general

On the same page! The problem is the district court judge is now willfully misreading the SCOTUS opinion.

You and @curious_straight_ca may be talking past each other:

Okay ... so he was protected from removal [to El Salvador], and ICE should not have removed him [to El Salvador] and admits so, but did so anyway due to an error.

Perhaps in your mind, the mistake is only where he was sent, not how the mistake occurred, but ICE never tried to send him anywhere other than El Salvador (so far as I know...) the remedy being ordered by the court isn't that he be sent "anyplace other than El Salvador" (the judge wants him back in the USA, presumably for the purposes of investigating ICE's compliance with relevant court orders; it'd be embarrassing to bring him back, due to having fucked up intra-branch - not even inter-branch - approval for deportation, just to re-deport him correctly, but that's on ICE for being sloppy...), so a miscommunication occurs, due to lack of specificity.

Okay ... so he was protected from removal, and ICE should not have removed him and admits so, but did so anyway due to an error.

And because people are often confused, one has to reiterate -- he was protected from removal by a ruling from an immigration judge that is part of the Executive Branch. The same branch that made an oopsie and removed him.

This isn't even two branches of government jostling over it -- for example if the 2019 order was from an Art III court (i.e. the judiciary). It's the league of morons in the same branch!

Immigration judges are part of the executive, they aren’t even Art III judges. This is the same branch that deported Garcia, in violation of their own order. And at the time of the order, that Executive was Donald Trump.

It’s not even close to an issue of national sovereignty, it’s just dumbassery. It’s a refusal to be at all serious about the process required to remove this guy.

The crackpot theory would be that the dumbassery is the point - the Trump administration doesn't have the ability to engage in deportations on the scale it desires without spending a bunch of money building a large and invasive immigration enforcement apparatus that will alienate the general public. What it can do is terrorize immigrants with an arbitrary and capricious enforcement regime in which you may be irretrievably sent to a black hole prison, regardless of your notional legal protections. This serves the dual purpose of providing a spectacle for hardcore nativist voters and creating an atmosphere of fear that will encourage immigrants to leave and discourage more from coming.

However, per my flair I think this is probably giving them too much credit and they are simply incompetent and view things like due process as an obstacle design to protect criminals.

However, per my flair I think this is probably giving them too much credit and they are simply incompetent and view things like due process as an obstacle design to protect criminals.

There was a comment with a sentence along the lines, "Trump isn't playing 5D chess; people think that because he's playing checkers, but cheating," and perhaps it should have been nominated as AAQC.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1812/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/314861?context=8#context

Since it was only that one sentence, nominated! Perhaps it'll become the second shortest Quality Contribution, behind "We have Roko's Basilisk at home."

Only third-shortest, if we still count The Old Place. The Roko's Basilisk quip managed to dethrone it but "The far-right statement isn't: "It's okay to be white" , it is you tearing it down." is still a masterclass in pithiness.

I agree that the limiting factor isn't money, it's competence.

Do... do supreme court justices not know that El Salvador is out of their jurisdiction? Or do they think because Trump is within their jurisdiction they can force him to send a Seal team to extricate an illegal, possibly murderous gang member, migrant that will just get deported again anyways? How do they expect to get this man back? Does facilitate just mean Trump calls and asks in a sarcastic voice for him back and Bukele knowing Trump doesn't actually want this says no. Then Trump throws up his hands and we move on? It's bizarre the amount of effort and resources globalists will tie up to keep the whole illegal immigration grift going.

That's a lot of emotive language in your post.

I don't have an opinion about this guy in particular (although clearly you do) but this is a horrific precedent to try and set, this argument could easily be applied to a citizen. There's nothing about the executive's argument that actually requires him to be an immigrant and the courts could equally "not have jurisdiction" over a citizen on foreign soil.

If there was the executive will to actually get this man back it's plainly obvious a phone call could be made to El Salvador to put this man on a flight back tomorrow. He's only there on the behest of the United States in the first place.

If there was the executive will to actually get this man back it's plainly obvious a phone call could be made to El Salvador to put this man on a flight back tomorrow.

I think you're probably right at some level on the circumstances in this case, but the man is a Salvadoran citizen and international law generally provides a number of protections when one country requests something resembling extradition. If Australia asked the US to return an American who overstayed their visa there and was now imprisoned in the US (for whatever reason), I'm not sure we'd just hand them over either. "Why didn't the Judiciary just compel the Executive to make foreign nations release their own political prisoners?" reads very much as "one weird trick" that you wouldn't expect to work.

international law generally provides a number of protections when one country requests something resembling extradition.

International law comes only into it in so far as it prohibits sending in the marines to fetch him. Prisoner transfers needing the consent of both countries is just a downstream consequence of respecting national sovereignty.

From my understanding, El Salvador has locked him up for being a gang member on the US say-so without a trial. I think that it is safe to assume that they will not be overly concerned with violating his citizen rights by "extraditing" him to the US at his request.

In fact, if the US needed him for a much more unfriendly reason, say to compel him to bear witness against US citizen gang members in a criminal case, I am sure that El Salvador could be persuaded to extradite him without too much trouble.

You are correct that most countries are not willing to either extradite their citizens to the US or send over their political prisoners, but this case is unlike most such cases. Basically, Trump is paying El Salvador to take back (and imprison) suspected gang members to score a political victory. It is safe to assume that on the part of El Salvador, this is purely a business relationship -- they likely don't feel either protective or vengeful towards the man in question, and would be equally happy to get paid for locking some other former US resident up.

Does facilitate just mean Trump calls and asks in a sarcastic voice for him back and Bukele knowing Trump doesn't actually want this says no.

I think so yes. But i guess this is why scotus is punting, they asked the lower court to clarify, and after that clarification we can have round 2 at scotus.

First of all, the Court isn't the one issuing the order, it's the district.

Second, there are allegations that the US is paying for the prisoners that is has sent to El Salvador. I don't know if that's a true statement, but if it is, that would imply that ES is holding them on behalf of the US, which further implies that the US has substantial control over the process.

I expect that the name of the game now is ascertaining exactly how much or how little control the US has here.

When judges can override issues of national sovereignty

In the United States, national sovereignty is vested in three co-equal branches (plus, to the extent it still kinda counts as "national", fifty separately sovereign states).

literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel

You are correct that this is a very important thing for a country to decide. That makes it a teeny bit weird to get super upset about this case, in particular, since it appears that the government has claimed that this wasn't really a "decision" and was just an "error". Like, sure, someone could get a little bit into the details of the legal arguments, but on your own terms, it seems wayyyy less important than you're making it out to be.

three co-equal branches

This business about the three branches being "co-equal" has always rubbed me the wrong way. It doesn't appear in the constitution. Congress has the power to set the president's salary and to fire him. But not vice-versa. It sure sounds like Congress is the boss. To boot, Congress is set up first in the constitution, in Article 1, whereas the president second in Article 2.

Sure, "co-equal" is definitely not often defined extremely precisely. They're obviously not, like, mathematically "equal" or "identical" or anything. They don't have exactly equal tools or powers. They might even have different numbers on their Articles. But they all get Articles. They're all equally established by the Constitution. They all derive a sense of legitimacy as institutions from that establishment by an adopted Constitutional text. They all exercise powers and authorities given to them directly from the primary document, not some lesser establishment or delegation. No branch can simply eliminate another wholesale.1 (Though they obviously each have tools that can greatly impact the operations of the others.) And moving back a bit toward the discussion at hand, I think there is little sense in saying that national sovereignty is located purely within a strict subset of branches. They all have some component or part to play in the exercise of national sovereignty that no other bodies or institutions apart from them have.

1 - Congress comes the closest here, but even they must appeal to the judgment of the fifty separately sovereign states.

Curiously, Congress refuses to do fuck-all about any of this.

As many (here and everywhere) have pointed out, this is one key root of our political dysfunction. There is a body that can definitively solve matters by passing an unambiguous law but simply doesn't, leaving us to fight over the exactly implications of a 70-year old vague statute.

Right the only intentional decision here was the one putting off his expulsion.

I happen to think that decision is wrong, and he should’ve been deported there anyway, but that doesn’t really change what happened at all.

What evidence is there that this man is a gang member or has committed any crimes other than entering the country illegally?

A confidential informant who may or may not exist says he's a gang member. Also he wore a Chicago Bulls cap and hoodie, in Maryland.

I think the norms of this community strongly opposed copy-pasting the same response into multiple replies in the thread. Even if it is an apropos, relevant quote.

I think you guys are missing the point. US immigration law is messed up, it's an insane struggle to bring a spouse to the US (like a 10 year bureaucratic process of living and waiting in the Czech Republic to be allowed in, or a few years for some spousal visa.) This guy has a US citizen wife, who's not able to keep her family. Yes, the border's weak, many bad apples were let in which spoil the bunch, but this regulatory environment is not helping you and me; it restricts the supply of tradwives!

As a sovereign citizen, I should be able to relocate my harem to Idaho, but Johnny gov don't let me, and you celebrate precedent to arbitrarily remove the spouses we do get in?! To quote Crass:

If you care to take a closer look at the way things really stand, You'd see we're all just niggers to the rulers of this land.

Remember, they are exerting effort to defamily a US citizen, to break the bonds of holy matrimony, instead of prioritizing the millions without such bonds and connections. This is raw anarchotyranny.

Except that we can’t even start that process as long as the default position of the government is “just come in, stay. By the time we actually get around to dealing with the case, you’ll be married to an American, probably have a couple of kids, and therefore we won’t be allowed to deport you anyway because we don’t break up American families.”

I want a sane immigration policy, as I think it’s much to hard and takes to long to come in legally. But at the same time, starting on that process with so many people crashing the border, overstaying visas, coming in as “students” but never enrolling in college, etc. isn’t going to work. We first need control of the border. Then we can create a vetting process that allows us to let good people in people we know are not gang members, drug pushers, terrorists, and people with so few skills that well be paying them welfare benefits forever. A sane system is possible, but trying to build it without dealing with the backlog and making it clear we don’t tolerate people sneaking in or overstaying visas, there’s no way to get there.

There it is: a casus belli for ignoring the supreme court. Trump has the perfect narrative: he needs to keep the country safe and the court is letting philosophy and activism stop them seeing it. SCOTUS chose violence by trying to override what is obviously executive branch prerogative. Now all Trump has to do is find his cojones.

There was never a need for a "casus belli", Trump can just do things. He can just ignore the supreme court. What's supposed to keep the country working is not "presidents don't assume dictatorial powers" but "the other organs stop him". This will simply be an opportunity to discover if it works.

If a judge prevented an American citizen from being expelled from the US because it was illegal, would that be a good thing or would it be a problem because it undermined the country's ability to decide who to keep and who to expel?

What did you think the judiciary's role was? I see barely any room between having judges exercising their normal amount of power and what you say means the country is basically doomed. I don't see why this particular individuals case is somehow of primary national importance such that a judge cannot be allowed to interfere. Nor do I understand why this is black pulling or surprising, this seems like a very typical type of thing for a judge to do in the course of business absent any special evidence to the contrary. Do you think this particular judge has done something illegal?

"A country deciding for itself". The trump administration is not The Country, just as the judge is not The Country. You seem so afraid of vesting a minimal amount of power in the judiciary that you are willing to accept much greater authority from a third party.

Breaking: all reciprocal tariffs halted for 90 days EXCEPT on China. Tariff rates over 100% on Chinese exports.

So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically? Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days.

Interesting choice to make as a country then… do we want cheap goods from China but lose access to the American market? Or do we want to be able to sell to Americans?

The next “stick” will be weaponizing the financial system against China-aligned nations, while China dumps treasuries and tries to spark a financial crisis.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/china-holds-back-retaliation-opts-strategic-messaging-through-white-paper-trade

I've largely ignore all the tariff talk the last, jeeze, two weeks? Three weeks? It's just repetitive top level posts really adding nothing over and over and over again, everyone so certain they know what's going to happen.

Nobody knows what's going to happen. Did anyone know this would happen? Does anyone know what happens next?

I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop. I've repeated my criteria for the Trump administration, and my hesitancy to rush to judgement too quickly. I'm waiting until the mid terms to see if my life has gotten better, or worse. I don't care about twitter post, I don't care about stock market swings, I do care about inflation, but in the "Has my pay risen faster than my grocery bill" sense and not a "Here's how the federal reserve is lying with statistics" kind of way.

Can we all reflect, for a moment, about all the breath and ink that has been feverishly spilled over this topic the last two weeks, to come to what? Do we even know what this point is supposed to represent? Or what tomorrow's tweets will be?

We've had topic bans before, and honestly I wouldn't be opposed to a month long ban on tariff discussion. Or putting it into it's own thread. Might as well be arguing alternate histories as far as I'm concerned.

Look, I understand finding a topic uninteresting but we're talking about a thing that could upturn the whole world economy. And the reason there is so much uncertainty about it is because the president of the united states is intentionally yoyoing us back and forth across the precipice. It's not a psyop that this is being discussed, some thing are actually genuinely important.

But it is very tiring to see people suddenly pop up acting like they're experts after months of low/no engagement, just because they suddenly have a stick they can hit people with.

I keep asking them tariff questions from last year and never get a response, because they never cared about tariffs until this week.

  1. Before 2001, most people had never cared about airplane cockpit security.
  2. Before 2008, most people had never cared about mortgage-backed securities.
  3. Before 2020, most people had never cared about coronaviruses.
  4. Before 2025, most people had never cared about tariffs.

Why is 4 different from the others?

I still don't care about coronaviruses or airplane cockpit security; the threats were wildly overblown by a single high-profile incident. We didn't need to respond to covid at all(and indeed, the correct response- both with the information available at the time and with benefit of hindsight- was to just shoot the chicken littles trying to shut down society over it and declare it 'not a big deal') and 9/11 can be safely considered a one off event.

So the real question becomes 'why are tariffs more like mortgage backed securities than covid?'

The cockpit security doors are less obviously insane than most of the anti-Twin-Towers measures. There's a drawback in the whole "pilot suicide" issue, but pilot suicides are a lot less bad than ramming attacks and are in some ways easier to stop.

Yes, the Flight 93 scenario is the norm now which makes it far harder to pull off a lookalike, but some defence in depth isn't crazy.

The cockpit security doors are less obviously insane than most of the anti-Twin-Towers measures.

As far as I know they are the only such security measures to have resulted in the loss of an aircraft Germanwings 9525 with all aboard. Pilot suicides might be less bad than ramming attacks... but it's an open question about whether they are less common, or if the security doors enable more suicides-with-all-aboard than they do mitigate ramming attacks.

Pilot suicides might be less bad than ramming attacks... but it's an open question about whether they are less common, or if the security doors enable more suicides-with-all-aboard than they do mitigate ramming attacks.

They are much more common but the right comparison would be between pilot suicides and ramming attacks if the latter was still possible. But the safety doors don't really matter for pilot suicides, they happened just as much before and logically you don't need a long time to crash a plane. You couldn't do it the way the germanwings guy did it but the SilkAir way would still work.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_control_of_whole_flight

More comments

There's a drawback in the whole "pilot suicide" issue, but pilot suicides are a lot less bad than ramming attacks and are in some ways easier to stop.

This doesn't even seem to be that big of a problem in the US. The largest differences from the Germanwings flight being:

  1. There are always two people on the flight deck now. Even when one pilot has to take a relief break a flight attendant steps onto the flight deck. Even if the FA has no idea what is going on, the added sense of shame from committing the act in front of another person is a strong deterrent. I also assume the FA would at least notice when the plane starts calling out "Terrain terrain. Pull-up Pull-up."
  2. Roughly (1,000 + 500) + 1,000 flight hours to fly a 737 or A320 size aircraft. Through a combination of rATP, ATP, and scope clause/regional captain restrictions. There would have been substantially more time to detect the Germanwings pilot unfitness with US airline levels of flight hour requirements. He only had 630 hours at the time. This would barely be enough to fly a clapped out Cessna 172 on pipeline patrol in the US.
  3. The FAA making it practically impossible to hold a first class medical after a severe depressive episode like the Germanwings pilot had. There's some argument for allowing pilots with minor problems to seek help, but not everyone is suited to every job. You've got to draw a line somewhere.

I actually don't follow in terms of how mortgage-backed securities are different than the other two examples here. If anything I think the tariffs are the odd one out here, since my modal expectation is that Trump walks them back and there is approximately zero long-term impact (at least relative to the other three examples). If you had said "4 is different because it's a nothingburger" I would admit you might have a point -- but to say that tariffs are nothingburgers like 9/11 and covid, not real like the GFC... I notice that I am confused.

My original point was just that there is frequently some Event which impacts everyone, and where everyone gains strong opinions about Adjacent Topic where they didn't really have an opinion on Adjacent Topic before Event, and so pointing out that people had no opinion about Adjacent Topic before Event isn't particularly informative.

Mortgage backed securities are different in that they actually had an effect different from people reading too much into them following a high-profile news story. You couldn’t have just ignored sub-prime mortgages in ‘08 the way you could have the virus in 2020.

Tariffs weren't really a huge deal until last week. They were generally considered bad policy with a couple edge cases and much of America's presence in the world was preaching free trade, which in practice meant no to low tariffs. Trump's hallucinated list of tariffs imposed on us notwithstanding there was bipartisan consensus that they were bad policy outside of very specific targeting. When the bear wakes up from its long hibernation and begins mauling people it is unsurprising that bear related discussions go from very rare to quite frequent.

But it is very tiring to see people suddenly pop up acting like they're experts after months of low/no engagement, just because they suddenly have a stick they can hit people with.

Trump blowing his own foot off and staggering around bleeding while the stock market tanks and his supporters flood the internet with contradictory asspulled copes about what he might be trying to do isn't actually tiresome or boring, no matter how little some people want to talk about it. If you guys don't like it, minimize the subthreads like everyone else does for everything else they don't care about.

The thing is, to me it seems that high tariffs are obviously bad for me, in a way that many of Trump's other policies are not obviously bad for me. I'd prefer to keep buying cheaper products, as opposed to more expensive products. I have no desire to go work in manufacturing. And I care almost nothing at all about the US becoming self-sufficient in national security-related products because as far as I am concerned, the oceans and the nukes are all we need to keep the US safe from any major threat.

Given that tariffs offer me nothing that I value, and only seem to offer me bad things, of course I go criticize them online. It's not some general attempt to bash Trump on my part, it's a specific criticism of a specific Trump policy that I would really prefer he dropped.

Congratulations, you just made the worst argument in the world for the millionth time. "You don't care? That makes you a bad person."

I don't care because I already lived through worse in 08, assorted points during Obama where we nearly "broke the buck", COVID, and most recently at points in 2022 where all the gains of my portfolio were wiped out going back to 2017. These tariff hiccups don't even take my portfolio back to the beginning of 2024.

Also, it's not a loss until you sell. Which if you do, you're a chump. Panic selling the bottom is how they get you.

I don't care about daily stock market swings because they are fucking retarded, and you shouldn't either.

  • -15

Sure, I wouldn't care either if I didn't have hundreds of thousands invested in the market, like millions of other people do through various retirement accounts.

Maybe I read too much into it. That just pattern matched to "millions are suffering and I care like a good person should". And I refute both points. Retirement accounts are not lost in a day unless you sell the bottom like a hysterical woman, and we've seen worse event in recent memory, much less living memory.

Shit man, if you are 59 years old you really ought to have figured out what a bad person is by now. Or at least have some inkling. I am similarly confused if you meant you don't understand what he meant by 'insinuate you are a bad person'.

I also didn't see your post as insinuating he was a "bad person". I don't know how he came to that conclusion or what he means by that.

at points in 2022 where all the gains of my portfolio were wiped out going back to 2017

What the fuck you invested in? Year end 2017 S&P 500 was below 2,700, the low point in 2022 was over 3,500.

These tariff hiccups don't even take my portfolio back to the beginning of 2024.

Until Trump climbed down today the slide was showing no signs of stopping whatsoever. We're barely more than a week removed from the original announcement.

Until Trump climbed down today the slide was showing no signs of stopping whatsoever. We're barely more than a week removed from the original announcement.

I will say, having my net worth in term deposits (because I'm a pessimist, if largely for other reasons) has served me well this week.

I'm not sure that @newintown is saying that if you don't care, you're a bad person. At least, that's not how I read it. To me it seems that he is pointing out why he cares.

I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop.

"It feels like a psyop"? Oh good heavens.

I feel like you're only upset about the topic because it reflects poorly on your ingroup, and it's providing fodder for your outgroup. Democrats were practically wallowing in despair for several months after the election, but Trump's buffoonishness was such a blatant shoot-myself-in-the-foot moment that suddenly the Dems were getting very talkative again, and almost became triumphant. They were practically egging on a crash, and reality was largely granting it to them until Trump waffled.

I doubt your reaction would be similar if the shoe was on the other foot, e.g. if Biden suddenly tried to force 1 in 20 people to undergo a sex change in the name of diversity.

I doubt your reaction would be similar if the shoe was on the other foot, e.g. if Biden suddenly tried to force 1 in 20 people to undergo a sex change in the name of diversity.

As rude and susceptible to partisan bias as it is to speculate on someone's partisan motivations, I find myself agreeing with your assessment of WhiningCoil in most of this comment, but this last part is pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure there's a level of behavior about tariffs that any POTUS could do that would come within an order of magnitude as extreme as actually forcing anyone to undergo sex changes, which would be legit authoritarian overreach in a way that the tariffs or even Trump's recent behavior with respect to deportations aren't. To say nothing of forcing millions of people to undergo sex changes. Like, even if Trump decided to enact Graham's Number% universal tariffs one second and then 0% the next second and varied wildly between them 3600/hour for every waking hour of his presidency, that wouldn't be anywhere in the same ballpark (though certainly it would provide a ton of legitimate fodder for conversation!). Yes, they're both examples of politically shooting oneself in the foot, but you're comparing doing so with an assault rifle and doing so with a nuke. And the precise examples of comparison isn't the point, but using such an obviously absurd hypothetical makes this comment appear in bad faith. Which is unfortunate, because, again, I think the main thrust of the comment is accurate.

I'm not sure what the equivalent of Trump's recent tariff behavior would be from the Democratic end. Something like a wealth tax on some ridiculously low amount of wealth that would apply to a majority of households, for the purpose of funding entitlements, maybe? That'd certainly be worth discussing plenty, and certainly there would be plenty of Democrat-aligned people trying to minimize the discussion as much ado about nothing as a way to distract away from something that made their side look bad, though I'd hope that no one on this forum would do so (and I'd honestly guess none of the regulars would do so).

OK sure, my particular example was dumb for the reasons you pointed out. I wanted to think of something that had partisan valence in the other direction, but at this point Republicans are mostly only pro-business as a historical accident. Most of the base hates "Wall Street" and "Big Business", so I think their response to Bernie-style economic leftism would be relatively muted compared to, say, 20 years ago.

That's a pretty good way to spin writing a dumb comparison and then admitting that you can't think of a better one. But not good enough to actually distract me sadly.

though I'd hope that no one on this forum would do so (and I'd honestly guess none of the regulars would do so).

While we have quite a few good eggs around here, a brief look at the past 8-9 years should be enough to dispelled most of this hope. We've had regulars argue against Damore, against Nick Sandman, in defense of BLM burning down that police precinct, that Kavanaugh was a rapist, and I don't recall more than a handful of progressive/liberal-leaning posters saying anything about it (and the ones that did probably wouldn't be recognized as progressive/liberals by other progressives/liberals).

It’s fun to see opinions in real time.

Be boring if we all held our breaths until everything is over.

I mean, I get that, but I don't.

Like, I get that if we're talking about a court case. Diving into the minutia of which legal arguments the Supreme Court will agree with, and which justices will go which way. Less so when it comes to individual court cases, like Rittenhouse, although I understand they are good drama and lightning rods for the culture war. I certain dove all in on some of them.

I get it when it comes to hot conflicts like Ukraine and Russia, and debating tactics, strategy and capabilities. Especially because reality quickly asserts itself.

The tariff discussion though... all I know is that all the same talking heads who've been wrong about everything insist tariff's will destroy the economy. They quote that the last time we did this was 100 years ago, and that simultaneously that's how we know it's a terrible idea, but also that the world has changed so much tariffs won't work like they used to when Trump brags about how great they were 100 years ago.

Fact of the matter is, Trump is a singular figure in history. He doesn't compare to anyone else. As well, these tariffs, coming from him, with the state of the world being what it is, is a singular moment in history that cannot be compared to any other. 10 years from now, some people might rise to the top as "having been right about the Trump tariffs". Some of them might have even done so on purpose! But I would also not be shocked if they lead to outcomes nobody predicts and nobody gets it completely, or even half right. You might as well be arguing about the next number at the craps table.

I struggle with economic discussion in general because

A. I know almost nothing about economics and what I do know makes the entire system seem like a massive fraud i.e. it's a ponzi scheme when I do it but they're treasury bonds when the feds do it

B. The kinds of people who are able to discourse about economics are overwhelmingly PMC and will represent PMC interests and when economics are discussed at all then what is considered to be "good policy" will be policy that doesn't take into consideration blue collar workers

Ok, but until he climbed down the expert consensus was exactly right on what the reaction of the markets would be.

I haven't been taking my opinions on the tariffs from talking heads. It just seems evident to me from first principles that the tariffs are more likely to hurt me than help me. I can't think of any way in which they could possibly help me. I don't want to work in manufacturing and I don't care about increasing US national security from its current level of "almost completely impregnable" to "so ridiculously impregnable that it's hard to imagine it being much more impregnable, barring the invention of effective anti-nuke defenses".

Has there been a topic moratorium in years? As I understood them, the topic moratoriums were put in place to soothe a plurality of people uninterested in (or uncomfortable with) the 10th weekly HBD/trans thread. A vestige from a more complex environment where mods had to account for significant differences to keep the peace. Most of those interests are gone along with the contributors that enjoyed those efforts. Unlike the dark arts behind HBD poasts this is an active and developing news item that has immediate and potentially long-lasting impacts on the world.

Taking the grill pill is fine. Welcome. Embrace the grill pill and accept what will be. To fully transcend you must let go the desire to rain on other parades.

There has not been a topic moratorium ever on themotte. There was one in the culture war thread in the slatestarcodex subreddit.

We have implemented rules about single issue posting for specific users that can get annoyingly stuck in a single issue.

We have sometimes had containment threads, but there isn't tons of enforcement of that containment. I don't think anyone has ever had so much as a warning for violating those.

This is a news discussion forum and this has been the biggest news for a while, clearly it’s going to be the central topic.

I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop.

When the market posts the biggest decline since Covid or 2008, of course people are going to care . It was the market crash that got people talking about it. And the fact the tariffs were so much more onerous compared to past tariffs.

I've repeated my criteria for the Trump administration, and my hesitancy to rush to judgement too quickly. I'm waiting until the mid terms to see if my life has gotten better, or worse.

Then I'd recommend utilizing the little bar next to any post about Trump for the next eighteen months to minimize discussions on it.

This is such a weird reversal in the demand for hugboxing, that I'm seeing on Twitter and IRL as well. Where I felt like last year the story was "SO WHAT IF BIDEN DOESN'T KNOW WHO THE PRESIDENT IS, WHAT ABOUT FASCISM!?!?" Now I'm seeing so many right wingers telling people to stop talking about the tariffs because idk there's a trans fencer or something.

Trump seems to have a legitimate hard-on for tariffs going back decades (as some people point out even most of his 2016 announcement speech was about tariffs and thinking free trade is bad) but he also seems to be a scaredy cat who keeps backing down anytime it causes actual trouble. He's delayed stuff like what, 4-5 times already?

At some point the market is just going to stop reacting because they'll internalize the large majority of tariff threats end up fizzling out. High chance he backs down on China some too, or at least that they allow some obvious workaround like China > Vietnam > US or something.

Edit: And it's already starting https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-hell-take-look-exempting-some-larger-us-companies-hit-especially-hard-tariffs

but he also seems to be a scaredy cat

125% tariffs on all Chinese imports is "scaredy cat" behavior?

If he caves on China then sure, make fun of him all you want.

125% tariffs on all Chinese imports is "scaredy cat" behavior?

If he caves on China then sure, make fun of him all you want.

It doesn't seem like the market believes he will actually follow through given the rally back, and given he's caved multiple times already on other nations (including this recent one) it's a fair expectation when seeing a consistent pattern.

Well we can do a !RemindMe and if he does cave on China (i.e. returning to basically the pre-tariff status quo, modulo perhaps some minor and ultimately inconsequential concessions on either side) then yes, I will acknowledge that the whole thing was dumb and a waste of time.

Decoupling from China is a legitimate and important strategic goal for the US, and I think there are enough China hawks in both the administration proper and the Republican party in general that there is enough political will to see it through.

It's not some 100% guarantee thing. It's possible he goes through with it, but we also have his whole first term to look at where he also did the same exact thing of threatening tariffs on China only to pull back like what happened with Apple https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/apple-dodges-iphone-tariff-after-trump-confirms-china-trade-agreement.html

He had said over and over again there would be no exemptions only for the exemptions to come. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/26/trump-apple-tariff-waivers-1437284 https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/20/trump-apple-mac-pro-tariff-exemption/

Even if he doesn't drop the tariffs themselves on a technical level, history does suggest there will be meaningful levels of exemptions and workarounds. Most of his actions so far have been to bark really loud and then pull back.

Again, if he does pull back, or if he leaves a loophole so big that the tariffs are effectively symbolic, then I will acknowledge that the whole thing was dumb and a waste of time.

Well good news, not even that much later and it's already starting with talk of exempting large companies https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-hell-take-look-exempting-some-larger-us-companies-hit-especially-hard-tariffs

What event are we reminding for exactly, though? If the China tariffs remain large and the stock market fully recovers despite this? My claim is pretty much just that financial markets think the tariffs are bad for the economy and that they are not pricing in the consequences of them staying long-term.

While I would agree that the market does not find the China tariffs very plausible as a long-term policy, we're still well below inauguration asset price levels, so I would interpret the market as mostly saying that a) the 10% tariffs are a major impediment to growth and so are the China tariffs and b) he screwed the business climate up so badly already that there is no fixing it.

Or the market was irrational back then with crazy P/E ratios.

Or that China is not the only important country from a trade perspective.

Man, I don't even know. Because "the stock market crashed and a bunch of retirees are mad because that's their nest egg" is, I think, a significant part of the signal Trump is looking at. But the market is considering the impact of tariffs times the probability that Trump actually sticks with them, so if the market stops believing Trump, the market impact of the tariffs stops looking so large, which makes Trump less likely to change his mind, which increases the chance they stick around... feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.

feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.

I believe the technical term is 'negative-feedback loop'.

The term "negative feedback loop" is a technical term for this but a non-specific one. Other related terms are "non-credible threat", "equilibrium selection", and "brinksmanship". I like the term "one of those cursed anti-inductive things", though, because

  1. The situation is cursed
  2. The anti-inductiveness is the main think causing the situation to be cursed
  3. I don't have the math chops to know what the equilibrium actually looks like here, so using proper terms from the game theory literature would be an implicit claim to expertise that I don't have.

Here's how I'm modeling the situation:

  • Trump has two buttons. The first button is labeled "WIN", and announces to the world that an economic disaster will happen. The second button is labeled "LOSE", and announces to the world that the scheduled economic disaster has been cancelled.
  • Trump views himself if a winner if his people love him AND his most-recently-pressed button was the "WIN" button. He cares more about being loved than about winning.
  • Trump wants to be a winner.
  • Trump can press both buttons any number of times.
  • Trump's people are old and their nest eggs have significant market exposure. If the market drops >10%, his people will stop loving him until the market recovers to at least that point.

As far as I can tell, this situation leads to the cycle

  1. Trump presses "WIN".
  2. Nothing happens until market participants judge that there's at least a 25% chance that Trump won't press "LOSE"
  3. Once market participants judge a 25% chance that Trump presses "LOSE", the market drops by 10%
  4. Trump's people stop loving him
  5. Trump presses "LOSE".
  6. The market recovers. Anyone who bet that Trump would press "LOSE" makes money.
  7. Go to 1.

I don't have the math chops to figure out what actually happens in this model as market participants get better at predicting Trump's behavior though. My suspicion is "25% chance the disaster actually happens each time we go through the cycle".

I am worried about this too, but the strength of the favourable initial market reaction to his climbdown makes me hope he might not try again in 90 days again.

It’s just his usual negotiating tactic

Make some crazy demand then pause it to use the demand as an anchor from which to negotiate. Door in the face technique it’s called iirc

Door in the face technique

Ok, that's pretty damn funny. I'll have to steal that!

It’s not really stealing, that’s actually what it’s called in psychology.

I see! I'd heard of foot-in-the-door, and thought Magusoflight was riffing off that. I guess psychologists have a sense of humour too.

Trump thinks he is a genius but he does also think other people (Musk, some of his golfing pals, some other real estate people, some Wall St people) are also geniuses and I guess some combination of them on the phone spooked him.

So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically? Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days

I think this is giving too much credit. Plenty of people in Trumpworld, even people very close to him, have spent the past days insisting that the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic, they are a necessary measure, and even in some cases that the stock market collapse is a necessary correction. I think they just got spooked that the slide had no signs of stopping and went into reverse gear. It's hard to see that 90 days is sufficient to conclude trade deals with most of the countries in the world (TPP took over 8 years to conclude), it's just a panic button.

It's hard to see that 90 days is sufficient to conclude trade deals with most of the countries in the world (TPP took over 8 years to conclude), it's just a panic button.

That depends on whether or not you believe that long trade negotiations occur as a means of negotiating trade, or as a means of furnishing the sinecures of lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats.

We saw the same thing with Brexit and the length of negotiations were all BS there too. In no possible universe is [https://www.gbnews.com/politics/brexit-news-eu-laws-bananas-retained-eu-law “How bendy can a banana be”] a legitimate negotiating question.

“How bendy can a banana be” a legitimate negotiating question.

Well it sort of obviously is a negotiating question. If you want free access to European markets some degree of harmonisation has to occur - whether one party thinks regulation X is pointless isn't really material, the question is are they willing to endanger a trade deal to ditch the bendy bananas regulation. And so the inevitable horse trading.

whether one party thinks regulation X is pointless isn't really material, the question is are they willing to endanger a trade deal to ditch the bendy bananas regulation

Considering what said bendy bananas regulation actually says, it's a good example of something the EU should insist on having as it's all about labeling standards, ie. not trying to pass subpar produce as prime quality.

Why is a bendy banana subpar?

I think the bendy ones are supposed o be higher quality.

Produce seems like the perfect example of a place where regulation is not needed. Lidl’s general guarantee plus consumers’ discernment should be enough without Brussels needing to mandate a standard banana

No, it's exactly as ridiculous as the memes say. I grew up under a lack of EU regulations on the matter, and for some mysterious reason there was no deluge of mislabeled poor quality food (in fact I'm prettty sure the general quality was better).

That depends on whether or not you believe that long trade negotiations occur as a means of negotiating trade, or as a means of furnishing the sinecures of lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats.

One of the arguments made against reciprocal tariffs is that it was simply too difficult to calculate - given the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of items and so many countries, and the non-tariff barriers that the Trump admin themselves pointed out - by April.

I would be much more confident in the "lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats trying to get paid" explanation rather than "Trump panic button" if Trump had already outperformed the naysayers by putting out a reciprocal tariff scheme that didn't boil down to a simple formula.

Plenty of people in Trumpworld, even people very close to him, have spent the past days insisting that the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic, they are a necessary measure, and even in some cases that the stock market collapse is a necessary correction

This is true. However, how effective would tariffs be as a negotiation tactic if they came out and said "don't worry, it's just a negotiation tactic" ?

I'm not one to ascribe genius and 4D chess for every move that DJT does, but this case in particular does have Art of the Deal written all over it:

  1. Start with an extreme position
  2. Pump out soundbites and headlines that suck up all of the attention. Create a sense of urgency to pressure the other side and keep everyone guessing about your true intentions
  3. Walk away if the the deal doesn't satisfy you

This is true. However, how effective would tariffs be as a negotiation tactic if they came out and said "don't worry, it's just a negotiation tactic" ?

So is Trump lying about the tariffs being potentially permanent? Because, if not, "do X or I will continue to withhold Y from you" seems like a perfectly valid and sensible negotiating tactic. It is straightforward and lets your counterparts know exactly what they have to do and you've already shown them that you're willing to seriously harm them if you don't get what you want.

It is the same strategy Trump himself used against Colombia.

If Trump isn't lying that he was willing to keep on tariffs this seems like a pretty good negotiation tactic since he achieves the same certainty that he is serious without the doubt that he's serious/acting in good faith.

If Trump is lying, then what are we to make of his sudden pause after refusing to offer such a thing? It seems the worst of all worlds. You appear insincere and erratic and like you're pulling a negotiation tactic with people being unable to settle on one explanation.

I'm not one to ascribe genius and 4D chess for every move that DJT does, but this case in particular does have Art of the Deal written all over it

Maybe. But one might wonder whether Art of the Deal is what you want here.

It's one thing to highlight leverage. But there is a question of whether you actually want to keep people guessing about what you want in a trade deal, especially when that trade deal will have to be sold to their domestic audience who a) have to accept it as legitimate and b) have to trust that Trump's demands are bounded and that making them eat shit on supply management or whatever won't actually just lead to Trump coming back in a little while because your willingness to fold emboldens him.

Anticipating the outline of the 5D chess explanation: this was the plan all along, training allies to meekly accept US dictates, baiting the disrespectful Chinese into cringe, standoffish behaviour. Now allies, cowed, thankful, will only negotiate 1:1, happy to put tariffs on China to avoid the terrible, terrible flood of goods. Such determination was shown that nobody will dare reduce own vulnerability to another round of similar 'negotiations'.

They’d have to convincingly explain why he wouldn’t just say “we’re aligning the world away from China, let’s get tariffs between members of the Free World to 0% so we don’t subsidize the Chinese manufacturing industry that can be used against us” or any version of that, adding or subtracting important information.

With a level of charity that I would myself question the reason behind: "reasonable requests" get indefinitely referred to committees and yield "we'll see" (which means probably no in practice) responses. Witness that American presidents have been encouraging increased EU defense spending for decades, but it took the (IMO very questionable) announcements of the last few months to seemingly cause a change in mindset and priorities. It takes a (perceived) crisis to make people reconsider seemingly "forever" policies: "but we need our dairy tariff to protect our delicate cows and farmers and their ancestral cheese making practices" sounds so nice and reasonable, making it hard to ever get rid of. Neoliberalism is really bad at enacting policies that sound mean.

Even with all that said, I still am not convinced it's worth it. Or even that close to being worth it.

With a level of charity that I would myself question the reason behind: "reasonable requests" get indefinitely referred to committees and yield "we'll see" (which means probably no in practice) responses.

The alternative is not the President politely requesting X in a diplomatic communique and then sitting around, especially if the thing is clearly something people are not inclined to do. It's some mixture of messaging combined with arm-twisting and maybe even tariffs, just without the weird deficit/tariff calculations, the erratic behavior or the opacity or inconsistency in the messaging.

It's not as if this is even unknown in the Trump administration: it is quite clear what his beef was with the Colombian president and why it would end and what he would do if it didn't.

WhiningCoil feels like they're being psyopped by the debate, I feel similar. The debate forces you into arguing about whether the American president is incapable of coercing nations or manufacturing crises for them without this level of uncertainty or incompetence.

People literally cannot say what Trump's goal is for sure, but we're all forced to play this game.

Looking at this, I wonder if it’s not some kind of reverse rug pulling, where insiders buy on the dip, knowing reversal is coming.

More seriously, I wonder how aware Trump is that this constant flip flopping is destroying his ability to make credible threats in future.

"Trump is acting in a way which maximizes his ability to rip off the stock market through insider trading" is as good an explanation as any.

Him becoming not credible is only a problem for the US, not for him personally. If the stock market stops reacting to his announcements he can always order the US military to occupy Greenland to get their attention back.

Luckily MAGA influencers put out so many mutually conflicting explainers for what Trump's strategy actually is that they can always pick one narrative and say that this was the plan all along.

The intellectual leader of MAGA has basically already confirmed your line of thinking.

There's no way that Trump and his inner circle aren't insider trading on these tariff announcements, right?

He tweeted earlier today, telling people to buy. I didn't realize you were supposed to take shit like that seriously.

I assumed he was saying that in a "buy the dip" and "please stop selling" sense, not that he was actually going to start taking steps to raise the stock market again...

Whatever happened to the fig leaf of "This is not financial advice, but here's what I'm doing..."

I think that’s likely too and doubt he tweeted with the intention of doing this. He spent days saying similar things.

I don't know if it makes it better. "At the time I had no idea I'd cancel the reciprocal tariffs a couple hours later!" But of course, it's also all according to plan.

Of course. Just give out 100 blanket pardons at the end of your term.

A lot of these earlier crypto announcements were clearly insider traded, cause you can see these crazy flows actually on the blockchain. Tradfi very opaque

What’re they going to do, send the SEC after them?

Who cares? "Insider trading" probably doesn't crack the top 5 list of worst examples of corruption, and Trump defenders would furiously denounce it as "lawfare" no matter what it was anyways.

So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically?

Imputing any kind of reasoning behind anything Trump does seems insane to me.

These sort of comments are popular but don’t make sense to me. Trump is simultaneously a political genius who can win two elections with the deck stacked completely against him, and also a blathering idiot with the critical reasoning and planning skills of a 3rd grader.

Not to mention his cabinet being comprised with very intelligent people and industry veterans…

a blathering idiot with the critical reasoning and planning skills of a 3rd grader.

These things massively aid him in being able to lie and make unachievable promises without doubting himself. If he was smarter there's no way he'd say the things he says or he would be plagued with doubts and counterarguments. There's no way he'd have got to where he's got.

Most people who are geniuses in one area are kind of mediocre in other areas. Trump's a genius at entertaining and getting votes, and he's terrible at economic policy. Why are those two particularly related?

So you have no theory of mind for Trump, his team or his supporters?

That seems greatly distinct from what he said; "Trump is running on vibes and obsessions rather than means-ends reasoning" is a theory of mind, and an analogous statement is true of many people (at least in a lot of situations) regardless of whether it's true or not in this particular case - this is the simulacrum levels 3 and especially 4.

I have read hundreds of different pet theories on the "strategy" behind what has happened with the tariffs, and the vast majority of the time, I've come to the conclusion that the theory is basically a reflection of the writer's own bias.

I think in all likelihood this is simply a result of everyone agreeing (even his supporters) that you simply can't trust anything that Trump says as a reflection of his own motivation. I'll add a caveat, though, that there are some people who insist that his actions are entirely consistent with his rhetoric, but I have not yet been convinced.

So it's not so much "no theory of mind", as much as "no mind worth theorizing about". It's intellectual terrorism. People are bending over backwards spending precious thought cycles that could be spent on work or with their family trying to rationalize what can only be reasonably described as irrational.

I'll even add my own pet theory to the end here: Trump wants to push buttons and feel powerful. House Republicans have blessed him with the "tariff" button. Trump pushes it. Trump feels powerful. The end.

(Edit: this sort of dovetails with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory, first associated with Nixon. Maybe great for foreign policy, but when practiced on your own electorate, I think "intellectual terrorism" is a fair descriptor.)

I wonder if it was another real estate guy who said something like ‘this is going to be very bad for Manhattan real estate’. Can’t think of anything else.

Musk got through?

Musk really needed / needs a reprieve on the China tariffs, Tesla will continue doing poorly in Europe regardless because of his perceived politics.

Even going from the complete insanity of, like, a hour ago to something that is merely extremely risky would be beneficial from Musk's point of view.

Watch to see if Navarro survives I guess.

All told, this was an excellent exercise in letting the markets price my risks. Since the initial announcement, I haven't bought or sold stocks-- because I'm saving up for some personal risks, but also because there's no sense panicking when the market isn't. SPY is down about ~15% from the peak rn, which sucks, but it's "economic contraction" territory rather than "economic disaster" territory.

Idk when the S&P dumps 20% in a week it’s a pretty good buy signal. Especially if you’re on a longer term time horizon

I didn't panic sell, but I'm on a month-and-a-half time horizon, and that's why I didn't buy.

Wow, the fake news was real. I honestly can’t tell if this was straight luck or a legitimate leak.

I'm guessing leak; it fits in with Trump's usual MO on these things.

Apparently call volumes spiked about 10m before the report.

Maybe this is Trump's plan to balance the deficit -- create massive economics swings and profit by whispering hints about it.

Interesting choice to make as a country then… do we want cheap goods from China but lose access to the American market? Or do we want to be able to sell to Americans?

I'm not sure I follow. A Vietnamese firm can import mostly-finished doo-dads from China, do the final step and then send them off to the US.

As of now, sure. But if it’s really a trade war against China, then an obvious escalation would be tariffing any other country that trades with China. Encourage other countries to turn their backs on China to keep access to US market.

Isn't there still a baseline of 10% during these 90 days?

A 10% blanket tax on imports is a mild price increase on Amazon and an inefficient federal sales tax. Not big news.

I think the fact that Trump would not go through with the tariffs were already priced in, and the share prices going up is just the world updating the probability that Trump will cause a worldwide recession.

Also, I think Trump comes across as an asshole in all of that.

  • "You are all not listening enough to me, so I will stop talking with you, effective today."
  • "On further reflection, you have signaled a willingness to discuss this with me, and thus I will postpone my not talking to you by 90 days. Except for Winnie, who is super-duper terrible, so I will not only not talk to him, I will not even look into his direction now. Also, if I see anyone still talking to him, I will possibly become angry at them and stop talking to them."

Given that, the rest of the world might think long and hard if they prefer to trade with the unhinged clown who will threaten them one day only to say "just kidding. OR AM I?" the next, or with a somewhat sinister power who at least pursues their own objectives in a rational, long-term thinking way.

Yes, before, if China approached your country and said you must take your pick: the US or China, you would probably pick the US.

After all of this unhinged clown shit, if the US says you must choose between the US and China, it's a tough call!

Watch for staff turnover.

If this really was "the plan all along," I would expect most people to stay put.

If there was some moment where Trump "realized" that this was a massive economic blunder, he'll move or fire people, while still claiming "yep ... plan all along"

What a huge rally. I am wishing I had been more aggressive. I bought on the dip on Monday. FNGA , which is a 3x tech etf, but I should have bought some 0-days when the story broke.

This is why you always got to keep some powder on the sidelines. You can do nothing for a year and then the opportunity arises 100x your money.

This shows the importance of not being whipsawed when investing. Stick with the plan if you're DCA (in which you generally want declines if you're young).

I don't think this will be resolved anytime soon, but what the market cares about is that things do not get worse.

Apparently China only accounts for 12 percent of imports/exports:

In 2024, US exports to China and imports from China accounted for 7.0 percent and 13.8 percent of the US total exports and imports for the year respectively

http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2025-04/09/content_117814362_3.html#:~:text=China%20is%20the%20US's%20third,imports%20for%20the%20year%20respectively.

So with the 90 day pause on other countries, the actual inflation tally as reflected by CPI will be much less than originally feared and limited to only a handful of goods.

Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days.

If that was the plan, it's pretty dumb. First you can't really un-declare a (commercial) war. Second, if you want people to side with you, you don't start a fight with them. Third, it puts everyone except China and the US in a better negociating position with those two, because they can play one against the other.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats