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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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How should Elon Musk's role in the Trump administration and reactions to it make us update on boogeymen like George Soros/Koch Brothers/Yo Mamma!/Whoever and the rhetorical use of such boogeymen? If you can openly buy power like this, is buying "shadowy" influence more or less likely? Or should we not update at all, because Musk and Trump are so extremely weird (n=1, of course)? What does being a combination Musk-phile and Soros-phobe or Musk-phobee and Soros-apologist (are there Soros-philes?) say about someone?

George Soros himself has a vaguely lib, pro-democracy, pro-markets ideology influenced by his youth. His son Alexander, who spent 8 years at Berkeley doing his masters and PhD (graduating 2019), and who is in charge of his charitable giving, is the arch-progressive who, unsurprisingly, supports just about every progressive cause championed in the Berkeley faculty lounge, from homeless drug addicts in San Francisco to Arabs in Israel/Palestine.

Soros Sr had, I suppose, some kind of shadowy influence in that he funded huge numbers of educational and think tank type institutions that promoted his ideas, especially in Eastern Europe. Soros Jr just realized that local politics was even more important to progressivism than national politics and so funded huge numbers of leftist DAs, city council members and so on very strategically in competitive races. I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.

I don’t know if that influence counts as ‘shadowy’ given it was all very public.

I think one of the things that's unusual about the pairing of Trump and Musk, at least for politicians, is the way that they're very intentionally brash and attention seeking.... and provocative, and, for Trump especially, fractious.

It seems to me that, in the normal course of things, activist parts of a coalition's base tend to be very noisy and confrontational, and then the more technocratic part of of a coalition, or the finance-oriented part of a coalition, tends to let that activist part suck up all the negative oxygen and emotion and then respond to in in the most anodyne, bloodless, quiet ways possible, generally making the really big changes. They tend to be more in the Politics and the English Language camp when it comes to attention management. And of course there is often more financial or organizational connections between the two parts of coalitions.

Trump and Musk seem like they're collapsing that distinction, which is... interesting.

Anyway, whether or not this way of behaving, this division of labor between funders/organizers/NGOs and the groups they fund, is shadowy is kind of a tricky issue, or so it seems to me. On the one hand, when I read, say, this Tablet story about the Pritzker family, their wealth, and the way they use it, and all the programs they fund, I could see the argument that none of what they're doing is secret; it's all in public, in some literal sense. That's what makes it possible to write that Tablet article, after all. And yet I also know that my fairly well-educated progressive in-laws, who live in Illinois and follow CNN and MSNBC, absolutely don't know any of this stuff, and it absolutely isn't worth the time trying to get them to know about it, because they have all sorts of ideological white blood cells about even the framing of topic. Same with the topics covered by Jacob Siegel in this article about the rise of the disinfo industry. Same with this famous Time magazine article. Same with all the discussion about the role and influence of USAID. Obama was famously very swayed by Cass Sunstein's theory of nudging groups, which is quite literally about recognizing problems with the attention that normies pay to things and then making policy that leverages those flaws (ostensibly towards pro-social ends). Is Moldbug's Cathedral shadowy? Or is it just normal and inevitable, the reality of complicated modern states dealing with the cognitive realities of their "citizens"?

I feel like this is a major fault line right now. Over and over, one set of people is inclined to say, I think, "Everything is legal and above the board, and this is just what our system literally IS. This kind of technocratic organizing is simple how power works, and how it must inevitably work." And another side says, "Even if it's ostensibly legal, there are so many layers of indirection, and so much rhetorical obfuscation, and so much artful shifting of attention, that surely the goal is not democratic deliberation and self-governance. TPOSIWID." Much like with the USAID stories, whether or not these different organizations or funders or whoever else is shadowy, large blocks of voters sure seem to respond like the organizations have been shadowy when those voters finally realize what the organizations have been up to...

the Pritzker family

Ironic that the collapse of their savings-and-loan-whatever, due to a strategy of chasing subprime loans to create securities, should have been heeded as a warning to the Bush administration for what locked in Obama's 2008 general election win. Can anyone explain why dhey held FDIC-uninsured money and how their settlement prevented account-holders from being made whole?

They have very different styles, so I can understand people having different opinions of them. Soros is about aligning government and society with his ideology, he doesn't necessarily have to go for the top dog, and in fact I think he rarely does, and instead opts for influencing education and putting the right people in lower ranking, but important positions. Musk on the other hand did a hail mary pass hoping he could bail himself out if it works.

I think being pro-Soros and anti-Koch would be more incoherent, than being pro-Soros and anti-Musk.

If you can openly buy power like this, is buying "shadowy" influence more or less likely?

Musk's methods being more crass and offputting to a certain type of democracy enjoyer, I'll opt for "more likely".

Musk's methods being more crass and offputting to a certain type of democracy enjoyer, I'll opt for "more likely".

Do you mean, "Most people with enough money to buy influence wouldn't do so as openly as Musk has, but can be assumed to want to do so in a discreet way; since Musk has bought influence at the highest level, we should take that as an indication that others do so, conditional on whatever we assume about discretion from the associated politicians?"

Very well put!

It depends if we're talking about big decisions or little ones. One of the pernicious aspects of the administrative state is that you have minutiae that can have huge impacts on businesses, tax classifications of particular business inputs or what constitutes a "tree" or whatever, and I can absolutely believe that those kinds of decisions are influenced by money.

On the other hand, the recent SCOTUS kerfluffles seem goofy to me, in that it seems to be built around the idea that Clarence Thomas can't possibly believe what he does in fact believe.

On the other hand, the recent SCOTUS kerfluffles seem goofy to me, in that it seems to be built around the idea that Clarence Thomas can't possibly believe what he does in fact believe.

Can you be specific about the SCOTUS kerfluffles and Thomas's beliefs?

The whole, so and so cant possibly believe the things they plainly believe, is the thing I've found most frustrating about political discourse over the last 10 years or so.

I feel like i am continuously watching affluent liberals tie themselves in knots to avoid grappling with basic arguments and claims.

They're unrelated, because Musk is openly an advisor to the President. He has influence in the administration and it is quite legible.

I don't really see how it is "buying" power. Musk and Trump shared similar ideological paths. Starting as moderate dems that became disillusioned with an increasingly authoritarian left as their business projects hit endless red tape and corruption while interacting with government. Spoke up about it and got the state media attacking them. It's not at all surprising that they ended up influencing eachother, they're friends.

If you're referring to the election in general money wasn't the deciding factor, Kamala outspent Trump by like 50% or something, 1.6b to 1b. So whatever power was bought, less of it was bought by Trump. He won on policy.

Soros follows the traditional shady lobbyist m.o. where he doesn't bother trying to convince the voters like Musk does, he just buys low level politicians, or influences vulnerable populations, low iq minorities, vulnerable children at college campuses. It's not really the same.

The left mostly has themselves and their incredibly rigid ideology to blame for Musk.

AIPAC would be the more relevant group to compare to Soros. The things Musk is doing are all things Trump ran on. War with Iran and taking the territory of Gaza are not.

If you're referring to the election in general money wasn't the deciding factor, Kamala outspent Trump by like 50% or something, 1.6b to 1b. So whatever power was bought, less of it was bought by Trump. He won on policy.

Not quite. Whatever power was bought, was bought by buying Twitter, not direct contributions to either campaign.

A single non censored source of information vs completely managed media = buying power. I think libs are just used to having complete authority over communication via control of media, hollywood and the power of false accusations of the various "isms" to deter any critical speech and formation of grassroots organization.

It's such a load of hypocrisy. Like the whole Bernie, AOC nonsense tour. The Oligarch has bought our government, Trump is Musk's puppet. Trump? a puppet? I think he's easy to manipulate, but he's not someone you buy. Meanwhile they ignore that the dems are propped up by Gates, Bloomberg, Soros, Cuban etc. and the last guy they installed up as president had to literally be led around by handlers and fed his lines.

A single non censored source of information vs completely managed media = buying power.

I mean, yes. If Musk didn't buy Twitter and turned it into the single non censored source of information, Trump likely wouldn't have won, and it's still useful to him now that he's president, otherwise he'd still be operating in a hostile media environment like during the first term.

This is why Elon gets to be one of Trump's closest advisors, while Vivek gets ejected.

I think libs are just used to having complete authority over communication via control of media.

Yup, that's me. The biggest lib on the Motte.

The biggest lib on the Motte.

Arjin, I... I thought I knew you.

Were all these years just a lie?

It's much worse than that, I thought I knew myself, but now I don't what to think anymore!

If he were actively using it to censor and promote his own viewpoints I'd call it buying power, but since beyond a few erratic bans over personal grudges he is not it doesn't really qualify. More like liberating the public square.

Yup, that's me. The biggest lib on the Motte.

It's all relative. You are far to the left of me.

If he were actively using it to censor and promote his own viewpoints I'd call it buying power, but since beyond a few erratic bans over personal grudges he is not it doesn't really qualify. More like liberating the public square.

But as you pointed out, the media landscape is so scewed, that merely not censoring, or "liberating the public square" is enough to make a massive difference in the election. All I'm saying is that if you're looking at expenditures that may have won Elon influence in the Trump administration, you have to look at the purchase of Twitter, not the chump change he spent on the campaign.

It's all relative. You are far to the left of me.

Uh... that's certainly possible, but are you sure you know what you're signing up for?

AIPAC would be the more relevant group to compare to Soros. The things Musk is doing are all things Trump ran on.

Trump ran on being the most pro-Israel president ever and openly discussed assisting Israel in the war on Hamas many times in the campaign.

For the last couple years of the Biden administration it was unclear who if anyone was actually exercising presidential authority.

Any complaints about Musk's "undue influence" must be read with that in mind.

No one who was silent while a bunch of unnamed White House staff weekended at bernie's can credibly claim that they are worried about "Musk's influence", or the "dignity of the office". They are obviously just mad at Musk/DOGE for threatening thier sinecures, and at Trump for stealing a base and denying them thier first female president yet again.

Okay but that goes both ways. If you weren't silent about unnamed white house staff being in charge, you ought to also be loudly exercised about a billionaire who's bought his influence.

Why?

Trump was talking about hiring Elon to take a machete to the executive branch the same way he did twitter all the way back in October.

Am I supposed to be holding the fact that he followed through on that against him?

In contrast the Democrats and Legacy-media felt compelled to conceal Biden's decline from the public and tar anyone who called attention to it as a fabulist.

I assume musk has more influence than just through doge cuts.

By that logic everyone who voted for Biden should have been OK with Democratic aides and advisors running the show because that’s the way it has been forever, it didn’t even need to be mentioned.

Am I supposed to be holding the fact that he followed through on that against him?

I see this a lot. Trump campaigns on doing something. Then he does it. People are blindsided and demand that Trump supporters be equally shocked and regretful of voting for him.

Probably because during the campaign (and now, for that matter) it was routine for Trump defenders to pretend that he wasn't going to do it, that it was just big talk, take him seriously not literally, etc... Encouraging people not to believe Trump was (and is) standard practice.

"Of course he's not going to do it, that's ridiculous" -> "He said he was going to do it, what are you complaining about?"

It was a delight to be on the other side of that tactic for a change

"For a change." - this being a deviation from Trumpism's usual scrupulous honesty.

Yes

"Of course he's not going to do it, that's ridiculous" -> "He said he was going to do it, what are you complaining about?"

Like “abolish the police” and “end whiteness”?

It’s mottes and baileys all the way down.

The police and whiteness remain conspicuously intact.

Not for lack of trying, arguably.

To add to this: Mike Johnson claimed he had a meeting with Biden in which Biden denied recently signing an executive order to block natural gas exports. So Biden either signed it and forgot, or staffers signed it for him without his knowledge. Either an unelected cabal was the real president and/or his brain didn't work.

We already know his brain didn’t work.

Or he lied. Don't dismiss the third way.

The natural gas "export ban" wasn't actually an export ban: it just gave a monopoly to the companies the US gov partnered with to build LNG terminal infrastructure. Very much a long term deep state project that started way back in the bush admin.
My suspicion is that someone made a few phone calls to the white house and got the order they wanted added to the auto pen queue. No need to bother Biden with the little details.

If the export ban wasn't actually an export ban, should we consider the possibility that this was a banal miscommunication between Johnson and Biden, not a clear-cut example of him having forgotten something important? You have to be senile enough to lose the ability to communicate normally, for senility to prevent banal miscommunication.

I don't think this was miscommunication. Mike Johnsons was referring to a recent executive order, Biden denied signing such an order. News articles phrase it correctly as a ban on new export permits. But there is no transcript of the actual conversion

I mean, Trump ran partly on giving musk a major role in the administration. There’s nothing hidden about it.

For the last two weeks (basically since the whole tariff conversation kicked-off) I've ve been seeing comments here about how trump is "erratic", "stupid", "illiterate", and a "retard", about how he's going to tank the economy and usher in a new age of Democratic party rule, about how his supporters are all deep-throating cock-slobberes who deserve to loose everything.

I would like to propose an alternative take. What if The Art of The Deal is an accurate reflection of Trump's beliefs and and approach to the world? If that were the case, it would seem that theMotte may be seriously underestimating Donald Trump.

I recently started reading Art of The Deal and I found it interesting to contrast Scott's review of that book with his latest on "The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does" as Trump (or his ghostwriter if you prefer to continue believing that Trump is illiterate) makes a similar but inverse argument.

According to Trump (or Tony Schwartz) one of the key skills of a sucessful negotiator is the ability to remain focused on what is rather than what ought to be, or what people say. Scott alleges in his review that the purpose of a real-estate developer is to lie, and there is a naive "the purpose of a thing is what it does" interpretation where this is plainly true but I don't think Scott gives the Trump/Schwartian position enough credit.

Regardless of it's purported purpose, the "role" of planning boards and zoning laws is to prevent buildings from being built. in orderfor a building to be built the planning board must be thwarted.

Thus the Developer tells the Contractor to start pouring concrete. The planning board is going to approve this project, we're just waiting on the paperwork. The contractor starts pouring. The Developer then goes to the planning board and tells them, you might as well approve this project because we already started work and otherwise you'd have go down to the job-site and tell the Contractor to stop. The planning board approves the project.

Scott would characterize the Developer as having lied to the contractor about having the approval, but did they? The planning board did in fact approve the project after all. That the contractor beginning to pour without approval played a major part in the granting of approval is either of vital importance or completely irrelevant depending upon which side of the managerial versus working class divide you are sitting.

Another key element of the Trump/Schwartian approach is the idea that there are no "friends" and no "enemies" at the negotiating table. Only people who are willing to negotiate in good faith, and those who are not. People who refuse to negotiate at all are definitionally in the "not" catagory.

Finally, contra Scott, i would hold that rather than being vague and unsatisfying the solution of "find someone who knows more about the issue than I do and pay them to persue my prefered outcome" is sensible and actionable advice.

With these ideas in mind a lot of his allegedly "erratic" and "nonsensical" decisions regarding Tariffs, Zelenskyy, and Immigration start to look less "nonsensical" and more like deliberate tactical choices.

trump is "erratic", "stupid", "illiterate", and a "retard"

Erratic? Definitely. Stupid? In a sense. Illiterate? No. Retard? By the medical definition, of course not.

I prefer the term "buffoon" myself.

his supporters are all deep-throating cock-slobberes

I'm assuming that's supposed to be "cock-slobberers". I wouldn't call all his supporters that, but a decent chunk, roughly about 33-37% of the country certainly are. I'm confident enough in that assertion that I'd be willing to bet money on it, if such a market existed.

With these ideas in mind a lot of his allegedly "erratic" and "nonsensical" decisions regarding Tariffs, Zelenskyy, and Immigration start to look less "nonsensical" and more like deliberate tactical choices.

There's two big problems with the "4D Chess, Art Of The Deal, Trust The Plan" style of arguments.

  1. It's deployed as yet another everything-proof shield for any of Trump's actions. Trump cultists desperately, desperately want any reason to love the man, so there's an extensive distributed search to come up with any reason to do so. This is just like how woke academics searched for any reason not to blame black people for their own problems, and ended up coming up with unfalsifiable ideas like "structural racism" as the cause for everything. When the motivated reasoning is this blatant, you should be suspicious of the purported results.

  2. Where are the actual results? Trump has already had a full term where he was full of erratic actions. Where are his successes where the erratic behavior clearly led to a good outcome? Note that there are going to be happy accidents every once in a while, so we would expect at least a few good results even if we made an RNG simulator the President. Trump certainly had a few good results during his first term, but they were mostly just him acting like a conventional politician, e.g. Operation Warp Speed (which Trump later disavowed, because of course he did) or his SCOTUS nominations (more of McConnell's victory really, but Trump gets some credit for not buffoonishly sabotaging it in some way).

If, come the 2026 midterm or 2028 presidential elections, the economy was looking decent to strong and there had been significant progress towards any of the following goals; balancing US trade deficiets, restoring US shipbuilding capacity, or peace in Ukraine. Would you update your priors? Or is being an anti-populist such a core component of your identity that you would deny reality to protect your ego?

If the latter, how is your claim that "Trump is a buffoon" any less of a fully general "everything proof" argument?

I already give Trump credit for destroying wokeism or at least hastening it's demise. I also gave him credit for announcing a buildup of the military, which is a good idea. Hopefully he actually goes through with it and doesn't waffle.

I don't find balancing US trade deficits to be a priority. Something like reshoring (high tech) manufacturing though, sure.

Yes, it would be great if he could restore US shipbuilding.

Peace in Ukraine is highly contingent on what the peace looks like. If it's effectively "force Ukraine to surrender and give up huge swathes of land that they wouldn't need to if Biden were still around" is not a good peace. If it was "ceasefire at current lines, and Ukraine protected from future invasions by European guarantees", that'd be reasonable.

So that is a "no" then, you would not update your priors.

I sincerely don't understand how you're coming to that conclusion based on what I wrote.

This is pretty low effort and seems meant only to antagonize and not actually get at the other person's reasoning. Playing gotcha with "I asked you a yes or no question, and you gave me a couple of paragraphs of explanation but didn't say yes or no therefore you didn't answer my question" is obnoxious. If you genuinely believe you still do not have an answer:

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.

Honestly it must be said that these rules are often honored more in the breach than in practice, but this one-liner just stands out as egregiously "ZING! I am not arguing to understand but to score points."

@TheAntipopulist is one of the specific users i had in mind writing the OP.

Their three paragraphs here and replies elsewhere in this thread can be summarized as; "even if the populists are sucessful (which they wont be) it will be for reasons outside thier control and thus not count."

So cutting to the chase, no the anti populist is not going to be updating his priors regarding populism and populists.

With that in mind do you really think they are arguing to understand rather to score points? A large portion of the users' output (along with thier user name) is little more than casual disparagement of anyone outside the managerial class.

Casual disparagement that you are not just tolerating but actively defending from push-back.

Their three paragraphs here and replies elsewhere in this thread can be summarized as; "even if the populists are sucessful (which they wont be) it will be for reasons outside thier control and thus not count."

All three specify circumstances under which he would update, and some of them aren't even all that demanding. None of them require things outside the government's control or at least not wildly more than your list that he was replying to. Reading "here are three ways I would update" as "I wouldn't update" is... certainly a thing someone said on the Internet today.

Honestly, you're not making much sense. You don't seem to be reading what the words in front of you actually say, but what your opinion of the person posting them leads you to expect to be there.

No they did not specify any circumstances under which they would update, they explained why even if x y and z were to happen they are not high priorities and thus beneath consideration. While there is a throw-away line about giving Trump credit for setting "wokeness" back a bit the possibility that Trump and the people who voted for him might genuinly believe the things they claim to believe is dismissed out of hand.

More comments

Strong economy (which would mean back to trendline without strong inflation, NOT merely a return to positive growth), trade deficit narrowed by a lot (really doesn't matter since the thesis of tariff criticism is that they are bad for the economy so this is fully covered by that item, but the volatility, reputational loss and immediate financial pain needs to not all be for naught), peace in Ukraine with a Ukraine-favoring resolution would make me update my assessment.

US shipbuilding is very "who cares", and I'm not sure how to judge a successful policy since fixing it would take decades of reform. Certainly, having revenue from US gov purchases of ships go up would not count.

US shipbuilding capacity isn't going to be restored without first breaking the various unions involved, which isn't going to happen. Even after that you'd need someone who could build things from the ground up -- maybe Musk has someone at Tesla who could do this. But it would probably require hiring a lot of foreign experts, too.

Ukraine seems unlikely to happen due to the intransigence of the parties (in particular Putin, who thinks he can get it all eventually) but if it does I'm sure it will be spun as surrendering to Putin (which it wouldn't be, but Ukraine would lose significant territory)

I wouldn't call all his supporters that, but a decent chunk, roughly about 33-37% of the country certainly are.

33-37%/Trump-supporting % of the country = % of Trump supporters that are "deep-throating cock-slobberes" - I'm assuming less than half the country supports Trump, at this point, so "33-37%" is actually 67-80% (before factoring in "the evaporative cooling of group beliefs")

Yes, they've essentially captured the Republican party in its entirety by this point. Criticizing or even disagreeing with Dear Leader too consistently is seen as a crime worthy of (political) death, no matter the topic or how wrong Trump is.

You should read patriots.win. I'm guessing that it is peak MAGA. And yet they engage in lively debates, with comments calling out Donald when he makes mistakes, and getting upvotes.

Criticizing appointments

If only Trump knew ...

Unfortunately, bad appointments has been one of Trump's glaring weak points. 28 upvotes, 12 hours ago

Sure, there's always been a bit of dissent around the fringes (/pol/ has had similar debates). But these people are nowhere close to being in the driver's seat when it comes to MAGA. The tariffs debacle was really the ultimate test, as it was 1) a big policy that 2) affects something almost everyone cares about (the economy) and 3) had a pretty significant flip-flop in a very short timeframe. Basically everyone should have been pissed either when the tariffs were announced, or when the tariffs were significantly watered down.

"Not in the driver's seat" and "political death" are vastly different.

Where are the actual results? Trump has already had a full term where he was full of erratic actions. Where are his successes where the erratic behavior clearly led to a good outcome?

Ukraine seems like an obvious example of the success of the "madman" diplomatic style to me. Trump (allegedly) threatened to bomb Russia if Putin invaded [this, as I understand it, would be a big no-no by conventional diplomatic wisdom] and as a result millions of Russians and Ukrainians were spared tremendous pain...for a few years, until Biden and his more conventional and "less erratic" foreign policy took over.

I definitely do not think that Trump is beyond criticism. But I do think that "madman diplomacy" can work – and Trump isn't the first leader to use it effectively.

That's a stretch since Russia didn't invade any country during Obama's first term either. Even if you think Trump really did prevent a war during his first term he didn't do anything substantive to fix any underlying issues, so he just can-kicked.

Are you taking the position that the "little green men" wrre totally not Russian special forces and that anyone who says otherwise is an Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theorist?

Because if not, Georgia, Ukraine and Maldova would all like a word.

No, I agree little green men were Russian. It's just a question of timing. Moldova was in the 90s, Georgia was 2008, Crimea was 2014. None of those happened under Obama's first term, nor Bush 2's first term.

Not really sure what the first term has to do with it – Russia invaded Ukraine in Obama's second term and successfully annexed Crimea, but that was almost certainly because of intervening events, not because Putin prefers invading in people's second terms (a courtesy he did not extend to Biden).

From a certain perspective all politics is can-kicking. I think that Trump's erratic actions in his first term (threatening to bomb Russia if they invaded Ukraine) led to a good outcome (Ukraine not being invaded). You're right that we can't split the timeline to test a counterfactual, but that's true in all cases, by which logic politicians should never get credit for anything good that happens.

I could be persuaded it was a coincidence if there was good evidence that Putin had an internal clock set to 2023 for some reason (e.g ongoing modernization efforts made Russia much more lethal in 2023 than in 2021) but considering that Trump sent lethal aid to Ukraine, it might have been in Putin's interest to invade even sooner – but he didn't for some reason. At the risk of oversimplifying, I find "Putin being 5% persuaded that Trump might actually strike the Kremlin" a very parsimonious reason.

It's not the fact that it's the first term, it's that Russia's actions don't follow a predictable clock. Blaming Biden for Ukraine being invaded is almost as bad as blaming Trump for COVID happening under his watch. Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts. Maybe Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan slightly helped goad Russia to invade, and maybe Trump's threats might have had some small impact, but they were not the primary determinants by any means.

From a certain perspective all politics is can-kicking.

Not at all. If the debt explodes to 99% of bankruptcy during one leader's term, and the bankruptcy happens under his successor, would we say the first leader was great and only the second one was the issue? Obviously not. The first guy set the powder and lit the fuse, it doesn't really matter if the bomb only went off when he wasn't in charge.

While it's true to some degree that we can't know with perfect accuracy unless we had a time machine that let us rerun the presidency with the alt candidate, some actions are clearer than others, e.g. I doubt if Biden had another term that we'd have a tariff-induced market crash. Maybe Biden could have caused a crash in another way, but Trump owns his own stupid actions in this universe.

Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts. Maybe Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan slightly helped goad Russia to invade, and maybe Trump's threats might have had some small impact, but they were not the primary determinants by any means.

I would say Russia is actually relatively reactive on the international stage. However, I don't think Afghanistan had much to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I think that the Biden administration's non-erratic approach to Ukraine policy is more to blame. As we have seen, it was incapable of deterrence.

If you don't think that Trump's threats (which were effectively an informal security guarantee of Ukraine) have any impact, then it seems to me that Ukraine's continual asking for NATO membership or security guarantees is pointless, since "Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts" and they will invade Ukraine regardless of security guarantees. (Put in that light, it kinda seems like NATO is pointless.) Is this your position?

Maybe Biden could have caused a crash in another way, but Trump owns his own stupid actions in this universe.

Right, but in your telling, not his smart ones. Deterring Russia is not to his credit, but the stock market crash is.

Blaming Biden for Ukraine being invaded is almost as bad as blaming Trump for COVID happening under his watch.

Funny, because I do blame both of them for those things.

For Biden: what the fuck else do you think Hunter was doing there? The Ds have been angling for that war for years and have been playing stupid games in Ukraine even back when he was VP.

For Trump: massive partisan riots broke out and weren't controlled. Law and order gave way to burn, loot, murder in literally every major city and he did what, hold a Bible upside down? And the money printing began under him- the Ds continued it, sure, but that was a bad move from the get-go.

The point is you should blame them for the response they had to the event, not the fact that the event happened under their watch. There's not much evidence to say that Biden instigated Russia to invade, and its obviously ludicrous to insinuate that Trump caused COVID.

Hunter was in Ukraine being corrupt. I've not seen any compelling evidence saying he was there to goad Russia to invade.

BLM riots breaking out during Trump's term isn't really Trump's fault. He might have instigated it to some small degree, but it was primarily caused by the high point of woke mania. I agree Trump didn't really respond to it (nor COVID more broadly) well, but that's a separate discussion

The point is you should blame them for the response they had to the event, not the fact that the event happened under their watch.

If they had the means and opportunity to prevent "the event", it is perfectly reasonable to blame them for the event happening under their watch. Putin is not, in fact, a implacable force of nature.

According to Trump (or Tony Schwartz) one of the key skills of a sucessful negotiator is the ability to remain focused on what is rather than what ought to be, or what people say.

Sure, but now we have what appears [to me] to be tactically-inconsistent backpedaling. Enhanced high-tech manufacturing capabilities were supposed to [by who?] be the goal but now only token tariffs remain in the most important areas- and yes, the US has weaknesses in this area that are so significant that major Chinese manufacturing firms being told to suspend shipments of that equipment to the US is probably a bigger deal than most give it credit for. The Americans might indeed not be in any position to unilaterally establish independent industry at this time.

And while people do indeed have incredibly short memories- people barely remember 2020-2022 these days and that economic cataclysm dwarfs any economic disturbance tariffs have caused (oh, market fell 10%? I don't hear reparations for the 30% inflation over the last 4 years in addition to all the authoritarian shit so I don't fucking care!)- my main problem is that the negotiations are highly public, but the timeframe is not.

Let's take the whole 51st State thing as an example. I feel that to start trying to accomplish that goal... well, the economic tactics are sound ones, but there's only a concept of a plan here, nothing more substantive [as perceived by the general public].

When working on any project, the answer to most questions [from a stability/investment mindset] cannot actually be the Underpants Gnomes strategy; we pour foundations so that we can accomplish the next step of the process, but to pour those foundations the finished product needs to be coherent. Is it self-sufficiency, like petroleum? Is it simply reduced dependence with an eye towards self-sufficiency? The last major economic reformer in US history, FDR, had the fireside chat specifically for this reason- massive and immediate reforms benefit from someone explaining why. That should be Vance, since he's capable of doing this whereas Trump is... very not, but I'm not hearing anything.

And doubly so if we're going to see dealmaking consistently in public- whereas right now, we just have the disruption. And yes, this sort of thing absolutely is bad for American provinces like Canada and the EU; to the point that I see the offer of statehood as an early buy-out package for performers capable of being disruptive to larger goals before the layoffs begin... which, you'll recall, was exactly what was occurring around that time.

I've been seeing comments here about how trump is "erratic", "stupid", "illiterate", and a "retard", about how he's going to tank the economy and usher in a new age of Democratic party rule, about how his supporters are all deep-throating cock-slobberes who deserve to lose everything.

The only real criticism is "erratic", the other ones are all just incoherent screaming (same with "corrupt"; I have yet to hear how substantiated/used outside of a thought-terminating argument).

Literally just lying might work fine in business as long as you avoid legal troubles, the same way that stiffing contractors might end up working out perfectly fine if you're the bigger company but proper governing is a different beast entirely. Risk taking like that in real estate just means you might pay for a few fines if the zoning board says no, risk taking in government can mean tons of people lose their jobs, lose their homes, or even die depending on what you're taking a risk for.

And unlike with venues or contractors where there's plenty of fish in the sea so pissing them off isn't too bad, there is not another Canada or UK or EU to turn to. You can poke the bears a little especially with a country as powerful as ours but this is an iterative game and defecting is way less useful. Likewise there's a reason why his measures still have us at -8% from 6 months ago and Polymarket has been hovering around 50% chance of recession, people and the overall market want and need long-term reliability.

Edit: And not even to mention, what are we getting out of it? Even if we settle into a "win" for him on getting high tariffs implemented, there's plenty of strong evidence that it will hurt the economy, reduce downstream jobs that use those inputs, and make us poorer.

Edit2: Also here's a really great example of how this approach seems to be failing, Canada. Everything was lined up for a Conservative victory, it was basically taken as a given. PP would have been really Trump friendly. Instead he rallied the Canadians so hard that the odds have shifted massively and Carney will be elected not just as a liberal party pick, but an anti-Trump pick.

Politics is an iterative game, and defecting so hard with aggression towards Canada has most likely lost him in the long run. And there is no other Canada to turn to, he can't just run off like you could with contractors or venues or city zoning boards. Our closest and friendliest neighbor economically and geographically has been pushed away

Is it really "lying" though if the statement is objectively true?

By the same token, if the statement is true, where exactly did "the defection" occur?

You seem to be arguing for a concept "truth" that is independent of ground level reality.

You said

Scott would characterize the Developer as having lied to the contractor about having the approval, but did they? The planning board did in fact approve the project after all. That the contractor beginning to pour without approval played a major part in the granting of approval is either of vital importance or completely irrelevant depending upon which side of the managerial versus working class divide you are sitting.

I think yes, they did lie. They made a guarantee that they knew had decently high chances of not being true and did not express this to the contractor. Even if we don't label it as lying, it is certainly misleading and it is done so intentionally as most people in good faith understand the contractor to mean "Is the project currently approved?" and playing tricky semantics doesn't absolve the developer of deceit. The developer could simply express the truth "It is not currently approved but I am confident in my ability to get it done and believe the chances would be all but guaranteed if we pour early" if they wished for honesty.

Contra point on Canada. PP was never the "pro-Trump" pick. He's Trudeau lite, instrad of Carney as Trudeau 2.0. Trump supporters cheering him on are missing the point just as badly as Trump haters cheering his downfall. Frankly there is no pro-Trump option in the Laurentian elite, and there is unlikely to ever be with the current arrangement of Canadaian politics. You would need one of two things to happen- a PM from Alberta, or the current Canadian politcal class to have it hammered into their skulls that they are truly a vassal of the US, probably by a trade war that crashes their economy but leaves America unnoticably effected.

PP might not be perfectly Trump aligned but in the question of who would be more accommodating of MAGA idealogy and Trump foreign policy, it's definitely him over Carney.

Our closest and friendliest neighbor economically and geographically has been pushed away

Please don't mistake politicking for reality -- we are right here and not going anywhere. (not least, but not only -- because we can't)

I voted for Trump three times and as far as I'm concerned this term has been nothing but a big wet fart so far. It's just been one embarrassing clusterfuck after another accompanied by a perpetual drumbeat of asspulled contradictory coping from his fanboys on Twitter.

  • Trump has a cockamamie idea about acquiring Greenland. Denmark promptly tells him to blow it out his ass, at which point Mr. Art of the Deal is completely out of ideas. He just lamely brings it up now and then seemingly at random, even though everyone knows it'll never happen, just to remind us what a limp dick he is.

  • Trump wants Canada to become a state. Maybe. Nobody seems sure whether he's serious about this or if it's just a rhetorical salvo in his ongoing mission to antagonize them for no comprehensible reason. In any event Canada tells him to blow statehood out of his ass too, and in the end the only result is to bail out the Canadian Liberal party.

  • Trump announces infinite tariffs on everything because he's a dumbfuck and thinks anyone will bother to build a factory here rather than just wait a little bit for this to blow over. He wipes a zillion dollars off the stock market and then mostly folds like a bitch anyway.

  • Edited to add: Oh yeah, and where the hell are my apocalyptic mass deportations?

Art of the Deal my fat ass. All this guy's selling me is the idea that he really is a boob and his first term was only as decent as it was because he wasn't really expecting to win or prepared to do anything.

Scott would characterize the Developer as having lied to the contractor about having the approval, but did they?

Yes, and I don't understand how you can even question it. Remember again the original claim: "they're going to approve it, we're just waiting on the paperwork". Not only does this falsely imply that the approval has been agreed upon (which is why the contractor should go ahead and start), it contains the explicit falsehood "we're just waiting on the paperwork". The developer is not "just waiting on the paperwork", they are trying to gain leverage to force the planning board to capitulate. This is a very clear lie.

If you don't understand, is it because you missed the part where the planning board approved the project?

If not, how is telling the contractor "The planning board is going to approve this project" a lie? Where is the falsehood? Where is the deciet?

Nobody said anything about a preexisting agreement. They said an agreement would be made and that statement was correct. An agreement was made.

If not, how is telling the contractor "The planning board is going to approve this project" a lie? Where is the falsehood? Where is the deciet?

First, because the planning board was not going to approve it at the time that was said. Second, and more importantly, you left out the very clear deceit I already cited: the developer is not in fact "just waiting on paperwork", he is engaged in manipulation to apply leverage to the planning board so that they will approve it.

Nobody said anything about a preexisting agreement.

It is very clearly implied, as otherwise the contractor would not go ahead.

They said an agreement would be made and that statement was correct. An agreement was made.

Yes, only because of the lies the developer told. That doesn't count as an accurate reporting of facts.

Your hypothetical scenario is not some clever bargaining flourish. It is a dirty lie that only a scumbag would engage in. I have pointed out the express and implied untruths that the developer says. If that isn't enough for you to call it a lie, then I lack the means to persuade you I guess.

Yes, it's all lies. Big mean Trump is fooling the innocent construction company and permit offices of NYC, all of whom are completely non-corrupt innocent idealists seeking only the best for everyone.

Back in reality, trump is a NYC real estate developer the same as all the others. Everyone involved knows the game. Trump didn't make the game this broken, NY politicians did. Trump has always been critical of them, and engaged in theatrics to expose them - e.g. writing a book, public clashes with Ed Koch over what later became Trump skating rink, etc. This is what led him to enter politics.

What would you have preferred he do? Be the only honest real estate developer and go bankrupt cause nothing gets built? (Similarly, I don't fault Soros for breaking the pound.)

What would you have preferred he do? Be the only honest real estate developer and go bankrupt cause nothing gets built?

Yes. "Everyone else does this too, it's how the game is" is not and has never been an excuse for immoral behavior. You are responsible for your conduct, no matter the circumstances you find yourself in.

What’s immoral about finding an end run around retarded awful laws and rules?

Lying, and not following the law, are both immoral without a sufficiently good reason. "I want to make money" isn't remotely good enough of a reason to lie and break the law.

‘Shit needs to get done and these kinds of adversarial boards aren’t doing what they’re supposed to’

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Following the rules as-written as opposed to the rules as-enforced doesn't make you a paragon of morality; it makes you a chump.

Perhaps, but the issue here isn't everyone else doing it, it is specifically the government and system that enacts and enforces the rules. If that system doesn't play by its own rules, then playing by those rules will only hurt you. You can not expect a system without enforced rules to produce any other result, because even if you play by the rules others will not.

We aren't talking about "does this system produce good outcomes", though. We are talking about "is it wrong for someone to do bad things because that's what the system incentivizes", which IMO it is.

What I'm saying though is that it isn't the people who are wrong, it's the system.

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Doesn't this "Art of the Deal" lens prove too much?

Can you find any economist who thinks universal tariffs are a good idea? Any published literature on it?

Maybe they're deliberate tactical choices, but to what gain? The markets lost something like $10t in value since he announced them. Losses on this scale were certain while any recovery afterwards is more speculative due to the loss of confidence. Is whatever Trump thinks he's going to gain from this worth that risk?

Almost certainly no. Just because you may be doing this as a tactical choice doesn't shield you from your choice mathing out to erratic and retarded.

Doesn't this "Trump is a buffoon and the people who voted for him a bunch of deep-throating cock-slobberes" lens prove too much? Why is the principle of charity only being applied in one direction here?

I consider myself using the deliberate tactical choices lens here. Valuate the choices by its effects: it's bad!

Stated another way, I interpret your post as saying: don't judge Trump by the virtues of his choices, judge him by the results. See how he punks the planning boards who don't let shit get built? Great. Now lets apply that standard to his universal tariffs.

When I do that, they still seem like a disaster.

How can you claim to be "evaluating a choice by it's effects" when those effects have yet to manifest and there is significant disagreement regarding what those effects will be and what "bad" even means in this context?

Well, he caused quite a market crash with his announcements, even though the market was likely aware that he would not go through with his tariffs.

I think that few people claim that starting trade wars with most countries in the world (plus a few uninhabited islands) would go well for the US economy. The disagreement over the effects on the economy seem more to be about if the per capita GDP of the US (89k$/a) would fall to the level of Denmark (72k$/a) or to the level of Estonia (33k$/a).

Apart from the markets, in the international community he managed to disabuse people of the notion that the US is a steadfast partner who will not fuck you over because their commander in chief has just read another book, and also most of the belief that official announcements by the POTUS are more reliable than The Onion.

Well, what does a good outcome look like to you?

Every way I can think of to measure this universal tariff move looks bad, regardless of how many dimensions of chess I use.

Aside from maybe demonstrating that the coffee shop revolutionary liberals suddenly love capitalism and are hypocrites. That has been amusing but not really worth the cost.

Are the people who called Trump supporters "a bunch of deep-throating cock-slobberes" in the motte with us right now?

Yes. In this thread even.

I'm pretty sure they are.

Not with those exact words (as that would be against the rules), but yes, we clearly have them.

Ah damn, I did not expect that. I stand corrected.

(or his ghostwriter if you prefer to continue believing that Trump is illiterate)

I don't think you have to believe Trump is unintelligent, let alone illiterate, to believe The Art of the Deal was ghostwritten. Ghostwriters can be used by someone who doesn't have the capacity to write a decent book, but more often than not, they're used by someone who can't be bothered to write a book although, if they hunkered down, they could. I'm perfectly willing to believe Trump could write a book by himself. I'm less willing to believe that he'd go through the trouble when he can pay someone to do it for him and rubber-stamp it.

Honestly, paying someone else to do something he couldn't be bothered to do would be very "on brand" for him the question is whether the art of the deal is an accurate representation of his worldview.

Scott would characterize the Developer as having lied to the contractor about having the approval, but did they?

Yes in your scenario, but it's not necessary. Try this:

Thus the Developer tells the Contractor to start pouring concrete. The building permit isn't their responsibility and the contractor is paid based on work done (not buildings constructed), so they have no reason to refuse. Worst case they get paid to tear up concrete afterwards. The contractor starts pouring.

If I was a contractor pouring concrete for Trump, I would want all the paperwork signed and notarized in triplicate before I lifted a finger. Because if his weird little scheme goes sideways, he will not absorb the costs, he will try to throw me under the bus and claim that he had never authorized me to start pouring.

There might be real estate developers whom I would trust to have my back (or not), but anyone who trusts Trump to not leave them hanging is to naive to run a business.

And?

...and therefore the scenario doesn't illustrate their point.

It would seem to me that, if we take the pouring of concrete as an analogy for Trump's policies, then in all cases, the parties opposing him (China, Ukraine, the courts, respectively) are all refusing to accede to his demands, and are attempting to go to the contractor directly and tell them to stop.

Man, this is one of those times I read something and think living in the 80s must have been awesome. What kind of pissant planning commission would put up with that? Nowadays even in the small towns I work in, they'd tell you to go fuck yourself and call the cops on your concrete pour.

The federal government can’t survive the hit from losing the global hegemon world reserve currency thing. Onshoring or not.

Without the inflated standard of living delivered by being the global metropole, the US experiences a prolonged crisis which probably results in balkanizing.

It's not clear to me why the US abdicating global hegemony leads to the collapse of globalization. It seems much more likely to me that China steps into the void.

Trump’s strategy might be to prep the U.S. for that collapse.

Don't make me tap the sign. The pump-and-dump theory is more plausible than a scheme to prepare the US for global economic collapse (especially because if you were prepping for that, you'd want to be tightening trade relations with your big neighbors to the north and south, not pissing them off).

China lacks both interest and ability of being world hegemon, and you wouldn't want them to be anyway. Even a bad American hegemon is restrained by Western cultural mores and ethics: the Chinese have no such limitation.

Multipolarity isn't some sort of kumbaya where everyone gets along and does trade: it's great power competition and world wars.

you wouldn't want them to be anyway

I agree, which is why I'd really rather the Trump administration stop trying to pilot the US into the ground. I quite like the state of affairs where the US is on top - though I am admittedly biased by being American - but I don't think that means it is the only possible state of affairs under which 'globalization' persists. OP is right to observe that China presently depends on international trade, and a world where the USN isn't securing freedom of navigation is one where China is likely to feel compelled to step up to secure its own interests.

What?

If the dollar collapses, world traders will just pick a different currency, or a basket of currencies.

And nobody needs to prevent all conflict in the world, they just need to prevent piracy or a giant world war for trade to continue on.

And nobody needs to prevent all conflict in the world, they just need to prevent piracy or a giant world war for trade to continue on.

The issue is if conflict leads to piracy or a global world war, particularly if some actors decide to egg it on to stick it to the West (e.g. Iran, Russia).

Whatever happened with those Somali pirates, incidentally?

EDIT: I think another way to think about the challenge with globalization is that the term "globalization" implies a sense of motivated cooperation, the world literally coming together as one. Maybe I'm just speaking from the 90's liberalism worldview I knew as a child, but I imagine that that is what was always intended with globalization. The reality seems to be that the various world powers will only cooperate as far as they absolutely have to, and past that point, we are back to conflict.

Piracy is easy to prevent if there really was a desire to stop it. Just start dropping thermobaric bombs willy nilly until you wipe out everyone having the temerity to float a dingy against you. For a less insane aproach just have soldiers with RPGs and Snipers with shoot on sight orders stationed on every ship.

For a less insane aproach just have soldiers with RPGs and Snipers with shoot on sight orders stationed on every ship.

I'm not convinced. The escalation is to easy for the pirates. Current Somali militias could do it if they cared. Slightly bigger ship, 10 tons of hand mixed concrete to form a ghetto pillbox, soviet artillery piece. Done.

They can't board as easily anymore, but they can threaten to blow up the cargo ship's bridge.

Escalating for the cargo ships is not as easy. They already have to keep most of their hardware and mercenaries in international waters on their floating armory ships, they really don't want to install naval guns every time the mercenaries board a cargo vessel.

How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower? The only reason the houthis are getting away with their current operations is precisely because they aren't doing stuff that presents an obvious stationary target.

It's not just the ships the pirates face, but the nations that back them.

How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower?

The Houthis are operating in a much smaller area than the Somali pirates did before them. The oceans are big, the horizon is small. Finding a pirate ship via aircraft hours after a call for help (which is how long it takes until airpower arrives if your navy isn't dominating the seas and your allies are far and few between) is difficult, especially if you try avoiding blowing up random fishing boats.

And both Somalis and Houthis are extremely low tech. Doesn't take much to give a pirate ship thousands of miles of range.

The Somalis are extremely low tech. The Houthis are not; they are getting sophisticated radars, missiles, and drones drones from Iran. Very different opponent.

I don't think you understand that you can also do piracy by threatening to sink ships unless you get paid off.

For the record, China could credibly threaten to hit ships halfway across the Pacific without ever leaving home. Houthis have shitty ASBMs given to them by Iran which allow them to do this within 500 km.

https://missilethreat.csis.org/china-launches-antiship-ballistic-missiles-in-test/

How do pirates credibly threaten a specific ship and get them to pay up with a missile 500km away? What's the procedure here? Has this actually happened?

Ships have AIS. They can observe them with drones easily, they can easily get info from people watching the canals and match them against ship registers.

People bribe them to go through the straits unmolested. If you're Israeli or US affiliated you can't though, iirc.

Procedurally, it's relatively simple. As long as you can see / monitor the area you'd shoot in, you just advertise by any means that anyone who goes through that area may / may not be shot. The risk alone is what drives most people away- for insurance reasons if nothing else in the modern era.

From there, you just also communicate that you won't shoot at people who buy your pass. In exchange for money, you give some sort of authentication measure tied to the sale. This could be anything like 'broadcast this code at this time when sailing through this area.'

Then you have your sensor-people look for the authentication measure. If a ship has it and matches the ledgers of who paid, don't shoot. If a ship does not have it, shoot. If a ship tries to broadcast a 'I paid' code, but isn't on the ledgers, shoot.

Fair in theory, but has this happened at least once?

Depends if you believe the UN report last year alleging around €169 million a month.

Though that article does cite more concrete examples of Somali pirates as well, such as paying them by dumping suitcases of cash.

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Whether that was smart or not, historians will debate, but we were never going to keep this going much longer, certainly not beyond 2035. Fundamentally, because the U.S. government is insolvent. It burns through $10 billion a day it doesn’t have, backed by the money printer, which funds the military, which enforces global security, which props up the dollar, which keeps the money printer running.

This makes no sense to me. Why does globalism depend on the solvency of the USG? Because the US is responsible for keeping piracy on the high seas to an absolute minimum and that's not affordable? Why can't some of that responsibility be delegated to other countries? Of course, this is missing the point entirely, because the military is only the third biggest line item on the federal budget. The US is more likely to be bankrupted by boomers retiring than mowing the lawn off the coast of Somalia.

Global trade has existed for thousands of years. Spices and silk have been imported by the west since time immemorial. We're just haggling about the level.

This makes no sense to me. Why does globalism depend on the solvency of the USG?

Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.

Europe/China/Rome/the mongols/etc all basically pillaged for their own benefit when they were in power. It's much more likely that the next power will also do this, rather than follow the US's lead (especially with a US collapse in this hypothetical giving them a good reason not to).

Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.

Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.

But also, is it really that controversial to suggest that the USG has been engaging in various forms of pillaging throughout its entire history?

Seems to me that there's always been a balance between expending resources for establishing rules, and then also pillaging. I don't think world powers establish rules out of benevolence, but because it allows lower-risk extraction of resources outside of its own borders - sometimes best-described as "fair trade" and sometimes best-described as "pillaging".

Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.

Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.

Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.

Original comment:

Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.

Your response to me bringing up Rome:

Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.

This is a bit of moving the goalposts, no? They were a hegemon, and they expended resources to establish a rules-based system.

I'm just positing a more complete theory of world powers throughout history that neatly explains everyone's behavior, rather than trying to put one more notch on the bedpost for American exceptionalism ("the only hegemon"!). World powers establish rules, and then use those rules for profit - somewhere on the spectrum between "fair trade" and "pillaging".

Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.

I mean, it does count as "within your own borders" once you conquer those peoples and expand your borders I guess. People frown upon that these days but I'm sure without our modern views on sovereignty, the US would have "expanded" its borders a few more times in the past couple of decades. (But sovereignty seems to be a concept that some world leaders seem to want to leave in the 20th century, so who knows.)

Likewise, I'm sure if Rome had the capability to remotely ensure stable trade outside of its borders in the early AD centuries, it would have. A more stable silk road / spice trade? Easy to agree to. It wasn't for lack of desire ("willing"), but lack of technology.

Britain and France have every incentive to kill pirates to keep the suez open. So do Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

How much resources have been expended to do so?

But last time either tried to exercise authority in north Africa, they were humiliated.

Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.

Would you count the West Africa Squadron as another example? Admittedly, "Okay, we're not going to stop you from owning or selling slaves, but we'll try to stop you from taking them across the ocean" was kind of a baby step in the grand project of abolition, and in some ways an anti-globalist rather than pro-globalist step, but it was a rule based on principle that was enforced with British Empire funds and lives, against a trade that had been profitable to British slavers. They did it for a decade before the US started helping, then for two more decades before the US joined in in earnest.

Kinda, I guess. That's a relatively small expenditure of resources compared to the resources spent pillaging Africa and India.

This also seems like an attempt to enforce one rule, rather than an entire rules based system. Are there others?

Why can't some of that responsibility be delegated to other countries?

Past experience? The more parties you delegate enforcement to the more parties whose interests can clash.

You have four or five nations managing this stuff and you risk just being back in the great power era where people protected their own trade and spheres of influence.

Also, a lot of nations simply aren't as good at this right now due to delegating it to America. It's not Somali pirates you need to worry about but state-sponsored groups like the Houthis, and their sponsors themselves if they decide to pull a Saddam.

Global trade has existed for thousands of years. Spices and silk have been imported by the west since time immemorial.

Your example - a luxury good like silk - is telling.

We live in an incomparably more connected time and much smaller falls can lead to large changes in our standard of living.

Past experience? The more parties you delegate enforcement to the more parties whose interests can clash.

You have four or five nations managing this stuff and you risk just being back in the great power era where people protected their own trade and spheres of influence.

There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.

Also, a lot of nations simply aren't as good at this right now due to delegating it to America. It's not Somali pirates you need to worry about but state-sponsored groups like the Houthis, and their sponsors themselves if they decide to pull a Saddam.

Indeed, but that's hardly insurmountable with a bit of will and training.

But I must repeat again that military spending is not the elephant in the room.

We live in an incomparably more connected time and much smaller falls can lead to large changes in our standard of living.

Agree. But I don't agree that reduced trade or living standards means the "end of globalism".

There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.

So what? Plenty of people benefit from public goods or are not harmed by them directly and yet they often never get built or decay as parties see it in their interests to exploit the commons.

A sword is a sword. The same ability to protect sea lanes opens the risk of a party trying to control it. The more parties you have with serious navies with no absolute superior the more the temptations rise. The more a party might wonder why it must accept losing a valuable natural resource to a rival or opponent and then be forced to protect that opponent's trade.

Nations that have amicable relations today like Western Europeans cannot agree on a European army or how it is to be used. Why would we assume this would change in a world without America?

The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade. Then the next temptation for other parties is to prey on those who either can't or they have rivalries with. And then there's the temptation to lock weaker nations into trading only with you, which may strictly be worse than a totally free trading system, but balances the costs of your navy with more control because you assume someone else is planning the same thing.

Indeed, but that's hardly insurmountable with a bit of will and training.

Demographic decline is not a matter of a bit of will. The European nations that once protected their own spheres are in terminal demographic decline. They don't have the bodies, they don't have the money (because of welfare, not the military) and the world has changed.

But it also just is insurmountable for many nations.

America can blow up everyone that'd interdict its trade. How about Poland? Lesotho? Indonesia? Ghana? What about when the trade is being stopped by a legitimately powerful nation like Iran?

Agree. But I don't agree that reduced trade or living standards means the "end of globalism".

I mean, if you take the broadest definition of globalism, sure.

The trade system we know and take for granted (that some call globalism pejoratively) would in fact end and it would be a noticeable change and drop in the living standards of a lot of people.

The simple temptation here is just...to not do that. Let them fend for themselves and protect your own trade.

The interesting thing is, based on that leaked chat, the Trump administration doesn't want to do that. They want the Europeans to pay more, but they don't want to stop protecting trade.

There's a different party on each end of the trade. The route between those parties being protected benefits both and hurts nobody.

This is a classic free rider problem. It’s always better to have the other guy go crack skulls for you than to do it yourself.

It is not the military that makes the USG "insolvent", it's generous unfunded (mostly elderly) entitlements. Neither America nor much of western Europe ran up these massive deficits during the cold war when military spending was much higher than today. The issue clearly isn't military spending.

And even if one wanted to make cuts to the military it could easily be done without endangering freedom of navigation, by for example making cuts to the army rather than the navy.

The short-term benefits of printing money go to American voters, while the costs are pushed onto foreigners who don’t vote

How exactly are the costs of increasing the US money supply borne by foreigners?

Maybe you're implying they are diluted (e.g. via inflation) but most US dollars are held by the US, and so this would mostly hit Americans. Moreover, those US dollars are held by choice -- they can trade them at any moment for Euros or Pounds or CAD or AUD or Yen or even BTC/ETH/DOGE and the price of that transfer represents that. If structural reasons imply that the US is gonna print more money, that's ought to be priced into the USD/EUR exchange rate.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/timely-topics/how-much-u-s-currency-held-abroad-why

Currently, non-U.S. residents hold a little bit over $1 trillion in U.S. currency, and that’s about 45% or almost 45% of the total amount of U.S. currency that’s held.

foreigners holding our currency abroad are essentially making an interest-free loan to the United States …

So currency is like a government bond, but it’s a government bond that pays no interest. So if, for example, an American tourist were to go someplace in the world where U.S. dollars were accepted in exchange for payment for hotel services or restaurant services or some sort of trinkets or souvenirs, then you know if the U.S. tourist shows up in Jamaica and pays some place for souvenirs with U.S. dollars, then the U.S. tourist is getting something of value that is in exchange for little green pieces of paper that cost the United States more or less nothing to make.

Now, if the owner of the souvenir shop in Jamaica just circulates that currency within Jamaica and it stays there forever, then Americans have gotten goods and services of value — souvenirs or tourism services — in exchange for something that costs us more or less nothing. But if, say, in 10 years, somebody in Jamaica decides to take those U.S. dollars and exchange them for U.S. goods and services, then what the United States has done is gotten goods and services for 10 years in exchange for almost nothing, and then 10 years later, we have to pay for them, say, in terms of goods or services or other assets. And so we’ve gotten a 10-year interest-free loan for the amount of the currency that was paid for the original souvenirs.

Yes. Then the question is why would anyone in Jamaica (or anywhere) not chose to go on their favorite FOREX platform and immediately convert it to something else. Presumably holding or circulating dollars is a good deal in some fashion, and provides some benefit or else people wouldn't do it.

[ I can think of a number of such reasons, but it kind of doesn't matter given that they all have that choice. ]

Because everyone else’s fiat currency depreciates even faster and is all around worse than the dollar. This is just how fiat currencies are designed.

The slow and steady transition to bitcoin & hard money is marching forward…

The promise of hard money is that individuals can accumulate wealth by saving without needing to invest. Since society as a whole cannot do this, hard money systems are inherently unstable. They normally end with a coalition of indebted warriors and merchants liquidating the token-hoarders when the burden of trading real resources for tokens becomes intolerable.

The majority of the population who are not bitcoin speculators have no reason to hand over $3 trillion of real economic value to bitcoin speculators, so they probably won't.

Can you explain how moving to bitcoin & hard money would prevent the same slide into fractional reserve banking that happened under the gold standard? I’ve always thought that was the biggest problem with it.

The classical Gold Standard didn't slide into fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking was baked into it from the start - the Bank of England was founded in 1694 with the explicit mission of generating a float that would be lent to the Crown in order to fund the rebuilding of the Royal Navy.

You can download historical data on the BoE balance sheet here. I calculated the bullion-to-base-money reserve ratio by dividing "Coin and bullion" assets (column O) by the sum of "Notes in circulation" (column S) and "Bankers' deposits" (column AE - this is commercial bank reserves viewed as liabilities of the central bank). The ratio oscillates between 60% and 80% during the classical Gold Standard era (roughly 1844-1914 in the UK), drops during WW1, returns to the target range in the 1920's, and then goes off a cliff due to Depression-era money printing.

To that 1T$ of foreign held dollars, you want to add the foreign held portion of the US debt (which totals 36T$), which seems to be 7.9T$. Debt will just turn into freshly printed dollars at some point in the future, so it is kinda similar to holding currency.

Of course, the GDP of the US (in 2023) was 27.7T$, so from my naive point it does not seem to be that big of a deal -- if you owe a third of a year worth of productivity, it hardly seems that you are hopelessly over-debt. It might be that the valuation of the GDP is off by some huge factor (god knows what the worth of a finance firm should be), but then the valuation of the US$ is likely off by a similar factor, so this would not change the ratio all that much, I think. One of the merits of having your debt denominated in your own currency.

Of course, this is just the feel I get from five minutes of googling, so I could be terribly wrong.

Assuming that this tariff war with China continues, I wonder what sorts of smuggling operations will pop up. A 100%+ tariff provides a huge amount of room for black market organizations to provide the same import service at a lower mark-up. What sorts of companies are best positioned to take advantage of such services without drawing law enforcement's attention (and how can I invest in them)? Assuming that other countries manage to make deals with Trump to make that 90 day tariff pause permanent, exporting from China to those countries before exporting further to the US seems likely to be the weakest points for enforcement, where America doesn't have the resources to deploy their own, and local law enforcement can be more easily corrupted or just have different incentives. And if smuggling infrastructures pop up in these spots, plenty of traditional black market products can use the same infrastructure as well. Could this tariff war end up increasing the amount of drugs or guns or slaves (or what/whoever else these black market smugglers tend to smuggle from China) smuggled from China to these other countries?

I'm probably speculating down way too many steps removed from the source on something I know very little about, though.

I expect we'll see a lot of origin-laundering from China, with goods falsely labeled as being made in other countries to bypass tariffs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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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.

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.

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”

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.

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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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, but there is asymmetry.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.


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