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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   2720 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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Where is the shame, Americans? Where is the shame?

Background: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/ice-secretly-deported-grandfather (all bolding mine)

Ice secretly deported Pennsylvania grandfather, 82, after he lost green card

Family of Luis Leon say they were initially told by someone he had died, but they found him alive in Guatemala hospital

An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.

According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, long-time Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. So he and wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.

When he arrived at the office on 20 June, however, he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. She herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.

The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.

Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was.

On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.

A week later, however, they discovered from a relative in Chile that Leon was alive after all – but now in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection.

According to Morning Call, the relative said Leon had first been sent to an immigration detention center in Minnesota before being deported to Guatemala – despite not appearing on any Ice detention deportation lists.

A recent supreme court decision ruled the Trump administration could deport immigrants to other countries beside their country of origin.

In his nearly 40 years living in the US, Leon spent his career working in a leather manufacturing plant, and raised a family. He had since retired.

His condition at the hospital in Guatemala is unknown. He suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and a heart condition, according to his family, who said they are planning to fly to Guatemala to see him.

An Ice official told the Morning Call it was investigating the matter.

My first reaction after seeing this was a singular and complete WTF???. I do not see how it is possible to read this and go anything other than "Shame on you" at the American government, ICE in particular and also the American populace for acquiescing to this.

Note that this is not some drug dealer or gang lynchpin, this is 82 year old gramps, who is a retired leatherworker granted asylum fully under the rules who has been working in the USA for the last 40+ years and has raised a family in the country. Instead after losing his Green Card he gets summarily disappeared and put on a flight to Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection...

This is not the behaviour I would expect of a mature world power like the USA, this is more like what one would expect of Saudi Arabia, or actually no, at least the Saudis would at least have more respect for their elders. Instead what we see here is what happens when a modern secular polity jettisons the moral framework it took up as replacement for the laws of God and the ancient idea of noblesse oblige: we are left with a hollow shell; a massive cavity, ringing under the total emptiness of its own fundamental depravity.

The US supreme court has its own share of blame and shame to take here. Judicial Review is a fundamental check on the balance of power of any modern western government, as Americans with their whole "we have checks and balances" schick are wont to tell us. Instead some power tripping ICE worker two grades above the rank of janitor decided to act as judge, jury and executioner and sent a vulnerable 82 year old man off to a country with which he has no links whatsoever.

And what did the Supreme Court do? It approved this sort of behaviour from servants of the government just a few months earlier. Either this is direct malice from the court or the learned justices, sitting in that august hall (august by American standards, by our standards there is terraced housing within 5 minutes walk of me that is older), failed to consider the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions. Now I know what they say about Hanlon's Razor but even I will admit the people elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States aren't going to be incompetent...

In a civilized country like the UK, firstly something like this would never have happened as the man would have a right to argue against his deportation in front of a judge, so none of this "ambush deportation" would ever be possible. Furthermore, even if the deportation for some inexplicable reason happened without following any process the family of this old man would be able to bring a massive suit against the government which they would easily win if the government was foolish enough to not settle.

On top of this, in the UK they have a special class of damages called "Exemplary Damages" which are designed to punish the perpetrator instead of compensating the victim. Exemplary damages are very very rarely available under UK law, but one of the very few exceptions is "arbitrary and oppressive conduct by a servant of the government". In a mature democracy like the UK the government recognizes that it has more power, and therefore more responsibility, than a private entity in the same situation, and so opens itself to an additional type of liability when it makes a big mistake compared to a private company that does something equally as grave.

Instead in the USA we have the opposite situation where the government, with the tacit support of the judiciary, has cloaked itself with additional protections under the guise of "Sovereign Immunity" that mean it can behave in a malicious way and not leave itself liable to damages. The US talks the talk on how it has punitive damages which keeps big bad actors in line so they don't mistreat the little man but then you can take one look at its convoluted and extremely adversarial judicial system and realize instantly just how difficult it is for ordinary people to not get worn down in a war of attrition long before any final hearing.

The UK handles things so so much better here. The judge in the UK isn't a neutral umpire but they have their own duty to the court to ensure that cases are handled fairly and efficiently, the more inquisitorial nature of our legal system means that playing procedural games is frowned upon and both parties are incentivised to stay honest lest they piss off the judge, who has a certain amount of leeway available to them to help out the little man if necessary.

All in all as I learn more about the Law as it is in both the UK, other systems like European Civil Law and the US, I am slowly being drawn to the inescapable conclusion that the American legal system, for all its grandiose self professed claims, is a steaming pile of shit. And no, I'm not basing my conclusion here solely on modern jurisprudence, but also looking at old Supreme Court cases like Espinoza v. Farah Manufacturing Co. where the court, in its infinite wisdom, decided 8-1 that refusing a job offer for a non-security sensitive role to a Mexican national who was a US green card holder with full working rights in the US just because they are technically not a citizen does not count as discrimination based on national origin...

And what may be the worst part of this sordid affair may not even be the ambush deportation, but the utter and total lack of class displayed in falsely telling the family that that their patriarch had died... I mean have some basic respect... The chain of failures and completely absolute misjudgment by multiple different individuals without somebody interjecting somewhere that what they are doing isn't right which must have happened for such a call to ever be made in the first place speaks volumes about the American psyche...

In a way this really goes to show us that the US, for all its wealth, is still a young country: it is still new money, in the worst possible sense of the word. I think the great LKY put it far far better than I ever could talking about the true character of Americans (n.b. I'd say that if you watch just one video today, this should be near the top of your list, it's only 3 minutes long and well worth the time as it shows one of the great men of the 20th century diagnosing the American malaise with effortless precision).

Perhaps after the end of Trump, the USA will be in a position where it can apply for readmission to the human race...

This whole thing has not been fact checked and is based on one anonymous source... That's enough for you to consider me a nonhuman?

You think you have the moral high ground here?

granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet

So he's probably a communist fleeing anti-communists backed by the US. Then let into the US. "This poor cobra is being oppressed by the mongoose. Quick, let him shelter in our home to keep him safe."

I thought the rules were communists don't count and should not be let in. Googling a bit, the specific immigration policies reference party membership. I suppose this guy was not a communist party member since that was illegal in Chile in 1987. Maybe he was technically eligible for entry only because he couldn't officially join a party matching his ideology. I'm getting more and more skeptical of political asylum. It seems to be misapplied.

To me this thread, from start to finish, is the Britta/Chang plot of the UN episode of Community. But I got here too late to break out my globe and red paint.

So one thing I think is very common in modern western countries is something like the following:

  1. No administration may bind a future administration to a promise.
  2. An administration has a deep, deep desire to do something that they think will take more years than they will be in power.
  3. So what they do is let themselves be "negotiated" into a position where breaking the promise that they made, although possible, is extremely costly.

If voters want to express a sentiment against something a government has done, sometimes the more rational option is to bite the bullet and do the costlier option, even if it'd be "easier" to not do so. I think for a lot of voters, they've hit that point with immigration.

The erosion of shame as a social force is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidencies.

You see pretty often in this forum and in right-wing circles people expressing pride that they have got free of the distorting power of empathy and shame. Elon Musk's claim that empathy is the most dangerous force in society would be the peak example of this phenomenon. As a result of this, they go even beyond biting the bullet of e.g. it being disgraceful that an old man has been wrongly deported. They actually enjoy said bullet like a delicious amuse bouche, and imply that it is a GOOD sign if it's true that he has been deported and that his family wrongly told he was dead, because it implies the administration is acting at speed and focusing on the big picture, not worrying overly about individual liberty.

I'm pretty sure those who embrace this conclusion are making a major strategic mistake that will come back to haunt them. By thinking they can jettison the concept of shame, they are storing it up to be brought down on their asses in much larger quantities later. Shame is not a force humans can, ultimately, live without.

Empathy and shame are certainly valuable, but I think the problem is that in this era of social media and in many cases media in general is that such feelings have quite often been weaponized in order to remove boundaries or excuse behavior or make decisions that are actually long term bad for everyone. Finding a way to create sad puppy content so that the viewing audience feels the pathos that the creators of that content want you to feel, and are thus manipulated into believing that such a thing is disgraceful is tge easy mode of getting people to do what you want. And it’s become fairly common and in my view dangerous, as it prevents people from really slowing down and thinking about it.

And the real danger is exactly what is happening on the right. After years of sad puppy porn used to manipulate people into thinking things that turn out to be wrong and decades of fear being used in much tge same way, people now see those feelings as bad and even dangerous. They see people using pathos for manipulation and react by celebrating the thing that is supposed to be shameful. That’s not a bad thing when the story told is not true, Annnd tge danger is under reaction to a story that is true.

The erosion of shame as a social force is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidencies.

Shame comes with fiduciary responsibilities: it is the interest paid on a positive balance of social credit.

When the faction[1] stewarding the account runs out of social credit, or the social interest rate drops to 0 or (worse) goes negative, shame disappears. Wrong but aesthetically pleasing policies decrease this balance, like rioting, defending illegal migration, and hysteria over an uncommon cold- the trick is to limit your imposition of shame to the interest only so you don't run out of it. A virtuous people can do this, but being too focused on your social credit balance compromises you in other ways.

A minimum level of shame (and interest) is required to enforce message discipline. Once you stop having that, you stop being able to generate interest entirely, and the opportunity for rival investors appears to take over stewardship of the account- once the interest rate rises, they're locked in until they overspend or the bottom falls out of the social economy again.

This is now what has happened- the right overspent hard from 2016-2024, and now the left is hunting the right's institutions of social capital generation (academia, etc.)

they are storing it up to be brought down on their asses in much larger quantities later

I disagree. If the left/classical liberals can deliver on its promises- that fixing the abuses of right-wing/progressive privilege will make things better- then the left will start generating social capital [and thus shame] for itself and transition back into being right-wing. The 'first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win' cycle typifies this- social credit holders always eventually go bankrupt, and this happens slowly, then suddenly.

Elon Musk's claim that empathy is the most dangerous force in society would be the peak example of this phenomenon.

Elon Musk is a liberal (definitionally, but not popularly, left-wing), so he doesn't believe the right should be allowed to accrue any social credit because when they do, the typical abuses happen. Left-wing thought has the opposite problem in that, when the economy switches from a positive-sum to a zero-sum mode, it failed to store up social credit and gives way to whoever the right-wing is at the time; this is why classical liberalism ultimately died in the '80s, and part of why it has returned now.

[1] Right-wing thought is defined by the desire to keep a balance higher than what market conditions otherwise dictate; or in other words, the dominant faction that's seeking to increase and wield a balance in this way is by definition right-wing. (This is currently Progressives- the people who call themselves left-wing- so it's very confusing.) This is also, by definition, why the left "always wins" (Progressives simply believe that calling themselves "the left" means they should always win, but winning ain't a left-wing idea and "correct" isn't a real political identity.)

The erosion of shame as a social force is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidencies.

The erosion of shame as an asymmetric weapon is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidency; the right will no longer accept being shamed. Its use for anything but had long since died. McCarthy could be brought down with "have you no sense of decency, sir?"; while McCarthy himself probably didn't, others on his side did. The woke could not be shamed; when they brought down Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt based on a lie, or Hawaiian Shirt Scientist for no good reason at all, it was to thunderous applause.

Elon Musk's claim that empathy is the most dangerous force in society would be the peak example of this phenomenon.

Finding empathy to be dangerous has little to do with shame; Musk was talking about a phenomenon similar to what rationalists call "utility monsters".

As for Leon, I suspect the truth lies between "The story is completely fabricated and no such 82-year-old Allentown grandfather named Luis Leon even exists" and "82-year-old Allentown grandfather Luis Leon got his green card replaced because he needed it to take a trip to Guatemala, which he then did". Making up stories to shame people is certainly one way to immunize them against shame, and there's been a LOT of stories.

The erosion of shame as an asymmetric weapon is one of the biggest impacts of the Trump presidency; the right will no longer accept being shamed.

This is the problem though. Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side. They won't be shamed by the left. And they won't shame themselves. Trump has identified accepting shame of any kind as weakness; I suspect it would be soul death for him to think of himself as having done something wrong or acknowledge contrition. With the regulation that shame provides gone from both directions, nothing can stop awful things being happily written off as costs worth paying in the name of a bigger cause such as lowering immigration.

To my mind a wise right wing person would accept shame for something like this story, if true. They are then welcome to e.g. turn the tables and say it's the left who should be really ashamed for not taking immigration seriously in the first place. That'd be a stronger response, one that keeps shame in play, versus claiming oneself to have moved beyond shame altogether.

This is the problem though. Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side. They won't be shamed by the left. And they won't shame themselves. Trump has identified accepting shame of any kind as weakness;

I don't think that's correct. There were significant dramas around H1B's, Iran, Epstein, and recently amnesty. All this involves a doing things powerful people don't want done, or not doing the ones they do want done, so it's not an insta- victory for Trump's base, but it does show he responds to shame from his supporters.

To my mind a wise right wing person would accept shame for something like this story, if true.

That's a big "if". There were too many controversies where the right was expected to accept shame, that turned out to be obvious lies. A wise right wing person would not even acknowledge this as a real thing, until several smoking guns are produced. Then we can start talking about accepting shame... though it's a tall order. When I want to talk about the biggest medical scandal of this generation - pediatric trans medicine - I get told that the amount of people impacted is tiny, and so I shouldn't care. So since the impact of this (if it's even true) is one dude, I'm afraid I won't be able to accept more shame than the wise left-wing person does for transing kids.

Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side. They won't be shamed by the left.

What has accepting being shamed by "the left" brought them?

It hasn't bought them economic prosperity, it hasn't bought them moral prosperity.

The problem with shame is that you can always just say "no" if you're willing and powerful enough to do so. The "right" has regained that power, for the "left" emptied their stores of social credit on wasteful social investments that ultimately failed to pay off/legitimize themselves.

Large parts of the right now won't accept being shamed full stop, by either side.

Why is this a problem?

Trump has identified accepting shame of any kind as weakness

No, events have demonstrated that accepting shame is weakness. Both Smollett and Floyd demonstrate this -- the totally fake Smollett incident got Congress to pass a hate crime law, and the shame about the killing of Floyd resulted in shamefaced politicians dialing back on enforcement of basic laws against real crimes.

They are then welcome to e.g. turn the tables and say it's the left who should be really ashamed for not taking immigration seriously in the first place.

That doesn't work, the left simply sneers at the idea that they could do anything shameful or that the right has any standing to shame them. As I said, it had become an asymmetric weapon, and the breaking of it was necessary.

The Chinese have a parochial and xenophobic term for foreigners of all stripes, 鬼佬 (Gweilo). literally 'ghoul man' or poetically, 'foreign devil'.

It is a useful term for an malevolent foreigner who intends you harm, who acts disingenuously with lies and deceit.

A man who asks you to define your self-worth by the good treatment of foreigners and not the consideration of your countrymen is definitely a 'foreign devil!'

Americans would be well advised to rectify this appropriate name for such individuals, and recognize such people as for who they are.

Perhaps after the end of Trump, the USA will be in a position where it can apply for readmission to the human race...

The idea that America's/the Wests standing rises or falls based on how it treats every migrant was a cope to deter critics and act as a self-esteem bolster for migrants themselves.

It clearly seems to have failed to stop the seething (even from totally unrelated migrants an ocean away) so one wonders if it should just be subject to the same critiques as the broader self esteem movement.

I don't at all (look at my post history) think we need to treat every migrant kindly -- especially those with facially bogus asylum claims. But I think we should have treated this individual migrant better.

Of course, there is no actual political movement for "be fucking reasonable, don't let a million Venezuelans and Hondurans in but also don't deport a guy that runs a legit business".

Yeah, this case seems ridiculous on its face. But then, Trump is a ridiculous figure.

All that needed to happen , anywhere, was for someone else to have picked the "be fucking reasonable" option. Part of the reason I'm so contemptuous of the moralistic line is that people seemed to have gotten drunk on their own Koolaid and made everything worse.

Not that I disagree. But the Biden policy was ridiculous even though their leader/figurehead (whichever, dgaf) tried to maintain that he was a serious person.

IOW, ridiculous figure or not, we get ridiculous policy.

The politicians who claimed to be picking the "be fucking reasonable" option turned out to, by revealed preference, favor the "let them all in, yes, even the obvious fakers and criminals" option.

Trump has mostly followed legal procedure. Legal procedure on paper for immigration law is actually quite harsh -- and yes, third party deportation is right there in the statutes. The big exception is the Alien Enemies Act stuff. (Maryland Dad was a violation of procedure, but almost certainly just a normal fuckup)

I expect legal procedure is gonna converge on "you need to give meaningful notice to deportees unless they already have a final order of removal".

I expect legal procedure is gonna converge on "you need to give meaningful notice to deportees unless they already have a final order of removal".

That's pretty much where it was except for the AEA stuff, and that's going the same way, yes.

(Maryland Dad DID have a final order of removal, he just also had an order that said he couldn't be sent to El Salvador specifically)

In a civilized country like the UK, firstly something like this would never have happened as the man would have a right to argue against his deportation in front of a judge, so none of this "ambush deportation" would ever be possible

The UK, it should be noted, cannot deport illegal immigrants at any meaningful rate, and its capacity to do so has completely collapsed. To give foreign readers an idea of how farcical the system is, one Nigerian woman appealed her deportation eight times before deliberately joining a Nigerian terrorist organisation, and then (successfully) arguing that she would face persecution in Nigeria because of her membership of said terrorist organisation.

I'd rather have a system that occasionally unjustly deports a tiny number of people to one which deports almost nobody.

This is also probably the only case I've ever seen where the euphemism 'undocumented migrant' is appropriate. He literally lost his documents, as opposed to just not having them because he's in the country illegally.

I'd rather have a system that occasionally unjustly deports a tiny number of people to one which deports almost nobody.

Especially when it is a system that deals with hundreds of thousands of people, most of which have an incentive and thus proclivity to lie.

I'd rather have a system that occasionally unjustly deports a tiny number of people to one which deports almost nobody.

If those are the choices, maybe it's the right one. But we should probably demand better.

But we should probably demand better

The optimal amount of crime is not zero.

I would love a system that deports 100% of illegal immigrants and never mistakenly deports a legal immigrant, but such a system cannot exist outside of fiction. The world is messy and complicated and people make mistakes and lie and misremember and enforcement of any law is expensive and difficult.

The developed world has been experimenting with the 'better system' and it has been abused to such an extent that it has lead to fully fledged volkerwanderungen and ethnic replacement of a native people in a single generation.

The idea that the West should be more lenient to illegal immigrants because of a few sob stories seems laughable when one considers the scale of the thing.

You're arguing against a straw man.

How so?

What I'm demanding is the undoing of the unchecked demographic replacement of my people in my homeland. That's what I've chosen. I don't particularly care about these other things, since that care tends to be weaponized against me, and seldom reciprocated.

Plus, I don't think Pinochet is any threat to this man any more. Good news, he no longer has to be a refugee.

If he was granted asylum due to fear of torture by Pinochet, then he was a communist who should have been handed over to operation condor at the time, and was ineligible for asylum under US law. Finding and deporting such cases is a stated priority of the Trump admin.

due to fear of torture by Pinochet, then he was a communist

you are claiming that Pinochet regime tortured solely communists, which is a false claim

Insofar as I've understood the specific criteria for ineligibility for asylum in US is membership in a Communist or otherwise totalitarian party, which is something that might apply to a Pinochet regime opponent but by no means was guaranteed to be the fact.

I think the great LKY put it far far better than I ever could talking about the true character of Americans

I very much enjoyed your link because I enjoy listening to historical leaders talk about how they see the world and why.

But I don't see this link as a meaningful example of America's flaws. In the video, LKY talks about how a CIA officer tried to bribe a Singaporean security official and why he won't work with America because of the fallout. This is something that all countries would do and have done on 1000s of occasions. The fact that the US did this in a hap-hazard, unskilled way I don't think reflects poorly on the US. If anything, the fact that the CIA was incompetent I think reflects well on the US for not "needing" this type of espionage for most of its history. I expect these days the CIA to be significantly more competent than the 1960s because it has now existed for 80 years instead of 20.

Perhaps after the end of Trump, the USA will be in a position where it can apply for readmission to the human race...

I'm no fan of the USA, but considering the rest of the world, that statement is not serious.

  1. I have no reason to believe this. It may or may not be true but at this point it is not convincing me.
  2. Any sufficiently large-scale action is going to have a few mistakes, there will always be false positives. If we insisted on zero false positives the only solution would be to deport no one (or something approaching zero). Similar to how cops enforcing the law will periodically result in an innocent person being shot. It is unfortunate, and we should work to minimize mistakes but to some extent mistakes are a sign of things actually being done as opposed to total inaction. If we insist on 30 appeals for every person we will simply never be able to match the incoming rate of illegal immigrants.

Could probably start with a single appeal, in front of an Art II appointed official (not an Art III judge) scheduled for a reasonable time in the future (say 10 business days).

Right. No one says “shame on all doctors” or “shame on medicine as an institution” just because thousands of people die from medical errors yearly. Complicated centralized operations are bound to result in errors, especially in a country with a lot of stupid people. This is also just a general issue with importing stupid people into your country, and why it’s good to deport any who make it in. Imagine an operation like this, done by people with an even lower IQ?

No one says “shame on all doctors” or “shame on medicine as an institution” just because thousands of people die from medical errors yearly.

"I often say a great doctor kills more people than a great general." -- Gottfried Leibniz

People can either read this as another unimpressive attempt by a left-leaning individual to fixate on a single tree despite there being an entire forest, or they can look at it as unintentional satire, which is what it really is. Lecturing Americans about immigration policy as if the last decade(s) of UK immigration disasters simply didn't exist is actually funny.

Your legal framework and its habit of prioritizing everyone but its natural citizens has landed the UK exactly where it is now. You brag about these laws that, while intended to protect individual rights, have led to a system where every single removal attempt is open to countless appeals and human rights claims. The UK and whatever it once was is basically done for. It's so bad that to say that it has an identity crisis is to assume that the is still has any identity left at all. This has been the UK's "infinite wisdom" which, ironically, will prove to be not-so-infinite.

So while people like you brag about the process, people like me look at the results, and the results of the process you're defending are undeniable.

It's neither of those things. Burdensome Count is not a leftwinger. He is a beneficiary of the UK immigration policy, and therefore sees it as a smashing success.

Imagine a socially conservative Mexican immigrant, sitting outside of a taco truck, with his friends and family after Catholic Mass, celebrating his life in what was 3 decades ago, a strongly Protestant community and condemning the disruption of a recent ICE raid. This guy might be very glad for the liberal immigration policies of the past few decades and distressed by the recent reversal, while still being otherwise more aligned with MAGA populism on most other issues.

I see. He benefits from liberal policy, champions it, but only insofar as it benefits his own kind.

He is a beneficiary of the UK immigration policy, and therefore sees it as a smashing success.

I am a beneficiary of the UK immigration policy. I very much don't see it as a smashing success. Count makes us look bad, and even if he didn't, I have great distaste for people who bite the hand that feeds them.

Guatemala denies that Chilean green-card holder was deported from the United States

The Guatemalan Migration Institute said in a statement that it coordinates with ICE on all deportations from the United States and that no one matched Leon’s name, age or citizenship.

ETA: The reporting in this story is horrendous.

https://archive.is/4wLeK

https://archive.is/bbrSg

As far as I can tell, it's possible ALL the info comes from this "Nataly". Nobody reporting on this had anyone check on Mr. Leon in Guatemala City. The story about Leon being handcuffed and his wife left for 10 hours in the immigration comes from unspecified "family", NOT from the wife. Sure, she doesn't speak English... you don't have a single Spanish-speaking reporter? This isn't a Khoisan click language, it's common!

40 years in the US and she doesn't speak english?

Not at all implausible, assuming the language is Spanish, to just… go about life not using English in the USA. There’s plenty of Spanish-language services available and immigration services is used to speaking Spanish. It probably means languages aren’t the strong suit here, but not much else.

Completely normal. My mom has been in the US 30 years and she doesn't speak English. It helps that a lot of businesses are bilingual, and there are even some that are exclusively Spanish. For example, before the internet took over television, she could watch Univision and Telemundo. And, of course, South Florida is full of Hispanics, so she has plenty of other people to talk to.

My mom has tried to learn English, even taking classes at a local community college, but she failed. This is not surprising. Most people lose the ability to learn a new language after they become adults, and most people only have the intelligence to speak one language really well anyway.

From "Language is Culture" by Spandrell:

Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.

Now I don't know if LKY thought of it in these terms. I think that, as a language learner, he went by experience. I guess the more time he spent practicing Mandarin, or Hokkien, or Malay, the worse his English prose got. And that's exactly how it works. Happens to me all the time, and happens to anyone who uses 2 or more languages regularly. The more different the languages, the less commons structures they share, the more acute the problem. Again, there is no reason why it should not be so. Information takes space. It isn't hard.

Alas, it is true that academic linguists will not tell you this, even though they probably did in the 1950s. That is not because common sense has been "refuted". It is because since the 1960s academia has morphed into a worldwide racket of fraud and deceit. If you read this blog you already know that; economics is bogus, climate science is bogus, psychology is bogus; even more than half of medical papers are bogus. Well, surprise surprise, linguistics is also bogus. The language learning industry is huge. There's a lot of money in telling people that the brain is made of magic dust, that they can learn whatever they want whenever they want, as long as they give you money. 3 languages at the same time? Go for it! Kids are like sponges, they can learn anything. No, they can't.

Now of course, all human traits are distributed in a Gaussian curve. Some kids are pretty good, can learn 3 or 4 languages given some exposure. Some can't even speak 1 language properly by the time they enter primary school. Lee Kuan Yew, who was in charge of spending Singapore's money, realized he didn't have money to waste, and he took what was the most rational decision: let's focus on having everyone learn English, then let's make some half-assed effort at teaching a "mother tongue"; mostly for political reasons, so tribalists didn't complain. Some kids will learn the mother tongue well; most won't. Not the government's problem. Lee Kuan Yew was CEO and what he wanted was an efficient workforce, so English it was. And English he got. Well, kind of.

Japanese researchers, fortunately isolated from their American comrades because of their ineptitude at learning English, have long found that Brazilian immigrants in Japan often end up not bilingual, but "halflingual". They end up speaking shitty Portuguese and even shittier Japanese. Because Japanese is hard, they don't speak it at home, and whatever they speak at home tends to have very low vocabulary levels. So they end up sounding retarded even if they really aren't.

You know who else sounds retarded? Singaporeans. OK, sorry, that's overly harsh. I apologize to my Singaporean readers, I love you all. But I had to say it. With all due respect, Singaporeans in general don't speak proper English. They speak Singlish, which is a pidgin English with a fair amount of Chinese grammar and vocabulary baked in, and a pretty weird (and what sounds to me a pretty big Indian influence) pronunciation. As you may remember, even Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, by every account a 150 IQ genius, speaks what can only be described as pretty goofy English. Again, it's not their fault, it's just the unintended consequence of public language policy.

How did this happen? By forcing diglossia (widespread bilingualism) on Singapore. After independence most people spoke some either Chinese dialect at home, Malay or Tamil. The schools taught English, what is a foreign language to everyone. So yes, they learned, the minimum required to pass the exams, and went on with their daily lives. Given that kids spent almost more time at school than at home, eventually the exposure of English was greater than their respective languages. Let's say a random Singaporean teen was exposed to 65% English and 35% Hokkien during their formative years. So, surprise surprise, he ended up speaking a language which is 65% English and 35% Hokkien, and so did most everyone else, with all languages and dialects getting some of their stuff in this hodgepodge lingua franca that evolved into Singlish. And once that got widespread it became almost impossible to change.

My mother is going to die without ever learning English. But that's OK. I speak heavily accented English, and if I ever have children they will speak English as their native language. Assimilation is a generational process; just like no individual organism ever evolves, but rather the population evolves, no individual immigrant ever fully assimilates, but their lineage does.

From "Immigrant Assimilation Is Obviously High" by Bryan Caplan:

In The Culture Transplant, my colleague Garett Jones writes as if there is overwhelming evidence that assimilation is slow. So overwhelming, in fact, that you’d have to be a blind fool to deny it. I think his reading of the academic research is deeply wrong. But even if he were correctly summarizing what we know from the data, he’d be deeply confused about the actual facts about assimilation.

What are these “actual facts”?

First, if you compare first-generation immigrants to people from their countries of origin, they’re very different. First-generation immigrants proverbially do straddle two worlds. Yes, most seem very foreign to natives in their new country. But they also seem very foreign to friends and family from their original country! I’ve travelled all over the world, and met hundreds of first-generation immigrants in the U.S. My wife is a first-generation immigrant. I see with my own eyes that their assimilation, though far from complete, is high. If your eyes are open, you’ll see it, too.

Second, if you compare the children of immigrants to their parents, they are very different. A contrast of night and day. Indeed, I’ve never met an immigrant parent who failed to notice that their kids had massively assimilated. Usually, though not always, to the parents’ dismay. And again, I’ve known many hundreds of second-generation immigrants. They’re some of the people I know best in the world. All four of my children are second-generation immigrants. If any of them still had one foot in Romania, I would know it

From Open Borders

If you want to quickly assess an individual’s assimilation, your best bet really is to listen to how they talk. If they can’t speak the local language at all, they’re probably not assimilated at all. If they speak the local language with a thick accent, they’re moderately assimilated. A mild accent? Highly assimilated. No accent? Then their assimilation approaches 100%. If you’ve met a lot of immigrants, you know this to be true.

Mr. Lee held the popular idea that language was a zero-sum game? No, Mr. Lee understood the commonsensical idea that your brain has limited storage capacity. Like anything else. Your brain is made of atoms. It is not made of magic. It is not made of godly dust. It is a material thing. It is, in a sense, a container of information, and information takes space. It obviously does in computers; pray tell, NYT, why the brain should have infinite capacity? It doesn't make sense.

The human brain is obviously finite, and doesn't have infinite capacity. Yet, I find the idea that merely learning additional languages has any risk of exhausting its stores to be highly unlikely.

The plausible range is vast, ranging from a mere 10 terabytes to tens of petabytes. Whatever the figure in question, languages definitely do not take up a significant fraction. Even tiny ass LLMs, with only a few billion parameters, are fluent in multiple languages. They are a tiny fraction of the complexity of the brain at best.

Further, the claims that learning new languages hampers fluency in the mother tongue is quite controversial. Not using a language for the majority of speech will obviously have deleterious effects, but language acquisition has steeply diminishing returns. Speaking English for 40 years will not make you twice as fluent as when you were 20.

I also find the claims about Singaporean English... questionable at best. There are all kinds of English derivatives and dialects, and it's no surprise that the locals learn those instead of standard English. That's what they're growing up hearing or speaking! Being fluent in Singlish is just as valid as being fluent in Anglosphere English.

To further hammer the point home, IQ doesn't seem to be that big of a factor. Africans tend to me trilingual or better, often speaking a mother tongue, another local language, and then a trade dialect such as English/French/Arabic or Swahili. They find that entirely normal and not a big deal.

Most people who suffer from additional language acquisition grew up in a linguistically impoverished context, just speaking to immigrant parents provides a much poorer experience than growing up in a country where most people speak the language. There's also the issue of the motivation to learn, which is often lacking. If you're thrown into a brand new country and have no choice but to start learning the language to survive, then you're going to be much better and faster than someone whiling away time on Duolingo.

Both of these things are true in degrees. Humans are obviously capable of learning at least 2/3 languages well given the right social setting and motivation. There are endless examples of this even in the modern world. But they will almost never know all of these languages at a high literary or native-passing level. When multilingual societies exist it’s always with a certain prestige hierarchy of languages.

Typical setup is something like 1 language representing high culture, 1 language for of commerce and 1 is for talking to your grandma. For example an Ottoman Greek of 1890 might read his novels and newspapers in French (always obsessing about having perfect grammar and spelling), do business negotiations and bureaucracy in Turkish (noticeable accent, lacking high vocabulary, but can talk to important men about important things) and in the evening talk to his female relatives in Greek (short sentences, familiar topics, constantly inserting vocabulary from French/Turkish, might struggle to write). This social structure is extremely common in history and is dishonestly presented as proof of how people can be “multilingual”. This man is not a “Greek” yet, he is an “Ottoman Greek”. He sends his sons to the new Greek high school and hopes they will one day read and write their higher ideals purely in Greek instead of Turkish or perhaps even French.

Even the most educated people can typically do high culture in 1-2 languages maximum and any other language acquisition will have to come at some cost. I have in fact lived a short period in Singapore and got to observe a bit how Singlish works. Most people I met who were highly proficient in English (and could code switch to mostly neutral American English) had very limited ability in their parents tongues. As you go lower in social strata you meet more people who juggled 2+ languages daily but weren’t that good in either of them.

Languages are hard, and they probably lived in some refugee community.

Nataly — who has asked her surname not be used to protect her family

... as opposed to her Grandfather's surname?

According to Nataly, a Chilean government contact of Leon’s brother was able to reach an official here who told him Leon had been taken to Minnesota, then to Guatemala.

I mean, that should have been easily verifiable - can't be that many flights, commerical or otherwise, from Minnesota to Guatemala.

Yeah, there's a lot going on here, but admittedly, the resources of a small-ish local paper are not going to be that great for pursuing stories, as opposed to just going by what they're being told. At some point, they're probably hoping a large outlet can pick it up and do the investigation, since it's outside their bailiwick.

I think that for theguardian, such a story might simply be too good to risk ruining it with a fact check.

On the other hand, nothing in it seems implausible given my knowledge of the Trump administration. The only thing mildly surprising is that there is no allegation of excessive violence during the arrest.

The goons of ICE are likely working on a quota basis. Trump wants that many people deported per months, he does not care who it is. They know that Trump does not give a rats ass about following proper procedure, that guy had his mob try to stop the certification of an election before, and has shown a great willingness to pardon any deeds done by his side in the culture war.

If the courts overturn the deportation decision, that is still a win for Trump, because he can paint himself as following campaign promises to the best of his ability while being hampered by the cuddly justice system.

Deporting armed gang members who might prefer death to spending the rest of their life imprisoned without judgement in some hell in El Salvador is obviously a dangerous occupation. But luckily there are plenty of harmless immigrants which you can deport instead, and they will count just as much for statistical purposes.

Because of the CW, there is also zero consideration to the individual's case. Either you are MAGA and support all deportations, or your are left-wing and support none. The moderate position that deporting someone who came to the US age 15 and has served multiple sentences for assault is fine but that deporting an elderly man without a criminal record is bad is not shared by either side, because both see it as a slippery slope towards their enemies position.

I've actually seen some on the Right express dismay with how the government is going about things. Yes, deport millions! But it's still The Government doing it, so it's bound to be done backasswards.

Recently saw someone with a 12-point proposal to send to senators asking them to make sure deportees are treated humanely, detention is short, religious services are not withheld, and that if the issue is an honest paperwork error that it does not prejudice them against entry in the future. This form letter was created by a Floridan who is as anti-illegal immigration as any other conservative.

Just because the interests of the United States should be served first and foremost by our immigration system does not mean that detention and deportation must be an elongated or humiliating event. Processing should be swift, efficient, dignified, and safe and detentions, when necessary, should be brief and at the expense of the State rather than an opportunity for vendors to mine aliens for cash. We need to put our best foot forward as a country and give foreigners the opportunity to behave and be treated like ladies and gentlemen while reserving the right to reasonably and forcefully protect ourselves and our nation’s representatives from harm. No system operated by the government is ever going to be perfect, but that is no excuse to settle for mediocrity or ratify substandard frontline practices.

Unfortunately, X is not full of such moderates.

Hmm interesting, I kind of beleived the story at first, but now I could see the entire thing being a lame hoax and entirely the figment of one person's imagination.

A woman claiming to be an immigration attorney contacted the family unsolicited a few days after Leon was arrested and claimed to know where he was, though she wouldn’t say where. On July 9, the woman called to say Leon had died in detention, offering scant details. The family has since been unable to reach her.

According to Nataly, a Chilean government contact of Leon’s brother was able to reach an official here who told him Leon had been taken to Minnesota, then to Guatemala.

Like come on, this is like saying a fairy came and told her where he was.

The first one is obviously a scammer, lots of these come out of the woodwork to offer help (at a hefty price) to families whenever there's something newsworthy like a tragedy reported.

The grandpa's brother had a contact in the Chilean government? This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported. If any of this is true and not a story being peddled around by "Nataly" to make bank off the outrage about deportations. Sometimes people do make up fake stories to sell, shocking I know!

This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported.

He was granted asylum because he was tortured by Pinochet, so he was probably involved with left-wing politicos there. Maybe he kept in contact.

It's also... just not that hard to get in contact with government officials, in most countries. In the US, you can absolutely call your Senator because a passport is taking too long to renew, or because the feds are being too annoying about an EPA thing. There's an entire industry of constituent services. You'll get thrown around by half-dozen different aides and they probably won't help much unless it's the sorta problem that can be solved with a phone call, and I'd assume a helpful unrelated donation will get faster a response, but it's absolutely something John Public can and often does do.

I remember waiting a full year for the government to complete a task... at which point I reached out to my local Senator's office, and within two weeks, shockingly it was done.

The grandpa's brother had a contact in the Chilean government? This sounds less like "simple leatherworker" and more like maybe something is going on that is not being reported.

To be fair, I am no high-class fellow, and yet in a governmental crisis, my family could probably make calls to contacts to contact their contacts to contact their contacts and, eventually, find someone who might have heard something.

Unironically, this might be indicative of the single biggest difference between WEIRD and non-WEIRD societies: the expectation that people naturally will—and should!—leverage social ties, especially family/kinship ties, to get preferential treatment when dealing with large, impersonal bureaucracies like the government. The Chinese call it guanxi, but of course it has a million names besides, in basically every part of the world except Northern Europe and the Anglosphere. Hell, even in the Anglosphere, we have the old saw “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, which gestures at the same thing.

There’s not enough evidence to say whether this situation in particular is a case of such behavior, but it being Latin America, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Then again, it is Chile, which I vaguely intuit is WEIRD-er than par for the Hispanophone course.

I don't think this is a WEIRD vs not situation. I'd expect anyone in a Western society, faced with a blank bureaucracy and a dire situation, to reach out to someone who might know someone who might know something about the situation.

I do not see how it is possible to read this and go anything other than "Shame on you" at ... the American populace for acquiescing to this. ... This is not the behaviour I would expect of a mature world power like the USA...

Why is it concern of American citizens to live up to the 'expected behaviors' of a 3rd world immigrant to the UK, who is absolutely giddy at the idea of population replacement and takes ample opportunity to say so? You've cashed that card in here too much to try to pull 'shame on you, be better' arguments at anti-immigration anything.

That aside, ok, this story taken at face value sounds awful, and whoever said he had died, should face criminal consequences. Going beyond the scope of the story itself, what is the so what, I'm supposed to be morally shamed into?

...Therefore accept all immigration uncritically, become a 'US is an economic zone globalist', and get on board the program of population replacement? Again this is what you've generally argued for over several years at least across the pond, so if this isn't your main point, you can see how it seems suspicious?

If the alternative moral is, look how bad and sloppy this is!, yes! I agree! It's horrible that we've come to this situation, but it's obviously a consequence of that bad actions of the other side that's created the mess, and the obstructionism against cleaning it up. This is the song and dance that keeps playing out:

The one side that doesn't agree with cleaning up the mess, wants to continue creating it, and obstructing the cleanup, but then use the difficulty of cleaning around this as an argument that the cleanup is being done wrong. It's diningenuous. Grab a broom, admit you're part of the mess, or shut up. Standing in the corner criticizing is seen for what it is at this point.

This is the exact same playbook that played out across any conservative issue on any topic. 'Creating a Dialogue' became a trope when it came to the final LGBT push against religious holdouts. The same side encouraging and creating the dissonance uses the dissonance as an insincere argument of process objection, when its really an object level disagreement. It's sabatage, and the US population is tired of it, especially from foreign globalists.

Sending one guy to Guatemala doesn't exclude you from humanity.

Expelling people from the wrong place, from the wrong tribe, is deeply human. It is an ancient practice committed by almost everyone who can and often attempted by those who can't.

The Native Americans massacred civilians in sneak attacks and gruesomely tortured them for being on their land. Uncivilized behaviour but not that unreasonable.

The US has been extremely, extremely generous to non-Americans. You can show up in America and make billions of dollars, wield great political influence. This wouldn't be allowed in some other countries, there'd be methods and attitudes in place preventing foreigners from, say, becoming mayor of their largest city. Mamdani's not mayor yet but he's the most serious contender. America shifting from 85% Openness to foreigners down to 60% is not an apocalyptic, abysmal disaster for humanity or even America.

Xenophobia looks like the wrong people (regardless of citizenship or qualities) being told to get out now - without their property or any legal right of appeal. Or skipping expulsion and moving onto enslavement or liquidation. Real hostility to foreigners does not have courts discussing the issue of 'discrimination of national origin', unless it's to query as to why there isn't more discrimination. Real contempt for foreigners doesn't have foreign aid being cut (foreign aid?), it has warships negotiating unequal treaties and unloading huge quantities of narcotics.

The UK has gone from world leader to third rate power in large part to its immense openness and generosity to outsiders, many of whom end up in social housing, deal drugs, rob or scam. There's a huge DEI structure to patronize and enrich foreigners. They're spending billions of pounds feeding and housing refugees in hotels yearly. Many other countries (still incredibly open by historical standards) would've noped out of that and sent them away or had them dispersed. A country cannot stay at such high openness, openness to the point of self-sacrificing xenophilia, forever. It's an unstable policy and it's not unreasonable for a country under pressure to retreat from such high openness.

I miss the old BC,

straight from Canary Wharf BC,

the Alawite rule BC

I hate the new BC,

This shtick got old BC,

Breaks all the rules BC,

thinks the mods are fools BC,

Ahem. Count, the mods are not retarded. I might often be quite entertained by your shenanigans, but they're better reserved for /r/drama, and being occasionally amusing isn't sufficient to let you off.

Hell, I was going to let you off, but then I remembered I have to actually set an example every once in a while, and I took a look at your moderation log. You have that one AAQC to your credit, and a laundry list of warnings, temp bans, and even a perma ban that was cut down because someone spoke up for you.

The second-last entry is "More baiting. Really should permaban him next time."

I really dislike permabanning people. Hate to do it, I'm a bleeding heart that way. I will find a middle ground and say you can sit in the corner for another 60 days, and consider that lenient. In the meantime, you can consider opening a bait-and-tackle store or drying your copious tears with stacks of money, or whatever it is finance people do. Consider this provisional, if the other mods want to extend it, or make it permanent, I'm not going to say a word.

I don't disagree as such, and sure, BC has always seemed more than a little interested in baiting, but can you pinpoint what exactly about this post qualifies?

I think this his is straightforward a "can you believe the bad thing $outgroup has done?!!!11" comment, e.g. waging the culture war. The reporting quoted is certainly partisan. There is a slim chance that the other side had a point for this deportation beyond "we have a quota to meet and non-Americans do not really have rights here", not that I will cut them much slack here, because the part where they could sell their arguments for deportation would be a court hearing, which they decided is too much of a hassle.

Still, this is the kind of story which smells like it could end up being fabricated or misreported (say my subjective p(substantially correct)=0.7). If BC had made more of an effort to aggregate similar stories to make the -- imho highly plausible -- point that ICE is just deporting anyone they can get their hands on, I think this post would be ok.

Still, I think that with no prior record BC would have gotten a warning for that post, but one straw has to be the one which eventually breaks the camel's back.

Fair question. The line between a passionate, strongly-worded argument and trolling can be blurry, and if this post existed in a vacuum, without any knowledge of Count's antics, it would have been unobjectionable. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. The problem isn't the topic: it is the user, the pattern, and the presentation.

To put it plainly, trolling isn't just about what you say, but why and how you say it. The goal of this forum is to "optimize for light over heat." Trolling optimizes for heat, exclusively. Count does occasionally provide light too, but in the same manner that lighting your house on fire helps find the keys during a blackout.

Breaking down this specific post:

  1. Performative, Over-the-Top Language: The post isn't structured for discussion. It's a screed. Phrases like "total emptiness of its own fundamental depravity," "steaming pile of shit," and "apply for readmission to the human race" are pure flamebait. They're designed to provoke outrage, not invite reasoned disagreement.

  2. Deliberate, Gratuitous Antagonism: The constant, almost comically exaggerated praise for the UK system versus the condemnation of the US isn't a good-faith comparison. It's tribal button-pushing. "august by American standards, by our standards there is terraced housing within 5 minutes walk of me that is older" is a perfect example. It adds zero substance and exists only to be condescending and get a rise out of American readers. It's a classic "Boo outgroup!" move.

Now, the crucial part: context.

BurdensomeCount has a long, long history of this exact behavior, for which he has been repeatedly warned and banned. His schtick is to take a kernel of a real argument and wrap it in layers of aristocratic, elitist, and often racialist provocation. You can see it all over his comment history (make sure to sort by negative votes):

  • His entire "dissolve the people and elect another" argument where he calls for replacing "low human capital natives" with "elects" (migrants).
  • His frequent use of terms like "low tier people," "mayos," and "proles" while positioning himself as a superior "elite human capital" finance professional.
  • His open admission that he wants to "punish" Europe by flooding it with migrants to watch "progressive modernity" collapse, and that he does this with "glee."

He isn't arguing to understand; he's arguing to provoke, to feel superior, and to watch the fireworks. He knows exactly which buttons to press. This latest post is just his standard formula applied to a new news story: find a legitimate grievance, crank the rhetoric to 11, lard it with condescending UK-vs-US bait, and serve it up to see who bites. And people will bite, they will get mad, while Count laughs away or engages in performative denialism.

In short, he's not engaging with the culture war; he's waging it, which is explicitly against the rules of the thread. He's a "masterful" troll in that he's very good at it, but that doesn't earn him an indefinite pass.

I like Count. He amuses me, like a monkey that is very good at flinging shit. He also annoys me and tars other migrants by association, coming off as immensely entitled, ungrateful, and willing to bite the hand that feeds. But that is a personal stance, and not what he's being modded for.

His mistake is to assume that the Motte runs like an actual court of law. While this particular comment wouldn't sway a judge, Lady Justice might be blind but I'm not. We know Count.

If he expressed his Great Replacement desires in more formal language, perhaps referring to genetic groups instead of "mayos", would his posts be under less scrutiny?

I'm not a Burdensome Count sympathizer, but I am under the impression that this forum is one where you can express any idea, as long as it's done civilly. The civility requirements do seem to be more stringent on the left than the right, probably because when someone insults the Left there's not a lot of push back.

If he expressed his Great Replacement desires in more formal language, perhaps referring to genetic groups instead of "mayos", would his posts be under less scrutiny?

Yes. 100%. It would be quite trivial to rephrase everything he has to say in a manner that is minimally inflammatory. Some opinions will inherently piss people off, no matter how politely stated. We account for this, and let them stand.

I'm going to sacrifice even more of my lunch-break, and take on the burden of providing an example of how Count could have made the same point without breaking the rules:

This incident highlights what I see as a structural weakness in the American legal system regarding accountability for government agents. It's interesting to contrast the US concept of "sovereign immunity" with legal frameworks like the UK's, which allows for "exemplary damages" specifically to punish "arbitrary and oppressive conduct by a servant of the government." The latter seems to provide a stronger check on potential executive overreach by creating a more direct path for redress.

If the reporting is accurate, the false notification of the man's death is particularly concerning. It points to a breakdown in process and professionalism that seems severe, even accounting for the complexities of immigration enforcement. It raises questions about the institutional culture within ICE and what safeguards are in place to prevent such grievous errors.

This seems to align with critiques, like those once made by Lee Kuan Yew, that American institutions can sometimes lack the deeply ingrained cultural norms that act as informal checks on behavior in older states. My read is that this isn't an issue of malice, but perhaps a cultural immaturity where adherence to formal process can sometimes override basic considerations of human decency, leading to outcomes that are both unjust and counterproductive.

The second version makes the exact same three points:

  1. The US legal system has structural flaws for redressing government misconduct compared to the UK.
  2. The agency's actions demonstrate a shocking lack of professionalism.
  3. This may be symptomatic of a broader American cultural issue related to its relative youth as a nation.

The difference is that the rewrite focuses on systems, policies, and ideas. It critiques without insulting. It frames the point about national character as an analytical observation from a historical figure, not a childish insult. It invites a counter-argument ("Actually, sovereign immunity is vital because...") rather than a flame war ("How dare you call us a steaming pile of shit!").

That is the standard. It's not about what you say, but about making a good-faith effort to say it in a way that contributes to a discussion. Count consistently and deliberately chooses not to.

The civility requirements do seem to be more stringent on the left than the right, probably because when someone insults the Left there's not a lot of push back.

We can't please everyone, but even the perception of such bias is concerning. Take it from me, that we take this concern seriously, and have been debating it internally. I'm not going to name names, but a certain someone, who is a right-wing darling, will not enjoy it if we decide that we need to make an example.

Of course, that's an extreme outcome, and we generally try not to make examples for the sake of it. Many lengthy explanations have been written about why the perception of anti-leftist bias might exist here, including even in its absence. I can't rule out that it isn't, in fact, absent, but take my word for it that we care about fairness as well as the appearance of fairness.

Thank you for responding!

I thought trolling was definitionally disingenuous? As in, he's saying all that shit to fuck with us, but didn't actually believe any of it. Probably isn't even who he says he is? That's what makes trolls so odious, there is no there there. They don't actually believe anything. Mere stubbornness to concede a point does not qualify one as a troll. A person can have odious but sincerely held beliefs, but that doesn't make them a troll.

It is very kind of you to believe that Count isn't being disingenuous. Donning saintly levels of forbearance and patience:

We're less concerned with what's in a user's heart of hearts and more with the mess they make on the floor. The relevant question for us isn't "Does he believe it?" but "Is he posting in order to start a fire?" This is where you get the "sincere troll." This is the user who may genuinely hold an opinion, but chooses to express it in the most inflammatory, condescending, and insulting way possible, because the hostile reaction is a core part of what they want. The outrage is the point, not a byproduct.

Let's grant that Count sincerely believes the UK's legal system is superior. The sincerity of that belief doesn't make phrases like "steaming pile of shit" or telling an entire country to "apply for readmission to the human race" anything other than deliberate, high-octane provocation. He knows it's inflammatory. He chooses those words precisely because they're inflammatory. That's baiting. You can already see the fish biting in this thread.

Sincerity isn't a defense for deliberately "waging the culture war," which is explicitly against the rules. He's not just expressing an odious opinion; he's lobbing a grenade wrapped in an opinion, and he does it over and over again. Whether he's a nihilist who believes nothing or a zealot who believes everything, the result for the thread is the same: heat, not light.

We don't moderate beliefs (or at least we try not to), we moderate behavior. And his behavior is consistently that of someone trying to start a fight, and then scream about police brutality.

Since I have your attention, I must remind you that you're on thin ice yourself. Your posts are popular, you've got AAQCs, but you're flying too close to the sun. Do yourself a favor, and take extra care to couch your language in a manner that minimizes opportunities for it to be misunderstood. This is for our sake too, I do not look forward to the shitstorm in the comments that will ensue if we have to bite the bullet. Don't make us, please.

I don't care about the ban, I'm just saying, I don't think that word means what you think it means.

What exactly is objectionable about his post? Personally, I think it's too emotionally charged and credulously accepting of the news story, but it doesn't seem very different in style and tone from other things I've read over the last week. It's just left-wing and not right-wing.

Granted, I'm not familiar with BurdensomeCount's other posts.

It's just left-wing and not right-wing.

The immediate admission that you don't know BC's posting history, demonstrates that you're offbase with that categorization.

BC, and Alexander Turok, have both in recent days been defended against bans as 'left wing' being punished. But neither is remotely a leftwing poster.

I'm getting a "you barged into our secret club" kind of vibe. That's fair! I didn't mean to disturb whatever exactly this place is.

I'll go back to my internet space. I'm nobody, so this feels a bit silly, but this will be my final comment. Apologies for the intrusion.

Please, stick around. Every forum needs new blood.

If you're interested, the origins of the forum are that there is a blogger called Scott Alexander. His subreddit had a politics discussion thread. This thread moved to its own subreddit (r/themotte) and later to this site.

The aspiration is for civil, charitable political discussion and a place where tone is moderated rather than content.

Meh. If someone's so thin-skinned that their response to "you don't know the context" is a passive aggressive "sorry to disturb you I'm leaving and never coming back" instead of lurking more and/or digging through to find context, or at bare minimum shrugging off the critique and ignoring it, then they're probably not a good fit anyway.

I don't think threats to leave, from new people, or old people, or in real life, should be met with begging "no please stay." That sets a bad precedent. As a matter of principle I think you call the bluff and either they stay or they leave and it's a win-win either way.

No, you stumbled into a weird little internet site that cleaves more closely with old-style forums, with old-style rules that aren't explicitly defined, and the expectation that you at least lurk quietly to adapt to the overall local culture before making yourself known.

If you've been exposed to nothing but reddit and/or twitter for most of your online life, of course this place is going to look weird. You came in expecting an industrial rave and instead got an English Gentlemen's Club.

Stay around a bit. You'll be fine.

This was an unusually drama heavy week. I’m going to encourage you to stick around to read the first quality contributions report after your arrival and see what we’re aiming for here.

That's not what I meant, Im not even that frequent a commenter here these days.

Just defending that the moderation policy isn't really along a left/right divide.

I'd say rather, it's biased against arguments that amount to 'You are moral monster and cannot be tolerated'. This was, at least online, pretty strongly associated with the progressive advance over the last decade, so I thikn reaction against this gets pattern matched to reaction against leftism.

But 3 recent moderation debates have been around:

Alexader Turok: sneering contempt for populist conservatives, from a viewpoint within the general 'right', but a libertarian/EHC perspective.

Burdensome Count: moral outrage against American nationalism from a globalist, EHC perspective, though socially somewhat conservative

Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.

The third was kind of liberal adjacent? But more like centrist disgust at racialist remarks. All three kerfuffles though, were not about left/right, but about reacting to an argument that amounts to 'how dare they!'

To be super clear, I also flamed out of here several years ago, because I too hold some how dare they views. I don't agree with the general philosophical aims of theMotte, and think it is founded in self-destructive tolerance-maxxing. I do not agree with the axiomatic viewpoints that found the philosophy of the motte and it;s moderation.

But I simply defend that it's not left-vs-right.

Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.

On this, it's not always just the racism element, more that what the mods appear to be selecting for is having a line of how much contempt you are allowed to give off when expressing a view. This seems mostly with the goal of preventing the forum from becoming trading insults back and forth.

Some positions inherently come with animus. There's a reason I scroll past the HBD discussions. But there are times I feel that users get away with a little more spice against groups that aren't typically here than if those groups were here, such as when feminism comes up.

This is a good point and, I think, a big reason why the mods are now levying permanent ban warnings against WhiningCoil. Every time he goes as far as he did last time, he causes a wave of discontent and many people have a hard time reacting to him civilly. The more inflammatory he gets, the more it's unreasonable to turn a blind eye to him but not to the people responding to him. I do not envy the moderators on decisions like this, because he's posted many a good post.

this is all fair, I think. But it's aside my point that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism. They both come from a particular EHC right pov.

I agree that BC and AT weren't banned for leftism.

I was more saying that the forum can be perceived as a "right wing secret club" because, for example, a feminist might consider some of the writings about feminism to be boo outgroup, only there are no feminists here. Whereas a comment that is around the line of boo outgroup towards the right will be read by many people who are right leaning, so there are many more chances for an individual reading it to decide that it is over the line and create a hostile discussion.

This isn't necessarily an insult against the mods, because it is admittedly hard to decide when things are right on the line.

More comments

Contra Whinning Coil: somebody flaming out because Whinning Coil was allowed to express racist views.

Oh, come now. I could just as easily frame it as Turok and Count were banned because someone was allowed to criticize MAGAs and their feelings were getting hurt. Or are you going to argue that Whiningcoil (and many others!) is habitually more charitable and 'arguing to understand, rather than wage the culture war' than either of those two? I can provide receipts if you like but I assume we can both find better things to do with our time.

People got mad at WC for 1 sentence. His sin was failing to flatter our sacred sensibilities about race. That sentence was NOT saying "outsiders [to White society] are bad" it was saying "outsiders [to the family] are bad." The traditional deference to race is to triple-proofread your post to ensure it can't be misinterpreted in a bad way.

AT and (to a lesser extent) BC write paragraphs of emotion-slop that shouts the vibe on a neon sign. As far as I know, nobody is misinterpreting what they say though. Indeed, with AT and BC often time the vibe is the point.

I think you misunderstand me. I was somewhat flippant because I didn't follow that one super closely, and don't remember the upset user in question. My point is more generally that the Motte's moderation philosophy is against 'moral monsters, end of story' framing. this framing was associated more with the left for the past decade, thus why places like the motte exist, and don't exist on Reddit, pre-Musk twitter etc.

But when Turok and Count jumped in, they didn't do it from the left, and the pattern matching of 'the Motte bans leftists' is incorrect.

Fuck bigots, fuck white people, and fuck low human capital, all get banned for a reason other than political association.

I will concede that 'fuck HBD deniers' seems to get a special pass on this space as some kind of legacy protection

Charitability isn't the only thing that is being measured in any ban. I was just re-reading this post and its replies, in rehashing some old drama to satisfy myself, and there is a reply from Zorba below, to something else that I'm not sure what it was:

I want to be really clear on why it's a warning, though. It's a warning because you have a stellar track record. If you were a new user, this would probably be a quiet remove-post-and-ban; there are people coming from dedicated troll subreddits who are making better posts than this and still earning bans for them. You've been a spectacular long-term contributor, and that gives you a considerable amount of leeway, but not infinite; our ban lists are littered with people who made great post after great post, then some switch got flipped and they turned toxic overnight and now they're permabanned.

Rightly or wrongly, WhiningCoil has a bunch of AAQCs and is generally upvoted and considered a quality, if provocative, user. I can't really think of anyone who thinks the same of AlexanderTurok or BurdensomeCount, even on the left. Do they provide good steelmans of their own side? Seems like they don't, or you'd get more left-leaning posters defending their posts, or you'd get the more even-handed moderators giving more nuanced opinions of how they view the posts. If you've read a lot of moderator warnings, you see that they show their homework when giving any warning or ban.

Just lurk for a while, or participate without criticizing the mods imo. The context is that people bitch about the mods' decisions (whether that is to ban or not) on a weekly basis, and I'm sure they're sick of it. People have been here for nearly a decade.

There's plenty of dysfunction in the community, but it's not driven by incompetence or ideological bias on the part of the mods. Even if, I have to say, I share your frustration for the Turok ban.

I'd say it's more coming into a bar, and wondering why some of the regulars are discussing with the bartender whether another of the regulars (who, over the course of many nights before you got here, established a rep as a bit belligerent once they've had too many) should be cut off. Doesn’t mean it's not a drinking establishment, or that you're not welcome to belly up and order, but that there's backstory and conflict (like with any established group!) that you weren't around for. Don't let that worry you.

I'm sad that this has been your first week here. It's not every week that two prolific posters are banned. This is actually one of the only places left on the Internet where you can say any idea, as long as it's said civilly. Unfortunately, it can be hard for some people to keep it civil, to the point where I think many posters have forgotten what civility even looks like.

I could make an effort post on why gay sex is morally terrible and it wouldn't be moderated - as long as I wrote it as if I was trying to convince a close gay friend, using the friendly language one would use with someone you will inevitably see every day. It would be downvoted terribly, because that kind of sentiment is wildly unpopular here. But it wouldn't be moderated. If I made the same post, with the same argument structure, but with some homophobic slurs added in and in the tone of a drill sergeant, it would be moderated in much the same way you see here.

We’d really prefer it if you didn’t leave… we need new people to prevent this place from slowly withering away.

In any smaller and more tight-knit space it takes some time to get acclimated to the local customs, but that’s just like… normal.

I'm getting a "you barged into our secret club" kind of vibe.

I for one do not believe you barged into our secret club.

What exactly is objectionable about his post?

Primarily, it's "boo outgroup."

Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

BC's post does not even pretend to do the very patient work of contextualizing or steel-manning the position. Rather, the substance of the post is "damn, America sucks, and Americans suck for not revolting." This is also tinged with an edge of consensus building or recruiting for a cause, albeit in a nonspecific way. The parting sentence is particularly inflammatory:

Perhaps after the end of Trump, the USA will be in a position where it can apply for readmission to the human race...

I decided against modding it because I don't think it's a significant enough violation of the rules to warrant a permaban, and BC's moderation history has reached the point where other moderators are saying "we should probably permaban next time." But self_made_human decided to go ahead and just add another tempban (proportioned to BC's post history), which seems like a good call to me.

it doesn't seem very different in style and tone from other things I've read over the last week. It's just left-wing and not right-wing.

Assuming you are actually new, I'm going to invite you to not make this a hobby horse. We ban right wing posters for the same sorts of tonal problems, as you and I have discussed. To be blunt, you do not have enough of a reputation here in the community to be credibly assessing its norms. You'd be well served to stay out of the meta, at least initially.

Ok. I won't ask any more questions or make any comments at all for some time, if that's how you feel.

That's not how you get a reputation. This is a reputation economy. If you contribute valuable things to it, that will increase your credibility. What is valuable in this reputation economy? Lots of stuff! Insight, novelty, effort. Original research, eloquence, reasoned argumentation. Steelmanning, deep dives, critical self-reflection. And yes--the beating heart of this space is the Culture War thread, where we discuss the culture wars--but, at our best, refrain from waging them.

We also have quiet lurkers! If that's more your jam, that's fine. Even there, you can contribute through meta-moderation and user reports.

What we don't need is more people trying to characterize this space, to place it within the culture wars rather than to keep it outside of them. We don't need more accusing mods of thumbing the scales one way or another, complaining that there are too many bad posters, too many bad comments, too much left wing content, too much right wing content, whatever--we already have entirely too much of that. The best--often the only--thing you can do to make this place better, is to write good posts.

To be blunt: I am skeptical that you "FoundViaTwitter." Right now I would guess at about 30% odds that "you" are a Turok alt. You don't write as if you are unfamiliar with this space; you write as if you are someone who has already been banned previously. But I've been wrong about this sort of thing before, and quite possibly I'm wrong now, so instead I'm trying to treat you like a new user who just found this space.

We welcome your effort, insight, etc. on whatever topics you care to write about, provided you do so within the spirit of the foundation and the intention of the rules that support it. We are less interested in having yet more off-base aspersions cast on the mod team or the site.

That's the opposite of what you're being asked to do. Post. Engage. Discuss. But maybe give it a few months before getting into every mod decision.

Granted, I'm not familiar with BurdensomeCount's other posts.

That's the issue. Count has a long time history of trolling and yanking on chains, going back to the subreddit days. He's masterful at making incredibly inflammatory statements with just enough of a veneer of sincerity to pass muster. He's an ur-example of barely toeing the line.

This would serve as a great example. Look the mods, being so heartless and evil, banning a poor participant on the forum for expressing sincere concern about government outreach? It's only when you take into account everything else he's done that it falls through. I'll let someone fill in with a more exhaustive explanation since I'm at work, but in short, this ain't new.

Fair enough. Thank you.

https://www.themotte.org/post/2269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348537?context=8#context

I did write a longer explanation, so you don't have to just take my word for it!

I've seen one of two reactions online:

  1. He wasn't a real "American". He was a foreigner and will always be, no matter how long he'd been in the country and regardless of whatever papers he had. "They all gotta go". (This is a fringe online talking point.)

  2. Immigration is so fucked up in this country, especially after Biden, that I can't be bothered to care if mistakes are made. We need to deport as many illegals as possible, and if that results in citizens, permanent residents, and legal visitors being caught up in the net once in a while, so be it.

Of course, these reactions are contingent on the person believing the story is true. I'm skeptical, given the update that @Mantergeistmann provided and the fact that Leon doesn't pattern match the type of person who would be deported to a third country - in this case, to Guatemala rather than Chile. My understanding is that the people who have been deported to third countries - Eswatini, South Sudan, etc. - are people with serious criminal convictions whose home country won't take them back.

By the way, even assuming the story is true, this has happened plenty of times in prior administrations:

Immigration crackdown also snares Americans

A growing number of United States citizens have been detained under Obama administration programs intended to detect illegal immigrants who are arrested by local police.

In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

American teen mistakenly deported to Colombia returns to Texas

In The Rush To Deport, Expelling U.S. Citizens

All in all as I learn more about the Law as it is in both the UK, other systems like European Civil Law and the US, I am slowly being drawn to the inescapable conclusion that the American legal system, for all its grandiose self professed claims, is a steaming pile of shit.

On one hand, I substantially agree. Our legal system has always pretty much always been "trash," if "trash" means "governed primarily by politics and judicial self-interest rather than reason or the rule of law." That is just judicial review in a nutshell, to say nothing of our deference to bureaucracy, including "law enforcement." The old Ben Franklin saw about only a virtuous people being capable of freedom seems to be true!

But our trash legal system is also the most imitated in the world, as when it does work, it seems to work better than any other in history. Its failure modes are... still being explored, I suppose we can say. I would even so rank our legal system well above that of any nation that jails its own citizens for making bad posts on social media. Ironic, given the heat of your own post here! America may get many things wrong, but we're not the only ones.

(Aside: your post has been reported as both "boo outgroup" and as "antagonistic." I think you do bring some unnecessary heat and smear the not-very-specifc group "Americans" a little too liberally, but I will chalk it up to reflexive participation in long English tradition. Partly because your next ban is very likely to be permanent, and I don't feel like this particular post quite warrants it. But it's probably worth noting that the whole substance of your post, including a significant portion of your maybe-even-genuine outrage, could have been expressed pretty easily without either the heat or the jingoism.)

But our trash legal system is also the most imitated in the world, as when it does work

No. Our legal system (England) is the most imitated in the world, almost all of the Commonwealth uses something deriving from it. Your system is a derivative of ours and as one of the things England actually does extremely well I think it is something our country should take great pride in and not let it be appropriated by some 250 year old pretender.

Who is "our", Kemosabe? Didn't you show up in the West basically yesterday?

If he's willing to move to and live in a system, then he gets to use "us" and "our" statements. He's walking the walk, so he gets to talk the talk.

Absolutely not. Moving to Japan does not make me Japanese.

In this case, I think foreigners are probably right to describe the British justice system as their own, because it seems to serve them more than it does the British.

Although these types of retorts are exquisitely tempting, these are also exactly the sorts of reactions that Count is attempting to provoke, which he then parlays into accusations of bias and incivility.

Our legal system (England) is the most imitated in the world, almost all of the Commonwealth uses something deriving from it.

I mean, in some sense we're all just derivatives of the Romans, or maybe the Greeks. But you complain about American "sovereign immunity" while living in a country that still has a King, and lacks meaningful protection of some very important basic rights. That seems relevant. As I suggested, your post would have been much better to simply focus on the perceived failings of the United States government (which many Americans would agree are many!). Taking the position that the UK government exhibits moral superiority here was an overreach at best, both undermining your point and your credibility.

"14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having laws and borders and shit"

I have no idea why you're still allowed to post here. You seem like one of those posters who is good a just barely toeing the line to avoid getting permabanned.
Your schtick is writing in a smug, antagonistic way to try to rile up the wignats (who sadly always take the bait). You claim to be a rich Pakistani or something who lives in the UK and despises the native English people which is so on the nose for the place that I honestly think you're probably just some leftist troll getting your kicks here. I would actually like to read the opinions of a rich Pakistani who immigrated to the UK and hasn't really assimilated for whatever reasons, but you only seem to post to try to start flamewars.

The mods apparently won't ban you for being intentionally irritating and disingenuous. I wish other posters would stop feeding you.

On a different note, credit where credit's due. You've got some mad trolling skills. You know exactly which buttons to push on the userbase here. Easily one of the most effective trolls this site has seen. Trolling is a art, after all. Hat tip.

I have no idea why you're still allowed to post here.

The forum is undoubtedly better with his presence. In the words of Hitchcock, “the more successful the villain, the more successful the picture”.

You claim to be a rich Pakistani or something who lives in the UK and despises the native English people which is so on the nose for the place that I honestly think you're probably just some leftist troll getting your kicks here.

I have actually met in person multiple active posters from this site. I assure you I am not lying about who I am. And no, I don't despise the native English.

And no, I am not trolling.

You should meet me, then I could arbitrate for our friend their your net worth and country of origin.

I have to give it to you, if this is bait, then it's well done. From most other commenters, I would have assumed that they had genuine, sincere concern.

Who said it's bait? Unfortunately I seem to have ended up in a situation where even when I give my genuine views on things I get accused of baiting. "Innocent until proven guilty" is an ancient legal maxim, that applies to all (or should at least, much to Mr. Leon's misfortune).

"Innocent until proven guilty" might work in the legal system, but the medical one goes by "if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras".

Please pull the other one guvna', it's got bells on it.

but the medical one goes by "if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras".

This one makes me laugh because I heard it first on an early episode of House MD (maybe even the first episode?), and then the show is the biggest zebra parade you ever saw.

Well yes. It's a TV drama after all. No one's going to watch a story about common problems that are easily diagnosed and solved.

It's still probably good advice for real doctors.

Foreman said it, House told him off for it:

Are you in first year of medical school? No. First of all, there’s nothing on the CAT scan. Second of all, if this is a horse then the kindly family doctor in Trenton makes the obvious diagnosis and it never gets near this office. Differential diagnosis, people: if it’s not a tumor what are the suspects? Why couldn’t she talk?

And it was a zebra, of course, neurotrichinosis.

(And sometimes the medical community thinks a condition is a zebra when it's actually a horse)

In the show's defense, sometimes it's not a zebra, it's horse with stripes painted on it so that they waste the whole episode assuming it's a zebra.

Unfortunately I seem to have ended up in a situation where even when I give my genuine views on things I get accused of baiting

Yes, how unfortunate. Who could have possibly predicted this would be the result of your posting style?

I suppose it depends on who you believe: the fellow's family, or the Guatemalan government

The Guatemalan Migration Institute said in a statement that it coordinates with ICE on all deportations from the United States and that no one matched Leon’s name, age or citizenship.

So! If your story as presented is full and true... it's absolutely god-awful, a horrible overreach, and there should be some sort of massive legal reaction against the levers of power that made it happen. If not... well, it's yet one more reason why I find it difficult to get worked up when I'm told about a horrible news story with political implications, especially a breaking one.

Honestly, this makes me think it is more likely to have happened - and there is some kind of mistaken identity at the source. Some guy messed up his own DOB or something (maybe he didn't have a known DOB, picked one when coming into the country, picked another one that was more significant later and didn't remember the one he used on his paperwork, IDK.) Maybe the government mixed up the files.

My prior is that people typically don't outright lie but rather twist the truth. It's a heck of a story to make up whole cloth. Stranger things have happened, so I wouldn't be too put out if it turned out to be someone's imaginary Grandpa. But Bureaucratic mistake seems more likely to me.

Interesting. Lets wait and see where things settle down. But honestly, the fact that such a story is even believable speaks volumes about the situation on the ground, five years ago this story would have been seen as too absurd for The Onion.

You're trying too hard, obvious bait is obvious.

But honestly, the fact that such a story is even believable speaks volumes about the situation on the ground

Please put this juvenile argument to bed, permanently. If something didn't happen, the fact that it could have is irrelevant.

To be the devil's advocate here, that's not true in practice. Drunk driving without killing someone is punished because it could have lead to someone dying as a consequence, or at least severely increased the risk of an adverse outcome.

I phrased it poorly. What I mean is, if Alice is accused of having done something bad, and then it's conclusively demonstrated that she didn't do it, the fact that Bob thinks the accusation against her was "plausible" is irrelevant.

It's plausible, and I'll reserve judgement before making any specific assessments, but I'll point out some red flags beyond the Guatemalan denial:

She [Leon's wife] herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.

What, exactly, is this claim? Was she arrested or detained for ten hours? Is she a citizen, and that's the only reason she wasn't deported herself? If she's a non-citizen, did they attempt to deport her? Those things are all possible, but the sentence would also be technically honest if she just didn't have a ride home.

Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was. On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.

This is some incredibly precise phrasing. No one knows the first date this woman called, and the Guardian doesn't know what the claims were? Other sources say this was probably somewhere around 6/23ish, but don't expand on the claims. Three weeks ago, she called again, gave the family false information, and then no one knows her name or even if she's actually an immigration lawyer?

More critically, while Guatemala is one of the countries that has agreed to receive third-country deporations (albeit not of people from Chile), it is not a country that has (or is known to have) received Alien Enemies Act deportations. The time period from 6/20 to 7/3, the claimed range, was after both AARP v. Trump and Trump vs. JGG, which clearly established AEA deportations still had judicial review. And neither the Guardian nor other media I can find say he was deported under the AEA. Indeed, it's not clear how many, if any, LPRs have been deported under the AEA.

Any other deportation would require a (admittedly waiveable) hearing with an administrative law judge. It's possible that the Trump administration just fucked things up, or that the immigration judge involved was just rubber-stamping papers. Or for a more borderline (or scissory) example his LPR was revoked; unlike naturalization, green cards can be revoked for a pretty wide variety of reasons, some serious and some less so. But few of these answers give a result compatible with "Instead some power tripping ICE worker two grades above the rank of janitor decided to act as judge, jury and executioner and sent a vulnerable 82 year old man off to a country with which he has no links whatsoever."

And some of that other reporting gives other reasons to put your antenna up:

He told her he tried to contact his family but, because he didn’t have his phone, couldn’t provide phone numbers... He told her he doesn’t plan to return to the United States, but hopes to have his wife join him as soon as possible in his new home.

Perhaps that's just a reasonable reaction to what could well have been an extremely traumatic experience. Perhaps.

But honestly, the fact that such a story is even believable speaks volumes about the situation on the ground, five years ago this story would have been seen as too absurd for The Onion.

AAAAAH.

"The fact that I would believe bad things about my enemies proves they're bad" is an UR example of a horrendously bad faith argument. This post was more worthy of a ban than the original.

I remeber people saying the same thing about Juicy Smolliet.

I didn't. Smollett's story had more red flags than the Chinese Parliament. This one at least has the chance of being a series of bureaucratic fuckups -- those are a lot more common on the ground than MAGA fans of Empire who carry around bleach and a noose in a Chicago winter.

Oh, don't misunderstand me. I was being rather suggestive with that post, pointing out that "the fact that I COULD believe it" is really, really terrible guidepost.

I didnt believe Jussie either - my only failing being the extent of my disbelief not going far enough. I was prepared to say drug deal/prostitution gone wrong. Performative self-lynching wasn't on the menu.

the fact that such a story is even believable speaks volumes

I'll be honest with you, that's one of my least favorite arguments, and says more about the sayer than the situation. "The fact that I'm able to believe something terrible about my outgroup, even if false, is just another indication about how bad they are!" It's tiresome whether it's the Left, the Right, the Orange, the Purple, the Monarchists, or the Revolutionaries. "I may be wrong about this" should be cause for self-reflection about other cases where oneself may be wrong--"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken"--not as an excuse to double-down against the group being unfairly maligned.

After all, if my hunch/info turns out to be incorrect, and the situation as originally presented was 100% truthful, would you say to me (with sincerity) "That's alright: the fact that you considered it believable that the news might be misrepresenting the situation or jumping the gun speaks volumes about how terrible and inaccurate the reporting usually is on these things?"

five years ago this story would have been seen as too absurd for The Onion.

No, it wouldn't be, and that's the point. I've cited some examples of the Obama administration deporting U.S. citizens.

where is the shame?

I simply don’t have any!

My shame response has always been rather attenuated (in certain contexts) compared to the population average. Probably part of what makes it so easy to resist the “right-thinking” social consensus on immigration.

Anyway, no, sob stories won’t guilt us into not having borders and immigration enforcement procedures.

An opinion I've seen for years expressed in this image.

They really try to lay on the tears to get us to agree with their border policies. Like AOC's weeping photoshoot in front of that empty parking lot.

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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