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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   2569 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...

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.

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

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