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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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it's a shame that our politicians have fully embraced the heat-over-light dynamics of the culture war, to the point where they really are teetering on the brink of starting a civil war

Trump brought this on himself.

There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty. Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint has horrible optics. There are documented cases of people being deported to random nations, a few people have been disappeared (from public tracking, limiting a family's visibility into where a loved one is) and there's a general allergy to due process. Horrible optics.

"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.

Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer. Literally randos. (I retract my statement, I was wrong here)

  • U.S. citizenship
  • Have a valid driver's license
  • Be eligible to carry a firearm

There is reason that police & military training take time. Using a gun for law enforcement is a heavy responsibility. ICE is picking untrained civilians, giving them guns and asking them to go be bounty hunters.

Democrats are justified in believing that this will select for bottom-feeder men with anger problems looking to get the high of having power over someone else. Given that most illegal immigrants are brown, I can see why democrats would believe that the average ICE agent is a raging racist too.

If Democrats believe what they claim to believe, then their actions are in line with those values. ICE agents look like an angry paramilitary that a dictator would deploy against his populace. People believe what they see. Democrats are cherry picking, but the cherry picked images are still real images.

Democratic response as what it is - basically outright treason against the U.S. federal gov

It may be treason. It may not. An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter. In your characterization, when the state oversteps its powers to oppose the federal govt, it is treason.

Now, both parties have operated in a maximally oppositional manner since Obama was elected. The adversarial nature has only gotten further amplified with every subsequent President. Given the way laws are written, both parties fight it out in the massive grey area between words. States vs Federal tussles are the most common form of inter-party warfare. This is business as usual. The system leaves it to Courts to decide what the bounds of this grey area are.

As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason. Given that no one have been convicted of Treason since WW2, I think you're being hyperbolic.

I hope that we can right this ship because man, I do not want to have to fight in a civil war I have to say. Having studied history, it's a lot more horrible than you might think.

I'm confused. Trump is consistently the first one to raise the temperature and to lower the bar for acceptable discourse. I don't want to sound like a kid. But, he started it. Only now, the democrats are responding.

Trump is the President and central figure to America's current polarization. If there is a civil war, it will be because of him. As the one in power, the onus is on Trump to reduce the temperature.

Yes, I think that Trump's camp is doing a lot of damage to the pro-ICE position, and is raising tensions in the country, by going with the "fuck you, we're sending ICE in and by the way, fuck you again" optics. I don't know why they're doing it that way. My only guess is that it feels good to them and it delivers quick cheap optics wins to serve to their base, because it feels good to many in the base as well.

The left is also very much to blame in many ways for raising tensions in the country, so it's not like I'm just blaming Trump's camp. But Trump's camp is certainly choosing to display, frame, and discuss their actions in an inflammatory way.

I don't know why they're doing it that way. My only guess is that it feels good to them and it delivers quick cheap optics wins to serve to their base, because it feels good to many in the base as well.

My personal theory is that while the Trump base legitimately wants to put an end to illegal immigration due in large part to the economic consequences, those economic consequences are actually extremely beneficial to a lot of republican donors. When you remove illegal immigrant labor and force the farmers to hire Americans (legally) the price of everything goes up. Ultimately society and the economy would be healthier after this gets done, but the political consequences for Trump in the short term would be disastrous. "All basic staples are now twice as expensive, but in exchange your wages will improve permanently in 9 months" might be a great deal for his base in the long run, but it is suicidal for someone who has to care about daily opinion polls and work around congressmen and senators who are taking vast sums of money from the people who benefit from illegal labour.

"All basic staples are now twice as expensive,

So, between deportations and self-deportations, a purported 2 million illegal immigrants have left. What percent of the "twice as expensive" are we up to?

Is there actually real, serious and muscular enforcement of immigration law against migrant workers? I was under the impression that Trump was explicitly preventing this from happening because illegal immigrants can be treated badly and help keep the costs of produce down.

Trump, who has appeared sympathetic to both farmers and immigration hawks, said Tuesday that the farm laborers aren’t easy to replace — an argument that runs up against critics’ argument that native-born workers could fill the jobs. The president said that “people that live in the inner city” won’t do the work.

“They’ve tried. We’ve tried, Everybody’s tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally,” Trump said. “I said ‘what happens’ — to a farmer the other day — ’what happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting.’ In many ways, they’re very, very special people.”

If I'm wrong and Trump has been aggressively enforcing the laws against the employment of illegal immigrants I'd be happy to hear it.

It's hard to gauge. Here's an article claiming that the raids have devastated the industry, but journalists/hate/insufficient/etc.

That article seems to suggest that I'm correct.

Across the nation today, about 70% of workers in the U.S. farm sector are foreign born, according to the Federal Reserve of Kansas City. The National Milk Producers Federation says milk prices could nearly double if the U.S. dairy industry loses its foreign-born workforce, the group said.

70% of all your farm workers are foreign born and I have zero doubt that the vast majority of those would be illegal immigrants, because the entire reason they can get those jobs is their lack of labor protection and inability to protest terrible conditions. Remove them and the price of staples like milk will double - which is why I believe Trump and ICE are focusing on getting deportations into the news rather than actually fixing the problem.

Again, 2 million immigrants are gone in the last 9 months. Where price doubling?

It seems possible that there are simply so many illegal immigrants in the US that even herculean efforts at mass deportations will take years, e.g. enough time to gracefully offramp most industries.

Again, 2 million immigrants are gone in the last 9 months. Where price doubling?

The price doubling will happen when the illegal immigrant laborers and workers are actually removed. The Trump administration just isn't doing anything about the immigrant workforce because keeping the costs of basic staples down is a higher priority than actually delivering on removing immigrants - remove the migrant workers and prices will increase because the jobs currently being performed by illegal immigrants will have to be done legally, which means paying at the very least minimum wage and respecting basic workplace health and safety laws. If an American breaks their back working on your farm, you're actually responsible. If an illegal immigrant breaks their back working on your farm they're fucked and you don't have to pay anything, which keeps costs down.

Look, I'm extremely pro deportation of illegal immigrants and foreign workers/scabs - but you actually have to do it! Trump just isn't removing the illegal immigrants who are the biggest problem because the entire American domestic economy is resting on their backs. The "deal" that society accepted with regards to illegal immigrants in the past was that they would dramatically drive down labor costs by being exempt from employment law/minimum wages etc, which would in turn make all sorts of things less expensive. It was a bad dead, it was always a bad deal, but you're just being dishonest if you don't think there are real tradeoffs involved here. In order for the working class and heritage Americans to have good jobs picking fruit, that fruit is going to have to cost more than when it was picked by an imported serf.

(edited for clarity)

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