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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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but it does, almost tautologically, mean that they are giving off a scary hatable vibe.

I would surmise that the majority of americans have not seen an ICE officer performing their duty in real life, only through videos that are cherry-picked, contextualized and characterized by a hostile media. In that context, the vibe around them is definitely not something that they are tautologically giving off, but something that could be constructed around them.

ICE themselves posts videos of them raiding places. They posted a video to the pokemon sound track. The pokemon one has clips of masked dudes blowing up doors. It doesn't look good man.

You don't even need the media lol, they're structuring their own optics. It doesn't look great.

It doesn't look good man.

Would it not look good if it were not in the context of the media breathlessly describing them as stormtroopers for months? We're talking about counter-factual world we can't really observe here, but purely on its own, for me, masked guys blowing up doors to the Pokemon soundtrack doesn't really raise an eyebrow. It's not like they're committing atrocities, or even just filming themselves doing a bit of the ol' unnecessary police brutality and laughing about it, that'd be different.

So if ATF started releasing videos like that you'd think it's fine and not a worrying sign about how they see themselves?

I'd worry they can't meme well since "Gotta catch 'em all" doesn't really work for them.

It sounds fine to me for the message they're trying to push. Am I turning into a boomer?

I'm not saying the media isn't biased, I'm just saying they're making the media's job very very easy, which makes me think they're bad at this

Which is what I keep saying

TheMotte is weirdly averse to admitting the Trump’s administration is often deliberately maximally inflammatory and absolutely does engage in “liberal tears” style antagonism. Yes, I understand that the media will always portray conservatives as the villain no matter what you do (Nicholas Sandman, Binders full of women, etc) but that doesn’t mean you have no agency in being more or less provocative. In many cases it may make no difference in your public perception due to media manipulation, but we shouldn’t ignore that Trump is openly, deliberately inflammatory

In group do no wrong, out group baaaaad

You’re being downvoted for it, but you’re correct.

ICE themselves posts videos of them raiding places. They posted a video to the pokemon sound track. The pokemon one has clips of masked dudes blowing up doors. It doesn't look good man.

It does, to the target audience, which is why they do it.

There is no way ICE can have good optics for Democrats and those who watch mainstream-left media. So they don't bother, which leaves them free to pander instead to those who are receptive.

... that sure sounds like "ICE is intentionally cultivating a particular narrative about who they are" to me. I don't get why people here are so averse to the idea that ICE has PR people and those PR people are decent at their jobs.

They are cultivating a narrative, but

  1. They are quite constrained in this. In particular, they cannot cultivate a narrative that will make those who consume mainstream-left media not hate them.

  2. They are trying to be scary at least some of the time. But not hateable. Consider all this handwringing about the Pokemon soundtrack... does the Pokemon soundtrack make them seem scary and hateable? Hardly. It's whimsical; that part is aimed not at generating fear or hate, but at convincing the convincible that they are doing their job.

  1. Yeah, agreed on that. They can, however, cultivate a narrative that further increases the salience of the things that the mainstream-left media already loudly objects to. And this seems to be their strategy, at least with their decisions with the Hyundai plant (I haven't seen the "gotta catch em all" video)
  2. I think they are strategically trying to instill a sense of impotence and anger in a specific group of people (specifically the group of people who vocally backs sanctuary cities and similar things), on the working theory that if those people feel angry and impotent they will do counterproductive rage-signalling things instead of actually-obstructive process things.

Sure but when the target audience is <50% of the people (and shrinking) in a democracy, your messaging strategy is kind of stupid

They also haven't seen and/or haven't thought about how law enforcement is done. It's often brutal, because you're trying to catch people who don't want to be caught and make them do things they don't want to do. It's also often far more brutal than it has to be, but most of the time you can't tell if it is that just by looking at a few short videos. Dragging people away at gunpoint is part of what law enforcement does, and indeed there are many circumstances where they are masked when doing so. I object to most of ICEs masking, but I don't believe for a second that the objection here would go away or become significantly less strident if they didn't do so.

It's also the El Salvadorian prison stuff. The whole vibe sucks.

I agree, the objection wouldn't have changed a lot, but the sway it has over the median American would.

If ICE acted in a less shitshow aggro way, the opposition to them would look more like crying blue-hair SJWs and not a broader coalition of SJWs, Americans who don't like para-military themed law enforcement, etc

Then, it would be a really intelligent wedge issue to bait democratic leadership into opposing something broadly popular, instead of now something that half of Americans don't like.

It's also the El Salvadorian prison stuff. The whole vibe sucks.

Why does it matter whether illegal immigrants awaiting deportation are held in an American detention facility or a Salvadoran one? The particular illegal immigrants in question were sent to El Salvador because their proper country -- Venezuela -- refused to take them. That has now been resolved, and they were sent back to Venezuela.

ICE has to act in an "aggro" way, because they're law enforcement, and the people they are arresting don't want to be arrested. There's not really any way around that, aside from either doing nothing or by doing a form of anarcho-tyranny where minor violators (e.g. otherwise law-abiding people who overstay a visa by a few days) are punished but major violators (those intentionally staying indefinitely) are not.

Anyway, the Trump administration basically tried it your way in the first term. It turns out that no, it doesn't help; the news would post pictures of Obama-era detainees and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez crying at an empty parking lot, and the optics would be just as bad without actually getting things done.

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