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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16967 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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I dont think there is much evidence supporting this assertion

Yes there is???!

Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint has horrible optics.

This is happening, and the optics do suck. You can tell they suck because people hate and fear ICE officers in a way they didn't a year ago.

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)

This happened, and the optics are so bad

and there's a general allergy to due process.

This has been happening.

Why are you in dental

  • -13

Yes there is???!

Then by all means, lay it out. When I want to list law enforcement travesties by federal law enforcement, I list people murdered, women and children burned alive en masse, obviously unnecessary use of lethal force, decades-long patterns of abuse of rights and murderous malfeasence, destruction of evidence, perjury and coverups, all without meaningful accountability through any process intended to supply it.

What are the clear misdeeds of the current ICE offensive?

This is happening, and the optics do suck. You can tell they suck because people hate and fear ICE officers in a way they didn't a year ago.

Blue tribe emotions are not a reasonable guide to material reality.

But fmac is not talking about material reality. fmac is talking about the optics. If people hate and fear ICE officers in an unprecedented way, this is strong evidence that their optics suck. Being feared and hated doesn't prove they're actually behaving badly, but it does, almost tautologically, mean that they are giving off a scary hatable vibe.

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.

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.

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