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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.

No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble. What they're seeing is context-free clips on Facebook and TikTok elaborated with straight up lies, posted by activist Karens who assault and harass federal law enforcement with near impunity due to their overwhelming privilege. OTOH, DHS and ICE don't ever shut up about the prior criminal convictions of the people they're deporting, but that doesn't go viral by abusing weaponized empathy.

Maybe some conservative billionaire needs to start shelling out a grand for every woman who posts a crying fictional sob story video about how she was raped by an illegal immigrant.

I too am skeptical of polls, but you ignore them at your own risk.

Not wrong, but I'm also super skeptical of this "Better stop doing that stuff you were just elected by promising to do because we've suddenly gotten better at narrative control!" line.

Like, yeah Sherril just won, but she did so while disavowing everything she'd ever said as a progressive, dumping a fortune into painting Citarelli as a tax-and-spend liberal and swearing to fight against her own Democrat economic policies.

Maybe ignore that at your own risk?

that doesn't go viral by abusing weaponized empathy

How are those going viral, then?

There are ads playing on my local radio about “a Honduran convicted of raping a child” and the like. (I couldn’t find transcripts but i think they’re part of this program.) If that’s not weaponizing empathy, I don’t know what is.

So upfront, I basically think every illegal alien criminal has to go. Non-criminal illegal aliens I care less, but I do agree that it’s hard to make the case that they shouldn’t also go.

I object to the current DHS, CBP, ICE behavior on the basis of the collateral damage they seem to be ok inflicting on actual US citizens who aren’t even bothering them. One incident that hits pretty close to home for me since I’m a runner is this case in Chicago where a 70yr old white guy was driving back from his run club and found agents blocking his driveway with their cars. From what I’ve heard from friends in the area, the agents asked him once to back up, didn’t give him a chance to comply, and proceeded to drag him out of his car and kneel on his back, breaking 6 of his ribs. He was training to run the NYC marathon this past weekend, and this meant he had to miss the race. Months of work down the drain for pretty much no reason. You can find plenty of videos of it if you search.

Yeah this is one incident, but I keep seeing stuff like it. Stuff like agents pulling their gun on citizens for almost nothing, etc. Again, US citizens minding their own business. I’m sorry but my desire to have all illegal immigrants go does not outweigh my desire to not have a risk of being attacked in that manner by agents of the state. You might tell me to avoid seeking out trouble by following ICE around like some people do, but this guy was literally just trying to get into his own house. I’m chalking this up to extremely poor training due to the pace this admin feels they have to deport people at, and the resulting increase in headcount they’ve had to do. But I simply don’t think that behavior like this is what Trump voters voted for when they voted for immigration enforcement. Assaulting an old man who wasn’t even impeding their activities is in no way a necessary part of deporting illegals.

But I simply don’t think that behavior like this is what Trump voters voted for when they voted for immigration enforcement.

The high cost of removing immigrants is an argument against their admittance in the first place. I refuse to accept a ratchet, and so I assert that we simply can remove these people, and this is right and good, and that the costs are steep but worth it.

Ideally we wouldn't have old men with broken ribs. Ideally we wouldn't have tens of millions of hostile foreigners, either. The world isn't ideal.

I found a video that starts with the man already on the ground, bitching like a Karen, while an angry crowd crowds around the agents screaming hostilities.

I'm going to express a bit of skepticism that things played out the way your "friends in the area" say it did.

And just putting this out there, but these anti-ICE protestors are doing a lot to radicalize me. They come off as so delusionally self-righteous, so appallingly entitled, wreathed in such false bravery, that I think they nearly automatically discredit whatever cause they support as well as anyone who thinks they're the good guys. If you want to convince me that ICE are doing evil, muzzle these retards first.

I always find it mildly disconcerting when Americans (especially right wing Americans like the ones here), a people who's whole national mythos was "fuck the British, and fuck anyone else who tells us what to do" , who's contemporary culture is deeply shaped by concepts like "get the fuck off my lawn before I shoot you" and "fuck the government they shouldn't tell me what to do" go from that to:

"Erm, well actually it's fine when the immigration enforcement people break the ribs of a middle aged white man when he gets annoyed they're depriving him of access to his private property. If you didn't want the feds to hurt you, you should just let them do whatever they want to you and your things without question. Don't forget to tip!"

Like seriously one of the reasons the Dems are so lame is because they're pussies, the right is cool because they're not. But the second it's your team doing stupid shit you don't stand up, you hop in the cuck chair with a big smile on your face

Oh look this keeps happening:

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will

I mean, Americans have a history of going "fuck the Feds, we're keeping our slaves, get off my lawn before I shoot you", which resulted in the only large-scale civil war in the nation's history. Could have gone either way, too.

Of course, the group currently keeping the slaves, and arguing that there should be more slaves, and doing anything they can to acquire and encourage more slaves has built their identity around "being the people who ended slavery". So they couldn't be slavers (or "oppressors" more generally) simply by defining their identity away from it.

Besides, what they're doing is only "illegal immigration" and that doesn't mean "growing a group of sub-citizens that have zero rights and is as such more or less wholly dependent on their massa's good graces to stay fed and clothed, and keeping them around because you only have to supply [a proxy for] those things"... right?

Then again, I'm sure the Confederate soldiers thought what they were doing was right too. Ironically, that is the one thing Blue cannot admit.

I'm not pro mass immigration at all, I'm quite unhappy with how it's been implemented, especially in the last decade across the West.

I'm just very very anti government force being applied retardedly and without extremely high standards for conduct and use of force

A libertarian nightwatchman state was off the table before I was born. If you build a boot and gleefully stomp on the faces of your opponents, you don't get to cry when the boot ends up on the other foot.

Alternatively, would you rather Trump just issued letters of marque and reprisal to citizens to hunt illegals and communists? Something tells me you'd flood the zone with tears over that, too.

Sorry forgot to respond

If you build a boot and gleefully stomp on the faces of your opponents, you don't get to cry when the boot ends up on the other foot.

I didn't build the boot? I'm also not a shitlib and have been deeply against wokism for basically my entire life.

I went to schools that were deeply immersed in grievance politics and "wokism" long before it was cool, and I found it stupid then, as I do now.

Alternatively, would you rather Trump just issued letters of marque and reprisal to citizens to hunt illegals and communists?

No, I just think that agents of the government exercising a monopoly on force should be held to extremely high standards, and relaxing those standards because they're "on your team" is stupid, because they very much are not on your team, even if your goals are aligned right now.

Well, there's our disagreement. I think they seem to be operating at a shockingly high standard. Vanishingly few bad arrests, and extremely reasonable uses of force when we don't just consider activist lies.

bitching like a Karen

muzzle these retards first

If your reaction to this is to make fun of a guy acting the way most people in his situation would act, and then express anger at the people protesting it instead of the federal agents actually doing it, you’ve lost me and most Americans, and you’re gonna see it at the ballot box.

First, you don't get to just assume what's happening there. What the agents are actually doing in that video is restraining a guy. There are countless examples of old, boomer libtards assaulting these officers because they are bad people with delusions of grandeur. Maybe the ICE actions against that guy were unprovoked and unreasonable, but you certainly don't get to just assume that.

Have you ever actually lost a fight or suffered serious physical pain? Most people, in that situation, act a certain way. They become irrational and agitated, stressed and panicked.

The guy in that video reminds me of a different video. I won't link it because it's quite upsetting, feel free to look it up. In the video, a couple confronts a male neighbor in the snow over some petty bullshit, the culmination of months of relentless Karen harassment, and the man, a single father of an extremely disabled child, finally loses it.

He goes back into his house, gets a gun, and opens fire on the couple, fatally injuring both of them. And the truly remarkable thing about the video is that while the couple is bleeding to death on the ground they are still ranting and screeching like the unholy avatar of Karen. Not "OMG, help, I'm in so much pain." But "I don't care if I'm dying, your brutally autistic son's wheelchair makes too much noise in the morning, and I'm going to report you to the HOA! Why haven't you shoveled your driveway?! You're a disgrace, no wonder your son is a retard!"

That's the energy that dude brings in the ICE video. He doesn't sound hurt, or even alarmed. He sounds like he's saying the magic words that make law enforcement the bad guys. He'll probably get to pop a Cialis and fuck an old hippie afterwards.

But I don't think you're correct about "most people". This crap comes from a special breed of entitled Main Characters and every bit of enabling just makes the world a worse place. Do you really want carefully clipped sections of those videos to be the new meta for what we see at the ballot box? Because there's about a million hours of body cam footage going the other way.

"I don't care if I'm dying, your brutally autistic son's wheelchair makes too much noise in the morning, and I'm going to report you to the HOA! Why haven't you shoveled your driveway?! You're a disgrace, no wonder your son is a retard!"

I don't recall this part of the altercation post the actual shooting starting. I assume you're talking about Jeffrey Spaide killing James and Lisa Goy.

Well, with that I had to go rewatch the video. (Obviously disturbing, people dying.) You are correct. The bit immediately after the first shooting where she's yelling "You fucker!" was much more involved in my memory. And the son being theirs instead of his... woof. Talk about misremembering important details!

Well, I suppose this is in line with eyewitness testimony being famously unreliable. I'd expect for video review the mind can also add/remove/compress the events in such unusual ways that it becomes a completely different story in memory.

Also a solid reminder to double-check sources. I actually thought about it, but decided that the video was quite unpleasant and I didn't want to rewatch it. I still could have found an article or transcript that might have helped.

In fact, that would make no sense. It's the Goys who were murdered and they were also the ones with the autistic son. Spaide shot himself but no last words after he pulled the trigger were recorded.

Yeah, "Pussy, huh?" were the last words he uttered on tape. That and with the case where Buzz Aldrin punched Bart Sibrel sure reminds me not to insult anyone on their courage lest they suddenly find it. Though I'm sure any modicum of de-escalation at any point would have gone a long way for the Goys.

I mean this is equally speculation on your part that the guy is just some libtard of the type you describe. I don’t have much else to say on this other than that I agree the bodycam footage would be good to see and I hope it comes out, though I’m not optimistic that it will. I do acknowledge that often bodycam footage shows quite a different story than what media reports, so if that’s the case here it’s in ICE’s interest to release it.

Your example seems to prove the opposite of what you're trying to. If one of the possible reactions to obvious fatal injury is angrily ranting as if you haven't just been shot, then that makes the ICE video guy's ranting less indicative of whether he's actually hurt, not a proof that he wasn't.

Possible, but so unlikely that it's existence proof consists of a single video that went viral precisely because the reaction was so disturbingly inhuman.

It's about a million times more likely that the man being arrested by ICE was just not actually being subjected to "break six ribs" levels of force. Injured rib is a great fake injury because there's no casts or visible proof except occasionally clutching your chest in pain, but if you bend a bit and don't clutch your chest in pain then probably no one will notice. But if the story were true, it would be national news because the overwhelmingly left-leaning media would be thrilled to finally have a perfect example of ICE brutality, and the man would be sueing for damages.

Given that none of those things happened or seem to be happening, I stand by my prediction that the activists are full of shit on top of being horrible people.

Possible, but so unlikely that it's existence proof consists of a single video that went viral precisely because the reaction was so disturbingly inhuman.

You mean you've seen a single video. Personally, while I don't have a habit of watching liveleak and such, I've heard of the general phenomenon of people in a high-adrenaline situation failing to notice pain.

Cool. Any thoughts on any of the Bayesian evidence arguments?

More comments

I actually don't act this way with authority figures. Even if their apprehension of me is unjust. Nor do most people I know.

Are we talking "traffic stop" unjust apprehension, or "barged into your home and put your face to the floor"?

Both. Because for better or worse, I have the intuitive sense that holding up the process is going to make things WORSE for me.

And I have at least one instance where being uber cooperative likely SAVED me from the worst that could happen - and I was absolutely guilty.

And I have at least one instance where being uber cooperative likely SAVED me from the worst that could happen - and I was absolutely guilty.

Alright. Tell us a story.

I object to the current DHS, CBP, ICE behavior on the basis of the collateral damage they seem to be ok inflicting on actual US citizens who aren’t even bothering them.

Is this actually happening, and if so, how often? Searching for your story I see a lot about a "shocking video" but the video i find, while it does show a man in running gear being arrested, shows nothing more than that and isn't shocking at all. All the "shocking" details seem to come from biased sources.

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-citizens-arrested-detained-against-will

170 citizens detained and counting

... So about 1 in 2 million American citizens? Are you genuinely concerned you'll be one of them? You weren't in the past year. I'll hazard a guess you also weren't struck by lightning in the past year and that is the more surprising fact (about 1/1,222,000 per year).

I'm actually shocked the number is so low; this isn't deportations, just detainment. I'm pretty sure the normal police have a much worse record of detaining innocents (though my attempts to look it up only give results about ICE, perhaps predictably).

If this number is accurate, it's just not a real problem: it's not going to happen to you and it's not going to happen to anyone you personally know. In fact, it happens just enough the media can make it seem like a common occurrence. The fact you're aware of it at all is the Chinese Robber Fallacy in action.

I'm not American, so no

I just think standing up (or massively expanding) a new militarized government force, one who also in this case likes to mask up, not uniform up, and generally act like aggressive retards is a massive self own. They're racking up a small, but growing resume of doing awful shit to American citizens which will only grow larger and more frequent as they expand.

I think further, if you support the government creating yet another group of goons who get to fuck people up, detain them without rights or due process, and above all, operate in an environment of "eh whatever, shit happens" then you are a cuck.

You might feel fine about it, but make no mistake, you're sitting in the chair

A similar number of children have been receiving trans medicine and surgery and this forum has been absolutely livid. Seems like every user with children expressed genuine fear of their kids being transed. It is quite fair to be livid about similarly miniscule numbers of detained citizens, especially when the supporters of ICE indicate that they want the numbers to increase.

I'm not sure I'd say 'similar;' 5700 over 4 years (1425 a year) out of not all American citizens but only the 73 million American children is nearly 40 times more common!

But sure, I at least am willing to bite the bullet and say that neither of these are real problems. Could they become problems if they become vastly more common? Sure. ... But realistically, is that going to happen? Given, as you implicitly agree, these events are so rare an order of magnitude isn't nearly enough to elevate them to a substantial risk, ICE is going to have to massively accelerate operations before this becomes something genuinely worth worrying about. I'd personally put the floor for even considering a given risk at around 1/50,000 per year -- your odds of dying in a car crash in a given year are about ten times that, all-cause mortality for a 30-year-old 100 times that -- and it's got a long way to go to get there.

Actually, given the current ratio of detained citizens to deported non-citizens (about 170/500,000), they're going to run out of people to deport well before crossing that threshold; well before even breaking 5700. Their error rate could get much worse, I suppose? Well, again, I'm surprised it's as low as it is now, so that definitely seems plausible. Still, it's an enormous gap.

A detained citizen is inconvenienced for a couple of days and many of them were very literally asking for it. A transed kid has their endocrine system skull-fucked forever because people they trusted lied to them.

One of these things is 4-6 orders of magnitude worse than the other.

I think policies should also have a "needless stupidity" modifier.

Some things are bad implementations of policies that are at least somewhat necessary. Some things are just needlessly stupid and never needed to happen and that makes them more egregious because of what they imply about our systems.

It is quite fair to be livid about similarly miniscule numbers

The thing is I've been told that it's not, and I never saw you step in before. Can I count on you saying something the next time someone uses this argument?

Anyway, sure, give these people some restitution. Unlike transgender care, this is actually reversible.

The thing is I've been told that it's not, and I never saw you step in before.

I didn't have a precedent to refer to before.

Can I count on you saying something the next time someone uses this argument?

Only if it actually becomes a commonplace bipartisan argument. Otherwise I'll follow the example of other users and keep only using it when it's my side suffering the miniscule excesses.

I didn't have a precedent to refer to before.

How exactly did you run into this forum being absolutely livid about the small number of kids being transed without seeing the "come on, it's just a tiny percentage of people affected"?

Only if it actually becomes a commonplace bipartisan argument.

I literally just agreed with you, what more do you want?

More comments

"Detained". So, comprehensive examples of "detained" that have come up in the stories I've seen and that we've discussed here.

  1. Retired vet who was working security at the weed farm that used illegal child labor. Was held for a few days.

  2. The guy who was technically born in the US, then his mom took him back to Mexico to raise him in a remote village that didn't even speak Spanish. Guy snuck back over the border with his actually illegal friends and got stopped by them in Florida. Was held for a few days while the authorities figured out what Aztec language he spoke and confirmed his identity.

And in general, 170 out of 500k is an arror rate of 0.00034. Can you name another government function with an error rate that low?

As I said in my other comment, I'm not against ICE at all, I think that agents of the government exercising a monopoly on force should be held to extremely high standards, and relaxing those standards because they're "on your team" is stupid, because they very much are not on your team, even if your goals are aligned right now.

it's a tough sell when you're rounding up hardworking people just trying to make a buck.

No one is seeing this. Functionally no one has ever seen anyone get rounded up by ICE at all. If you think that's a reasonable description of reality, then you're in a propaganda bubble.

Have you considered that you, too, are affected by a propaganda bubble?

Just a couple days ago there was an ICE raid at a car wash right down the street from where I live. They didn’t have a warrant to enter the building so they simply arrested all the employees who happened to be outside at the time (which is to say, the ones who were drying and vacuuming cars). Many of those arrested said they had legal work permits in their lockers inside, but they were not allowed to retrieve them. In fact the owner insists that ALL of the employees had proper work permits and has been pretty furious to the local media. (For what it’s worth I find this believable, because the car wash is a relatively bougie one for the area, the kind where people bring their nice new BMW— I don’t even always use it, even though it’s good, because it’s more expensive than the others nearby— and so I honestly don’t think the owners are short-changing the workers, which is the primary motivation for hiring illegals.)

This is very literally “rounding up hardworking people trying to make a buck”! They were actively working when they were arrested! Trying to convince people this stuff isn’t happening (and it’s good that it is) is ridiculous an extremely ineffective messaging strategy.

I am not completely unsympathetic toward ICE, I don’t want to see it abolished and I certainly acknowledge the reality of the problems we have with illegal immigration. Most people being deported very much deserve it, and I have limits on my sympathy even for the sympathetic cases. But the impunity being given to ICE is genuinely very bad, and raids like the one I’ve described (which very much ARE happening) are pretty much indefensible. If nothing else, people need to have the opportunity to show their papers if they’re being accused of not having papers! If the response to that is “well we can’t let them go get them because they might run, and we can’t escort them to their locker because we have no warrant to enter this building”, too bad, you should’ve thought of that before you started.

This is very literally “rounding up hardworking people trying to make a buck”! They were actively working when they were arrested!

The relevant factor isn't lazy or hardworking, it's American or foreign. Once upon a time I would care more about this, but that was millions and millions of foreigners ago.

I decline to participate in your ratchet. We can undo the immigration if we choose to, and I want Trump and the admin choosing to every hour of every day until 2029.

I honestly don't believe you. If this were true, I would expect it to lead the national news. Every leftwing journalist in the country would be talking about it. We've had nine months of these stories being falsified or collapsing under scrutiny, to the point where I'm genuinely baffled at how on point ICE seems to be. Maybe we should just put Tom Homan in charge of the entire government.

But the grand total number of arrested and deported people so far is something in the ballpark of 500k. Many of those will not have been in super visible locations, so round that down further. The overwhelming majority of Americans (99%+) have never seen anyone getting loaded into an ICE van. The number of people who have watched with their real eyes as a "hardworker just trying to make a buck" gets picked up for deportation is probably something like 0.01% of Americans as a highball estimate.

If I seem to offer them impunity it's because I've been having this conversation for 9 months, and as best I can tell their error rate is between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude better than any other branch of the government.

I also found it, wasn't that hard

I don't want to doxx OP so I'm not going to post it, but I found a local news report after about five seconds of looking. On the other hand, everyone knows where I live, so I'll have no trouble posting this news report from a couple months ago. It's not mentioned in the video, but the restaurant was open at the time, with customers inside, and the agents also managed to start a small fire in the kitchen after they damaged the gas line of a stove. I don't want to say these stories are exactly common, but when they appear in the relatively unbiased medium of local news every couple months in an area without a high immigrant population at all, what sort of impression are people supposed to get? Why would people think that those detained are criminals or otherwise bad people when ICE just no comments the news?

Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what kind of people are being deported because it's really beside the point. The important thing is that the perception exists among a lot of people, and calling them morons who live in a bubble isn't going to change that perception. This is the same logic that led to the Democrats underestimating Trump in 2016. "How could anyone possibly vote for that man? We can't lose!" Followed by a bunch of crap about how Hillary's email scandal wasn't a big deal and all the other nonsense that they assumed the electorate downplayed because they were motivated to not care about it. As I say in another comment above, this is how waves happen; you assume you have a broad mandate without doing any research to confirm how popular your policies are, ignore or downplay information that suggests people don't like this shit, talk about whatever "structural advantage" you have through gerrymandering, a Blue Wall, becoming majority minority, or whatever, and then act surprised when you get shellacked. This is exactly how the Democrats went from having a supermajority in 2009 to being in the position that they are now.

relatively unbiased medium of local news

Bro, did you watch your own video? It's literally a press release from an anti-ICE activist group presented as a news clip. Every single person interviewed is from the same anti-ICE rally without a single countering take.

Meanwhile the reporters do note that the agents had a warrant and arrested so many illegals that both locations shut down temporarily. That is nothing like the "legal immigrants dragged away while begging for the chance to go get their papers" crap I was replying to.

the perception exists among a lot of people

And this perception has little to do with reality. So please stop actively making it worse. "A lot of people believe these wild exagerrations and lies I'm actively peddling, so you'd better start acting as if the lies are true". How about I keep pointing out that they're wild exagerrations and you stop making it worse?

You're simultaneously missing my point and making it for me. They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything. They're doing the same thing you're doing where they're hoping people just assume that everything that ICE does is 100% justified, optics be damned. And if they think otherwise then it's just because they're brainwashed by activist propaganda. Both of those things could be completely true, but it doesn't matter.

When that story broke I watched the news report in the kind of bar where people sit and watch the news, with people who aren't exactly liberal, and they were all uneasy about the whole thing. That restaurant has a location about ten minutes away and everyone has eaten there (though I'm personally not a fan), and there's a very real anxiety that they could be enjoying dinner only to have it interrupted by Federal agents barging in because a dish washer doesn't have his papers.

I flesh this out more in another comment, but wave elections happen when a party ignores obvious warning signs and either denies that there's a problem or makes excuses for why things aren't quite going the way they like. Maybe you're right and maybe this isn't really a problem, but there's a long list of other things people don't like about this administration, and if your only response is that it isn't a problem, then don't be surprised if something catastrophic happens.

They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything.

On what grounds do you believe this to be true?

  • Did the presenters claim this?
  • Did the presenters claim this with evidence?
  • Did the presenters ask the other side to say anything?
  • Did the presenters acknowledge anything the other side said?
  • Did you do your due diligence to see if the presenter claiming this was lying?
  • Did you look for other sources other than your chosen presenters?
  • Did you ask for other sources that you were unable to find?
  • Did you ignore or dismiss other sources that have been provided, maintaining a totality by categorical exclusion of contrary evidence and speakers?

They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything.

The other side is constantly talking about the criminal records and unsavory behavior of the people they're deporting. That just doesn't make the news.

They're doing the same thing you're doing where they're hoping people just assume that everything that ICE does is 100% justified

I'm not assuming. I've had this conversation a bunch of times, and found the anti-ICE people to be about as well-justified in their claims as when certain people go off about the Holocaust.

You do realize this is right off the back on you taking professional activist press statements at 100% face value, right?

optics be damned.

This is the entire dispute. Optics is subjective. Optics is in the eye of the beholder. Optics is two movies seen on the same screen. Why do you take left-wing optics framing as an immutable fact of reality?

When that story broke I watched the news report in the kind of bar where people sit and watch the news, with people who aren't exactly liberal, and they were all uneasy about the whole thing.

Did Albert Einstein recite the "then they came for the" poem and everyone clapped?

and there's a very real anxiety that they could be enjoying dinner only to have it interrupted by Federal agents barging in because a dish washer doesn't have his papers.

A "very real anxiety", wow. How many times has that happened to people you know? Are you similarly invested in very real anxieties about pretty white girls being raped and killed by illegal gang members?

and if your only response is that it isn't a problem

My response, which you're missing and making for me, is that this is a problem entirely because of the "optics", which is a shorthand for "dedicated propaganda campaign". You are correct that the right does need to get better at that, but it would behoove you to notice the extent to which you're participating in said campaign.

The problem is there's a million of these, where someone says ICE came in and arrested everyone even the American citizens who didn't do anything but ask the ICE agents some questions. And the stories often place front-and-center irrelevant details like the people detained not having a criminal record. But there's never any follow-up showing that all the relevant stuff is actually true. Instead this reporting is all simply repeating the claims of advocates. Which means that even someone like myself who is biased against law enforcement and believes they tend to be generally brutal starts to disbelieve the stories.

If that is indeed the case, then the administration needs to do a better job communicating that. By which I mean they need to make that information available to media either via press release or simply giving all the details when they ask. They can't just not comment or simply confirm that they executed a search warrant. Local news these days won't even hire copy editors; it may be a journalistic best practice to verify everything, but in today's media environment they aren't going to have a guy looking up criminal records, especially when these stories go out the same day. That being said, the stories I've seen around here never mention the criminal record or lack thereof, or anything about the victims for that matter. People aren't going to just assume that someone has a criminal record. If that's part of the story, you have to tell them.

If that is indeed the case, then the administration needs to do a better job communicating that.

Nobody who believes all those stories will listen, and any denials will just be taken as confirmation by them. There's no point in trying to satisfy those acting in bad faith.

That being said, the stories I've seen around here never mention the criminal record or lack thereof

https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/zero-criminal-record-nine-workers-detained-by-ice-boston-car-wash/UXQPWN3VUNAZHMYMBIK7K4MS6M/

Except you're doing the same thing you're accusing them of by assuming that all these people do, in fact, have criminal records and you're just being lied to about it. And the people who think otherwise are hopeless and won't believe you no matter what you tell them. This is the kind of mentality that I was talking about that causes elections to be lost. This conversation started by a comment I made where I listed the deportation policy as an example of a Trump policy that was at least somewhat unpopular and may be among the things that costs the Republicans votes. It was just one of a number of things, and we could be talking about any of them, really. I got comments from people who told me that this was exactly what they wanted him to do. Well, great, but you're not the only one voting. This particular discussion stems from a comment where someone tried to argue, in essence, that there were either no or very few normal, hardworking people who were being deported, and that they were all criminals. I don't think that that's true, but I'm ultimately not trying to litigate whether it's true or not. The important thing is that there is a perception that it's true, and it's not just a perception that's held among woke socialists who want open borders and wouldn't vote Republican if their lives depended on it; it's a perception that's also held among the kind of people who voted for Trump in 2024 but are uneasy with the conspicuous brutality with which ICE is carrying out it's business. I know some of these people. They exist. They decide elections. I beg your pardon if I'm wrong, but you're not one of those people. I doubt you're a few policy tweaks away from voting Democrat in the next election.

I fleshed this out a little in another comment, but the larger point I was trying to make was that wipeout elections tend to happen whenever the party in power ignores and makes excuses for obvious signs of trouble. Trump fans who all love Trump and all need Trump and think that everything Trump does is great and can't believe that anyone doesn't like Trump and that everyone is being unfair to Trump and the big bad media isn't given everyone the whole story, with which they'd understand how great Trump is aren't the people who are going to decide the next election. If that were the case, he would have won in 2020 and wouldn't be president now. Trump did not run away with the last election, even against a candidate as bad as Kamala Harris. When I rattle off a laundry list of things that are unpopular but that the Republican Party doesn't seem too concerned about addressing and the responses I get are that these things simply aren't problems you're making my point for me.

Except you're doing the same thing you're accusing them of by assuming that all these people do, in fact, have criminal records and you're just being lied to about it.

No, I believe they have no criminal records. It's just entirely irrelevant to whether they were proper targets of an immigration raid.

are uneasy with the conspicuous brutality with which ICE is carrying out it's business

What conspicuous brutality? The Rodney King arrest, THAT was conspicuous brutality. The ICE arrests look like normal arrests.

To be fair, everyone is in some sort of bubble, and as such you ignore the bubble at your own risk. Most people are getting their view of the world through some sort of media, and unfortunately social media, so you can’t just throw your hands up and say “it’s just a social media propaganda bubble.” The bubble has caused three assassination attempts. It swings elections.

If I wanted to steel-man the administration's choices, it seems that the very public ICE actions are intended to broadcast a message of unwelcomeness to would-be illegal immigrants. Uncontrolled traffic at the border is down, I think, in a large part due to changing perceptions here, and while many of the individual actions seem cruel, it's demonstrably effective at piercing perceptual bubbles ("Uncle Joe will let us in") more than having the VP say "do not come."

I don't have the time to write this up at length right now, but I feel like this aligns with a much deeper pattern. Basically, I think there's an older kind of wisdom that says it can be socially optimal for authority to make credible, even hard, threats that different groups take seriously, because if people take those threats seriously, they'll often behave in socially desired ways and then the threats don't even have to be exercised for the most part. BUT doing that does require authority figures to look, publicly, like mean assholes, and it might require implementing nasty punishments a couple of times in especially public ways. You could say this goes all the back, at the level of theory, to at least Machiavelli, with his observation that, if a ruler has to choose between being feared or loved, it's generally more stable to be feared.

Internalizing this requires understanding second order effects on some deep level, and understanding that authority might need to be dickish in the correct ways for the greater good. And it absolutely seems like an understanding of the world that is apparently abhorrent to a lot of well-educated progressives I know. Interestingly, those same progressives seem to have exactly the same difficultly when it comes to parenting and holding the line on their own kids, a difficulty that often produces nasty consequences, so I don't think this is about hypocrisy. I think it's just an actual deep moral revulsion at "being mean", even if it's trivially necessary and for the greater good.

When I hear of "migrants dying on rickety boats trying to cross to Europe" I keep wondering if the tally would be positive or negative and by how much if Europeans countries had been sinking the unidentified vessels with unlawful intentions approaching their coasts right from the start. Sometimes, real mercy is harshly disincentivizing bad and dangerous behavior.

It's trivially true, even obvious. Sink a couple of boats and far fewer people die in the long run, nevermind the preventing other problems.

I think Australia has been successful without actively sinking boats, and the US' former "wet foot dry foot" policy seemed a IMO decent way to balance the incentives.

I think Australia has been successful without actively sinking boats,

It hasn't. The offshore detention process is corruption, with each illegal immigrant costing 1.5 million dollars a year in fees (some of which goes directly to organised crime). At the same time, indian immigration is currently running at absurd levels to boot.

I don't know about that. A lot of the boats already sink just because they're floating pieces of trash. "There's a chance we'll sink and drown" is something immigrants are already pricing in when they take that leap of faith. Obviously there's some number of deliberate sinkings that would move the needle, but I don't think it's "a couple".

The actual consequences of killing a boatload of migrants in cold blood are far broader than just the deterrent factor though, so the utilitarian calculus is not obvious. E.g. It might lead to diplomatic isolation for the country responsible, protests and counterattacks, legal cases against the killers, etc.

Plausibly true, but not trivially.

Depends on how many potential migrants actually learn about the policy, evaluate their odds correctly, and decide they aren’t that desperate.

They would learn about it before the end of the day, they would not want to drown, and France is really not that terrible (despite all the French people).

Yeah, I'd agree it's plausible but far from trivially true. Which I why I wonder about it. How many boats would they have needed to sink? And you can look to Palestine to see how long some people can insist on taking basically suicidal actions even against a grimly determined superior force.

Palestine is a near-perfect example where Jihad Muslims who believe in martyrdom and paradise hopelessly fight a losing battle against the IDF, while almost all moderate Muslims flee the combat zones when told by the IDF that Gaza City, or Rafah, etc. will be invaded.

These non-combatant Palestinians (i.e. Jihad doubters) were the same ones who hate Israel enough to parade the corpses from the Nova massacre, and celebrate the taking of Israeli civilian hostages. They are brutal uneducated people, but only a small subset are suicidal would-be martyrs. Sam Harris has been saying this for years.

When ICE is raiding Home Depot parking lots,.farms, and restaurants, nobody is under the impression that the people they're rounding up are just there to hang out.

Isn't Home Depot where they picked up the wife-beating, human-smuggling, child-exploiting gang member?

Is that the weed farm with the child slaves you're talking about?

But what's the ratio of Home Depot day laborers with no other legal problems to people who are criminals even aside from the border crossing? Do you know? Does it matter? Is the standard "your policies can never have a single instance of a sad optic and will never get any credit for any number of positive optic scenes"?

There's a reason you're not posting links to the ICE twitter feed going "Damn, Democrats. I'm so concerned about the optics of all these rapists you're going to the mats to protect."

Just so with every other issue. Troop deployments; are people seeing Stunning and Brave Activist Women denouncing tyranny, or are they seeing the charts with stunning drops in carjacking and murder rates?

Your point isn't wrong, but the real issue is that conservatives need better methods of dealing with suicidal empathy.

That may be a coup complete problem.

or are they seeing the charts with stunning drops in carjacking and murder rates?

I haven't seen these charts. Do you have a link?

Only normie source on the first page of results. Damn. I knew that mainstream outlets reacted to Trump wins like vampires to a cross, but I'm still surprised by the dearth of coverage.

The DC police statistics do show a drop, but the chart isn't IMO clear that it was a specific inflection point. Plus I have trouble believing that the last month or two have all their paperwork completed and won't change later. But down almost 50% in the past 12 months versus the previous 12 months is good. But 2024 was massively down from 2023 too.

https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/carjacking

Your point isn't wrong, but the real issue is that conservatives need better methods of dealing with suicidal empathy.

That may be a coup complete problem.

It is. There really is no way to stop a sufficiently committed suicidal person short of killing them. As an example, Seneca speaks in a respectful tone about a gladiator who killed himself by shoving the communal toilet shit sponge down his throat.

That’s commitment. How do you stop that guy? Every gladiator has to use the toilet, so do you assign a guard to him every day? He’s a gladiator, he might be able to take a guard, so do you assign two? Three? Does the Imperial economy eventually just center around everyone guarding everyone else so no one commits suicide? Because that sounds like a very fragile and unsustainable equilibrium.

Our society is like that gladiator. It yearns to die and will shove the shit sponge down its throat if no more pleasant opportunity presents itself.

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