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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24805 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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without letting them [wind down their life here]

They had literal years, decades even, to do this. How much time is enough?

That is what strikes me as being in violation of the Golden Rule, as being unkind, cruel, inhumane about ICE raids.

I'd rather them prosecute the traffickers directly, but "daring to remove trafficked humans" might legitimately be the most punishment for the pro-trafficking faction that the anti-trafficking faction can muster.

They had literal years, decades even, to do this. How much time is enough?

Quoting myself from elsewhere in the thread:

I don't think human psychology is such that a mass message of this kind is fungible with a personal "you, yes you, we know who and where you are - you need to scram" notification, for much the same reason that a big sign that says 'don't step on the grass' is not as effective as a guard personally yelling 'hey, you, with the ugly sweater, get off the grass' - even though, in the latter case, many more people will comply with the verbal command than escalate to physical violence. We can wish human behavior were more rational, but you've got to work with what you've got.

Sure, but what actually happened here was half the country going "here's a free plane ticket, come on in, we'll never enforce this law, and you should ignore it- the guard may personally tell you you're in violation but he can't do anything, don't worry".

The guard now has the power to enforce the law, and has proceeded to do that.

without letting them pack their bags, say goodbye to their neighbors and coworkers, figure out what to do about pets, take a last stroll around the neighborhood that was their home for [X] years

As the reply to you states, a good chunk of these are already in the "this is the time you have to pack your bags and say goodbye" stage. For the ones that have not, they've been on notice since January 2025 when some official got on TV and said the guard's power was coming back, and literally half the nation (and statistically, where the trafficked humans are most likely to live) went into hysterics about "the guard is finally removing people".

Killing enemy soldiers is not breaking Golden Rule.

It might not be their fault they were there, but I'm not actually owed special protection from things that are not my fault, and trying to force me to grant it is an injury much like removing trafficked humans is to you. You could have bargained to change that law, and compromised with me, but you didn't do that. So, by Golden Rule Your Rules, Fairly...

Killing enemy soldiers is not breaking Golden Rule.

No, but the nice thing about killing enemy soldiers is that it's almost perfectly symmetrical. You are killing them to prevent them from killing you (or your countrymen): the nature of the harm you are inflicting on them is exactly isomorphic to the evil that you are trying to prevent by doing so. In contrast, I contend that the amount of suffering inflicted on a given deportee by grabbing them overnight far exceeds the very diffuse harm that their presence on US soil inflicted on a given American. It's basically a torture-vs-dust-specks problem.

I contend that the amount of suffering inflicted on a deportee by grabbing them overnight far exceeds the very diffuse harm that their presence on US soil inflicted on a given American.

Good for you. I do not.

Stealing a cent from everyone would make you very rich; when punished, it looks disproportionate- wasn't it only a mere cent from everyone?
Can't you spare an extra cent?

But it's not about the extra cent, it's about removing the people who have it normalized that cents are available to steal; that's why we punish white-collar criminals when they do this.

(And to the extent that it makes the traffickers feel bad- it should, and "making them feel bad as punishment" is a salient thing, because the way they trafficked the humans was also stealing, though of political power rather than directly financial. Now, that theft is being prosecuted, and the thief's final argument, "but you were bad for being able to afford it and refusing to", is just DARVO.)

Would you care to elaborate on that? It seems very hard for me to picture how a given illegal immigrant, individually, is doing any kind of "harm" to anyone at all. Sure, in some distant sense they're contributing the continuing existence of an economy in which it becomes substantially harder for a certain class of American workers to find a job, and, from there, to all sorts of unpleasant second-order effect on the economy - but that guy in particular - one illegal immigrant more or less - is not going to make a measurable difference in anybody's lived experience. Removing 500,000 illegal immigrants, yes, that gets to making a substantial difference to a lot of citizens' lives. But removing any one guy? As far as I can tell, the effect size is indistinguishable from zero. I don't just mean that the effect is very small; it's that the immediate practical consequences are so irrelevant to the broad market forces at work that that guy's disappearance is not going to reshape the economy one iota, and consequently Americans' collective quality of life will not be improved at all.

Or are you coming at this from the other end, and disagreeing about how traumatic and painful being grabbed overnight would be? That seems even stranger to me.

It seems very hard for me to picture how a given illegal immigrant, individually, is doing any kind of "harm" to anyone at all.

Which just shows the folly of analyzing harm exclusively on an individual level. If a counterfeiter prints $1000 per month in fake money, his individual impact on the economy will be basically nil. If the government decided that throwing their ass in prison would cause more harm than he's causing the US economy, and as a result every American resident starts printing their own $1000 every month, this would result in total economic chaos. Many laws serve to guide collective, rather than individual, action towards a more beneficial trajectory, and I don't see a reason to suddenly stop and carve out an exception for immigration.

If the government decided that throwing their ass in prison would cause more harm than he's causing the US economy, and as a result every American resident starts printing their own $1000 every month, this would result in total economic chaos

Granted. But surely, if there were already millions of people doing this, punishing every one of them as harshly as we would the first wise-guy to figure out this neat trick in an otherwise law-abiding society would clearly be overkill. We place harsh punishments on these kinds of deleterious-in-aggregate violations as a deterrent - to disincentivize anyone from breaking the norm, crossing the bright line. Part of why the harshness of the punishment is morally justifiable is that you are trying to game-theoretically create conditions such that ~0 people will commit the crime at all, and thus you hopefully won't have to inflict it on anyone in practice.

When Moloch has already sunk his teeth deep into the former norm, when the line is being trampled every day by millions of people, the calculus is completely different. At that point, trying to robotically apply the harsh punishment to every single person who crosses the line trivially creates far more suffering than would be strictly necessary to prevent the greater evil (because the very harsh punishment on the books was arrived at in large part as a matter of deterrence, and the deterrence angle is now moot because everybody's doing it anyway). You need to go back to the drawing board and figure out the least-painful way to right the ship ASAP, not fixate on what the deterrent punishment would have been in a world where hardly anyone crossed the line.

You need to go back to the drawing board and figure out the least-painful way to right the ship ASAP

We are here now: taking Blue's pawns off the board, in a fashion meant to ensure that, when Blue again calls for more pawns, less of them show up (Blue media is doing a great job of over-reporting the dangers here). Would you prefer Red go after Blue directly?

Hence the physical removals, hence the [so far, only claimed] attempts to stabilize the nations from which they come.

robotically apply the harsh punishment to every single person who crosses the line trivially creates far more suffering than would be strictly necessary to prevent the greater evil

This is robotically applying the harsh punishment to the people who trafficked those humans (the greater evil in this case, at least from Red's perspective)- or at least, what Blue perceives as a harsh punishment despite it being objectively pretty lenient. Blue has to see on the news more of their pets being deleted, and whining about being afraid they'll be removed, every single day. They have to listen to their peers cry that It's So Over and marinate in their own hysterics about the end of Our Democracy. Some of them get so angry about this that they try to run over cops.

As for "but it's a human rights disaster", Blue has no leg to stand on here- they could have compromised for an amnesty properly but refused to, so clearly they don't care about their pets' rights beyond their usefulness as pets.

Ironically, that's the best way to criticize this event- using a human shield to cover hurting the outgroup, then striking back under "self-defense" when the outgroup decides they care as much about the life of the human shield as the ingroup did.

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