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No, the Biden administration tried to throw out a completely toothless bill to distract people before an election, and remove some of the few constraints on progressive immigration bullshittery remaining.
Perhaps the way I wrote my comment misled you, but I wasn't specifically referring to that bill. The majority of Trump's agenda has been through executive orders that will be reversed the day after he leaves office, particularly since the center and center-left have soured on immigration enforcement after the last year.
I'd rather not block you because I sometimes enjoy reading your writing, but I'd also appreciate it if you stopped dropping by now and then with a 'you're wrong about everything, actually.' I respect and admire you, but I'm also at a loss as to how to interact with you in any kind of mutually beneficial way.
If you want to interact with me in some mutually beneficial way, then interact with me. I'm not chasing you with a cluebat and then disappearing into the wilderness after every bonk. Hell, the first reply I had to one of your comments I can find is nearly three months old, and it's not some harsh teardown of your every claim: it's saying that I wanted to believe you were right, but that being right wouldn't be enough to argue against malicious actors.
Or, you could comment on ways I'm wrong. Lord knows it happens enough. I'm not a gracious loser, but I like to think I can at least notice when I've lost, and you've got the domain expertise to do a credible contest in some matters.
I'm sorry that I'm not just pointing "this (up arrow emoji)" on the MMUD or tauren druid posts, but I generally try to avoid posting unless I either have further information or a correction, especially since this time of year is a clusterfuck.
That's more close to a coherent claim, though I'd quibble about how the start time works.
But you do understand why it's not that persuasive as a crux of your argument? There's zero trust that 'moderate' enforcement regimes would be tolerated or accepted -- not just because of the Lankford bill showing that 'moderate' meant no actual mandate, or that literal decades before that 'moderate' enforcement meant wildly net-positive illegal immigration, but simply that Trump tried that in the first administration, it was overwhelmingly not tolerated or accepted, and indeed its use was made to justify the massive uptick in tolerated illegal immigration under Biden.
Why do you think anything could be done about immigration on January 19th, 2025?
If you think I do this for the adoration of the community and the fuzzy feels, look at the vote counts on most of my posts. Or I can send you some of the death threat DMs, although those died down a bit since I mostly started avoiding grabbing live wire culture war issues.
Saying that conservatives should have taken HR815 as a compromise is a coherent claim, just one you dislike and disagree with.
I understand why it's not persuasive to you, and frankly to the others with dug in positions on immigrants and American identity. Do you understand why 'we will never trust any legislation on immigration again' is also not persuasive as an argument, in addition to being rather stupid? If you're done with the legislative process, go join the fedposters and leave me alone.
He did what? You think the rhetoric around muslim travel bans and shithole countries and building the wall with DOD funds rather than taking a DACA deal is the 'moderate' position? Stoking partisanship is going to win you elections and make your base love you, but it's not a recipe for passing laws in congress or winning in the court of popular opinion.
Yes, extreme positions and rhetoric provoke backlash, the same way that Biden suffered a backlash on immigration near the end of his term and Trump is probably suffering some level of backlash on ICE now. Time will tell, but however much people like to play rules lawyer about cars being lethal weapons, I don't think normies like seeing normie moms getting shot in the head.
Because Ezra Klein, Gavin Newsom, Kathy Hochul and a host of influential figures on the left admitting that illegal immigration is a problem and the Biden admin fucked up combined with shifts in the general population is the ideal time to pass immigration legislation. When else do you think it's going to happen? Now that Trump is calling blue cities warzones and making shitposts about Chiraq and we're seeing ICE raids in our neighborhoods? The opportunity for rapprochement and compromise was wasted.
I don't know how, and frankly I'd rather not - honestly, we'd both be happier if you went and found someone else to argue with.
So... is there a reason you asked how we could interact in ways other than criticism?
No, it is not. A coherent claim has to have some clear logical support. There needs to be an X thus Y component; otherwise it's just an ipse dixit.
And this sort of game is what drives me bonkers about HR815 getting used as a cudgel. You're not "specifically referring to that bill", and you aren't even saying it's an example or part of your example now, but you're also not going explain any level of specific support that could be falsified, to confront any of the reasons people might disagree, and you're not going to recognize that the people defending it here had to constantly
liecompletely miss details about every single section.No, my position is not "we will never trust any legislation on immigration again". My position is that any compromise on immigration needs to have immediate, serious, and costly compromises paid by the group that has spent half of the last forty years exploiting and ignoring the law for their own purposes, instead of people insisting that it's a compromise because it's an immigration bill and Ezra Klien lied about it.
If you think 'fedposting' is bad, you probably will do a better job arguing against it by arguing against it, instead of just going nuts shoving words in other people's mouths.
Trivially, as I demonstrated in the link that coincidentally wasn't worth responding to, it's actually pretty unclear how incompatible it is with winning in the court of popular opinion or passing laws in congress.
More critically, if a policy someone in the media gives a bad name, mean words, and sketchy misuses of DoD funds are all that it takes to make someone not-moderate on that position, you're going to have to give up ever Dem politician on the national level in the last thirty years, especially on gun control. Trump's actual actions were, despite his best efforts, not that far from those of the Obama era... as evidenced by one of his biggest 'scandals' on immigration enforcement revolving around pictures from the Obama era. Didn't matter. Suddenly everyone thought kids in cages were worth crying themselves to sleep over, until Biden got elected and they forgot it was even a thing.
... there's a minor quibble, here, about the 'normie hobby' of spending several minutes doing an Austin Powers impression in the middle of a bunch of federal officers trying to do their job. But it's a distraction.
In 1992, ATF agents trying to enforce a pretty arbitrary federal gun laws -- while operating off a bench warrant issued for a 'failure to appear' to a court date that was itself issued in error -- shot four people, killing two, including an unarmed woman holding a baby. Lon Horuichi, the sniper who killed the unarmed woman, had his state prosecution dropped after federal politicians intervened heavily in the state to unseat the only prosecutor willing to consider that a Bad Thing.
There was another thing, you might have heard about it in the context of charcoal briquettes for some reason? Oh, yeah, 82 people died, a significant portion of which were women or children. Many of them in pretty awful ways! Heavily motivated by the ATF wanting a big, high-profile win on a gun-related case.
And, of course, this had zero impact on Bill Clinton's then-active campaign for a federal assault weapon ban, which passed in 1994 and only ended when an unrelated Republican wave coincided with a sunset provision. Wasn't even controversial at a federal level until a couple complete nutjobs spent five-plus years digging into it and revealed that the official story in both cases had more holes than Ben_Garison's Lankford story, and even then you didn't get national television heads suggesting that maybe you can't shoot people or burn them on a pyre for being annoying and 'resisting arrest'.
(Not that one in a hundred normies could tell you what, say, LaVoy Finicum was protesting, either, but he didn't have a vagina, so he doesn't count.)
No one cared. Progressives don't give a damn about women getting shot. They care about what's politically useful, and what's on the television. And, hell, I'm not saying conservatives are different! (although I personally try to care; in addition to my IRL work, I've pointedly tried to stick to 'don't speak ill of the dead' for this specific example.)
After a sizable Republican trifecta, bluntly, if then. There is absolutely zero tolerance for any serious enforcement on immigration, there wasn't before Trump flopped his fat ass onto an escalator, and there won't be in my lifetime. There's not a single Democrat on the federal stage that can even credibly pretend to oppose sanctuary city policies hiding convicted murderers from ICE. Wasn't in December 2024, either.
Klein, Newsom, and Hochul 'admitted' a lot of things in the same sense that they admitted some trans policies were wrong or a Fieren villain admits anything: "words are a means for deceiving humans". And you can tell that, because Trump has not overstepped anywhere near as dramatically on trans stuff, and all three are bending over backwards for those at the same time they make mouth sounds about moderation, and that Newsom was promoting benefits for illegal immigrants in this supposed golden hour before Trump's second inauguration.
The opportunity for rapprochement and compromise was before someone else had power over you. There may well be strategic or tactical benefits for moderation on the behalf of the victors, but you have to actually make them and support them, not just that it costs political capital to do things, or that you have things you'd rather the political capital be spent on (I agree with you there!), but actually demonstrate that it's not the BATNA.
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