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Every White Male In Minnesota is now ICE
First I saw the video of a MSM Cameraman who was accused by a crowd of being ICE due to the car he drove. He himeslf was Anti-ICE and fine with opening his vehicle up and showing that all he had inside was camera equipment. The crowd was not mollified by this, their demands just grew more ridiculous. "Get another car! Rent a car!" They learned no lessons about stereotyping people based on their race and vehicle. It was the victim's fault for looking like the wrong type of person.
Then I saw the video of the tech workers sitting down for lunch together. One of the gentlemen was on an Anti-ICE Signal chat and saw a notification that was accusing him and his friends of being ICE. At first it seemed funny, but then the mob descended. And of course, despite this mob not having any badges, several of them covering up their faces, generally being a threatening bunch, these tech workers were expected to give out details about where they work, where they live, what their occupation is, their politics, etc. lest they face the wrath of the mob.
The videos are abundant once you start looking. The Tree Trimmer who has a caravan of Anti-ICE cars following them around, honking, for the crime of driving a work van with tinted windows. The tall white guy just walking by himself with a warm jacket.
The irony of it all is that this is what anti ICE groups are accusing ICE of doing. Going to places and harassing people based off of stereotypes without any legal authority to do so. Demanding evidence to prove that someone belongs here.
However, that's just not true. ICE goes after specific people who have a final order of dismissal from an Immigration judge. When they do so, they often find other illegal immigrants living in the same area or working at the same business, as that is the nature of these things. Oftentimes these people also have final orders of removal. And so it goes.
From January to October of last year, only 170 US citizens were detained by ICE as reported by ProPublica. Of those 170, many were arrested for interfering with ICE operations. Compare this with 234,211 removals (I don't have data on arrests or detentions, but I can assume the number of arrests/detentions is greater than removals. The "US Citizen arrest rate" is at most 0.07% of the ICE arrestees, probably much smaller due to fact that there are more detentions than removals.
The narrative of, "ICE is just going to immigrant communities and asking to see papers and then arresting anyone who can't prove without a shadow of a doubt that they're here legally," does not hold up to scrutiny. But it seems like Anti-ICE people are assuming this is their playbook because it's what they would do, and are now doing.
On a totally unrelated note, can you imagine how much worse things like this could get if the US adopts Universal Basic Income? Suddenly every midwit in the country, every marginal person, every post-wall cat lady on SSRIs simultaneously has (1) lots of free time; and (2) a desperate need to do something that feels remotely meaningful.
Aristotle talks about this in the Politics. He argues that, when it comes to paying citizens to take part in politics, the worst outcome is when the state pays for participation in such a way that those without productive work to do or assets to supervise have unlimited time to engage in politics, but the productive citizens are distracted from politics by their private concerns. This seems to me an obvious failure mode of UBI, even if most recipients just become consoomer-addicts.
But that's already here: anything the government pays for (or mandates employers/society at large pay for) that doesn't have a mandate for results, or UBJs (universal basic job) for short, enable this.
This is the reason the education-managerial complex is the way that it is; it exists because the people without productive work to do (as in, 1950s housewives) got bored and demanded it be created. This is why the workers of those jobs oppose any measure of standards (and those that are imposed are gamed into uselessness re: graduation rates), and the people who actually try tend to find themselves behind the political power curve (this failure mode is fractal).
The defense of UBI is that it allows you to send these people home with the intent of imposing standards on the jobs they were pretending to do- but zoom out and you find yourself/your society's productive efforts captured again by people who have nothing but time to try and rent-seek/insert themselves into every space they aren't welcome, so it's probably a wash on balance.
And inb4 "but the 19th Amendment enabled this, just repeal it", it really didn't; that was simply an expression of the law changing to reflect the conditions on the ground at the time (the bored women at the time had enough men on-side to enforce it). The 19th Amendment comes after the 18th Amendment.
Yes, absolutely, though there are more central cases than education. This is why boomers schizo out over "paid protestors", because they can't realize that it's one level of abstraction up for that: many of the people protesting have jobs, but NGO or whatever jobs which pay them for make-work while demanding they hold the type of politics which would get them out protesting.
Their salary (social security/OAS/your local equivalent thereof) depends on them not realizing.
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