site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   31559 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

On Provision of Violence: (And some mild trauma processing).

I will try and avoid directly mentioning the Minnesota situation, but that’s obviously why I am writing.

I am not a police officer or active-duty military in a combat zone, despite that I have one of the few jobs that involves legalized provision of violence to individuals without their consent.

In healthcare this happens a few ways, one of which is treatment over objection, which happens for a variety of medical and psychiatric reasons and is in most settings a slow-motion problem that involves court and ethics committees. Emergency care absent consent is almost always adequately established retroactively without issue.

Far trickier is restraints.

Restraints happen for a lot of reasons. On the medical floors the classic example is delirious grandma flailing at the nurses. On psychiatric floors, well it should be obvious. In forensic (correctional) settings you have a variety of places where these becomes necessary because the patients are pretty much definitionally assholes. However, psychiatry and the ER are probably where this happens the most.

Fundamentally the reason for restraining patients is to protect the patient, the other patients, and staff. Plenty of people are a serious threat to themselves or others. Sometimes it is drugs. Sometimes it is delirium and confusion. Sometimes it is mental health, and sometimes it is pure personality.

People don’t usually appreciate being put in restraints. They fight back. Hard. Sometimes they attack unprovoked early which is a whole sperate problem. The impact of violence on healthcare workers is grossly underappreciated. It almost always goes unreported and unprosecuted. “The patient was sick” and it gets swept under the rug.

Nurses and techs are more risk than doctors, but it is a common way for careers in psychiatry and emergency medicine to end – tired of the threats and just giving up or injured and forced to bail out. Rarely people die, but it does happen.

During medical school I once got covered in my supervisor’s blood, and on another occasion, I had to carry away a chunk of somebody’s scalp. A guy I know from medical school once responded to a code in the middle of the night and found two patients and a nurse wrestling in the nursing station while another nurse slowly bled out from a neck wound.

I’ve been swept by a gun during a trauma (fucking search the bangers before, thanks), and handed a knife by a guy who was already searched while alone in a room. Yesterday, a nurse at another hospital in my region almost had their finger bitten off while restraining a patient, which is why I decided to write this.

And none of this occurred in the correction setting, which is far, far worse.

Below I have some lessons I’ve learned while dealing with this sort of thing.

-Violence is uniquely hard to deal with. At this point in my career, I can handle a medical code just fine. The risk of death is present, but the “enemy” is a disease. It fights back in predictable ways. Other people can get hurt (and I’ve seen it) but it doesn’t hit the same. Managing agitation is almost always far more uncontrolled and challenging. It is more likely to be different every time. It is enormously more stressful. And-

-It is hard to get used to safely managing violence. Training helps but very few people are actually dealing with situations that go pear shaped often enough to be calm, cool, collected, to learn lessons and get better next time. Most cops don’t deal with a serious incidence once. You can drill all you want but that isn’t enough real-world practice time to be actually good. It requires a lot.

-If you do get enough experience, being callous is nearly inevitable. The behavioral response team at a busy city hospital is going to be putting multiple patients in holds and restraints a week most of the time. They might get used to being punched in the face or nearly punched in the face. Some of their number may end up seriously injured. The fear is always there, but once you get used to it, you get used to it. You tune it out and it takes serious diligence to not blow things off and become blase. I don’t think I’m good at this. Someone with less training or dedication? Fuck no, it is an impossible task, anybody who could do it wouldn’t because inflicting violence sucks. You feel bad. You don't want to be in that position. You don't want to do it.

-Communication is hard. Restraining someone is like most police action. You have a large group overpowering and bum rushing one person. This should make things easy. I am also in charge, they can’t touch the patient without my explicit order, nor can they administer IM medication or put the patient in restraints. Everything runs through me. Clear communication. Should be easy, no? Fuck no. Everybody is shouting, the patient most of all. Uncontrolled things are happening. Somebody drops the keys. Somebody trips.

Tearing open the chest of a patient in a clamshell thoracotomy is a more controlled and clearer situation. A sub 90 second C-section is a more controlled situation. A “fight” hampers communication like nothing else. And that’s in a hospital with more than enough people and an experienced team.

-Everybody can’t breathe. Some patients who need to put in restraints are more “behavioral” (this means that instead of someone who thinks the doctors are leaches from Mars or is zonked on a UTI…. they are just an asshole). These patients almost always loudly shout they can’t breathe while being restrained. They say they can’t move their limbs while flipping you off. They'll claim racism no matter your race and their race. This goes double for forensic patients. You start to tune out these complaints since they are “always” lies. The connection to law enforcement is clear, I hope.

-We don’t like it. I’ve never seen staff bad enough that they enjoy restraining patients because they like the power, sometimes you see people who get disrespected and get some gross catharsis out of it. For the most part they hate it. The emotions afterwards can be hard to manage, even if you are a good person who didn’t like it. People say things. Stuff comes out.

-Lastly, violence isn’t safe. No form of violence is safe. Some are safer than others, but patients used to die in four-point restraints (now we have strict limitations on use and have to nanny patients, but bad shit still happens). Holds are dangerous to staff and patients. Chemical restraints have a risk of respiratory depression and other side effects. We minimize risks but if you do these things an appropriate number of times something wrong will happen eventually.

Restraints are a bad option, but they are a required option. In life that happens sometimes.

I'm just gonna register that I think everyone who is following this story should watch a random sample of police bodycam videos. Try Midwest Safety on Youtube. It may not change your view, but it will probably change your perception, because there appear to be many commonalities across a broad spectrum of situations.

I'm actually a paying subscriber to that channel. And one other. A dollar a month. Beats a Substack subscription on cost.

But it's a low status thing to admit to watching (much less paying for), even as it gives you a more realistic view as to what police are dealing with, at least relative to getting your information from scripted dramas and non-profit org stats and prog talking points. My more educated, higher income left-leaning friends will watch every last show on Apple TV before they waste their time on that "crime porn."

My friend calls it "exhibiting getting shot behavior", and it's remarkable how bad it is. There's definitely a selection effect because boring stops don't get posted. You've got your freak atrocity's like Daniel Shaver and Philando Castile (granted I've seen people claim they just needed to follow orders as well) but most of the time these people can just not sit still. Or like this guy "Let me reach deep into every pocket" while the cop has his gun drawn on me.

That's a crazy video. I can't believe that the cop kept his finger off the trigger (either for the taser or the pistol). I know all about trigger discipline, but I'm shocked that police would keep their finger off the trigger when a potentially armed suspect is digging through their pants like that. The extra couple hundred milliseconds to move the finger into the trigger guard could really make a difference.

Looked at the channel and one of their most popular videos seems to demonstrate the point quite well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5FMtL7saNKE?si=5-UEv0w-P9KmYvtH

A woman's boyfriend gets mad at her for stripping and when the police intervene the man just absolutely refuses to be chill about it. Winds up needing to be manhandled quite severely. Dragging him into the police car without dislocating his shoulder was tough.

The woman being unable to enter the club legally under the age of 21 and therefore quickly signing up as a stripper in order to get in is a pretty insane sequence of events, I've got to say.

It's weird but it's a quirk based off of the strip club being a bar. It's state by state but it's not uncommon for employees to be allowed to be under 21. Beyond that there's the even more common carveout for "performers"; granted the law makers probably had musicians in mind.

I get why there'd be a workaround for professionals but the idea they've just got a pile of stripper signup forms and then she actually went up and danced instead of being 'observing Stripper intern' for the day

Violence is an inherently high-variance activity. Those who whine about the necessity of violence are fundamentally immature.

There's a common scene in street fights where a girl starts a fight, drags her man into it, then impedes him in the fight so he loses. This is the basic strategy of the political left, and the psychology that underwrites it is identical.

Violence is an inherently high-variance activity.

This does seem truly hard to grasp if you've only ever experienced physical violence in the abstract. i.e if you've never been punched in the face.

Even if you watch professional fights, the rulesets in those arenas are optimized to avoid the actions that can cause instant incapacitation or grievous harm/death, and the competitors are fighting with less than lethal intent.

Take away the refs, rules, and moral restraints... any given strike COULD be a life-changer or life-ender. Quadruple that if weapons are involved.

For me, and I think most 'right-thinking' humans, this means you avoid violence as long as possible because you mostly lose control of the outcomes once it comes to that.

And on the flipside, it means you don't let opponents implement violence unilaterally, both for the deterrent effect and to prevent your side from being the sole recipient of the the consequences.

But there is as you say a group of people who see this reluctance to get violent as an exploitable 'weakness'. Push the line to force some violent response and then hope for those fat-tailed outcomes to result. Then claim the fat-tailed outcome was SOLELY the fault of one side for acting out.

And it is a lot easier to implement this strategy if you can convince your low-agency ideological followers to become human fodder.

Even 'violence' against property carries this risk with it. One image that stuck with me from the BLM era is the protestor getting clobbered by a falling confederate statue.

Its a very, very stupid thing being done, on so many levels. This is fucking around with the laws of physics and finding out quite immediately. One second you're celebrating the fall of racism with your buddies... the next you're in a vegetative state.

But the human body is indeed resilient so he survived... for some definitions of that term.

Here's a terrifying line that I hope is never written about me:

Chris is blind in one eye and lost his hearing in one ear, but he’s making progress. He’s learning how to eat and walk again, and his speech is slowly coming back.

In some very similar timelines that guy is just straight up dead. In some he's grievously injured but not traumatically brain damaged. And in a few he dodges fate by a few scant inches. High variance indeed.

Incidentally, this is why I think the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is an extraordinarily bad sentiment to believe in the context of physical violence.

Humans can survive nearly anything, and die to nearly anything. But injury is fucking easy. People pretend that anything short of death isn't a big deal, but death isn't why violence is scary. Every violent situation contains a distinct possibility of major injury for someone, usually everyone involved. The sort of thing that changes your life forever.

Even without death, a simple fistfight will almost certainly require months of healing and rehab, if you win. More if you lose. It is rare that a real fight ends without both participants having broken bones. Fingers and toes the most common, of course. Add weapons/vehicles and this risk skyrockets. There are a world of outcomes from violent situations, but few of them are as good for either party as before the fight. Even winning without injury has its psychological and social costs.

My mother and I recently visited a memorial to WWII submariners, and my mother looked at the list of lost ships and their crew numbers and said wow how on earth did you convince anyone to get on a submarine? And I pointed out that submarine service isn't SO bad, because for the most part you either sink or you don't.

You're much less likely to get grievously wounded, disfigured, crippled than you would be in the infantry. You aren't crouching in a trench in perpetual terror for months. Your moments of danger are intense but they last mere hours, and then generally you're dead or you aren't. Not a bad deal as war goes.

Though the WWI u-boats were pretty bad. But I guess so was the rest of WWI too. http://vlib.us/wwi/resources/archives/texts/uboatu9.html

Definitely pretty bad. In WWII, US Submarines were by far the worst deal in the US military for KIA. Worse than infantry, worse than bomber crews.

But in terms of the bravery required, it feels like it would be different and probably easier (for me) in nature. You get on the sub, and that's it, relatively little personal courage required after that. You'll have to act under pressure, of course, but no moreso than anywhere else in combat. Compared to sleeping in a foxhole under fire, day after day, seeing your friends wounded and killed and knowing you might be next. Jumping up to run into a bullet, over and over, seems much harder than "hope the ship doesn't sink."

Yeah. Its like, unless you're being paid pretty handsomely, or defending your life or a loved one against an unavoidable attacker... why do you ever want to fight?

Break a limb and now you've got a medical bill and lost work, and that's assuming no permanent complications. Concussions suck. Brain damage sucks worse. To not even talk about para or quadriplegia, which we aren't yet able to really treat.

I could curmudgeonly blame the movies that VASTLY understate how much damage it takes to incapacitate a human. But it really must come down to people RARELY encountering physical violence in their life unless they're in a profession or lifestyle that demands it.

Fewer people working in factories seeing dudes get dismembered by heavy machinery. Drunken bar brawls are rarer, I'd wager.

Cars are safer, too.

White collar/service jobs really insulate people from this particular facet of reality.

That said, some of us grew up with access to liveleak.

This does seem truly hard to grasp if you've only ever experienced physical violence in the abstract. i.e if you've never been punched in the face.

I mean. I haven't been punched in the face, but I've seen the aftermath of violence - especially if you define it more broadly as blunt trauma.

It is a gigantic freaking crapshoot. I've seen a guy literally run over by a pickup truck survive, though at the cost of his right arm and chronic pain for life. I've seen a guy fall off a TWO FOOT bench onto concrete, hit his head, and wind up in a nursing home.

Yeah, I imagine paramedics have a clinical but unvarnished view of human fragility. Most of us are probably, in theory, only a few inches and a bad fall away from parapalegia at any given moment when we're not fast asleep.

Seeing what a short fall to concrete can do to a human, its sometimes amazing to think that we don't keep the whole world (or ourselves) ensconced in bubble wrap at all times.

I mean, the modal marching-band boy scout who passes out wakes up with a concussion, not in a nursing home or not at all. Head + concrete = crapshoot, with everything from minor injury to death on the board.

It is hard to get used to safely managing violence.

This is the core issue. Violence is easy. Minimal amount of violence necessary to achieve your goal, with the understanding your actions will be under the microscope in hindsight by others with all the time in the world is very difficult.

I have so much respect for healthcare security and medical staff for dealing with the worst of humanity.

Do you know what cops do when they assess that someone is out of their minds (either psychologically, or due to drugs)? They drop them off at the nearest ER, shrug, and say 'your problem now.' The worst types of criminals and mentally ill aren't dealt with by cops, but the healthcare system. The medical staff are meant to treat someone in a psychotic aggressive state without harming them or allowing themselves to come to harm. Imagine a George Floyd once a week except he's screaming and trying to bite your face off like a fast moving zombie from 28 Days Later.

Get it wrong and you've lost a digit, been stabbed with a junkie needle or are in fear of losing your job based on the outcome of an administrative panel review (that cares about the corporate image more than your wellbeing).

You couldn't pay me enough to do that.

Do you know what cops do when they assess that someone is out of their minds (either psychologically, or due to drugs)? They drop them off at the nearest ER, shrug, and say 'your problem now.' The worst types of criminals and mentally ill aren't dealt with by cops, but the healthcare system. The medical staff are meant to treat someone in a psychotic aggressive state without harming them or allowing themselves to come to harm.

All too true. Alas, this is pretty much SOP since a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1975 set that specific standard. The system, such as it is, is working as intended. I work with folks that are responsible for doing the psychiatric screening end of this that get dispatched to the hospitals to determine whether or not these sorts of individuals are in such imminent danger to themselves or others or alternately cannot care for themselves that they need to be temporarily detained against their own will. It pretty much sucks for all liable parties, which is to say the hospitals, LEOs, and the screeners. The LEOs must regularly attend training on how to assess potential mental health issues with these sorts of folks and they could conceivably be put under the microscope for the decisions they make in these sorts of cases, so they're going to err on the side of taking folks to the hospital, where high-priced medical staff often need to basically wait for a drunk/drugged up patient to sober up, deal with the frequent fliers that are off their meds or worse still, decompensating but have to stay there until a bed opens up in a longer term care unit, or convince the depressed individual to just commit to a fucking safety plan already and Get Out of Dodge while they still can because they really don't want to have all of their things away and have to live in a padded room for a few days until they're judged safe from harming themselves, now do they? If a patient makes it to one of our people then we have to go through reams of paperwork to document the encounter with the client as well as the entire timeline from when the client hits to the hospital to when we leave, including when we first get the call, when we arrive at the hospital, what the disposition of the case was, whether or not the client was temporarily detained and if so, where were they sent, when was the ruling made, who ended up transporting the client, when did they arrive to collect the client, other various and sundry questions all revolving how long things took because detainment orders expire, and so if things go awry the bureaucracy can cover its ass and point the finger at the right party, which starts with our folks if they don't document everything to a T to begin with.

Somewhere, Moloch is smiling.

I sometimes feel like we over-medicalize things in modern society: we want to defer "hard" ethical decisions to "experts", and doctors are some of our favorite experts.

I noticed this acutely when I was called for jury duty a while back (I was not selected), and voir dire included some questions about considering about applying a legal label ("sexually violent predator") that does have a very loosely defined medical component, and I could tell a tangible number of potential jurors really wanted to hide behind "what does a/the doctor think?" in terms of something the legislature, in it's great wisdom, deserved a jury trial rather than a medical panel. Frankly, given the weight of the decision, I see why: there are plenty of horror stories of doctors involuntary committing people, and a jury seems a potentially-preferable way to evaluate such status.

There were also quite a few jurors that questioned their own fairness on the topic of heinous crimes. I didn't get selected (the defense busted the panel, as it turned out), but am I weird in thinking that sometimes "fair" is, after carefully weighing the evidence of guilt, "throw the book at them"?

Your last paragraph is the reason juries are rarely given much, if any, say in sentencing. The jury decides your guilt or innocence, and then the judge applies the appropriate standards and determines the sentence. This (in theory) lets the jury focus on the facts of the case without getting caught up in the emotions of also being responsible for punishing the convicted.

Though arguably this defeats the entire purpose of a jury trial in the first place by ceding too much decision-making power to unelected elites who can use their discretion over sentencing to usurp the jury's role in applying justice/mercy according to community values.

I think most Anglosphere jurisdictions now limit the discretion of local judges with some form of sentencing code produced by a body like the US Sentencing Commission (for federal crimes) or the English Sentencing Council.* Political supervision of the organisations that issue the code is possible, and would be a good idea. (Although the likely outcome of more political involvement in sentencing in today's degraded democratic culture is populists noisily passing longer sentences without spending the money to build the necessary prisons).

The real problem is that even judges have a limited say in sentencing if most cases are plea-bargained. Having sentencing decisions de facto made by prosecutors is good for democratic accountability in a system with elected DA's, but bad for the rule of law.

* I support mandatory tarring and feathering for everyone who registers a government domain on a .org, .org.uk or similar domain name, including the registrar. The government should be honest about what it is.

Right, I really should have mentioned sentencing guidelines and plea bargaining, since those probably have more of an impact on the criminal justice system than either judges or juries nowadays.

They drop them off at the nearest ER, shrug, and say 'your problem now.'

Yes absolutely, so many patients end up dumped in the ED who aren't really medical or psychiatric, they are just difficult enough that the cop figures it must be a healthcare problem.

Then we are left discharging this massive liability as soon as they sober up or whatever.

What options do the cops actually have otherwise?

Then we are left discharging this massive liability as soon as they sober up or whatever.

Kinda sounds like buck-passing all around. How can society deal with low-grade socially corrosive people? Without offending the bleeding heart types who do nothing to help but condemn anything that might?

You need us to make sure they don't die from intoxication or withdrawal? Fine. Cut themselves on a window breaking in, or got hypothermia? Fine. Need us to psychiatrically clear? Fine.

You'll see presentations that start this way though: "Patient brought in by police for threatening to push people onto the subway tracks while clearly high on a serious drug, two other incidents this week, and was brought to the hospital 14 times in the last 2 months for similar presentations but the police decline to press charges."

Probably not actually the police fault there but that's what the docs like to blame, but we see tons of dump jobs where we are just waiting for the guy to do something bad enough to not be caught and released and its an actuarial game. Seldom anything medical or psychiatric to do.

Big scandal in NYC recently after a state hospital cut someone loose and they immediately went and stabbed someone in a Macys. Doctor scuttlebutt is that the patient wasn't psychiatric - pure personality. Should have been a criminal matter front to back and now somebody is quite likely going to get sued out of the profession for something no physician has any control over.

Probably not actually the police fault there

Yeah, I would guess this is a blue city soft on crime prosecutor problem. A crazy/drug-addled person threatening to kill people should actually not be left free to be a violent random encounter for the citizenry.

Exactly. The Modern West just struggles to deal with people who defect from polite society. Most of the punishments that can still be levied are more 'this derails you from polite society so don't do it' effects. Thus for committed defectors it quickly becomes a case of the latest fine simply adding to the pile.

Most of my work has been in blue locations but I'd wager that even red ones aren't great about this, I'd love to hear anecdotes or data to the contrary though.

You'd be shocked at how soft the legal system can be, even in red areas. You see this in stalking and DV cases - threats and implications are often not enough to do anything useful and things end up being too late.

You see this in stalking and DV cases - threats and implications are often not enough to do anything useful and things end up being too late.

True but you think those'd have more inherent grey areas than the litany of 'moderately violent homeless person is brought in 50 times until finally actually murdering somebody' if it's a defective relationship between two societally-functional people versus a person who is clearly just not beneficial whatsoever.

It's how our individual rights based system works. I'm usually okay with it but the problem is that many people have bought the progressive frame and never transition to actually managing the issue.

The key word that twigged me there was "subway". Are there any places with both subways and Republican mayors? That actually seems like a good question for an LLM.

The Bing default search AI summary completely shit the bed:

The last five Republican mayors of American cities with subways are: Richard Riordan (Los Angeles, 1993-2001). Jean Stothert (Pittsburgh, 2013-2021). Corey O’Connor (Pittsburgh, 2021). Mike Mergner Bloomfield (Bloomfield, New Jersey, 2024). David Bronson (Anchorage, Alaska, 2024).

Richard Riordan is real, but Pittsburg has not had a Republican mayor since 1934. Mike Mergner Bloomfield seems to have been entirely hallucinated (hilariously so - "Yeah, the last Republican mayor was old Johnny CityName). Jean Stothert was the Republican mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. Corey O'Connor is the mayor of Pittsburgh, but he took office last week, not 2021, and is a Democrat. David Bronson is real. 3/5 fake answers.

Copilot did better, listing

  1. Michael Bloomberg - NYC
  2. Ralph Perk - Cleveland (1971-1977)
  3. Bernard Samuel - Philadelphia (1941-1952)
  4. William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson — Chicago (1915–1923, 1927–1931)
  5. Malcolm Nichols — Boston (1926–1930)

All of whom seem to be real.

Michael Bloomberg is real but a Republican in name only; he switched to the Democratic party partway through his mayorship and his most distinguishing feature was that he was all-in on government paternalism. Bloomfield, NJ is also real but lacks a subway, unless you mean the fast food chain, and has had only Democratic mayors in recent years.

More comments

This was an interesting exercise, actually kinda blows my mind.

Big scandal in NYC recently after a state hospital cut someone loose and they immediately went and stabbed someone in a Macys.

In the US, this is a scandal; in Canada, this is Tuesday.

Oh no, released from police custody and does it? Def a Tuesday in the U.S.

Hospitals? Much rarer (in part because suing is an option).

Doctor scuttlebutt is that the patient wasn't psychiatric - pure personality.

How do you define this though? Not to cast aspersions on the doctors but the inherent nature of mental health diagnosis means that declaring somebody absolutely sane isn't the same as saying 'they don't currently have a broken leg'. The whole system is clearly creaking under an unwillingness/inability to actually handle whatever small % of genuine social defectors which then produces people rushing to palm them off on some other subsystem in order for them to no longer be their problem.

This means something very specific in a medical context, yes people can have personality problems in the sense that you mean outside of healthcare and end up in prison, but we have a specific suite of diagnostic identities called "personality disorders" (the most famous are probably: anti-social, borderline, and narcissistic) that represents a pattern of maladaptive personality features with a somewhat known cause that don't respond to medication and barely response to non-medical interventions like therapy.

Patients with these disease processes sometimes end up in a psychiatric hospital because of behaviors that are dangerous (towards themselves or others), but the purpose of a psychiatric hospital is to begin the acute stabilization process, if someone can't be helped by a psychiatric hospital and engages the in dangerous and illegal behavior than the correct location for them is prison, while in prison someone can try and treat comorbidities and begin loooooooooongitudinal therapy.

The answer is simple, but society refuses to accept it. Death. Life is not precious, it's cheap. Just execute these people. They don't add any value, they massively degrade the quality of life for all of society, they also take precious resources that could be allocated to more productive ends.

In the past, these people would have been outlaws, which means banishment and near certain death, and should an outlaw venture into civilisation it was legal to kill them.

Naw, dump 'em in the middle of the woods with some survival gear and a waterproof manual and let Nature decide.

Without offending the bleeding heart types who do nothing to help but condemn anything that might?

Here's the trick, you start with them.

How?

'Callousness' in medicine is unavoidable. End of the day most serious medical engagements are the worst thing to happen to the patient this year, decade or lifetime and it's Tuesday for the person treating them.

I'm counting the days till a patient socks me in the face. It'll save money on a nose-job.

Funnily enough, I've never seen restraints in use on the ward. Mostly because my placements have skewed geriatric, and there's only so much damage a delirious granny can do with a plastic spoon. That is not the same as that being the ideal level of usage for restraints, it boggles my mind how much shit UK doctors, nurses and hospitals put up with. I acknowledge that emergency sedation isn't perfectly safe, but neither is tolerating violence and agitation to the point where sedation is necessary. I haven't been offered any hazard pay, and I've had to patch up broken noses more than once.

there's only so much damage a delirious granny can do with a plastic spoon

That sounds like a film script waiting to be written. I'm picturing Die Hard in an old people's home.

Die Hard meets Hobo With A Shotgun with a bit of From Dusk Till Dawn thrown in.

From what I've heard the U.S. patient population is much more dangerous and violent than in other countries, in a variety of settings.

Doctors in other countries seem to pat themselves on the back for not really using restraints but it ain't for the reason they think it is.

Drugs use is probably a large part of this. So is safety social net.

So is safety social net.

We were patting themselves on the back about our social safety nets and how they lower criminality for decades. Then we imported 7 zillion Middle-Easterners and Africans. We don't pat ourselves on thr back so much anymore.

I would really like to talk to a non-woke doctor from say Germany about how that stuff goes.

I'd suspect that this side of things wouldn't be as bad as you think since shit hole countries may have a tendency to just kill or lock away forever patients with serious mental illness or drug use.

Baseline criminality and poor understanding of Western cultural norms is more of a traditional police problem and dodges (some of) these tensions.

How does a social safety net reduce patient violence?

This is more of a stereotypical lib left answer than my own but it keeps people away from drugs and homelessness and being super foul tempered.

To what extent do you (or legal or ethical theory) conflate or distinguish between force, and violence? Restraining someone is certainly forceful, but is it necessarily violent? If you had cheap, harmless sleep rays to aim at patients, would this be considered 'violence?' Such a technology "feels" unethical, even though it seems like it offers safety improvements.

People generally resist, because you wouldn't be restraining them unless you had to and you have to because they accidentally or intentionally want to do something dangerous, so they resist.

Restraining someone who is resisting involves them attempting to attack you, and you essentially attacking them. It is not safe. It is violent. It is dangerous.

People who do not have experience with these things can easily go "oh well it's a magic controlled situation" and underestimate how brutal it often is, which is one of the reasons I wrote this up.

Policing for similar reasons is inherently violent. The threshold for someone to resist the police is higher because of life long training to be scared of the police but people who do it present a threat to themselves, bystanders, the police.

And the left is training people to resist, violently or in a way that isn't distinguishable from violence in the moment.

That's why this woman died.

She didn't realize just how dangerous what she was doing was.

Okay, here is my hot take. Get rid of paternalistic involuntary commitment, and you will cut down the instances of violence by half. (Most of the remainder will probably be prisoners in forensic psychiatry, e.g. people who committed (mostly violent) crimes but were found not guilty for reasons of insanity. These are probably best considered prisoners first and patients second, just like normal, sane, sociopath serial killer serving life who also has a bad toothache is unlikely to be rendered less of a danger because of his medical condition.)

Specialties of medicine which respect patient autonomy presumably have a vastly lower incidence of patients turning violent. Take oncology. Breaking off a promising chemotherapy is probably among the treatment decisions which carry the highest QALY cost, outside of outright committing suicide while healthy. Yet for adult patients, society and healthcare professionals generally accept that it is the patients decision. Very few cancer patients will attack a nurse out of desperation, because if they want to leave, they are just one signature of their own death warrant ("leaving against medical advice") away from getting out.

Contrast with specialties which do not give a damn about patient's autonomy, psychiatry first and foremost. I wish I could say that a month in a psych ward had the same long term QALY gain associated with a month undergoing a promising chemotherapy, but while both treatments may share a similar quality of life during treatment (i.e. utter misery), the long term outcomes of these intervention are as different as different as a shot of rum and fentanyl are for pain management: in my experience, the main goal of psychiatry is to keep their patients alive for another day. A mostly functioning patient going into a locked ward for debatable psychotic symptoms might emerge a month later addicted to benzodiazepines (which effectively removes them as a further treatment option), prescribed some antipsychotic (which he will stop taking at the earliest opportunity), having experienced physical restraint (because people who mostly cope with life in freedom sometimes cope badly when put in very stressful situations) and a life-long conviction that anything related to the mental health system is utterly evil and terrible (which further limits their treatment options). (On reflection, likening this to rum for pain management seems optimistic, and it might be closer to chewing glass for pain management.)

(I am fine with people who attempt to kill themselves without success or are expressing the intend to commit suicide spending a few days locked up for their defection around social norms. There is no intrinsic right to fail to kill yourself or distress others with your plans. Just let them out after a few days, and hope that they have overcome their acute suicidality, learned their lesson either about threatening suicide, or the lesson about which way to cut and keeping their mouth shut -- suicide is a human right, after all.)

If a base jumper falls to his death, that is sad, but not particularly upsetting. After all, when he took on his hobby, he was perfectly aware that humans are ill-suited for gliding close to the ground.

If someone who has made it their profession to lock people up without them having violated criminal laws gets attacked by one of his prisoners, that is also sad (and generally wrong and evil on the part of their prisoners, because typically it will not lead to them escaping), but also not particularly upsetting. Treating people as unable to make decisions about their own life (which is why you lock them up, after all), while also expecting them to respect norms of polite society e.g. about not sticking a cake fork into through your eye socket seems to be both hypocritical and utterly foolish.

Further reading of my opinions.

I apologize if I missed something here, it's been a long day at work.

You are making two mistakes I think.

The first thing to note is that the vast majority of restraint encounters are in the ED with mostly undifferentiated agitation. That almost always ends up being drugs or medical illness.

Patients who end up in a psychiatric unit, well the vast majority of restraints are for violence towards others not the self.

If you are a reader here and you've been in a psych unit it's probably been for suicidal ideation and it was probably in a cushy unit. The majority of inpatient psych work involves violent criminals, drug users, and the severely mentally ill (ex: schizophrenia, bipolar) - not depression.

An untreated manic episode prior to modern medical care had a 20-25 percent fatality rate due to getting themselves killed in one way or another.

Even if we gave up on the suicidal it really wouldn't solve the problem.

Protecting other people from the crazy and foul tempered is important.

Get rid of paternalistic involuntary commitment

On a broader level if anything it should be increased. Instead of releasing clearly schizo criminals 50 times in a row so they can finally set a lady on fire or kill some one and be put in jail, instead of the 3rd time they punched some one randomly on the street having them committed involuntarily in an asylum.

If you read my quote very carefully, you will notice that the fourth word is "paternalistic".

Putting someone into forensic psychiatry for crimes they committed is not paternalistic, it is clearly 'for the good of society', not 'for their own good'.

I have no problem with putting people into forensic psychiatry, provided that that get their day in criminal court, that their maximum stay duration is no longer than the penalty the law provides for their offense, and that they have the option to transfer to regular prison if they want to.

So if you jurisdiction allows for sentencing a sane person to life in prison for their third unqualified assault (which might set bad incentives on its own, however), I have no objection to you locking up a psychotic offender in forensic instead.

Of course, this also involves society being willing to pay the costs of keeping someone locked up in a psych ward long term, not only for patients who are naturally inclined towards violence, but also towards any patients which might prefer this to being left to their own devices, if they exist (because qualifying on purpose would be trivial).

That assumes they should be locked up after committing a crime, I think I'm proposing something you're completely against. I want the homeless and the violently insane institutionalized before they offend. Being homeless shouldn't be a crime, being homeless again after being supplied housing and a drug rehab program but then choosing nah, lets be homeless again and do drugs should get you involuntarily committed even before you start assaulting people.

Same for the randomly schizophrenic and psychotic roaming the streets without rap-sheets. Hell, you could have something like a cross between half-way houses and sanitoriums for the less pathological cases. Where the staff makes sure you take your meds while re-integrating into society in a structured environment.

Anything but the current status quo of dumping these disordered people on the streets we currently have going on.

During medical school I once got covered in my supervisor’s blood, and on another occasion, I had to carry away a chunk of somebody’s scalp. A guy I know from medical school once responded to a code in the middle of the night and found two patients and a nurse wrestling in the nursing station while another nurse slowly bled out from a neck wound.

I’ve been swept by a gun during a trauma (fucking search the bangers before, thanks), and handed a knife by a guy who was already searched while alone in a room. Yesterday, a nurse at another hospital in my region almost had their finger bitten off while restraining a patient, which is why I decided to write this.

Do you think these situations would have been improved by you being armed with a gun? And given that many doctors suffer a...size disparity from your average trauma patient, and fists can easily be a deadly weapon, should the doctor have shot the patients in any of the stories you list above?

Where do the NRA and courts land on arming doctors/self-defense in hospitals, anyways?

With the exceptions of oversized atriums anything in a hospital is necessarily going to be CQB. Between that and the fact that incidents of violence are either totally unforeseen (or missed, anyway) or planned in advance....not likely to help. Most city hospitals will have some armed police onsite in some capacity and they have strict rules about what weaponry where.

Ultimately we are trained and "required" to accept being victimized instead of defending ourselves, this isn't always the wrongest thing in the world - delirious granny, well it's not her fault I'm not going to shoot her.

Incidents like the banger with a gun are rare, and almost always we have a damn large team and a million people in earshot, that lowers the risks.

Hospital policy is almost always going to ban people from bringing their own weapons but you definitely run into people who ignore that. It has been on occasion comical, some people will have capped syringes in their purse "just in case."

Coming to work armed is going to be more common in outpatient - you are more likely to be alone or semi alone, in the hospital someone can always hear you scream.

Sometimes that person is another patient - the second patient in the wrestling anecdote was actually helping restrain the stabber.

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.

In July 2025, during street arrests and similar activities, ICE arrested some 4,494 persons who had no criminal record and no final order of deportation. If ICE were just arresting people who looked different, this is the statistic that would show it. The vast majority of Black people (96%) and Hispanic people (79%) in this country are citizens, so, if a government dragnet arrests a bunch of Hispanic people just for their skin color, we would expect about four out of five of them to turn out to be U.S. citizens. The ratio would be even higher in this dataset, because we’re already excluding people with final orders of deportation.


Of the 4,494 immigration suspects arrested in July, 209 have been released (<5%). 30 won their cases and received some form of formal relief. The others were released without much detail, but it seems safe to assume that ICE realized that they were likely to win relief in some form and pre-emptively granted it themselves. Zero—I repeat, zero—of those arrested were U.S. citizens.

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.

Something like 1/4 to 1/3 of ICE agents are latino. By focusing on white men, anti-ICE SJWs are neglecting to respect the wholesome Diversity and Inclusiveness of ICE.

Sounds like the anti-ICE SJWs have an excuse to do what they’ve always wanted to do: Harass and bully white men using the safety of numbers as a shield.

From the perspective of anti-ICE SJWs, if white men don’t want to be mistaken as ICE, maybe they should consider having a more diverse friend group or reconsider going about their day alone without a woman or POC to vouch for them.

Plus, now white men might develop some Empathy for women and POC in understanding what it’s like having to live every day in fear. So harassing a group of white men, whether or not they’re ICE agents, is a Good Thing in leveling the playing field.

“If you’re not with us, then you’re against us,” as that one lady in the tech worker video helpfully explained. Silence is violence. No justice, no peace. White men don’t get to flaunt their privilege and blithely eat their lunches in public when POC can’t exist without fear of getting attacked, imprisoned, and/or deported by a racist, fascist torture regime.

“My friend was shocked,” Lee said. “He’s on the [anti-ICE] side politically. He lives nearby. He’s eaten there before. And suddenly he’s seeing messages saying we’re ICE.”

The software engineers — all white males dressed casually in sweatshirts and jackets — were soon confronted by protesters who surrounded the restaurant, shouting insults and blowing whistles in their ears as they attempted to leave, according to Lee.

Lee emphasized to Alpha News that the group’s political views were mixed, but said the encounter left some of them reconsidering their positions.

“One of us is pro-ICE, one anti-ICE, others on the fence,” he said. “After this, I think some of them are rethinking everything.”

Local man who supported leopards eating faces shocked as leopards eat his face, friend says.

Wrongthinkers should infiltrate anti-ICE Signal groups and call the anti-ICE SJWs upon random groups of white men. This would waste the time of the anti-ICE SJWs and let the anti-ICE SJWs do some recruiting for the side of wrongthinkers. This could also be a funny thing for University of Minnesota frat guys to do to friendily mess with rival fraternities. Frat guys vs. anti-ICE SJWs would make for an interesting crossover event, like two groups of characters from different continuities.

But it seems like Anti-ICE people are assuming this is their playbook because it's what they would do, and are now doing.

This is still too much of a mistake theory frame. The anti-ICE people don't care what ICEs playbook is. They oppose ICE and will do and say anything that they think helps their cause. They stubbornly deny the agent who shot Renee Good was hit by her car. They made up an Allentown grandfather. They post all sorts of stories, often claiming they're backed up by video... but the video doesn't back them up. Or they post videos which aren't even of ICE agents, such as this one. Yeah, that looks bad -- but those aren't ICE agents, those are Mobile, Alabama sheriff's deputies, and that particular incident isn't even an immigration arrest. And those filming likely KNEW those were sheriff's deputies because they (unlike the camera) could have seen what was written on the side of the police vehicle.

I don't know if they're anti-ICE because they're pro-open-borders or (more likely) they're just anti-Trump, but they're definitely by-any-means-necessary full conflict theory people.

This is still too much of a mistake theory frame. The anti-ICE people don't care what ICEs playbook is. They oppose ICE and will do and say anything that they think helps their cause

But is it really helpful to their cause to (apparently) give everyone the impression that they are a bunch of unhinged lunatics?

It reminds me of a (in my opinion) fascinating video made by William Pierce (the late neo-Nazi). It's only about 4 minutes but well worth watching in my opinion.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mu4-RRhs9aM

The red guards don't, uh, care very much if they make the revolution look bad, because the revolution cannot be criticized. It doesn't occur to them that not everyone thinks this way.

But is it really helpful to their cause to (apparently) give everyone the impression that they are a bunch of unhinged lunatics?

Not "everyone" gets this impression because only sketchy right-wing sources like AlphaNews report it. You won't see it on the mainstream media, not even the local Fox affiliate (which appears to be fully anti-ICE).

Note on that Reddit thread of the Mobile Sheriff's deputies, not one person even questioned whether those WERE ICE agents. Probably because the mods would ban anyone who did.

But is it really helpful to their cause to (apparently) give everyone the impression that they are a bunch of unhinged lunatics?

Wait, are you talking about anti-ICE people or ICE officers?

I don't understand how any White man could support the left in this country. You can think what you want about healthcare, you can hate Donald Trump if you want, all that could be true and I still don't understand how you could support the left. The left has such open, naked hatred directed specifically at White men it just feels like self-preservation should kick in at some point and supersede the rest of your political preferences.

Lots of white men hate white men too, in what is usually called "internalized racism" when discussing self-hating non-whites, "internalized misogyny" or "pick me" behavior when discussing insufficiently feminist women.

I doubt it's just white women carrying the torch here for white liberals. Some of these men think of themselves as one of the good ones or have White Savior complexes, while others are down for some self-flagellating. It's not even necessarily limited to leftists or liberals among white men.

Really adds a new dimension to the debate over whether handgun magazines should be limited to 10 rounds. How likely am I to be attacked by a group while walking down the street where I need more than 10 rounds? Apparently it's no longer in the realm of "absurdly improbable" but (anxious laughter) "statistically unlikely".

Almost like this is precisely what the kind of person who wants those limits is afraid of. Guns naturally nullify strength in numbers.

While one's mileage may vary when it comes to what "need" means and where the line between "absurdly improbable" and "statistically unlikely" lies, when you're attacked by a group you'd likely prefer more rounds than fewer. This was the case before, too.

As can be seen in the Rittenhouse experience, for example, it's not always the case that your attackers will disperse and flee once shots are fired, even if one or more of them have been struck. You may not be as good of a marksman as Rittenhouse; missing multiple, or the majority of, rounds amidst the chaos of being attacked is highly probable.

True. And indeed, at some point mag limits are moot. It becomes a question of whether you're a Virgin practicing lightning-fast mag changes vs. Chad just carrying multiple concealed handguns.

I'm discounting the wisdom of open carrying an AR-15 in public in Minneapolis since people seem unhinged enough right now to pick fights with you for having an AR-15 more than they would be too intimidated by the AR-15 to stay away from you.

It probably isn't a good idea for someone alone, but small groups running FONOPs might help.

chuckles_im_in_danger.jpg

A second handgun is more reliable than a bigger mag anyway.

Remember, switching to your sidearm is faster than reloading. Or as Django put it, "I count two guns, nigga."

The left has such open, naked hatred directed specifically at White men it just feels like self-preservation should kick in at some point and supersede the rest of your political preferences.

That, but obviously reversed, is basically what I've heard from a lot of my friends who aren't straight white men. And you could say "well, the difference is I'm right about how the Left feels whereas they're wrong about how the Right feels," or you can say "YesChad.jpg," but I feel like neither addresses the core issue of "everyone feels hated, probably in large part blamable on social media".

There is a certain annoying rationalist-ish tendency to notice meta-level patterns and thereby conclude that there is no truth, or that truth is irrelevant, that there is nothing but patterns and that all things that can be fit to the same pattern must be interchangeable. Of course the other side has an isomorphic complaint, but it is simple, they are wrong and I am right.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

What makes you think they are caused by a single core issue, rather than one side being right and the other wrong? Even children learns the simple tactic of pretending they were aggressed upon even though they know perfectly well they started shit. Why should we assume this is different?

The left has such open, naked hatred directed specifically at White men it just feels like self-preservation should kick in at some point and supersede the rest of your political preferences.

The hate directed from non-white leftists to their white patrons simply does not register as a threat, and this is because the left sees the white man as functionally invincible. On this point, they’re more correct than not: he is, as a matter of fact, very, very, powerful (more powerful than some on the right are willing to admit) and the gulf in capacity between himself and all non-asians makes their fear of him far more justified (on a group level) than his fear of them.

Nevertheless, he is not truly invincible. Individual whites can and have been harmed by racial reprisal, and the white man’s institutional power has been steadily eroded since the civil rights era, now being considerably weaker than it was before. Still, he rules the better part of the world (in more ways than one), and since the left sees that as fundamentally injust, there is plenty of work to do.

Still, he rules the better part of the world (in more ways than one)

Kind of?

White men do have 90%+ of the world's nuclear weapons and could theoretically subjugate the bulk of the world, extracting resources at will. Theoretically, there's military and technological supremacy over non-China. Certainly there's a fairly high standard of living.

But in actual fact, most large companies and government organizations in supposedly white-ruled countries seems to have a DEI policy that works against white men. In actual fact, the prevailing animus even in the US still seems to be anti white male. That is to say media, ads, television and video games seem to be lukewarm at best about white men, opposed at worst.

"It's OK to be white" as a slogan was treated as a serious, potentially terror-related, political crime. Maybe that's changed more recently?

White men may rule the world but they do not seem to rule their own countries, or at least rule in favour of themselves in the countries they supposedly rule. Control without accruing gains isn't true control I think. The loot flows from whites in Minnesota to blacks in Somalia, not the other way around. Supposedly white-run America enjoys overwhelming superiority in strength to Somalia but who is making gains here, who is really in control?

Military and economic strength is not as important as political strength, that pillar is the most important of all I think. When we study history, we seem to focus on the military and economic angles, the great leaders, innovations, organizing principles that seem to drive history. Or with the HBD crowd race is added to the mix. But it's political strength that is the most important factor, it's 'why' Rome could fight on after losing so many men to Hannibal but then lose their 'we will never lose' aura and fall to a force of Goths and Huns. Political strength is why Somalia stands above America in some respects, even though by any of the normal analytical frameworks we use the very notion is laughable.

Agreed.

I was thinking about Minnesota and this comment a day or two ago. It's part of a kind of memetic that I think of as "Stop making Scott Adams look like Nostradamus."

Scott Adams, Dilbert comic creator turned online politico commentator and, recently, dead, made some not PC comments in 2023.

They're nothing special. A bit of breathless hyper-noticing and juiced up with a Very Online Person kind of flair. Ho-hum, as far as it goes. But the media pounced and Scott took a lot of flak for it. Elon defended him, which is kind of cool, I guess. Everyone moved on.

And then, at the end of 2025, he turned out to be completely right, at least directionally. Roving gangs of private citizens are harassing people - well, white men - for just kinda sorta looking like ICE agents. Which, I guess, consists primarily in ... being a white male.

While I am firmly on the right, I've never liked Trump. He's economically illiterate, a populist Dixiecrat rather than a conservative, and has no actual worldview other than an interesting and admittedly successful (in some sense) set of boomer "vibes."

But he keeps not trying to kill me or brand me as the devil. Which puts him materially ahead of half of the country, and the leadership and majority of the democrat party. And yet, they keep being astounded that I don't want to get my membership card in the "Kill Everyone who is like TollBooth" club.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of one of them. All your friends are SJers. Your girlfriend is an SJer. Your internet hangouts are explicitly controlled by SJ, or have filter-bubbled you to the same effect. You probably went to some form of tertiary education controlled by SJ. Your workplace may be controlled by SJ-HR.

If you jump the fence, you're jumping it with the metaphorical clothes on your back. This is not an easy thing to do. In fact, the outflow overestimates it, because a lot of those who do "leave" didn't actually choose it; SJ expelled them first, and that meant they actually started talking to the deplorables leading to an eventual flip. That was my trajectory, for instance.

The left has a chance to do a funny and reclaim "It's Okay to Be White" from the nazis. Maybe add (red?) white and blue stripes to the diversity/rainbow flag. We'd need some black leaders to say it on tv and in churches. Then the workers united will bring about the socialist paradise.

The left is made mostly of white people and I’ve never felt anything bad directed at me for being one

The left is made mostly of white people and I’ve never felt anything bad directed at me for being one

Your insensitivity doesn't make it not exist.

Nor does your hypersensitivity.

The vast majority of people are normal people.

The online world intensifies a tiny percentage of extreme perspectives and actions.

People on the right are very sensitive to picking these very specific types of bad vibes from social media and pushed to them from their algorithms and then attributing it to everyday reality. (Similar problem obviously exists on the left but focused on different issues).

The world is not that bad out here.

The argument that I should become more sensitive to online microagressions and less in tune with the actual social world I inhabit is unbecoming.

Nor does your hypersensitivity.

You don't need to be hypersensitive to understand that "As a white male, you are a member of a harmful group" is indeed something bad directed at you for being a white male.

The world is not that bad out here.

We've been through this since ~2014. No, it is not just a few college kids on Tumblr, or whatever.

I just know that I’ve lived my entire life at the epicenter of what you guys seem afraid of, the bluest parts of the country and among college campuses.

I’ve never had anybody say anything or act in any way which would leave me to believe they harbored anything at all towards me for being white, nor have I ever seen this directed at anybody else.

So what am I supposed to do? Cower in fear of something I’ve only seen in extreme online videos? Or just live my normal life with my normal friends and not give a damn about the obsessions of the hyper political terminally online types?

Even if I were concerned with that sort of thing it’s a wave that already had its crest and has been falling since like ‘21. Which holy shit was now 5 years ago, time is moving too fast man…

In the end, just because I believe that certain people are race obsessed losers (sorry, speaking generally here, applicable to both sides), that wouldn’t change my views on things like healthcare spending, environmental protection, the value of scientific research, international cooperation, etc.

"Don't be hypersensitive"

"Most people are normal"

"Except all people on the right. Who are hypersensitive"

And, the parting morality shot - "Don't introduce data and ask me to review it, that would be ... unbecoming"

I'm not going to try to change your mind on anything. I'm only going to try to suggest that you read what you write before posting and ask yourself the question "am I making any arguments here or am I just kind of teasing my opponent?"

I meant that it was unbecoming for someone on the right to ask me become preoccupied with online micro aggressions as if those were representative of my day to day reality.

I don't understand how any White man could support the left in this country.

Because I can Notice who is President of the United States and who is pseduonymously posting in tumblr so they don't get fired from their job at the coffee shop and make a rational assessment of who poses a greater threat to my freedom, well-being, and prosperity.

The left has such open, naked hatred directed specifically at White men it just feels like self-preservation should kick in at some point and supersede the rest of your political preferences.

YMMV, especially given that Republicans seem dead-set on killing their voters.

  • -15

Republicans seem dead-set on killing their voters.

Would you, uh, care to expand upon that?

I do hear a lot of rhetoric about abolishing white people -- even 'kill all white men' -- but it's not coming from Republicans.

It's probably some argument similar to opposition to free government services = killing poors. Otherwise idk what he means.

Would you, uh, care to expand upon that?

The Republican Party aggressively pushes policies which are inimical to the well-being and longevity of their voters. This includes pushing crank health theories (most prominently anti-vaccine sentiments), defunding rural healthcare, and weakening environmental protections.

I do hear a lot of rhetoric about abolishing white people -- even 'kill all white men' -- but it's not coming from Republicans.

Can you please point to the Democratic policies implementing plans to abolish white people and/or kill all white men?

If so, the fact that the left now fulminates on pseudo-anonymous tumblr rather than spreading open anti-white, anti-male material on their employer's official blog and Slack channel would be more of a win for the Trumpian right than anything else IMO.

I also think that left-wing whites have an entirely unjustified confidence in their own future. Demographics are what they are. One day, as usual, the left will look at the ‘utopia’ they memed into existence and realise that it has no place for them.

One day the Trumpist Mottizens will make a serious attempt to explain why I should worry more about random people on social media than actual, elected government officials holding the highest offices in the country and making policy. But it's obviously not today.

One day, as usual, the left will look at the ‘utopia’ they memed into existence and realise that it has no place for them.

Possible, but probably not. The historical pattern has been that the inclusive, liberal parts of the US are prosperous and decent places to live while the white supremacist parts are shitholes.

Could you speak more plainly?

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.

This seems to me an obvious failure mode of UBI

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.

because they can't realize that it's one level of abstraction up for that

Their salary (social security/OAS/your local equivalent thereof) depends on them not realizing.

My suspicion is that all the folks with a predisposition to form pro-illegal-immigrant mobs are already unemployed, so UBI wouldn’t actually free up any more of them.

My suspicion is that all the folks with a predisposition to form pro-illegal-immigrant mobs are already unemployed,

I would have to disagree with this. I regularly meet employed people who are nasty and aggressive and narcissistic and would love an excuse to harass other human beings while feeling morally superior in doing so.

OK, that’s fair evidence to the contrary. I guess my countersupposition would be that if you’re enough of a conformist normie to hold down a job you’re also enough of a conformist normie that your psyche recoils at the prospect of engaging in meatspace anti-regime violence. I’ve met plenty of employed keyboard warriors who make all the noises that they want to bash the fash, not many employed actual warriors who’d really go do it.

I have two relatives that are passionately anti-ICE and I have found only a limited amount of reasoning in the maintenance of their viewpoint. They have no interest in discussing the possible consequences of high amounts of low IQ migrants on society, how deterrence theory factors into the desire to deport those who arrived as a child, the longterm impact of demographic change, or the actual statistical risk that ICE poses in regards to unjustified use of force. They are stuck on ideological “flashbulb memories” from the media and thoroughly convinced that ICE = totalitarianism = no freedom = very bad = they will come for the women next (and other such statements of catastrophe). I speculate that the motivations behind some of the protesting has a purely psychological etiology: excitement from a sense of purpose + externalizing the problems which plague one’s own life. Toward this latter point, I am reminded of the externalization in Ecclesiastes, where the worries about the breakdown of the human body are writ large symbolically onto the body-politic:

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut—when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low— they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way

Spoiler in case you wish to decipher the metaphors yourself: (The grinders being the teeth, the window’s being the eyes, and so forth.)

Consider the poignant interview from the No King’s Protest: “I'm just so scared. I'm 74 years old. I worry about everything. I just, I just am so scared and upset, and I don't - I don't understand why people voted for this person." Fear, worry, confusion, alienation — is this really all Trump’s doing? Or instead, are these found in one’s own life, and there is a pressing need for communal catharsis, however artificial, which is so difficult to find in our secular and atomized age? A possibility.

I speculate that the motivations behind some of the protesting has a purely psychological etiology: excitement from a sense of purpose + externalizing the problems which plague one’s own life.

I think this is a significant factor. You probably get to feel like a superhero responding to an alert somewhere in the city and hopping onto your rented e-bike like the Batmobile. Then there is the whole psychological aspect of just getting to scream at ICE for as long as you want, any insults you can imagine. In a way it strikes me like a form of those "Scream Clubs" you see in leftist cities, just like the dark/evil version of them. I never understood the appeal of those scream clubs to begin with, but they seem very popular among women. Like the woman pictured in the article basically matches my mental model of what someone screaming at ICE would look like perfectly.

they seem very popular among women

If it is the case that everything traces to Ev Psych, then the “environment” of the progressive woman is torturous: your tribe has been deposed from power and the enemy tribe now rules over your old territory (he is “not my President”); their warriors now invade the dwellings to snatch away the little ones (Guatemalans and Ecuadorians short in stature whom she has been made to identify with as tribal equals — they cook the communal meals in the longhouse). The evolutionarily-correct response to this is to literally scream and stress all the men in the vicinity. Someone should do a survey to see whether political radicalization among women is negatively correlated to whether their husbands are rich / tall / strong / possessing abundant acreage, as these things would lead to a primal sense of safety and security. It is obviously lower in religious women who believe in a strong and mighty God, paternalistic and providing, who exacts vengeance against enemies in time. (Where are all the stressed out Somali women? They are psychologically buffered against this.)

your tribe has been deposed from power and the enemy tribe now rules over your old territory

Or more like the enemy tribe has recently had some minor successes in reclaiming some territory that your tribe long ago captured, but the enemy tribe is still far from deposing your tribe from power or ruling over your territory as a whole.

Since the ev. psych. playbook of women, when their tribe is defeated and conquered, would be to shrug and submit to the conquerors.

The evolutionarily-correct response to this is to literally scream and stress all the men in the vicinity.

It reminds me of the trope associated with street fight videos, where uninvolved women can be commonly heard screaming. Men engaged in combat; women most affected.

In a way it strikes me like a form of those "Scream Clubs" you see in leftist cities, just like the dark/evil version of them. I never understood the appeal of those scream clubs to begin with, but they seem very popular among women

I dunno, it reminds me of Rage Yoga, which I feel was more popular with men. And I can certainly understand the appeal of "exercise coupled with getting some good hearty shouting in". Sometimes you just want to be that guy from the Highlander: The One meme, ya know?

But what if you end up as that Tom Hanks-looking cowboy screamer in the sky instead?

The current atrocity going around X is that a mob stormed a church because the pastor had the same name as one of the higher-ups at ICE. They are not the same person.

Storming a church is a federal crime under the FACE act, a law passed in the mid-90s to protect abortion clinics from right wing activists, but which also protects religious services. If the disruption is forcible (as this was), it's a felony.

So to recap, these people are all catching felonies because they didn't bother to double check that the guy they were looking for didn't have the same name as somebody else.

Among the people in the group which stormed the church was Don Lemon, who was following them around to document their exploits.

Don Lemon getting sent to PMITA prison for breaking a law signed by Bill Clinton to protect abortion clinics wasn't on my 2026 bingo card but I'll take it.

Everyone in the justice system knows the FACE act was about abortion and the church part was a sop thrown to the right that was never intended to be used. I believe prior to Trump II it was never used for that. I don't think judges are going to be willing to apply the dead half of the law.

So, a little update, they are apparently not charging him under a law signed by Bill Clinton to protect abortion clinics, they're charging him, a black man, under a law named after the KKK, signed by Ulysses S. Grant to protect newly freed slaves, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I love this timeline.

It is nevertheless federal law.

It seems likely to me that that part of the law hasn't been used before simply because people up to now have largely had the decency to not storm churches as a form of protest. If this action is not prosecuted I don't see how this does not escalate into a tit-for-tat storming of mosques and such.

I (European) googled who Don Lemon is and conveniently a news article from the Hindustan Time had a short paragraph about Lemon, the FACE Act and a link to the video. The American soap opera truly has global appeal.

Will Don Lemon have 34 FELONIES!!!! on his record? 🤣

Better. Apparently he's being charged under the KKK act.

Well dash my wig, sometimes things fall out so wonderfully it's almost like the universe was steering them that way. Was he just doing "I'm a journalist, I'm reporting on this" or was he doing "Let me help document the Legal Observers peacefully protesting against the fascist bigots, since I too am part of La Résistance and wish to disseminate our goals to the wider public in order to encourage them to also peacefully protest"?

He was with the group before they went to the church and then when he went into the church he was weirdly aggressivly interviewing the pastor. "Don't you think Jesus would be understanding and love these folks [interrupting your church service and trying to chase your congregation home]?" He seemed to be involved with the planning. If it becomes a journalistic activity just because he has a camera when he's trying to force the pastor to give into the roudy mobs demands then whatever. A lot of people think he should have tipped off the police at least since he knew ahead of time this flagrant violation of the FACE act was going to take place.

Sounds like ol' Don there needs to be reminded of the whip made out of cords in the Temple.

The current atrocity going around X is that a mob stormed a church because the pastor had the same name as one of the higher-ups at ICE. They are not the same person.

This random site has pictures seeming to show that they are.

That makes prosecution more likely, I suppose.

I wonder when anti-ICE groups will start attacking each other, in the spirit of the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front.

Does this count? https://x.com/i/status/2012649035673350540

Why would it? They attacked him because they thought he was an ICE supporter for wearing hunting (rather than military) camo.

Because it seems he was in their protest group, just didn't get the memo that they don't wear camo on Saturdays or whatever the line is now. Maybe you can expand what your comment meant because I took it as a general, how long before they eat their own?

I mean how long before an anti-ICE group attacks another anti-ICE group for doing anti-ICE activities all wrong? And they consider the other anti-ICE group just as bad as (if not worse than) ICE.

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.

It's interesting that you preceded this little tidbit with examples of four non-ICE being accused of ICE. How many people accused of being ICE actually were ICE? If you're implying that a certain false positive rate is acceptable, at least show that the behavior you're complaining about is above that rate.

The irony of you mentioning "equivocation" further down this thread, as any equivocation—to the extent that it eventually occurred—was initially enabled here when you made this comment and the false equivalence it contains. You discuss ICE and anti-ICE false positive rates as if they're different sides of the same coin, yet:

ICE false positive: ICE was wrong in incorrectly arresting someone.
ICE true positive: ICE was right in correctly arresting someone.
Anti-ICE false positive: They were wrong in harassing someone that had nothing to do with ICE.
Anti-ICE true positive: They were wrong in harassing an ICE officer off-duty or wrong in obstructing an ICE officer on-duty.

There's not a "positive" for which anti-ICE can be in the right. Furthermore, ICE is right X% of the time and wrong (100-X)% of the time, whereas anti-ICE is wrong 100% of the time.

You could take this even further:

Anti-(good-ICE)-true-positive: Protesters harassing ICE while they are conducting an operation lawfully

Anti-(bad-ICE)-true-positive: Protesters harassing ICE while they are conducting an operation unlawfully

Unless ICE has a 100% conduct-the-operation-lawfully rate, at least some of these will A(BI)TPs.

Anti-(bad-ICE)-true-positive: Protesters harassing ICE while they are conducting an operation unlawfully

That'd still be wrong of anti-ICE.

Whether an arrest is unlawful is decided in the courtroom, not by a mob. Resisting an unlawful arrest is generally unlawful in most states, including Minnesota. Even in states where resisting unlawful arrests is legal, the advice on attorney websites is to cooperate temporarily and if necessary, litigate later. An "unlawful" arrest may be more lawful than you think, and suspects often incur (more) crimes while resisting arrest. I imagine a similar principle applies to obstruction, if not more so due to the potentially greater numbers involved.

Absolutely agreed.

But it is also lawful to protest a police action without obstructing it. I’m sure there are examples of protests in Minnesota that are & aren’t.

There's not a "positive" for which anti-ICE can be in the right. Furthermore, ICE is right X% of the time and wrong (1-X%) of the time, whereas anti-ICE is wrong 100% of the time.

That's simply a value judgment that doesn't get us anywhere. Being anti-ICE is only "wrong" when the activity in furtherance of that position breaks the law. You may not like the fact that people are protesting, recording their activity, or warning the community of their presence, but all of these things are both legal and constitutionally protected.

That's simply a value judgment that doesn't get us anywhere. Being anti-ICE is only "wrong" when the activity in furtherance of that position breaks the law.

One of my values is that incorrect arrests are bad, although incorrect arrests are sometimes incurred in the "furtherance" of correct arrests, and there's a tradeoff between incorrect and correct arrests if one seeks correct arrests.

Another one of my values is that harassing people is bad, whether or not the person's occupation is law enforcement—if they're law enforcement, this especially goes while they're on duty. Perhaps your values differ on this front.

Either way, let’s play along and evaluate whether anti-ICE breaks the law in the "furtherance of [their] position" with the evidence that we have. I figured I'd take a look myself at Minnesota statutes given sometimes you might not have done your legal due diligence before commenting.

I was using "harassment" somewhat colloquially, but there's Subdivision 1. of Minnesota's Disorderly Conduct:

Whoever does any of the following in a public or private place, including on a school bus, knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know that it will, or will tend to, alarm, anger or disturb others or provoke an assault or breach of the peace, is guilty of disorderly conduct, which is a misdemeanor:

Where (3) of Subdivision 1. is:

engages in offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others.

I would say impeding the path of an individual or group of individuals, blowing loud whistles in front of them, following them and shouting things like "FUCK YOU NAZI," following them and blowing whistles at them and honking at them, would qualify as "noisy conduct" or "abusive language" that could be reasonably interpreted as an attempt to "arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others."

There's also statutes on harassment per se:

A person who commits any of the acts listed in paragraph (c) is guilty of a gross misdemeanor if the person, with the intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person:

(1) directly or indirectly, or through third parties, manifests a purpose or intent to injure the person, property, or rights of another by the commission of an unlawful act;

(2) follows, monitors, or pursues another, whether in person or through any available technological or other means;

Likewise, impeding the path of an individual or group of individuals, blowing loud whistles in front of them, following them and shouting things like 'FUCK YOU NAZI,' following them and blowing whistles at them and honking at them, could be reasonably interpreted as an attempt to "follow[] monitor[], or pursue[] another, whether in person or through any available technological or other mean... with the intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person." To intimidate would already qualify.

Then there's Obstruction. As (1) states:

(1) obstructs, hinders, or prevents the lawful execution of any legal process, civil or criminal, or apprehension of another on a charge or conviction of a criminal offense;

Once again, doing things such as the aforementioned "impeding the path of an individual or group of individuals, blowing loud whistles in front of them, following them and shouting things like ‘FUCK YOU NAZI,’ following them and blowing whistles at them and honking at them," would apply, much less hindering the lawful execution of any legal process by pathways such as driving your vehicle at them.

I would certainly feel hindered and obstructed at my job if a crowd showed up to do things including, but not limited to—blocking my path, surrounding me, and/or blowing whistles in my face.

The state legislature can pass all the laws they want, but their application is limited to the bounds of the Constitution. Impeding the path of law enforcement may rise to the level of obstruction depending on the specific circumstances, but blowing whistles and shouting insults are expressive activities that don't fall within any exception to the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has already addressed this directly, and since they've already ruled that Nazis marching through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors and members of the Westboro Baptist Church yelling insults during soldiers' funerals are protected speech, it's safe to say that people blowing whistles around ICE agents isn't going to cut it.

The state legislature can pass all the laws they want, but their application is limited to the bounds of the Constitution.

You may not like it, but unless the Supreme Court finds Minnesota’s Disorderly Conduct, Harassment, or Obstruction laws are in violation of the Constitution, Minnesota’s laws on those three fronts stand and are enforceable as such.

Fortunately, for leftist protestors who harass, obstruct, and create disorderly conduct—behaviors such as exhibited by the "mostly peaceful" protestors we saw in OP’s videos—they have many lawyers out there who are sympathetic and will carry water for their causes, including chief prosecutors who may or may not decide to prosecute.

The Supreme Court has already addressed this directly

And, to the extent the SC addressed “this” directly, it explicitly highlighted that behaviors, including but not limited to, those that fall under disorderly conduct or “fighting words” can still be punished:

Moreover, although speech might be prohibited if it consists of "fighting words" that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace, the ordinance in question is not limited to such expressions

We agree, however, that such conduct might constitutionally be punished under a properly tailored statute, such as a disorderly conduct statute that makes it unlawful to fail to disperse in response to a valid police order or to create a traffic hazard.

Appellant's contention that the ordinance's sweeping nature is both inevitable and essential to maintain public order is also without merit, since the ordinance is not narrowly tailored to prohibit only disorderly conduct or fighting words

Sounds awfully familiar with regard to the videos OP posted, as well as other videos of anti-ICE agitation. The Court’s main hangup was the word “interrupt” amidst the phrase:

in any manner oppose, molest, abuse or interrupt any policeman in the execution of his duty,' and thereby prohibits verbal interruptions of police officers.

The Court’s opinion specifically reinforced it was upheld that Colten’s conduct in Colten v. Kentucky did not fall under protected speech for disorderly conduct concerns:

(1) A person is guilty of disorderly conduct if, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he…"

"(f) Congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse. . . ."

Again, sounds awfully familiar with regard to the videos OP posted, as well as other videos of anti-ICE agitation.

since they've already ruled that Nazis marching through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors and members of the Westboro Baptist Church yelling insults during soldiers' funerals are protected speech

Don’t know if you have a specific Court Opinion in mind with regard to purported ‘Nazis” and “Holocaust Survivors.” I did take a look for a bit as to what may constitute WBC activity nearby a military funeral and which incurred court rulings.

Insofar as you’d like to evoke something like WBC protesting near military funerals—only one popped up, the infamous case of Snyder v. Phelps. Where the WBC activists, not that these were prerequisites for anything:
1. Were 1,000 Feet Away
2. Did not disrupt the funeral’s activity
3. Ceased their activities prior to funeral
4. Were not seen or heard from the funeral site
5. Were not hindering the actions of LEO

it's safe to say that people blowing whistles around ICE agents isn't going to cut it.

It’s safe to say you don’t do your homework before commenting. It’s also safe to Notice your repeated attempts at minimizing what anti-ICE people were doing despite video evidence.

Is it really constitutionally protected to warn a felon of the presence of the police? Like let's say Alice gets a phone alert that a white murderer who killed three black kids escaped from prison. Alice sides with the murder because she's a white supremacist. Alice later sees several police cruisers on a nearby street. Worried that her favorite convict is nearby and will be returned to prison, she starts blowing a whistle and making a ruckus to help the convict escape.

That is constitutionally protected speech?

There's a review on the history of such speech in section 2(a) of this paper.

Ok, but the standard is Brandenburg and Brandenburg says you can't incite imminent lawless action. Evading the police is lawless action, and alerting criminals to police is inciting them to flee.

In your example Alice isn't inciting lawless action, the murderer is going to try to escape regardless. At best, she's aiding or facilitating it, which isn't squarely covered by Brandenburg.

If you care to read the section aptly titled The Existing Crime-Facilitating Speech Cases is a fairly comprehensive survey of cases on it.

Is a posted lookout for a robbery not committing a crime because them alerting the thieves is protected speech?

More comments

Would you like to specify which case you think matches Alice's example? Because the ones that match most closely take my side, for instance:

Haig v. Agee concluded that an ex-CIA agent's "repeated disclosures of intelligence operations and names of intelligence personnel" were as constitutionally unprotected as "'the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops,"' at least when the disclosures were done for "the declared purpose of obstructing intelligence operations and the recruiting of intelligence personnel."'

and

Several federal circuit cases have held that speech that intentionally facilitates tax evasion, illegal immigration, drugmaking, and contract killing is constitutionally unprotected.

At most your source is saying there's a complex history of caselaw here and the Supreme Court hasn't ruled on this action specifically.

More comments

Your scenario is a bit vague so I'll dress it up for you: If Alice feels strongly about the wrongness of the murderer's conviction and subsequent incarceration and she decides to engage in a boisterous on-woman protest on a street corner during which she yells words of encouragement for the fugitive and expresses hope that he will escape justice, then yes, she would be engaging in constitutionally-protected speech. As repugnant as one may find her views, opinions about the appropriateness of criminal convictions are a fairly common subject of public protest, and the fact that the police may find them distracting doesn't exempt them from constitutional protection. And even then, this case would still be somewhat stronger than what's going on with ICE, where the protestors don't even know the identities of the people ICE are looking for, or indeed if they're even looking for anyone (Renee Good was shot while ICE was returning to headquarters). They're just generalized warnings about law enforcement presence, and are as illegal as flashing your brights to warn a fellow motorist about a speed trap.

You seem to be missing the point that thy aren’t just protesting generally but doing so in ways to try to prevent ICE from doing their job. Your hypo is of Alice standing on a random corner.

Here Alice is following ICE and making noise for the express purpose of making it harder for ICE to conduct their legal duty of apprehending illegals / warning illegals so illegals can flee.

The activities are of a different nature from your hypo and caselaw.

Blowing a whistle is not necessarily constitutionally protected though, there can be reasonable restrictions on noise levels.

Regarding City of Houston v. Hill, striking down a law that is too broad does not mean that none of the activities included in the law could be constrained by law.

The behavior of these people does not seem constitutionally protected to me. They are, in a coordinated way, mobbing officers of the law in the process of enforcing the law for the purpose of helping people escape, in such a way that they are actually successful a lot of the time. https://tiktok.com/@raebaebae28/video/7596446605474057527?_r=1&_t=ZP-93BispJ7Wlb

I hope a case like this goes up to the Supreme Court so we can get a clear ruling on this.

It could potentially violate noise ordinances, yes. But the way the Minneapolis ordinance is worded makes it clear that it almost certainly doesn't violate the law there:

389.60. What constitutes violation. (a) Any activity, not expressly exempted by section 389.50 or this section which generates sound regardless of frequency that is more than ten (10) decibels (A scale) above the ambient noise level when measured within any dwelling unit (other than the one of sound source) in a condominium, townhouse, apartment house, multi-unit dwelling, single-family dwelling, or similar dwelling between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. All measurements applying to the above shall be made indoors with the doors closed, and within the dwelling.

(b) Any activity not expressly exempted by section 389.50 or this section which generates sound regardless of frequency that is more than five (5) decibels (A) scale above the ambient noise level when measured within any dwelling unit (other than the one of sound source) in a condominium, townhouse, apartment house, multi-unit dwelling, single-family dwelling or similar dwelling between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. All measurements applying to the above shall be made indoors with the doors closed, and within the dwelling.

There are obvious evidentiary problems here in that you have to know what the ambient noise level is and whether the sound exceeds it by the specified amount, but the problems go beyond ones of evidence; the statute is worded in such a way that there is no violation without a measurement. This could be a case of bad drafting, but if you look at noise ordinances generally they seem aimed at specific problems like noise emanating from point sources or adjacent apartments. They aren't really designed for intermittent loud noise coming from outside.

I hope a case like this goes up to the Supreme Court so we can get a clear ruling on this.

At least in the present situation there's no chance of that happening. Federal law requires that any interference with law enforcement be "forcible", and Minnesota caselaw does so as well. On the state side there are some limited exceptions, but warning people of police activity is specifically exempted. I can't speak for other states, but nobody in Minneapolis is able to be prosecuted for this.

But where is the line here? A lookout for a bank robbery is presumably an accessory to the crime, even though his only role is to use his constitutionally protected speech to alert the other robbers to the police.

A lookout for a gang is presumably an accessory to a crime if they whistle out as soon as a police officer comes onto gang territory, even if they don't know which specific crime the police officer is investigating. Or is that protected speech but the lookout for bank robbery isn't? What is the deciding factor?

More comments

Do you believe "warning a felon of police presence" is the best analogy for the average case of people warning illegal immigrants about ICE? Isn't unlawful presence a civil offense, and a first offense illegal entry into the US a federal misdemeanor, so nowhere near as bad as a felony from a legal standpoint?

If you compared it to another non-felony, like having the fines from an overdue library book going to collections, do you believe that warning your buddy that a debt collector is going to their house should not be allowed under the First Amendment? Even if you think such a warning is anti-social and breaks the social contract of paying fines or debts that you accrue, surely you can see that the choice of analogy biases the analysis here?

Unlawful entry is criminal, not civil, under 8 USC 1325 carrying a maximum prison sentence of up to six months on the first offense (higher on subsequent offenses). That makes it a Class B misdemeanor (18 USC 3559).

So misdemeanor, no probs right? Still way worse than a library fine, but less than a murder. But a significant number of people ICE targets are felons, as in having committed a crime inside the US which they have been found guilty of. And a significant number of those who are not are guilty of committing crimes in their home countries. ICE's method in Sanctuary Cities is largely to go to locations where released criminals are, arrest the criminal, and grab anyone else there who shouldn't be here.

Cato (a pretty hostile source) says:

The ICE data show that the share of immigrants detained after an ICE arrest who had criminal convictions has fallen in half since January from 62 percent of detainees to 31 percent in November.

Note they say convictions, many of those without convictions have pending criminal charges. And then, as they say in the headline, only 5% have violent convictions.

So let's take that smallest number, 5%. You only have a 5% chance each time you mob ICE of preventing a violent convicted felon from being deported. If you make a habit of it, say you interfere in 10 arrests, you have at least a 40% chance of having interfered in the arrest of a violent felon. Great work!

Edit: I changed it to "At least 40%" because from my understanding, ICE often targets violent felons, and then catches others unlawfully present. So this is kind of a floor, the likelihood of a violent felon being caught in any given raid is likely higher than 5%.

I realize that you're the lawyer and I'm not, but I didn't think that harassing people (as we see in these videos) is constitutionally protected.

As I said in another comment, if Nazis marching through the neighborhoods of Holocaust survivors and the Westboro Baptist Church harassing mourners during the funerals of soldiers is constitutionally protected, this certainly is.

What about Nazis accosting and mugging random passersby to foce them to show their arms to see if they have certain tattoos?

What about driving a truck outfitted with concert grade loudspeakers through a Jewish neighborhood blaring Hitler speeches?

Forget about Nazis doing it and you'll have your answer. If they're using force or threat of force then it could be illegal. If they're merely asking then I'm not even goign to bother with an analysis of the First Amendment laws because, insofar as I'm aware, no state in the Union has laws that make it illegal to talk to strangers. For your second example, again, forget about the Jews and the Hitler speeches. If there is an applicable municipal noise ordinance and you can prove that the driver violated it, then they can be charged with the noise violation.

Those are easily distinguishable. Yes, if the anti ICE people went to the local ICE HQ and did those things, then it would clearly be protected speech.

However, if anti ICE follow ICE and try to alert illegals to I E presence to thwart ICE from apprehending illegal aliens, then the anti ICE protestors are now obstructing officers. The examples you gave are examples of people being obnoxious but had nothing to do with interfering with police work. So they prima facie don’t control.

I agree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when enforcing the law (up to but not past the point of conviction/sentencing at least). I disagree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when forming a mob. This is not hypocrisy.

But the problem isn't in the false positive rates, the problem is the methodology of accosting random people in public. I can point to official statistics about ICE to demonstrate that this is not their methodology. I do not have comparable statistics for Anti-ICE protestors, but I can point to them literally doing the methodology they accuse ICE of in broad daylight.

I agree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when enforcing the law (up to but not past the point of conviction/sentencing at least).

And past it too - in a lot of cases, we won't have definitive proof, and part of that means that we will occasionally put the wrong person in jail.

Yeah, but I'm slightly less ok with that. Not 100% less ok, just slightly and it isn't really necessary to the point if we're comparing false positives on detainees.

I agree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when enforcing the law (up to but not past the point of conviction/sentencing at least). I disagree that certain false positive rates are acceptable when forming a mob. This is not hypocrisy.

In that case it doesn't matter if the mob is harassing or assaulting ICE or non-ICE folks.

Which implies that the examples you gave are not relevant.

The examples I gave in the OP had nothing to do with a false positive rate. I'll repeat:

But the problem isn't in the false positive rates, the problem is the methodology of accosting random people in public. I can point to official statistics about ICE to demonstrate that this is not their methodology. I do not have comparable statistics for Anti-ICE protestors, but I can point to them literally doing the methodology they accuse ICE of in broad daylight.

You wrote:

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.

I'm sure ICE has done exactly this -- going to a place they suspect removable aliens to be present and demanding evidence.

I'm sure ICE has other operations where they target specific removable aliens on which they have prior information too.

Seems very similar unless you are really resting the justifiability argument cited.

There's a degree of equivocation though. The worst thing the mobs you described did was mildly irritate people for periods lasting up to five minutes (if I'm being generous). The feect on one guy was that there was a parade of cars behind him honking, which happens to anyone who drives in rush hour on a daily basis. It's not nothing, but it isn't in the same league as being detained for a day or more. The acceptable false positive rate you're really looking for is the number of people who were accosted by ICE but weren't detained.

  • -13

The worst thing the mobs you described did was mildly irritate people for periods lasting up to five minutes

I have grown convinced in the last couple of weeks that one of the defining characteristics of being on the left is a total lack of a theory of mind.

Mildly irritated? I can think of a few ways that I would feel if I were surrounded by a mob directing hostilities at me, and I don't think "mildly irritated" would describe any of them. "Legitimately fearing for my personal safety" would probably be a much better description. That seems to be not only a reasonable thing to feel in that situation, but also, the actual intent of the people engaging in this behavior.

As a resident of the Minneapolis area these sorts of scenes are the reason I will not go into Minneapolis for the foreseeable future, simply because I would feel absolutely justified in drawing a firearm to defend myself, but the "jury of my peers" would consist entirely of people like you who apparently think that I'm only supposed to be "mildly irritated" that a group of angry people have surrounded me.

The acceptable false positive rate you're really looking for is the number of people who were accosted by ICE but weren't detained.

That would be closer to analogosity, but I don't think it quite reaches; someone hassled but not detained by ICE still has it worse, because of the implication.

"Because of the implication" cuts both ways. The mob is perfectly capable of attempting murder, just look at what happens to Jake Lang yesterday.

No. You can’t equivocate law enforcement with mob behavior. You’re trying to compare false positives with legitimate law enforcement with false positives in the disruption of said law enforcement.

How many people accused of being ICE actually were ICE?

At most 2000 (i.e. every one of them), for an error rate of 0.2%. It's three times the rate just with those anecdotes.

Wait, there's only 2,000 ICE agents? Or just 2,000 in MN?

Just in Minnesota (mostly Minneapolis, AFAICT). They announced another thousand last I heard, but I don't know if they're there yet.

Are you accounting for repeated encounters? A person is presumably removed by ICE only once, while protesters repeatedly interact with ICE agents, allowing for multiple accusations of being a part of ICE.

The second encounter presumably follows from the first. If an officer was identified once then harassed a hundred times, I'd count that as one true positive.

But ICE is going to different neighborhoods. While I would expect repeat harassers/protestors for a given geographic region, I would also expect a lot of churn from people only sticking their necks our for their own neighborhood and local community. I find it extremely plausible that you will get multiple true positives here as a result.

Agreed. The same generosity however is not applied to ICE

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.

While I have no first hand experience of ICEs operations, I am skeptical.

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented. Oh, sure, you might catch and deport a few foreigners who overstayed their student visa, but generally the government is unlikely to have a complete list of all the people who illegally crossed the border and try their best to stay out of the governments databases.

Then, I have to say I am somewhat confused. I would assume that ICE would enforce deportation warrants nationwide. So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?

In your opinion, when Vance announced that ICE would go 'door to door', what he meant was that they would politely ask around the neighborhood if anyone had seen a person on their wanted poster?

I mean, technically it is possible that Noem told her department:

The first and foremost priorities of this administration are the rule of law, due process and courtesy. You will only arrest persons for deportation on which you have positive ID and a warrant signed by a judge. If any unidentified person claims that they are a US citizen in English or Spanish, you will not detain them unless they are interfering with your duties. If this means that we only deport a tenth of the illegals we would deport under a more robust regime, that is the price of freedom.

Would this be in character for the Trump administration? Fuck no. Trump bombs whom he wants to bomb, invades whom he wants to invade. His administration lies boldly and blatantly, he wields the justice department as his personal cudgel to bash his enemies with while pardoning his allies (or people willing to pay him). He bombs shipwrecked sailors. How many Venezuelans died in his kidnapping operation, again? Who cares, nobody gives a shit about brown foreigners. What is holding him back from invading Greenland are not moral considerations, but merely strategic ones. When ICE shot Good, Noem wasted no time to transparently slander her as a domestic terrorist.

Last year he hired on a lot of new ICE agents, paying good money for a job with rather few requirements. Of course the MAGA militia cosplayers joined in droves, finally a salary and a badge for doing what they wanted to do for a decade. Do you think these will have procedural doubts about rounding up all the day laborers looking for work at Home Depot? "If it turns out one of them is a citizen, we just let him go, no big deal." To my knowledge, there is no rule that you can not deport someone if you had arrested them without sufficient probable cause.

Trump is aware that he was elected on a platform to deport illegals, and he is very willing to deliver on that. The people who care about snowflake topics like due process are not his voters. And these will cry Nazi no matter what he does, so there is point to playing nice for him. Most administrations would be embarrassed if the SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against them after they claimed that there was nothing to do about someone they had sadly deported to some foreign megaprison without due process "due to an administrative error". But most administrations also have voters who care about such things.

Of course, this extrapolation from my Gestalt impression (which is based significantly on what Trump actually says and does, not what the 'lying mainstream media' reports, btw) does not have to correspond to the truth, exactly. Perhaps Trump's ICE is keeping precisely in the same procedural bounds as Biden's ICE.

Still, in the fog of war, where any and all statements could be lies (perhaps all of the reports of Native Americans getting arrested as illegals are fake news, perhaps Noem had secret proofs that Good was planning a bomb attack, perhaps the Ayatollah has decided that the best way to deal with the protesters is to embrace human rights and due process), extrapolation of character is a useful heuristic (so Noem was likely talking out of her backside, the Mullah regime is likely cracking down on protests without any giving a damn about human rights, ICE is occasionally arresting a Native American for matching their target racial group, and the left might invent another of such incidents for anyone which happens).

So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?

Cities that voted Harris tend to be sanctuary cities. In sanctuary cities ICE has to do more work.

Then, I have to say I am somewhat confused. I would assume that ICE would enforce deportation warrants nationwide. So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?

I find it difficult to believe that this question is being asked in good faith.

ICE is being deployed to so-called "sanctuary cities" like Minneapolis and NYC for the same reason federal troops were deployed to Alabama and not Idaho when it came time to enforce desegregation. A state that is already complying with federal law does not require federal troops to enforce compliance.

That certainly is a narrative. Going to stick with the factual bit at the top:

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented. Oh, sure, you might catch and deport a few foreigners who overstayed their student visa, but generally the government is unlikely to have a complete list of all the people who illegally crossed the border and try their best to stay out of the governments databases.

Many get put into databases once they are arrested for crimes inside the US. Others are caught on the border, start the process of removal proceedings, but are released on bond while their case goes through court. Congress explicitly gave ICE the power to revoke bond or parole, at any time, for any reason. Hope that helps!

Edit: I guess there was another factual claim there. ICE is not targeting sanctuary cities as punishment for voting blue. Most arrests take place in cooperative jurisdictions, like Texas, where 110 out of 100k non-citizens are arrested. In sanctuary Illinois, that number is 21 out of 100k. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/12/11/ice-jails-update/#:~:text=Impact%20of%20strategies%20to%20block,remain%20lower%20than%20other%20states. ICE arrests in cooperative jurisdictions are easy, they just show up to the jail and it's done. ICE arrests in non-cooperative jurisdictions make more noise and take more manpower.

Exactly. Enforcement in Blue Areas is noisier since the local power structures are trying to actively resist ICE participation, meaning that ICE needs more boots on the ground instead of just picking up those who are already collected.

Also people are conflating illegal immigration with 'coyote land border crossings', there's a ton of people who are just visa overstayers and originally entered reasonably.

So why the focus of the cities which voted Harris?

Like they say about robbing banks, because that's where the money is. Blue-voting cities are the ones with the most visible levels of "we're a sanctuary city! we have all these activist organisations for undocumented persons!" If I'm going to be looking for easy finding of illegal immigrants, where do you think I'll head to first? Tom Johnson's produce farm out in the boondocks (where indeed there's likely to be undocumented workers, same in meat processing plants, but it's also probably going to be tougher to identify/arrest them), or the George Floyd Memorial Centre and Legal Aid Provision for Persons of Irregularity?

When ICE shot Good, Noem wasted no time to transparently slander her as a domestic terrorist.

Gosh, how very reassuring it is to know that the people who created the category of "domestic terrorist" never, ever, used it to slander people! It's all a lie, yeah maybe sure something in the letter could be interpreted that way but really now, are you going to believe us or them?

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that he couldn't even "imagine a circumstance" where "parents complaining" at a school board meeting would be "labeled as domestic terrorism." Yet, several Republicans have continued to falsely claim Garland called such parents "terrorists."

The nugget of truth behind the political spin is that a letter from the National School Boards Association to Garland last fall argued some violent threats against school officials "could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism" that would warrant the intervention of federal law enforcement. In his response, Garland directed his agency to review strategies to address violent threats and harassment against school boards, but he didn't use the NSBA's "terrorism" language, for which the group later apologized.

Was Good a domestic terrorist? Ask the people who created the term. I don't think it was useful then or now, but it's been put into use and you really can't complain if the tools you created to bash your enemies then get used in turn to bash you when your enemies get their hands on them. I think she was a damn fool who fucked around and found out, she didn't deserve to be killed, but neither did the ICE agent deserve to be put in that position by someone thinking she could larp as the Maquis and nothing would happen because she was one of the Good Guys fighting the fascist nazi tyrant's stormtroopers, and every movie assured her that bad things don't happen to the Good Guys fighting the nazi fascist stormtroopers.

I mean to me the biggest hole in her hagiography is that nobody to my knowledge has ever tried to explain how the wonderful mother who dropped her kid off at school on her birthday ended up in her car blocking traffic and accosted by ICE agents to the point where she is trying to drive away. She clearly put herself there for some reason, and did so understanding that something was going down. So where is she getting that information? Why did she think she personally needed to be there? Why did she think to block traffic?

I suspect she’s a part of some larger group, one that sees itself as “the resistance”. And I think this is the real story— that a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum are being radicalized and weaponized by groups of political activists pushing fear porn and the idea of them as “the rebellion” as in Star Wars. And until the swamp of radicalization is drained, there’s always a reserve army of ideologically possessed people ready to act on that perception of reality they’ve been fed in their echo chambers. It’s hard to do because the groups are generally smart enough to stay just inside the lines of acceptability while heavily implying the things that would drive people to actually go do something about the “bad guys” of choice. That’s what the fascism narrative is about — every child over four knows Nazis are evil, and has heard the hagiography of those who “resisted” — often with the costs removed. Calling someone a Nazi in the post WW2 era is like telling a bunch of medieval peasants that someone or some group desecrated the host at the church. The point is to create the hatred and ultimately the violence while keeping their hands clean by not saying “attack those people”.

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented.

Completely undocumented immigrants that entered the country secretly are actually a decent minority plus the whole sanctuary city setup means that there's a natural impulse to cluster into certain areas.

First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented.

This is one of those cases where euphemisms are confusing the issue. Minnesota is far from the southern border.

Most of these cases are going to be things like visa overstays, green card holders / visa holders who had their status pulled because of a conviction, asylum claimants who lost their case but never left. People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.

Obama and Biden had programs called "administrative closure" or "parole" where the deportation case was closed without actually granting them real legal status or deporting them.

There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.

People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.

Someone somewhere at an ICE field office is literally doing TPS reports. Hope they remember to use the new cover sheets.

There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.

Exactly. Actual honest to god 'carried into the country by a coyote or completely undetected and stayed completely off the radar' cases are rare especially above the Mexican border states.

Most of these cases are going to be things like visa overstays, green card holders / visa holders who had their status pulled because of a conviction, asylum claimants who lost their case but never left. People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.

Obama and Biden had programs called "administrative closure" or "parole" where the deportation case was closed without actually granting them real legal status or deporting them.

There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.

This sounds like the streetlight effect to me. The words "we deported X illegals" might sound good to Trump's electorate, but realistically they wanted him to start deporting the illegals "dat took deir jerbs", not random-ass schoolteachers that lost their green card over speeding 20 years ago. This will run out of this kind of low-hanging fruit quickly anyway.

Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites. And you can do this only by raiding the place and detaining every worker until they or their employer can prove their legal status.

Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites.

This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.

In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.

If a business is found to be hiring illegal immigrants, they are fined.

Sure. There are some dodgy businesses who hire undocumented cousins from India. But these businesses are tiny, and the problem is also tiny.

I just don't understand why the US doesn't implement this policy. Like all of the associated issues here would be solved over night.

I'm pretty sure you need to prove you're not an illegal immigrant to study or get a driver's licence here. Why is this not the solution for the States? It puts the pressure on businesses and is totally politically palatable.

Starting in 2015 California has been issuing driver's licenses to illegals. They also illegally issued 17000 commercial driver's licenses to illegals, according to the Federal Department of Transportation.

That's the huge problem which leaves both sides open to charges of hypocrisy: some sectors of the American economy are reliant on cheap, disposable labour. They can't/won't get the natives to do that anymore, so they need a constant flow of immigrants willing to take on hard, dirty, uncertain work. This is going back decades, my teen years were blighted by every local talent show where someone with a guitar did Deportees (a song from 1948 by Woody Guthrie).

The hypocrisy of the right about economic exploitation is easy to see, the hypocrisy of the left less so: but they are de facto defending the permanence of a serf class for manual labour in order to keep their nice lifestyle of abundance going.

The problem is you have to enforce immigration law consistently, nationwide. Otherwise the non-compliant businesses gain a substantial competitive advantage.

This is honestly the most baffling part of the american immigration system to me.

In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.

But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs. Hiring illegals would be significantly cheaper, after all. Which is why the Americans don't do work permit checks. Every push for legislation like that would be met with intense lobbying from employers in the stereotypical sectors (farming, construction, hotels, ect.).

But it certainly also helps that a faction of the blue tribe is also opposed to work permit checks, for different reasons.

But it costs those Australian businesses collectively billions of dollars in (direct and indirect) labor costs.

I obviously understand that's the situation. I'm saying it shouldn't be.

It solves 100% of the issues re: immigration conversation. Australia has a ruthless immigration policy, and far more immigrants per 100k than the USA, Germany or Britain. And we have far less politicised immigration conversation.

An Australian can reliably depend on virtually every man woman and child they meet to have either been thoroughly vetted by a government bureaucrat or a slob from accounting.

We have something like 30% of people in country born overseas (compared to less than 15% for German, UK and USA) but consistently poll pretty high for our happiness with immigration.

Yes, most of our immigrants are east asian, British or Kiwi, as opposed to African or Middle Easterners, but still.

If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind. American politics being dependent upon the random industry association lobbying some spineless boomer in the senate is so foreign to me.

"Stop hiring people who aren't supposed to be in the country" should be the short work of a year of policy making. If you're against it, you're against hiring Americans, right? If you're against it, you're funding illegal immigration. In another world the libs could even have pushed this policy to get back at the capitalists.

My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that Tony Abbott basically forced through hardline illegal immigration restrictions against huge protests from both sides of the isle right before immigration massively ramped up due to easy travel. The problem is that the numbers are so big in other countries, and the use of migrants so structural, that getting from America’s ‘default yes’ to Australia’s ‘default no’ is extremely difficult. Though IMO Trump should definitely do this.

If it costs businesses money to be forced to hire Australians, and wins back some social cohesion, it's just such an easy policy to pursue in my mind.

Maybe I'm just so much more black-pilled than you are. If you're changing something and "it costs businesses money" that automatically means not only is this not an "easy policy", it's going to be an uphill battle. No matter where you are, one of the political parties will be "pro business", and this party will fight you. Because this is actually important. There's actual money on the line. "Social cohesion", "anti immigration vibes", "campaign promises", ect. are all pretty much irrelevant once the wrong people lose money.

And if the same change also, at the same time, disadvantages minorities and/or people struggling with paper work, elements from the other side of the isle will also fight you.

In Australia, we have a requirement for all workplaces to verify that a new hire has a right to work in the country. You provide your birth certificate or working visa, or other proof upon your first day at work while you're signing a document with your preferred bank account for your salary. This costs the employee and the business approximately zero overhead.

I just don't understand why the US doesn't implement this policy. Like all of the associated issues here would be solved over night.

Well, Russia is a heavily bureaucratized country, but companies still hire lots of illegals because they are cheaper. As long as you have cash or can convert the money on your account to cash plausibly legally, you can hire them. All it takes is the low probability of your company being raided.

I'm going to get another 20 replies saying "it's cheaper to hire illegals" and I understand that.

I'm saying that if you are pursuing a policy to remove all of the illegals from the country, rather than making ICE do it in possibly the least efficient way you could think of, it's easier to just do the workplace check. It's easily advertised as pro-American by a president like trump, who can push it as a policy to give jobs back to Americans.

It's not like Trump is worried about shaking up the stock market or pissing off lobby groups.

Trust me, smart conservatives know. This is why many conservatives who actually care about immigration are pissed at Trump. If he simply mandated e-verify, and actually fined businesses who hired illegals, the illegal immigration problem would shape up quite quickly. And with a lot less partisan fanfare, likely.

It's deeply unfortunate that he failed to do so, and I don't have a great understanding of why.

Small business owners who employ illegals are the corest of the core constituency of the Republican party. Exploiting illegal labour requires entrepreneurial spirit, mild evil, and to be working in a sector that is already Republican-dominated (mostly farming or construction).

The problem isn’t wholly illegals. There are a whole group of people who on the merits are illegal but on procedure are here temporarily until their status is adjudicated. Then there are problems like the Somalis who are here legally but are just a drain. We need to cut off welfare without running afoul of the 14th.

Russia is also full of corruption, which helps.

Suppose there is a Hotel X in Australia, and instead of hiring cleaning workers directly, they outsource to another company -- Dodgy Cleaning Services, Inc. Who is responsible for immigration compliance - the hotel or the cleaning service or both?

Or better yet, suppose an Australian family hires a contractor to make some improvements to their house. Who is responsible for immigration compliance? The homeowner or the contractor?

The contractor. This isn't a hard question.

The contractor. This isn't a hard question.

I don't think it's as simple a question as one might think. For example, in the United States there is a lot of precedent that with respect to some types of laws, the hotel is potentially responsible for compliance.

Anyway, assuming that compliance responsibility falls solely on the contractor, this seems like a straightforward workaround for immigration compliance. Instead of directly hiring illegals, use a dodgy contractor. If the dodgy contractor gets fined, they just close up shop and re-open under a new name somewhere else.

Combine this with the fact that the American economy is to a large extent dependent on the labor of illegal aliens, and it's easy to see how we can get into a situation where people get away breaking the rules.

To an extent I am speculating, but I am pretty sure that in the United States, things like going out to eat at a restaurant; hiring a crew to do yard work; or going on a week's vacation in Las Vegas would be very noticeably more expensive but for this kind of cheating.

The devil is in the enforcement, as ever.

If there's a huge problem with outsourcing illegal-intensive labor to Dodgy Contractor Inc, it's making things fairly simple: target all the dodgy staffing agencies. In theory like 99% of the work is already done to make it impossible to earn an income in this country without the government being aware of it. And that's what frustrates a lot of people about illegal immigration, even those who are pro-immigration: that the government doesn't use the information and powers that it has to enforce the laws that are on the books.

More comments

Anyway, assuming that compliance responsibility falls solely on the contractor, this seems like a straightforward workaround for immigration compliance. Instead of directly hiring illegals, use a dodgy contractor. If the dodgy contractor gets fined, they just close up shop and re-open under a new name somewhere else.

You are just assuming things will happen in such a way as to make this whole thing complicated. Which, to be fair, it has happened in that way until basically now. But it doesn't have to. Like there is a workaround in your telling of events because the government creates one, which it doesn't have to. If you assume the government actually wants to accomplish its stated goals then this isn't really a conundrum. Just send the dodgy contractor to prison. Its not that hard.

More comments

I think the Trump base just likes to feel like something's actually done, and both sides are happyish to dance around the cheap labor manufacturing/agricultural illegals in the South for as long as possible since there's too many competing interests. However stuff like the Somali fraud (Yes they're mostly legally in the country) is relatively easy optics for ICE to go after since it's very very very hard to defend their actions

However stuff like the Somali fraud (Yes they're mostly legally in the country) is relatively easy optics for ICE to go after since it's very very very hard to defend their actions

Except what can ICE to do them if they are legally in the country?

Nothing yet. The trick will be to nail them on fraud, de naturalize , and then deport.

It appears that there are some Somali visa overstayers (thought that's not really impacting the core issue that much) but it functions to keep the issue alive in the public's minds.

Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites.

It's possible that by that time the anti-ICE movement will have discredited itself so much that no one will care.

Or, that if the anti-ICE movement is in power, that they might be tempted to spend political capital to make them legal (such that they can't be targeted again as they have been this time). Which is arguably the revealed preference of the Trump admin anyway.

What good is retaining their illegal status, if enforcing it somehow "reveals the preference" for revoking it?

Sooner or later ICE will have to go after more central examples of illegals: Joses in restaurants and hotels, on farms and construction sites.

They won't. First of all, this would go against the demonstrated raison d'etre of ICE. Namely, their fascist tacticool LARP. You don't need guns, secret "police," and general military gear to go to a hotel to check the employee directory. The revealed preferences in actions and very real investment is the opposite of unsexy but effective work. Whatever ICE's real purpose is, it has something more to do with blowing millions of taxpayer money on making a spectacle, picking fights with Americans, or making armed citizen resistance against state violence ineffective (note for the confused in the audience, this would be pointless for real immigration enforcement).

Second, if they wanted to do this they would have already. Are their lots of farms and hotels using over the border illegal immigration in Minnesota? No, of course not. The cruelty is the point. The ICE LARP, in part, exists to channel useful idiots away from the real reasons of white demographic replacement with ostentatious displays of cruelty to brown people and symbolic acts against "the Left/Liberals" as a symbol of "something is being done" without obviously doing anything substantive. It exists to do the exact opposite of something substantive and effective.

"The right wing," as much as it is a real thing, exists to simp for and be useful tools to elite capital (and Jews) that benefit from cheap, therefore often third-world from low IQ areas, labor. To actually hurt the pocketbook of capital would go against the very funding base, closest thing it has to an intellectual base (who do you think is doing Heritage?), and purpose defining "the right" has - especially mainstream right. The capital holding elite would sooner perma close the American Republican party and just try to start a new one.

Oh, sure, you might catch and deport a few foreigners who overstayed their student visa, but generally the government is unlikely to have a complete list of all the people who illegally crossed the border and try their best to stay out of the governments databases.

I think the bulk of it is the backlog of individuals with final orders of removal that are still here.

To my knowledge, there is no rule that you can not deport someone if you had arrested them without sufficient probable cause.

This is actually being litigated right now. I suspect you are right about where the law end up.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats