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Notes -
https://www.newsweek.com/video-appears-to-show-new-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis-11411971
Ice shooting round 2 has kicked off. Numerous rumors already flying around but will be a bit before we have facts I imagine.
EDIT: I've been asked to add some relevant points, I'll say: this comment has links to various angles: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405295?context=8#context This comment mentions the "Sig misfire" angle that I've seen a bit: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405451?context=8#context
Walz has activatedthe national guard: https://x.com/MnDPS_DPS/status/2012614253090619619 The NBA postponed the Minnesota/Golden State game tonight.
Good luck to all rightists in the next years, trying to dodge the incoming 1000 years Unlimited Immigration Reich. The problem is that immigrationism is an extremely powerful ideology, because everytime you try to go against it you need to use force, and force make normies have the ick, and reinforce immigrationism. A lesson for all future societies, if we will ever have one (Demography is the most important thing ever and nothing else matters)
Instead of luck, maybe the rightists could use some competence instead ? They have dug their own graves.
I bet if ICE roamed in suits with slicked back hair, they wouldn't have half the issues they're facing. Instead, they chose maximally aggressive optics, and they're getting the obvious reaction. You expect Americans to view ICE favorably when they dress and act like bank robbers from a crime procedural ?
Were they forced to to digitally alter images of people to make them uglier ? Was the white house forced to post AI memes about detention centers with alligators in them ? The right is setting themselves up to fail for no good reason.
Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged. There is a modest increase in detentions for those pending charges, but nothing ground breaking. At the same time, the amount of arrests (esp. of non criminals) has skyrocketed. The deaths in custody numbers tripled, and 2026 has gotten off to a horrifying start. More people have died in ICE custody in January (15 days) than died in the entire year of 2023 !! (This warrants 2 exclamations)
With the Somali scandal, Trump had a solid narrative for the midterms. If MAGA loses the mid-terms, it is because they are both incompetent and intensely dislikeable. Hilarious that Trump came to power by swinging non-white voters and gen Z. Now that the same voters are turning their back on him ( in polls at least), it is somehow a sign of the woke mind-virus and immigration led anti-Americanism.
...you did catch at least a half dozen of the ways that link was trying to manipulate the reader, no?
Like, there are way more than a half dozen techniques being used. A common one was making a big deal of % increases without giving base numbers, or whether % increases they don't like correspond to % increases in things they don't care to admit. The 'Annual Deaths in ICE Custody' chart takes the deaths in the first half of January- without establishing any cause of death or even alleging they were a result of ICE mistreatment- and then multiplies them by the time for the rest of year to claim 122 'projected deaths' for 2026.
It's also notably including in the 2025 death count the migrant detainees killed by anti-ICE people trying to shoot ICE.
I particularly liked how the 'Systemic Accountability Failure' accepts "billions of dollars in claims" against ICE as the baseline (invented by people opposed to ICE no less) for which 'less than $1 million in settlement' is the systemic accountability failure in question to make the reader upset... and then goes on to blame / concede that acts of congress, longstanding judicial policy, and the sovereign immunity of the state. Only not in that order, of course, because sovereign immunity is the scary boo word, and the New Deal law passed by the Democratic Party and regularly used over the last half-century is to be last-noted and without such context.
The sort of people who will be moved by that website are not the sort of people whose opinions would be changed if and where ICE behaved particularly differently. That is an advocacy/propaganda website, and there will always be propaganda to make anything come across as a travesty. The only thing that would change the position of the people so easily moved by such blatant propaganda is if they didn't get propagandized.
This, in turn, would require the propagandists in question to not see a need to generate the propaganda. Which would primarily be if ICE wasn't doing deportations, as opposed to if ICE was doing deportations differently.
Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.
The statistics I am interested in, were still sound. I deliberately highlighted the 3x number which is over an entire year, instead of the rather ambitious 2026 projection. Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.
That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.
The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.
Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.
And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?
But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?
And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.
Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
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How about “ICE is under siege so violent events are more likely to happen?”
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