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PaperclipPerfector  11hr ago (text post)   2084 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Well a couple of things.

First you listed a number of false positives, people being wrongfully arrested/deported. Any sufficiently large scale operation will have mistakes. If you tried to crack down on disability fraud surely you would end up mistakenly depriving some genuinely deserving people. As you said, the optimal level of crime is not zero, similarly, the optimal level of wrongful convictions/arrests/deportations isn't zero. If you could demonstrate that it was egregiously error-prone then there would be cause for concern. But at the moment I don't trust the media to be objective. Surely the Obama administration occasionally wrongfully detained a legal immigrant but the media wasn't shouting it from the rooftops when it happened.

Regarding the theatricality. Of course there is an element of theater to it, as there is with the protesting. What good does blowing a whistle or shouting "fuck you Nazis" actually do to impede their activities? Basically nothing, it is entirely theater. The theatricality of ICE and the focus on Minneapolis is largely about sending a message loudly, publicly and clearly that "no, blue states do not get to veto federal laws whenever the choose as they have a history of doing." The protestors do theater and ICE does counter theater. We can argue that their theatricality is losing in the court of public opinion, but I appreciated it at least.

Well whistles aren’t just intended to be annoying (though imagine having to work with whistles like that all the time). They are intended to warn illegals of your presence. It isnt just theatre.

imagine having to work with whistles like that all the time

IMO "subjecting federal agents to noise likely to cause long-term hearing damage" (impossible to tell from the videos, but quite believable) probably shouldn't be allowed. Having them don hearing protection and ignore people talking to them seems the worse option there.

Surely the Obama administration occasionally wrongfully detained a legal immigrant

Obama did more than that - he deported four US Citizens.

He also ordered the extrajudicial killing of a teenage American citizen.

Claim not supported by your source, according to which the teenager was killed in a drone strike against someone else - just bad luck.

Two U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity stated that the target of the October 14, 2011, airstrike was Ibrahim al-Banna [not the teenager], an Egyptian believed to be a senior operative in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.[7][8] Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time", stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son [the teenager] was there" before the airstrike was ordered.[7]

Fair. His (citizen) father's killing was ordered extrajudicially. The son was a bystander in a separate ordered extrajudicial killing.

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