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In an update on the case of the 5 year old kid in a blue hat taken away by ICE, Judge orders release of 5-year-old detained by immigration authorities in Minnesota.
I was curious what the judge actually wrote, so I delved into the actual court opinion which I found here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492.9.0_3.pdf . And it seems this judge clowned himself with the most insane deranged court opinion I've ever seen. I've seen some performative court opinions, but I think this one takes the cake with gems like:
Interestingly, the court opinion makes exactly 0 legal arguments to support its decision.
I'm increasingly disappointed that activist judges aren't even pretending to be arbiters of the law, but are just doing whatever they want. Of course you expect an enemy judge to make his decision and figure out the justification later, but you expect them to at least think backwards and figure out some kind of fig leaf of legalese to claim that he actually believe that is the law. Instead this judge makes a mockery of the process. And of course for whatever reason, federal judges have never been punished for not doing their jobs.
At least the kayfabe of pretending we live in a country with laws I think is critical for legitimacy. At least for now the court of appeals can write a quick "your a retard" order on Monday, but even so it's a bad look.
For a neutral-ish perspective on the court opinion, try giving an AI the court opinion and asking what it thinks.
PS: AI told me that that the same judge is a known joker and is known for writing this punny though legally sound opinion here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8725121.pdf
To me this, just proves that the Trump admin has (accidentally?) struck a small vein strategic gold. Apparently directly antagonizing the left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip. This seems like evidence in favor of the efficacy of further accelerationism and direct antagonism from the right. Previously, it was believed by many on the right that long-march leftists were simply too clever, disciplined, and coordinated to challenge directly. Instead, the only option was to "exit" or to go full Benedict Option. But no longer. It must be frustrating for the more self-possessed and strategically-minded leftist partisans who are quietly manipulating procedural outcomes in a plausibly deniable way. Their grandstanding compatriots are giving away the game.
Too bad for Trump that it doesn't matter. Similarly to when 4chan tricked the left into thinking the OK sign was a racist thing... it didn't knock the left out of power, it just mean now you could get canceled for the OK sign.
Cancelling people for the OK sign does have the potential to alienate normies though, provided that the anti-woke media spins it the right way.
I don't think people here understand how totally goulish "Mother of two shot through window of car as she tries to escape", "ER nurse who loved his dog and had a concealed carry permit shot in back X times by ice after his weapon was seized trying to defend woman", "Small child in cute hat taken into ICE van, has to be forcibly released by judicial order." looks.
You can look at the images on your screen, and no amount of "But the context! She was a radical! He was a terrorist who scuffled with the cops a week before! Little bro was illegal!" is gonna matter. It's the vibes that count here, and the vibes are rancid.
I might put something on the main culture war thread next week, but as a practice draft of that comment: This is the Worst Thing To Happen in optics since Iraq, a war so bad yet so important to the cultural right it got a black guy elected president and made a generation more atheist and more leftist than anything since the great depression.
If the rightists don't learn from the past, it's gonna happen again.
Reform literally always has bad optics; conservatism (currently leftism) defines itself by being on the right side of those optics.
This is why reform is hard.
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Optics debates are inherently bad faith. Every time someone says "The optics of this are good/bad!", they're manifesting their own claim.
Personally, I think Democrats really need to worry about their optics of "retarded, violent street crazies". And all of those white, Democrat Karens harassing Latino and gay/black Feds! Dems look so racist it's crazy! Just like they did with Bull Conor and segregation. Terrible optics. They really need to spend a lot of time defending themselves over this crap.
This is one reason I think Trump has a lot of room to do whatever he wants. I don’t think there is a coherent pragmatic Democratic Party right now. He might lose the mid-term but he can do things without 50% approval because when the big election occurs the Dems won’t be able to unit. It feels like a fractured party right now.
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Your attempt to pull a UNO Reverse card here falls flat, because the implied accusation against your interlocutor of concern trolling is not credible. On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win, and therefore the parent poster's concern (that ICE's strategy might lead to just that) is more likely than not genuine. On the other hand, you are not even trying to convince anyone that you would be unhappy if the Democrats' access to power suffered due to any putative bad optics.
The parent might not favour your specific brand of Republican politics, especially if that brand is just "more power to God-Emperor Trump and his goons", but it seems very plausible that they are coming from a place that is more like "please, surely none of us want to go back to the Obama/Biden years, so stop doing things that will lead to that" than "I want you to stop doing things your party likes and start doing things my party likes". It might of course be that the former is not very compelling to you because you are one of the people who have memed themselves into valuing everything other than "whatever Trump does, or perhaps more of it" at minus infinity so there is simply no viable solution that involves any form of restraint, but if so that would make you unusual enough that you should state your value function explicitly rather than just shit-flinging because you assume your interlocutor knew this about you and wanted to troll.
This seems like a square (if obviously non-malicious) example of that "consensus-building" thing the rules prohibit. And, in point of fact: hello! I want them to win. Not without qualifications, I have considerable misgivings with aspects of the mainstream "woke" left, but I still find them the least bad option.
Fair. I mean, I want more people who want them to win around! In this context, it just seemed more expedient to talk down Iconochasm who felt besieged/mocked by and snapped back at an outgroup that most likely was not involved in that exchange at all.
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Yes, but the claim is just that "Democrats do/don't like this".
They don't, because control of the media means the normies will see the retarded, violent street crazies as good and normal and the people they are fighting as fascists.
Yes, we have two Hispanic agents who shot a white guy dead, but the narrative that ICE is going around rounding brown people is not hurt in one bit by this.
That's extremely - "funny" is the wrong word to use here, but it's sure something.
Queer
In the
sense
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With no apologies to Alanis Morissette, I believe the term is "ironic".
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Sure. But "Democrats don't like this" is a very different claim than "the optics of this are bad".
The link is "Democrats control the optics".
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But isn't it true that the american public is largely moving against ICE in polls? Incidentally I also think that it's crazy what the "protestors" are getting away with, including being called protestors in the first place. But unfortunately, most people don't seem to agree, which is what the optics argument is referring to. Yes, the bad optics are also arguably partially downstream from highly sophisticated media propaganda, but not entirely, and it doesn't change the fact that most people who hear about this are against it.
My point is that "optics" as a concept has a pseudo-Uncertainty Principle. Because it's entirely about appearances and impressions, it's impossible to talk about without interacting with it. For example, saying this
Normalizes the idea it's purporting to describe. The line between descriptive and prescriptive blurs. You could just as easily say that in spite of all the rioting and harassment and crimes, a large majority of Americans still want to deport all illegals and a supermajority want to deport all illegal criminals.
We're a decade past the two screens epiphany. "Optics" are extremely silo'd. Addressing the concept at all necessarily involves accepting a partisan framing, which necessarily involves promulgating it.
There is no dispassionate analysis here. It is impossible to talk about "optics" without defacto engaging in Mean Girls style social manipulations.
And stating this normalizes that belief. The choice of framing itself functions as an act of persuasion.
The Motte is a tiny and obscure forum. Posts here are not going to normalise anything or materially affect the outcome of the culture war, even on the off chance that they persuade a significant number of posters here. In fact, assuming this is necessary to make it possible to have a reasonable debate here at all; if you treat this forum as a pulpit where posts must be judged for their effect on the course of history rather than their factual content, you just reproduce the grandstanding popularity contest dynamics of Xwitter and Reddit.
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One of my favorite parts about this website is how people manage to express my ideas in ways much more descriptive and eloquent than I ever will
Great stuff, thank you for sharing
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Normies don't read the anti-woke media.
I remember that companies cancelling people for the OK sign was a spectacle so cringy that even Bill Maher ridiculed it on his show, which is normie-friendly entertainment by anyone’s standards. When the woke overplay their hand and they come across as desperate and shrill, even the media that isn’t particularly known as anti-woke will not play along with their agenda.
I remember that companies canceling people for the OK sign went on for many months, and the New York Times posted breathless images swearing various figures were making OK signs in public.
There was a high school in Chicago that chose to reprint the yearbooks at a cost of over $50,000 because some of the basketball team was doing the OK sign. (They weren’t. It was the circle game.) Extra hilarious because most of the team members making the sign were black.
Which is just another case of a news report alienating the normies even further.
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Just as an example, Technology Connections (calm, nice, midwest technology YouTuber) just went absolutely brain numbingly ballistic after an incredible video on renewables, nullifying all the work.
I can totally imagine a pro fossil fuel person watching the video, changing their mind, watching the coda about politics, and then doubling down...
I wish supposedly objective people would stop doing this.
That was a terrible video; he starts by talking about the moral superiority of midwesterners. And then he goes to silliness, like suggesting that buying half a tanker truck of gas over 15 years is unreasonable. Honestly, I expected it to be a whole tanker truck, so I guess I wasn't off by that much. But that's wrapped within the sillier thing -- he's banging on about how the fuel can only be used once.... but that's true of any energy. He complains that pointing this out is a "gotcha", but it's just a response to his own "gotcha" about fuel being single use. He's on somewhat more solid ground when instead talking about economics, but then the details matter and he just glosses right over the "what about nighttime" issue. He also then goes and compares the price by the palletload of solar panels to the retail price of gasoline (rather than considering the delivered price of electricity, including batteries -- unless he's ONLY going to use his car at night, so he can charge during the day).
"There's a 27 Megawatt solar farm build in DePue, Illinois. Why is that?" Answer: subsidies, in the form of selling
indulgencesRenewable Energy Certificates.And then in the rant section, after he's constructed this whole case that solar either already does or soon will make economic sense, he complains about Republicans taking away subsidies. Bitch, please... do you not believe your own case?
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I think the most confusing part of this video was dumping on Starlink. Legacy telecoms don't want to provide Internet to Assfuck, Minnesota? We can just launch satellites and beam down high bandwidth Internet to any point on the globe between the Arctic and antarctic circles? Everything is working as intended, the market provides. What is the problem?
But it's ridiculously impractical and requires continual expensive maintenance by chuds (like Musk); the existing technology is good enough or even ideal in certain circumstances, so we should just stick with that.
You know, kind of like electric cars.
If only there were a video describing this phenomenon. Here's one that springs to mind.
The frustrating part is that he's proven he knows better than to do this. (And yes, this naturally applies to his pet social issues too.)
It's a good thing those cell towers erect themselves!
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And yet he's still friends with the Aging Wheels guy, who's red tribe-coded as fuck, quirky hobby aside.
Is the Aging Wheels guy red coded? I mean, he's got the homesteading stuff going on, but I never got that impression. He loves quirky european cars, electric cars, etc...
Well, he owns land in the middle of nowhere (grew up there as far as I understand), has several trucks and a bunch of farm animals. Not exactly a blue stereotype.
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I would seriously guess not anymore.
A lot of Blue's had their brain break in the last few weeks - it's even being reported by mainstream media (Mark Halperin)
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Technology Connections has always reminded me of another nice, friendly, but left-wing technology youtuber, CathodeRayDude. He's a little quirkier than Technology Connections and covers more old PC stuff, but he has the very similar vibe of "geeky leftist dork who believes he is enlightened by his intelligence."
CRD has a very droll sense of humor and he's fun to watch, but he definitely has a nasty habit of going on unnecessary political tangents where he insults the right, especially about trans issues because his partner is transgender. But mostly he complains about capitalism and how all jobs are awful with a kind of antiwork energy, which kind of makes my eyebrow raise, because I feel like if he weren't dating a transgender person or weren't from Oregon, he'd be a self-employment bro talking about how you've got to make your own money away from the corporate machine, small businesses baby! kind of guy.
What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people. Energy policy is one of the clearest ones, where its obvious why Californians with living memory of smog and pollution, and Oklahomans and Texans and West Virginians, would have different assumptions about the value of burning fossil fuels for energy.
There's been recent, massive, and overwhelming change to see conceding any genuine motivation for the political enemy as not merely misguided or wrong, but active and malicious betrayal. The Blue Tribe's further down that slope, but the Red Tribe isn't exactly slow at it, either.
((for an extreme example, I'm trying to write up the Varian Fox verdict, and it's a mess because the only people covering it are the ones that are absolutely uninterested in the pro-trans viewpoint, while the pro-trans people are largely unaware it happened.))
I don't know the cause. It's tempting to point at the growth of 'animus' as a Kennedy-school legal theory, or social media filtering, or increased polarization, or the takeover of HR-focused careers, or just external pressures making being the knee in search of careerism.
But it's bad, and it's getting worse, rapidly. There's always been a little on the edges, where knowing enough about guns set you outside of the acceptable discussion window with gun control advocates, even when that knowledge was necessary to make the very laws gun control advocates wanted. Now, it's hard to think of a culture war fight were that isn't the norm.
Perhaps worse, even for those of us autistic enough to be skeptical and analytic, where do you think the information's going to come from? A Blue Triber that goes looking up some Red Tribe values, you're going to be lucky if the best you find just looks like an overt scam site; more likely you'll get to something like thefp or fox news that 'everyone knows' isn't even a good model of what Red Tribers think, and completely disconnected from reality. And Red Tribers going to wikipedia can honestly say the same thing. What's left? Talk to your Other Tribe friends?
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As someone who is old enough to remember how tech people used to be (and is more or less one of them), this change makes zero sense to me.
IMAO, this sort of thing is where, "the past is a different country," saying gets its teeth. Again, IMAO and all that, but the barriers to tech were higher and different, the PMC hadn't yet metastasized, kids could still fail out of public schools, colleges were not yet degree factories with extra steps, TFR decline wasn't quite a Thing beyond the Doomers, the American monoculture had yet to be fractured by the internet, Western ideology seemed ascendant in the larger world, Social Media had not yet been unleashed upon the world, etc. etc. etc.
Somewhere in my head there lies an ill-formed effortpost on these themes. If I can keep myself from getting too turgid in my prose, I may even write it and perhaps post it.
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The progressive tech weirdos purged all the other tech weirdos who didn't keep their head down, so the only ones you'll hear from are the progressives.
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RIP, the entire video was totally reasonable until he launched into an unhinged rant about how republicans are evil
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As a long time watcher and patreon supporter of his, I'm afraid to watch that video.
It was obvious for years he was chafing at the thought of not being able to discuss politics without risking a large portion of his viewership, but it seems the restraints are gone now.
Yeah, honestly one of the less surprising crashouts I've seen to the ICE situation. I like his stuff, but he's always strongly given off that very particular nerd vibe I became super well aquatinted with in college, of the intelligent guy who bases his identity on being the "smartest guy in the room", and in so fully embodies the Freddie deBoer "politics is obviously solved" aspect of wokeness.
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I doubt that his viewership is going to care about this.
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It was completely and disappointingly unhinged, every stereotype of disgruntled leftists, 0-100, etc.
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I watched some of that reasonable video, and my only conclusion was, this seems to be an example of two films on the same screen.
He introduces oil energy by describing some uses, but underplays that importance (nearly all modern wealth is built upon the super high energy return provided by fossil fuels). When that high energy return stops any time, we have to get much much poorer.
Isn't the whole point of the video that we won't get much poorer if we switch to renewables?
Depends on which "we" you're talking about.
"We" meaning urban white-collar folks in places like southern California, who already own EVs with high quality roads and charging infrastructure? Yeah, they can probably make it work, and they'll see a nice benefit from less air pollution.
But for people in rural areas, small islands, or especially in 3rd world countries? That's going to be rough. It's not just a matter of producing enough energy, it's getting it where you need it. A lot of these people have no power grid (or a highly unreliable one), no engineers that can maintain an EV, and no one coming to help them if they suffer rough weather or an extended blackout. For that, the ability to store up "energy on demand" in a simple can of gas or propane tank, is absolutely necessary. The heat that it generates is also just as important as the electricity.
Ironically, a lot of these people are also early adaptors of solar, since it works well in a small off-grid capacity. You can use a solar panel to charge lights, computers, cell phones, etc during the day, then at night you either go to sleep or burn some propane when you need to. They can also use a simple EV for short range trips that they can charge from home, while also using gas for longer trips. It's a very practical solution to save money and get more independance while still having that oil when they really need it. But forcing these people to go "100% renewables, 0 fossil fuels" would be impossible, and lead to a lot of resistance from some of the best solar advocates.
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Could be, but it's false.
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