site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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.

7
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Hawaii is an epic novel by James Michener that was turned into a (pretty good, you're not wrong) movie by cutting out the 80-90% of the story that wasn't about Abner and Jerusha. It covers the island from physical creation to (upon release) modern day following a dozen generations of a dozen families from a dozen origins. Personally I consider it Michener's best even better than The Source.

If you liked the movie Hawaii about the thin slice you're gonna go bugfuck for the whole pie

I read Hawaii in high school, but Michener’s patronizing treatment of Hale is one of the few things I remember now. Whatever the movie’s take, Michener clearly didn’t think Hale’s faith a virtue; in modern terms, it felt like a lot of 1950s literary sneering at the repressed, nerdy missionary.

Is the movie more nuanced in that regard, or does it just feel that way given the evolution of the culture war? Is my memory unfair to the novel?

You went to a great high school! Unless you meant you happened to read it around that age rather than have it assigned, which would be even cooler

I can't speak much to the movie, having only seen it once or twice and long ago. Having said that though, I've only read the book once or twice and long ago! Funny how some things you remember and some things you don't.

Anyway not to contradict your memory, but as far as I can tell Michener was a great lover of the mystique. He had no love for busybodies and tyrants and their factions. Abner is sometimes the (repressed, nerdy) personification of CS Lewis 'of all tyrannies the worst is the one who cares.' But he's also a man, one little lonely soul, who but for his rock solid faith in the Lord would be adrift like all the rest of us. That's one of the themes of the book - faith as necessary but sometimes dangerous. For example in Michener's narrative the Hawaiians originally left Polynesia because they were fed up with all-powerful Kahunas demanding human sacrifices at will - what they do to celebrate getting to Hawaii I will not spoil for those who haven't read.

One thing I do remember vividly from the movie was Abner force feeding Julie Andrews underripe bananas. It was in the book as well, but the people in charge of the movie really took the opportunity to make it a cinematic moment. Lost in the movie was the reason he was doing it - he was trying to acclimate Jerusha to what life would be like because he was deeply committed to the mission. Not that that justifies force feeding your wife underripe bananas - but that's a whole other layer - Abner didn't even know enough to know they were underripe! He was just clueless, stumbling around, and committed to his faith. The next layer is that when they get to Hawaii - it turns out women are forbidden from eating bananas because they're 'sacred!' So he made her sick (on top of the sea sickness) for months for no reason at all. That's obviously the behavior of a villain.

But Michener wrote Abner as a hero. After all, big swinging dick Captain Hoxworth didn't get the girl, Abner did. More seriously though despite adversity Abner learns to love and lives a full life to a ripe old age, finding fulfillment along the way. Classic hero 'man in the arena' stuff. This has all made me want to reread the book and I suppose I recommend the same to you. Great questions, thank you

what they do to celebrate getting to Hawaii I will not spoil for those who haven't read.

Is it human sacrifices?

I happened to read it at that age. Although it's not exactly history, it did put our brief coverage of Hawaii in my US history class to shame.

Love Michener. I read Hawaii but still didn't recognize the main characters in the film review. It's about so much more.

It's sometimes harder to ascertain just how realistic these movies are, or how unrealistic they are. Compared to more modern stuff, the noble savage is so obvious and transparent that one can easily wave them aside. But when the image presented is more pragmatist, realist, ambiguous... That's a lot more believable.

I think that believability is very obviously based on personal preference for 'pragmatism', 'realism' and nuance, as opposed to more in your face progressive ideological notes everyone has heard before. And I think taking the historical narrative seriously is usually an error, and just as fallacious as when a progressive starts mouthing off platitudes about 'hidden figures'. The fact it is more appealing makes it even more sinister.

These are stories from people. These people are not representing reality, they are representing themselves. The producers, writers, directors, actors. Just like modern cinema represents contemporary progressive values, the older movies represent the values of their time. To that end watching them is a good time and a very interesting looking glass into the past psychology of people, but with some caveats.

A part of me always feels that even being actively aware of the movie as the fiction it obviously is, it still taints your imagination and view of the world. Like reading a book, having your own vision on what everything looks like, then watching a movie based on the book and now all you can see when you read the book is the movie. Even worse when one thinks back, knowing this to have happened, and being unable to remember anything of what you originally imagined being.

Richard Harris

You know, I’d somehow never connected the MacArthur Park guy to the actor who’d end up playing Dumbledore. Not until I saw the face on this IMDB page.

AP News reports:

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.

The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.

Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said.

The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.

I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.

There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.

The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.

Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.

They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!

Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution persecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.

We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.

We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.

"Civil Rights" is a wholly-owned trademark of Blue Tribe, and as such nothing Blue Tribe does can be recognized by them as a civil rights violation. The right to keep and bear arms obviously is not a real civil right, and neither is the right to practice Christianity; such activities are simply too harmful to society, and of course things people want must be balanced against the interests of the public, as understood by Blue Tribe. They will never stop violating these rights, because they fundamentally do not and cannot recognize them as rights. If they have power, this is how they will use it.

[EDIT] ...And of course nothing in the above is exclusive to Blue Tribe. Rights are, in fact, a spook. The vast majority of people will never respect them as anything more than a means to an end, and ends differ between tribes. As our values continue to diverge, the "Civil Rights" framework becomes increasingly unworkable.

It's helpful to note the ways in which consensus is formed. You wrote this up yourself, pulling together a dozen or so articles to attempt to generate context. When it goes the other way, that job is done by a professional class who are paid to do it and outnumber you, roughly speaking, 9 to 1. That means they can generate at least nine times as much context as you do, and even if that "context" is absolute garbage, it's still inescapably dominant. Naively, people look at that information and drift naturally to the easy conclusion, that the truth generally lies with the majority. This naïve base impression persists even in relatively sophisticated environments like this one; we triangulate based on our data, so controlling the data means controlling us, even here. The only possible response as an individual is epistemic closure: to refuse to update based on discredited sources. Not doing this means allowing yourself to have your dataset irreparably corrupted. Doing this means foreclosing any ability to conduct constructive object-level dialog with the outgroup.

I think that the "civil rights" approach degenerated decades ago. When I was thinking about it, the right is now basically whatever value you want to push, it is an excerpt of your holy book you want to impose on other people. I had this discussion about the program of leftist party in my country and I was called a bigot for opposing some trans related points in the program. Of course, because these are rights and we do not discuss them, rights are outside of political purview, you see?. Of course we also have climate rights, we have right to free shelter and healthcare including proposals for right to oral care. In such a case you are basically supposed to live in blue tribe version of sharia law, the only thing that is to be part of the political process is meaningless issues - such as if tax should be X or X+1 percent. The rest is not subject of discussion, it is all spoils for winners of culture war. Everything is political indeed, and at the same time nothing is.

Similarly to OP, I realize that this post is quite antagonistic in a sense, but I do not see any other way. I consciously decided to vote on culture war issues exactly for OPs reasons. I think that voting based on policies is becoming stupid in this polarized society. Otherwise you will exactly end up in situation that OP describes, an anarchotyranny where one side views your values as illegitimate and that is capable and willing to do anything to suppress them. It is fundamental clash of aesthetics above substance. In my political discussions I have better results pointing out that incompatibility:

You think that I am transphobe for criticizing program of your favorite party? Look, I don't care. Your words ring hollow to me, I could not care less because I do not share your aesthetics. To me it is analogous as if you criticize me for being uncouth pigeater who sins against muslim aesthetics. It is a category error, I do not care about it whatsoever - in fact I laugh in your face while eating greasy pork fried in lard, downing it with huge gulps of forbidden strong beer. What are you going to do about it?

I really do not know how to get out of this pickle.

When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them. Well, here's us starting to slide down that slope. Make up any rule you want, call it a "public health order", and just maybe it will stand and actually be enforced.

I really hope this doesn't stand, because it will only accelerate us towards a regime of government executives actually ruling by decree without regard to the Constitution. And what'll happen if a Red team executive in a Red state copies the pattern, maybe doing something like closing down all gay bars and other meeting places as a "public health order" to stop Monkeypox or Aids or something.

Long term I think this might be a blessing in disguise. There’s really a mask-off moment here where the government never even pretended to be making or enforcing a new law. They didn’t bother with even a decent pretext for doing this. The governor simply declared a health emergency out of not much (the murder rate isn’t as bad as most major cities) and decided that carrying is illegal.

This is a case that everyone concerned with civil liberties can and will point to probably for a long time as the point where the mask slipped and the public got to see the full on truth that the government doesn’t actually believe in rights or at least not your rights. I don’t believe in conspiracy, however the last several years seem to have been a whole series of red pills in the sense that I don’t think anyone paying attention can deny just how far from the Republic (as defined by the Constitution) we’ve actually gone.

It makes me wonder what the governor’s motivations are. I don’t know anything about New Mexico politics (besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing). This seems like a totally bizarre thing to do in an off election year for a politician who can’t possibly aspire to an office outside of New Mexico. I wonder if she is trying to get ahead of a scandal or something.

Charitably, people who don't care about guns or are anti-gun to start with sometimes might have seen a recent few high-profile incidents that Hit Close To Home and suddenly justified everything. This model's kinda the dark mirror to the "conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" deal: there's a lot of people who were once willing to live-and-let-live (or at least had better places to spend their political capital) who become true believers over some incident that made things too salient for them. The resulting policy proposals aren't always this hairbrained, but you're picking from a group that's by definition not considered the space at length in the past nor been heavily exposed to other people who have. Some people are people do really believe what they're doing.

But Grisham has been in this game for a while. The more cynical analysis is that she's term-limited (New Mexico governors can only serve two terms; her second ends in 2027) in a pretty Blue and increasingly blueing state (between Californian exodus, and the aftermath of the last decade worth of redistricting), and she's been working in (otherwise unemployable parts of) the .gov since 1992. There's three major career paths available where this sorta trial balloon is a major resume-burnisher even and maybe especially if it flops: either moving to federal politics, managing state-level politics, or going into the bureaucratic activism or non-technically-state-just-state-funded activist groups.

It's possible she's gunning for Lujan's seat -- he had a stroke last year, and while he's recovered might take it as a sign to retire -- or perhaps the VP slot for 2028. But more likely I'm thinking the last option. This is the sorta thing that absolutely blocks any chance of a cabinet-level position or other place requiring a senate confirmation, short of a wildly stacked Dem Senate, but it's an excellent advertisement for Acting whatevers or bigger names at think tanks or commentary positions, where this hugely visible commitment is useful to know who's likely to stay bought.

Could be she’s angling for a possible Vice President nomination. Correct-thinking Latina governor in a border state? You may recall when Susana Martinez, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, was a serious VP contender for Mitt Romney, and she spoke at one of the RNC national conventions one year.

As far as the state being ‘left wing’, it really isn’t. Not in the Vermont/Bernie Sanders/Portlandia way. New Mexico has for some time been a majority-minority state. American Indians make up 11 percent of the state’s population, the third highest in the United States after Alaska and Oklahoma. The median household income in 2021 was on the level with Alabama, making it 45th out of 50 in the United States. To put it bluntly, the modal New Mexican citizen is a poor, lowly educated Hispano-Indian who correctly perceives the Democratic Party as the party of handouts. The state is about as far away from the Gray Tribe, Bay Area rationalists and the Sanders socialists as can be!

besides the fact the the state is inexplicably left wing

It got me to wondering, why is New Mexico more left wing than the surrounding states? I had two hypotheses: indigenous population and government employment.

Looking up indigenous population, New Mexico is third in the nation, at 10.86%. And looking up government employment, New Mexico is also third in the nation at 22.2%. The combination of the two seems initially compelling.

Looking at other states, however, seems to refute both hypotheses. In terms of both, Alaska trounces New Mexico, taking the top spot in both at 19.99% and 24.6% respectively despite being significantly less left-wing. I can buy that it's kinda sorta a special case. But at second place are Oklahoma at 13.2% and Wyoming at 24.1% respectively. (Oklahoma is 6th in government employees at 20.6% and Wyoming is 8th in indigenous population at 3.5%).

Curious if anyone has other explanations.

Many of the government employees are military and fairly reddish, I don't think it's government employment.

All I know is back in the 2000s, people were complaining about all the Californians moving in. And the state moved from a Red, to a Purple, to a Blue state in the time following. I don't have any actual statistics on how many Californians moved to New Mexico, I just know that was a complaint people were making.

A lot of filming started to take place in New Mexico, the Albuquerque government began courting studios.

New Mexico is a very urban state.

Urban is a bit underspecified, but some statistics about the urban population:

Arizona 89.3%

Colorado 86.0%

Nevada 94.1%

New Mexico 74.5%

Texas 83.7%

Utah 89.8%

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/mapping-us-urbanization-by-state/

NM is more urbanized than AK, OK, and WY though.

Is this using a system like the census where they define urban as an arbitrary density cutoff that includes things like small farming towns that are ruby red? That kinda undermines everything people mean when they say urban.

I mean, it's kinda justifiable for the census. Their data presumably have some hand in planning things like plumbing infrastructure, but it's really not helpful for a thread on the culture war where urban tends to imply blue tribe.

At least for Texas the vast majority of the population lives in definitely urban environments in a few major metros(DFW and Houston combined have just over half the state's population, add in San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso there's a supermajority), so I think the data is directionally correct.

How many of those residents would self-identify as "suburban" instead of "urban"?

Because there's a pretty big difference between the political behavior of suburbanites and urbanites.

From what I remember, there was an article from a while back about the majority of Texas identified as suburban. Let me see if I can dig it up.

Edit: Found it. I was thinking of an old 538 article from 2015. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ it's ~8 years old at this point, so the percentages could have swung a couple points, but I think the general point still stands.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities. So it's urban in that sense, but only a tiny sliver of the geography is actually urban.

It's mostly wasteland, so very desolate and unproductive outside cities.

Or in other words, the state is just Australia in microcosm; political implications and all.

Interesting, because Oz is perhaps surprisingly more woke and lefty despite the "pioneer spirit" which would lean very much the opposite. But, I suppose, now that the vast majority are softies in the cities, it makes sense.

New Mexico/Colorado have always been kinda libertarian in a vaguely blue way(eg drugs and weird sex stuff and not too attached to guns). New Mexico is also super duper Hispanic.

I think that sounds very compelling, I would also add a little to the government employment aspect (especially with respect to large # of very well compensated scientists working at sandia and Los Alamos), is substantial, but who knows, the hard sciences are usually split more evenly.

I mean instead of checking 1 by 1 you can plot and check for correlations

Harder to do on a phone, though, and I try not to open my computer on weekends. Maybe I'll do it at work on Monday.

When the arbitrary and unconstitutional "public health orders" for things like mask mandates and business closures started coming down, many argued that it was a slippery slope towards the Government making up any orders they felt like any time they felt like it and successfully enforcing them.

It wasn't a slippery slope. It already was the Government making up any orders they felt like at any time they felt like and successfully enforcing them. There's no need to make a slippery slope argument when you've already hit the jagged spikes at the bottom.

I'm all for gun control, but this is just lawless. Trying to pretend that bullets are a disease is nonsense. Using that as a justification to unilaterally take away a constitutional right, without any sort of legislative fig leaf? It's absolute garbage.

If you don't like the second amendment, repeal it. If you can't repeal it, abide by it. It's that simple.

This will obviously get slapped down by the first court it encounters, but there really ought to be some sort of penalty for this kind of blatant abuse of power. I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.

If you don't like the second amendment, repeal it. If you can't repeal it, abide by it. It's that simple.

Thats outdated point of view, the constitution is something to be ignored, worked around or at best something to be read as we say in my country - the way the devil reads the bible. And also courts are allowed to write their own fan fiction on the original material.

To explain in game of throne terms - after the 60s we are living in the constitutional season 8. Probably split 2/1 about it written by democratic leaning SCOTUS.

Sometimes I dream about the Marshall of the Supreme Court going to the house of the NY governor and jailing them for contempt of court for passing the same bullshit gun restriction that has been slapped down a dozen times with minor alterations. Would certainly enact the spirit of the law if not it's letter. Then I remember that would only escalate the situation and probably trigger court packing.

But if officials are going to have such blatant disregard for the law of the land, maybe escalation is all that's left.

That's the beauty of it, with leftist control of the justice system, they can just do this in thirty day chunks and by the time any judge ever hears it, it will be "moot" because that particular policy ended and a new thirty day one just started.

There are of course exceptions to mootness for recurring policies.

I'm sure there's an emanation from someone's penumbra that creates an exception to anything that's unpopular in law schools.

There are of course exceptions to mootness for recurring policies.

Indeed, but entirely up to judicial discretion. Which means whether they are applied or not will be decided by other criteria.

Also relevant to point out that CHL license holders are filtered for higher levels of law abidingness than the general population, and if the goal is to make gun owners trust gun control, it is almost exactly the wrong approach to make policy which primarily impacts them.

if the goal is to make gun owners trust gun control, it is almost exactly the wrong approach to make policy which primarily impacts them.

And this is obvious to anyone, including skilled politicians like the New Mexico governor. Therefore, that is not the goal.

I am genuinely glad to see you post this.

I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.

Unfortunately, most of them find the same problem. New Mexico's abuses of emergency health orders during COVID weren't as severe as California or Michigan, but they were still pretty severe, and legislative attempts to limit them stalled in committee on a party-line vote. The legislature does not even convene until January 16th (for 30 days on even-numbered years), so unless this order is extended for nearly four months it would take a special session to even start any legislative response, which can only be convened by a 2/3rd majority. And Grishman can veto or pocket veto legislation, which again requires a 2/3rds majority to pass.

The New Mexico GOP has claimed to pursue a federal lawsuit, though I'm skeptical that they'd have any better standing or argument than the individual cases. There's... not much hope of a state lawsuit going anywhere.

It's too bad NM doesn't seem to have criminal penalties for violation of oath like Georgia.

I will make a further prediction: At least one person will be arrested and charged with violating this order. Like the tiki torch marchers, they will not get their day in court; they may not be convicted of violating the order but they will be effectively coerced into pleading guilty to something and having their firearms and firearms rights taken for them.

I predict that this emergency order works as intended: if you look like an upstanding citizen you can CC and no one will care. If you look like a felon, this now gives the police a great pretext to stop you, leading to your likely arrest for other infractions.

That is, unless an unlikely bipartisan coalition tries to force the government hand: upstanding citizens that look like upstanding citizens and defiantly OC because constitution, and upstanding citizens that look like felons and want profiling to stop.

Usually, at least at the prosecutor's level, if not the actual beat officers, this seems to work the opposite way. If you're an upstanding citizen CCing in full compliance with the actual published law, then you get the book thrown at you - full charges, highest bail they can get, max punishment, etc. If you're a career criminal on the way to commit another armed robbery or gang hit, then you get charges dropped lightened to where you can be released immediately.

This law doesn’t prohibit CC though.

Actually it does

It's New Mexico. It's solid democrat but there's actual hardcore red tribers in much more significant numbers, and much more urban and periurban environments, than in say New York or California, and lots of libertarians running around. Open carry protestors will take over some minor local landmark(maybe a farmer's market or a park) and the cops(at least the locals) will let them. That's just going to happen.

So this is going to get injuncted. Until the injunction happens, there will be some open carry protestors- either local yokels or three percenters- taking over some minor public place in Albuquerque. These people will get away with it, the New Mexico state government will see the NRA crowd take over the square in front of their capital building some time in the next year but otherwise come away unharmed, and the lesson everyone takes will be "violating firearms laws is OK".

... so, there's a funny thing that happened today:

Handguns, assault rifles and even a few muskets were fully on display on Sunday in Old Town Albuquerque by about 150 or so people defying the recent New Mexico public health order issued late Friday by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham banning the carrying of firearms in public spaces.

What wasn’t obvious, was an attempt at enforcement. Police were not present, save for an Albuquerque Police Department surveillance device parked at the corner of Old Town Plaza that is often there during weekend events. It’s unclear if any plain clothes officers were in attendance. No police in uniforms were seen throughout the event.

Even without that physical presence, the governor’s office intends to act.

“The order is being enforced, and citations will be forthcoming from the State Police,” said Caroline Sweeny, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham’s office. ”To ensure officer safety, we will not be providing additional details at this time.”

I don't expect this will stick -- if actually sent, and not sent pretextually, if anything this makes the standing argument easier -- but at this point I could see something stupid like arbitrarily pulling CHL permits without stating the cause.

Separately, there was a hearing scheduling on one court case for a temporary restraining order for early on 9/12; it has since been canceled. Presumably it or another companion will be rescheduled at some point.

become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution.

* persecution?

Technically both, since she claimed the persecution was in the form of prosecutions, but yeah, that's more correct. Thanks.

Fucking hell. I can only hope you’re wrong.

On one hand, we are getting the enforcement split that should be expected for this issue. I do think that’s some evidence against the strong form of the deep state, where anyone who takes government dollars is on board with a particular brand of authoritarian neoliberalism.

On the other…I’m not seeing any evidence that the courts or pundits or general voting public are giving Grisham the thrashing she deserves. There’s some intraparty squabbling, but it’s laughable—directly proportional to their distance from the actual law. Talk is cheap, and tweets are cheaper. So your central thesis is holding up depressingly well.

To be fair, the New Mexico Attorney General says he will not defend the law in court, which is a bigger surprise to me. I don't think it'll turn tomorrow hearing into an effective ex parte one unless Grisham decides against sending anyone, but it's not something he had to do, either.

Could this work by "all law-abiding citizens no longer carry, only the criminals, so now if someone is stopped and found to have a gun, the book gets thrown at them NO EXCUSES so for once we can keep Denzil The Drug Dealer in jail for longer than ten minutes"?

Which means Denzel just hires local youths to be his security. Drug dealers have been splitting up roles for decades to make prosecution harder.

No, fails the disparate impact test.

No, no it can't.

I don't see any serious approach where it could. There's already a lot of normally law-abiding citizens who are going to go far out of their way to break this particular order, and the order was issued with far too little notice for law-abiding normies to obey it if they wanted. And the punishments are trivial compared to traditional criminal law.

Perhaps more damning, I'm not sure why anyone would issue this order for that purpose, as opposed to simply directing her branch of the government to do it directly. There's some fun constitutional questions for whether drug users or sellers can possess firearms legally, but they're less constitutionally dubious than this. And the simple bit of "actually just go after drug dealers and violent criminals" is right there waiting for someone to pick it up.

There's a (very limited) steelman where this becomes a police tool, as a fig leaf for a broader stop-and-frisk; even if no one's ever prosecuted for breaking the order, it gives a lot of space for police to do random searches for weapons (and thus drugs and contraband and fleeing-from-police and not having a license for a gun and not having a gun that's not the one listed on your CHL and whatever). But even that doesn't really do a great job of actually focusing police power on violent criminals; it's one of the major flaws with actual stop-and-frisk. And it of course only augments the constitutional issues.

Not an effortpost, just a casual summary of a court case in which people may be interested:

  • Audrey Stone was a Southwest flight attendant, and also the president of the flight attendants' union. In her capacity as union president, she attended an pro-abortion protest and at that rally implicitly represented all the flight attendants at Southwest. Specifically, she carried signs with the Southwest logo on them, and the expenses of union members who attended the protest were paid for using union funds.

  • Charlene Carter was another Southwest flight attendant, who had left the union several years prior and was in active opposition to the union (including leading a recall campaign against Stone). She was opposed to abortion, and therefore was angered by Stone's implicit representation that all of Southwest's flight attendants were in favor of abortion. On Facebook, she sent to Stone various anti-abortion messages, including graphic videos of aborted fetuses.

  • Stone complained to Southwest, which fired Carter for "representing our company in a manner that is disparaging to Southwest Flight Attendants". An arbitrator confirmed that the firing was supported by "just cause" under the applicable collective-bargaining agreement.

  • Carter (1) sued the union for failing to properly represent her in the complaint process, (2) sued both the union and Southwest for retaliating against her due to her protected speech (both union-related and religion-related), and (3) sued both the union and Southwest for discriminating against her due to her religious beliefs. A jury agreed that all of these charges were valid, and awarded to her millions of dollars in damages. Due to federal law, the judge capped the damages at 600 k$ in compensatory and punitive damages, 150 k$ in backpay, and 60 k$ in pre-judgment interest.

  • On the basis of the jury verdict, Carter also asked for an injunction (1) reinstating her to her former position, (2) forbidding Southwest from violating its flight attendants' rights to religious speech and union-related speech in the future, and (3) requiring Southwest to inform all its flight attendants of item 2, including an explicit mention of Title VII (which protects religious speech). The judge granted the request. Southwest apparently asked for some parts of the ruling to be stayed pending appeal, but it did not ask for part 3 to be stayed.

  • Southwest then openly defied part 3 of the judge's ruling, and instead sent to all its flight attendants a message (1) stating that Southwest would continue to enforce its policies and (2) failing to mention Title VII. Accordingly, Carter moved that Southwest be held in contempt of court.

  • The judge investigated, and found that the memo circulated to the flight attendants was drafted by one of Southwest's in-house lawyers (Kevin Minchey), who obviously should know better than to willfully defy the judge in this manner.

  • Therefore the judge: (1) told Southwest to distribute a specific message verbatim, without edits, in order to comply with part 3 of the ruling; and (2), as sanction for this willful disobedience of the court's order, required three of Southwest's in-house lawyers (including Minchey), as representatives of Southwest itself, to undergo at least eight hours of religious-liberty training conducted by a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom, since the lawyers obviously don't understand religious-liberty law properly.

Relevant court documents:

The Washington Post complains that "Southwest had a constitutional right to issue a memo expressing its disagreement with the jury verdict". The judge's response to this argument is: Speech can be compelled by the government as long as it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Making sure that Southwest's flight attendants are aware of their rights under Title VII is a compelling government interest, and the message that the judge is forcing Southwest to send is as narrowly tailored to that interest as possible. Also, the message ordered by the judge is significantly less objectionable than the longer notice (including an apology) that Carter originally asked the judge to force Southwest to send.

The Washington Post complains that "subjecting lawyers to training by an ideological advocacy group such as ADF", rather than "by accredited law schools", is "ludicrous". But the judge points out that ADF has won multiple Supreme Court cases on the topic of religious liberty in recent years, so it obviously is well-qualified to conduct a training session on that topic.

I hate that this is framed as a freedom of religion issue. So I may publicly disagree with the woke Jacobins without fearing reprimand as an employee as long as my dissent lines up with the teachings of another cult?

Note that Carter also won on several union-related counts, not just on religion-related counts.

Yes. If you talk about being in favor of abortion, say, and you are fired for explicitly that reason, you can absolutely sue.

I doubt most companies will be that dumb in practice, which also seems to be Southwest's main issie here: they lack the finesse to lie and had ideologues break the law without any requisite fig leaves.

I think your abortion stance would have to be informed by sincerely religious belief though, wouldn't it? It couldn't just be secular pro-natalism.

It would seem so, yeah.

I think the question of when one’s speech begins to represent the opinion of an organization or otherwise stops being simply your own touches both this and the Peterson Social Media case. In both, the question is when are you speaking in behalf of your organization. I think there needs to be something done to give people clear lines because it’s really an end run around free speech at this point. All I need to do is have you always represent your work and then your speech in no longer protected.

The judge's response to this argument is: Speech can be compelled by the government as long as it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest

So does this mean that companies can be compelled to post false warrant canaries? Or is the interpretation narrower than that / limited to compelled truthful speech?

I don't think there's anything new here. I'm quite certain that there's a long history of courts ordering employers to inform their employees about their rights regarding things like unionization, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, etc.

Yep, the break room or lunch room at pretty much every office I've worked at has posters of all those things, required by law.

Interesting case. Now I disagree with unions (in most cases) and I believe you should be allowed to fire someone because they are a Christian and vice versa or because they have a skin color you don’t like.

But since there is a union involved I definitely think special protections should be involved. The flight attendant can’t bargain for herself and work in her chosen profession. It’s not a free market. It’s already at its core a coercive relationship where she’s forced to join the union.

Stones her union rep by government force. So she certainly should have to deal with the complaints of her constituency. Without knowing all the legalese here it feels like this was decided correctly.

But a core part of this to me comes from unions only existing because of government violence. Otherwise they wouldn’t exists.

There are a small amount of unions that would freely appear without government. Construction is one potential area as project may be short-lived and both sides of the transaction would prefer to work with an organization verifying worker quality.

The solution in a free market (works best when it’s a constant costs business like airlines and not firms with moats who can discriminate) would be for the wrong thinkers or wrong skin pigment bidding their labor cheaper than the right thinkers and the firm hiring the wrong thinkers makes more money.

The job of the union is to represent the rights of the workers when bargaining with employers. Unions have little to no business advocating for anything outside that. The airline, too, seems to have tacitly agreed that it was pro-abortion by letting the union rep use their logo.

I think we all know what would have happened if Ms. Carter had tried using the airline logo or union funds to go attend a pro-life rally. Now, did she harass Ms. Stone online? That's debatable. Certainly I think she had a right to complain that what the airline tacitly supported was not the views of the entirety of the workforce, and that there was no justification for coming down on one side rather than the other.

I agree since I believed she used the word despicable. Though sending pictures of fetuses could just be considered educational.

But a core part of this to me comes from unions only existing because of government violence. Otherwise they wouldn’t exists.

...They can exist by private violence too, right? Like, a bunch of workers can band together and agree to break the legs of anyone who doesn't stand with them, right?

They can exist by no violence at all. For most of the early 19th century in Britain, the direction of violence was unquestionably from government and mill-owner towards unionist.

It seems to me that such organization, sans violence, requires a fairly high level of social cohesion to tamp down on defectors. maybe in the early 19th century, the workers really were cohesive enough that social shaming or other "soft" enforcement mechanisms could get the job done. On the other hand, maybe the violence then was simply informal and illegible. Either way, we're not that cohesive any more, and unions have what seems to me to be a well-earned reputation for playing dirty.

Well unions can/could reduce 'defection' both by securing sufficient benefits for their members that joining becomes rational anyway. If a union reaches a critical mass of membership where an employer can't really do without it in the short to medium term, a union can negotiate better terms that a non-unionised employee doesn't have the bargaining power to secure and if a certain size negotiate closed shop agreements with employers in a fully voluntary manner. Unions had no special legal protections at least until 1871 (and even then that's debatable, some would put it further forward in 1906).

Sure. Fundamentally they require violence at some stage to exists. Mafia would be the example of an organization that used those practices.

As with FCfromSSC above, so too here: unions can exist without violence. A bunch of employees can agree to bargain together and walk out together if they'd so enjoy. The US may or may not deal with this very well, but that's the US' problem, not an issue with people in general.

Then the airline would hirer different workers. Unions primarily only exists because the Gov gives them special rights. And if the employer violates those rights they sue and the government then uses violence at some stage of the dispute to enforce their ruling.

There are places where unions don't get these special rights, and where they exist just fine. What gives?

Example? I gave one potential instance where the union provides worker training/quality standards for short term work.

Where do unions exists as you say?

I am most familiar with Dutch law, and passably so with Irish and Swedish law on the subject. Dutch law forbids employers from firing people for unionising(1), but does not get enmeshed in any negotiating that goes down. Sweden's laws on the matter are similar. Ireland does the same. The Netherlands and Ireland additionally have their laws written in such a way that unionising can never be required of someone; it is strictly that employee's choice. I don't know why I'd be opposed to this status quo, and it seems to work just fine.

1: This is not a special right, as Dutch law prohibits people from being fired for political association (and a lot of other stuff) in general. This may or may not be a good thing, but the right to unionise isn't at all special.

I define that as a special rights.

It means the employer can not choose to hirer a cheaper worker. If you can’t fire then you can’t hire someone else either.

It basically violates free association. Unless the employer can fire the unionized employees for not accepting the wages they are offering.

Unless the employer can fire the unionized employees for not accepting the wages they are offering.

Yes, of course that's possible. The law forbids employers from firing people for joining unions. It does not compel employers to do anything else, and they are free to laugh unionised sorts out of their offices when they dislike the terms.

More comments

In my country for most unions at least joining is optional - I joined the union for retail workers when I was a retail worker, and in exchange for a small reduction in my paycheck (about the price of a single homecooked meal a month) I received access to a bunch of services provided by the union. I was happy to support it anyway because they'd also negotiated several really useful concessions and pay-raises. I haven't joined the union for my current industry because the last I checked it was captured by ethnic nepotists who believed that the best answer to falling wages and increased competition in the industry was to massively increase immigration of indian workers into the country.

I think the union was a net good - and companies could absolutely hire non-union workers, who were mostly travellers and students who took the job on a very temporary basis. Most workers just joined the union because it legitimately worked out to be a better deal for them, even beyond the additional negotiating power. I'm struggling to understand your opposition to unions here because the kind of organisation you're describing just doesn't have anything to do with the unions I've encountered in the real world.

Well American ones all promote things I think are awful.

From a broader point unions are bad for society but can be good for individual workers.

The best example in the US was when the big three automakers controlled the US market for cars before Japanese cars entered the market. Auto unions could negotiate hirer wages and since all 3 auto unions had to use auto union labor the automakers had the same costs which means they could all pass the higher autoworker wages on to everyone else.

You know who suffered? Every American who had to pay higher auto costs but didn’t work in a protected industry and couldn’t get similar wages. Everyone else losts.

A bunch of employees can agree to bargain together and walk out together if they'd so enjoy.

Sure, they can give up a vast majority of a union's powers and survive without government backing. Let's compare what a theoretical non-government-backed collection of employees could do relative to a union (under my local laws).

  • On inception, a collection of employees that got buy-in from 51% of the employees would consist of 51% of the employees. A union would consist of 100%. (Technically you have the ability to refuse membership, but you are forced to pay membership dues regardless.)

  • If the company doesn't like working with the employees (for whatever reason), it can fire them. If it doesn't like working with a union, it's stuck. Similarly, it can hire replacement workers if they stop showing up for work (It can also do that against unions now, but couldn't before 2008).

  • If the company shuts down its location, the employees get laid off. If the company shuts down a unionized location, then the union hold power over the vacant building and must be reinstated when someone else buys it.

Some type of unions being able to exist without government backing isn't much of an argument that the currently existing ones could. Heck, I'm not sure if your "bunch of employees [that] agree to bargain together" even deserves to be called a union.

I believe it, and I'm entirely open to believing that your local laws are poorly-written. Sliders' argument however is that this is intrinsic to unions, rather than poor lefislatoon, which is the source of my disagreement with him.

This feels like a reflection of Against Murderism.

My examples are central to the category (obviously, because they're mine) like UAW and CUPE, while yours are weird fringe groups that barely deserve to be in the same category. It's like arguing that taxation is theft, therefore theft is pro-social.

No! We're talking about a whole country here. By the time something grows to that size and can be observed for long enough of a time, they aren't 'weird fringe groups barely in the same category'. You can't just dismiss arguments because you happen to feel like they aren't similar enough. Some nations have X set of laws for unions, some nations have Y set of laws, you can look at them and figure out what works well. It may be that not all laws work for all people, that circumstances are different elsewhere, but then you'd have to argue that. Do so, rather than insist for no seeming reason at all that the Atlantic leads to a WILDLY different dimension where words stop having meaning.

I just read up on Dutch labor law, and one part stuck out at me:

[A collective bargaining agreement applies] if you are not a member of an employer’s organisation, but the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment has declared a CAO binding to your sector;

That's about as far as possible from "a bunch of employees can agree to bargain together". At least in North America you can shut down your entire business and build a new one from the ground up (on different ground, of course) to escape your union. Dutch labor law is firmly in the realm of "If you don't like it, build your own government" rather than true free association.

Given that baseline level of coercion, of course the entities-which-the-Dutch-call-Unions look completely different than North American Unions: All of their most important functions have been outsourced to other entities, not removed as I had thought.

While I understand your point, in some sense taxation is the central example of theft.

How many people get robbed each year? How many get taxed?

How much money gets stolen? How much gets taxed?

Any examination of other forms of theft are basically looking at weird hobbyist fringe-thieves.

But a core part of this to me comes from unions only existing because of government violence. Otherwise they wouldn’t exists.

Apart, as someone else has pointed out, being kind of meaningless since corporations only exist because of government violence too, it's also rather unhistorical. During the initial phase of the emergence of unions in Britain they were banned under the Combination Act 1799 - an odd thing to do if unions only exist because of positive government action. They often persisted in spite of such legislation in the form of friendly societies and the like. Even today in most of the West unions have at least many restrictions on their behaviour as they do protections.

Corporations would exists without government violence. And historically there are examples of them happening like basically any long distance trade. Where a group of people wanting to share risks in the enterprise.

Trade might happen without government violence (though they would still be involved in protecting the property of those engaged in trade), but the corporation as it exists in modern America is absolutely the product of government intervention, especially in terms of creating the necessary legal infrastructure for things such as limited liability companies. In addition government intervention assists corporate activity via patents and trademarks, regulation of union activity and most of all creating the peaceable environment that allows their private property 'rights' to have any meaning at all.

Why couldn’t limited liability corporations exists without government?

If I buy consumer product from “Y” there is a risks the product fails and I get hurt etc. But I could still see public disclosures on their equity risks and see that the loss to shareholders is limited. So if I buy a car from them and the brakes fail killing my daughter I still contracted for that risks and as the consumer would realize I can’t sue them for full value.

because limited liability for tort victims only exists with state intervention

limited liability against consumers, creditors, employees, other known parties, could all be done by mutual agreement, but limited liability to third parties, e.g., someone who is killed by one of the corporation's drivers, can only exist with state intervention

to see how clownish this can get, check out some of the horror stories related to people who are injured by cabs: driver has no money, car is owned by one company, taxi medallion owned by another company, and only $20,000 (probably different now) insurance policy is required

So if I buy a car from them and the brakes fail killing my daughter I still contracted for that risks and as the consumer would realize I can’t sue them for full value.

you may have agreed to the risk, but the claim would rest with your daughter, for which you likely have a survivor claim wrongful death lawsuit on her behalf, even if we agreed you had signed away your "rights" by buying the product

I'm sure we could come up with a hypo to avoid this issue and I only mentioned this because it reveals a third party innocent who has not agreed to limited liability.

Can agree unrelated third party issues would exists.

One thing, or rather a couple closely related things, I don't understand. If Carter left the union, how would she still fall under their CBA, and why would they be expected to represent her? Seems like she wanted to have her cake and eat it too. These are exactly the things she'd be voluntarily giving up by choosing not to be part of the union.

Honestly I'm surprised leaving the union is even something you *can *do at SWA - most workplaces I'm familiar with are either unionized or they're not, and in the former case you either belong to the union or you don't work there. Or maybe that statement was misleading? What exactly is meant by "had left the union several years prior" here?

Honestly I'm surprised leaving the union is even something you can do at SWA—most workplaces I'm familiar with are either unionized or they're not, and in the former case you either belong to the union or you don't work there.

Presumably, Southwest is not a "union shop".

Quotes from the complaint:

Although she became a member of Local 556 upon employment with Southwest, Carter resigned from membership in Local 556 on or about September 29, 2013, and exercised her RLA rights under Ellis v. Bhd. of Ry., Airline and S.S. Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Emps., 466 U.S. 435 (1984), to object to paying the union’s compelled fees for its political, ideological, and other nonbargaining spending. Since that date, Carter has remained a nonmember objector.

 

Under the [Railway Labor Act], a union acting as the exclusive representative of a craft/class of employees owes a fiduciary duty of fair representation to all of those employees that it represents, members and nonmembers alike.… Steele v. Louisville & N. R. Co., 323 U.S. 192 (1944)…

Quote from the second cited Supreme Court opinion:

So long as a labor union assumes to act as the statutory representative of a craft, it cannot rightly refuse to perform the duty, which is inseparable from the power of representation conferred upon it, to represent the entire membership of the craft. While the statute does not deny to such a bargaining labor organization the right to determine eligibility to its membership, it does require the union, in collective bargaining and in making contracts with the carrier, to represent non-union or minority union members of the craft without hostile discrimination, fairly, impartially, and in good faith.

Okay, seems weird to me, and I'm reasonably sure that's not how it would work here, but clearly there's settled law on this in the US. TIL.

Backlash to the border bussing policies: To the surprise of no one, sanctuary cities don't actually want hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners wandering about in their backyards. New York City- which has received the largest number of migrants shipped from the southern border by Greg Abbott- is the site of protests https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/another-massive-rally-expected-outside-staten-island-school-turned-migrant-shelter/ Obviously not all of these people are democrats, but some of them seem to be. But the real story is down below, in LA.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/la-city-council-texas-governor-migrant-busing/story?id=102840424

One motion directs the city attorney to investigate whether any crime was committed by Abbott and if there's any potential civil legal action that can be taken against him and Texas regarding the initial busing incident. The other is a resolution calling on LA County District Attorney George Gascón, California State Attorney General Rob Banta and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to similarly investigate Abbott's actions, as well as urges the county, state and federal government to assist in responding to the needs of the migrants. MORE: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott buses group of migrants to Los Angeles

Both motions, which passed 13-0, were filed on June 16 -- two days after the first bus originating from McAllen, Texas, arrived in LA carrying 42 migrants, including 18 minors, according to the motions. Since then, 10 more buses have arrived from Texas -- the most recent Wednesday morning, a spokesperson for LA Mayor Karen Bass said.

Obviously, some of this is just hypocrisy and looking out for number one- it's fine for you to have hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers camped under highway overpasses with no say in the matter, but don't you dare dump any on me- but I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work

"[Abbott] is just going to continue to do it, because he has no incentive at all whatsoever until there is legal teeth put to this," he said. "And that means an injunction by a U.S. federal judge to stop the trafficking of these individuals." Abbott has also sent buses to cities including Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia.

When in reality Abbott has no incentive to stop when a federal judge tells him to, he has every incentive to appeal to the supreme court and ignore the federal judge- he does after all want to win his 2026 primary- and realistically unless the federal government decides to take over the border itself, or meet his demands, they can't make him stop. Both practically- he wants these people to be someone else's problem- and politically- this makes him look tough to a base that doesn't already think of him that way- there's every reason for Greg Abbott to just keep doing this until he's lost much, much bigger than anybody seems to be talking about, or his demands are met.

And of course, 2), the decision to cast this as human trafficking

During Wednesday's meeting, LA City Council member Imelda Padilla addressed the strain the influx of migrants causes on service providers while calling the busing an "ugly form of political theater."

"It's against all dignity and humanity of all people -- especially towards immigrants, families and children who have fled their country due to injustices or threats against their lives, who have faced unimaginable obstacles to seek asylum," she said prior to the vote.

When, likewise in reality, "free bus tickets to New York/LA/DC" is quite an appealing pitch to migrants living under a bridge in McAllen and Eagle Pass Texas. After all, most of them didn't walk from Venezuela with the intent of settling in McAllen, they wanted to go further into the US. And obviously Abbott's real incentive is to get them out of his jurisdiction as fast as possible, which means offering free bus tickets to the places they actually wanted to go to in the first place. There just isn't a scenario where the migrants stayed in Eagle Pass long term; they could be deported to Honduras or wherever they came from, or they could go somewhere else in the country.

Schadenfreude all the way on this one. If you're going to call yourself a sanctuary city, then live up to it. Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling. Funny how all those thousands of future productive citizens who will stimulate the economy by the advantages of immigration turn into resource sinks when they do show up in the big city that is built by immigrants and has plenty of jobs, instead of border towns and the south and western states, isn't it?

I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work

Particularly when you have people leaving food and water dumps in the deserts for the illegal immigrants because "no human is illegal!" and breaking laws. If it's fine to break laws to support immigrants, why expect Abbott to abide by legal decisions?

"families and children who have fled their country due to injustices or threats against their lives, who have faced unimaginable obstacles to seek asylum"

So why is LA putting obstacles in their way? Why doesn't it want to help people who have fled injustice and are in fear for their lives?

Yes, it's a stunt, but by God it's great to see the hypocrisy of the liberals exposed like this.

Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling.

What share of illegal immigrant/asylum seekers/etc... do you think wind up in California? (Spoilers: it's a lot, considerably more than Texas)

LA and the state of CA have perfectly adequate reasons to oppose migrant busing without exposing themselves as secretly anti-immigrant hypocrites:

  • lack of coordination from TX government
  • Denying precedent for the principle that TX can shuttle indigents or undesirables to CA in lieu of handling them itself
  • Ideological belief that shuttling migrants around is unethical.

The preponderance of evidence suggests this is an exercise in lib-owning, so it really shouldn't be surprising that liberal governing bodies are opposed to it.

This is all very very weak

lack of coordination from TX government

This would be valid if the response was "Hey, it's great that you're sending us these people! Can we coordinate to handle this better?", and TX refused to send more people with coordination.

Denying precedent for the principle that TX can shuttle indigents or undesirables to CA in lieu of handling them itself

This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables" -- otherwise the precedent is that TX can ship people that CA wants to CA.

Ideological belief that shuttling migrants around is unethical.

This doesn't appear to have enough reason behind it to even refute.

The preponderance of evidence suggests this is an exercise in lib-owning,

Of course it's an exercise in lib-owning. What do you think lib-owning is, if not exposing their hypocrisy and virtue signaling? Saying "You're getting a kick out of my floundering around in cognitive dissonance when you expose my hypocrisy!" is not a defense.

so it really shouldn't be surprising that liberal governing bodies are opposed to it.

Who's surprised? The fact that liberal governing bodies are opposed to something their stated beliefs demand they support is exactly the point. That's why it's "owning the libs"

This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables"

No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.

This doesn't appear to have enough reason behind it to even refute.

When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.

Or, to put it another way, if they have such a problem with migrants, why do they have no problem with the literal millions of them already there? What it is about a few additional busloads that makes it a bridge too far? Nativists prefer to believe that this exposes their opponents as hypocrites because it vindicates their own sentiments ("our enemies secretly agree with us"), but it doesn't square with reality.

What do you think lib-owning is, if not exposing their hypocrisy and virtue signaling?

Showing off to your supporters that you're tough and cruel to the people they hate.

  • -10

The position of the left-wingers is that countries have no moral right to exclude any immigrant that isn't literally part of the Taliban or ISIL, and that all complaints about practical matters such as housing are actually just a cover for ethnic hatred, and that no measure for immigration enforcement is acceptable.

In what way is it unacceptable to make them bear the full burden of their position that housing and other resources are free and materialize the instant an immigrant shows up?

Why should they not be made to take all unauthorised migrants in the entire country? They volunteered.

Sanctuary cities are free riding, and to correct the incentives this should be fixed.

No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.

Absolutely not.

If you inherit your fathers rifle and think it's "icky", then a gun collector would be happy to take it off your hands without worrying about "setting a precedent" that it's okay for anti gun people to gift guns to pro gun people.

When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.

Yeah, no. Not when it's politically convenient to have an excuse, and there's no substance behind it.

And the number of people does very little to make something more credible, since it's not like they're independent observations.

Or, to put it another way, if they have such a problem with migrants, why do they have no problem with the literal millions of them already there? What it is about a few additional busloads that makes it a bridge too far?

This does nothing to provide substance to the claim. There's still no proposed reason why "bussing migrants is bad", so nothing to even argue with.

Showing off to your supporters that you're tough and cruel to the people they hate.

Absolutely not.

The Wikipedia page is actually pretty decent on this one.

You may find it to be "cruel" to make fun of people for their exposed cognitive dissonance, but it is specifically getting a kick out of proving their perspectives to be reliant on mental contortions. Quoting Wikipedia here, "Online troll Jacob Wohl has stated that the goal in owning the libs is to evoke in people "the type of unhinged emotional response that you would expect out of somebody who is suffering a serious mental episode."". There are plenty of ways to be cruel to people you disagree with which you do not see falling under "own the libs" -- for example, "punch nazis!" is a thing, but "punch libs to own them!" is not, despite it being a great way to show how tough and cruel you are to the people they hate.

In contrast "owning the libs" works well even the "lib" in question is smiling and being a relatively good sport about it. Jordan Peterson vs Cathy Newmanis a good example. It is an asymmetric weapon in that it only works if you can successfully frame your opponent as having no rational response, and isn't even cruel to the extent that your outgroup can demonstrate humility, intellectual integrity, and a sense of humor when they can't respond with a rational thought. Those which can be humiliated with truth should be.

The whole point of "owning the libs" is definitely to own the libs. Yes, they get a kick out of doing it. Yes, there are social incentives to get "high fives" from the ingroup. Yes, people on the right sometimes like to pretend that their arguments are more solid than they actually are, and conveniently fail to notice valid rebuttals (shame on them). Yet the purpose of doing and rewarding this behavior is to actually show the libs to be fools, and to the extent that it is obvious that it is not doing this, the behavior isn't socially rewarded.

And as a result, the only valid response is... a valid object level response. Pointing out that they are high fiving each other and enjoying having made you look like a fool doesn't help your case, unless you first show that you aren't actually the fool you appear to them to be.

This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables"

No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.

The whole issue here seems to be that states other than TX, such as CA, finds it undesirable that TX give these people bus tickets that have places like CA as the destination. I'm not sure how it's possible to frame this in a way that doesn't fully admit that the decisionmakers in places like CA that are complaining or at least pushing back at this action by the decisionmakers by TX are seeing these immigrants as "undesirables."

"We don't want to establish a precedent that other states can just ship people they don't want here without our prior consent. If migrants want to come here on their own that's fine, but we don't want the TX government deciding next week that since we're not doing anything about immigrants they can save money on vagrancy or prison facilities as well."

Sounds like they should petition the Federal Government to intervene in some way.

if the migrants want to come here on their own that's fine

But it also sounds like if the migrants sign a simple form in their own language that says "I consent to being shipped to California" that this concern goes away.

And absolutely none of this avoids the fact that the source of the problem is unfettered migration across the Southern Border, which could be fixed if there were action taken at the Federal Level, but that the Democratic Party has decided is not worth addressing. Indeed, they will take photo-ops next to the 'cages' where they keep the kids at the border to make you feel bad about current immigration restrictions.

So in essence, if your policies are creating a problem for another state, why do you get to complain when they make it your problem as well? Especially if you have been previously denying up and down that it was actually a 'problem' and saying it was, in fact, desirable.

We don't want to establish a precedent that other states can just ship people they don't want here without our prior consent.

Then why call yourself a sanctuary city?

We don't want to establish a precedent that other states can just ship people they don't want here without our prior consent.

That precedent was established a long time ago when CA and TX (and other states involved) joined the United States with the expectation of free movement of people between the borders. If TX officials are handing out bus tickets to people, and those people are voluntarily choosing to use those bus tickets to transport themselves to other places within the United States as they have a right to do, then the Union is working as intended.

If TX officials are using coercion, manipulation, or even just the slightest bit of pressure to these migrants to "ship" them off to other states, that's certainly an issue, though it's one between the individual migrants who have been wronged and the government officials who have wronged them. From what I can tell, there's likely some evidence that something like this took place, and justice for these wronged migrants seems worth pursuing. But if the objection is to a different state handing out resources to its inhabitants which then free them up to voluntarily choose to move within the United States to one's own state of residence, then, again, I don't see how to interpret that objection as anything other than the declaration that those people are "undesirables" in some meaningful way.

From what I can tell, there's likely some evidence that something like this took place,

What evidence? Assertions from people who don’t want to have to deal with them?

It doesn’t seem likely that significant numbers of migrants illegally hop the border to take up residence in places like Eagle Pass and McAllen, and the state governments shipping them off are able to produce signed consent forms on a regular basis.

More comments

"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:

Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).

Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.

We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!

When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.

Is this a standard you apply across the board? You'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's opposed to mass immigration (esp. illegal immigration) who admits that their opposition is based on hatred of foreigners - they always claim they're opposed to mass immigration because of the negative socioeconomic impact of mass immigration on their community.

Good luck finding:

  • A Holocaust denier who admits that the only reason they think the Holocaust didn't happen is because they despise Jews as a group - they invariably claim that they approached the subject with an open mind and don't find the mainstream narrative convincing
  • A person who's opposed to gay marriage and the decriminalisation of gay sex who admits that they're so opposed because they hate gay people or think homosexuality is evil - they will instead talk about the sanctity of marriage or how risky gay sex is relative to straight sex.
  • An anti-abortion activist who admits that they don't care about unborn babies one iota and just want to control women's birthgivers' bodies - they will instead insist that they do care about unborn babies and think aborting them is morally equivalent to murder.

I very much doubt you're applying your own stated standard across the board. You say we should "generally" believe people who say they believe X because of reason Y, which implies that there are exceptions, and I suspect that all of these exceptions are people with whom you disagree.

Is this a standard you apply across the board?

Yes. I might think they don't take their avowed belief seriously (but then, who does?), but if, e.g. there are tens of millions of people saying they think abortion is murder I can probably guess that they actually believe a rough approximation of that rather than somehow coordinating tens of millions of people to lie about their motives.

It might not be their only motive, since social desirability bias encourages people to put their most acceptable justification forward, but we can pretty safely say they're mostly sincere about it.

You'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's opposed to mass immigration (esp. illegal immigration) who admits that their opposition is based on hatred of foreigners

No, but it's quite easy to find people who will admit that they think immigrants (or particular groups of immigrants) are lazy, dirty, criminal, parasitic, etc... or that they don't consider their lives to have equal value. Holocaust deniers won't generally just say "I hate Jews" and most of them probably don't hold that belief in so many words, but they will then go on to make some very sketchy claims about the character of Jews. And I'll be honest, it's not that hard to find people who will say that they think homosexuality is evil.

Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.

The Democratic Party believe in "race conscious" policy. By your thinking, they have already agreed that racism is good and an acceptable basis for government policy.

These policies were supported with low epistemic standards, and they want to make them race-based content mandatory, so they even agreed that low quality racism is good and acceptable for institutional policy.

In what way do they have any moral standing to complain?

Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.

So why is my judgement (that many Democrats who claim to support mass immigration, open borders and sanctuary cities are insincere virtue-signallers who only support these policies when they don't affect them personally) unreasonable? Aren't their reactions to Abbott and DeSantis's bussing stunts entirely consistent with them being insincere virtue-signallers?

Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.

Giving people free bus tickets sure is cruel.

So you think TX should be forced to host immigrants that it does not desire, whereas CA should not be forced to do the same even though it desires immigrants?

What share of illegal immigrant/asylum seekers/etc... do you think wind up in California?

I'm aware of that, but New York complaining now about immigrants turning up is just extra-creamy richness of hypocrisy. Are we back to the days of the Know-Nothing Party?

I argued this after the Martha’s Vineyard stunt, but it really doesn’t have to be hypocrisy.

So New York probably isn't far off from its proportional share, it's not being obviously exclusive, and it clearly has handled previous migrants well enough that residents aren’t upset.

If they’re already at equilibrium, but Abbott or DeSantis decides to put his thumb on the scales, why shouldn’t they be annoyed? The outgroup is benefiting at their expense; it doesn’t matter how much!

It’s the difference between choosing to paint your house and being compelled to do so by your neighbors.

  • -12

The term "Sanctuary city" doesn't seem to imply "we accept a proportional share of migrants but get upset if we have to deal with more than that" (1) Instead it seems to imply "we welcome all migrants". If what they really mean is (1) then their proclamations of being a sanctuary city are empty virtue signalling and they deserve to be exposed by stunts like this.

The sanctuary city lot never said "yeah there's an optimum number of immigrants and our share would be X" or "economic migrants are definitely not covered", it was all pious "why are the horrible rednecks oppressing the mothers and children fleeing for their lives from despotic regimes? why are they not letting them through and helping them settle in their states?"

Now suddenly there's such a thing as a "fair share" of people you can take in?

I've not followed this closely, but are the tickets offered on a voluntary basis?

It seems like if they were and food and water were provided, it would sharpen the critique against the target cities with the exact same effect. Arguably that might make the posturing seem less "tough," but I would guess that's not nearly as important when it comes to Republican primaries as is embarrassing Democrats.

Then again, who knows if those details would actually even be reported. I don't know if I can trust ABC to fact check someone saying the migrants were sent without food and water.

The Texas state government claims that migrants boarding busses volunteered to go wherever they were being sent(and my prior is that setting foot in a refugee camp on the border and asking "Quieres una boleta gratis a Nueva York?" would result in very many takers, so this isn't implausible, and the Texas government has produced waivers signed by migrants before) and that food and water are stocked on the busses(I believe this, if only because you don't do anything to move groups of people in south Texas in the summer without laying in water) and migrants are offered a medical exam before boarding(I am more skeptical of this one, at least if the medical exam is more extensive than a national guard soldier checking to make sure no passengers have open wounds or are in labor before departure).

I was on one of these busses that was filled with migrants sometime around the beginning of the year. The bus was traveling from San Antonio to Dallas. It was a normal Greyhound bus, and I had purchased a ticket. When I got to the bus station, there was some kind of (possibly Christian) charity group distributing boxed lunches. Most passenger wore stickers on their chests listing their names and final destinations.

I talked a bit to the guy sitting next to me (I speak Spanish). I'll call him L. L was from Venezuela, but had been living the past few years in Ecuador. He had a wife and 2 kids remaining in South America. He'd crossed north through Central America and then Mexico through some combination of foot, car, and rail. Finally, he'd arrived at the US border a few days prior. He proceeded to cross-over around Laredo, TX, then surrendered himself to American immigration agents. L was detained for a few days in some kind of immigration facility, then discharged to the streets with an (online) court date for a year in the future. Someone told L he should proceed to some kind of homeless shelter, so that's what he did. He stayed there for a few days, and then someone came and offered him (and other migrants) a free, 1-way bus ticket to the American city of their choosing. L chose Indianapolis, because he had some relatives living there. Some days later, he was escorted into a shuttle with other migrants, transported by shuttle to the Laredo bus station, handed a stack of bus tickets (there's no direct route from Laredo to Indianapolis!), and encouraged to board the bus. His first stop was San Antonio. L told me he'd worked as an auto mechanic before, and that he hoped to find similar work in Indianapolis, but that he was willing to work at any kind of job.

A few points:

  1. L maintained that he had been treated well during his few days in detention. (I asked.)
  2. L was clearly an economic migrant. He wasn't fleeing violence, or religious persecution, or climate change, or anything like that. He saw America as an economic opportunity for himself and his family (correctly or not).
  3. L seemed intent on finding a job ASAP. He asked me whether I could help him find work.
  4. L seemed intent on learning English. He asked me some questions about how to say simple words in English.
  5. L expressed the hope of saving money, then sending for his wife and kids to join him. He maintained that he would fly them to America, because it would be too dangerous for them to travel across land as he had done.
  6. I have no idea who the agent was who distributed bus tickets, or on whose authority he was acting. Did he operate in a governmental capacity? As a private citizen? As part of an NGO? I don't know.
  7. There was some kind of charity group (it seemed) greeting the migrants in San Antonio. I don't know who they were or what their role was, or how they were organized.
  8. L maintained that he hadn't been coerced into leaving Texas.
  9. This was a normal, commercial bus. It wasn't chartered. I had purchased a ticket online. Most of the people on the bus seemed to be migrants.
  10. L had received a medical evaluation when he entered detention, but he didn't mention any medical exam having been administered prior to his boarding the bus.
  11. I have no idea how typical L's case is.
  • 107

Reading this I wish L the best of luck in making a successful life in the USA. Economic migrants (of all stripes) are one of the few groups for whom their version of the American Dream is still a possibility.

That's the equivalent of "I met a poor person who genuinely needed a car, and the US budget is obviously able to handle giving out a car, so we should buy cars for every poor person who needs a car."

Even if the immigrant isn't a criminal and can get a job at a reasonable salary, the problem is the country only has resources for a limited number of immigrants. Because the drain on resources is distributed as a zillion dust specks, if you peer at any specific example it will always seem like that particular example couldn't possibly drain enough resources to matter, no matter where you put the limit. But cumulatively, doing that ends up meaning completely open borders and no limit at all.

Or in other words, the sympathy for the individual immigrant is a concentrated benefit, while the drain on resources is a distributed harm, so it's always going to look like we should add just one more immigrant because we don't balance concentrated benefits and distributed harms very well.

I fail to see how this type of immigrant is a resource drain at almost any scale. He's hungry and eager to work, has a skill, is willing to learn english (which I'll take as signaling the desire to assimilate). The job market is tight. Where's the downside? Yes at some point we don't need more workers but we're several million workers short of that at the moment.

Perhaps in a more perfect world we'd have an elaborate visa system like Canada to only let in the immigrants like this. But in some respects the journey he made was the elaborate filter, and seems to be doing a somewhat decent job. I trust the government to do almost nothing properly, so maybe a difficult journey works just as well in practice as letting the government pick immigrants.

Where's the downside?

The downside is the (alleged) corrosion of social fabric and other intangibles. On a purely material level, working age immigrants with useful skills are pretty much a free lunch.

On a purely material level, working age immigrants with useful skills are pretty much a free lunch.

Only if they pay enough taxes to cover their use of government services. Which if they have kids they very likely don't.

More comments

He's so willing to work he's undercutting the wages of natives.

Fuck him, send him back where he came from along with the rest of the foreigners.

This is a good thing. It means that I, as a consumer of labor in the USA, can get the same product at a cheaper price.

Protectionism in trade, which is what your argument amounts to, tends to benefit the few at the expense of the many and are negative sum over all. If skilled mechanics come to the USA from Central and South America mechanics in the USA will be econimically worse off but everyone who needs their car fixed will be economically better off

More comments

I considered making a comment with a similar angle. As nice as it is for L to work for a better life and all that, it's also bad when a bunch of Ls undercut people's wages. I see the "a bunch of" as the problem, not L himself.

It's also morally questionable that the US incentivized him to take a dangerous journey, too dangerous for his family by his own account, in order to get here.

Beyond that, all the authorities knew was "this guy showed up at the border," and they just released him with a joke of a court date. L seems nice, he knows a trade (or so he claims), he's certainly courageous, and I infer that he's a hard worker. A model immigrant, in other words. Most people who show up at the border probably aren't L.

A question for you, KMC. If the US accepted fewer immigrants, would you mind L becoming a citizen? Pick your ideal number of immigrants accepted each year for the hypothetical, whether 10 or 1000000.

Put another way: Do you absolutely hate all immigrants/foreigners in the US, or are you reacting to the ever-increasing number entering the country? Something else entirely?

Your vitriol seems misplaced. L isn't the problem, it's the people who made the policies that convinced L that migrating here was a good idea.

More comments

Unnecessarily antagonistic, write like you want to include others in the conversation, low effort, banned for this behavior before...

Let's call it seven days this time.

I'm not convinced that people like L are a harm on the country in any way shape or form, at least any more than comparable citizens. I can accept that the country is better off without L, but then I equally want acceptance that the country is better off without all its low end citizens (I am not asking for the citizens to be removed, I just want there to be a societal consensus that the low end citizens are a drain on society, who only get what they have by grace of their superiors), and we all know that's never happening.

The next best alternative to this is to flood the country with people like L. That way the wilfully blind societal consensus gets what it deserves by being run over.

I can accept that the country is better off without L, but then I equally want acceptance that the country is better off without all its low end citizens (I am not asking for the citizens to be removed, I just want there to be a societal consensus that the low end citizens are a drain on society, who only get what they have by grace of their superiors), and we all know that's never happening.

Without all its low end citizens? Or without a chunk of them? After all, not a lot of people are demanding that all immigrants be kept out.

And even if you restrict it to "a lot of low end citizens", that's sort of cheating, because it's indeed widely believed but it would get you cancelled if you say it in public. (There are also a noticeable contingent of people who "don't believe" it but whose revealed preference shows otherwise.)

Without all its low end citizens? Or without a chunk of them? After all, not a lot of people are demanding that all immigrants be kept out.

We could in theory rank all citizens (or households headed by citizens) in order by net value to the country; anyone below a citizen whose net value is zero you could define as a "low end citizen"; then the country would be better off without them.

Without a large chunk of them,.not without all of them. Just like cancer, the optimal amount of low end citizens is non-zero.

Fair enough that my language in the post above was needlessly extreme.

Someone like L who has a trade, family members who will house him and get him work, and wants to assimilate isn't the worst type and good luck to him. The people trying to argue that it's a river, not a pie and that the USA can handle unlimited amounts of immigrants because they will magically grow the economy are the ones who need their feet held over a fire (in Minecraft).

I admire L and his actions, because they demonstrate that he's high agency.

I despise our country's response to his actions, because it means we're not.

I suspect we might see "informed consent" rear its ugly head. As much as I like playing amateur lawyer, I can't make heads or tails out of immigration law. I legitimately have no clue where SCOTUS would come down on this.

I'm reminded a bit of SF's "Homeward Bound" program, where it offered free transportation home to homeless people. I'm not aware if they got the agreement of the hosting city before they did so, but I doubt it. Immigration law, of course, is a different beast.

I got a medical exam before 1st grade tee-ball. I don't think anyone was doing bloodwork, but they probably took temperature, bp, and maybe some fellas had to turn their head to the side and cough.

This might be stupidly uninformed by me but wouldn’t it be easy for Texas to get voluntary compliance? Just put them in a shitty jail for the crime of being illegal which is against the law until they say give me the bus ticket.

That is if they didn’t already want to leave.

That would be relevant if they wanted to live in McAllen(none of them do).

  1. As I understand it, most of these migrants are people who have arrived at a US border and applied for asylum; hence, they are not in the country illegally.
  2. As for those who are in the country illegally, a state law declaring that to be a crime would almost certainly be preempted by federal law under Arizona v. US, 567 US 387 (2012). And although a state can probably arrest someone for violating federal immigration law, they do not have jurisdiction to maintain them in state custody, in the absence of a federal detainer order.

TheAgeofShoddy writes on Twitter,

The argument has been that there is something inherently superior, both morally and practically, about migrants- they were more willing to work, more entrepreneurial, willing to make due with less, more in tune with American values, more patriotic (somehow), thus more deserving.

That’s easy to believe when you’re comparing an idealized migrant to the worst assumptions you harbor about your domestic enemies; less so when comparing actual human beings, their needs and strengths and frailties, against all of your most cherished assumptions about yourself.

If the argument now is that migrants may be a net burden but there’s a duty of hospitality, then it is fair to ask how long such an obligation lasts and how far it extends. If the answer is “only so long as it hurts my enemies” then bussing will continue until morale improves.

The fundamental point is that the assumption of innate migrant superiority to current Americans, and therefore of a greater debt which the state owes to migrants relative to those who constitute it and pay for it, must be broken. That is the source of the problem and the fight.

And this is just one front in a larger war over this point. I could re-write this thread and replace “migrant” with “Ukraine” and have to edit very little, because the same principle is at issue: a belief that the government owes moral duties to everyone but its own people.

It is, in one sense, about resources; but core it is about whether democratic government is responsible to the people of the states which elect and empower it, or whether it is responsible both to and for a free-floating set of idealized moralized manias.

That is one of the great questions of our time.

I happen to overall agree - the dominant contemporary US left position on immigration is very much about avoiding having a serious discussion over how much it costs (currently, it is argued that it is free), and what means are acceptable to prevent immigration (currently, almost none) and keep it within some level.

About the only ones moderately serious about this are libertarians, who propose "no welfare" and "upzone everything" as answers, which at least fits the economic considerations, but fail to consider the political economy in a world where social programs fail to converge group outcomes and demagogues are eager to weaponize ethnic tensions.

The current position helps Democrats to keep their coalition together, but it's an obstacle to necessary reforms - which also fits the overexpansion of universities and student debt, Left-NIMBYism, and the general amount of reputation management conducted by Democrats in and outside of the party.

Obviously not all of these people are democrats

Probably, very few are. Staten Island voted 57-42 for Trump in 2020, and the demographics that tend to vote Democratic do not seem very well represented in those pics.

and realistically unless the federal government decides to take over the border itself, or meet his demands, they can't make him stop.

Of course they can. They can put him in Federal prison for defying them.

I am really curious as to whether you think that is actually, in the reality we currently inhabit, going to work out for them, if we assume that the Government of Texas doesn't believe that any crime has been committed.

How do you imagine an attempt to physically take him into custody would go, and are you already assuming that the FedGov would be willing to roll armored vehicles and/or Apache Helicopters up to the Governor's mansion?

f we assume that the Government of Texas doesn't believe that any crime has been committed

  1. It isn't about a crime being committed. it is about being held in contempt for defying a court order. There will be no dispute on either side that that is exactly what he is doing.
  2. If it comes to that, Abbott will either comply, or he will quite happily go to jail, because going to jail for his supposed principles would be very, very good for him politically. Far better than provoking some sort of armed conflict between state and federal authorities, which is not going to be very attractive to swing voters (or, to be more precise, it will convert some Republican voters into swing voters).

If it plays out like the vast majority of situations where there's a looming conflict between State and Federal Authority, the whole situation will get put on hold (i.e. the warrant will remain unserved for the duration) and gets fast-tracked to SCOTUS.

I can't imagine anyone 'jumping the gun' to trigger such a possibly violent conflict when one of the major reasons SCOTUS exists is to help ameliorate the need for violent confrontations between states and the Federal Government.

I am really curious as to whether you think that is actually, in the reality we currently inhabit, going to work out for them, if we assume that the Government of Texas doesn't believe that any crime has been committed.

If he pushes it, it will work out quite well for the Federal Government. He won't push it though, he'll give in if a judge tells him to.

How do you imagine an attempt to physically take him into custody would go, and are you already assuming that the FedGov would be willing to roll armored vehicles and/or Apache Helicopters up to the Governor's mansion?

They roll in with overwhelming force, take him, and win. You don't really think the state police are going to try to fight the military (or a nationalized Texas National Guard for that matter), do you?

They roll in with overwhelming force, take him, and win. You don't really think the state police are going to try to fight the military (or a nationalized Texas National Guard for that matter), do you?

Remind me again, Nybbler, about those calls for local police not to co-operate with the Feds/ICE when it comes to arresting illegal immigrants?

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced Friday that the Chicago Police Department will not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that are expected in Chicago and nine other major cities starting Sunday.

“I have directed – and Superintendent Johnson has confirmed – that CPD has terminated ICE’s access to CPD’s databases related to federal immigration enforcement activities,” Lightfoot said in a statement, and reiterated the city’s support for immigrant communities.

That sure seems like thinking state authorities can ignore or refuse to help a federal authority? Someone better warn Mayor Lightfoot about the overwhelming force that's going to roll in and take her!

The local police don't need to co-operate with the arrest of Abbott if it comes to that, they just need to get out of the way.

Is there any precedent, particularly in the past 50 or so years, where any sitting Governor got arrested for Federal Crimes without resistance from the State the Governor presided over?

I'll go ahead and give you the one I can think of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich#Impeachment,_removal_from_office,_trial

And in that case they had no support in their own legislature and had indeed violated the state's laws as well.

Do you think Texas would impeach Abbot over such an arrest?

You don't really think the state police are going to try to fight the military (or a nationalized Texas National Guard for that matter), do you?

I think the downside for the Federal Government taking such a step is so vastly disproportionate to the upside that it would be absurd to imagine them attempting it. So the State police aren't going to 'fight' the military, but what do you expect the Federal Government to do if state forces merely 'obstruct' their attempts to arrest the governor, say by erecting roadblocks and refusing to stand aside for the arresting officers.

Who fires the first shot?

"Putting him in Federal Prison" entails giving him some measure of due process and a chance to have a hearing and thus isn't going to be a quick fix to the alleged issue.

Everything with precedent happened a first time. The last time it came close was the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door". Alabama governor George Wallace yielded rather than be arrested.

So the State police aren't going to 'fight' the military, but what do you expect the Federal Government to do if state forces merely 'obstruct' their attempts to arrest the governor, say by erecting roadblocks and refusing to stand aside for the arresting officers.

Destroy the roadblocks and forcibly move the officers aside if it comes to that. But the state forces won't actually attempt to intervene bodily; they'll yield.

"Putting him in Federal Prison" entails giving him some measure of due process and a chance to have a hearing and thus isn't going to be a quick fix to the alleged issue.

No, they just put him in for contempt on the word of the judge who gave the order.

No, they just put him in for contempt on the word of the judge who gave the order.

Again this is without precedent, so I don't think anyone can be confident in this outcome.

In the vast majority of times the question of the State's authority to resist Federal intervention has arisen, the whole situation gets put on hold and fast-tracked to the Supreme Court. Since that's one of the main reasons they exist.

So understand that I can envision the scenario where Abbot backs down after a SCOTUS ruling establishing that he's apparently in the wrong, but I have a much, much harder time envisioning (and ascribe low probability to) Federal agents immediately jumping to arrest a sitting Governor on a contempt order where there is any probability that the State government declines to cooperate and there's likely an immediate appeal.

I mean Jesus, there IS precedent of Federal Agents Attempting to serve warrants in Texas wherein the party on the other side declined to cooperate. It was a debacle all around and I doubt that the FedGov has really forgotten that lesson.

Likewise, FedGov has folded in more recent memory when faced with CIVILIAN resistance. FedGov didn't just roll through the barricades and easily arrest those involved. It was way messier overall.

Cliven Bundy is, as of now, still a free man. Strange to see that FedGov can be cowed by a rancher out of Nevada and yet conclude they would simply steamroll the Governor of one of the largest states in the Country without a second thought.

Anyhow, I doubt any of this comes to fruition, I just think "they'll put him in Federal Prison" is not the easy checkmate move you're asserting.

Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?

Because Waco was considered an ur-example of a poorly run operation that resulted in more carnage than was really necessary and the exact sort of collateral damage (women, kids) that should be avoided whenever possible.

It lasted 51 days on top of it all, so for a long time they DID repel the government's ability to serve the warrant.

At least, consider how the most recent popular documentary about it was received. I don't think public opinion on the situation was favorable to the state, and would the President really want to have that kind of massacre on their hands?

I dunno, there was no major upside for the Government regarding how that turned out. It is fathomable that they might risk that sort of event again for a sufficiently important goal, but I doubt they'd be eager to do so.

More comments

There is plenty of precedent to throw people in jail for contempt on the word of the judge who claimed the contempt. That's how contempt works.

In the vast majority of times the question of the State's authority to resist Federal intervention has arisen, the whole situation gets put on hold and fast-tracked to the Supreme Court. Since that's one of the main reasons they exist.

The precedents are now in place; no need to wait. The Insurrection Act exists, and the National Guard can be federalized at the word of the President.

Cliven Bundy is, as of now, still a free man. Strange to see that FedGov can be cowed by a rancher out of Nevada and yet conclude they would simply steamroll the Governor of one of the largest states in the Country without a second thought.

Steamrollering Cliven Bundy doesn't politically benefit anyone; the bureaucracy might do it on its own but it doesn't help the political set. Steamrolling Abbott with a sufficient legal fig leaf is like steamrolling Wallace back in the day -- it shows who is in charge.

The Texas national guard(and the other state national guard forces in Texas under Texan command) would refuse federalization orders if Greg Abbott came up with some kind of sovereign citizen tier bullshit(he is, after all, an accomplished constitutional lawyer) as for why they have the right to. That’s almost literally the story of operation lone star.

This would then cause a constitutional crisis that paralyzes everyone.

You’re forgetting the fact that Austin is in Austin. If this happened the national media would stir up George Floyd-level mob of “patriotic citizens” who would storm the governor’s mansion and the state capitol. If the Texas National Guard fired upon these protesters, it would be Fort Sumter all over again.

The Texas government relocating top executive functioning to Lubbock, Corpus Christi, or Tyler for particularly controversial decisions is a matter of routine, and even if it wasn’t Texas police are more willing than average to turn on the firehoses and Austin doesn’t have full control of its own PD anyways- state troopers patrol the streets on an ordinary beat.

It’s true that the entire government can’t be moved, but it doesn’t have to and Greg Abbott relocating to Tyler for a while and some protestors getting beaten by cops is a step on the escalation ladder, not a nuclear launch.


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