domain:forecasting.substack.com
TK-421
15hr ago
The government is deploying the military because of civil violations. Other types of civil violations involve...
Whether those are valid reference class comparisons to illegal immigration is almost the entirety of the debate. Rightly or wrongly, people feel much more strongly about immigration than other items you listed. It may be an area where the law is lagging popular opinion.
However, assuming that they are valid I think the missing dimension is scale and state capacity. It would be wrong to bring down the military on a jaywalker, yes. But if instead of a jaywalker it was a sufficient number of jaywalkers to significantly impede the operation of a government building, jaywalking in that location not for the sake of jaywalking but for the sake of impeding. Then you might send in the military to ensure that the government building is clear of jaywalkers so that the building can operate according to its function. It would be technically true in such a scenario that you were "deploying the military because of jaywalking" but the military doesn't care about and isn't enforcing the laws against jaywalking as such.
And I support the use of the military in such a case.
But there is the possible complication - what if the majority of the people in the area of the government building would prefer that the jaywalkers successfully prevent the government building's operation?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
The government is deploying the military, not to enforce immigration law, but to protect the Federal officers who are charged with enforcing immigration law from organized violence on the part of civilians. Normally this violence, if it was greater than the amount the Feds could easily handle themselves, would be dealt with by state and local law enforcement, but several cities have decided that they will not provide this service. This is the "protective power", which Trump is using to deploy the National Guard without invoking the Insurrection Act. I think this power is dubious, but it's not new with Trump. It is possible he will actually lose the cases based on this, but if he does, he could (and I think he would) use the Insurrection Act (as he has threatened)
That unlawful presence is not criminal isn't really an issue. Why would it matter?
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
[The Trump movement is] just soft liberalism with a lot of bloviating
Trump is neither an economic liberal (i.e., a libertarian), as he has a raging boner for tariffs, nor a social liberal, as he cuts down medicare and the like.
Even previous Republicans with impeccable right-wing credentials like George 'Waterboarder' Bush have refrained of sending the national guard into cities which had dared to vote against them.
Ethnic replacement was a winning strategy and the only the Democrats need to do is wait.
Yes, not only are They doing the Great Replacement, but also they have picked immigrants which will reliably vote for the Democrats for the next 1000 years. Everyone knows that Latinos have the commie gene, after all.
In the real world, things are different. Latinos are often strongly Catholic and have views on abortion which are roughly compatible with the Evangelicals. And Muslims are likewise sex-restrictive. If not for some ancient beef with the Christians (and the ME conflict), they would vote for whatever party proposes porn bans, which tend to be R.
Also, in a two-party system, both parties will adapt until they are seen as a viable alternative by the median voter. For example, neither party is campaigning on repealing the 19th because that would be immensely unpopular.
veqq
15hr ago
why is all effort directed towards more pious coreligionists instead of Muslims or Hindus etc.?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15hr ago
Come on. This is not true. First because treason is pretty well defined. But by this logic Texas was treasonous when they decided to enforce border control on their own.
IIRC, Texas explicitly defied federal control of a core federal concern. The federal government letting it go and refusing to push the issue was an admission of weakness, but... you can taboo the term "treason" if you want, but this was very clearly an inflection point in the collapse of our old system of government, a case where the rules very clearly went out the window. I supported it then and support it now because I think the rules are, at this point, a complete joke, but we should be clear-eyed about what is actually happening here: The federal government as an institution is dying.
aqouta
15hr ago
but I admit to being surprised by seeing the sheer volume of that here at the Motte.
You're just making stuff up dude.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15hr ago
Why's Trump sending red state national guard units into blue cities? It's obviously a performative provocation which his base is lapping up.
Because, according to Trump, the blue cities are allowing violence against Federal immigration authorities in those cities.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Neat!
You’ve got a couple typos (“vaul”, “REDACTED}”, some missing punctuation) and numerous run-on sentences which needed a semicolon rather than another comma. Other than that, technically solid.
I do think I enjoyed your previous post more. In that one, explaining the premise worked to amplify the character’s isolation. Here, it just breaks up the tension. Contrast an SCP: Procedures go at the front to build tension, then the expedition logs deliver.
The lovecraft influence was obvious and appropriate. Have you read Vandermeer’s Annihilation? It’s a masterclass in sketching something that transcends procedure.
functor
15hr ago
Do the people opposing ICE really believe that large scale unregulated immigration from Latin America will actually benefit the US? Mexico is in a state of permanent civil war. The countries that the migrants are coming from are low trust, violent societies with major dysfunction. I am not really seeing the endgame here. Importing labour in an unregulated way from third world countries is going to dump wages.
It seems like they are taking a position which they themselves know is losing in the long term for some other benefit that I can't see.
Drinniol
15hr ago
If there is one single issue I think you will have trouble rallying cops to kill feds for I really think, "Actually we don't need to allow law enforcement to use greater force on criminals and we should decriminalize even more vagrancy and brazen public lawlessness" is it.
It is nearly infinitely more likely the cops grab their own balaclavas and join the NG and ICE than line up against them. Fuck, this is the purge most city cops have been itching for. They're gonna instead form a human wall against it because the dem apparatchik who 6 months ago was calling for their total defunding and disbandment tells em to? One might even think that constantly claiming the cops are racist murderers might not endear them to your cause.
France has also been rather running into this issue. It turns out that when you constantly side with criminals over cops that cops are less inclined to take massive personal risks just because you tell them to. And, of course, the politicians dearly want to gut the police for this but they also need them more than ever.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
The local base of the democrats, in the sense of actual party members, have a pretty serious case of Old. Statistically the party is run by old black people with surprisingly moderate opinions.
aeqno
15hr ago
Why's Trump sending red state national guard units into blue cities? It's obviously a performative provocation which his base is lapping up.
The guy doing most to fan the flames of civil war is the President himself.
faceh
15hr ago
Belligerent nutbars can more easily be thinned out if we're allowed to shoot them under the right circumstances.
I think we're in an arguably worse equilibrium where public harassment and 'fighting words' can be thrown around willy-nilly, degrading the general discourse because there is no legal means of reprisal that doesn't also expose you to possible legal liability.
hydroacetylene
15hr ago
There is a very large percentage of the Republican base who identify as Christian but don’t go to church or make any attempt to follow Christian morality- Christianity is something they’ll do when they’re old and have to worry about it soon.
These people will not judge you for pot, cohabitation, whatever.
UwU
15hr ago
Yes you can be right. It's also possible that "white men" specifically has especially negative connotations in progressive circles, enough to make the democratic decision-makers use a different label for the "good ones".
These are just theories after all, and we are just engaging in bulverism without having a real progressive here to defend their ideology.
But again, why are they not changing the laws to deal with this more thoroughly and why is all effort directed towards more pious coreligionists instead of Muslims or Hindus etc.?
Because it has been established that blues ignore laws they dislike or find inconvenient, and that this is one such law. There is no reason to believe that making illegal immigration double-illegal will result in Blues actually enforcing laws they don't want to enforce and perceive great advantage in not enforcing. This is an invitation to waste political capital on "process" that has already been subverted.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
15hr ago
I said “church lady” in the sense of the 1990s Dana Carvey sketch. The idea being basically “you can’t enjoy things normal people like, because Satan.” And that’s kind of the read I get on a lot of Woke is exactly that — everything normal people like or believe in is flawed, wrong, sinful, and “good people” don’t do those things.
faceh
15hr ago
Yes, but at least you can be held to account for failing your commitments.
If you never commit at all, then best we can do is punish what we view as misbehavior and hope it changes your behavior.
faceh
15hr ago
I don't think it's a good idea to chuck people into volcanoes because they didn't have PTSD when you thought it appropriate.
Not quite what I mean.
More that if someone doesn't have the requisite cognitive wiring to consider children a particularly 'special' class in terms of moral weight (that is, they are genuinely 'innocent' and have a heightened need for protection) it ups the odds, in my eyes, that they have other sociopathic traits that make them an overall undesirable neighbor, whatever their other values. Wouldn't want them around my kids, for sure.
What other types of vulnerable individuals would they feel comfortable exploiting? What moral code, if any, DO they follow, if 'killing kids' is easily permissible?
But as we've established, one can't really know another's heart or their true feelings so I accept that we have to make do with the circumstances we're given.
To make my position 100% clear, I do have a very particularized wariness of abortion doctors and the docs who push gender transition surgeries and puberty blockers on kids.
Everyone throws oil into the fire and kicks mud around. From one perspective:
- the great majority of entrances are legal (illegal entry is a criminal offense, the first offense a misdemeanor punishable by up to 6 months in prison and/or a fine)
- unlawful presence is only a civil violation (not punishable by jail) (illegal reentry is a felony)
The government is deploying the military because of civil violations. Other types of civil violations involve running a red light, building a deck without a permit, accidentally spilling a small amount of pollutants, filing your taxes late (this is closest), letting your dog roam unleashed. If they are merely enforcing the current law, why in this manner? Does or should the military repel down helicopters to clear entire buildings and check everyone's tax documents on the presumption of guilt? Why is it doing differently here? If the law is wrong, why are they not changing regulations etc.?
From another perspective, sure, mass immigration is a threat against Western civilization and the other side hates patriots. But again, why are they not changing the laws to deal with this more thoroughly and why is all effort directed towards more pious coreligionists instead of Muslims or Hindus or Jews etc.?
From my own perspective, I have little idea what anyone's actually doing. It all seems like incompetence or self-sabotage, randomly flailing around with no coherence. I don't think anyone benefits besides China and goldbugs.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
What actually happens is the police decide they’d rather live to cash their paychecks than shoot at federal troops.
Like sûre, the police being red is not going to stop them from carrying out liberal-coded orders. But the kind of insane far leftists who will go up against actual soldiers for leftist policy goals do not become cops.
roystgnr
16hr ago
He wrote some giant two-volume biography first, and then cut it down to that one (and added more recent material) a decade later. It's easier to avoid being boring if you have to force yourself to cut most of what you've written.
IIRC he did leave in my favorite part, the bit about becoming the most popular teacher at Boston University and having his writing career take off but being belittled for not doing enough research:
I finally felt angry enough to say, “…as a science writer, I am extraordinary. I plan to be the best science writer in the world and I will shed luster on the medical school. As a researcher, I am simply mediocre and…if there’s one thing this school does not need, it is one more merely mediocre researcher.”
Of course he got ... not fired, since he had tenure by then, but effectively "constructive dismissal" from the administration? Still he disclaimed coworkers' admiration for the incident:
I shrugged, “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words:
“What’s that?” He said.
“Outside income,” I said.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
I mean Greg Abbott successfully raised an army and forced the feds to back down within the last few years.
As per the original post, he seems to be doing it because blue state local government officials are actively trying to block him, and are encouraging citizens to resist federal agents?
Also, this has been happening for over a year now consistently in various blue states, so I don't see how this is Trump trying to fan the flames.
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