domain:inv.nadeko.net
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
Here in Texas we’re getting radio ads to that effect.
“If you’re in the country illegally, leave.”
Definitely in line with the strategy.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
Warren v DC
Warren v. DC is even more upsetting because it's in DC where at the time you couldn't prepare to defend yourself effectively (with a gun) either. Probably still can't. However, the Federal Government is not subject to such restrictions and CAN defend its agents (either through the protective power if it holds up, or via the Insurrection Act), and I see no reason to be upset at them doing it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
This isn’t brinksmanship.
The Trump administration must end the war on Chicago. The Trump administration must end this war against Americans. The Trump administration must end its attempt to dismantle our democracy.
They have repeatedly called for a rematch [of the Civil War], but in the coming weeks, we will use this opportunity to build greater resistance. Chicagoans are clear that militarizing our troops in our city as justification to further escalate a war in Chicago will not be tolerated.
What kind of resistance? Anti-ICE signs, apparently. Maybe some malicious compliance. Chicago isn’t importing military hardware. It’s not calling for volunteers. It’s not even obstructing the federal agents and troops who are already there. No, the ball is in the President’s court. He holds all the cards, right? He can threaten to make things worse and worse until he gets what he wants.
That’s brinksmanship.
Totalitarianit
9hr ago
I can't help but see every counter proposal made thus far as anything other than favorable to progressives and detrimental to Republicans and their voters.
If they try to be legally efficient and spend months checking boxes for every potential deportee, it slows the process and works in favor of Democrats and progressives.
If they defer to local law enforcement overseen by Democratic mayors, it slows the process and works in favor of Democrats and progressives.
If agents remove their masks and get doxxed by the public, it endangers agents and slows the process and works in favor of Democrats and progressives.
If they kneecap ICE agents' discretion when it comes to use of force, it slows the process and works in favor of Democrats and progressives.
Democrats and Republicans working together on maximizing efficiency and morality of deportations would be something, but it simply is not possible. Democrats will resist every step of the way.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
Which would be much more upsetting in a country where Warren v DC was not a thing.
I'm not as positive about the right or as tribal as some, and I still hold back from identifying as conservative, but I would say that my experiences with online leftists and rightists in the late 2010s and early 2020s had two common themes.
The first is, as you say, the right was usually more accepting. There's that Hanania line - "the left looks for heretics, and right looks for converts" - and it is basically right. My experience of the time was that the left was looking for differences in order to exclude people from their coalition, and the right was looking for similarities in order to include people. If I disagreed with leftists on one issue, they badgered and hectored me, seeking conformity; if I disagreed with rightists on one issue, they'd probably call me an idiot and then laugh and say that we're still basically on the same team. The only one sort-of-exception to this was Trump. I generally ran into people who were happy to say, "okay, fine, you don't like him, we can still hang out and be friends", but at the time I was conscious of traditional conservatives (e.g. David French or Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch types) being intensely vilified, as far as I can tell only for being anti-Trump. But that one specific issue aside, they were more willing to accept diversity of thought. Notably they were fine if you were pro-choice or pro-gun-control or whatever and could work with you on other issues, whereas admitting to being pro-life or pro-gun-rights in a left-wing crowd was just asking for a bullying.
The second is that the right tended to be more honest and direct. This may be just as simple as having a more masculine communicative culture, but I remember being struck very strongly that, if people on the right disagreed with me, they told me that I was wrong and stupid, and we had it out fiercely in an argument, and then we went right back to being friends. We had the fight and then got on with our lives. On the left, there was much less direct aggression, but a lot more passive-aggression and shunning. It wasn't the stereotype of the blue-haired leftist screaming at me - it was more like the way that a stereotypical clique of popular girls shuns people? I felt like the way they handled disagreement was to go "ew" and then disgust and ostracism did the rest. The times we did have debates there was a lot more pre-emptive dismissal.
I don't mean that in general the right was wonderful and the left was terrible. I am stereotyping large crowds. The worst of the left were conformist bees angrily shunning anyone who doesn't fall into line, and the worst of the right were rage-obsessed idiots fed on a constant diet of grifting misrepresentations. What I did in the end, of course, was make friends with the people I liked most in both camps and spent my time with them, though to my great and lasting unhappiness, many of those people, though friends with me, find it impossible to tolerate each other. Even with close friends, though, I look out for certain kinds of failure mode? With people on the right the failure is "oh no, don't mention X, he'll go off on another rant". With people on the left, I can almost see the ideological blinders descend in real time, as the brain turns off and they go back to smug slogans. I'll spare you any examples. Suffice to say I do find, in a quite immediate sense, that the right's sin is anger or rage, and the left's sin is contempt or pride. The right's response to disagreement is to pick a fight. The left's response to disagreement is to pretend that the fight has already happened, you lost, and now all you need to do is fall into line. I find the latter much more annoying than the former.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
saying that Republicans want a "redo of the Civil War," amongst other incredibly inflammatory things.
Oh no, the perfidy of the woke left truly knows no bounds. And to attack such an upstanding citizen as president Trump, who started his political career with his very nuanced ad about the central park five (about whose guilt he was factually wrong, sadly), based his bid for the presidency on another unfortunate misunderstanding of his and proceeded to win the hearts and minds of Americans by always maintaining decorum and treating his political opponents with respect. Always a voice of moderation and compromise, as well as a great husband and fine human being and an upholder of the highest epistemic norms.
Let me be blunt. Falsehoods are always bad, but if there is one party which has forsaken the high ground here, it is Trump's party. Given all the shit Trump has been spewing over the years, I would not particularly upset on his behalf if the Democrats were to spread a rumor that he has an Olympic swimming pool filled to the brim with the eyes of murdered babies in which he likes to go skinny-dipping with his cabinet.
Besides, "Trump wants a civil war" is far-fetched, but not maximally far-fetched. There is a notable community of preppers and 'militias' for whom "another civil war" has long been a favorite masturbatory fantasy. (Of course, they did not expect to fight on the side of the federal government!)
It is established case-law that the duty of the police to protecting individual citizens is fuck-all. I do not know if relevant local or case law has decided if local police forces owe any service to the feds, but I would default to "no".
Letting the BLM riots happen was actually bad. Deciding that you have more urgent police priorities than helping ICE, which Trump likely ordered specifically into Chicago to punish the people who voted against him, and whose whole mission is to score cheap political points in a rather farcelike manner -- "we get rid of all the illegals, except for the ones in the hotel sector (where Trump is involved) and the ones in the agricultural sector (whose deportation would make the food prices skyrocket even more)".
Why should the local mayor lend Trump the PD for his political stunts? Let him at least waste federal funds for it.
For some reason sending in the national guard is really helping me frame the Democratic response as what it is - basically outright treason against the U.S. federal gov.
Are you saying that you know that the Democrats are treasonous because Trump sent the national guard to deal with them? Then DC must have turned treasonous already weeks ago!
Here is my take. This is a clown-show. Trumps masked goons try to kidnap illegals to help him score political points (and own the libs). I imagine that local PDs will in turn try to hamper ICE as much as they can. Perhaps their unmarked cars get towed while they are illegally parked mid-arrest, or they are subject to frequent 'random' traffic checks. This is probably likewise not the best use of police resources.
I can not speak for the random people Trump gave a bonus, a badge, a mask and a gun to act as his muscle, but my priors are that both the national guard and the local PDs really really do not want to shoot at each other. If they clash about specific questions which enforcements of local strictures which just so happen to impede ICE are allowed, both sides will refer to the court system to figure it out, and the court system will do this in very short order. Few national guard commanders would be stupid enough to trust Trump to pardon them if they break the law in his name, and approximately zero police chiefs have any delusions about defeating the federal government once the courts have decided in its favor.
At the end of the day, this is mostly a pointless dick-measuring contest.
What part of this is confusing?
I don't believe hardworking Christians represent a civilizational threat. So clearly the current administration aren't Christian nationalists like the supporters I know and see. But I don't know what they actually are or what the purpose of such measures are.
I'm also confused by the legalism (caring if they are legal or not) mixed with antilegalism (why bother trying to change the laws).
zoink
9hr ago
There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
Could have been maximally "gentle" and the cruelty would have been manufactured by the mainstream media. Under Biden the media used forced perspective to make it look like border patrol was whipping illegal aliens.
You have a point. I can see how that would be the case, although that doesn't mean I think that it's necessarily worth the damage it causes to society in other ways or that I necessarily believe that this is the Trump camp's actual motivation.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
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.
Okay, I'll elaborate.
Like 10 years ago, I was living rurally, and as sometimes happens rurally, a wild mouse snuck into the house and started eating our food (in particular, my Weet-Bix). My aunt put out poison for it, as she'd done many times before. However, I didn't much relish the idea of having to find the corpse by the horrible stench of putrefying mouse. So, when I spotted it one night, I got a pair of tongs, grabbed it (I think it was slowing down from the poison), crushed it to death, and then chucked it in our wood heater to be incinerated. Perfectly logical and justifiable action.
But lots of the urban West has grown up... shall we say, sheltered. They're not up to the job of killing an animal in that kind of personal fashion, even when there's good reason to do it. I grew up sheltered too, but for whatever reason that psychological block didn't take root. Probably something to do with me being high-functioning autistic and/or borderline.
So the instant half the Blue Tribe hears this story, of course, they start doing the Body Snatchers scream. I don't think like them, so I'm not one of them, so I'm dangerous, so I'm to be destroyed or at least contained. Xenophobia. It doesn't matter that there's nothing ethically wrong with what I did (unless you're Ziz, I suppose); the thought process wasn't the same, so the hardware's not the same, so I'm pattern-matched to a serial killer.
I really, really don't want to legitimise the Body Snatchers scream. I know my face looks exceptionally tasty, so I'm not going to vote for the Leopards Eating Faces Party.
(Admittedly, I'm willing to make the "no, being sapient doesn't mean having anything remotely like human morality" argument with regard to AI. Combination of being essential to understanding the danger and the bright line of "not human".)
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
9hr ago
People who are afraid will self deport.
Illegals aren't afraid of being caught by ICE, they're afraid of having to leave America. The only illegals who will actually leave on their own are either rich enough to avoid the dysfunction of their home countries (in which case, they're probably not illegal) or so dirt-poor that it makes no difference. For the average Jose, living in America is such a massive increase to quality of life that he'll pay his life savings to smugglers for the chance to escape his shithole of origin[1].
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9hr ago
My own opinion is that they should openly state their position and attempt to modify the laws to fit it (or at least draft laws they would like).
We did that decades ago. We passed laws, and stopped laws we did not want from being passed. We won the legal argument fair and square. Only, it turns out that the legal argument doesn't matter because the other side, broadly speaking, is willing to ignore or actively subvert the law sufficiently to preclude all enforcement. There is no reason to believe that passing additional laws will force Blues to actually respect them.
So again, why are they attacking Christians first?
Did you miss this part?
Most effort is being directed toward South and Central American illegal immigrants because these are by far the most numerous cohort of illegal immigrants, also generally the poorest, and at least arguably the most criminal.
Considerable effort has been expended against Muslim and Hindu migration as well, but it is the southern border that represents the core of the problem. What part of this is confusing?
Totalitarianit
9hr ago
No, it wouldn't because the optics are the primary deterrent and the right wouldn't control the bureaucratic infrastructure that would be overseeing this "efficient" process. Without the optics of swift deportation, left wing lawyers and nonprofits would be using every tool imaginable in order to become equally as efficient at delaying deportations.
Botond173
9hr ago
According to this fantastic animation about the history of division in Congress, the turning point was sometime during Reagan's 2nd term.
TK-421
10hr ago
My only guess is that it feels good to them and it delivers quick cheap optics wins to serve to their base, because it feels good to many in the base as well.
Yeah, of course this is part of it. How could it not be? This is a political question being driven by political considerations for the consumption of audiences of political information. A government should deliver on its pre-election promises as best it can and make sure its voters know about it. Else it will lose to ones that do.
I don't know why they're doing it that way.
The optics, as you said, but also - why not? People interfering with ICE operations are in open defiance of Federal courts. They're deporting people with final orders of deportation. How much restraint is the Sovereign supposed to show towards internal unrest? (That's rhetorical, it's situational.)
Now we do live in a world of state level legalized marijuana so it's absolutely fair to call the administration hypocritical to choose to bring a sledgehammer to immigration law enforcement while playing dumb on marijuana. Completely true and fair and it doesn't change the fact that the Feds can enforce their law inside States up to Constitutional limits when and where and how they choose.
The best thing Dem elected officials could do (and to be fair, I assume basically are doing in many times and places) for the country would be to provide exactly as much assistance as legally required. This is not necessarily the best thing for them to always do electorally. Similar dilemmas exist on the Republican side.
Or, to invoke my proud heritage of a defeated people: why did the 82nd Airborne have to invade Little Rock?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
Justice lets us align virtue with self-interest. That’s good because the latter is much easier to measure. I think most positions of trust work this way, and I find it unfair to apply a different standard just to this one.
I say this despite thinking the guy should lose his election. He should lose because his competition is more agreeable, less impulsive, less hateful. But not because he failed a hypothetical test.
Nostradamus_2
10hr ago
Thank you for the feedback. I really need to edit better.
Yeah, I think, strangely, this one was more fun to write than to actually read, because it was an interesting subject to learn about, and I enjoyed trying to ground an idea that felt very abstract---not sure if I 100% pulled it off, but I got closer than I thought I would. As a result, it ended up being a little more theory than fiction.
I haven't read Annihilation. I've been meaning to. The concept is right up my alley, but the movie's ending really threw me off. Completely unintelligible: either I'm stupid or it basically just devolves into substanceless performance art with no discernible payoff (both are probably true). I hear the book is way different, though.
veqq
10hr ago
My own opinion is that they should openly state their position and attempt to modify the laws to fit it (or at least draft laws they would like). I see no reason why they couldn't act at the same time. (Really, what incompetence would limit the entire administration to only doing 1 thing at a time?) If all civilization is truly at stake, I don't see why they should restrict themselves to laws beholden to their enemies. So again, why are they attacking Christians first?
Goodguy
10hr ago
This solution would still work nearly as well if ICE just acquired a reputation of being very efficient, without the Trumpian "fuck the left" optics.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
10hr ago
· Edited 9hr ago
Do the people opposing ICE really believe that large scale unregulated immigration from Latin America will actually benefit the US?
It is precisely because the migrants' home countries are terrible that white progressives support them. After all, we can't blame them for wanting to escape poverty; in fact we have a duty to share our wealth, which we probably stole from them one way or another. White leftists believe that we're already so much better off than everyone else that to advocate for our own interest is disgustingly mercenary; all their other arguments for migration are downstream from this impetus.
TK-421
10hr ago
Interesting, thank you. The midterms are the proper test of the electorate's views - even as coarse a signal as elections is vastly more reliable than my opinion of the vibes. I could definitely be wrong, I'm eager to find out.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
Trump brought this on himself. There's a million ways he could've implemented the ICE program, and he chose one with the greatest optics of cruelty.
There's a million ways he could have implemented the ICE program completely ineffectually. This way is delivering at least some level of results, and there is no reason to believe that any other plausible method would deliver better results.
"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.
This has been a bipartisan pattern throughout the last decade, pretty clearly as a result of collapsing federal authority. Gun laws are routinely enforced this way, and have been for decades. COVID mandates were very clearly enforced this way. Trans ideology was enforced this way.
Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer. Literally randos.
What job requirements would seem more appropriate to you? Can you point to some examples of how low recruiting standards have resulted in bad outcomes?
Democrats are justified in believing that this will select for bottom-feeder men with anger problems looking to get the high of having power over someone else.
As you say, "An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter." I disagree that Democrats are justified in such a belief. On the other hand, I can point to recent cases where federal agents promulgated official orders to violate their core mission to better discriminate against Reds.
As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason.
I think you overestimate the sociopolitical "pull" maintained by the courts, including the Supreme Court. We are more than a decade into lesser courts, and local, state and federal officials operating in open defiance of rulings they disagree with.
The fact is that systems of law do not constrain human will, individually or collectively. "Treason" is a word invented by humans, applied by humans, and assessed by humans. If the argument here is that Democrat local and state officials probably won't be charged, convicted and sentenced for Treason for the things they're doing right now, I'll readily agree with you. But the fight that is happening right now is more likely to grow than to gutter out, and there does not appear to be an obvious point where it will stop. Blue Tribe has acted for decades as though it is above the law, and it turns out those actions have consequences.
Trump is consistently the first one to raise the temperature and to lower the bar for acceptable discourse. I don't want to sound like a kid. But, he started it. Only now, the democrats are responding.
It is certainly true that Trump started raising the temperature, if one carefully defines "raising the temperature" to exclude everything Democrats have done to raise the temperature over the last decade or more. Trump is essentially a copy of Bill Clinton. His cabinet and associates are full of former high-tier democrat figures. His policies used to be entirely normal within the democratic party as recently as a decade ago. Red Tribe has slaughtered numerous sacred cows to assemble their current coalition, essentially capitulating to broad swathes of the Democratic policy platform. The democrats have only moved further left in response, and have made both unconscionable government repression and large-scale, organized lawless violence core aspects of their political program.
The democratic party announced their intention to use mass immigration to secure a permanent majority Twenty years ago. It turns out that this was not quite the silver bullet they expected, but Reds are assessing future cooperation in terms of intentions, not results, and Blues have made it abundantly clear that further cooperation with them leads to no livable future for Reds.
Reds are not going to back down because there is no retreat available to us. We decline to be reduced to second-class citizens in our native country. We decline to be victimized by the full power of the Federal Government. We decline to uphold rules that are enforced only to our detriment and never to our benefit. We decline to maintain systems that exist only to oppress us.
No justice, no peace.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10hr ago
Fair, but the valence of "we're going to enforce the letter of federal law because the feds have chosen not to" hits differently than "we're going to willfully obstruct federal enforcement efforts". That's probably a bit charitable to Abbott there, but he could at least claim it was seen as an act of loyalty to federal law.
Yes, the people opposing ice believe the median illegal is good for America. They like someone else doing the lower construction jobs and janitorial work it takes to keep a society running.
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