domain:forecasting.substack.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr 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
11hr 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.
Totalitarianit
11hr ago
I'm confused. 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.
Trump is the President and central figure to America's current polarization. If there is a civil war, it will be because of him. As the one in power, the onus is on Trump to reduce the temperature.
I agree. If we can get Trump to speak nicely about deportations, then people will suddenly calm down...
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
11hr ago
There is no need for new law. Immigration enforcement is already legal. It is already legal to deport aliens unlawfully present. If Tony Gonzales objects to this, it is up to him as a Congressman to change the law.
zeke5123a
11hr ago
Proposition 1: it is impossible to deport millions of people by actually catching them and deporting them.
Proposition 2: People who are afraid will self deport.
Proposition 3: We want to deport millions.
Solution: Make illegals afraid they might be caught and disappeared.
where the law is lagging popular opinion
If the law is wrong, why are they not changing regulations etc.?
That's the point the top comment is making. If popular opinion is in line with Trump, then the votes should bestow enough power onto the Republicans to formally change the regulations. That's the whole point of a democracy.
Instead, Republicans have slim filibuster-able majority in the House and the Senate. The House can user the nuclear option, eliminate the filibuster and pass whatever law they want to pass. If a sufficiently large majority agree with you, then win 59% senate seats and pass what you want.
The fact that Trump isn't doing that, shows that the popular opinion may not be fully onboard with this style of aggressive ICE deportation.
Given that 7 Republican house members explicitly oppose this style of ICE raids for non-violent illegals, I'd argue Trump is operating below simple majority on this issue.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
Margaret Aislinn Channon, a 26-year-old Tacoma resident was sentenced to five years in prison in March 2022. She was charged with five counts of arson after setting five Seattle police cars on fire during a protest on May 30, 2020. Upon her sentencing, then U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said that the right to protest and call out injustice is one of the dearest and most important rights we enjoy in the United States: "But Ms. Channon’s conduct was itself an attack on democracy. She used the cover of lawful protests to carry out dangerous and destructive acts, risking the safety of everyone around her and undermining the important messages voiced by others.”
Devinare Antwan Parker, 31, was sentenced to two years in prison in June 2023 for bringing a homemade firearm to a protest in Seattle on May 31, 2020. The charge was “unlawful possession of a destructive device.” Parker threatened to kill police at the time, and was arrested after he threw a can of beer at a police officer's face.
Isaiah Thomas Willoughby was arrested for attempting to set fire to a wall of the East Precinct in June 2020. Willoughby reportedly piled up debris next to the police station, soaked it in gasoline, and set it on fire. People nearby put it out. Willoughby was sentenced to two years in prison.
The last defendant facing federal charges for crimes committed during the racial justice protests of 2020 in Seattle was sentenced on Wednesday to just over three years in prison. Justin Moore, 35 of Renton, previously pleaded guilty to possessing destructive devices. On Sept. 7, 2020, Moore brought 12 Molotov cocktails made from beer bottles and gasoline to the Seattle Police Officers Guild headquarters during a protest. Surveillance video shows a hooded and masked Moore lugging the explosives outside the headquarters, which was the target of numerous attacks during the 2020 protests.
Jacob Greenburg, 19, the stepson of former Kirkland State Rep. Laura Ruderman, was sentenced to five years in prison, in line with what prosecutors recommended. Greenburg was charged with first-degree assault, first-degree attempted arson and first-degree reckless burning.
A federal judge on Friday sentenced Samuel Elliott Frey, 20, of Brooklyn Park, Minn., to more than two years in federal prison for setting fire to a health food store during the riots that followed the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
A Minneapolis man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for starting a fire inside Target headquarters during a riot in August 2020, U.S. Attorney Andrew M. Luger announced Wednesday. Leroy Lemonte Perry Williams, 37, was convicted on one count of arson for the incident in October last year.
Just this month, a man was sentenced to four years behind bars and ordered to pay what his attorney said is likely to exceed $1.5 million in restitution after pleading guilty to inciting a riot last spring in Champaign, Illinois. Shamar Betts, who was 19 at the time, posted a flyer on Facebook on May 31, 2020, that said “RIOT @ MarketPlace Mall” at 3 p.m. and instructed people to bring “friends & family, posters, bricks, bookbags etc.” He participated in the looting, went live on Facebook during the riot and bragged about starting it, authorities said. More than 70 stores were looted, and the riot caused $1.8 million in damage, prosecutors said.
Victor Devon Edwards, 32, was given his sentence of over eight years in prison followed by two years of supervised release by U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz, after Edwards was convicted by a jury in August on one count each of rioting and arson.
I can keep going if you really want me to—there were over 100 felony convictions in Minneapolis alone—but I think you get the point. Hell, Los Angeles had a special task force set up to identify people who committed crimes in the riots.
J6ers got felonies simply for walking through an open door.
You make it sound like this is some unusual gross injustice. But if you look at the Pennsylvania laws for Criminal Trespass:
(a) Buildings and occupied structures.--
(1) A person commits an offense if, knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so, he:
(i) enters, gains entry by subterfuge or surreptitiously remains in any building or occupied structure or separately secured or occupied portion thereof; or
(ii) breaks into any building or occupied structure or separately secured or occupied portion thereof.
(2) An offense under paragraph (1)(i) is a felony of the third degree, and an offense under paragraph (1)(ii) is a felony of the second degree.
Of course, DC is not Pennsylvania, and their comparable statute is only a misdemeanor, but that's what the people who merely entered were charged with. The ones who were charged with felony Obstructing counts had some kind of aggravating circumstances going against them, like remaining in the building after specifically being told to leave or engaging in behavior that delayed the police attempts to get everyone out. And even then, I don't see how it's relevant to the point that it justifies pardons, since those convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court. And I still don't see how that justifies pardoning people who committed more serious crimes. If this is really just a tit for tat response to partisan pressures, then Trump should also pardon those I listed above who were convicted of Federal crimes, no?
re-arrest every single one of them on new charges and throw the book at them. Get a warrant and crawl through every device and account they they have, and search all their belongings for any antifa-related items.
And charge them with what, exactly? Having antifa-related items? In the case of Jan 6, entering an open door in that case was clearly a crime, and the people charged clearly committed it. The perpetrators were arrested on the basis of actual evidence, and the investigators were willing to present that evidence in court They had them dead to rights, and the smart ones took pleas. A lot of them were incredibly stupid, though, making inane arguments that they seriously thought the building was open to the public, or sovereign citizen bullshit. The George Floyd protestors who were arrested and charged with misdemeanor or summary disorderly conduct, failure to disperse, loitering, or similar offenses were arrested in public areas where it isn't illegal to be. Prosecutors would have to show, for instance, that the assembly was illegal (which requires them to prove a risk of unlawful conduct), that a dispersal order was issued, that the person charged would have heard the dispersal order, and that the person was given a reasonable opportunity to leave.
The problem with the 2020 arrests was that most of them weren't made in strict accordance with the law, but were mass arrests used as a crowd control tactic. If you've never been involved in a protest and seen this before, and officer or officers will make the arrests and load everyone into a paddy wagon, staying behind to continue to work crowd control. Once everyone arrives at the station they are all charged with some low-level misdemeanor and released after a few hours. Police generally didn't prosecute these cases because they weren't prosecutable. The once exception was Detroit, whose mayor, Mike Duggan, was a former prosecutor dedicated to making an example (though it should be noted that the rioting in Detroit was limited to a couple broken windows on police cruisers and some objects being thrown). I pity the poor ADA who had to tell the judge that he couldn't produce bodycam footage, or a police report, or even the name of the arresting officer. He had to endure this humiliation dozens of times in a row and watch the cases get dismissed for lack of evidence until the DA got the point and dismissed the remaining cases.
Goodguy
11hr ago
Yes, I think that Trump's camp is doing a lot of damage to the pro-ICE position, and is raising tensions in the country, by going with the "fuck you, we're sending ICE in and by the way, fuck you again" optics. I don't know why they're doing it that way. 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.
The left is also very much to blame in many ways for raising tensions in the country, so it's not like I'm just blaming Trump's camp. But Trump's camp is certainly choosing to display, frame, and discuss their actions in an inflammatory way.
Do the people opposing ICE really believe that large scale unregulated immigration from Latin America will actually benefit the US?
Forget the US. What benefit do blacks like Johnson specifically get?
They compete with blacks for jobs (or spending in the case of cities with right to shelter) and now there's not even a pretense that they'll be a permanent Democratic client base like them to push for policies African-Americans would want. Clearly the emerging Democratic majority with a bunch of minorities all loyal to one another is not going to happen.
Hell, insofar as they do join up they dilute AA's hold on the party. And, because they're not fully captured there's more of an incentive to pander to them. As Biden said: unlike the black community Latinos are diverse.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
11hr ago
"Not every room in my house needs to be aesthetically pleasing! Where's the variety? Where's the tension? If every room in my house is painted pleasant colours, I will take aesthetic pleasure for granted and I won't appreciate those rooms as much! That's why I painted my living room traffic cone orange with bright pink molding."
Also I don't know why you would assume a Japanese production with Japanese artists working in a Japanese style would make a white character, but they didn't. She's mukokuseki.
Edit: lol that was you calling her a big tiddy Asian girl, so I think even you know you're being reductive.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11hr ago
They are angry at Trump. But not in a "bullied kids shoots up a school" way. But in a, "I cry in every therapy session" way.
I like this framing. For goofy effect, I'll boost it by linking this nails-on-chalkboard level of unwatchable Satanic Grotto Podcast.
Timestamps at 22:00, a direct quote:
"When you see is walking down the sidewalk, and we're dressed in all black, you know that we fuckin' mean business.
I'm sorry that Chad McBro was mean to you in the 10th grade, but it seems like you've been holding onto this for too long. No one gets intimidated by people wearing all black. In fact, we kind of think it's sexy. But this is deeply layered performative emotionality; the constant refrain of "hail Satan", the goofy pit-of-fire green screen backdrop.
And I do believe that's what Jay Jones is all about as well. He types out those moronic texts as a way to hyper up his inner bullying victim self. He's never been in a real fight, but he can rhetorically decapitate Trump over and over. Do I think Jay Jones would actually take the opportunity to kill my family the way @WhiningCoil does? Not directly, no, but he might do what a lot of cowards in the past have done; use the state to make my family's life meaningfully worse.
And that's where, although I like @DirtyWaterHotDog 's framing, I disagree with the "harmlessness" of these kind of swamp creatures. The ones that really commit to it can really fuck things up. "Oh, come on, what are they really gonna do?" stopped being easy to say when, in 2020, they started to coerce everyone into getting mystery juice injected into our arms.
Goodguy
11hr ago
The motivations of the people opposing ICE are heterogeneous.
Some are not thinking about benefit/harm at all, as in, it literally is not something that comes up in their minds.
Some think that the morality of allowing the immigrants in is more important than considerations of benefit/harm.
Some think that the morality of rejecting what they see as racism is more important than considerations of benefit/harm.
Some believe that immigration should be controlled to some extent, but think that ICE is currently acting in much too authoritarian a way and/or that Trump's camp's use of ICE sets up a dangerous possibility that Trump's camp might start to use ICE as their personal army in attacks on Trump's political opponents.
Some are various kinds of Latino nationalists who want to help their co-ethnics.
Some have mixes of the above motives.
In general, they are not taking a position that they themselves know is losing.
Totalitarianit
11hr ago
Because border security has always partly needed to be an optical illusion for economic reasons. It needed to be flexible: A scary bark with a less scary bite, to be tolerant of the massive illegal labor force that propped up multiple industries in this country. Republicans and Democrats alike projected the image of being somewhat strict on immigration all while allowing millions to work here for cheap. It was beneficial for both sides. Illegals got to bring home more money and the country could maintain an image of strictness that would deter massive amounts of other potential migrants, all while we benefitted from low wage labor. That cat is out of the bag now because progressives, through their oppressor lens, shed a light on it and started demanding more rights for "undocumented" workers.
The Republican tactic still appears to be optical, but they are cracking down harder on people overstaying their visas. This projects to other wannabe migrants that if you come here illegally, or temporarily, your ass will be deported when your status expires or you are caught and people have miraculously stopped showing up at the border.
The problem is that we have so many people on the left who are hellbent on pointing out the hypocrisy of the right for not deporting people in certain industries, or pointing to how racist they are, or pointing to how fascist they are, or pointing to how illegal their actions are that their 'all or nothing' game of immigrant chicken pushes a growing number of Americans to be in favor of 'nothing' and to upgrade border crossings to criminal offenses.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
Is your claim that Reds generally are unconcerned about Muslim or Hindu illegal immigration? That would be a surprising take, given a number of past incidents.
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.
it's a shame that our politicians have fully embraced the heat-over-light dynamics of the culture war, to the point where they really are teetering on the brink of starting a civil war
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. Masked and armed bouncers dragging people away at gunpoint has horrible optics. There are documented cases of people being deported to random nations, a few people have been disappeared (from public tracking, limiting a family's visibility into where a loved one is) and there's a general allergy to due process. Horrible optics.
"Cruelty is the point". I didn't believe it during Trump 1. For Trump 2, I believe it.
Here are the 'job requirements' for a deportation officer. Literally randos. (I retract my statement, I was wrong here)
U.S. citizenshipHave a valid driver's licenseBe eligible to carry a firearm
There is reason that police & military training take time. Using a gun for law enforcement is a heavy responsibility. ICE is picking untrained civilians, giving them guns and asking them to go be bounty hunters.
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. Given that most illegal immigrants are brown, I can see why democrats would believe that the average ICE agent is a raging racist too.
If Democrats believe what they claim to believe, then their actions are in line with those values. ICE agents look like an angry paramilitary that a dictator would deploy against his populace. People believe what they see. Democrats are cherry picking, but the cherry picked images are still real images.
Democratic response as what it is - basically outright treason against the U.S. federal gov
It may be treason. It may not. An accusation must be validated by a supposedly neutral arbiter. In your characterization, when the state oversteps its powers to oppose the federal govt, it is treason.
Now, both parties have operated in a maximally oppositional manner since Obama was elected. The adversarial nature has only gotten further amplified with every subsequent President. Given the way laws are written, both parties fight it out in the massive grey area between words. States vs Federal tussles are the most common form of inter-party warfare. This is business as usual. The system leaves it to Courts to decide what the bounds of this grey area are.
As with all accusations in the US, until the supreme courts weighs in, it isn't formally treason. Given that no one have been convicted of Treason since WW2, I think you're being hyperbolic.
I hope that we can right this ship because man, I do not want to have to fight in a civil war I have to say. Having studied history, it's a lot more horrible than you might think.
I'm confused. 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.
Trump is the President and central figure to America's current polarization. If there is a civil war, it will be because of him. As the one in power, the onus is on Trump to reduce the temperature.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11hr ago
Why's Trump sending red state national guard units into blue cities?
Because that is a response on the table when state and local governments violate federal law and conspire to deny citizens their civil rights.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11hr ago
Also, I hate The Office and I'm very glad that it seems to be mostly fading as a cultural touchstone
Please say more - because I vigorously agree with you.
Jim Halpert is responsible for more actual work place sexual harassment than Don Draper.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
11hr ago
Importing labour in an unregulated way from third world countries is going to dump wages.
For blue-collar work, yes.
Why should a white-collar worker (including those with that aspiration) care about that, especially if there are an excess of them on the market?
You can alleviate the problem of having too many chiefs by importing more Indians. It's important to throw chaff about how it's justice for this to happen, so the people smart enough to figure that out don't say anything. What are they going to do, throw their support behind a counter-elite?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
11hr ago
It's interesting to see how porn has become somewhat of an obsession not only at opposite sides of the political/cultural spectrum, but all across it. Depending on the group, it's an issue of free speech even if it is kind of icky, it's sexual expression, it's destroying the family and the children, it's an unavoidable by product of digital technology, it may be consenting adults - but also inextricably linked to human trafficking, and on and on and on.
My idea for why porn keeps occupying this position is because it forces a question that individualism doesn't resolve well. "Two consenting adults with a camera" paired with "a private person in their own home" should be a pretty cut and dry issue of personal privacy within the liberal tradition (as in philosophical-political liberal tradition - not the generally center left of left political movement of the post WW2 USA).
But it isn't. It has been, and always will be, more weighty than that. This is because sex is something significant. We've all heard some version of the joke about when the little kid accidentally walks in on his Mom and Dad and the quick thinking father pulls the covers up and informs the wayward youth that he and Mommy were just "wrestling." This is because wrestling is something that can easily occur in public. And people of wildly different ages and genders can wrestle with one another without causing alarm, until that "wrestling" goes too far or seems to be less than innocent (side note: avoid and Sandusky references in the comments, it's too obvious of a joke). There's some sort of hard-to-define "line" about physical touch that isn't necessarily sexual but could be. This is where we get to use the famous line of "I can't necessarily define pornography, but I know it when I see it".
Individualism can't demarcate that line effectively because we all have an innate sense that sex is something more than wrestling, more than shaking hands, more than a hug, more than laughing together. But how much more and to who / whom and in what context will be defined an infinite number of ways by billions of different subjects. To use an complementary example; define "horny." We all feel it (okay, I guess Scott doesn't. Whatever, nerd) but we don't feel it like we do heat, cold, wind, or wet (settle down). There's no danger in feeling horny for an extended period of time (no four hour dick jokes, please) and it pretty much self resolves one way or another (seriously, no dick jokes here!). But define "horny" for me. Don't cop out and say "The imminent feeling of sexual desire and arousal." I mean quantify and specific define it in general for all people. You can't. And you can't define porn either.
Even worse, the inability to define porn doesn't mean we can agree to disagree. One man's hot fetish is another man's "eww who the fuck looks at this shit?!" It can, and does, trigger a disgust reaction. All of a sudden, a subjective taste is catapulted, potentially, into an object sense of not only moral outrage but hostility to a private and vulnerable act (sex).
And so people try to bridge this gap with all of those secondary arguments; free speech / expression etc. Where non-individualists have at least much more cohesive and simple argumentative advantage is in plainly stating "Sex is special. No one person or even a group of people get's to say it isn't special. We should make special rules to protect the special things." It doesn't matter who finds what inherently "sexual" in nature. All that matters is that, should such a circumstance occur, we all agree that it is handled with a strict sense of decorum, discretion, respect, and sensitivity -- we keep "it" sacred.
So the problem with porn isn't what constitutes porn or the subject evaluation of pornographic content, it's that such content exists in ways that betray and lower its conceptual weight in society. Having a nudey mag stashed under your mattress in 1979 was to be in possession of a talisman of great power. That conceptual weight is no longer the case when every person with a cell phone has, in a Schoredinger's cat sort of way, unlimited insane-o porn in their pocket at all times.
I don't have a solution - in a legal sense - to the porn-free speech tension. I could see a kind of "Canadian Prostitution" paradoxical structure where having porn and acting in porn is legal but producing or facilitating the production of porn is not. Then, with a lot of prosecutorial discretion, amateurs who want to get weird all of the internet aren't targeted, but scammy/scummy bro-dude production studios are.
In a conceptual or philosophical sense, the solution to porn is realizing that is is significant inherently because of it's inherent sexual nature and then making the personal and active choice to avoid it in order to better preserve the better nature of sex in and of itself.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
11hr ago
Ok yeah that was a bit inflammatory, edited.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
11hr ago
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.
TK-421
11hr 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.
11hr 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
11hr 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.
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.
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