domain:forecasting.substack.com
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
13hr 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.
13hr 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
13hr 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.
13hr 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
13hr ago
Ok yeah that was a bit inflammatory, edited.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
13hr 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
13hr 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.
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr ago
why is all effort directed towards more pious coreligionists instead of Muslims or Hindus etc.?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
13hr 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
13hr 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.
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
14hr 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.
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.
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