Feels like this conversation is full of people getting hung up on arguing the technicalities and exact phrasing of this situation. Is that really important to the broader conversation?
There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
What good can we be, if *this* result is the sum total of our good intentions?
>There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?
I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.
> every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.
It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)
ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.
This is mental. Game you seen the amount of illegal stuff the current administration have done that results in zero arrests? There is bad faith and then there is this argument. As if the role of law is even being remotely adhered to by the current regime.
Things are moving closer and closer to a civil war. Occupying and destroying government property is where the military get called in. Shots will be fired and that will be the flame that ignites the powder keg. A lot of children will die, and even more will grow up in an endless cycle of death.
If people of the past would have followed that argument, we would not have seen the declaration of human rights of the French Revolution, not have had the civil war, slaves might still be slaves. Hitler’s successors would reign Europe.
Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
When it come to Hitler people will generally approve of political assassinations and infanticide if it would have meant that Hitler were killed before world war 2. Any benefit that society would have gain if those methods would had been established as the norm would however be dwarfed from the negatives. Sometimes bad methods make things initially better, but long term has terrible consequences.
As a minor historical perspective. The French Revolution is know in Europe as one of the bloodiest period in France under the name of Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon who then initiated the Napoleonic Wars, which is also know as one of the biggest war in Europe.
> Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
> No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
The other problem is that literal Hitler thought the exact same thing, which is why Mein Kampf got written in a prison.
I wonder if the people four years ago chanting to hang Trump's VP (for accepting having lost the election) also thought they were in the right…
(Not that it matters either way if those people are "mistake theory" (power) rather than "conflict theory" (truth), because I expect all clothes to eventually be worn by various conflict theorists).
Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
> Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
Every individual involved in this is doing it because there is something to be gained. The system is basically saying “the more you deport, the more numbers you generate, the more funding you get and the less I will check what you do with it”. We can blame the individuals sure, but if they keep getting showered with money for doing the wrong thing, of course the system has a big responsibility. Why should the people involved not do this if they are being explicitly encouraged by their employer to do it?
Based on some interactions I have had with CBP and ICE in the past as a legal immigrant, I'm confident that many of those people aren't doing it because of any sort of monetary gain or career advancement, but simply because it gives them an outlet to realize their sadistic tendencies.
And because is tolerated and even encouraged, these jobs attract exactly those kinds of people. Which is how you end up with an organization with an internal culture that revels in human suffering.
The assumption of "good intentions" is not really warranted at this point. This movement is mainly driven by people who feel they have been marginalized by our society, and they want to lash out and see other people get hurt, period.
Regardless of the ways they have been marginalized, and how much marginalization they have done to themselves by failing to engage with the complexity of the world and following malicious leaders instead, this is where we are at. We need to stare this bare reality in the face lest the supporters, enablers, and fence-sitters continue soothing themselves with rationalizations.
> This movement is mainly driven by people who feel they have been marginalized by our society, and they want to lash out and see other people get hurt,
Yes. This.
This is what drives facism: It is not your fault you feel bad, it's them, over there
This is why it is so important to "cuddle a facist".
Facism feeds on violence, showing love and compassion to those whom you disagree with robs fascism of its oxygen
Not all of those adults have good intentions. In fact, situation happened because of adults who have bad intentions, managed to execute them and are happy about the result.
And they have been giving benefit of the doubt too many times already. At this point, it is absurd to pretend there are good intentions in the core of this.
When you're a sheltered suburbanite nerd (yeah, even the "rural" ones) who will never have to truly worry about being in this situation, this is just an exciting news story to squabble over and smugly flounder about on your keyboard.
I feel more disgusted by the Americans who know this is wrong but do nothing. I have no patience for evil people, but the truly damned are all the Americans who know and sense better but do not or cannot act properly.
If deporting U.S. CITIZEN CHILDREN does not send you to the streets with fire and fury, you are well and truly lost. So much damn talk over the decades I've been alive about patriotism and liberty from America, but when a moment unquestionably calls for action, it turns out Americans were just unserious cosplayers the whole damn time.
>but the truly damned are all the Americans who know and sense better but do not or cannot act properly.
MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
And even now you have people that think showing up with clever signs around the downtown parks / public areas on the weekend when all the government offices are closed are somehow going to get their message across. It's not enough. It was never enough. It wasn't enough for Vietnam or Iraq. It's definitely not going to be enough now. Americans are going to have to choose to do some uncomfortable and maybe even risky things to demonstrate our disapproval.
Or we have to admit that for many of us, this is who we actually are as a country. It certainly is a good bit of the voting public. I don't think it's a mistake that in basically one generation we lied to the world about Iraq then elected a fascist twice. And at that point I don't think stern dissent is an effective or even morally correct course of action.
I’ve been in the get-out-the-vote space for 25 years, now. I’ve been politically active against gerrymandering nearly as long. My wife was tooth-and-nails in the redistricting fight (in Texas; Texas!) for ~10 years.
Here’s my hands-on experience: at least half the people you meet are defective, to a scary extent, functionally in terms of empathy. Probably two thirds have serious executive functioning deficits. That means they can neither understand the plight of their fellows; and, even if they could, they could not generalize their own situation into a policy to help everyone in the same situation.
EDIT: most people don’t vote. A disproportionate number that do are both empathetic, and high have high levels of executive functioning skills. The flip side of the coin are activated people who are missing one-or-the-other skills, but are voting out of some other errant ideology. I want to be clear that the distribution of voters is “both sides”: there are disgusting and enlightened voters on both sides of the spectrum. We’re all trapped in the box, together.
I grew up working class in Indiana, and can confirm. My in-laws were reeling after the 2016 election and they just couldn't understand how people could vote for Trump, basically. My answer was "you're polite, highly educated, upper middle class people, most people everywhere are not like you. That doesn't make them bad or less than, but they make bad decisions basically constantly. This is just one in a long stream of them."
I dunno. I think we need to can it with the PCness of “it doesn’t make them bad.”
It does. Constantly making bad decisions makes them bad. What it doesn’t do is make them any less entitled to all of their rights. Something their badness has paved way for robbing others of.
My FIL has been a conservative his whole life and has never voted. He immediately recognized the nazi talking points from Trump. Said Trump was going full Nazi. But it wasn’t enough to get him to register to vote and vote against a nazi
> MLK said it best: "the moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice"
Are you a moderate who has a better plan? I ask that sincerely, if I've given up its not because I prefer peace but because I know a losing battle when I see one. We don't have a charismatic leader like MLK. The democratic party is in shambles. They're afraid of fighting the tariffs and alienating the working class. There is no one in the party who is broadly likeable, who has any chance of bringing the voting public together. Voters on the left still cling to their own personal pet peeves and insist they will never vote for anyone who doesn't specifically address whatever they think is the _real_ problem.
The sad reality is that Trump's policies are still really popular and if people are unhappy they are only unhappy with the execution. You see that in this thread. People see the this news story and see it as an unfortunate side effect of a basically good policy. They think illegal immigration is hurting our economy, they think 'anchor babies' are people taking advantage of a loophole that should be closed.
They think this country suffers because of tariffs and maybe they think Trump got carried away but they still support the idea. They are sick of Ukraine and think it's time we walked away. They think DEI means a black women will be hired over a white man under any circumstances. They think DEI in schools means our kids are being taught that the US is full of horrible backwards racists and sexists who need liberal saviors to make it better. They think that government agencies are overpaid and over bloated and full of people who don't do anything but get a fat paycheck.
These beliefs cut across people of all genders, of all colors, of all ages, of all states and cities. We can't even blame the boomers anymore and insist the younger generations will save us. No one will save us.
When it comes to divisive issues such as DEI, a way to bridge the beliefs of both sides is to not engage with far side of either spectrum but rather deploy something that unite people like the European declaration of human rights. The far left would loose the ability to address past injustices, and the far right would have to agree with the enforcement of equal rights over personal belief, but the general concept has a very broad appeal to both left and right wing voters.
stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person. find someone with charisma like obama. there is no magical moderate voter that the dems keep hoping to appeal to. they already have been the center right party for decades now.
2) Moderates do, in fact, have stronger appeal than leftists. It's empirically true. As evidence, see: literally just about every election where a leftist is on the ballot, with the possible exception of AOC who has Obama-tier charisma factor and also not-coincidentally has moderated her image a bit the past few years to the point where the most lefty leftists think she's a sellout.
People like Tester and Manchin overperformed in their deep-red states for a long, long time. People like Collins and Don Bacon on the other side overperform for the same reason.
The point of moderation for a Democrat is not picking up Republican votes, it's picking up votes from the 30% of the country that doesn't identify with either party, most of which are moderates.
Also, the black community is the core of the Democratic coalition, and they are pretty moderate politically, especially on social issues. Latinos are the same and that's part of the reason we've been losing them.
> stop supporting moderate politicians that appeal to no damn person
I think you are right but I think half of democratic voters think the party has gone too left ( abortion, gender politics ) while half thinks it has gone too far right. The democratic party is trying to have it both ways and utterly failing, but in their defense I don't think fully embracing either side will be enough for them to win. The problem is largely the voters who absolutely refuse to compromise on their personal hill to die on. Republican voters will unite on anyone as long as they piss of the left.
> find someone with charisma like Obama
That person does not exist, or if they do they are too smart to support the shambling mess that is the democratic party.
I think the party is gambling that Trump makes such a hopeless mess of things that voters will have no choice but vote blue. I'm not sure they will win that gamble.
What did the US democratic party ever do that was considered too left wing? Not said or wishcast, what material thing did they implement that was too left wing on abortion?
Theoretically, abortion in the US used to be extremely liberal (in the original meaning of the word liberal).
Materially? No one wait week 22 for an abortion unless it's an emergency, considering the damage it does.
The percentage of childbirth death plus late stage abortion in the US is barely superior to the one in my country where abortions after weeks 18 needs to be argued by two doctors and a social worker in front of a judge. And that percentage is only superior because US have a very, very high childbirth death for a developed country.
Materially, Usians do less late stage abortion than other developed countries where those are way more restrictive. Because people love to talk about 'theorically' when they talk about other people body and choices, never about what really happens, and that bothers me greatly.
> What did the US democratic party ever do that was considered too left wing?
Jack shit probably but that doesn't mean right-leaning Democrats are going to vote for Bernie Sanders and cross their fingers that none of his proposals get enacted.
1. They don't know what they can do that will be effective.
2. They don't want to be targeted as dissidents or non-loyalists to the regime.
3. They're drained by their individual economic situations and worries.
4. They're drained by severe disappointment in large swaths of the electorate, and in the failure of checks and balances.
5. Events are so upsetting that they're in denial or consciously avoiding it.
It might be reassuring to see huge protests, but I wouldn't encourage individuals to do that anymore, because most of those people will be identified by the various surveillance technologies that we've built. (Half of the surveillance built by techbros, incidentally.) The identified can then be further suppressed with automation, and the barriers to doing that are much lower than mass physical roundups and concentration camps.
Worse, I believe anything the average citizen can do will either be ineffective or counterproductive. They are not going to listen to anything other than force and any outside force will simply provide a focus. Thus the force must come from within--law enforcement has to do their job. Or, if they don't, a military coup.
It’s worse than that. Far too many of us want this stuff.
I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
Last time around, I could at least soothe myself with the idea that he only won because our electoral system is idiotic, and a lot of voters didn’t understand what they were voting for. This time? He won the most votes, and everyone had every opportunity to see what they were getting. I can only conclude that my countrymen are fucked in the head.
> I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates.
If everyone hates it, you only need to fight it if has external support. A regime needs considerable active support and even wider at least tacit support to operate; if everyone locally hates it, it cannot function as a regime (but, if it has sufficient external support, can perhaps function as an occupation, that you do have to fight.)
> I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports.
You fight it by actively seeking to make it one that has much less support, by means such as revealing to the people who would oppose various acts the things that it is doing that have been effectively concealed or misrepresented to them that they would oppose if they understood.
> I understand the basic idea of how you fight an oppressive regime everyone hates. I have no idea how you go about fighting one that half the country supports. Protests aren’t going to fix that.
In reality, around 22% of the US populace (not just voters, but everyone) voted for Trump. Similar voted for Harris.
The rest didn't vote. I refuse to attribute justifications, since they are too numerous.
But that is correct, peaceful protests like 50501 aren't going to do much. Their value is more networking and mutual aid creation/management.
What does work, especially historically, is violence. As a historian, when you look at pivotal points in history, changes were only won after a LOT of violence was applied.
The trick is that groups like 50501 are absolutely needed for a different reason. The governments cannot negotiate with 'terrorists', but can save face by negotiating with 'peaceful groups'. We see this recently with MLK and Malcolm X, Sinn Fein and IRA, Ghandi and dozens of separatist factions.
I'm not publically advocating violence, but the more fascist they become, well, that will be inevitable. Different people and groups have different lines in the sand.
We're already talking about breaching medical records for 'defectives' (autism) list, turning trans folk into non-humans, kidnapping/disappearing people off the street, tattle-tale emails and phone#s to report people, lebensraum (Canada, Greenland, etc), off-country concentration camps (CECOT), and more. And we're only 3 months in of 4 years.
If I had the ability to get out, I would have. But I'm guessing that even the better off here also don't have the ability.
I think you’re counting people who aren’t even eligible to vote. Among eligible voters, it was about 1/3rd to each of Trump, Harris, and staying home.
I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
> I think you’re counting people who aren’t even eligible to vote. Among eligible voters, it was about 1/3rd to each of Trump, Harris, and staying home.
Oh, I absolutely am counting every human in the US, and not registered voters. Total counts are like 45% of the whole population voted.
I chose total counts to get a better idea of density vs political affiliation since we have those at the district level.
> I don’t give a lot of credit to those who stayed home. They also knew who Trump was and decided to let others make the choice on their behalf.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Usually, the back and forth between statist democrat and statist republican weren't that much diverging, although campaigns would portray the other side as baby-eaters.
This is different. And even just 3 months, I'm seeing apolitical people come out of the woodwork and actually start being political. And even though I do vote, I get the idea of 'as long as politicians do decent, I don't care'.
> I’m not confident that even violent action would change things when so many people are in favor of or at least ok with what’s going on. You’re not going to win a fight, so is the idea to win hearts and minds? I don’t see that working.
I'm not seeing a fight ala lines of militia lining up firing in lines. I'm thinking what we're headed towards is much much more like Luigi. Or more historically, what we saw in France during WW2 - sabotage and hit-n-runs.
And the battle lines are also pretty defined as well. Its going to be a fight between rural and cities.
Like I said, if I had the ability to leave until the situation here comes to some semblance of sanity and stability (along with respect for human decency), I would leave. But at the moment, that is not an option for me. So instead, its a "what can I do to safeguard me and mine, for the foreseeable future?"
(So far, my answer is: grow my own food, get to know local farmers and pay/trade, connect with local mutual aid orgs, become more self-sufficient, canning and food preservation. That sort of stuff. Goal is to just blend in, and help non-violently where I can.)
>If deporting U.S. CITIZEN CHILDREN does not send you to the streets with fire and fury, you are well and truly lost.
This ended up being fake news. Who would gain from enraging Americans with divisive fake news?
Justice Department attorneys argued that it was in the child's best interest to remain in her mother's legal custody and suggested the child could return, writing, "V.M.L. is not prohibited from entering the United States."
Trump administration officials told the court that the mother had informed ICE agents that she wanted to bring V.M.L. with her to Honduras, providing a handwritten note in Spanish that they said confirmed her wishes.
Answering for myself, I don't see a movement that is strictly for due process, law, and order.
Each side is so encumbered with baggage that I don't want to support them.
One is breaking law and processes in egregious ways. The other thinks that law should not apply to illegal immigrants and even legal deportations are a due process violation.
Im entirely honest. There are many in this thread suggesting amnesty or non-enforcement. If I dont want to take part in an open boarder or anti-enforcement protest, where do I go?
What do you think? Should all illegal immigrants be deported?
And there was a bipartisanship solution under Biden that got nixed when Trump, then an unelected citizen, cried to congressional leadership about it hurting his chances for reelection. Like so many other things this weak autocrat cries about, he made things worse.
I think the one who derailed the conversation did not do that on purpose, but yes, throwing in a technicality to us/the HN crowd is like throwing red meat to the lions.
It seems we as technical people give little reason for giving us a leading role in society. I admit that the media doesn't help as they keep the big picture out of frame, but then again, we are very easily cornered with minor details.
Anne Frank's house is not far from where I live. I bet that the term "forcefully" in a sentence like "She was forcefully deported" could have been up for debate too, who knows, but in the end it would not have really helped the girl.
The broader conversation is impossible to have. “What policies do we need to ensure due process without compromising the effectiveness of immigration enforcement?” Even trying to start the conversation feels like a troll, because when the system looks like it does today who’s going to concede the premise that immigration enforcement shouldn’t be compromised?
You're starting from an unverified assumption (the presumed ineffectiveness of immigration enforcement), that's maybe why it feels off to you. How is it ineffective, and why? Once you have answers to that, you can start the conversation about policy.
There's millions of people currently in the US who aren't authorized to be in the US. 11 million, if you believe Pew's estimate (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...). I'm not sure how it's possible to avoid the conclusion that immigration enforcement isn't effective.
Why it's ineffective is, again, something that's been impossible to research for as long as I've been paying attention to immigration. I genuinely don't know where I could go to get answers. Other than a couple people spinning evidence-free conspiracy theories about their political opponents, nobody seems interested in analyzing it.
Our legal system has always depended on vibes to mitigate technically correct unjust or catastrophic outcomes. It's broadly labelled "prosecutorial discretion", and operates at every level of the justice system.
Good vibes, or bad vibes? The technicalities of the law keep both in check. Vibes don't just allow us to "mitigate technically correct unjust...outcomes" - they also let people in power "mitigate technically correct just...outcomes" to achieve their own desired ends.
Prosecutorial discretion hasn’t meant much to me since the Bond got prosecuted for violating a chemical weapons treaty, and Yates got prosecuted for fish-shredding.
Sometimes the vibes are wrong, and things go haywire. This is why zero tolerance policies have to be instituted in schools. That doesnt mean the general idea is wrong. Strict adherence to written law will always fail justice. The world is too nuanced and too fractal to handle every edge case well.
I seem to recall that zero-tolerance policies caused the expulsion of multiple Boy Scouts who were merely obeying the requirement that they always have a multifunction pocket tool with them (such as a Victorinox knife), and these caused the Scouts to rescind the rule.
"Zero tolerance" policies are a generally a tool of the Sith.
I assume you believe it's important that the federal agents should raid every marijuana dispensary in the US and for the DOJ to prosecute dispensary owners and individuals who smoke and participate in weed consumption in each state. Is that correct? After all, technicalities matter.
> Is that really important to the broader conversation?
Habeas corpus predates the Magna Carta [1]. A U.S. citizen's right to habeas has been wilfully abrogated by the state. If this stands, I'm absolutely for taking all the pardoned January 6th nutters and sticking them in Guantanamo or wherever come 2028 or 2032.
More an honest reading of the history of power. If one side seizes a previously norms-gated tactic and is allowed to use it, the other side either seizes it, too, or ceases to exist. (Obviously, the preferred outcome is this is not allowed to stand.)
I totally agree that is the common and probable outcome. However, is not the exclusive outcome, nor does it have to be enthusiastically supported.
Norm erosion and law breaking often see tit for tat retaliation with the notable exception of when norms and order are productively restored.
I follow your comments because I find them balanced and often insightful, even (or perhaps especially) when I disagree. For this reason, I was surprised to see you advocate more unjust and amoral behavior, even if it is in the form of retaliation.
I’m frankly surprised where I find myself. But I don’t see another move.
> even if it is in the form of retaliation
The most important part is messaging the expectation of retaliation ex ante: If you break habeus, we—too—will use that power. (And it won’t be our moderates who will be the first to seize it!)
Otherwise, we have a two-party system where one team seizes advantage through force while the other pudges along hamstrung by norms only they respect. Also: once a norm is eroded, it’s impossible to regain it through norms alone. (I don’t recall any historical example of norms escalation being peacefully rolled back. It takes a shock for people in the moment and in the future to be able to point to for why that norm is necessary. Somehow the Nazis, Japanese internment and the Argentinian economy aren’t enough anymore.)
Unfortunately, the norms being violated now probably require a Constitutional amendment to reïnstate. So I’m pessimistic about an off-ramp versus this being the new status quo. Maybe both sides being clear about what suspending habeus really means is the kick in the ass America needs to restrict pardon powers and/or give the Congress and courts limited direct enforcement authority. (Or maybe, as it was with Jackson, it will be Trump’s economic ineptitude that brings the shock.)
The distrust of the press has been cultivated intentionally. A POTUS saying "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening" would have been seen too farcical for a comedy. And yet here we are.
Absolutely. And this whole idea of demonizing misinformation just makes it worse by implying that true information presented in a way that intentionally and actually misleads readers is somehow OK.
> The distrust of the press has been cultivated intentionally.
Yea, by the press itself, or, do you honestly believe the billionaire owner class of this form of media has done an excellent job reporting truthfully over the past 30 years?
Pull yourself back from your politics and genuinely consider this.
Do a retrospective, you’ll see there are media outlets that have given accurate information and assessments of the world. The measure should be whether what they report holds true as time passes and whether, using their reporting to extrapolate predictions, do those predictions come true.
When reading an article, how do I figure out what the “good reporter” is trying to say, and distinguish it from what the “bad owner” is trying to say?
The best way I know is to carefully parse the text in its most literal form. That is what the “good reporter” is saying. The “general idea” of what is being said is probably what the editor wants.
Owners and editors want “wow” articles. Journalists know most of what they report is just “somebody said something.”
The point I'm replying to is that this was "cultivated intentionally." I understand the mechanism we're trying to determine the source.
You also seem to forget that journalists sometimes leave and become owners in their own right. Where does that blurry line begin and end, actually?
Means, motive, opportunity. It's always the same triad and you can't avoid applying to all parties involved.
Given that and the importance of broadcast media I can't imagine why anyone thought they were getting the truth. Or even if they were somehow not a highly selected and edited version of it. Designed to manipulate and control not to inform.
But yet, due to the nature of asymmetric warfare, it's so easy to discredit a reputable institution that holds itself to some standards which sometimes are not met. All you need to attack it is to not have any such standards but just flood the zone with shit and when you say something wrong just lie or claim "I never claimed to be an expert, I hate experts, I'm just a comedian/or something like that"
This is what HN has felt like for the past ~year ish. Makes me realize this community has a lot of "bike shedding" types who easily miss the forest from the trees.
Slowly stopped looking for insight here on any topic that involves even a small amount of larger picture thinking, really quite sad.
> Is that really important to the broader conversation?
The broader conversation is simple: there's an estimated 10 million illegals (low ball estimate, some go as far as 22 million) in the US, what should be done?
For if the numbers are really that gigantic, there are going to be a few revolting cases when people are getting expulsed.
Dems have been hard at work, for many years, funding ONGs with US taxpayers dollars, ONGs that'd actively facilitate and help millions and millions of border crossing and relocating illegals all across the US.
It certainly feels a bit like now is payback time: this may be one of the reason Trump won... US citizens being fed up with that "border" that was basically a wide-open highway.
I want to go live to the US: I raised my kid for ten years in english, she's only ever been to english-speaking schools. But as a non-US citizen I can't. We can't come to the U.S. $5m to buy the golden visa is a bit steep.
That's the broader conversation: close to 2 billion in africa, 1.5 billion chinese, 1.3 billion Indian many of whom (for a variety of reason) want to leave their country. For the EU. For the US. Some europeans, like me, who want to go to the US too.
Can the U.S. take them all? Every single one of them that wants to go to the US?
If there are 8 digits number of illegals, something has to be done.
You ain't dealing with 8 digits number of illegals without having a few "revolting" cases.
And of course leftist media and orgs (like the ACLU) are going to carefully pick their fight, here's an headline that'd be frontpage:
"Trans autistic mixed-race dwarf sick kid forced to leave the US".
Calling a majority of EU and US citizens "nazis" because they're fed up with uncontrolled, illegal, migration ain't intellectually honest.
What’s the conversation? Separating kids from parents or deporting them with parents because we don’t want them to be separate? There is no question about breaking the law by parents. Question is do you let children be with their mothers(who apparently asked to do so) or no.
As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
“Think of the children” works when you are in a super white rich neighborhood, if you never lived in slums you won’t understand the abuse of the system by “think of the children”, you just don’t see it from the other side.
> just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
This is a story about citizens being deported without due process, without access to lawyers, without access to healthcare.
You don't have to be "ok with cheaters" to still want those people to have basic human rights and to see the system have legitimate judicial review.
The punishment here is far worse than the crime, and it's directed at children who didn't commit the crime, and it was doled out in a horrifyingly abusive totalitarian police-state style. Maybe you're not seeing things from the right side?
Do you not recognize that that letter was most likely signed under duress? She was probably offered to permit her baby to be deported with or or the baby goes into the foster care system, not to the husband. The Felon has specifically used separation from families and destroyed records as a weapon before, why do you think he's not doing it now??
Does it really matter? Of course it was stressful. Most parents would not opt to be separated from a child. Especially mother from a baby…
If you make a decision that comes with a great deal of risk to you and by extension your family (like crossing a border without following a proper immigration procedure). If that gamble doesn’t go your way would you really opt to leave your child if you could?
Perhaps you would. I wouldn’t. Apparently she didn’t want to do that either. I am not going to ascribe any alternative motive other than love between a parent and child.
> She was probably…
> The Felon yada yada yada…
Do you any evidence at all that is what is being done here or are you just inventing a backstory and trying to pass it off as evidence?
> this is a story that really attempts to justify the use of birthright citizenship to create chain immigration …
*Which is the current law of the land.* The existing jurisprudence states that all people born on US land (with the exception of some foreign diplomat children) are US citizens.
The ACLU is arguing to maintain the existing, settled law. Attempts to undo birthright citizenship need to argue how they think it should work and why they think it should be changed without a Constitutional amendment.
Yes, obviously the ACLU will pick a case that has good optics for them. That is how EVERY special interest tries to bring their preferred case up the appeals chain towards SCOTUS. We aren’t ignorant of that. That’s pan outgrowth of the fact that the US court system is adversarial.
Here’s a fun thought experiment: if birthright citizenship requires additional requirements (I think the Trump admin claims it should also require at least 1 parent be a US citizenship at the time of the birth in the USA), does the citizenship rollback apply retroactively? Does it retroactively apply to all generations going back to the founding of the country? Does it go back even further?
Scarier thought experiment: Has any country ever tried to remove citizenship from tens or hundreds of millions of citizens? How do we “deport” people who have known no other country as home and have no paperwork in any other country?
Birthright citizenship may be settled, but the citizen is not the one being deported, the mother is. If the mother has custody of the child and opts to bring the child with them…I doubt you can find any settled case law that establishes that a parent cannot be deported because of the citizenship status of the child….whether a child is minor or not a minor.
Perhaps I need to read it again, but nowhere do I recall reading that the citizenship of the child is being revoked, so this isn’t really challenging birthright citizenship, it’s more about challenging the notion of an anchor baby passing legal residency status to a parent.
A dad of a kid was literally fighting for the kid to stay. He is an American. I read about one case and that was the situation.
Maybe stop making hypotheticals designed to excuse what happened and fake concerns. There was no attempt to keep family together oe do right by the kids.
> dad of a kid was literally fighting for the kid to stay. He is an American
Are you saying he's figuratively American, or that the father is a U.S. citizen. Because VML's petition for writ of habeas [1] doesn't mention the latter.
>I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system.
I usually steer clear of talking about these issues but there's something in the framing of this issue that maga has intentionally made people misunderstand: People do not say "I'm going to risk my life crossing a desert, and then when i have kids I'll be untouchable!" The actual "cheaters" are the birth hotel operators, whose clients are wealthy international elites who fly in while pregnant, then immediately leave to raise their US citizen babies abroad:
These instances of people actually and deliberately cheating the system require a completely separate system of enforcement that does not need to target desperate people who happened to get pregnant over the course of living life and making ends meet and whose children for all intents and purposes will grow up as regular English-speaking Americans who will go to school, work and pay taxes just like everyone else. Immigrants on dual-intent visas(e.g forever h1b but not yet green card), asylum seekers, etc do not get pregnant to "cheat the system".
But the birth hotels are people with money. Think the reich wing cares?
And life happens. The woman that became my wife was here on a temporary visa, life threw us together, our hearts had their own idea about the situation despite both of us mistakenly believing the other was not available. And, no, there's no way she engineered it--the choices that threw us together were all made by others.
Have you seriously not gone through the thought exercise of why some thoughtful + well-informed people would oppose your opinion on the subject?
(1) in previous centuries, the US accepted as many immigrants as could arrive “on Ellis Island” and it only took a few weeks. All of the immigration barriers that you overcame were added by American legislators many centuries after my ancestors came to America. I don’t view “illegal immigrants” any different than I viewed my own ancestors who came to America in the 1500s.
(2) US law affords legal pathways to residency/ citizenship for refugees and political asylum claimants. Just because you used one slow legal workflow doesn’t mean you should look down on people who used a faster legal workflow. They aren’t “gaming” the system — they are using the fast lane that was installed purposefully. If anything, we should use the legislature to revisit the fast lane (the refugee and political asylum claims)
(3) an infant didn’t have any volition in this situation. Maybe they were born here as an “anchor baby” (which the Trump Admin is trying to redefine as not-a-citizen, breaking with all of the jurisprudence). If they were pushed over the border by their parents or someone else, we have a duty to make sure their life is handled with care, not malice.
(4) there are political and media interests in making “legal immigrants” like you hate other immigrants. It makes native born Americans feel like they have cover for their hatred of immigrants. You should sit with the thought experiment of whether it’s actually relevant to the conversation that you “spent years getting here the hard way” or whether the conversation would be more productive without it.
(5) the reason the “immigration system is broken” is because there are multiple factions in America who can’t agree on what kind of changes to make to it. Famously Obama tried to force Congress to deal with it around 2013, but the “Gang of Eight” couldn’t come up with even broad guidelines for changes that both parties would agree to. There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration. Are you perhaps in this category?
Re point (5), the "gang of eight" bill would've been the de facto process (illegally entering, having children or marrying, attempting to bring family over via chain migration) the de jure one via advertising to the rest of the word that violating US immigration law does not matter. We ended up running an experiment over the course of the last 4 years to see what that looks like and the results are grim.
>There are simply too many people who have strong opinions and yet believe untrue things about American immigration.
You appear to be operating from a different premise than people who are skeptical of past efforts to "reform" immigration law. "Permanent legal mass migration" is not the bargain the country wants to make, and thus far every attempt to "reform" immigration operates from that initial premise.
Define grim? Surging stock market, reduced inflation? 4% of the global population producing 75% of Nobel prizes ( half of which are immigrants), robust high tech manufacturing? Robust agriculture that was recovered from the first round of tariffs? Increased housing stock stabilizing prices? The Chips act and infrastructure bill that would have accelerated strategic manufacturing growth? Clean energy investments that would have given us more power for AI.
These are all things that sound great to a religious listener of Ezra Klein’s podcast but normal people either don’t know about them, don’t care about them, or disagree with them.
I don’t think we should make policy specifically to cater to the part of a voting constituency (the willingly ignorant) who doesn’t know about the factual benefits of a large incoming immigration policy.
Policy should be made to cater to factual objective reality, not to make people feel better.
Ezra Klein isn’t for the unwashed masses. He’s not even interesting to the average Democrat. His content is specifically for people who care about boring facts and policy. Obviously MMA and WWE fans and crude comedian fans will respond more to show of force, peacocking, and loud brash speeches. These things are vapid when it comes to politics. They only serve to elect Dark Triad figures, not good policy makers.
The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.
Also worth pointing out that it’s likely that Democrats didn’t move on securing the border earlier in Biden’s term because all of the people criticizing Biden’s immigration policy were crying wolf for years or decades before it actually became a huge problem.
Well, I agree with you (sort of), but democracy lacks a solution for this problem (ignorant people existing and voting). Unless you are going to give everyone an IQ test before they register to vote or some other means to test some "eligibility" dimension it doesn't seem solvable, since those options are non-starters in western democracies.
>The problem with immigration is that we need it (just to maintain replacement rates and economic growth), but the average American voter says they don’t want it.
What would be helpful here is if people who state this so plainly as a matter of fact actually took the time to interrogate why they think that way. I don't think this statement is true, quite the opposite. You are sort of hinting at the real problem in your parenthetical, not sure if you were intentional in that regard. One should probably determine why the birthrate in a particular nation is below replacement before concluding that the only solution is "infinity immigration". Moreover, economic growth is not the end-all-be-all of a country, since these are places with history and a people in them and not a "special economic zone" there the only reason anyone lives there is to conduct economic activity.
Counter argument to what? You posted a list of things that look like a copy/pasta from last year's campaign trail. Unrelated to my point, only true at the margins.
Was inflation falling and the lowest in the OECD. Yes
I am not going to go point by point. And they aren’t “true at the margins” when taken together as a whole. They are a manifestation of a broad policy that created improved conditions in the country that would have continued. And the CHIPS act was the exact policy to set us in the course for how the world will be over the next 30 years rather than what it was 60 years ago.
This is a really bizarre claim to make. Are you claiming that the United States is, idk, forgetting how to farm and so we have to do mass immigration to bring in people who remember how? It also flies in the face of historical facts, like how the United States gained its status as an industrial powerhouse when immigration was at its lowest point in its history.
It’s not about knowledge. It’s about having people willing to use their strong backs.
Very few agricultural products are harvestable without the use of hands at the current prices. And when states have cracked down on illegal immigrants, farmers cry bloody murder that native-born Americans can’t last 1-2 days doing that work. American living standards are FAR higher than those of the people who are willing to work agricultural fields.
Okay. Then build robots to do it. Have you thought for a second about why these robots don't already exist? Perhaps it has something to do with available cheap labor. Really really strange to see a pro-immigration argument that amounts to "Big Ag needs their slave labor".
There wasn't even a single, popular vacuum robot with less then 7% one star ratings (complaints with valid utter failure).
How naïve must one be to expect decent robots for farming. And those very soon?
Do you believe in Santa? Or Tesla FSD?
A little difficult to parse your comment, but I think you're calling me naïve for asking the tech community on a message board for the incubator that has backed and does back the some of the most successful tech startups ever to think a little more deeply about how to solve these kinds of problems with technology. Wherein I posit that one of the reasons this tech community seemingly lacks interest - and surely the difficulty of the problem is also one of those reasons - is the availability of cheap labor, resulting in a weak argument for funding this kind of venture.
I'm not against automation. I'm against the interruption of the food supply chain.
I don't won't the US to see a lot of pitchfork in use -- and that wouldn't be for farming.
I agree that (slave like) misuse of cheap labor is a problem.
We have a similar issue here. (Bad cleaning, by badly payed, overworked cleaners).
I'm a bit angry because I looked into fixing it by (partially) automating it, but the supply chains are rather bad. The currently available mainstream robots (Dreame, Roborock) are not up to the task (no proper support in Europe).
The only interesting option seems to be cleanfix from Switzerland.
To make things short: that anger shouldn't have targeted you, because it boils down to my own current incompetence to fix a real problem.
Sorry!
Robots did my dad's knee replacement surgery. I don't think this argument holds water anymore. Maybe if you make your claim more precise: delicate + scale. But, if that's the case, the scale problem is solved with money.
Lots of teleoperated stuff in the medical world. That's not the same as robots. There's still a skilled hand at the controls making the medical decisions.
Chinese dark factories aren’t harvesting bruisable fruits and veggies. Dark factories are specifically selected for tasks that are easily automated with extremely high precision. Most of agriculture isn’t.
In some places Chinese labor is at price parity. However the reasons why China has dark factories is government investment and an abundance of mechatronics engineers.
People build factories in China because all the other factories are in China just down the road.
None of this contradicts my previous comment though. We don't invest in automation because we have cheap labor. China is an aging society with a shrinking workforce. Here we have cheap labor and offload the cost to the taxpayer. Illegal immigration is just another part of corporate welfare which is why socialists like Bernie sanders used to be against it.
Your counter argument clearly cuts against your initial argument. Low wages isn’t preventing automation. It’s lack of an ecosystem of similar suppliers, lack of highly trained talent and lack of government and market investment.
Liberals aren’t against immigration because it is corporate welfare but because of the strain it places on the social safety net and effects on jobs but both of those could be overcome with a rational policy on special economic zones.
I came to this country as an immigrant and gained my citizenship while going through the appropriate legal channels. I have zero fear of being rounded up in the current political climate.
The reason? I’m a white guy from Germany.
The entire process was easy for me. No one ever questions where I’m from because I’m white, have a white collar job, and speak fluent English. That seems enough to be enough for any fellow American to not consider me a “foreigner”.
If everything else about me was the same except I had darker skin and an accent I would be extremely scared right now that I could get rounded up based on nothing more than someone’s vibes of me.
Why was that woman being deported? I don’t think it was because of the color of her skin but she broke certain laws from what I’ve read. Don’t break laws and you would be fine. Problem before was that breaking laws went unpunished.
From the perspective from Sweden, the problem is not that complicated as long one agree to a few core concept. Children has rights that supersede that of their parents, and the parents are usually the best adults to take care of their children but not always.
If deportation of the whole family is the best for the child, then you do that. If placing the child with relatives or foster care is the better choice, you do that. Children aged 2, 4, and 7 can't "game" the system, and so its the adults job to take responsibility and find a solution that address the rights of the child.
> As someone who came legally to Canada and went through thorough screening of 4 years before coming I just don’t get how people are ok with “cheaters” gaming the system
We grew up with the idea that America was a beacon, not a whites-only gated community.
There’s no reason for us to think less of someone just because they want to be here. Our ancestors did exactly the same thing.
It sucks that you’re here complaining about the Statue of Liberty.
You think that letter was not signed under duress??
And I don't see the system particularly being gamed. The reality is an awful lot of people are fleeing oppression. The gangs and the cartels etc make it so the people don't have an option but to turn to them.
And despite what the reich wing says most of the immigrants are not a problem. And the reich wing specifically set out to ensure Biden couldn't accomplish anything. And now we see high profile and often wrong deportations, yet a lower total rate than under Biden.
