Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 80
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Alas, I've been doxxed. Time to delete my account.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
It's interesting; I finally met, in the wild, a woman who claimed there were no biological differences in terms of strength, agility, speed, etc. between men and women. I had thought they were just caricatures on the internet, but I guess they really exist. She was in the army and claimed to have 'outperformed' 90% of the men there before she was injured. She was about 5'6 and maybe 120 pounds, so while I'm not too familiar with the army, I'm a bit skeptical of that one. She claimed testosterone had no effect on athletic performance and that literally the only difference physically between men and women is that men have a wider pelvis. Scientific papers describing any effects of testosterone are just transphobic.
This all grew out of the casual [sport] league I played in over the summer that went out of it's way to encourage inclusion of trans players. Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.' Traditionally, we played co-ed and matched genders on the field, and trans players (100% trans women in this league at least) would match with the gender they identify as. The women on the field were getting absolutely wrecked. Like, every now and then someone would absolutely blast by me uncovered before I realized it was a trans woman and her defender was struggling 10-15 feet behind her before I'd peel off and try to salvage the situation.
It honestly doesn't affect me and all the most strident pro-trans commissioners in the league are female, so I don't particularly care, but this is just...a step too far. There's no way this can be covered up in smokescreens about hormones or whatever else, it's just an immediately obvious fact that this is true. You just need some video footage of trans women absolutely destroying people at [sport] and it's not really sustainable.
I tried the same argument you just brought up as it seemed the most likely to elicit sympathy from a strident feminist, i.e. that it cheapens the accomplishments of female athletes, but she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy. Thankfully, people with that point of view are a vanishingly small minority - on my team of very left-leaning players, it was about 13 people arguing with her and her reluctant boyfriend trying to mediate.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Wait I thought you were JB?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Joe Biden is clearly the greatest president of our era. America's enemies (and allies!) tremble before the might of Dark Brandon.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
I'm certainly emotional about it, furious, in fact, but that does not make it an emotional argument. It is the bare facts, as best as I understand them, based on a considerable amount of evidence assessed over decades. This is my best understanding of a particular slice of the reality we all live in, as best as I can express it in a short post at 3am.
Most of what you write doesn't register to me as 'facts,' particularly if you're drawing on personal experience. When you say things like so-and-so was involved in a leftist terrorist group in the 70s and is now a university professor it comes across as an unsupported fact but one that I can easily check by wikipedia. When you say Blues are responsible for the plight of black Americans with no supporting data, it strikes me as an opinion that may or may not be true and is complex enough that even if superficially true is the tip of an iceberg. It contains about as much information as me saying that Reds are responsible for the plight of black Americans, no? My response could easily have been that, we both likely would have been wrong and could have gone in circles eating our own tails. It reminds me of mock debates in high school classes where nobody could ever win and indeed determining the truth of the matter wasn't even the point.
But then, maybe that's just my pathological obsession with data.
Over time, it has grown increasingly difficult for me to take conversations across the isle at all seriously. The "national conversation" about race, like most culture war issues, necessarily involves a number of fairly nebulous ideas, like "white supremacy" and "implicit bias" and "structural racism" and so on. These terms frequently have uncertain and changeable definitions, weak supporting evidence, extremely poor predictive value, and a considerable history of falsification, but any conversation more or less demands that I accept them as the null hypothesis unless I can marshal strong evidence to the contrary.
And I could point out sacred cows on the right that are just as nebulous. You talk to me about the value of "Christian Morals," "patriotism," "respect for the military." Yet I try to take you seriously nonetheless, and avoid things that I know would trigger you.
And blues, you among them, appear to me to be completely blind to this momentous event, and seem to expect us to all go back to discussing theories about implicit bias from names on resumes. It's as though we're expected to simply grant a mulligan, and pretend the awkward events of the last two years didn't happen. But then, what's the point in any of this? Why go on pretending we're even attempting to engage with reality?
I think you're right about the BLM protests. As far as I can tell, the consequences have not been good. The crime wave in America, although still historically not that bad (things were worse in the 80s and early 90s), was not shared by Canada, Mexico or the EU as far as I can tell. I'm fairly confident I've said as much to you before, although maybe it was gattsuru or someone else, I'm not sure. From my perspective, every debate inevitably makes it way to the BLM protests because the easily available evidence around increases in crime is on your side and you want to just keep scoring the same point over and over again.
So, at least so far as your conversations with me go, how do you want to handle that? I can sympathize with your perspective and it seems like it has been self-destructive.
That being said, there are some problems with your narrative. Namely, the increase in violent crime and murders weren't restricted to black or urban neighborhoods. How do you draw a line between urban BLM protests and people in almost completely white rural counties murdering each other more often? I don't think the data is available yet, but I'm curious to see if there was a proportional increase in white and black perpetrators, suggesting some other factor.
Insofar as you insinuate that the BLM protests were orchestrated by democrats, I'm less on board. They were certainly involved, white liberals were definitely present at the riots, democratic politicians sympathized with the protesters. At the same time, I'm skeptical that a counterfactual world where white liberals said 'Hey, I know that cop killed your boy but he was on drugs and actually police help you on net' or facebook, twitter and the NYT actively censored stories about George Floyd would have stopped black Americans from rioting.
On the other hand, and I say this with what I sincerely hope is all possible charity, you seem to want to talk about the Culture War, but only from a perspective where conflict is simply ruled irrational as an axiom. That is not a perspective that I, or indeed many reds here, can actually share in good faith.
It's not clear to me hat you mean by this. Are you suggesting that from your perspective, conflict is rational and desirable? And what do you mean by conflict?
I don't want to paint a rosy picture, but I think we can at least agree that this is a factual question where the evidence should be reasonably clear, yes? If one looks at the data and rural/white/opioid areas see significantly less violent crime than the inner-city/black/crack areas per-capita, then it seems that the disparity in treatment is founded on factual differences rather than bias, yes? If they're pretty similar per-capita, then I'd happily stand corrected, withdraw my claims, and endeavor to modify my understanding of the world to match the available evidence.
I agreed that the inner cities were likely worse, but I disagree with your characterization of opioid addicts peacefully dying in their bedrooms without any crime or damage to society. That's largely based on discussions I've had with friends from these areas, although I can't find any actual data supporting that, so who knows. Maybe you're right and these people studiously follow the law and are good members of society right up until they overdose on fentanyl. Maybe their drug dealers scrupulously stop at red lights, and people suffering withdrawal who can't afford a score are too morally righteous to rob that house down the road to buy more drugs.
Where are you getting the conclusion that they didn't contribute much to the overall toll? The orange line in fig 2 appears to diverge rapidly and significantly, and between '99 and '07 the OD rates roughly double. "Significant" is a nebulous term, but unless I'm reading the charts wrong, it looks like by 2009 prescription opioids are killing more people than all other drugs combined. Am I missing something?
From 1999-2006 prescription ODs went up 3x (3500-10,000) while total ODs slightly less than doubled (19k-30k). From 2014-2016 synthetic ODs went up 5x (4000-20,000) while total ODs went from 52,000-60,000. I'm not surprised that the latter got more attention.
Whether the former got any attention I suppose is hard to say since google trends only goes back to 2004, and is unfortunately relative. I could search for news articles from the time, but that's not very quantitative either. I'm not sure how we'd settle that question.
You're right that prescription opioids were a big issue in the mid 2000s though, I was thrown by the different y-axis scales.
On the one hand, this indicates that closing the gap completely might in fact be possible, perhaps even in less than a century. On the other hand, Blacks and Blues don't seem to see this as acceptable progress, and are evidently willing to flip the table if a better deal is not offered.
There's a reason China affirmative actions the fuck out of their minorities. Having a permanent underclass, along racial lines or otherwise, does not seem like a particularly stable social structure to me. Nor a desirable one. I'm willing to trade some inefficiencies in the economy for welfare.
That isn't my argument; I have no idea where you're even getting it from.
You said:
Blacks are fucked. They are fucked because, in the main, Blues fucked them.
You also go on to say:
The people who speak for them blame Reds for their misfortunes, and those among them who can vote reliably vote blue. The misfortunes don't change, the resentments don't change, and the political allegiances don't change. How are these facts "largely bullshit"?
I pointed out that black Americans are doing better in states with blue governance than red governance. So relatively speaking, if Blues fucked the Blacks, did Red politicians in Mississippi and Arkansas and Missouri double fuck the Blacks? You're not responsible for Chicago, but it's also pretty clear that if we elected Republican leaders in Illinois and they enacted similar policies to other Red states the outcomes for Blacks would get worse. So...the conditions are not good on an absolute scale, but it's rich to criticize Chicago when states that you control are doing significantly worse. You skated past this argument in your response.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Someone is dealing opioids, and that someone elides the calls for law and order most of the time. Whether those neighborhoods are peaceful, orderly idylls where now and then someone dies quietly in a bedroom is a question that I can't answer without trying to dig into county-by-county crime statistics. I doubt it's as bad as inner cities, but I'm also skeptical of the rosy picture you're painting.
Most of them are white, and their deaths were largely ignored for, what, the better part of a decade before people started actually talking about the problem?
You frequently make unsupported arguments and force me to do the legwork for you.
I'm far from an expert, but Google trends shows that discussion about the opioid epidemic really took off around 2016 when fentanyl started flooding the market; this tracks pretty well with figures 2, 3 and 5 that I linked you previously. It seems like overdoses caused by prescription opioids don't elicit much discussion, but they also don't contribute much to the overall toll of overdoses in the US, so...maybe that makes sense?
Of course this ignores regional trends in overdoses, socially erosive drug habits that didn't end in overdoses until fentanyl hit the scene, etc etc but it seems to me that you've overfitted on 'nobody cares about white people problems.'
And since most of the victims of this violence are themselves black, people actually care when they die, and are willing to expend significant resources to try to solve the problem!
The feds spent $3.3B and $7.4B on the opioid crisis in 2017 and 2018 respectively (table 2). It disproportionately went to red states (Figure 5 and 6) outside of Vermont, NH and Maine for some reason. It's confusing to me why the south was ignored, and I'm too lazy to try and overlay it with overdoses per capita to see if it matches the funding levels. Looks like $7.6B in spending in 2019. I can't find data on how much the government spends on crack cocaine which makes me think it isn't much. The majority of federal spending seems to go towards dealing with the health consequences of drug abuse. Untangling whether there's bias in that system towards black people at the expense of rural whites is, I think, a bit beyond what I can be expected to do.
Blacks are fucked. They are fucked because, in the main, Blues fucked them. Nothing we Reds can possibly do will help them, because they'd rather blame us for the harm Blues have done them, and the harm they do themselves, than cooperate with any of the steps necessary to prevent those harms. They don't want police and prisons, which do in fact help at least a little. They want education and rehabilitation and restorative justice and equity and economic revitalization, which have all failed with absolute, flawless monotony for decades, and none of which are even slightly likely to work better in the future.
They did want police and prisons back in the 80s and 90s, no? The law and order approach didn't seem to work out that great either.
Poverty rates have more or less steadily improved since the 1960s and throughout the civil rights era. Maybe you could attribute the drop from 1994-2000 to this, but it seems like that argument would take a lot more support than anything you provided.
But what do you mean, nothing reds can do will help them? You've split control of the federal government for about as long as I've been alive. You control the governorships of places like Mississippi, Iowa and Arkansas which have some of the worst poverty rates among blacks even after normalizing for the slightly higher white poverty levels. Maryland, Washington, Virginia and New Jersey have some of the lowest (intentionally omitting states like Vermont and Utah which have negligible black populations). Your best argument is that local government is the most important for combating poverty, which is an argument of the gaps that you failed to proactively provide evidence for, and is incongruent with conventionally blue states having lower poverty rates.
This argument of Dems as neo-plantation owners is largely bullshit. There are ugly things like white elites who lecture us on multiculturalism, equity and climate change while flying their children to the Alps on private jets while on holiday from their boarding schools. I get that. But extrapolating that to the median Democrat is just as silly as assuming that you're anything like Lindsay Graham or the Koch brothers or something. If you're going to tell me that Republicans have this One Neat Trick to address poverty and social ills that the wicked Democrats don't want you to know about, tell me what that is and provide some data showing me that it works when the data I've seen largely points towards the opposite.
Perhaps the above is pessimistic. Call me when the Black Community is willing to admit that a black person going to jail for killing another black person over contested narcotics profits might perhaps not be the fault of white people neither have met or interacted with in any way, and that such a murderer being apprehended and sent to jail is a benefit to black people generally.
It's not pessimistic, but it's fundamentally an emotional argument. You're angry, because you feel like you and your tribe aren't in control but you're being blamed for problems you haven't created and you feel like you don't have much of a say in addressing. I don't think it's entirely false, but it does seem to be far from the truth in places. But I also don't think pointing out the ways in which you're wrong is the goal, nor is it likely to be productive, is it?
At some point I feel like people around here want 1) affirmation of their feelings of alienation and frustration by ingroupers with similar biases to them, 2) a free therapy session or 3) a chance to rail against what they see as their oppressor (me?). Usually I just say I'm sorry you feel that way man, I can commiserate, I think we have more in common than the media would have us believe. Indeed, that would normally be my response to your post rather than picking holes in it, but lately I've been accused of being smarmy, concern trolling and disingenuous. Asking how I'm supposed to converse with You (not you personally, the royal You) is often ignored. So tell me, how do you want me to reply to what you've written? I could easily write such a screed with the script flipped about how the Evil Republicans block all our bills that would have led to a post-scarcity utopia with equality between the races and sexes, we could both get angry at each other and move on with our lives hating the outgroup a little bit more, but that strikes me as the worst outcome.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Do we? Does the rap sheet of the mean or median "crack dealing superpredator" actually resemble that of the average "opioid overdose?" If it doesn't, if the behavior of these two groups is actually significantly different, why should we assess them identically?
I wouldn't ask you to assess them identically. But one is viewed as a threat to society, whereas the other is a victim. The crack-dealing superpredator was born wicked, while the opiate-addicted had wickedness thrust upon them by their opiate-happy doctors and the globalists.
There must be 'opiate dealing suprepredators' profiting from the decay of society in the white areas too, no? Overdoses from prescription drugs have been more or less flat since ~2006 (figure 4) so someone is dealing street drugs. Why don't we talk about them?
Progressives sympathize with blacks and sneer at rural whites. Conservatives...sneer? look down on? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my impression is that they look down on poor black communities and sympathize with rural whites. I don't think their plights are identical, but I'd argue that there are significant parallels and that should be reflected in our discussions about them.
I'm pretty sure most or all the murder-capitol-area contenders are majority-black. Most of the current massive spike in the murder rate is black-on-black.
Watched this the other day and it was wild. It's remarkable how much better substack and randos on youtube have become at informing us about the world relative to the MSM. I feel better informed about the violence in Chicago after 20 minutes watching that than years reading bullshit takes from both sides of the aisle.
Suppose you had solid evidence that the former communities were once flourishing, and then decayed into hellholes, while the later communities were hell-holes from the start. Would this not, again, be valid grounds to assess them differently?
That first sentence contains multitudes. You say Appalachian whites were flourishing and had it snatched away by the globalists, progressives would say that in the era Appalachian whites were flourishing, Blacks were still overtly being discriminated against. Each of those arguments deserves an essay that I probably couldn't do justice.
That being said, there were significant numbers of black workers in the auto industry, the other big employment opportunity often brought up in the context of globalism destroying American middle-class communities. 20% of Ford's workforce between 1920 and 1950 according to this source, although it seems too high and I can't really find a corroborating one (this article cites the same number).
The Projects were a project, an intentional expenditure of vast resources and effort in an attempt to ameliorate the evident social problems of the Black community. Did Appalachia get Projects? Did the Midwest? These questions aren't purely rhetorical, but the evidence I'm aware of leans pretty heavily in one direction.
I don't know, nor would I even be sure how to answer that question. Do massive farming subsidies to the Midwest count as equivalent to the projects? What about the fact that, ironically, roughly a third of the State budgets of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are federal aid? It's not clear to me if your point was that America invests more in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities relative to the rust belt or coal mining regions or something else.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Send your kid to an all black school in Baltimore or a suburb of Paris then and then report back to me if your opinion has changed.
So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Interesting to see what gets downvoted. Parent comment sitting at -5 as I write this.
On the subreddit where scores were hidden, negative scores were very rare. I wonder if it's a difference in the audience or the system.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Trumpist policies -- regardless, or because of -- their (lack of) merits, did not spend a lot of time being actually applied. Most famously the DACA stuff, which not only was blocked at length, not only was eventually turned back at SCOTUS under iffy legal reasoning, but also just took until June 2020 just to finish the court cases that eventually told Trump to try again.
DACA is irrelevant in a conversation about how many illegal immigrants cross the southern border in a given year, short of some laughably tenuous argument about making a 'favorable environment.'
I don't think it's very useful to try to extrapolate from the 2016-2020 to what would happen if "we gave repubs everything they asked for"
He built the wall which was his signature campaign promise on immigration. ICE was kicking in the doors of illegal immigrants who hadn't committed crimes (aside from being in the country illegally) at a higher rate. He slashed the number of refugees accepted. All much more relevant than DACA, and the former was his signature immigration campaign promise. I think it's quite useful to extrapolate from the Trump presidency, actually.
I don't know for certain whether ICE gave them a big list of options to pick, just really hates that one bus stop in El Paso specifically, or if they give each immigrant or asylum-seeker a spin on an oversized wheel of fortune. Presumably someone actually wants to live in the Bronx, so it's possible that the immigrants getting bused there requested it specifically.
Your link itself says the children were being released to relatives or sponsors. Desantis obviously didn't manage to find migrants with relatives or sponsors in Martha's vineyard. The fact that you're desperately trying to find some equivalence here to convince me that I'm being unfair in calling this out...bah. I'm done.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Let's pretend for a moment that we respect the sovereignty of other nations, and aren't going to colonize them for their own sake.
Economic aid and whatnot may be helpful. Illegal immigration is less and less appealing to Mexicans as their country has developed. Complicated by obvious problems, corruption, unwilling local governments, etc.
I'd love to hear what you're cool with us doing to remove these people and keep them out.
That's difficult for me to answer without knowing the efficacy of any given policy relative to the harm/brutality involved. For example, you want ICE agents to hunt down and smash open the doors of every illegal immigrant in America. Well:
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With 20,000 ICE agents they'd have to deport 550 illegal immigrants each, not counting the time to track them down, not counting another 0.5-2 million per year. Yes, you could hire more agents, deputize other enforcement agencies, etc, although that all costs money. At a certain point, would it just be cheaper to pay people living on the border a stipend?
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After apprehending them, do you just drop them off across the border only to have them walk across it again? I assume this would be paired with other policies.
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Would this harm the economy, and particularly the food supply (I assume you'll forgive me stereotyping) if they're integral to harvesting produce? Would this drive inflation, and/or would you have a plan in place to give them more legal, temporary work visas? If you gave out those visas, would the same people be in the same border-ish towns making you angry? Would red tribers approve of this policy if it meant their produce bill doubled?
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Probably other externalities I'm not even thinking of at the moment, not to mention the suffering imposed on the people being apprehended, the ICE agents/illegal immigrants that would inevitably get shot, etc.
I'm strongly against anything that explicitly causes bodily harm or deprivation to migrants; i.e. anything with border agents shooting them on sight or something, however effective at Bringing Number Down that may be.
If you could make a case for the efficacy of any given policy, or show me someone who has done this kind of data-driven analysis, I could probably be persuaded one way or the other.
I'd apologize for giving a potentially unsatisfactory answer, but I suppose I'd be accused of feminine concern trolling so.../shrug. That's the best I've got for you at the moment my man. I should also warn you that that's my answer for most things outside of the niche subjects I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
For one, I actively advocate for little beyond treating each other better and sometimes I wade into debates on COVID. It's quite rare that I write about culture war topics. I don't consider myself particularly knowledgeable about the border or immigration.
If you're just asking what policy I would support, then no, I don't agree with letting anyone into the country. It seems like there was some agreement that border security was necessary as recently as the Clinton years, and I suspect that if you pressed the median democratic voter rather than the serially online or activist class most would say as much. While expressing some sympathy for the plight of migrants. I'd personally support increased efforts towards developing and stabilizing the countries these people are coming from, but this could either have been shown to be ineffective or is already happening and I'm ignorant of it.
I have a more favorable view towards skilled immigrants legally applying for citizenship, as well as refugee programs.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
I'd like a better plan than "let's find out what happens". I'd like that parents have better oversight and control over what's going on in the schools, and I'm happy to nuke private schools, but I think homeschooling needs to stay.
If you want a better plan you'd need to hire me; at the moment I'm but a poor scientist spouting ignorant ideas outside of their field.
I like: Small families who want more control over their child's education and decide to homeschool them a certain way. Talented individuals receiving tutoring from experts.
Dislike: Rich families paying money to tutor undeserving children.
What do you have in mind? What would the substack be about?
Partisan hackery. The substack was a bit of a joke since I don't have the requisite time to really focus on it, but I do have lots of questions I'd be open to doing the old adversarial collaboration style for questions like: What happened to the Obamacare death spiral we were panicking about, and what's happening to it now? What were the ultimate effects of the Trump tax cuts (I heard apocalyptic warnings from the left about rich oligarchs raking in billions and excitement from the right about worker's wages)? In short, revisiting policy items from years ago that the media was hyping as apocalyptic and seem to...not have done a whole lot in the end, or at least not that overtly.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
That wasn't my take, and I'm not sure whether you'd count me as an activist or not. But if you're going to tally up my score, I may as well set the record straight, no?
Not to mention I can see someone accusing me of voting illegally down the line or something if I'm unclear about it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
It’s this kind of ultra-smarmy response that makes people laugh at you and dismiss you.
It's not smarmy, it's genuine. I'm genuinely sorry that my ethos, policy preferences, whatever it is, infuriate you. I'm sorry that you believe our worldviews are irreconcilable, and we're headed towards whatever conclusion you think that leads us to.
You’re openly advocating and voting for policies
I can't vote.
An uncharitable interpretation of your post is that your main goal here was to “trigger the Cons” and to push OUR buttons, using a conversational tactic that was guaranteed to provoke a hostile response that you could pre-emptively forecast to make yourself look virtuous and us look unreasonable.
Alright. How could I rewrite my post in such a way that wouldn't provoke such a response from you, while keeping the same general point intact?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Interestingly, the 2021 numbers broke the 2000 record, though NPR gives some estimation caveats. There's some fun questions about how comparable these numbers are -- NPR's waffling about gotaways applies as easily in the opposite direction, not just for this year but also for large parts of the lulls. But more interestingly, the surge had resulted in a large number of policy changes to discourage unlawful immigration, most notably the 1996 IIRIRA.
Maybe so, but the people ranted about how soft Obama was on the border and how much better Republicans would do if we enacted their policies. Well, Trump got elected and not much changed; the trend towards increasing numbers of migrants potentially started in 2018 before being masked (heh) by COVID or not. I don't have a counterfactual world where Trump won reelection in 2020 to see what the numbers would be today, but I think there's a pretty good argument that even if we gave repubs everything they asked for (at least mainstream repubs, defined as a majority) the numbers would still be relatively high. I'm not convinced by the folks saying the entirety of the crisis is due to the fact that we wouldn't build the wall and improve morale among Border Patrol agents.
The media doing so, alone, doesn't particularly control. The President of the United States, in response to the media outrage, informed the country that " promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences," while the Vice President said "it evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery"... still doesn't exactly control, but it has a lot of impact on the day-to-day operations. Not because that particular sort of behavior was especially common, or even because horseback operations, but because Tall Poppy.
I agree with what you say here, but your original claim was that federal ICE policies have hobbled border patrol. Whatever, forget it.
No, my argument being that "treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points" has been a common practice, and there's been crickets, at length.
Your contention here being that the current administration was under fire for the bad conditions at their border facilities, so they shrugged and started bussing all the people to random cities rather than where the people actually wanted to go? And your claim is that, in the article you cited, the relatives they are supposedly being bussed to do not exist and were fabricated? Before you accuse me of strawmanning I'm just trying to fill in the gaps here, I genuinely don't see how the evidence you cited is equivalent to Desantis or how ostensibly bussing children in border facilities to relatives is treating them as chattel.
But there was also a contemporaneous leak describing the White House's perspective. Maybe that leak was wrong! Maybe Trump somehow -- unusually -- managed to pull the vast majority of Republican politicians to his whims, and trick the Democratic Senators. But it's strange how the writer here can't even seem to imagine the possibility that a 'compromise' bill is actually not giving much to the other side, while demanding a lot.
So is your argument that Senate Republicans would, in fact, accept a compromise?
The bill that you linked seems to be healthcare-related, not immigration, or else I'm just unfamiliar with the arcana of congress.
Can you make any deep guesses about why DeSantis wants to do this, or why he -- and several other states, many of whom have been running similar operations -- believe that it makes effective political points? Was he born wicked, or was wickedness thrust upon him?
Neither; I suspect he wants to do this to amass political power and support a 2024 presidential bid. In the same way I don't think that Biden really cares about student loans or a lot of the diversity stuff, I think he does those things for his partisans. Doing what your constituents want isn't a bad thing, the real problem is when politicians of all stripes do things to hurt the outgroup and we cheer them for it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
I don't like this debate tactic. You substituted your interlocutor's request, which was basically reasonable and at least somewhat within your power to achieve, for a radical solution that is self-evidently monstrous to most people and completely unachievable, leaving you with no responsibility.
On the contrary. I'm fine with his proposal, and given free rein, I'd go a step further. I absolutely disagree that it's 'self-evidently monstrous' to mix students together regardless of their class and I'm baffled why you would think so. You might disagree, but it seems absurd to call someone monstrous for suggesting that a wealthy student may have to rub shoulders with an impoverished one.
It's also absolutely not within my power to achieve as I'm not a citizen and currently have no children. The only realistic way I can see to take personal responsibility is either volunteering my time or money, which I suggested. I suppose I could run for office, but either way, we're not talking about realistic proposals, yeah?
I don't see how that translates into it being unreasonable to expect Martha's Vineyard to bear some of the costs that they enthusiastically impose on other people, especially when those other people they impose on are almost universally lower status than they are.
Oh, I absolutely support taxing the fuck out of the people who live on Martha's Vineyard and breaking up their elitist private schools. Crank that marginal tax rate, baby. Send their kids to public schools. No more private jets, no more helicopters, no more yachts. No more generational wealth and trust fund kiddies. Raise my tax bracket too, although I'm light years away from buying a house in Martha's Vineyard. What else do you want to do?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Thanks for the earnest feedback. I'm not 100% certain I follow what you're trying to say, as I don't think I said anything about reds accusing blues of booing their outgroup. Unless you were referring to an older post?
I can try to take what you say to heart, but I suspect so long as I'm going against the grain the response will be fraught.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Are you sure that doing so is actually easier, more practical and/or more sustainable than building a figurative wall and deporting anyone who makes it across?
I suppose my point is that haven't we been doing that, and the incentives are so strong that people are coming anyways? I'm not going to propose that nothing we do matters, but it seems like short of fixing the economic disparities, there's no real lasting solution to the problem.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
No, get your local government to build adequate amount of shelter in your community, for a random, representative, and proportionally-sized group of immigrants to live with you, and go to the same school as your kids.
I'll do you one better: let's nuke the school system that ties property value/geography to school funding and mix everyone together regardless of class. Bussing but for SES rather than race. No more private schools while we're at it. Let's have the poor kids, immigrants, rich kids and my kids all in the same class and see what happens.
I'll point out that I can't vote at the local or federal level, but sure. I'd be fine with spreading them out as evenly as possible in the country and/or bussing towards that end. There are some thorny issues of consent where they may want to form their own communities but that's above my pay grade and maybe not worth arguing over for a hypothetical.
Like, what are you selling, and at what price? I go to the Breitbart comment section and tell them to chill out, and in return you try to get the FBI to not designate parents pushing against CRT as domestic terrorists?
Sure, although my pull with the FBI is more or less nonexistent so we'd be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere. You want to co-author a substack? Collaborate here? Run a presidential unity ticket?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
I'm sorry you feel that way, my friend. I wish you the best.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Hey, people used to go to watch people being tortured to death for fun. The fact that cruel political actions now involve free plane tickets instead of dousing someone in tar or sending bombs in the mail is progress of a sort.
It is, and if someone proposed resurrecting gladiatorial combat you'd really see the pearls come out.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
Martha's Vineyard is a 45-minute ferry ride from Falmouth, and from there 2-3 hours bus ride from Boston.
Undoubtedly illegal immigrants have plenty of disposable income and familiarity with the Massachusetts transit system.
Regardless, ship them to Boston for 1/3rd the price instead of nakedly stoking partisanship for political gain. And why is the Governor of Florida concerned with Texas, and using funds his legislature approved for the state of Florida to ship illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts?
There has been over a decade-long and massive surge of undocumented immigrants into border states, almost none of which has particularly been focused on parts of the border which have had shelter capability. Federal ICE policies have, at the very least, minimized the ability, and drastically demoralized any interest in enforcement where it remains possible (cfe 'reins').
Border crossings, or at least apprehensions as a stand-in for crossings, from 2010-2020 were lower than they had been for the previous 30 years. The total number of illegal immigrants in the country flatlined in the same time. Moreover, there appears to be a limited ability for us to control how many illegal immigrants show up at our borders.
If by 'reins' you mean this story, it's not clear to me how the media mistaking reins for whips is related to federal ICE policy.
Which looks a lot like... this, just with different political goals, since in no few cases the admin just bussed the applicants to random cities, gave them provisional status, and then shrugged about things like shelter capacity, often to defang criticism about custody numbers. Which, as with other times in the past, people didn't seem to care about.
Your argument being that there should be a better federal support and/or shelter network to be certain that illegal immigrants can be humanely treated? Your terms are acceptable. Even if we tied it to border funding or some other carrot, I doubt Senate Republicans would care - Trump, at least, was offered border wall funding for protection for dreamers and wound up shutting down the government instead.
I'm not a fan of this show-boating from DeSantis, but I don't think "$12 million ‘immigrant relocation program’ Own The Libs/Desantis for President" is a very strong steelman.
The governor of Florida is paying to fly illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts to score political points. I'm too stupid to rationalize how that is in the best interest of the citizens of Florida, so I'll leave that to my betters.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
2yr ago
To be clear, people aren't laughing because they think you care about poor immigrants too much, they are laughing because they think your reaction proves none of it was sincere.
And how should I react in a way that would satisfy them? Donate money or time to organizations that provide aid to illegal immigrants?
I love the idea of stopping the madness, and treating our countrymen better, but trust issues aside, what specifically are you even suggesting?
I doubt I'm knowledgeable enough to give you a list of policy prescriptions that will solve the problem overnight, nor does this seem to be the place for that. I'm too lazy to dig up my previous comments on it, but I believe there's room for compromise on immigration and most other issues. The response I got from that was angry conservatives claiming they compromised in the 70s and 80s and why should they listen to me now when they know I'll be back in 20-30 years asking for more compromises?
For lack of a better word, always this: less culture war, please. We're all humans, not moral monsters, let's not cheer the people trying to stoke partisan division for political gain. You and I aren't so different and largely want the same things, yet in some perverse reversal, we spend 80% of our time arguing about the 20% of things we disagree on rather than finding solidarity in the 80% of things we do agree on.
I don't think there's any impetus in my league; if anything, it's the reverse. Nobody is conservative, if they are they're closeted big city conservatives who still like most of the conveniences of blue tribe society, have a distaste for the homeless/wokeness and hide their power level to get laid. The men in my league don't really care and would probably be happy playing without the women if it weren't for the sizable fraction who want to play with their girlfriends. The women are broadly and emphatically pro-trans and diversity.
Moreover, there's such a broad range of skills at this level that it doesn't matter all that much and the highlight for many people is hitting the bar after the game. I've at times been matched up with players who are as far below me as the women on my team are below the trans women. Amusingly, trans women are the new ringers and I suspect a quietly sought after prize for many a captain; everyone wins!
I don't know where the professional leagues are headed.
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