HonoreDB
26d ago
You can google "stories from people who were bussed out of Texas" as well as I can, or just infer from the fact that they're humans who just did a dangerous and difficult thing that they had a plan, or note that if immigrants are showing up in inconveniently large clumps in some towns it's probably because they know each other. (Texas does actually try to send people to cities they wanted to go to anyway, I think, which I'm all for.)
HonoreDB
26d ago
Por qué no los dos? I agree that Trump can no longer manage to say anything anti-Hitler that sounds strong and sincere, or emphasize part of his platform that is blatantly un-Nazi, that's kind of the point.
HonoreDB
26d ago
Are we talking deontology here now because I think there are a few deontological arguments against death camps.
HonoreDB
26d ago
You seem to be saying that a just war, conducted with humility, a clearly defined goal and taking care (insofar as is practicable) to minimize civilian casualties is wrong if the people behind it are pursuing the destruction of their enemy as a terminal goal
Not quite. I'm saying that it's wrong to support a war you expect to be brutal, bloodthirsty, etc. and that one of the fallible-but-important heuristics feeding into that is if the people who would be leading it are saying brutal and bloodthirsty things. Also that "vibes" are the main thing that determine whether your occupying armies so kind they inspire cults praying for their return or whether they tend to massacre civilians in their downtime. But yes I only care about vibes to the extent that they're predictors or causes of actions.
HonoreDB
26d ago
All of the negative things I've attributed to Biden are ones I see as (partly) moral failings, as well as the big one where he insisted on running for re-election, and still hasn't stepped down from his office, despite being increasingly incapable of performing his duties, out of what seems to be selfish pride. And yes, totally agree that he's at least historically been racist. Most of the immigration policies I hate were put into place under Bill Clinton, and I think that's at best him callously sacrificing people he didn't need to sacrifice in pursuit of largely imaginary gains. I could definitely go on.
I don't know, I feel like I probably don't need to be in this thread anymore since Harris and Trump seem to be making basically the same case as their joint closing argument. I guess I am curious to hear your account(s) of why A: lifelong/devout Republicans who have worked with Trump closely seem to be making the same attribution error as I am, despite coming from completely different biases, and B: why Trump can talk about the degenerate traitors saying he likes concentration camps all day and never get around to saying "concentration camps are bad."
HonoreDB
26d ago
I don't think he's talking about Hispanic people in that video but I haven't checked. What he is doing, explicitly, is saying that people should break certain rules restraining their violence that they are currently obeying, and get really rough as a deterrent, and the authorities should look the other way.
HonoreDB
28d ago
We should never fight a war wherein our leaders want the enemy dead as a terminal goal, only as a regrettable instrumental one.
HonoreDB
28d ago
Texas is bussing in people who wanted to be in Texas, were captured and detained, and then they let them out and had a man with a gun offer them a free bus ticket to NYC without being too specific about what the alternative was, right? That is volunteering in a certain very specific sense.
Their intended support network is other immigrants they know, obviously, that's how it works here too. But if you can't handle the volume, then sure, please send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, just don't be a dick about it. I'd recommend "git gud" (and/or "git more federal funding to help you git gud") because more people is more better, but you do you.
HonoreDB
28d ago
See, all that would be more persuasive if Trump had ever personally said he disapproves of the camps. Despite, yes, getting asked about it as late as 2022 by people interviewing him for a book, and him ranting about China all the time. Has he? I can't find it if he has. The most generous plausible interpretation is that he thinks he'll alienate too many supporters if he condemns concentration camps. It's not about not wanting to offend China because, again, he talks all the time about stuff Xi is doing that he disapproves of.
And in that case, I mean, gosh, Trump sure does seem to hire a lot of people as close advisors who later turn out to be liars making up stories about their leader being a feckless wannabe-dictator. Maybe he shouldn't be in charge of hiring the next National Security Advisor if he keeps hiring traitors?
HonoreDB
28d ago
...not really the point, but also, nope, having massive numbers of unwilling immigrants whose intended support network was in Texas bussed in at once is inconvenient, especially for them, but they're still going to make us richer and safer in the medium term (three years is generally how long, see e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/12265934.2022.2093261). We've been a sanctuary city for longer than ICE has existed, what more do you want from us?
"Oh, you think there shouldn't be a federal law against people giving you free pie? Then you can't object to me confiscating a thousand pies in Texas, driving them to New York, and firing them at you with a t-shirt cannon, right?"
HonoreDB
28d ago
Ah, so you're the target audience for Don't Be A Sucker (1946). A fascist state operates for the benefit of the state, not its nominally model citizens/disposable cannon fodder.
HonoreDB
28d ago
I think you should put a hard time limit on this prediction
6 years should be plenty.
"most of the world" views anything Trump says or does with horror
Citation needed. Trump is broadly-disliked but controversial. I mean something a bit stronger--that it'll be an uncontroversial entry in lists of atrocities. I could in theory operationalize it with numbers but I won't because I don't want to spend a day going over atrocity statistics.
What, in your opinion, would an explicit call for a pogrom from Trump look like? Do you think any public statements he's made to date could reasonably be characterised as such? If so, which ones?
In my mind it's a continuum, not a binary, hence the "more and more." Especially when it's Trump, with his communication style I feel like he has to say something at least three times before it's uncontroversial to claim that he said it on purpose and meant it. I do think it's pretty reasonable to characterize e.g. this video https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1840483582433009711 as Trump calling for a pogrom, but the implication is that you're only supposed to get really violent with known thieves who are maybe even actively robbing you. So there's room for it to get worse, if and when he says the same thing but about some conspiracy theory about an ethnic group.
I'm not sure how to democracy if I can't use "this politician seems like he might do X" to inform my voting decisions. I disapprove of the deportations under Biden, but I mostly attribute them to weakness, not ideology. This ultimately matters, because, again, I don't want the state to kill millions of people due to a very well-known failure mode of ideology. And I don't trust anybody who's unusually willing to tapdance on the edge of that cliff, because even if they don't end up falling, they're betraying a fundamental lack of moral center.
When Trump ran in 2016, I was mainly worried that he was shifting the Overton Window and otherwise laying the groundwork for the next President like him to be significantly worse. Give or take the Grover Cleveland of it all, this is basically still what I'm afraid of.
HonoreDB
28d ago
Ideally, fix the economic problems that incentivize shadow economies and/or crime, but sure, I think mass deportations approved by a majority and compliant with the constitution are almost always a bad idea but I might be wrong and it should be considered ethically permissible...as long as your government can credibly promise to do it humanely. There's no way a 25% chance of death camps for millions of people is worth it for the net benefits to the remainder.
HonoreDB
28d ago
You might want to double-check where you personally are in the "first they came for..." sequence. You seem to be prone enough to thoughtcrime that while living in a liberal European society you're responding to a post saying "Trump is fine with massacring people" with "I hope you're right." Are you going to turn into a perfectly credible conformist if your country goes fascist? If not, that's a lower bound on where you are in the priority queue.
HonoreDB
28d ago
Kind of the second one? I'm saying we should have a firm ethical principle that we never authorize putting large numbers of people at the mercy of the state unless we're confident that all of the relevant decision-makers prefer positive outcomes for those people, either inherently or via incentives. (To me that's a core American value.) And, as a special case of that, that because of what Hitler did and said, we should treat any willingness to speak like Hitler and court the pro-ethnic-cleansing vote as disqualifying. I'm not saying that anyone should be able to veto any policy or politician by accusing a politician of being secretly Hitler (everyone I've ever voted for has had a non-zero chance of being secretly Hitler), but yes I do think somebody proposing retroactive illegalization and mass deportation should have to spend a lot of time credibly signaling that they're not secretly Hitler, enough that 50%+1 of voters believe them. Trump is more focused right now on signaling that he is, if anything. His response to being called a fascist by his ex-Chief of Staff was to call him a lying degenerate, not even to rotely say "I believe in freedom and compassion" as used to be the bare minimum standard for running for elected office.
HonoreDB
28d ago
Why should New Yorkers care about Texans? Why should people in London care about people in Birmingham? Why should I care about you? Why is nationalism the only permissible criterion for whom to care about? I can live in a pluralist society with nationalists, but I don't see why Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote that they care about foreigners too.
I'm personally also against the current admin's support for the current Israeli admin's actions, but more importantly, we need a norm in discourse that you can condemn one genocide even if there's another one also going on. I should be allowed to condemn the CCP's actions and our administration's lack of response without also having to list every other similar case past and present.
Thank you for your support for the Uyghurs, first of all.
I don't quite see why any of this is relevant to my argument, actually. You don't know me. I'm not asking you to take my word for anything, just trying to alert you to the necessity of looking freshly at what Trump is saying and reevaluating past judgments. No amount of previous mistakes, alarmism, or other rhetorical malfeasance by Democrats can exempt a politician from all scrutiny.
This time around, Trump has the opportunity to be more effective, if he wants to be--he can start fresh with more loyal civil servants and a more ruthless Cabinet, has a more loyal party in Congress, has more experience, has four years of the likes of Stephen Miller making plans now that he knows he actually needs them and can't just order the Deep State to do it. It's not like he deported fewer people because he wanted to deport fewer. He also has rhetorically positioned himself differently--before it was primarily "immigration is dangerous, especially illegal immigration, because it includes bad people, we need to build a wall to keep them out and pause legal channels until we figure out how to filter out the poisonous Skittles better." Now it's "There are tens of millions of evil people newly in this country poisoning our blood with their evil genes, and also by smuggling in literal poison, and whatever other terrible rumor you've heard about them is probably true, so we urgently need to revoke all their legal statuses, round up all suspected illegals, figure out which ones are actual illegals, and deport them." I think this reflects an altered worldview and altered intentions and expectations.
In terms of my personal gut probabilities (with conditional ones indented):
Deportations will be significantly higher than under the previous administration -- 80%
...and deaths in detention will be higher too -- 99%
...and deaths in detention will be later found to have been underreported -- 75%
...that detentions will happen at a scale, brutality, and death rate high enough that most of the world will view it with horror once the truth comes out -- 25%
Trump will revoke temporarily protected statuses granted under the Biden administration -- 80%
...and try to go further with retroactively making people illegal -- 80%
...and succeed -- 50%
Trump being elected will not increase the number of hate crimes -- 60%
Regardless of whether he wins, he'll call for pogroms more and more explicitly -- 75%
HonoreDB
28d ago
Not a lawyer, but I think that would meet the legal definition of genocide, which is maybe why the U.S. uses that word for it. But all of that just sounds like the CCP version of what's happening, not what refugees and defectors are saying. And see links and Folamh3's reply on the forcible organ harvesting analyses.
tl;dr: FYI, Trump has evolved from the 2016 guy who said the Nazis at Charlottesville should be "condemned totally." He's now personally in favor of mass state killings if they're the most expedient way to do ethnic cleansing.
EDIT: Now that I can see the net karma on the "I hope you're right" comment, I've reconsidered whether winning this argument would be in my interests. I'm invoking Godwin's Law on myself to declare that I've lost and the thread is over. Nobody is, shall be, or ever has been, a Nazi.
There’s a Holocaust happening in China today. The Uyghurs, an ethnic group that includes, or included, 11 million people in China, are being rounded up arbitrarily and sent to “re-education camps,” where they are often killed or forcibly sterilized. More than a million, we think, are in camps now.
I used to believe that if anything on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust were to start up today, the rest of the world would rapidly respond and put an end to it. As a kid, I imagined enlisting. But China is too strong. Our leaders get away with not responding, because China simply denies everything. Sometimes with only the thinnest veneer of plausibility, like when they claimed to end the involuntary harvesting of prisoners’ organs, but the number of organ transplants kept rising steadily.
Joe Biden is not responding appropriately to this atrocity out of pragmatism, cowardice, or weakness. Maybe Kamala Harris will be different; we can at least hope.
But this started in 2017. Donald Trump did not respond appropriately either, because he approves of China’s actions.
Here’s Trump’s National Security Advisor at the time:
At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.
His administration felt differently, but there wasn’t much they could do. Mike Pompeo officially condemned the Uyghur genocide on his last day as Secretary of State, now that Trump couldn’t fire him. They also got him to sign a bill (co-sponsored by Harris) that sanctioned some Chinese officials for the ongoing atrocity.
Since then, people working for Trump have continued to condemn the genocide, and made pledges in his name to end it if he’s elected. But Trump himself has, as far as I can find, still declined to. In 2022, interviewers asked him whether he agreed with his staff, and he responded “I’d rather not say at the moment.” During his 2024 campaign, he’s said that Xi would be his first call as President, but he would not include human rights in his agenda for the call—in fact, one of his demands would be for them to increase the number of state executions for nonviolent offenses.
This is a consistent principle of his. Here’s President Trump excusing the massacres of Kurds on the Turkish border:
Turkey, in all fairness, they’ve had a legitimate problem with [the border]. They had terrorists, they had a lot of people in there that they couldn’t have. They’ve suffered a lot of loss of lives also. And they had to have it cleaned out. But once you start that, it gets to be to the point where a tremendous amount of bad things can happen.
He’s going to try to do the same thing here in America.
Ever since being voted out of office, Trump’s language about immigration has shifted more and more towards the language of ethnic cleansing. He regularly tells crowds that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” There are about 15 or 16 million people here who shouldn’t be, he says, so “we got a lot of work to do.” More recently, he’s made it explicit that when he says “blood,” he means “genes.” It’s not a dog whistle, it’s not a gaffe, it’s not a malicious misreading of his ramblings.
This is identical to Nazi rhetoric. This is as harsh as Hitler was ever willing to be in his campaign speeches. He didn’t say he was going to round up the people poisoning his country’s blood and kill them. He said that he was going to deport them. Even once in power, when his government shifted policy toward extermination, they never admitted it.
A second Trump presidency will detain people suspected of being illegal immigrants, including those retroactively made “illegal,” and won’t be transparent about what happens next. How many of them survive detention will depend on logistics, on whether his new staff quietly rebels, and on how earnestly Trump tries to ensure that his preferred way of dealing with detainees is actually implemented. There are lots of ways this could end up not being a mass state murder. But “Trump disapproves of mass state murders” isn’t one of them.
(He wants pogroms, too. Just put people in charge who will look the other way, he says, and the problem will be solved immediately.)
I don’t think Trump started his political career as a Nazi. In 2017, he famously tried to have it both ways, saying of a rally led by white supremacists and containing avowed Nazis that it included some “very fine people,” but that the Nazis of course should be “condemned totally.” I think he just didn’t care one way or the other, and so was calibrating his remarks so that anyone could persuade themselves he agreed with them. Doing the politician thing, except most politicians don’t do that when it’s Nazis.
But in office, Trump got to know, and came to respect, Xi, and Erdogan, and Putin. His own attempts at mass deportation and building a wall were largely ineffective. But those guys. They knew how to get things done.
And now, after four years out of office, he’s rhetorically committed to the idea that there are millions of people here who shouldn’t be, because of their evil natures and evil genes. Now, all he’s willing to say against Nazis is that he’s never read Mein Kampf.
His Republican Party is, I believe and hope, not a Nazi party. As an institution, it’s not what the Nazi party was in the 1930s, just badly off-kilter. But Trump himself is a Nazi now. He doesn’t call himself that. But then, the Nazis didn’t use that word for themselves either.
For most of the past four years, I’ve tuned him out. I thought I knew everything I needed to know about him. Maybe you have too. But we were wrong—something has changed. People have been crying wolf for so long about Republicans being Nazis that now we just tune it out. Newspapers scared of looking like tabloids resort to headlines about “a fascination with genes and bloodlines.” So I missed it, and most people are still missing it.
Sources https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTribunal_JUDGMENT_1stMarch_2020.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-refused-to-say-whether-china-was-abusing-uyghurs-2022-4 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/elections-2024-trump-xi-us-presidential-call-09232024232901.html https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1184897777941307392 (video) https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-bad-genes-immigrants-hugh-hewitt-rcna174456 https://archive.is/nwOXF
As an existence proof that you can be a pro-freedom and pro-compassion right-wing opposition leader and not sound weak and performative, have some Churchill.
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