MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Depends on the date. The SA was the Nazi militia before Hitler took power, and engaged in a lot of non-state political violence. After Hitler consolidated power it had become an embarrassment (it was also a hotbed of Nazis who took the "Socialist" part of "National Socialist" more seriously than Hitler's new industrialist buddies were comfortable with) so it was dealt with in the Night of the Long Knives.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
America went to the moon and back before we opened the immigration floodgates
And I'm learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.
As well as the Project Paperclip scientists, George Mueller grew up in a German-speaking household so he wasn't exactly a "heritage American". The ancestors of Aldrin (grandson of Swedish immigrants) and Collins (long-established Irish-American family) wouldn't have been let in if the nativists of their day had won their political battles.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Both dogs and horses could be working animals and valued companions. I suspect the Neolithic dogs given honoured burials were hunting dogs, not housepets.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
When a boss gives a speech to subordinates, we should at least consider the possibility that what he said was meant literally.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
8-10. Most parents put considerable effort into the appearance of "Christmas magic". There's an adorable age where they're old enough to question, but afraid of what they might find out. They'll test their parents and gossip among themselves. But my own were afraid that if I knew that they knew, then I might not bother with the presents ritual, so they pretended to believe longer. And once it was explicit, they solemnly accepted the responsibility to not break the kayfabe for their younger cousins.
This is the point where the potential harm is. If a child spends 1-2 years thinking "Santa breaks my model of reality but I can't think deeply about this because the presents will stop coming" then they are learning to suppress curiosity for fear of punishment.
FWIW, I understood that Santa was the same type of being as God and Jesus*, as opposed to the same type of being as my Mum or the Queen, as early as I remember having complex thoughts - certainly before age 6. Having been taught about Santa therefore made me less likely to accept Christianity as an older child (whether this is good or bad is unclear). I had Santa, God and Jesus in the same bucket as Mickey Mouse and Peter the High King of Narnia by the time I was 9.
* My parents were not Christian, but the local primary school was a C of E school so I was partially raised Christian
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
There is free movement within borders. Open borders for one part of the country means open borders for all.
The fact that doing X (which is morally unproblematic of itself) makes it easier to do Y (which would be immoral) doesn't change the moral character of doing X-but-not-Y. As a matter of practical calculation, it might change the wisdom of banning X. Law and politics, not morals.
In the case of immigration, where X is migrating to a place where you are welcome, and Y is migrating to a different place in the same country where you are not welcome, there are good practical reasons for granting permission at the level of the sovereign state. But you absolutely can run a regime where legal immigrants can travel freely within a wider freedom-of-movement area while only enjoying the right to reside and work in the state that granted their visa - this is how Schengen visas work in the EU.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
The section of the speech I was thinking about was (transcript - at 40:51)
Washington D.C. went from our most unsafe city to just about our safest city in a period of a month. We had it under control in 12 days, but give us another 15 or 16 days, it was -- it's perfect. And people other than politicians that look bad, they think. You know, the Democrats run most of the cities that are in bad shape. We have many cities in great shape too, by the way. I want you to know that. But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they've done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they're very unsafe places and we're going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can't let these people in. You know, we had no people enter in the last four months, zero. Even I can't believe that.
Clear statement that Trump wants to send troops to Chicago, in a warlike posture. And the enemy is "radical left Democrats" in a context which suggests that the term includes the elected governments of Illinois and Chicago and the voters who elected them. Even if it isn't a promise of war against Chicago as a whole, it is a promise of war against domestic political opponents who are broadly popular in Chicago. Given the segue to controlling the border, I think you can argue that Trump considers the war on domestic political opponents to be secondary to the war on illegal immigrants you mention - this is consistent with administration behaviour to date. But that just gives him a comprehensible motive - it doesn't change what he is doing.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Arbitrary and capricious enforcement of paperwork offenses (and illegal immigration is a paperwork offence) is an injustice, though a minor one in the grand scheme of things and I certainly wouldn't call it an outrage. I think tolerating well-behaved illegal immigrants for decades and then rounding them up for deportation counts as arbitrary and capricious enforcement, although I understand why the people voting for right-populist parties don't*. It definitely isn't shocking given that almost every 1st-world government - especially the ones that don't actually believe in immigration enforcement - now engages in occasional bouts of arbitrary and capricious immigration enforcement as a form of reality-TV prolefeed.
As a separate issue, I think deporting well-behaved established members of communities harms those communities. If your neighbours like you, then the Tokyo government is hurting them by deporting you, and they are entitled to treat a government that does so as hostile, just as Chicago is treating ICE as hostile.
The median voter seems remarkably sane about immigration - people want system of managed legal immigration operated in the national interest, with criminals, scroungers, and radical Islamists deported asap and well-behaved productive immigrants on a 5-10 year path to citizenship. The "Why can't we have an Australian/Canadian points system?" discourse. There are multiple reasons why this does not happen in the UK or US, and the most annoying one is that the whole debate is poisoned by the completely broken humanitarian immigration system. It doesn't help that two-party systems in the social media age shut out the median voter, such that the public debate is between leftists who favour de facto open borders through a trivially abusable humanitarian system and rightists who want a near-zero immigration system that would have deported Elon Musk and Jensen Huang's parents.
* If you think that the 30 years of broadly-tolerated illegal working was a conspiracy by the Dems, the GOPe, and their corporate supporters against the American people, then the American people (and the Trump administration as their agent) aren't acting arbitrarily and capriciously - they are doing what they always wanted to do and always said they were going to do at the first reasonable opportunity. The comparable argument in the UK is similar but more complex because most of the low-skilled working immigrants in the UK entered using (possibly deliberately) easily-abusable legal routes, not illegally.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
Yes - trespassing often involves a malum in se crime like breaking and entering, breach of privacy if you get too close to the house, or trampling crops, but non-destructively taking a shortcut across someone else's field is one of the textbook examples of malum prohibitum and the law in most places reflects this.
Land Law 101 is that there are no legally cognisable natural rights in land and you only "own" land because the State says you do.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
Okay, whose house is it then?
My house is my house. Your house is your house. The nation isn't a family, and the national territory isn't a house. Avoid Mummy Party and Daddy Party frames where possible. If the Mummy Party was a real mother, it would be a divorced wine mum with four different mental health diagnoses. If the Daddy Party was a real father it would be a deadbeat dad with a DV restraining order.
Who does have the right to exclude?
Sovereign states have the legal right to exclude people - that isn't in doubt here. The question I was arguing with @Lizardspawn is whether this is a matter of ethics, such that illegal immigration is a malum in se crime and possibly even, per Lizardspawn, an "abhorrent" one, or whether it is a matter of politics such that illegal immigration is a malum prohibitum crime.
The basic argument for why illegal immigration (assuming otherwise well-behaved, gainfully employed immigrants) is malum prohibitum rather than malum in se is:
- In the absence of immigration laws, immigration for the purpose of working in a foreign country is not immoral.
- Illegal immigration and illegal work are, in and of themselves, victimless crimes and victimless crimes are generally malum prohibitum.
- The actual criminal acts involved in illegal immigration and illegal work are generally morally unproblematic acts (crossing a morally arbitrary line on the map, mutually beneficial commercial transactions) carried out without the correct paperwork - that is the paradigmatic example of malum prohibitum.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
This is, of course, the load-bearing item of contention. To me, and to many, peacefully breaking immigration laws is some combination of trespass, home invasion and squatting. If I come to your house, and I eat your food and I tell you I'm never leaving, and the police back me up, it's not really your house any more.
If you are a Republican voter in Alabama, I don't see how Chicago is "your house" in any morally relevant way. If you are a Reform UK voter in Lower Snoring, I insist that my house in London is not "your house" in any morally relevant way, and politely suggest that you show some gratitude to the people whose taxes fund your lifestyle rather than insinuating that our friends, neighbours, colleagues and servants are somehow "eating your food". That it is your country is legally relevant, but the only moral claim that gives rise to is the one that upholding the law is generally good. My claim that illegal immigration is morally trivial is restricted to the situations where the community the immigrants are moving to does not, in fact, object to their presence.
That's ignoring the face that lots of illegal immigrants actually turn out to be neither nice, peaceful or helpful, of course. But is it any wonder that voters react badly to breaking immigration law, or helping others break immigration law, when seen from this perspective?
Yes - there is supermajority support essentially everywhere for curtailing abuse of the humanitarian and family-based routes to immigrate to first-world countries, based on the accurate belief that the people who get in that way are, on average, bad neighbours. We should do so. But public opinion on this point is downstream of immigrant behaviour - people who have experience of well-behaved immigrants don't want to kick them out.
the direct import of specifically American racial grievances post-Floyd
I remember the pictures of the pro-Floyd march in London. I haven't seen a London crowd that close to all-white since before Blair opened the immigration floodgates, and I doubt I will ever see another one. I think it was whiter than the recent Tommy Robinson rally. Wokism isn't being pushed by immigrants or their descendants - unless you count the Milibands.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
I don't think they're guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but it's definitely bizarre to turn around and conclude that they're heroes, which is how they're being treated by progressives (???)
I think this is a general problem of modern therapy culture - we can't distinguish between innocent victims and actual heroes. (Christian martyrology doesn't help). I first noticed this after 9-11 - far too many people failed to make a moral distinction between the unheroic victims (the office workers in the towers and the Pentagon, the passengers on the three planes that hit their targets) and the actual heroes (the firemen and police who climbed up the burning towers, and the passengers on United 93).
The central park 5 were the victims of serious wrongdoing, in that they were imprisoned for far longer (and under worse conditions, as sex offenders) than would be justified by the various minor offences they committed as juveniles. That 4 of the 5 went straight after getting out is not particularly surprising and is why we have a relatively soft criminal justice system for juveniles - most (but by no means all) criminal youths grow out of it if given the chance. They aren't "heroes", and I don't think anyone capable of making the distinction thinks they are.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
If we are talking about well-behaved gainfully-employed illegals in blue cities like Chicago (which is where the ICE raids causing the fuss are focused), then nobody is imposing. The illegals are in a place where their landlords, bosses, butchers, bakers etc. as well as a super-majority of the community are perfectly comfortable to have them there. The people who don't want them are the people (almost entirely from outside said blue cities) who voted for Trump.
Now as a matter of positive law, this particular group of intermeddling non-Chicagoans and the federal government they elected do in fact have the legal right to send goons into Chicago to round up and remove the illegals. But that only affects the morality of the immigrants' behaviour if you think there is a moral obligation to obey permissibly-dumb-but-not-evil laws in a democracy. I do, but my impression is that most Motteposters subscribe to the libertarian view that there there is no such obligation. Even if breaking laws is immoral, peacefully breaking immigration laws is immoral on the level of filesharing or handling salmon suspiciously*, not on the level of victimful crimes like burglary, so "abhorrent" seems excessive.
* "Handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances" is, somewhat notoriously, a crime in the UK. The purpose of the law is to make it easier to prosecute blatantly guilty poachers like this guy without needing to litigate the provenance of a specific salmon.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
If there is one single issue I think you will have trouble rallying cops to kill feds for I really think, "Actually we don't need to allow law enforcement to use greater force on criminals and we should decriminalize even more vagrancy and brazen public lawlessness" is it.
If local cops start shooting at feds, it is going to be because the feds are engaging in hostile and warlike acts in their communities. Trump talks about sending troops into cities to quell general lawlessness, but apart from DC he has not done so - the facts on the ground are entirely about immigration enforcement.
The MO of ICE is to seal off an area, arrest everyone vaguely Hispanic-looking, detain the citizens for a few hours and most of the legal immigrants overnight to show who's boss, and throw the illegal immigrants and a few legal immigrants for good measure into immigration detention for eventual deportation. There is enough of a pattern that I think we can assume this is policy. If you are a Hispanic-looking citizen, or a legal immigrant, or the friend, pastor, employer, or local political leader of such people, you are going to interpret this as violent hostility to your community, because it is. The MAGA base who are cheerleading the immigration enforcement operations on right-wing social media are not hiding the fact that they would be happy deporting legal immigrants and non-heritage-American citizens if the opportunity arose. The federal legality of these tactics is currently being litigated - if ICE are exceeding their authority under federal law then as a matter of state law they are committing all the crimes.
The South Shore apartment raid in Chicago is an escalation, both in terms of the tactics (SWAT tactics were used, including doors kicked in in the middle of the night) and the targets (the Blacks were arrested as well as the Hispanics). And a deliberate one - Kristi Noem put out a celebratory Youtube video. It doesn't look like ICE stole enough to matter this time, but the nature of rapidly-recruited and poorly-trained goons is that if this type of operation continues ICE are probably going to start stealing from US citizens on a large scale due to poor discipline, even if it isn't policy. If and when that happens, local cops shooting at feds who are also robbers and kidnappers seems plausible, particularly in core cities where the local police are more black tribe than red.
The other factor is that ICE can burn through any goodwill they have with local police by acting like arseholes. Too many incidents of accidentally tear-gassing cops or calling 911 on journalists and actually-peaceful protestors would bring the "local cops willing to obey an order from the governor/mayor to shoot at feds" point forward. At the margins even garden-variety assholism like driving recklessly and parking illegally when off-duty (almost all cops do this, but their getting away with it when outside their local jurisdiction is controversial) hurts.
tl;dr: Local cops are going to be sympathetic to feds engaging in immigration enforcement, but the degree of collateral damage that local cops are willing to tolerate is a lot lower than the level of collateral damage Trump's people seem to be aiming for. It is possible but unlikely that this will reach the point where local cops are willing to shoot at feds.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
7d ago
He also flew every deployed star officer and their SEAs to Quantico for the biggest set-piece speech to the brass since Washington was alive, and told them that the people of Chicago were domestic enemies of the United States and that the officer corps should prepare for war against them.
History suggests that when Trump (i) says he is going to do a bad thing, (ii) the bad thing is wildly popular on right-wing social media, and (iii) appears to be doing the bad thing, he probably actually is doing it. If I was the mayor of Chicago or the governor of Illinois, I would be making "war" plans. After the attack on the South Shore apartment building, I would be thinking about activating them.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Jews are white.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
Even if Harris was a bad candidate, the blunder wasn't choosing her - it was allowing Biden to stay in the race for so long that there wasn't time to run a primary campaign and unite the party around a better candidate. At the point where Biden drops out, Harris is the least bad option.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
8d ago
I think "good" or "great" is asking the wrong question. The emotions Democrats and friends were feeling in summer 2024 was driven by "Much better than 2024-vintage Biden" and, to a lesser extent "Much better than Hilary Clinton". Also the campaign was basically competent (as demonstrated by the Dems doing better in swing states where there was a lot of campaigning than they did in deep red or blue states where there wasn't), which was a pleasant surprise.
There are basically two Kamala-sympathetic stories about 2024:
- The Democrats lost the election on the state of the economy, and Harris did surprisingly well to keep the election close. People who support this view like to compare the Democrats' performance in 2024 to other incumbent parties in rich democracies, who mostly lost by landslides.
- 2024-vintage Kamala was an okay (not great - nobody ever thought she was great as far as I can see) candidate but the 2020 primary campaign had been so crazy that she had "had" to say a bunch of discrediting stuff that she didn't manage to run away from, with free sex changes for trans illegal immigrant criminals the headliner.
The result of a close election is almost always multi-causal, but I think the economic competence story holds together best. 2024 wasn't a base mobilisation election - both campaigns got their respective bases out and were always going to. The election was decided by swing voters. And when people spoke to swing voters what they heard was "The prices are too #!@# high and the Democrats don't seem to care." There were some obvious-in-hindsight unforced errors by the Biden administration which made the prices higher than they needed to be - the too-big stimulus in 2021 and the big infrastructure bill which spent a lot of money without building any infrastructure.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Kimmel basically victim-blamed the right. His “punishment” was a week of leave and a ton of media attention and the full support of the rest of Hollywood.
There was an organic campaign to cancel Kimmel that would probably have succeeded (not least because Sinclair would have dropped him even without administration pressure). It failed because Trump ran his mouth in a way which made it an undeniable 1st amendment issue.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
A "member" of Annabel's? It is no more of a membership than my "membership" of American Express. They are subscribers with ideas above their station, and Annabel's is a commercial discotheque with ideas above its station.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
9d ago
Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).
Draft dodging can definitely show moral courage, but doing so in a relatively safe way doesn't show physical courage. In the specific context of a well-connected rich kid dodging the Vietnam draft, I would say it shows neither.
I am also opposed to the peacetime draft on principle, and the government and military brass ran the Vietnam war like a peacetime garrison operation for good but not sufficient reasons driven by Cold War grand strategy, so I count the Vietnam draft as morally equivalent to a peacetime draft. A draft in the case of existential war or grave danger thereof is an unfortunate incident of a state and society that wishes to continue existing, but the Vietnam war wasn't existential and wasn't treated as existential. But the chickenhawk argument you are making doesn't apply to the Vietnam draft - both the politicians who ordered the Vietnam draft and the generals leading the war had were WW2 veterans and most had been on the front lines. (There is some question about whether LBJ was ever actually shot at, but his staff job involved regular flight over hostile territory. McNamara was a REMF. JFK, Nixon, Laird, Westmoreland and Abrams were combat veterans.)
The contract between the generations has always involved old men who proved their valour in their youth but are too old to fight today's wars ordering younger men into battle. The ubiquitous Vietnam-era draft-dodging among elites broke that contract even if the draft was unjustified in that particular case. The breach of the social contract by the Greatest Generation leaders was sending the army to war with no idea of how they were going to win.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
with a good deal of physical courage.
What makes you say that? The main thing we know about Trump's physical courage or lack thereof is that he dodged the draft.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12d ago
Women (or at least the ones I encounter in my British PMC social circles, excluding the blue-haired feminists) only think or say, "Would you love me if I was a worm?" if they are hot and know it. Women want to hear "I love you and you are hot, but I would still love you anyway if you weren't." "I love you because you are hot" is second-best. "I love you even though you are not hot" is something that might work as push-pull/negging/whatever, but doesn't validate a woman or make her feel secure in the relationship.
Don't PUAs hammer in over and over that the boyfriend's nice personality is only praise because it is predicated on him being the boyfriend in the first place?
Only because of the word "nice". The point of PUA is that women are attracted by certain personality traits which are not "nice" but are attractive - and indeed are attracted by these traits far more than they are by conventional hotness (hence why Mystery could get laid while looking like a tranny), and are turned off by a "nice" personality. Part of the promise of OG PUA is that you can get far more bangs for your buck by learning how to perform "alphaness" that you can by hitting the gym.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12d ago
Something you may not get if you are primarily same-sex attracted is that the qualities straight people find attractive in an opposite-sex partner and the qualities that make them feel fuckable for themselves are different. Most straight men don't care about being hot, except instrumentally in that it may (depending on the surrounding culture and the particular guy's dating strategy) help get them laid. They care a lot about their partners being hot, because male sexuality is what it is. Another guy, or even a woman who isn't in my dating pool, telling me I am physically attractive doesn't emotionally validate me in the way that someone telling me I am good at my job, or a good cook, or even physically strong - all expressions of prowess and not fuckability. As a happily married man I don't find myself getting anxious about fuckability, but in so far as I think about it what makes me feel fuckable is my wife praising my bedroom technique - i.e. prowess again. I think this is true for most straight guys who are not PUAs, and of course the whole point of PUA culture is to turn an attractively masculine personality into a learnable, teachable skill - i.e. prowess yet again.
I am not claiming to be an expert on women, but based on standard cultural scripts (outside spaces where everyone is performatively denying sex differences), women writing about their petty anxieties (Blue Tribe/Unculture elites give women a lot of high-pl), and my experience supporting first my little sister and later my wife, women assume (mostly correctly, given straight male sexuality) that their own fuckability is 90% about their hotness. But their own attraction to men is mostly emotional, and only partly visual, and they know this. For a woman to tell her girlfriends about her boyfriend's adorable personality is high praise. For a man to tell his bros that he is into his girlfriend because of her personality is a relationship-ended if she finds out - it's a euphemism for "she's ugly."
I strongly suspect that your desire to be hot and loved for your intrinsic qualities comes from the same source that made you trans-curious when you were younger. It is a profoundly feminine trait.
The 100k only existed as a gold certificate (and therefore illegal for private individuals to hold during the New Deal era when private holdings of gold were restricted). The 500, 1k, 5k and 10k existed in all forms of US currency including legal tender Federal Reserve Notes ("green" money). The original Binion's Horseshoe casino in Las Vegas (home of the WSOP) had a tourist attraction where you could be photographed in front of a million dollars in 10k bills.
As with all obsolete US currency, the large denomination notes are still legal money and a regulated bank should accept them for deposit at face value. They are rare enough that the numismatic value normally exceeds the face value, so this never happens.
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