quiet_NaN
18hr ago
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
That is a strange thing to call Palantir.
Seriously, there might be some illegals where the government is not even aware they exist, but I was persuaded by others here that they might actually be a minority of the illegals. In particular, any illegal who was convicted of a crime will likely have left a paper trail in the court system. Probably most illegals are on facebook, too.
I generally dislike cops going on fishing expeditions. Facial id technology makes it much more feasible to find illegals without violating anyone's rights -- take pictures of people in public, check them against the database, then go after the ones which come up positive.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense
I will grant you that for Good, that argument can be made.
For Pretti, I just don't see it. Shooting someone who was at that time unarmed in the back because you thought they were armed looks bad. Likely there are thousands of gang members doing time for murder or manslaughter for cases which had a better claim to self defense than the Pretti shooters. They certainly had more reasonable doubt because their actions were unlikely to be filmed from multiple angles.
Are you advocating to pardon all of them, or do you advocate that cops should be held to much lower standards ("if the cop plausibly thought he was in danger, that's self defense")?
Anyone who is claiming that as of this moment, the US is a fascist dictatorship is obviously full of shit. I have no idea if the people in the video are making such claims, or if that is a straw man, and refuse to watch video arguments out of principle -- literate people should use text.
The ICE deployment to MN is not in itself a milestone on the path to fascism. Nor is them killing two people in error. The fact that both of them were slandered as domestic terrorists by Trump officials is much more concerning.
If you want to steelman the rise of fascism thesis, you could instead focus on Trump undermining elections, as he did in 2020 when he flat out denied the outcome. If his J6 crowd had been more successful and forced Pence to certify his election based on his alternative electors, do you think Trump would have refused if he had thought he could get away with it?
Likewise, Trump's recent call to nationalize the election seems dangerous. I have never seen Trump being willing to admit defeat in his life. I am certain that an election under his control would find the votes he wants, this time. This is different from Biden or Obama or W, none of whom I could imagine to end the American democracy experiment to stay in power for a few more years. All that is standing between Trump and kinghood is the SCOTUS, and to be fair, that is a substantial check on him. But that is the guardrail of democracy -- if everything was running well, you should not depend on the guardrail.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The general public does not care about statistics. Both sides of the CW play that game. MAGA wants you to think of the median illegal as a rapist, murderer and gang member, while SJ wants to think of them as a 6yo wearing a Pokemon hat.
The protesters breaking the laws more frequently than cops is to be expected. They are not getting paid by the taxpayer, though. There have been two people killed in MN. Both were protesters who were objectively (with the benefit of hindsight) not going to kill ICE agents. There are certainly situations where I would expect that outcome. If protesters had also murdered three ICE agents in MN in the same time span, that would justify ICE having a high prior that someone wants to murder them, making their snap judgments more understandable.
The other problem is that the Trump administration by trying to take control of the narrative and slandering the victims before their bodies were cold effectively endorsed the killings. SOP for a shooting which looks bad would be to say that the agent involved has been put on paid leave and that it is under investigation, and that it would be premature to comment on it. The Trump admin message to the ICE agents seems to be "if you need to break a few eggs to make our omelette, that is fine. We will shield you from consequences and tell bald-faced lies in our press conferences to provide cover for you."
quiet_NaN
1d ago
This would lead to fun implications if coupled with the SJ definition of a woman. "Yes, Bill has a beard and a cock, but what if he secretly identified as a woman in his heart of hearts? Might cause our ship to sink just by fantasizing about lingerie."
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization.
Haha, no.
We had humans on that rock 50 years ago. Did fuck-all to step us towards extraction and colonization.
Let's do some math. Let us take the ISS as a LEO habitat. It has a crew size of perhaps seven and weights 450 tons, for 64 tons per person, offering a comfort level in which specifically selected and trained astronauts have survived for a year without going insane. (Yes, you could also go for the Moon or Mars, where you will in theory have more material to build habitats. However, it also takes 5x as many launches to transport anything there. To build a practically self-sustaining habitat would be a massive endeavor -- you would have to copy a good fraction of the supply chains of the world economy.)
Take the Falcon 9, one of today's best rockets. It gets 22 tons tons to LEO, so we need about three launches to get a one person habitat up there.
The commercial price for a launch of the Falcon 9 is 70M$. Even if internally, SpaceX could launch at 10%, that is still 21M$ per colonist for the privilege of spending years encased in a habitat which would concern animal rights activists.
The fuel of a Falcon 9 is about 400 tons, which yields about 300 tons of CO2, generously assuming that Musk invents a catalytic converter (!) for his rockets so that CO2 is the only thing which we need to worry about. That is about the CO2 an American might produce in a lifetime. If you want to colonize space, getting controlled fusion power is the first (and one of the easier) steps.
Now, if there was Unobtainium in space, that might still be worthwhile. If Moon rock was the perfect material to build tension cables for a space elevator for, then I would be all for mining Moon rock (preferably by robots) and shipping it to Earth. Sadly, the rest of the solar system contains nothing we don't have on Earth for cheaper. This includes He-3: Earth price is 20M$/kg. If Moon regolith was 10% that stuff, that would be great. As it is perhaps 15ppb, so you need to go through hundreds of thousands of tons to get a kilogram.
The sad fact is that we will all die in the gravity well we were born, PRNS.
I think having the ISS to study the effects of microgravity on humans (and do all kinds of other experiments) is a great idea, if we find a material for a space elevator tomorrow, it would be embarrassing not to have done our homework beforehand. I also generally like space missions advancing our scientific knowledge, but that is a matter of taste, if someone wants to argue that the JWST will never teach us anything relevant for human life and we should therefore not fund it, that is a perfectly coherent position.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Trump highlights the core of the problem.
I do not see the problem, literally. Housing as an investment is merely a curiosity, if the prices of houses crash, that will not affect the people living in their houses (unless they got terrible mortgage terms, in which case you can legislate to make them unenforceable).
I might as well argue that a breathable atmosphere will permanently ruin the market for bottled air, or that eradicating smallpox permanently reduced the demand for medical treatments.
Good things are good. Anyone arguing that actually fifth order effects actually dominate and make things net negative is, on priors, very likely full of shit.
Of course, a well-meant intervention like a rent cap will unleash the terrifying and incomprehensible alien deity that is kept barely contained by a complicated and humanly meaningless ritual, which only cares about prices being the supply-demand equilibrator. But this does not mean that high housing prices are moral, just that we must pay respect to the alien god and not mess with housing prices directly.
Establishing a land value tax is a good way to fix housing costs. Land has a supply elasticity of just about zero, high land prices serve no practical benefits. Tax it so much that owners will become indifferent towards owning land.
Of course, this will fuck over people who invested their pension fund in real estate. Great, I don't care. Investing in a supply-limited good of which people need a certain amount to survive is not an ethical activity. I am sure that when the French revolution came around, quite a lot of people went bankrupt from deals and marriages which they had been sure would be highly profitable. And when methamphetamine became prohibited, that likely also destroyed some people's life savings. Just be glad if there will not be beheadings, this time. (If you want to ethically invest in a product with a limited supply, buy bitcoin instead. People can live while using zero BTC. They can not live while using zero square meters.)
quiet_NaN
2d ago
CRUD is definitely at the core of almost every piece of software that is sold from one company to another (business-to-business or b2b) and most software sold to customers (business-to-customers or b2c). There are exceptions, of course, some of them quite large.
I would not call it at the core, generally.
I mean, take Dwarf Fortress. Of course, you have CRUD on savegames, but the purpose of DF is not to create savegames. If you squint your eyes hard enough, you might also find CRUD in-game (make crafts, look at crafts, encrust crafts with gems, sell crafts). Or even any work with OOP objects. But looking at the game through that lens seems rather artificial. I might as well look at a computer through the lens of gates or RTL.
Or take something completely different, Google maps. There is certainly CRUD involved somewhere. The client reads (and displays) map data. It sends information on traffic back to Google. It also might request a route, which I guess you could model as creating an route_request object, which then gets resolved by the server (reading data on traffic in turn) and returned as a route object (which can then be updated by the server as traffic conditions change). CRUD would be involved for certain, but more like cellular respiration is involved in a human flirting with another. You are unlikely to learn much of interest for the outcome by looking at mitochondria performance (unless one of the participants has an abnormally high blood concentration of cyanide ions).
If I want to build a Google maps clone, the CRUD would be the easy part. There are protocols for that. The interesting part is all the rest -- in what format is your map data, how do you use it for routing and for displaying and so forth.
I will grant you that some B2B applications are indeed mostly CRUD, though. If you have a company internal procurement system which displays items from an external vendor, and lets a user place orders with the vendor, then that may well be just a thin layer gluing two APIs to each other. Just like sometimes mammals might primarily engage in cellular respiration and do little else.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Can I just throw in my opinion that this is a totally uninteresting and pointless case?
Seconded. This seems pointlessly stupid on both sides. The law, in this case, seems to treat parents the same whether they are mothers or fathers. A court should just decide that the parent is indeed a parent and thus their kid gets the citizenship.
If some crazy wants to use the terminology of budding to refer to their relationship to their offspring, that does not change the fact that they are a parent.
In any case where the gender of the parent actually matters, the answer is of course haha no. You get maternity leave iff you are carrying your unborn child in your uterus, however you got that organ. Likewise, if your body is capable of producing sperm, you can be ordered to provide DNA for a paternity test.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that the Trump administration displays unique characteristics which were not displayed by recent other presidents.
There is his utter inability to even understand that some people use language to communicate information about the state about that hypothetical generalization of human perception we call reality, sadly imitated by his underlings. If he is making noises which might sound to the initiated like factual claims about how many dog sleds defend Greenland, anyone who has followed him for more than two tweets will notice that he is utterly incapable of making anything which is a factual claim. Presumably, if he were to call 911 to report that the White House was on fire, the operator would simply wonder what political message he would want to transport with that.
Likewise, he seems dangerously removed from a common understanding of the upper classes how things are done, the informal rules on how society is conducted. When Biden pardoned his son, that was noteworthy, scandalous. With the Trump administration, pardons of political allies, people who bribe him by buying his shitcoin etc is not a scandal but a Tuesday.
This also makes him certainly more unpredictable. A sane-ish, elite ruler might certainly make decisions which are terrible for the country, but will likely fail in predictable ways, like some king starting a stupid war he can't win. A ruler not bound by elite expectations is much more likely to find novel and exciting failure modes, like le terreur or WW2. Sometimes out-of-the-box thinking is useful, but often the box was placed there intentionally. GWB and his cronies, for all their many faults, would not have tried to dismantle free trade or dismantle the alliance the US had build under the banner of the polite fiction of the international rule-based order.
Lying about the law to make people believe that ICE is breaking it (specifically that ICE needs to show random people warrants, ICE cannot arrest a US Citizen, ICE cannot detain an immigrant while their immigration case is being processed.)
While I am sure that a lot of the grassroot left is lying, I think their leadership is a bit better. OTOH, from the WH you will get plenty of takes on laws which are just plain wrong.
ICE can arrest an US citizen for disrupting their work illegally, sure. But detaining someone on the suspicion of them being an illegal immigrant seems to be a-ok only if the arestee is not a citizen. The government rounding up people and IDing them, effectively forcing their focus groups to carry proof of citizenship on pain of being hassled for a few hours feels very Unamerican.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
In some US states, it would be legal (if unseemly) for Trump to have sex with a 16 year old.
Sure, as long as he is not paying for the sex, and has no reason to believe that anyone else is paying her to have sex, either. Epstein's Island is Florida IIRC, and there AoC seems to be 18, so the excuse "I thought Jeff had just invited some teens who just liked to fuck older guys" will not fly.
Also that despite legal ages of consent, the de facto acknowledgement seems to be "teenagers are going to have sex before that age, so teach them about contraception, abortion, and sexual health".
AoC is the age at which you can have sex with anyone without your consent being considered violated. If multiple people of a common age have consensual sex, most legislatures recognize that this is not a problem which needs fixing, no matter if they are 11, 15, 17 or 99. Locking up two 11yo's for statuary rape of each other hardly seems very worthwhile.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The days of the Old West are gone, and they are not coming back.
Nor is shooting someone fleeing (without your property) in the back considered self-defense anywhere.
I think even in the US, only a small fraction of churches would be willing to worship with their AR-15s by their side, waiting for some interloper to make their day. On the other hand, every criminal gang would declare their headquarters a place of worship.
If you legalize individual violence, you are selecting for people willing to commit violence for their own benefit. Generally speaking, these are not the people a civilization wants to select for.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think Don Lemon should be charged with trespassing, maybe criminal mischief, etc, particularly since he remained in the church after the pastor asked him politely to leave and told him that he was contributing to the disruption of their worship service. But I don’t know if it’s appropriate for him, personally, to be charged with civil rights offenses.
There is a trope of journalists standing in front of some perfectly innocent-looking building reporting on some Breaking News while the news is happening somewhere within that building. They generally do that because they are not allowed to enter the building and get footage of the event itself.
If Lemon had been reporting from the street outside the church, reasonable people would not blame him for anything, even if he had been tipped off by anti-ICE rioters.
Entering together with the rioters makes him look like what is called an "embedded journalist". While I am sure that embedded journalists will claim that they are actually totally neutral and independent an in no way beholden to the party in whose unit they are embedded and who sponsored their kevlar west (and whose PR people possibly get to sign of any publications they might write), I am equally sure that their opponent will not be very inclined to buy that if they are captured and instead treat them as PoWs.
Lemon being a TV person, I presume that he was recording video from within the church. Here in old Europe, we believe that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now that is not an absolute thing, if your worship involves sacrificing kids to the Outer Gods, then there would be a public interest a journalist fulfills in violating your privacy of worship.
Frankly, I fail to see any public interest for life video coverage here. If schoolchild A is bullying schoolchild B, and then schoolchild C pulls out their mobile and openly lifestreams that to the internet, I am much more inclined to call C a bully than a journalist. I do not need to see the footage to know that some of the anti-ICE protesters are total assholes, a textual summary of what happened suffices for that. There is no Pulitzer to be won here.
So I am fine with letting the jury figure out if he was intentionally violating civil rights or not.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Using Paul Fussell's nomenclature, there are two very different classes near the top.
The upper middle are the ones who generally use their brains to pay for their lifestyle. Professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers and so forth.
Above them is the upper class, which as a class does not value education (especially not education in things which allows you to earn a living, like some pleb).
It seems to me that Epstein was really successful at passing as upper class, and that this was how he made money. Some of the filthily rich trusted him with their money not because he was the most brilliant quant in New York, but because they perceived him as one of them.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I do not think there is a huge overlap in guys who bang Daniel’s (big breast) and into underage girls.
I think that Stormy Daniels (and his wives) do put to rest any claim that Trump is an exclusive pedophile.
However, knowing one of his sexual tastes does not rule out the possibility of him having additional sexual tastes. If you know that someone restaurant critic is famous for his love of Italian seafood, do you conclude that he will never eat an Argentinian steak, but have seafood for three meals a day?
From an evo-psych PoV, the obviously advantageous path for a man is to fuck any fertile-looking woman his society lets him fuck. Being exclusively into teens or MILFs would really limit reproductive success, especially in monogamous societies where your marriage partner will likely start as a teen and age into a more mature woman later on.
We know that Trump was big time into running Miss contests (and allegedly walking into their dressing room). To my knowledge, he did not run any Mister contests, so it seems plausible to conclude that sexual attraction was one of the things which got him into that. Now, I am very much not into these contests, but it appears to me (starting from the label, a 'Miss' is a woman on the marriage market) that they are rather about young, nubile women than mothers with big breasts. A 16yo selected to appeal to Trump would be much closer to a Miss winner than Stormy Daniels is.
If the allegations were that he had sucked off underage boys, then I would be with you in finding that implausible, bisexuality seems to be relatively rare and there is no indication that Trump likes dicks.
And of course, there is Trump's creepy birthday message to Epstein. It could be about the both of them enjoying hunting federally protected birds on his island, but somehow I doubt it is.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
One interesting aspect would be how much we can trust the emails on Epstein's account who appear to have been sent from other people.
I think it depends on the technical specifics. If they scraped the data from his computers, then (unless the senders are the technical geeks who gpg-sign their mails) there is no proof that the sender ever wrote that. Epstein was obviously not the person who would be beyond falsifying mails for the purpose of insurance.
If they scraped them from Google (I think they did that), then the odds of him having messed with the mails sink. It might be that anything in the inbox, header and all, is still trivially writable via IMAP though. Ideally, one would want the mail server logs, but I am not sure if Google even keeps hashes of the mails they received. This still leaves the defense "that mail was sent from my mail server, but it was hacked", but with Epstein that seems a bit far-fetched, Epstein was clearly not some uberhacker.
Of course, if Epstein had messed with his inbox, one would expect that we would find things a lot more juicy in there.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Bizarrely as your phrasing is, in the context of the analogy I agree with you.
If it turns out that Pretti was shot in self-defense, then there is no obvious other party to blame.
The analogy would be of Pretti being a part of a community of very enthusiastic base jumpers who falls to his death. We can vaguely point at the rest of the community, but if you subscribe to the belief that adults should make their own decisions, the responsibility ultimately rests with the jumper. A base jumper still does not deserve to die and it is sad if they do, but there is also no injustice in them succumbing to gravity.
However, if Pretti was a clear-cut case of self-defense, it would not make good CW fodder.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Okay, I stand corrected. It seems that I overestimated how well social security info sent by employers to federal agencies is verified. (Illegals not getting any social security benefits for their payments still sucks for them, but it hardly seems fair to blame the employer for that. I still feel that if sanctuary industries are so important that even Trump does not dare touch their illegal workers, the saner approach would be some sort of legalization (perhaps a new visa category, "can work in agriculture, etc only, visa expires after six months of unemployment", just down call it brown card).)
Under the circumstances you and @hydroacetylene described, I will retract my original statement. There is still a point to be made that employers collectively benefit from a different equilibrium of the supply demand curve, but it would be false to suggest that illegals are more exploited than their legal colleagues.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
That it is a good thing that he died?
No one on the Blue side is arguing merely "there should be some negative consequences for thr officers that killed him", or "it's bad that he died", and no one on the Red side argued the opposite, so I have no idea how these questions are relevant.
@Throwaway05 on the top level post:
The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense
I would argue that people getting what they deserve (in the "traditional sense", e.g. what is their moral due) is generally something which is considered good.
"She totally deserved to go to prison for her crimes, but it is good that she got acquitted" does seem incoherent to me.
Or is this a Red hivemind thing? That @Throwaway05 can know that "many here think" he deserved to get killed, but nobody "argued" that openly?
quiet_NaN
8d ago
With no control over the media, the right can't chose the game to play, they can't reframe this on "let's just let the professionals do their job and we'll see if it was justified".
Which professionals? State police working for Tim Walz? Federal cops working for the Trump administration, who immediately slandered the victim? Do you think that Kash Patel would piss of Trump by releasing a report recommending indictment? Or that in the current climate, any politically savvy state cop would say "totally justified shooting, would have done the same" (immunity aside)?
There are certainly cases when it is important to wait for the professionals to collect the facts. Forensic analysis can solve a lot of crimes. If there was body cam footage which would exonerate the shooter (e.g. of Pretti pulling a gun), Trump would release it in a heartbeat. So we must either conclude that there is no body cam footage (faintly damning in itself), or that it would not make us update from the other videos.
Eyewitnesses are terribly unreliable compared to cameras, even if they are not actively malicious. In this case, both sides would have every incentive to agree on a story each. In the Good shooting, if there was no video evidence, we would still be disputing if her car was moving when the first shot was fired -- not so much because of lying evil leftist demonstrators but because of human nature.
What evidence, exactly, do you expect the professionals to rely on then which we have not already seen online? Personally, I would trust a trial jury slightly more to get to the bottom of the facts than someone just watching the videos, but from the looks of it we will not get a trial jury before the next presidential election.
You can trust professionals only if you can reasonably believe that they do not start by writing the conclusion of their report. In cases so politically charged as this one, the chances of that are slim, Trump has not exactly made a big show of keeping federal forces and DoJ independent.
If four years ago, some SJ guy had written here "don't worry about people who committed crimes during the BLM riots getting charged, just Trust The Professionals(TM)", most here would have dismissed this as laughable, and been proven right. I think that the FBI investigating the ICE killings is no less laughable.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The person involved deserved it - many here may think deserve applies in the traditional sense, but I think at minimum we see "deserve" here in the sense of "engaged in stupid avoidable behavior that necessitated the response or failing that represents a lifestyle that drastically increases the likelihood of a bad outcome."
Following that definition, would it be fair to say that you think a woman whose lifestyle involves walking around in the bad part of town at night in a miniskirt without male company deserves to be raped? Or that smokers deserve lung cancer, even?
I dislike politically motivated redefinitions of a word. "GWB is a Nazi[1] ([1]: where a Nazi is anyone to the right of Clinton). "Protesters deserve[2] to get shot ([2]: where deserve means to have a lifestyle which makes the consequences much more likely)". "Gas[3] the Jews ([3]: where gassing means to coordinate to cut back the influence of AIPAC)".
By design, the Motte does not do a lot of thought policing against ideas which most would find repugnant. If you want to argue that death is a fitting punishment for Pretti, you can do so openly. No need to torture the English language so that you can make a claim which sounds like that but acktually toootally means something much more harmless.
Also, I can not recall reading many people here who were arguing that people who are protesting by annoying ICE (through whistles, filming, blocking their cars etc) deserve (in the traditional sense) to be summarily executed, that it is an injustice that they are )mostly) suffered to live.
they think Trump is literally Hitler and that ICE is the Gestapo, they are seeking violence and finds it justified and at the same time don't seem to think what they are doing constitutes violence.
I think you would have to stretch the definition of violence to its breaking point to make the claim that most protesters are engaging in violence. If ten of the protesters in MN were serious about violence the way the IRA or the mafia in Sicily was, they would be able to murder ICE agents.
To judge the Pretti shooting, we do not need to milk his background for all its worth ("He was a nurse helping people" - "He had kicked out the taillight of an ICE car"). The people who shot him did not know either fact. The only case in which a jury would care about his character is if there was a dispute about what actions he was engaging in, and his character might make one version more likely than the other. (For example, if someone claimed that he fired shots at ICE, prior footage of him firing at a car with ICE people in it would be relevant in the absence of conclusive video evidence.)
From the videos, it seems to most (even here on the Motte) that there was insufficient justification for shooting him. This makes the shooting, morally if not legally (so far) manslaughter. The rest does not matter except for people trying to spin public opinion (e.g. everyone). If it turned out that he had been a serial killer or the reincarnation of Christ, it would still be manslaughter. (So far, he seems closer to the latter rather than the former, so on top of the shooting itself being unjustified, the left has been winning rather hard with this case.)
Was his behavior risky? Sure. But that is the miniskirt argument again. This case is not like a smoker getting lung cancer. We have a perpetrator who had signed up for a job which entailed scuffles with demonstrators, some of whom were armed, in a very stressful environment. If a truck driver runs a red light and kills someone, I would not give a fuck about his excuses for him being in a bad mental state (short of "someone drugged me"). You had a bad night of sleep, low blood sugar, migraine, anxiety, whatever? Too bad, by starting the ignition (or your ICE shift), you certified that you were of sound mind, so manslaughter it is.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
First They Came is a pretty good showcase of how this happens. The Enemy List of the authoritarian power abusers grows alongside their growth in power, until everyone is sitting around scared of being declared an enemy. You'll slowly lose your own freedom as your "enemies" get purged and you'll cheer it on smug and certain it could never come for you.
I was just going to link that in reply to your post. Happy 27th January.
Of course, Niemoeller is hardly the closest friend of the regime the Nazis murdered, that dubious honor likely falls to the SA leadership around Ernst Roehm, whose loyalty to the cause only bought them a quick death.
Nor is it uniquely the Nazis, power accumulated through violence has a tendency to not stay contained. The median victim of Robespierre was not an aristocrat or royalist, but (I think) a proponent of the revolution who simply was a bit more moderate, or a commoner who just got picked up by his goons when they were looking for an enemy to behead.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I find the pretense of caring about employers a sanewashing exercise
Employing illegals likely also involves financial crimes. After all, they do not have a social security number, so how are you paying social security for them? Even making sure they pay income taxes would create a paper trail most employers would likely avoid.
I would argue that the median case of illegal employment is not the woke Starbucks owner who employs an illegal out of her kindness of heart and spends as much money on him as on her legal employees.
Rather, it is some farmer or hotel owner who systematically employs illegals at wages which would not attract legal workers.
I am enough of a classical leftist to believe that freedom of contract should not be unlimited. There are cases where both parties agree to a transaction, and it is still exploitative. Sex work, selling your kidney, renting your womb, indentured servitude, or working with dangerous machines or chemicals are all fields where governments restrict the freedom of individuals to make contracts (sometimes beyond what is appropriate) with the aim to protect one party, and possibly also to protect society from the negative externalities of the transaction. (For employing illegals, these externalities certainly exist -- if an illegal working as a farmhand in Texas needs urgent medical care, the costs of that will be paid by the US society, not by him or his employer.)
I have read here the argument that tolerating illegals will create an underclass without rights which can be exploited by others, and I find it sound. Of course, the efforts of the Trump administration have not changed this situation for the better, now people being exploited in certain industries will be exempt from deportation while their exploitation continues, which gives their employers more power.
"Form a farmhand union you say? You're fired. Now watch me as I call the DHS tipline to report an illegal not employed in a Sanctuary Industry."
And Trump's abortive attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship can be best described as looking at the status of servitude and thinking "what is wrong with that is that it's not hereditary". I mean, they have not said that they have nothing against illegals as long as they know their place (working masta's fields), but from their priorities this seems to be their revealed preference. The pearl-clutching of "but the Blue cities will not enforce our immigration laws" would be a lot less pathetic if Texas enforced immigration laws consistently.
If your business can not compete with others without relying on illegal exploitation, I have zero sympathy. Sell your business, do something non-evil with your life. I am sure a lot of hard-working Americans lost their sugar cane or cotton businesses after the civil war due to increased labor costs too, and I have little sympathy for them either.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
This failure dilutes the voting power and saps the taxpayer resources from everyone else in the nation.
I do not understand your point. Are you saying that some illegal committing violent crimes in MN will harm the union by making MN less well run, which in turn will lead to them paying less federal taxes? This seems like an extremely indirect effect, and could be used to have the feds crack down on whatever crime they dislike.
I also do not think that the median violent crime changes the voting power of MN relevantly. If there is census fraud happening, that is likely not related to violent crime.
There is strong evidence, illegals aside, the last census was highly fraudulent and sent lots of extra political power to Democrats. There is also lots of evidence illegals compounded that.
NB: the obvious fix for census fraud is to bring back the 3/5th rule to elect the president by popular vote, and assign the number of Representatives based on the people who voted in the last election.
Last time I checked, ICE was in the lead 2:0 as far as the body count in Minneapolis was concerned. To the degree that the SJ left is coordinated, it certainly has not picked a strategy of grievous bodily harm. Sure, there might be outliers, but city cops deal with that every damn day -- with the additional kicker that the people they antagonize are much more likely to live a chill 20 minute drive from their families' homes.
I think that the main reason ICE agents hide their faces is not that they fear violence. Instead, the SJ left has plenty of ways to ostracize people which they do not like which are legal. ICE agents might find themselves getting kicked out of blue area bars, or their dating prospects reduced to the women who do not have SJ girlfriends they want to keep, which seems perfectly fine to me. Plus some harassment which is not fine, of course.
OTOH, having ICE agent act like masked stormtroopers is not only terrible optics, is also removes one of the few remaining checks on them. When ICE shoots someone, the Trump administration declares that shooting justified and praiseworthy within hours. ICE will not help with any state investigation because federal forces enjoy immunity. And the federal investigation will be lead by the very same administration who already decided the outcome before the victim's corpse was cold. If the shooters are never identified publicly, (which clearly was the idea of the Trump administration), then that is the end of the story, unless you get a Democrat administration in three years and Trump does not bother to shred the FBI report.
With the shooters identified on video, the loved one's at least know who fired the shots, and even if the shooters do not face criminal consequences, they can at least be punished by ostracism similar to OJ Simpson.
Part of applying violence on behalf of a democratic government is that you are willing to do so openly. If you believe that something is morally right and the will of the people, you should be willing to show your face. I am sure that the 101st Airborne was not particularly popular in the South when they escorted the Little Rock Nine to school in 1957. Yet they did not cover their faces, even as they knew that their countrymen might consider them race traitors.
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