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Do you not believe the woman he married is a "US citizen"? What basis do you have for that?
You seem to have strange assumptions about people's state of mind when the first thing you think of when someone engages in PR to help return a family member from a notoriously violent prison to the country they were illegally deported from is that they are "chasing a fat legal payout" instead of maybe wanting to help out their family member who had an injustice done to them. Of course her children having quoted "disabilities" is further evidence for this somehow, alright.
This attempt by the executive to pay to imprison a man in a foreign country after making an administrative error that they now refuse to admit is what actually comes across as theater and (il)legal chicanery.
Apparently it is "my brain on legalism" to demand due process and rule-following from the authority that governs everyone's lives and controls untold power. The founders would be seizing in their graves.
Did you miss the details where the wife in question filed a restraining order against him for repeatedly beating her to the point of injury? That seems to have ended in dismissal when she didn't show for the final hearing, so maybe she was just playing games.
"Brain on legalism" is a nice way to say "I think a lot of people are full of self-serving shit". Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?
I didn't miss it. And your pointing out that she didn't go through with the full process, I don't see how this is supposed to update my view. Perhaps she recanted her view of the domestic situation, perhaps she cares too much about him, perhaps it was too much hassle, perhaps it was a fake complaint in the first place. Perhaps she was threatened. Only the last would suggest more strongly to me that her concern about him is fake.
I am not routinely incensed at that because I don't see it come across my feed, which I am sure can be taken as evidence that I'm being a hypocrite, but if you'd like to point to an example I'd be more than happy to call it out if it seems like an egregious abuse/neglect of the system to me. I do get routinely incensed at whatever trampling of civil process I see exercised by those in power, of course mediated by the channels I follow.
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In defense of those you would call unprincipled hypocrites, one of the main reasons people care about protecting civil liberties is that these prevent loopholes that in the long run would allow the government to become tyrannical. People just don't find the "take guns away -> tyranny that the populace otherwise would have been able to violently oppose" story that compelling.
On the other hand, they might find the slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists -> disappear without due process anyone the administration claims is illegal/a terrorist -> disappear without due process anyone the administration thinks should have their citizenship stripped -> disappear without due process anyone who opposes the administration" dramatically more plausible, especially given the administration's comments on denaturalization. You are of course free to try to convince them otherwise on the factual point, but you can't really call them a hypocrite until you do.
Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.
The guy wasn't "disappeared", he had multiple days in court, this whole thing is about accidnetally missing a page of paperwork that would have had no material impact on the sequence of events.
By comparison, we crossed the "murder American children by drones with no due process" threshold over a decade ago.
Yeah, that would have been a decent example for anyone in this thread to bring up as an example of the non-partisan civil libertarian bonefides.
Instead of what they've actually provided.
Which is literally nothing.
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There are two more?!?!?! tears of joy
Then you recognize that we have not in fact been operating under "rule of law" previously?
Do you believe that enforcing "rule of law" here will increase its enforcement elsewhere? If so, why do you believe that?
If you do not believe that, why is one form of selective "rule of law" preferable to another?
Violations of the rule of law don't cancel each other out - us "three genuinely principled civil libertarians" don't "tap the sign.*
Law is a social construct, and as a social construct it depends on consensus and common knowledge for its function. It works if people believe it works, that "rule of law" actually functions in some reliable fashion.
Undermine that belief sufficiently, and people stop believing in it, and "rule of law" stops functioning in specifically the way that you are now observing: people stop honoring appeals to the rules, because they've seen those rules bent or broken in too many other cases and so no longer trust them.
I do not accept your appeals to the rules, because I have long since observed that my appeals to the rules are systematically ignored. I do not expect the rules to protect me when I need them to, so I have no incentive to expend effort or value to ensure the rules protect you when you need them to. I too used to make appeals to "rule of law"; I did so for many years. Now I don't do that any more, even when the law is purportedly on my side, because I understand that it is pointless.
Enforcing the law is costly. People bear the cost willingly when they believe that all bear it equally. When they no longer believe this, they generally stop being willing to bear the cost.
Hence violations not cancelling each other out.
Is "you" in reference to me, specifically, or a rhetorical device?
The claim is not that violations cancel each other out. The claim is that sufficient violations invalidate the construct, by destroying the trust necessary for it to operate. "but it's the rules, you have to follow the rules" is not a workable answer to "no one else is following the rules, why should I?"
It's a reference to the arguments you're presenting here, irrespective of any personal details or history of yours beyond these arguments in particular. You specifically are arguing in support of our existing social systems. I am pointing out that the actual history of how those social systems actually operate seems to badly undermine your arguments.
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Surely the only way to increase the enforcement of the rule of law is to... increase the enforcement of the rule of law? I very much understand and support advocating for the full rule of law in all spheres of life, but if you want to do that, you should, well, do that. Which would include advocating for it here. It's not hard.
No, this just ends up with rule of law being selectively used to constrain those who accept this argument, while not constraining actions against them. That's what I mean by "chump".
So I understand "they defected so we have to defect". That's what you have to do if you're stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma with a repeat defector.
But the question then is - how do we get out of this mutual defection spiral?
I think the usual solution among actual prisoners is referred to as a shanking.
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In so much that there are no coherent parties, then the people want to escape the defection spiral clearly and credibly signal their separation from those still interested, including the breaking of political alliances, even if it leads to their own political disempowerment as a faction.
In so much that there are coherent parties involved, the party that started the defection spiral signals credible intent via no longer pursuing a defection strategy, upto and including accepting rollback of previous gains at personal cost.
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What makes you think there is a way out?
Firstly, because nothing actually lasts forever, so I think that where there's a burden of proof, it's on people asserting that nothing can possibly change.
Secondly, because the only way to effectuate change is to first believe that it is possible. So it is usually for the best to operate on the assumption that positive change is possible.
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I certainly am. I feel politically homeless because neither party seems particularly interested in protecting civil liberties they find inconvenient. Meanwhile, the libertarian party is run by pants-on-head crazy people. The whole situation makes one want to scream into the void.
Oy! You got a license for that void?!
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Ah. My sympathies. I've been there. If anything, I think you're understating the magnitude of the problem.
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I don't agree with much of meduka's perspective, but if it's true that the wife had "filed a restraining order against him" as claimed, then it's easier to see why you might not want to take her concern about Garcia's well-being at face value.
I think it's reasonable to take this as evidence that their personal relationship maybe isn't the greatest, that they have significant problems, etc. What I don't think is reasonable is a) taking this as evidence that her concern about him is definitely performative or fake. It's quite common, even in situations where domestic abuse of some significance has occured, that the people involved still have strong feelings for each other, care about each other, and likely would not want that partner deported illegally to a violent prison. This might seem contradictory but I think it's actually more the norm than the exception, and blithely assuming that abuse victims don't care about their abusers (married with children, especially) is a bit of a miss in my opinion.
And b) denigrating a person who has been accused of this as "not elite human capital" and therefore not worth caring about. First of all, the procedure was never finished, so this is tantamount to assuming guilt before innocence in legal proceedings. Secondly, assuming he had done the violent things he had been accused of, it would make not one whit of difference as to whether his deportation was valid or not, and the government should not be able to waive correct processing because someone is sufficiently 'bad'.
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