TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
13m ago
Can we just agree Trump is now Caesar?
I don't like this comparison because Caesar had a successful military career and was overall competent in many respects. Trump is much closer to a jumped-up Hugo Chavez or Napoleon III.
Democracy just doesn’t work in non Anglo and definitely non European societies. It’s time for an emperor.
Democracy is fine, it's the electorate that's the problem. And an actual dictatorship would almost certainly be worse in the long run.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23m ago
Immigrants are actually less likely to engage in crime than natives overall. Deporting the criminal immigrants can produce a small effect, but Trump basically ran out of criminal immigrants a while ago.
The pay and hiring is likely to be concentrated in a few sectors, and normie voters have a consistently bad habit of focusing only on the negatives. They'll ignore any positive economic effect attributing it to their own "hard work", and then complain about $15 burritos or whatever.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
32m ago
The "trap" is rising expectations where families respond to having more money by blowing it on stuff like bigger houses, vacations, and fancy crap. It's a normal human reaction, but not one many people are aware that they'll likely fall into themselves, and then they become unhappy when they have to have 2 people working to maintain the same spot on the lifestyle treadmill.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
34m ago
Wages today are significantly higher than before the days when women entered the workforce.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
37m ago
Are you arguing against the main point that ICE slackened standards? If you are, this article supports my point quite explicitly with an ICE insider (who voted for Trump) saying "they lowered standards". And again, it would be very difficult for any company or agency to hire at this rapid of a clip without cutting corners.
And I don't understand the point your making on a lot of the smaller claims.
- Are you claiming financial difficulties are a non-issue for ICE agents? It makes them much more susceptible to bribery, which is why ICE normally wouldn't take them if they knew about it beforehand.
- Are you claiming that a case being dismissed with prejudice somehow vindicates Penland? The county paid out 75K to settle the issue, and then dismissing it with prejudice is a routine judicial procedure where the case is ended permanently.
- Are you claiming with the 170 / 582,000 number is the full extent of the problem? The 170 figure is a deliberately incomplete count, with reporting explicitly saying this was a (significant) undercount since the government doesn't track these incidents.
But I don't think those specific issues are particularly important relative to the overall trend.
Doing the same thing they're doing in all the other states, but it's "targeted" because "political experts say", even as they admit that the state is a hotbed for immigrant fraud.
Trump's own statements heavily implied this. It's not "political experts say". It's stuff like Trump responding to questions about Minnesota immigration enforcement with non-sequiturs like "it's a corrupt voting state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times."
Minneapolis is just the only one that had Walz staffers and government employees actively coordinating activist harassment and likely using internal government tracking data such as license plate readers to help the activists impede and harass agents.
Not a thing. Amanda Koehler had worked in D politics previously but that's very different from the Walz admin itself coordinating obstruction or leaking government surveillance data.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1hr ago
When was the last time a "small-government republican" to actually took meaningful steps to reduce the size and scope of the federal government?
Paul Ryan at least took meaningful steps towards this goal at the height of the Tea Party movement shortly after 2010. Before that the Republicans effectively boxed in Clinton and got him to reduce the deficit in the 90s.
When was the last time a president of either party took meaningful steps to reduce illegal immigration
Biden did near the end of his term after letting in 10 million. Trump 1 and Obama were both fairly decent at constraining the flow of illegals. Trump 1 tried to attack the stock of illegals but mostly failed.
Trump's only real substantive changes were tax cuts through deficit explosion (bad!) and SCOTUS nominations (good, but mostly due to McConnell).
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1hr ago
The Republican party also gained quite a lot of political capital from their stances during this time. They were even able to effectively box Bill Clinton in and get him to balance the budget somewhat. These were popular measures that helped win Republicans elections, since there were enough voters who valued these things relative to other priorities to make it so.
Again, the idea that balanced budgets are political poison akin to cooperating in a defector's game is an overwhelmingly modern phenomenon based on how the electorate moved. The problem is the modern electorate.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1hr ago
Incentivizing people not to work is in fact a bad thing. If it led to a significant spike in fertility then maybe it might be justifiable. This is not the case, however.
I'm not sure what you think Warren's book does to buttress your argument. The thrust of her book is that when people have more money from an additional worker in the family, they spend that money on things instead of saving it.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
11hr ago
This wasn't a problem for the vast majority of America's history. It's been an issue in modern times. The Left was fine up until either FDR or Great Society. The Right was fine until Trump.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
21hr ago
The money is being redirected from working parents.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
21hr ago
Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups.
Citation needed. ICE had an enormous surge of agents to hire to hit Trump's goals in an arbitrarily short amount of time. It'd be almost impossible for any agency to hit targets like that without slackening standards to some degree. And that's exactly what happened, though I wouldn't claim the Pretti shooting was responsible for this, it just generally added gas to a combustible situation.
MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states.
I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump. MN wasn't "flaunting federal law", they just weren't actively cooperating, so the George Wallace comparison doesn't work here. Part of Trump's ire against MN was for not cooperating, but it was also a target before that too, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation), while much of it was tangled in Trump's preexisting grudge with claims that he actually "won the election!" in MN, his personal hatred for Tim Walz, and the Somali welfare fraud stuff.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
21hr ago
For your first paragraph, lab-leak is a potential explanation but I've never seen it proved to a high degree of certainty over a random mutation. Also, calling the CCP part of the "Blues" is more than a stretch. There are a few tankies like Hasan Piker that idolize Mao as part of their shock-jock routine, but little beyond that. The modern CCP is basically just Fascism with Chinese Characteristics anyways (lots of nationalism, free enterprise + state capitalism, jingoism).
hostile propaganda
Obviously the both groups will try to demonize the other side, and the quality of their propaganda has a big impact. But both sides are still easily able to score a bunch of own-goals on that front, giving their opponents easy ammo or acting like ghouls. That's quite common with the Right when it comes to immigration at this point.
if the choice is between pursuing good things at the risk of "alienating the normies" or accepting bad things indefinitely with the approval of normies
These are not the two choices. Political changes will generate a baseline backlash proportional to how substantial the changes are. But on top of that you can also have partisans being extra inflammatory to flex their ingroup credentials. It's personally beneficial to them since they gain advancement within the organization, but collectively detrimental as it hurts the movement's image. Trump is basically the king of this.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
Biden's interpretation wasn't so egregious that a "reasonable" person would say it's completely unfounded based on the text alone. Usually we'd have courts decide these sorts of things, and they almost did! But then the court case got thrown out for lack of standing because, again, US immigration law is a trainwreck and badly in need of reform.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
22hr ago
So this isn't really natalist at all then, it's just punishing working parents and telling them they should be stay-at-home welfare leeches instead.
Amazing.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
The problem with housing benefits for the young is that it's part of the old "subsidize demand, restrict supply" schtick that populists love but which keeps failing over and over and over. If you subsidize demand, most of that subsidy just flows to incumbent landowners. If you actually want to help young people in that regard, you could do some federally-enforced YIMBY stuff, but there's just no appetite for that. In Trump's affordability push he explicitly said that he wouldn't try to lower people's property values, and MAGA's reaction was basically "this is fine".
Also, in Brazil housing affordability might be a real limiter, but in America most young people who want to get their own place can at least rent their own apartment. It's expensive as hell, but America is wealthy enough to mostly face-tank that.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
Would you tell the Cherokee that?
Trump and Biden are not Andrew Jackson. They're largely not ignoring court orders. They both try to reinterpret the statutes in ways that help their sides, but when the courts tell them to stop it they listen for the most part.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
23hr ago
That's all well and good... until the next election rolls around and you've alienated all the normies.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Competent at pushing forward political changes as I said. E.g. Obama had to have a certain level of competence to ram through Obamacare, even if it only ultimately survived in a somewhat mangled form. Trump has had comparatively little long-term change relative to the amount of political capital he entered with, especially in his second term.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
You're making a legalist argument for a society that has arguably abandoned it.
Society hasn't abandoned laws. Court cases end up being important or outright decisive in US immigration conflicts all the time.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Enforcing immigration policy at all is maximally inflammatory to many Blues.
Maybe to a tiny handful but it's not useful to collapse strategy down to the what the most hysterical Blues would think. The majority of normies want immigration laws "enforced" in some nebulous way, they just don't like seeing it done.
The one actually bad shoot from that scenario seemed like more of an accident than "trigger happy"
It was an accident because the ICE agent was trigger happy. To some extent it can be chalked up to bad luck but Trump did a number of things to make the bad luck more likely:
- Aggressive, rapid hiring for ICE that let jumpy agents in.
- Targeting Minnesota in the first place, which did not have an unusual number of illegals relative to its population, and which had an unfriendly state government.
- Trump heavily implying his action against Minnesota had a punitive bent rather than being specifically about immigration enforcement, energizing Blue resistance.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Mostly dumb.
- The US needs to spend less money, not more, given the deficit. If this is offset by cuts to Boomer entitlements like Social Security or Medicare, then that would be another story, but we all know that's not going to happen. The median voter wants to bankrupt the US while blaming their outgroup "it was always the other guys who were spending recklessly, my side was just spending in retaliation!"
- Baby bonuses barely move the needle in terms of fertility, e.g. Hungary has shoveled crazy amounts of cash into stuff like this and still has fairly dismal results. That's because the decision to have children is almost never about money. There are some at the margins where affordability genuinely is the deciding factor, but they're slim margins. Having kids mostly comes down to 1) are cultural gender dynamics conducive to people coupling up, and 2) is there enough social prestige and status in having kids to offset the burden that kids bring? Read this for more info.
- Flat payments like this, if they have any effect are usually dysgenic.
- Why payments for stay at home moms instead of simple baby bonuses? Having a parent take care of the childwork for the first few years is genuinely labor intensive, but after that kids mostly take care of themselves apart from occasional doctor's appointments and helicopter parent stuff. Society likes to lionize parents that stay home for some reason, but once the kid is no longer a toddler the parent will spend their time either doing helicopter parent stuff or using their "stay at home mom" status as an excuse to bum around watching Netflix, neither of which should be incentivized by the government.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
if you could describe the more effective expenditures of political capital the Right has failed to exploit
If I had a magic wand to control Republicans on immigration, I would do the following:
- Continue wielding executive authority like Stephen Miller has done.
- Pass laws instead of not passing laws. Yes, laws matter because they inform courts, which have been a central player in immigration battles. Legal nihilism is not backed up by recent history. Nobody said laws are foolproof. Absolutist legal nihilism serves primarily as a grandstanding podium to declare how much an individual loathes their outgroup with every fiber of their being -- how EVIL that person thinks they are, and how they never EVER follow any rules EVER so they must be opposed with the fury of trillion suns .
- Be as minimally inflammatory as possible when enforcing your immigration policies, while not actually changing the substance of the policies. If two actions lead to the same result, but one excites Catturd while freaking out the normies, do the other thing. Don't send in trigger-happy ICE agents to Minnesota with tweets implying it's "punishment" for other offenses.
- Hold Trump's feet to the fire when he doesn't deliver, or delivers below expectation, or he acts like an inflammatory idiot for no reason. Better yet, dump Trump entirely and get someone like Desantis who would presumably deliver on immigration without the buffoonery and baggage of corruption.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
Trump plus no bill is better than Harris plus bill.
Agree-ish, at least on the topic of immigration. Though I'd pretty strongly claim that the two were not mutually exclusive! It might have been a bit awkward for Trump when the Dems started implementing small chunks of his immigration-restriction agenda, but the Dems had already started their own crackdown on immigration by this point. The bill itself was mostly closing loopholes and getting funding for border enforcement, which I doubt would have moved public opinion much.
the fillibuster
Too convenient of an omni-excuse for purple state legislators to never have to vote on anything controversial. Obviously it should be abolished -- by either side.
If it was a serious obstacle to immigration reform at the start of Trump's term, Trump almost certainly could have obliterated it.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
1d ago
The problem with many of the immigration laws is things like they say "may" instead of "shall" so they can be turned off whenever a D executive decides not to enforce them. Then another issue crops up when states sue saying "hey well you have to enforce at least enforce the laws that say shall" and then they get thrown out of court for lack of standing.
Congress is hard to work with because there are enough crypto-democrats
Funny you say that since the 2024 bill was actually supported by many Democrats! Then Trump had an overwhelming amount of political capital to spend at the start of his term to force something even harsher through Congress, but he never even bothered trying.
The courts are also nigh-impossible to fix. There are nearly 700 judges who can issue an injunction against an executive order.
This particular issue was basically fixed in 2025.
Another round of looting the country.
Another round of justifying it by exaggerating the outgroup's policies and claiming "we're only spending in retaliation for how much spending THOSE guys did!!!"
Another round of populist-induced amnesia where everyone forgets the country was on solid financial footing a few decades ago.
Another round of everyone looking around for where the money went, while conveniently forgetting about Social Security and Medicare.
Another round of the electorate thinking the deficit is fake, and that we could trivially fix it if only we targeted [favored boogeyman] (choose one or more of foreigners, immigrants, billionaires).
It's all so tiresome.
More options
Context Copy link