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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I know this is whataboutism - and I’m not making this argument, just kind of stating how I feel - but, and this does suck, we killed a million Iraqi’s and Afghans and fucked our good will for decades … why do I care about this dude?

It’s an oopsie - it’s not a US citizen - it sucks but, man it just gets a big who gives a fuck from me.

Get him back eventually and give him a million bucks - I’m not saying it’s a non story but I bet minus the destination, we’ve made a few thousand similar mistakes over the last twenty years.

Or maybe it’s the opposite of TDS for me - maybe I just downplay every story because every story for 10 years has been amplified to 10.

Hard to tell.

In quality adjusted life years, this pales in comparison to the Iraq war.

Most civilians the US killed in Iraq were killed within the rules of engagement. While scholars of international law might have various ideas about the legality of invading Iraq, but from my recollection there was never a US court injunction against using bombs in Iraq.

The crimes which really enraged the public were not the median civilian killed by a bomb, but outliers like Abu Guraib. This is just a consequence of humans being scope insensitive, but also, you are who you are on your very worst day -- "but have you considered all the days of my life when I did not kill anyone" is not a very successful defense.

maybe I just downplay every story because every story for 10 years has been amplified to 10.

I feel this way whenever Trump says something truly 'out there' like wanting to make Canada the 51st state.

Okay, yeah, that's pretty crazy to outright say it. But meh, unless he started massing troops at the border you can't arse me to care when every second sentence out of his mouth for 4 years was turned into a national headline predicting immediate doom.

The dude blew up one of Iran's top generals INSIDE Iraq during his term, and we didn't actually see a war with Iran. There's no reason to keep declaring 4 alarm fires just because Trump is blowing smoke.

So yeah, I'm going to tend to assume that almost every crisis the media portrays is in fact exaggerated until proven otherwise.

It's not that you should care about this dude. It's that you (presumably, given your comment) live in a country with a legal system that primarily makes decisions based on precedent, and "this one weird trick lets the government sidestep due process requirements" is a terrifying precedent to set.

If the "administrative error" argument actually stands up in court, that is.

I agree with you, but I'll note that our entire legal system seems to be based on "one weird trick"s, all the way down. That's how they got a felony conviction against Trump for a misdemeanor whose statute of limitations had expired. Unfortunately if the system really wants to get you, they will. I don't know how to fix it, but at the very least let's keep calling it out wherever we see it.

Baby, bathwater.

Almost none of our legal system relies on that sort of chicanery. Rewarding any administration for doing more of it is a terrible idea.

terrifying precedent

I was terrified when the democrats stopped listening to the court system (ex: gun control), ignored violent protests (BLM) and engaged in unprecedented law fare against individual politicians and an entire voting block (ex: anti-BLM, J6).

This is just more of the same or better than all that.

Most of the stuff you mention is entirely orthogonal to ignoring the court system. Police getting deployed is a political decision, and the safeguard against politicians failing to stop violent protests is to vote them out of office. Law fare -- while problematic -- is explicitly using the court system.

If you have a story about someone who was imprisoned for a gun regulations charge, and the courts ordered their release and then the democrats said "haha" and kept them imprisoned indefinitely, please share it.

"Our protestors don't get charged with anything and your protestors are the recipients of an unprecedented manhunt" IS abuse of the court system. Who to charge and over charge is weaponization of the legal system.

The law fare against the NRA and Trump and so on is abuse of the court system.

The ignoring of SC rulings on gun control is abuse of the court system.

It is not the EXACT SAME abuse of the court system but demanding it be is missing the point.

Having no redress to those abuses - e.g., nobody has standing has to challenge or slow-rolling proceedings until the case is moot - is using the court system.

I'm definitely not saying that this is the first instance of the executive branch trying to circumvent due process requirements, or the worst instance. I don’t even think this is in the top 3 worst cases since the turn of the millenium (for those I'd say operation chokepoint, national security letters, and guantanamo bay, probably in that order of severity).

But each new bad precedent is in fact bad, and still the sort of thing I'd like to see less of rather than more of, and I'm sad when I see people on here who cared a lot about due process 2 years ago abandon that now.

Edit: On examination of the case, this the Trump admin defying the court, rather than the Trump admin finding a legal loophole that the court agrees with. So yeah, to your point, "executive branch does not listen to judicial branch" is obnoxious and worrying but I agree that this is less of a somethingburger than I originally thought on account of this AFAICT not actually setting any new legal precedents.