Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

I'll finish it tomorrow.

A literal illegal militia (terrorist group) and the federal government doesn't care. Part of their duty on the border is to secure, that goes both ways. Dissapointed but not surprised.

It's insane and in a just world there would be a swift federal response to these terroristic exercises of power(to put it mildly). From the article it seems like the New Mexico state government has a very restrained response. That's pretty standard issue with these types of groups, typically they fizzle out and go home. Granted, no one has ever inflamed them like this before, maybe their deranged moral mission will sustain them. I would hope not.

They have crossed the Rubicon. The people crossing the border are the Hegelian other. They are not a group of people but rather a philosophical threat. They represent tiny tears at these peoples identity. We are witnessing an othering in real time. The scariest part is that we have an administration feeding this from the bottom up.

These groups in the interior are often more numerous and much better armed than the local and state LEOs that they are often pitted against. What kind of polity can hope to sustain itself when it can not enforce itself? What do you do as an LEO when you are the weaker party and the citizens won't listen to the literal rule of law?

Just a total humanitarian disaster.

A book just came out, The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide, about a pogrom a hundred years in Mexico against Chinese laborers. Also sounds up your alley.

Hatred and resentment were fomented per all the pretexts used against Mexicans and Latinos in America today, that they don't integrate, that they steal jobs, etc.

300 Celestials were struck down by roving revolutionaries in 1911, in self-defense the Mexicans claimed.

[Montmorency]

No one's paying attention, huh? Ah well.

So Rod Rosenstein. And Barr lying some more. When will we learn to stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt? I'm including myself. It's incredible credulousness.

"The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world." - This quote will be even more relevant below

And I was wrong to present this as something novel, it is indeed stale news.

In other (slightly stale?) news about dangerous collusion:

Strike, this one seems up your alley.

NYT headline: Militia in New Mexico Detains Asylum Seekers at Gunpoint
Alternative headline: Freikorps activity in the borderlands, families held hostage, escalation to pogroms feared

It turns out the Border Patrol has always worked with racist private militias. In fact, the whole premise of the Border Patrol's founding in 1924 was as a white supremacist paramilitary to rationalize the long-standing white settler violence in the southwest under auspices of government. This was the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and the height of the national Ku Klux Klan and the same year of the legislative closing of America (National Origins Act) to pretty much all Eastern European and Asian immigration on the basis of eugenic theories. Being very politically active, the Border Patrol (at first) opposed the interest of agribusinesses in the movement of Mexican labor, participated in CIA training of brutal Latin American security forces during the Cold War, and engaged in systematic campaigns of crimes against humanity throughout the 20th century along the border, where no (other) law exists. Remind one of anything?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

John Crewdson, for instance, won a Pulitzer in 1980 for a series of articles published in the New York Times, including one titled “Border Sweeps of Illegal Aliens Leave Scores of Children in Jails,” yet his 1983 book based on the series, “The Tarnished Door,” is out of print. Crewdson’s reporting on the Border Patrol and the immigration system deserves a revival, for it provides an important back-history to the horrors we are witnessing today.

Patrollers, he reported, regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as 12. Some patrollers ran their own in-house “outlaw” vigilante groups. Others maintained ties with groups like the Klan. Border Patrol agents also used the children of migrants, either as bait or as a pressure tactic to force confessions. When coming upon a family, agents usually tried to apprehend the youngest member first, with the idea that relatives would give themselves up so as not to be separated. “It may sound cruel,” one patroller said, but it often worked.

Separating migrant families was not official government policy in the years Crewdson was reporting on abuses. But left to their own devices, Border Patrol agents regularly took children from parents, threatening that they would be separated “forever” unless one of them confessed that they had entered the country illegally. Mothers especially, an agent said, “would always break.” Once a confession was extracted, children might be placed in foster care or left to languish in federal jails. Others were released into Mexico alone, far from their homes — forced to survive, according to public defenders, by “garbage-can scrounging, living on rooftops and whatever.” Ten-year-old Sylvia Alvarado, separated from her grandmother as they crossed into Texas, was kept in a small cinderblock cell for more than three months. In California, 13-year-old Julia Pérez, threatened with being arrested and denied food, broke down and told her interrogator that she was Mexican, even though she was a U.S. citizen. The Border Patrol released Pérez into Mexico with no money or way to contact her U.S. family. Such cruelties weren’t one-offs, but part of a pattern, encouraged and committed by officers up the chain of command. The violence was both gratuitous and systemic, including “stress” techniques later associated with the war in Iraq.

The practice, for instance, as recently reported, of placing migrants in extremely cold rooms — called hieleras, or “ice boxes” — goes back decades, at least to the early 1980s, with Crewdson writing that it was a common procedure. Agents reminded captives that they were subject to their will: “In this place, you have no rights.”

Some migrants, being sent back to Mexico, were handcuffed to cars and made to run alongside them to the border. Patrollers pushed “illegals off cliffs,” a patrol agent told Crewdson, “so it would look like an accident.” Officers in the patrol’s parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, traded young Mexican women they caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets, and supplied Mexican prostitutes to U.S. congressmen and judges, paying for them out of funds the service used to compensate informants. Agents also worked closely with Texas agriculturalists, delivering workers to their ranches (including to one owned by Lyndon B. Johnson when he was in the White House), then raiding the ranches just before payday and deporting the workers. “The ranchers got their crops harvested for free, the INS men got fishing and hunting privileges on the ranches, and the Mexicans got nothing,” Crewdson reported.

Something else I learned this week? The Bush-era formula of "enhanced interrogation" is actually a direct English translation and implementation of the Nazi concept of "Verschärfte Vernehmung":

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.

Also: the use of hypothermia, authorized by Bush and Rumsfeld, was initially forbidden. 'Waterboarding" was forbidden too, unlike that authorized by Bush. As time went on, historians have found that all the bureaucratic restrictions were eventually broken or abridged. Once you start torturing, it has a life of its own. The "cold bath" technique - the same as that used by Bush against al-Qahtani in Guantanamo - was, according to professor Darius Rejali of Reed College,

pioneered by a member of the French Gestapo by the pseudonym Masuy about 1943.
[...]
The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration...
[...]
Freezing prisoners to near-death, repeated beatings, long forced-standing, waterboarding, cold showers in air-conditioned rooms, stress positions [Arrest mit Verschaerfung], withholding of medicine and leaving wounded or sick prisoners alone in cells for days on end - all these have occurred at US detention camps under the command of president George W. Bush. Over a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions.
[...]
What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

Was this ever brought up on the Org, before my time, that America tried the Nazis at Nuremburg for what the Bush administration did in Iraq?

This old quote from Mein Kampf never stops giving:

At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State.

Back in Europe, Hungary's Orban has reacted to a critical labor shortage not by easing off the ethnonationalism but by taking strides back toward slave labor.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

“Budapest is almost empty of workers,” he said.
[...]
...Laszlo Parragh, the president of Hungary’s chamber of commerce, lamented last year that the country lacked “white-skinned workers with Christian roots.”
[...]
The labor shortage has grown so acute that the government recently pushed through a contentious bill to address it. Widely referred to as the slave law, it allows employers to require up to 400 hours of overtime annually from its workers, while delaying compensation for up to three years. Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party promoted the measure as good for workers, saying it would let “those who want to work more earn more.”

Maybe we can discuss another time how in America, the government and the courts view being a unionist as worse than being a fascist...


"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." - Frank Wilhoit

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

[Strike For The South]

I'll finish it tomorrow.



A book just came out, The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide, about a pogrom a hundred years in Mexico against Chinese laborers. Also sounds up your alley.

Hatred and resentment were fomented per all the pretexts used against Mexicans and Latinos in America today, that they don't integrate, that they steal jobs, etc.

300 Celestials were struck down by roving revolutionaries in 1911, in self-defense the Mexicans claimed.

Mexico has its own interesting history of enforcing its brand of Nationalism. I'll have to pick those up.

As for the rest you posted. Yea that's pretty much true. I would only say that these paramilitaries see themselves as more of a supplemental rather than a synthesis. A point that doesn't really change anything but interesting none the less. The border patrol is also 3x the size it was in 1996.

So many Texas statutes have been overturned (by the courts) that denied Migrant workers everything from medical advice to schooling for their children. Political consciousness in the Rio Grande Valley comes out of Ag workers rights. The state is always trying to pull some type of shenanigan to make these people as invisible as possible. Exploiting labor and the State of Texas, name a more iconic duo. The old let them work and snag them before pay day is the dirtiest trick in the horrible book.