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Thread: Former British Colony in Downward Spiral of Ethnic Violence, State Security Impunity

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    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Continuing saga of the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show here in the US:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...an-jets-414883

    A digital ad released by a fundraising arm of the Trump campaign on Sept. 11 calling on people to “support our troops” uses a stock photo of Russian-made fighter jets and weapons.

    The ad, which was made by the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, features silhouettes of three soldiers walking as a fighter jet flies over them.

    Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies in Moscow, confirmed that the planes are Russian MiG-29s, and also said the soldier on the far right in the ad carries an AK-74 assault rifle.
    Kinda dovetails with this beauty:

    https://twitter.com/dave_brown24/sta...41421531045890

    The only thing missing is a scene from Mr. Big:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSF9TQ86PVs

    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 09-15-2020 at 03:41.
    High Plains Drifter

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    Hǫrðar Member Viking's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    So what are you asking for in practical terms, and to whom are you directing it? We could apply the desire for a comprehensive long-term plan on the course of human development in any number of domains, and maybe it would be right to begin demanding such, but you wouldn't really expect a civic, governmental, or business leader to have one one hand. What comes after the climate transition? What sort of relationship should civilization have to interstellar travel? I'm sure someone has thought about it, but it's not a question that should really hinder us in taking steps in the present. Find answers to academic subjects in academic literature.
    I've touched on this already. It's directed at anyone who wants change, and it is straightforward:

    • What do you want to change (abolish this law, pass this law, fire this guy etc.) - and when is the change good enough, if ever?
    • How do you want to change it? (laws, government programs, civil society etc.)
    • What is your vision for the USA in the long term in terms of ethnic relations? (e.g. 50 or 100 years now on) Cf. the example I brought up earlier regarding ethnicity and economic power.


    Bring people's ideas and visions into the public domain so that they can be debated, evaluated, and weighted. Answers to any of the points above don't have to be of more than a sentence or two before they can be seriously useful.

    Ultimately the ethics of the situation are tied to a high degree with the perceived causalities, though alarmists are put in a bind by the demonstrable utilitarian fact that immigrants from poorer to richer countries tend to get better off than they were/would have been.
    In the short term yes, in the long term: who knows. Following the logic above, the ethically correct solution would be to vacuum clean poor countries for people and put them in wealthy countries.

    Of course it's not so simple as a matter of "freedom" and choice if one group is economically and socially disadvantaged, except in the ironic aphorism of Anatole France on the equality of the law.

    [...]

    Attitudes change, but slowly. The most effective known tool to breaking these behavioral patterns, as far as I know, is enforcing the integration of schools. It stands to reason that there is a unique effect following close and extended direct exposure, in all directions, during childhood. (New York City is one of the most residentially and educationally-segregated cities in the country vis-a-vis African Americans, and my high school was overwhelmingly East Asian, so I have the relatively-unusual psychology of being more familiar with people of Asian descent as an American than with people of African descent. My sister attended a more evenly-split school in terms of the major racial categories, and I wonder if she isn't in some ways better off.)
    It's a bit unclear what you are suggesting here; schools dominated by students with minority backgrounds can be located a good distance away from schools that aren't, adding extra travel time for the affected students (increasing resentment among parents).

    One thing is to collect taxes with the purpose of redistributing wealth, quite another thing is direct intervention in people's lives

    Of course, in my theoretical understanding, the more multi-ethnic a society becomes, the more controlling (authoritarian) the state has to become to ensure everyday harmony in society (and the populace may also start to require it).

    It would tell us something, that there is some level of hypocrisy or inconsistency even among liberals. But in the United States, during the era of the formation of modern segregated municipalities, there were virtually no such liberals among the white population; aversion towards blacks was near-universal, and this aversion was given the tools of actualization by government support and subsidies to whites, the housing boom, the highway boom, and the proliferation of private automobiles. These days when there is hypocrisy, it manifests in the choice of where to move to (not so much the choice to move away). There is still a persistent tendency to stereotype a geographic concentration of black people (and to a lesser extent Hispanics) as a presumptively-"bad" area, independent of relevant attributes like infrastructure, amenities, crime level (a fraught analysis itself as we have seen), income level, or anything else that might influence the suitability of domicile.
    It could be hypocrisy, but it could also be a symptom of something potentially worse: that they don't really believe in the policies they support when push comes to shove.

    Conflict is fine and normal; that what democracy is there for. Sectarian conflict of the sort you seem to darkly hint it is not inevitable
    The argument is not that sectarian conflict is inevitable; the exact wording used was "significant probability". Presuming that you think Trump turning the US into an authoritarian state is an outcome of significant probability, I don't think you would appreciate it if someone tried to persuade you that voting for Trump is not unethical on the basis that the scenario is not inevitable.

    Instead of sanctifying xenophobia[...]
    You don't sanctify antisocial behaviour by taking it into account when planning for the future. A lock does not provide moral justification for burglary.

    That's not clear at all, though of course "bad outcome" is vague. Moreover, such an assertion - with all attendant implications - needs to be justified overwhelmingly, not the other way around.

    [...]

    Again, it's your onus to argue against that prospective causality and ethic.
    The onus is on anyone making any sort of claim; original claim or counter-claim. No claim is neutral.

    Ethnic Swedes, going by past performance in other societies, are set to retain the overwhelming share of economic, political, and cultural power even should they form less than 50% of the country at some point (itself really not likely in our lifetimes). Insofar as they do not it would be because a more equal arrangement between groups is attained, in which case the bases of serious conflict are removed.
    No, in a regular Western democracy, a vote is a vote; whether it is made by an affluent or a poor citizen.

    If the disaffected form a majority of the population, all they need is one or more political parties to represent them in order to gain political power (seems that 1,500 signatures is all it takes to get a political party on the national ballot in Sweden). From political power, any other type of power can follow.

    The biggest issue for such a scenario is heterogeneity among the immigrant population, and that that they would be required to actually vote for the relevant parties. But these issues have natural workarounds: the existence of multiple political parties, potentially catering to different demographics (e.g. Islamic, Christian and secular), and potentially occurring in combination with (or even exclusively through) takeovers of traditional Swedish parties. For the latter, you already have the example with the controversy surrounding links between Islamism and the Swedish Green Party.

    That said, it is not necessary to presume a conscious strategy to dominate the traditional political parties from the beginning. Numerical supremacy in the general population coupled with a certain percentage of the immigrant population having integrated well enough to rise to leadership positions in these parties would accomplish this which would make it easier for radical elements to ascend within the parties if the first wave of politicians were mostly idealists and individuals sympathizing with the traditional values of the parties in question.

    Furthermore, economic parity is not strictly incompatible with physical ethnic segregation, where the latter would be a boon for an ethnicity-based political landscape.

    You know the bolded is simply not true and has never been true. The existence of people is the oldest and most pervasive problem of all, doesn't mean you can go Thanos on them.
    The sentence did not introduce anything new, it was supposed to hammer the point in: you don't get discriminated against for being a Somali by Somalis in Somalia (maybe they would discriminate against you for having lived abroad, but that is a separate matter).

    Something you missed, Viking: Women are around half the population in every country. You can't segregate nations by gender (this is a surprisingly common premise in cartoons). Sexual minorities exist in every country. Religious minorities exist in every country. Lower classes exist in every country.
    The issue with this analogy is how ethnicity relates to human biology. Each of the groups you mention cannot form sustainable communities (not with today's technology, anyway) without recruitment from and/or exchange of germ cells with other communities, unlike ethnic groups, which are self-sustainable.

    Ethnic groups are thus much more likely to both occur spontaneously and to be able to successfully maintain themselves over an extended period of time. In practice, an ethnicity is in many ways the minimal self-sustainable group, which make ethnicities natural candidates for the basis to form states around (saving any debate the over differences between nations and ethnicities for later)

    But if any of these groups want to attempt to form countries of their own, I am not one to oppose it. I don't get the obsession with every kind of person living in the same society (of course, if every man and woman moved to separate countries, it would presumably be easier for the species to go extinct). For the groups above, it's mostly a question of where the land would come from, really.

    Reactionaries will always react. They've been doing the same shit as now throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, in all the same places. They learn nothing and remember everything. There's no appeasing them for long. At some point you just have to put them down, jetzt erst recht.
    How are you going to "put them down"?

    "Physically impossible" is a strange way of describing the effects of sectarian animosity. Why is "immigrants" something that triggers physical impossibility and demands relief, but racism isn't? The burden should be on the unjust to change, and it should be our superordinate goal to facilitate that change, everywhere it manifests (which, contrary to the premise of a philosophical natural state of ethnic segregation, is everywhere in some form), because such prejudice is always harmful and injurious to all our interests.
    Again you are taking the ethical perspective. Without a path to take to eliminate, or adequately minimize, ethical violations, that perspective becomes irrelevant. My position is that prejudice and antisocial behaviour are part of human nature, it is not something you can eliminate.

    Societies are made up of forces of nature - you don't ask if it is unjust for a volcano to bury a village, it just does it. The thing in dispute here is whether you can tame specific forces, or eliminate them. I am not volunteering to take part in an experiment to see if that is possible, as I live in a country that already functions rather well, and given that when such experiments go wrong, the results are often beyond the pale.

    Given that the US prides itself on being nation of immigrants, why don't you do the experiment for the rest of us. If the experiment is succesful, you are a beacon etc. etc.; if it goes wrong, at least you tried.

    First of all, why would be relevant to the question of immigration policy and obligations, and second, why would we take it for granted?
    For the former, why would it not? For the latter, short of the entire group migrating from the homelands, it doesn't seem particularly likely emigration would have a decisive impact on the situation.

    It might be that Kurds are more similar to Turks than to French people, or Tunisians to Moroccans, but there is no question that a typical Kurd or Tunisian is better off in France than in Turkey or Morocco.
    In Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran it's a matter of geopolitics; Kurds can be seen as a threat to national unity by the state and nationalists due to activism to form a Kurdish state. I am not so sure that your claim of Tunisians (or Kurds) being better off in France than Morocco is correct. There is also a distinction to be drawn between being better off as a member of an ethnic group (Arabs/Kurds) and being better off as a human (with the former being a subset of the latter). I.e. living standards (including access to healthcare) for the latter case versus e.g. ease or comfort of expressing a certain identity or cultural elements for the former case.

    Given that Kurds are an Iranian people, places like Ossetia, Pakistan and Afghanistan could be better destinations when considering this important metric, even if you ignore the geopolitical issues in Turkey. When considering the geopolitical factor and ignoring the more precise ethnic context, nearby countries (geographic proximity might in itself be beneficial) like Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt would be better suited. Maybe Israel could be mentioned for secular and other non-Muslim Kurds (geographically close it is certainly).

    For foreigners of a different complexion to live among you, be afforded the opportunity to participate in the polity and society, and not be denied resources necessary for that participation is too much to ask in your view? That's a fundamental disagreement.
    It is not clear at all what you are talking about here. We are not talking about isolated individuals immigrating, nor are we talking about an influx of aloof intellectuals that weigh political issues based on general ethical and philosophical principles. We are talking about mass-immigration, and for the average human, the cultural and religious background is crucial for the view the person has on a political issue. A democratic state tends to express in its laws and its governance concepts of justice that are prevalent in its society. If you change the population of a democratic country, you change the state.

    If you one day take 5 million people from a conservative part of Pakistan to Lithuania, a country of 3 million, the odds of a party promising Sharia laws coming to power in a later election would not be that slim. If the immigration is continuous over 100-300 years instead of a sudden explosion, you cannot assume that the probability of Sharia laws being introduced is now close to zero, for different reasons.

    How you personally relate to individuals, in terms of intimacy, is categorically different from what sorts of duties humans have to each other collectively, and what sort of harms and derogations are legitimate to apply.
    If interactions between individuals belonging to different groups of people tend to trend in a certain direction, then summing up all these interactions over all individuals will give you a non-zero sum, an abstract sum that potentially could describe most tangible effects in society.

    The 'duties' you describe would include to ensure that countries don't become dysfunctional, with the grave consequences that has.

    Bootstrapping? I'm referring to cooperation, which is possible today. Bootstrapping might be relevant to transcending a fragmentary world order, but there isn't a dichotomy holding us back from identifying and securing goals (e.g. international labor and environmental standards). In a more limited sense of bootstrapping, an actor with the will and influence to secure such programs needs to arise and realize the possible as something to subsequently build on. (Naturally the only extant candidate is the US.)
    The point is that for international co-operation to work well, there is a limit to how selfish and incompetent leaders can be before it won't, and I expect dysfunctional countries to provide such leaders at a much greater frequency than functional countries.


    Don't you feel it strange, that by this implication a subject of Suharto's New Guinea should be more resolute in the face of their challenges than some European having to accept that subject as a neighbor and citizen?
    ?

    I am arguing for an unprecedented level of international cooperation, not just intergovernmental but increasingly transpolitan, as needed for the scale and universality of 21st century problems.
    I get that.


    Well, yes. my point is that it was arrogant and complacent of the post-Cold War West to assume itself "mature" and judge the struggling states of the Second and Third Worlds as mere deviations or failures. None of us were ever safe, as we're increasingly forced to confront.
    From any of a bunch of world views that sees the world as a dynamic place, combined with basic probability theory, it follows that any democratic system would have a non-zero probability of turning into a dictatorship, and that a series of freak incidents lining up correctly would be all it takes for that to happen.

    The big question is what the greatest threats to democracy are, and, hence, which democracies are the most vulnerable.

    if we can declare elements among immigrants, or even the mere presence of immigrants, a prospective threat to our way of life and restrict them accordingly, why can't we abuse and disenfranchise those conationals of ours who are actually a clear and present danger as a demographic?
    There is nothing particularly deviating here: foreign criminals are deported after serving their sentence, domestic criminals are attempted rehabilitated and re-integrated into society. If the criminal in question has a different cultural background than the majority, re-integration will presumably not be made any easier; part of the problem might be that the criminal was never well-integrated in society in the first place.

    When the goal is to rehabilitate a radical Islamist, I'd place my bets on successful rehabilitation in a country where Islam is the majority religion over one where it is a minority religion.

    A thought: In smaller or less-complex (this may be an imprecise formulation, as what I'm really referring to is social bases of power) societies, authoritarianism is by the historical record more readily available based on - for example - the smaller number of stakeholders and institutions that need to be captured. On a global scale, assuming distributed actors of roughly comparable levels of wealth, resources, education, etc. it should be very difficult to overcome the numerous competing interests to establish authoritarianism.
    Russian and China are very big and complex countries.
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    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Bring people's ideas and visions into the public domain so that they can be debated, evaluated, and weighted. Answers to any of the points above don't have to be of more than a sentence or two before they can be seriously useful.
    This was basically the way it was 20-25 years ago here in the US. But today......yeesh Social media has turned the world into a place where mis-information runs rampant, and the latest conspiracy theory drowns out intelligent conversation. It's why I believe social media is one of the worst ideas humans have come up with in a very long time (and concurrently, one of the better).

    No, in a regular Western democracy, a vote is a vote; whether it is made by an affluent or a poor citizen.
    Might be true in a hypothetical sense, but the screwed up voting process here in the US is what allowed Fearless Leader to claim the office in 2016. He lost the popular vote by a considerable amount, but 'won' the electoral vote. And that's not even considering all the gerry-mandering of voting districts that occur.....
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    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    One of the better critiques of Fox News I've seen in awhile:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/...r-hoax/616309/

    Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. (You are under attack; they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.

    Language, too, is a norm. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another—how we’re failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. In the America of 2020, socialism could suggest “Sweden-style social safety net” or “looming threat to liberty.” Journalist could suggest “a person whose job is to report the news of the day” or “enemy of the people.” Cancel culture could mean … actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion. But it exacerbated it, and exploited it. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model.
    Referring to the RNC:

    The speeches, yes, were distractions from the ground truths of our crises. But they also attempted another kind of control: They reveled in the power TV has to shape—and to limit—viewers’ empathies. Instead of describing the America that is, the Republican Party described the America that is manufactured, every day, on Fox. It used its platform to refight some of Fox’s fondest micro-wars. It told its viewers not to focus on the people who have died, or the many more who might, but instead to focus on themselves: Your freedom. Your future. Your America. Watching it all, I felt the familiar fog that descends when something is lost in translation, when someone talks about something you share—in this case, a country—using details that are unrecognizable. It was the same kind of haze that came when Trump, newly sworn in as president, coined American carnage to describe a nation where violent crime had been declining for decades. Do we live in the same America? the broken words whisper. Maybe not, the same words reply.
    On Trump's relationship with Fox News:

    The leader and the news network speak, and enforce, the same language. Trump regularly lifts his tweets directly from Fox’s banners and banter. Last year, Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz counted the times the president tweeted something in direct response to a Fox News or Fox Business program. Gertz found 657 such instances—in 2019 alone. Fox hosts and producers use that power to manipulate the president. “People think he’s calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say,” a former producer on the show tells Stelter. “Hell no. It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.”
    On Fox News viewership:

    A 2019 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute tracked the differences between “Fox News Republicans” and other Republicans who said Fox was not their primary news source. Of the Fox loyalists, 55 percent said that there was nothing the president could do to lose their approval. That figure helps to explain how Fox can serve the state even as it operates independently. The “home team” is a powerful thing. Peter Pomerantsev, the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, points out how cannily Fox employs the metaphor of the family in its packaging of its opinion shows: Bill O’Reilly, Pomerantsev told me, was for a long time the network’s cynical uncle. Tucker Carlson is the quirky cousin. Sean Hannity, meanwhile, is “the father coming home, ranting about this horrible world where the white man felt disenfranchised.” Familiarity, literally—this is the “strict father” model of political discourse, rendered as infotainment. The upshot, Pomerantsev noted, is a constructed world that is above all “very, very coherent.”
    “No cable operator has ever seriously flirted with dropping Fox to save money,” Stelter notes, “because, among other reasons, they believe the right-wing backlash would cripple their business.” The president has his base; so does the network. That confers another kind of impunity. Fox can say whatever it wants with little consequence, save for, perhaps, higher ratings. One of the most sobering takeaways of Stelter’s reporting is that Fox foments fear and loathing not really because of a Big Brotherly impulse, but because the network has recognized that fear and loathing, as goods, are extremely marketable. In 2020, Stelter notes, Fox “is on a path to $2 billion in profits.”
    And yet: You are under attack, Carlson tells his viewers, with his signature furrow of the brow. They are coming for you, he insists. Carlson does what he wants, and says what he wants, because he can. And he suggests that his audience, through the transitive powers of television, can enjoy a similar freedom from accountability.
    When cruelty is refigured as “free speech,” and when expertise becomes condescension—and when compassion is weakness and facts are “claims” and incuriosity is liberty and climate change is a con and a plague is a hoax—the new lexicon leaps off the screen. It implicates everyone, whether they speak the language or not.
    High Plains Drifter

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    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Grand jury decides not to charge Louisville officers with killing Breonna Taylor, new round of protests have begun.

    A former police officer was indicted only on first-degree wanton endangerment charges for his actions on the night Breonna Taylor was killed by police.

    Two other officers who also fired shots during the botched March raid were not indicted, meaning no officer was charged with killing the 26-year-old Black emergency room technician and aspiring nurse.
    The long-awaited grand jury decisions come more than six months after Taylor was shot to death after Louisville police officers broke down the door to her apartment while executing a late-night warrant in a narcotics investigation on March 13.

    The charges against the former detective, Brett Hankison, were immediately criticized as insufficient by demonstrators and activists.

    The counts pertain to Hankison allegedly firing blindly through a door and window, with bullets entering an adjacent apartment where a pregnant woman, a man and a child were home, according to the state attorney general.

    Sgt. John Mattingly and Det. Myles Cosgrove, the two other officers, will face no charges following months of demonstrations and unrest over the killing. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron on Wednesday said the officers were "justified in their use of force" because Taylor's boyfriend fired at officers first. An FBI ballistics analysis showed Cosgrove fired the shot that killed Taylor, he said.
    Activists had demanded more serious felony counts, and the arrests of the three officers who fired shots the night Taylor was killed.
    The anger is completely justified.

    No justice, no peace.
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    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    No surprise here. The state of emergency being declared beforehand said it all as to the expected outcome....
    High Plains Drifter

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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Not to put too fine a point on the prior character of conservatives, but the effect of Fox News is to turn Humans into Gremlins. The right-wing media ecosystem is (or should be) one of the great challenges to liberal free speech orthodoxy. China wishes it could have a Fox News. It is to the USSR's credit that they were incapable of coming up with it first despite being fellow travelers in their aims. Sure it takes two to tango, but reinforcement schedules have an observable output when established; they can be disestablished.

    Whither Radio Rwanda?



    Quote Originally Posted by Viking View Post
    I've touched on this already. It's directed at anyone who wants change, and it is straightforward:

    What do you want to change (abolish this law, pass this law, fire this guy etc.) - and when is the change good enough, if ever?
    How do you want to change it? (laws, government programs, civil society etc.)
    What is your vision for the USA in the long term in terms of ethnic relations? (e.g. 50 or 100 years now on) Cf. the example I brought up earlier regarding ethnicity and economic power.


    Bring people's ideas and visions into the public domain so that they can be debated, evaluated, and weighted. Answers to any of the points above don't have to be of more than a sentence or two before they can be seriously useful.
    On the occasion of the Swiss decisively rejecting a referendum on terminating Schengen et al - the followup to the quota referendum that narrowly passed back in 2014, as discussed on the Org - I thought I'd settle the issue.

    What do you have in mind beyond what's going on now in the very active public discourse? If it all comes down to long-term visions of policy, I've already said that while it's a reasonable expectation to extend to any sphere of politics, it's unreasonable as a special demand with which to encumber or disprivilege a particular position.

    (In terms of 'end' goals, those are pretty easy to conceptualize. The whole planet should be roughly equal in wealth and along life indicators and all jurisdictional barriers to coexistence should collapse. Whether there would be very much or very little migration under such a regime does not concern me. A more complicated question is if sectional difference will need to have vanished (been "unlearned"), will be transformed into something novel, or will achieve some kind of managed equilibrium. Planning out the course of the entire human civilization is actually quite difficult and hubristic; we'll have to take it step by step over extended periods of time. As for the USA in the short term, we should make it considerably easier, legally and administratively, for people to come to America and stay with threat of personal jeopardy, for months or years. Much of the border security accumulation since the 1990s should be abolished. Medium-term, a path to a North American Schengen is desirable, as a stepping stone to future political integration.)


    More responsive toward your circumstances, in some abstract stable political environment it could in theory be available to hash out compromises between "no movement" and "unrestricted movement," but we're on the clock here. In identifying what the issues or potential problems are, let's be clear - currently, lawful immigration to most of Europe from outside the EU is very difficult. In fact, as authoritarian as the US immigration regime is most of the world has unexamined immigration policies that would be the envy of Stephen Miller. Yet millions continue to migrate to rich countries according to rules or not, some from less-developed neighbors for work, temporary or otherwise, others because their homes and livelihoods have vanished and they want to escape their region. These real-world pressures will only escalate exponentially over time, and changes to policy should take that into account. Almost all policy domains are implicated as to the management of migration into a state and around the international community broadly: regulation, technology, investment...

    Not even proponents of unrestricted movement want it to come in the form of chaotic, desperate streams of refugees, so the first external policy set should be to mitigate the causes of such. If you don't want mass immigration, cut off the reasons why people would want to emigrate! That takes proactive investment to increase living standards and stability and opportunity abroad, as well as to mitigate the very predictable effects of climate disruption on large, relatively-poor, populations in tropical regions. If countries with means fumble that up on the road to plutocratic self-destruction it's on us, not them.

    Internally, let's always be mindful of the sources of difficulties. It is not that there can't possibly be problems attendant to reterritorialization and ethnogenesis (i.e. hybridization of culture and population), but the form these problems take is almost always that of coercive bigots enforcing their beliefs on others. So to say that the introduction of heterogeneity is itself the problem, that the physical presence of immigrants is the problem, is to totally miss the mark. It is a misapplication of consideration, a mislocation of the site of the existential crisis, an illegitimate offloading of perceived risk, to blame those who suffer the burdens that are in themselves unjust. It is frankly monstrous to propose to sacrifice populations for (idealized) expedience rather than undertaking to challenge the disruptors of coexistence themselves.

    It's wrong for the same reasons why it's wrong to assert that rape is a problem associated with the existence of women, and that removing women is necessary to preclude rape. I hope most of us understand that education and socioeconomic egalitarianism are what reduce and prevent rape, while providing something of mutual benefit! Yet there are those who go in the opposite direction, who describe contemporary masculine rage and alienation as a key social problem on the margins and one that could and should be assuaged by literally assigning females to young males (see: incel). Such means to stability are as depraved and misguided as they are inefficient.

    Really, the very root of the disagreement is as much metaphysical as it is political, and in those terms - of course also in terms of practical guidance for policy - there is not a set of ideas to debate but a manifestation of politics to oppose.

    I have heard people say that America is 90% poor, 10% rich, but we need to keep it that way because government services and redistribution lead to Soviet Communism. There are conservatives who believe - or claim to believe - that Biden's policy platform on issues like a public health insurance option present such a slippery slope toward tyranny that it would be preferable to vote for fascist demagogue Donald Trump. Frankly what's the psychological or methodological distinction between the above and the fear that the formerly colonized will eventually exert colonial brutality onto Europeans if they are allowed to exist in Europe, or whatever? I consider all of the above a mindless wickedness in its substance.

    The bottom line is, I - and many others - categorically reject the reflexive impulse to impose burdens and harms onto marginalized populations. An exigent or compelling evidentiary case that deprioritizing human rights for securing some hormetically-oriented prospective (and this itself should be rigorously specified) greater good is the only threshold to compounding marginalization, to afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable. And of course any such project is inherently suspect for its recorded products across history (e.g. the Lifeboat Ethics of disgraced racist Garret Hardin in the 1960s). Stability must be humane, and for everything it must really be stable; pluralism-panic struggles to justify itself by those criteria. But given all that, the uncomplicated fear that, maybe someday, the hegemonic groups will become the marginalized, is invalid. That's literally Nazi logic (also, Camp of the Saints), or whatever the hell this freak is talking about.

    In the night of ecological finitude on a fenced dark pasture in the human zoo, the Leviathan transforms itself into a silent hunter-predator: the Anti-Leviathan – a towering figure conceived of the accumulation of excess prosperity-sluggishness, harmlessness, naivety and supersatiety. Its historical duty is to temporarily, locally and discretely suspend the social contract and revoke the guarantee to life.
    The tropes of auto-preservation, allo-immolation,and appeasement just tend to align in rationale across manifestations, and they've been discredited every time to my mind. What more is there to debate?


    In the short term yes, in the long term: who knows. Following the logic above, the ethically correct solution would be to vacuum clean poor countries for people and put them in wealthy countries.
    Most people naturally prefer to remain in their native areas. The practical reality is, either those with means pay for them to flourish there, or here. (Or we could have unimaginable widespread suffering and civilizational collapse and all that, but it isn't something we can consign ourselves to.)

    It's a bit unclear what you are suggesting here; schools dominated by students with minority backgrounds can be located a good distance away from schools that aren't, adding extra travel time for the affected students (increasing resentment among parents).
    In the past, white parents and local governments have literally had their kids travel further afield or closed down schools entirely to preempt integration. Racism isn't a function of convenience.

    One thing is to collect taxes with the purpose of redistributing wealth, quite another thing is direct intervention in people's lives
    I mean, our lives are shaped by the intervention or non-intervention of government in all sorts of ways. How does school assignment work in Norway?

    It could be hypocrisy, but it could also be a symptom of something potentially worse: that they don't really believe in the policies they support when push comes to shove.
    Or, the vast majority of people in general are not machines with rigorously-consistent ideologies. The framing of human nature here influences the interpretation.

    That said, it is not necessary to presume a conscious strategy to dominate the traditional political parties from the beginning. Numerical supremacy in the general population coupled with a certain percentage of the immigrant population having integrated well enough to rise to leadership positions in these parties would accomplish this which would make it easier for radical elements to ascend within the parties if the first wave of politicians were mostly idealists and individuals sympathizing with the traditional values of the parties in question.
    When has this happened? As far as I know when their ethnicity is not made salient by the wider society, immigrants vote according to individual ideologies. Otherwise, they seek safe harbor among those parties that are perceived to be least hostile to their group interests (e.g. existence).

    If the complaint is on the other hand that the more immigrants there are, the more they will participate politically, is normal and reasonable. Newer groups in the population should also be expected to increase their rate of participation in politics as they integrate (I am given to understand participation and turnout tends to be consistently depressed even among those eligible, across countries). As you say, everyone's vote (in theory) counts the same. Fears of sectarian conflict where one group has a single perceived group interest that it is, as I said, not a valid anxiety to act upon to others' detriment. In all periods of American history, foresighted individuals have pointed out the increasing fascistic inclinations among significant elements of the population. These reached moments of greatest salience with the Goldwater campaign and Bircher movement in the 1960s, the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, and the Gingrich/Norquist/Buchanan ascendance of the 90s. On the basis of these premonitions and observations would it have been appropriate for Democrats under Clinton to attempt to disenfranchise and suppress conservatives? Decidedly not (though on the other hand taking measures to prevent them from consolidating power toward minority rule would have been helpful). And we know and have always known that the existence of the far-right and of oligarchs is a more real existential threat than the existence of ethnic immigrants has ever been.

    Furthermore, economic parity is not strictly incompatible with physical ethnic segregation, where the latter would be a boon for an ethnicity-based political landscape.
    Sure, "separate but equal" is not theoretically unachievable, in the same way that there is a clear pathway to full communism...

    Ethnic groups are thus much more likely to both occur spontaneously and to be able to successfully maintain themselves over an extended period of time. In practice, an ethnicity is in many ways the minimal self-sustainable group, which make ethnicities natural candidates for the basis to form states around (saving any debate the over differences between nations and ethnicities for later)
    The point here is that social problems seem recurrent, but the common denominator is reactionaries. That ethnicity is more fluid than sex or gender doesn't seem relevant to separatism; if anything it undermines it. At any rate, class and religion and other such social markers can also be fluid in their context.

    How are you going to "put them down"?
    When they form minority factions, strengthening democracy and majoritarianism is the most productive and fair approach. When, as in a case like Hungary evidently, the reactionaries form a majority and oppress the minorities, it's a trickier proposition. From an internal perspective, dissidents should keep the flame of dissent lit to the extent permitted by concerns of personal safety. Externally, opposed entities should try to incentivize and influence the polity away from their nostrums. In the most extreme case this could take the form of military intervention, but in practice the maximal tactic is going to be economic sanctions.

    If the US were like Hungary in the distribution of popular sentiment we would be pretty fucked and the world with us. As it is significant mass violence in the medium-term is not out of the question. Not that much of the world can easily escape mass violence this century for a variety of reasons, but I'm referring specifically to conflict over national character and sectarian power.

    My position is that prejudice and antisocial behaviour are part of human nature, it is not something you can eliminate.
    You don't have to eliminate it, but if the choice is between acting to contain it and sacrificing the actual targets of it - see above.

    This isn't new ground for humanity. We have many examples of coexistence.

    I am not volunteering to take part in an experiment to see if that is possible, as I live in a country that already functions rather well, and given that when such experiments go wrong, the results are often beyond the pale.
    Aside from all the debates about history and causality per se - and my position is that the experiment you propose has always ended in horror - I have come to doubt that your lament can be your prerogative. Cf. metaphysical disagreement.

    Given that the US prides itself on being nation of immigrants, why don't you do the experiment for the rest of us. If the experiment is succesful, you are a beacon etc. etc.; if it goes wrong, at least you tried.
    We're doing better than a lot of countries in this regard, which may be why almost every developed country has chosen to liberalize immigration in some aspect. Even when qualifications and procedures are strict, such as Australia, you still have most of the country coming to be of recent immigrant stock.

    At any rate, there is no scope or time for iterative "experiments" in our human existence. It would be silly of a Hayekian conservative, for example, to have demanded that select countries implement social welfare states before they be adopted by other countries. It was appropriate for as many countries as possible to converge on social democracy and to "experiment" with the particulars individually.

    For the former, why would it not? For the latter, short of the entire group migrating from the homelands, it doesn't seem particularly likely emigration would have a decisive impact on the situation.
    Given that Kurds are an Iranian people, places like Ossetia, Pakistan and Afghanistan could be better destinations when considering this important metric, even if you ignore the geopolitical issues in Turkey. When considering the geopolitical factor and ignoring the more precise ethnic context, nearby countries (geographic proximity might in itself be beneficial) like Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt would be better suited. Maybe Israel could be mentioned for secular and other non-Muslim Kurds (geographically close it is certainly).
    I don't understand what you're referring to. Are you speaking from the assumption that immigration should be expected to benefit ethnic groups qua ethnic groups? When I speak of immigrant groups I'm not thinking of them as a subset of the global population of some supercategory, and I doubt it is common to do so. I'm thinking of them as a group in the context of the host society.

    I disagree that living standards are a function of some cladistically-designated ethnic similarity quotient, and don't see how this is backed up by any experience. Are you referring to a separate issue of recent immigrants facing loneliness and other issues due to culture shock and communication barriers? That can be addressed with specific policy, and is moreover cured by time.

    In Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran it's a matter of geopolitics;
    Ethnic similarity (certainly as framed from the outside) has never been a barrier to geopolitics or other conflict, as I have often striven to underline.

    Next you'll be telling me that Palestinians are better off living in Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt than in Germany or the US, by your theory - yet we know that objectively this is not the case.

    If you change the population of a democratic country, you change the state.
    In itself this is not a cause for complaint.

    If you one day take 5 million people from a conservative part of Pakistan to Lithuania, a country of 3 million, the odds of a party promising Sharia laws coming to power in a later election would not be that slim. If the immigration is continuous over 100-300 years instead of a sudden explosion, you cannot assume that the probability of Sharia laws being introduced is now close to zero, for different reasons.
    Why is that fear a sufficient basis for action in your view? By the same token the United States should have become a client of the papacy by now, as many Anglo Protestants warned in the 1800s (regarding the immigration of Irish, Italians, and eventually Latin Americans). We can say, no, back then those were virulent racists who sought to aggrandize their own sectional power at others' expense.

    The alternative vision is that in the far future what is now Norway will harbor a syncretic culture or cultures that do not yet exist, and the society will have advanced toward mutual material and psychological benefit. That's also a probability, and some appeal to it as a reason to really adopt a policy of rapidly 'dumping' millions of people from poor countries into rich ones right away. (Others who take this view somehow go in the opposite direction in their motivation, arguing that Western societies are so good at assimilating immigrants that if we turbocharge mass immigration then libertarian capitalist Christianity will come to dominate the globe in short order...)

    The 'duties' you describe would include to ensure that countries don't become dysfunctional, with the grave consequences that has.
    Again, who are the actors and what are the tendencies? These aren't pure abstractions. The dysfunctional actors manifest their dysfunction in other domains.

    Here we have an example of Putinist reprisal in the form of quietly-escalating ethnic cleansing against Crimean Tatars, who had just recovered generations after their Stalinist deportation.
    https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blog...n-persecution/

    By your theory there very existence is the core problem, rather than the novel depredations of an irredentist fascist dictator and his supporters.

    There is nothing particularly deviating here: foreign criminals are deported after serving their sentence, domestic criminals are attempted rehabilitated and re-integrated into society. If the criminal in question has a different cultural background than the majority, re-integration will presumably not be made any easier; part of the problem might be that the criminal was never well-integrated in society in the first place.
    You misunderstand, in this context I've consistently been referring to recrudescent elements of the far-right. To me the question of how to coexist with coethnics when irreconcilable belief systems generate dissonance is far more relevant and important than the abuse of ethnic pluralism (which, as it happens, is almost universally derived from certain belief sets).

    If anything, I suspect intra-ethnic cultural or ideological dissimilarities and contradictions tend to exceed inter-ethnic ones.

    When the goal is to rehabilitate a radical Islamist, I'd place my bets on successful rehabilitation in a country where Islam is the majority religion over one where it is a minority religion.
    As a standalone proposition I don't think this is quite clear. Radical Islamists are more common, even proportionally, in majority-Muslim societies than otherwise.

    Russian and China are very big and complex countries.
    Institutionally and socially speaking, perhaps not. They're very top-heavy countries with a history of centralized government and extreme stratification many times older than liberal democracy. While they have been prone to collapse and fragmentation, it was and is probably more straightforward for emperors and dictators to exist in Russia and China than in, for example, 20th century Germany. What's relevant is how distributed among individual and group actors are wealth, influence on collective decision-making, access to state institutions, and so on. How many veto points exist. Something something selectorate. Russia and China have had a lot of people (i.e. large populations), but their influence on social structures and arrangements is more limited in the context of my theory. Compared to some smaller countries, fewer people control or mediate between many others. This all ties in, by the way, into some leftist ideas of why hierarchy is damaging and self-destabilizing. All social structures appear to decay over time into capture by personal or factional interests unless renewed by some active process, but consolidated power both speeds up this decay and hinders rehabilitation. You even see this narrative playing out in the falls of both the Roman Republic and Empire.

    We'll see where they're headed, but some do argue that China has already become too socially complex for Xi's totalitarian model to offer long-term viability.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  8. #248
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Pretty good read on some of the internal workings of a militia group, in this case, the Oath Keepers:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...il-war/616473/

    His comments became more inflammatory as he began to warn about antifa and protesters. “They are insurrectionists, and we have to suppress that insurrection,” he said. “Eventually they’re going to be using IEDs.”

    “Us old vets and younger ones are going to end up having to kill these young kids,” he concluded. “And they’re going to die believing they were fighting Nazis.”

    Afterward, Rhodes traveled through Kentucky, meeting Oath Keepers at their homes, where the conversations stretched for hours, always winding around the same question—what if?—and always coming back to the election. A man named James, a new member, told me people would accept the result—“as long as we believe the vote was fair. And if both sides can’t come to an agreement, then you’re going to have a conflict.”
    And folks thought the first presidential debate was ugly...these people make that look like Sunday school shenanigans....
    High Plains Drifter

  9. #249

    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    Pretty good read on some of the internal workings of a militia group, in this case, the Oath Keepers:
    https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-throu...e-ba1e4b54c5fc

    I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

    This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

    I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks.

    Today I’m like, “Did we live like this?” But we did. I mean, I did. Was I a rich Colombo fuckboi while poorer people died, especially minorities? Well, yes. I wrote about it, but who cares.

    The real question is, who are you? I mean, you’re reading this. You have the leisure to ponder American collapse like it’s even a question. The people really experiencing it already know.

    As someone who’s already experienced societal breakdown, here’s the truth: America has already collapsed. What you’re feeling is exactly how it feels. It’s Saturday and you’re thinking about food while the world is on fire. This is normal. This is life during collapse.Collapse does not mean you’re personally dying right now. It means y’all are dying right now. Death is sometimes close, sometimes far away, but always there. I used to judge those herds of gazelle when the lion eats one of them alive and everyone keeps going — but no, humans are just the same. That’s the real meaning of herd immunity. We’re fundamentally immune to giving a shit.

    It honestly becomes mundane (for the privileged). As Colombo kids we used to go out, worry about money, fall in love — life went on. We’d pop the trunk for a bomb check. Turn off our lights for the air raids. I’m not saying that we were untouched. My friend’s dad was killed, suddenly, by a landmine. RIP Uncle Nihal. I know people who were beaten, arrested, and went into exile. But that’s not what my photostream looks like. It was mostly food and parties and normal stuff for a dumb twentysomething.

    If you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like “this is it,” I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says “things are officially bad.” There’s no launch party for decay. It’s just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol.

    Perhaps you’re waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re fighting the virus or fascism all the time, but it’s not like that. Life is not a movie, and if it were, you’re certainly not the star. You’re just an extra. If something good or bad happens to you it’ll be random and no one will care. If you’re unlucky you’re a statistic. If you’re lucky, no one notices you at all. Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.

    One day, I was at work when someone left a bomb at the NOLIMIT clothing store. It exploded, killing 17 people. When these types of traumatic events take place, no two people experience the same thing. For me, it was seeing the phone lines getting clogged for an hour. For my wife, it was feeling the explosion a half-kilometer from her house. But for the families of the 17 victims, this was the end. And their grief goes on.

    As you can see, this is not a uniform experience of chaos. For some people it destroys their bodies, others their hearts, but for most people it’s just a low-level hum at the back of their minds. Today I assume you went to work. Bad news was everywhere, clogging up your social media, your conversations. Maybe it struck close to you. I’m sorry. Somewhere in your country, a thousand people died. I’m sorry for each of them. A thousand families are grieving tonight. A thousand more join them every day. The pain doesn’t go away, it just becomes a furniture of bones, in a thousand homes.

    But that’s exactly how collapse feels. This is how I felt. This is how millions of people have felt, including many immigrants in your midst. We’re trying to tell you as loud as we can. You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around. In the last three months America has lost more people than Sri Lanka lost in 30 years of civil war. If this isn’t collapse, then the word has no meaning. You probably still think of Sri Lanka as a shithole, though the war ended over a decade ago and we’re (relatively) fine. Then what does that make you?

    America has fallen. You need to look up, at the people you’re used to looking down on. We’re trying to tell you something. I have lived through collapse and you’re already there. Until you understand this, you only have further to fall.
    Welcome to the Shithole America. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.
    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


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  10. #250
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    A bit over the top, but there certainly was a lot of truth to it
    High Plains Drifter

  11. #251
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Hooahguy might appreciate this article, or maybe you already know all of this. Even after reading it (twice), my head still spins over the convoluted way we do democracy here in the US:

    https://www.vox.com/21424582/filibus...-abolish-trump

    If Joe Biden wins the White House, and Democrats take back the Senate, there is one decision that will loom over every other. It is a question that dominated no debates and received only glancing discussion across the campaign, and yet it is the master choice that will either unlock their agenda or ensure they fail to deliver on their promises.

    That decision? Whether the requirement for passing a bill through the Senate should be 60 votes or 51 votes. Whether, in other words, to eliminate the modern filibuster, and make governance possible again.

    Virtually everything Democrats have sworn to do — honoring John Lewis’s legacy by strengthening the right to vote, preserving the climate for future generations by decarbonizing America, ensuring no gun is sold without a background check, raising the minimum wage, implementing universal pre-K, ending dark money in politics, guaranteeing paid family leave, offering statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, reinvigorating unions, passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — hinges on this question.

    If Democrats decide — and it is crucial to say that it would be a decision, a choice — to leave the 60-vote threshold in place, that entire agenda, and far more beyond it, is dead. All those primary debates, all those grand ideas on Joe Biden’s “vision” page, all those mailers and press releases and speeches and vows, will be revealed as promises they never meant to keep. All it takes to eliminate the filibuster, and to unlock that agenda, is 51 votes. All it takes to annihilate that agenda’s barest hope of passage is to do nothing. And doing nothing is always the easiest choice for politicians to make.
    The arguments for and against eliminating the filibuster:

    The founders envisioned a system of checks and balances, of pluralistic competition and deliberative government. That system had, and has, nothing to do with the filibuster. If anything, it is imbalanced by the filibuster: When Congress can’t pass laws, pressure mounts for the president to stretch executive authorities, as happened after the DREAM Act failed despite receiving 59 votes in the Senate, pushing President Obama to do through executive action what the filibuster prevented Congress from doing through legislation. Similarly, the Supreme Court grows in power as Congress gridlocks, in part because it becomes impossible for Congress to alter provisions of bills that fall to constitutional challenge, and in part because the paralysis of the legislative branch pushes movements to try and achieve their goals through the courts.

    This is the historical truth of the filibuster: It is a weapon wielded by the racial majority against racial minorities, cloaked in the rhetoric of protecting minority rights.

    [...] the US Senate is “the most powerful force for structural racism in American life.” The Senate grants unusual power to small states, and small states tend to be whiter than big states. In the New York Times, David Leonhardt calculated how many senators each racial group gets per million people. White Americans — the racial majority — get 0.35 senators per million people; Black Americans have 0.26; Asian Americans are right alongside them, with 0.25; and Hispanics are last in senatorial power and representation, with 0.19.

    It is a woeful abuse of history to claim the filibuster protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. As a weapon of the status quo, the filibuster is wielded by those who’ve already secured political representation and power, and so is often a tool the powerful use to protect their existing privileges. That the filibuster’s defenders cloak themselves in the glittering language of minority rights even as they’re using the filibuster to deny minorities rights is one of America’s more grotesque rhetorical inversions.

    At the core of the debate over the filibuster, then, is this simple truth: Members of both parties prefer the problems of paralysis to those of governance. They are more eager to block the other party from governing than they are committed to governing themselves. Or, to put it even more directly, given the choice between keeping the promises they made to the American people and sabotaging their opponents’ ability to keep their promises, they choose the latter.
    What is possible vs what is:

    What we are facing, then, is a trade-off: Should we prefer a system in which parties can, occasionally, govern, or a system in which they can’t?

    Answering this question requires ridding ourselves of the cramped psychology of the Senate and prizing, instead, the vantage point of the voter. How, from a voter’s perspective, is American politics supposed to work? In theory, something like this: Parties propose agendas during elections. Voters choose the agenda — and thus the party — they like most. The newly elected party passes a substantial portion of their agenda into law. Voters judge the results and choose whether to return that party to power in the next election or give the opposition a turn at the wheel.

    This is, of course, not how American politics works. Even in the absence of the filibuster, the American political system is thick with veto points and clashing institutions. It is also deeply undemocratic, with Republicans currently holding the White House and Senate despite winning fewer votes in the relevant elections. And then, layered atop all that, is the filibuster, which imposes a 60-vote supermajority requirement.

    As a result, the feedback loop of American politics is fundamentally broken. Parties propose agendas during elections. Voter choose the agenda — and thus the party — they like most. That party may or may not win power, depending on the vicissitudes of gerrymandering, geography, and the Electoral College. Even if the voters’ chosen party does win power, it can’t enact the agenda it has promised, as it is almost impossible to win 60 Senate seats, and otherwise, the filibuster blocks most of what parties promise to do. As a result, rather than judging the results of the agenda they voted for, voters are left assessing why so little has happened, and trying to understand who is to blame for their problems going unsolved.

    The removal of the filibuster will also have a disciplining effect on politicians themselves, who now have the luxury of promising voters all kinds of policies they know can never pass. In his comments above, Barrasso threatened Democrats with the anti-abortion bills Senate Republicans push routinely now, knowing they will die in the Senate. But does the Republican Party want to stand behind that agenda, knowing it might actually pass, and voters might actually see and judge them on the results? How differently would politicians act if they couldn’t use the filibuster as an excuse for disappointing their base?

    “It changes the dynamics when people are playing with live ammunition,” says Eli Zupnick, a former Senate staffer who’s now spokesperson for Fix Our Senate, a coalition of progressive groups pushing to abolish the filibuster. “In 2017, McConnell knew that without the filibuster, they’d have to pass things that would be politically catastrophic for Republicans. Instead, he was able to say, ‘Democrats didn’t let us pass this.’”
    An important note on Biden's past view of the filibuster:

    In 2005, in a speech condemning the Republican majority’s threat to extinguish the filibuster against judicial nominees, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said, “At its core, the filibuster is not about stopping a nominee or a bill, it is about compromise and moderation. … It does not mean I get my way. It means you may have to compromise. You may have to see my side of the argument. That is what it is about, engendering compromise and moderation.”

    There is, as Jonathan Chait has written, an obvious answer to this argument. “The simplest rebuttal to this claim is look around you. Do you see a lot of legislative compromise?” There are more filibusters than ever, and more partisan gridlock than ever.

    But this argument is dominant enough that it’s worth unpacking precisely what in the logic is flawed — because it is both subtle and important. The theory is straightforward: A 60-vote threshold in a Senate means that the majority will always have to win over members of the minority to pass legislation. The filibuster therefore gives the majority party an incentive to win over members of the minority. That is, it gives them an incentive to moderate and compromise, just as Biden said.

    This idea is dominant because, crucially, it’s half right. If you look across the Obama era, for instance, Democrats were desperate to find Republicans who would vote with them on health care, stimulus, or anything else. What it gets wrong is assuming that the majority party is the key actor here. The implicit logic, stated transparently, is this: If the majority party is willing to compromise, the minority party will be eager to compromise. It’s there that the logic falls apart, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proved to such devastating effect across Barack Obama’s presidency.

    What McConnell understood was simple and obvious: The party in power will get electoral credit for bills passed with big, bipartisan majorities. But by the same token, the party in power will get the blame if Congress is paralyzed, if bills die amid partisan bickering, if the problems of the nation go unsolved. Compromise isn’t a gift the majority offers to the minority. It’s a boon the minority offers to the majority.
    After the Civil War, Republicans were the dominant party for decades. After the New Deal, Democrats were the dominant party for decades. Our current era of seesawing power is the historical aberration, and as political scientist Frances Lee argues in her book Insecure Majorities, it has reshaped Congress and made bipartisan compromise nearly impossible.

    Lee’s argument is that close competition, where “neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority,” breeds all-out partisan combat. When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that’s the only realistic shot at wielding power. Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents. In the modern era, neither party is perpetually dominant, and the minority’s best shot at wielding power is to ensure the majority fails to govern effectively. That makes bipartisanship effectively irrational.
    And I had no idea about this:

    The budget reconciliation process was created in 1974 as a way to expedite the completion of appropriations bills. It’s a fast-track that avoids not just the filibuster but a normal amendment process and a normal committee process. It can only be used for one legislative package a year, and it includes a host of restrictions: Every provision that goes through budget reconciliation needs to certified by the parliamentarian as primarily related to taxing and spending, it can’t increase the budget deficit in its 11th year, and it can’t make any change at all to Social Security.

    In recent decades, senators from both parties have abused the budget reconciliation process to pass legislation they knew would otherwise fall to a filibuster. First, note the illogic of that: They are unwilling to get rid of the filibuster, but they are willing to avoid it by mangling another Senate procedure instead. Worse, because the budget reconciliation process in not meant for normal legislating, only certain kinds of initiatives can fit within it, and even they end up battered and bruised.

    Worse, both parties find themselves reaching for tax-and-spend solution when regulations would work better, because you can’t pass most regulations through reconciliation. You could easily pass, say, a carbon tax through budget reconciliation. But you couldn’t pass a renewable energy standard that reshaped private behavior, or new regulations on building materials and automobile construction, even if those would be more effective, or cheaper. Bills that go through budget reconciliation are worse bills, because they are written without the full range of tools and flexibility normally allowed to legislators.

    Budget reconciliation also warps the priorities of the two parties. It creates an incentive to prioritize bills that can be crammed into the budget reconciliation process, and to neglect priorities that cannot. You can, for instance, pass a Medicaid expansion, or a tax cut, through budget reconciliation. You cannot pass a voting rights bill, or a gun control law, or a serious climate change package, or abortion restrictions. Parties sensibly focus on what they can pass rather than what they can’t, and so the agenda is endlessly tilted toward the narrow set of issues that can be coaxed into budget reconciliation.

    This, then, is the bizarre equilibrium the Senate has settled into. The filibuster has broken the normal legislating process. But rather than fix the filibuster, both parties have broken another Senate rule so they can pass a worse version of a limited subset of bills on a fraction of the issues that face the country. Either the filibuster is a worthy rule that the Senate should honor or it isn’t, and it should be abolished or reformed. But the status quo they’ve instead settled into, where senators don’t have to make the hard decisions about the future of their institution and the American people pay the price through badly written legislation and a vast range of neglected problems, is indefensible.
    Probably the point that scares the Dems:

    A 2019 Data for Progress analysis by Colin McAuliffe found that the Senate has a 3 percentage point tilt toward Republican candidates. In an electorate as closely divided as America’s, that’s a powerful advantage. “The 1.5-percent penalty in the Electoral College was enough to elect the popular vote loser in 2016, but the penalty in the Senate was twice as large,” writes McAuliffe. A more recent FiveThirtyEight analysis pegged the bias at a startling 6 to 7 points.

    Behind the tilt is the Senate’s over-representation of small states — small states tend to be whiter and more rural than big states, with fewer immigrants and more Republicans. In this way, the Senate doesn’t just favor Republicans but also pushes the GOP toward being a more ethnonationalist party, as it gives them a path to political power in which white votes are over-represented and immigrants are underrepresented.

    So it is true that the Senate tilts Republican, but it is also true that if they eliminated the filibuster, Democrats could try to fight for the democracy they claim to believe in. They may lose that fight, but they should look around: They are losing that fight now, and the surest way to lose it in the future, too, is to refuse to actually fight back.
    The final argument:

    In 2014, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a speech titled “Restoring the Senate.” In it, he leveled a blistering critique at the degraded state of the institution in which he served, and explained how, if he won back the gavel, he’d lead the Senate back to greatness.

    “Without some meaningful buy-in, you guarantee a food fight,” McConnell said. “You guarantee instability and strife. It may very well have been the case that on Obamacare, the will of the country was not to pass the bill at all. That’s what I would have concluded if Republicans couldn’t get a single Democrat to vote for legislation of this magnitude. I’d have thought, maybe this isn’t such a great idea.”

    But just because McConnell is a hypocrite doesn’t make him wrong. In a country this polarized, perhaps he’s right: if you can’t secure bipartisan support, maybe you shouldn’t move forward.

    The logic is appealing because it inverts the basic case against the filibuster even as it accepts most of its premises. Yes, the filibuster paralyzes governance and leaves terrible environmental, social, political, and economic problems to fester. But in a bitterly divided polity, that’s a feature, not a bug. If we can’t agree on what to do, maybe it’s better we do nothing than do things that half the country will oppose, or that will just be undone when the other party takes power in a few years.

    The filibuster, in other words, traps us in the most polarizing and disagreeable phase of legislating: the partisan conflict phase. Ideas emerge, they become polarizing by virtue of being jammed into a zero-sum political system, and then they typically fail. The public experiences endless conflict but rarely sees its problems solved, or its material interests improved. If the two parties could legislate more effectively, more proposals would pass into the judgment phase, and either rise in popularity as they worked to better people’s lives or fall into disrepute as they proved themselves to be failures.

    I don’t believe that reform or elimination of the filibuster will solve all the problems that face America, or even reliably lead to outcomes I support. There is no utopia on offer, no end to our disagreements and debates and disappointments. While a 51-vote Senate would have a better shot at solving the problems that bedevil the country, it will not solve them all, and it may make some worse.
    Sorry for the long-winded post, but my copy/paste Cliff Notes are only a small part of the entire article
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 10-02-2020 at 14:17.
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  12. #252

    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Vitiate Man.

    History repeats the old conceits
    The glib replies, the same defeats


    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 



  13. #253

    Default Re: Trump Thread

    It is a testament to the American people those numbers are not higher. I mean that seriously. Even now a wide majority believe violence is never justified, and that gives me hope.


  14. #254
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    It is a testament to the American people those numbers are not higher. I mean that seriously. Even now a wide majority believe violence is never justified, and that gives me hope.
    Let's have that poll again in five weeks and see the results......
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  15. #255

    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    Let's have that poll again in five weeks and see the results......

    I mean... if there is a coup violence becomes the only option by default. Not so much people are eager but forced to fight for their country.


  16. #256
    Hǫrðar Member Viking's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
    What do you have in mind beyond what's going on now in the very active public discourse? If it all comes down to long-term visions of policy, I've already said that while it's a reasonable expectation to extend to any sphere of politics, it's unreasonable as a special demand with which to encumber or disprivilege a particular position.
    Don't see what more there is to expand on. You want to know the context(s) the various opinions of people exist in.

    You also want to know more about the context the opinions of politicians or other people that can gain power and influence through focusing on these issues. Once they are in powerful positions, it's a little late to be having second thoughts.

    This was my initial observation:

    Quote Originally Posted by Viking View Post
    The current debate on the subject focuses on current grievances and immediate policies to correct those. Without plans for the future, one cannot really see what kind of societies the particpants of the debate want to create, and what trade-offs they find acceptable. Nor what presumptions they make (that a particular political ideology or religion will prevail, the future of specific ongoing trends, and so on).
    It is difficult proving a negative. If you have an example of an opinion piece or similar that has a long-term perspective and that also has had a lot of mainstream exposure, you could always post a link.

    To the extent there is a special demand here, it is not because we are dealing with a disadvantaged group, but due to the prospect of radical solutions having an easier time gaining favour in the current political climate. And radical solutions would generally deserve greater scrutiny, one would think.

    If you don't want mass immigration, cut off the reasons why people would want to emigrate! That takes proactive investment to increase living standards and stability and opportunity abroad, as well as to mitigate the very predictable effects of climate disruption on large, relatively-poor, populations in tropical regions.
    Certainly. Yet the main focus of many politicians and voters in Europe is to increase the number of refugees being taken in. It's more important to be seen helping people up from a frozen pavement than to get rid of the ice.

    So to say that the introduction of heterogeneity is itself the problem, that the physical presence of immigrants is the problem, is to totally miss the mark. It is a misapplication of consideration, a mislocation of the site of the existential crisis, an illegitimate offloading of perceived risk, to blame those who suffer the burdens that are in themselves unjust.
    What is a society? It is a collection of people that implicitly agree to pull in the same general direction. There are many challenges to this unity, such as political ideologies and religiosity versus areligiosity.

    The unique thing about ethnicity is that it is inherited to an extent that few other things are, even if you don't include biological ancestry in the definition. In practice you can typically tell whether you and another person belong to the same ethnicity by taking a quick glance at the person, something that is much more difficult to do when it comes to ideology.

    This means that ethnic diversity within a society is a direct challenge to the very concept of a society - you have different groups pulling in the same direction separately, rather than everyone in the same direction; and the tendency is inherited from one generation to the next. It is poison for a well-functioning society. It creates an allegiance that competes with the commitment to a functioning state and society in a way that allegiance to friends and family does not (unless the concept of a family is a tribe, at which point we are dealing with mini- or proto-ethnicities).

    Heterogeneity is the problem, because at its core, a society is about co-operation. Up to a certain point, heterogeneity promotes resilience by providing more legs to stand on - above a certain point, it promotes self-destruction through incompatibility.

    Frankly what's the psychological or methodological distinction between the above and the fear that the formerly colonized will eventually exert colonial brutality onto Europeans if they are allowed to exist in Europe, or whatever? I consider all of the above a mindless wickedness in its substance.
    Who is saying that the criterion is that they are "allowed to exist in Europe"? Although 'colonial brutality' in the case of new ethnic majorities per se cannot be ruled out (how could it be?), you don't have to go there. A Mexican scenario is where things seems to be headed many places, currently. For example, the National Police Commissioner of Sweden said in September that there are 40 family-based criminal networks currently operating in Sweden (as far as I can see, he is saying that they are a result of immigration). Doesn't sound very promising when you combine the statement with all the shootings and the explosions being set off in the country.

    And criminals brazenly setting up roadblocks in a suburb of Sweden's second-largest city. When things look so bad at the surface, imagine what is going on underneath.

    It is frankly monstrous to propose to sacrifice populations for (idealized) expedience rather than undertaking to challenge the disruptors of coexistence themselves.

    [...]

    You don't have to eliminate it, but if the choice is between acting to contain it and sacrificing the actual targets of it - see above.

    [...]

    The bottom line is, I - and many others - categorically reject the reflexive impulse to impose burdens and harms onto marginalized populations.
    The argument that enforcing borders amounts to causing harm is as insidious as it is incorrect, and the talk of sacrifice is absurd. The are plenty of things to spend resources on, and the cost of lifting the living standard of large amounts (but still just a tiny subset) of poor people to Western levels is a massive drain of resources.

    Resources could be spent on limiting population growth in poorer countries (through things like contraceptives and education), they could be spent on vaccines and medication in such countries (which makes the first point even more important), they could be spent on infrastructure, and maybe on intelligent ways to speed up democratization, such as through the creation of, or a strengthening of, civil society where relevant. Resources are limited, as is the desire to spend them.

    Helping those that happen to make it to the borders of the West, or emptying refugee camps, is not going to eradicate the worst of the delible misery in poorer countries. When factored in that it has the realistic prospect of being extremely expensive given the small amount of people it is able to help out through spending huge amounts of money, such policies has the realistic prospect of being extremely unethical, and that's not factoring in the potential for the destabilization of previously stable countries.

    Remember that having superificially good intentions is not an excuse, deliberate ignorance in this context is often an act of malevolence

    Most people naturally prefer to remain in their native areas.
    If everything else is equal, quite likely. In practice, I there are probably more people willing to immigrate to the West than almost anyone who doesn't more or less favour open border policies would be willing to accept.

    I mean, our lives are shaped by the intervention or non-intervention of government in all sorts of ways. How does school assignment work in Norway?
    As far as I can see, pupils have a right to attend the nearest school, or the school associated with the local community.

    If the government removes the right, or authorities start closing or relocating schools, of course a lot of parents would be unsettled. Many parents settle before or after having children with precisely such things in mind as in which social environment their children would grow up in. You are likely to end up with many parents moving even further away from the areas in question so that new government policies won't affect them.

    It's no secret that some parts of the capital have more underage criminals than others, and they often rob children.

    When has this happened? As far as I know when their ethnicity is not made salient by the wider society, immigrants vote according to individual ideologies. Otherwise, they seek safe harbor among those parties that are perceived to be least hostile to their group interests (e.g. existence).
    When has mass-immigration in conjunction with mass-segregation happened before in modern democratic states like it is happening now in Europe? I suppose never, this is unchartered territory.

    That means you need to go back to the basics and look at what you have. In countries like Sweden, you got massive segregation. If you get even more immigration from relevant countries, you'll likely strengthen the segregation. If people from segregated areas maintain a different culture than that found in the rest of society, they can of course also develop their own voting culture; i.e. who they vote for.

    The Assyrian politician Edip Noyan was voted all the way into the Swedish parliament. His ascent to parliament started when relatives and members of his church congregation supposedly were bussed in to vote him into power at a local level, effectively staging a coup (short version, long version).

    In all periods of American history, foresighted individuals have pointed out the increasing fascistic inclinations among significant elements of the population. These reached moments of greatest salience with the Goldwater campaign and Bircher movement in the 1960s, the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, and the Gingrich/Norquist/Buchanan ascendance of the 90s. On the basis of these premonitions and observations would it have been appropriate for Democrats under Clinton to attempt to disenfranchise and suppress conservatives? Decidedly not (though on the other hand taking measures to prevent them from consolidating power toward minority rule would have been helpful)..

    [...]

    You misunderstand, in this context I've consistently been referring to recrudescent elements of the far-right.
    One the one hand, you have the internal democratic process of a country, one the other, you have the question about who should be granted citizenship in a country. These are two very different topics. Suppressing the participation of a demographic in democracy is a defeat on a whole other level than what not permitting a demographic revolution through immigration is. It must be, because in the first case, the quality of the currenty society itself is necessarily the problem, while in the second case, it does not have to be.

    And we know and have always known that the existence of the far-right and of oligarchs is a more real existential threat than the existence of ethnic immigrants has ever been.
    Where to begin? 'Existential threat' to whom or what? And with the phrase 'more real', we might be headed for ontological territory.

    Now, if minority and majority flips due, the ethnicity of the powerful 'far-right' and the ethnicity of their victims will likely also flip; so you would just have shifted the existential threat to new groups.

    Sure, "separate but equal" is not theoretically unachievable, in the same way that there is a clear pathway to full communism...
    There are at least a couple of Sami-majority towns in Northern Norway, and they appear to do well enough (one of them was in fact the place of a rebellion in 1852, one of few instances of violence at such a scale between the Sami population and Norwegian authorities, and actually instigated by Christian Sami. Fun fact: in terms of land area, this municipality is larger than the US states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined).

    The point here is that social problems seem recurrent, but the common denominator is reactionaries. That ethnicity is more fluid than sex or gender doesn't seem relevant to separatism; if anything it undermines it. At any rate, class and religion and other such social markers can also be fluid in their context.
    There is an important point here that is implicit. There will always be variation in a population - such as for height and weight - and pretty much everyone will belong to different minorities, memberships that can place them at a disadvantage.

    This kind of diversity is more or less avoidable in practice. It contrasts with ethnic diversity within state borders, which in practice in many instances both is and has been easily avoidable through immigration policy. The world view of those who consider migrating is also imporant, and a highly malleable factor.

    When it comes those who migrate to the West, and those who considered it, a very interesting concerns precisely worldview: How do they think about ethnic diversity? Do most of them not think about it at all? Is the question so firmly subordinated to the motivation for the migration that the question does not register when it otherwise might have? Do they think they will join a colony of likeminded people in the target country? Are they not aware of how big the cultural differences are between their country of origin and Western countries are?

    It's wrong for the same reasons why it's wrong to assert that rape is a problem associated with the existence of women, and that removing women is necessary to preclude rape. I hope most of us understand that education and socioeconomic egalitarianism are what reduce and prevent rape, while providing something of mutual benefit! Yet there are those who go in the opposite direction, who describe contemporary masculine rage and alienation as a key social problem on the margins and one that could and should be assuaged by literally assigning females to young males (see: incel). Such means to stability are as depraved and misguided as they are inefficient.
    If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, then unwillingness to let women serve prison time in the same same cell as men convicted of sexual assault would be acquiescence.

    Segregation does not in itself imply the removal of one party alone, except for the circumstances when both are already present and you cannot send them both away.

    As for your example of incel ideology, people would reject it on the basis that personal autonomy is viewed as fundamentally important. Not allowing people to enter the country, on the other hand, is basically status quo.

    When they form minority factions, strengthening democracy and majoritarianism is the most productive and fair approach.
    I don't think we are talking about the same scope here. I was thinking more about undesired behaviour in daily life. Preventing relevant groups from organizing into powerful entities is quite a different objective, and presumably much easier.

    That said, your short description for places that are not like Hungary sounds like business as usual.

    If the US were like Hungary in the distribution of popular sentiment we would be pretty fucked and the world with us. As it is significant mass violence in the medium-term is not out of the question. Not that much of the world can easily escape mass violence this century for a variety of reasons, but I'm referring specifically to conflict over national character and sectarian power.
    Let's revisit the US and Hungary in 30 years time and see.

    I suspect that the most prescient lesson for the US to take from Hungary is that Orban, once was known as an anti-totalitarian reformer, who rose to prominence in 1989 after a speech on the occasion of the reburial of communist reformer Imre Nagy. Look now where Orban and Hungary is (and indeed Imre Nagy's statue).

    Cf. the first paragraph of this post, if you had studied Orban closely in 1989, or earlier, maybe you'd find hints of unsavoury traits that would make you highly skeptic of him. Maybe because he said the right things and stood up against totalitarianism, a good cause, people were initially more inclined to shrug off any gut feeling they may have had that some things were off.

    This isn't new ground for humanity. We have many examples of coexistence.
    What we are dealing with now is the modern democratic state. Examples of co-existence from ancient or medieval times are not that relevant for modernity, and co-existence in authoritarian and totalitarian states are also providing very different fundaments for co-existence (watch what happens when the dictatorships end).

    and my position is that the experiment you propose has always ended in horror
    Which 'experiment'?

    At any rate, there is no scope or time for iterative "experiments" in our human existence. It would be silly of a Hayekian conservative, for example, to have demanded that select countries implement social welfare states before they be adopted by other countries. It was appropriate for as many countries as possible to converge on social democracy and to "experiment" with the particulars individually.
    This time, again, it is really mostly an appeal for those who believe in something to carry it out. I don't think it will do the US any good in the long run, but consenting adults and all that.

    I don't understand what you're referring to. Are you speaking from the assumption that immigration should be expected to benefit ethnic groups qua ethnic groups? When I speak of immigrant groups I'm not thinking of them as a subset of the global population of some supercategory, and I doubt it is common to do so. I'm thinking of them as a group in the context of the host society.
    It has a special relevance if the immigrants belong to an ethnic group that is disadvantaged locally for some reason, whether due to ethnic persecution or wealth disparity between different ethnic groups.

    But in any scenario, if the majority of people staying behind do not benefit from the migration, we return to a question of allocation.

    I disagree that living standards are a function of some cladistically-designated ethnic similarity quotient, and don't see how this is backed up by any experience. Are you referring to a separate issue of recent immigrants facing loneliness and other issues due to culture shock and communication barriers? That can be addressed with specific policy, and is moreover cured by time.
    One aspect is sticking out as an individual: if wearing certain clothes and speaking the local language is all you need to do to seem like a fellow native to other natives, that can decrease a feeling of not belonging, being different or belonging to a different group than the rest of society.

    Another is sticking out culturally: if you follow the same religion as the natives, observe the same holidays and otherwise have similar cultural traditions, you are less likely to feel that you need to defend your beliefs to people that aren't necessarily acting in good faith, more likely to feel unity when you observe the same holidays like the rest of society, less likely to have your traditions treated like something weird or quaint. In short: things that seem natural and fundamentally important to you is more likely to be treated respectfully by the rest of society.

    Next you'll be telling me that Palestinians are better off living in Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt than in Germany or the US, by your theory - yet we know that objectively this is not the case.
    There are two things to say to this:

    1. In many immigrant-dominated suburbs in Europe (places where they have a significant probability of actually ending up), many or most of them could well be better off - perhaps much better off - in Jordan or Lebanon.
    2. To the extent that they are worse off in, that's likely an effect of the inferior function of the Jordanian and Lebanese states that probably also affects Jordanians and Lebanese, and, at any rate, the solution is to reform the Jordanian and Lebanese states, not to transport the Palestinians to Europe. Jordan and Lebanon might also be over capacity in terms of migrants.


    In itself this is not a cause for complaint.
    If the cause is mass-migration from dysfunctional countries to highly functional countries, the odds are probably against the change being a net positive.

    Why is that fear a sufficient basis for action in your view? By the same token the United States should have become a client of the papacy by now, as many Anglo Protestants warned in the 1800s (regarding the immigration of Irish, Italians, and eventually Latin Americans). We can say, no, back then those were virulent racists who sought to aggrandize their own sectional power at others' expense.
    If it is a dead horse, it looks like not everyone is done beating it.

    For Catholicism to become a powerful force in the US, you need massive immigration of Catholics, mass-conversion, or a large amount of both.

    Mass-conversion does not sound very realistic unrealistic, and the immigration part looks like it is only happening now:

    Catholics are more likely than other Americans to be immigrants or children of immigrants. Indeed, more than a quarter of U.S. Catholic adults (27%) were born outside the country, compared with 15% of U.S. adults overal
    There are a couple of things here that needs to be made explicit regarding desirability. If you think that by your own standards, a country dominated by mainstream Catholicism is no worse than a country dominated by mainstream Protestantism, then Catholicism becoming the dominant religion would not have much of an impact in this context.

    Now if you have a mostly secular society, like you have in many European countries, then even if you think swapping Christianity with Islam as the dominant religion is unlikely to generally make things worse (which is not a sentiment I share), then if a secular society is your end goal, an Islamic society represents a step down in desirability.

    There is also the ethnic aspect; the earlier immigration of Catholics was immigration of Europeans to a country dominated by people of European ancestry, while the immigration of Muslims to European countries typically is in the form of non-Europeans.

    Even if you transit from one secular society to another, presumably extremists of other ethnicities represent a greater threat to a person than extremists from the person's own ethnic group.

    The alternative vision is that in the far future what is now Norway will harbor a syncretic culture or cultures that do not yet exist, and the society will have advanced toward mutual material and psychological benefit. That's also a probability, and some appeal to it as a reason to really adopt a policy of rapidly 'dumping' millions of people from poor countries into rich ones right away.
    The worst case scenarios introduced with relevant immigration do not appear to replace any worst case scenarios without immigration that are similar or worse, so the new best case scenarios better be a big step up, yet what you offer here seems pretty bland.

    (Others who take this view somehow go in the opposite direction in their motivation, arguing that Western societies are so good at assimilating immigrants that if we turbocharge mass immigration then libertarian capitalist Christianity will come to dominate the globe in short order...)
    Not sure what you are referring to here; non-Christian immigrants to the West don't tend to end up Christian, as far as I am aware. If you are talking about emptying the non-Western world of Christians and moving them to the West, you might be onto something, although political Christianity in Europe often looks rather different from political Christianity in the US.

    Again, who are the actors and what are the tendencies? These aren't pure abstractions. The dysfunctional actors manifest their dysfunction in other domains.
    Ordinary citizens that vote for the wrong politicians, for instance.

    Here we have an example of Putinist reprisal in the form of quietly-escalating ethnic cleansing against Crimean Tatars, who had just recovered generations after their Stalinist deportation.
    https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blog...n-persecution/

    By your theory there very existence is the core problem, rather than the novel depredations of an irredentist fascist dictator and his supporters.
    Rather, I would say that there are multiple problems; the cohabitation of ethnicities being one of them.

    To the specific issues faced by Crimean Tartars today: If the ethnic composition of Krym was strongly dominated by Crimean Tatars, then it would have been more difficult for Russia to annex the peninsula, even if Russia in the scenario also has military bases in Krym prior to the annexation attempt. For one, armed resistance would be much more likely, and a stronger international response would also be more likely; certainly so if Russia also tried to ethnically cleanse the terriorty.

    As a standalone proposition I don't think this is quite clear. Radical Islamists are more common, even proportionally, in majority-Muslim societies than otherwise.
    The proportions would do well with citation, but it doesn't necessarily have much of a bearing on rehabilitation. The main point is that it is a smaller step to go from a radical Islamist to an Islamist or a conservative Muslim in a Muslim society (a transformation that authorities in Muslim-majority countries might be more than happy with), on the one hand, to a more apathetic Muslim that is content with living in a decadent society (which is more likely to be the desired end-goal in a Western country), on the other.
    Last edited by Viking; 10-08-2020 at 15:28.
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  17. #257
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Sad to say, here in my home state:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...n-soon/616635/

    Last week, in a 4–3 party-line vote, Republican judges on the Michigan Supreme Court invalidated a law that had empowered a historically popular Democratic chief executive to take emergency actions to combat COVID-19. The basis for the decision was an antiquated doctrine that conservatives on the United States Supreme Court have signaled they want to revive.

    Like other governors around the country, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer declared a state of emergency in March and enacted aggressive emergency measures to fight COVID-19. Those efforts found support in two separate laws, one of which—the Emergency Powers of Governor Act—was adopted in 1945.

    By mid-June, statewide cases had dropped to fewer than 200 a day from a peak of more than 1,600. A study out of Imperial College London and the University of Oxford suggested that Whitmer’s efforts saved as many as 74,000 lives. (Full disclosure: I served as special counsel to Whitmer on her COVID-19 response and aided in drafting many of her executive orders.)

    The Michigan Supreme Court’s decision last week marks the apotheosis of this “totalitarian” line of thinking. Criticizing the Emergency Powers of Governor Act for giving Whitmer “concentrated and standardless power to regulate the lives of our people,” the Republican majority held that the law was unconstitutional because it violated the so-called nondelegation doctrine.

    The doctrine ostensibly prohibits legislatures from passing laws that delegate too much power, or power of the wrong kind, to the executive branch. But the doctrine has never done meaningful work in U.S. constitutional law. It has not been used to strike down an act of Congress since 1935. It has never been used to strike down a Michigan state law, much less an emergency law that has been on the books for three-quarters of a century.

    [...] a Republican-controlled court handcuffed a Democratic governor as she moved to address a global pandemic that, to date, has killed more than 7,100 Michiganders. The court’s opinion is almost devoid of citations of Michigan case law, as the law professor Rick Hills has noted. Instead, the court lovingly quotes Gorsuch.

    As a result of last week’s decision, Michigan became the only state in the nation that is not operating under some type of state of emergency.

    For now, that doesn’t mean the end of all COVID-19 protections. The state’s public-health director has the independent power, not at issue in the Supreme Court’s decision, to take emergency actions to control epidemics. On Monday, the director issued a series of orders incorporating the governor’s prior restrictions, including her mask mandate and limits on gatherings. These orders, too, will surely be challenged.
    *sigh*

    On a related note:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...voting/616634/

    Voters in Arkansas, North Dakota, and Idaho took Roberts up on his suggestion to drive reform via citizen-led initiative or by amending their state constitution. In Arkansas, with two different amendments, citizens worked to establish an independent redistricting commission and also open primaries and institute ranked-choice voting. In North Dakota, they looked to strengthen overseas-military voting and election audits, open primaries to all voters, and enact instant runoffs. Idaho voters, meanwhile, sought to expand funding for public education. One by one, these initiatives have been knocked off the ballots this summer by state and federal courts, and for the most tendentious and technical reasons.

    These court decisions have limited the ability of the people to hold their representatives accountable through direct democracy. This is frustrating because in many states, such levers are all that citizens have left for addressing both voting and more run-of-the-mill policy concerns, with statehouses gerrymandered beyond use, or otherwise beholden to special interests.

    But what is all the more frustrating is that these court decisions threaten the very avenue the chief justice suggested for citizens to do something about their own entrenched representatives. In many red states, this could slam the door on meaningful electoral reform for a generation.
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 10-07-2020 at 23:05.
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  18. #258
    Member Member Gilrandir's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Viking View Post

    If the ethnic composition of Krym was strongly dominated by Crimean Tatars, then it would have been more difficult for Russia to annex the peninsula, even if Russia in the scenario also has military bases in Krym prior to the annexation attempt. For one, armed resistance would be much more likely, and a stronger international respons would also be more likely; certainly so if Russia also tried to ethnically cleanse the terriorty.
    A stronger response? So grave concerns would give way to very grave concerns? That would surely have made Putin think twice before annexing the Crimea.
    Quote Originally Posted by Suraknar View Post
    The article exists for a reason yes, I did not write it...

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  19. #259
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    As expected:

    https://apnews.com/article/virus-out...3818d96c54f748

    President Donald Trump portrays the hundreds of people arrested nationwide in protests against racial injustice as violent urban left-wing radicals. But an Associated Press review of thousands of pages of court documents tells a different story.

    Very few of those charged appear to be affiliated with highly organized extremist groups, and many are young suburban adults from the very neighborhoods Trump vows to protect from the violence in his reelection push to win support from the suburbs.

    Defense attorneys and civil rights activists are questioning why the Department of Justice has taken on cases to begin with. They say most belong in state court, where defendants typically get much lighter sentences. And they argue federal authorities appear to be cracking down on protesters in an effort to stymie demonstrations.

    “It is highly unusual, and without precedent in recent American history,” said Ron Kuby, a longtime attorney who isn’t involved in the cases but has represented scores of clients over the years in protest-related incidents. “Almost all of the conduct that’s being charged is conduct that, when it occurs, is prosecuted at the state and local level.”

    More than 40% of those facing federal charges are white. At least a third are Black, and about 6% Hispanic. More than two-thirds are under the age of 30 and most are men. More than a quarter have been charged with arson, which if convicted means a five-year minimum prison sentence. More than a dozen are accused of civil disorder, and others are charged with burglary and failing to comply with a federal order. They were arrested in cities across the U.S., from Portland, Oregon, to Minneapolis, Boston and New York.
    Barr should get the cell next to his boss when the dust finally settles......
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  20. #260
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Another not-so-surprising study:

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ey-study-trump

    The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.

    In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
    High Plains Drifter

  21. #261
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Video of "the Donald" in his greatcoat and "stern visage" pose has me really flash-backing to shots of Brezhnev on the balcony above Red Square...

    We've had Presidents wielding more power and doing so more dictatorially in practice (Lincoln, FDR during the war, Jefferson's foreign policy) but I don't think we have ever had one who actually enjoyed that role and enjoyed the dictator cult trappings so much.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

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  22. #262
    Headless Senior Member Pannonian's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
    Video of "the Donald" in his greatcoat and "stern visage" pose has me really flash-backing to shots of Brezhnev on the balcony above Red Square...

    We've had Presidents wielding more power and doing so more dictatorially in practice (Lincoln, FDR during the war, Jefferson's foreign policy) but I don't think we have ever had one who actually enjoyed that role and enjoyed the dictator cult trappings so much.
    We've got someone who enjoys being PM without having to do any of the work of a PM or taking any responsibility for decisions as a PM.

  23. #263
    Praefectus Fabrum Senior Member Anime BlackJack Champion, Flash Poker Champion, Word Up Champion, Shape Game Champion, Snake Shooter Champion, Fishwater Challenge Champion, Rocket Racer MX Champion, Jukebox Hero Champion, My House Is Bigger Than Your House Champion, Funky Pong Champion, Cutie Quake Champion, Fling The Cow Champion, Tiger Punch Champion, Virus Champion, Solitaire Champion, Worm Race Champion, Rope Walker Champion, Penguin Pass Champion, Skate Park Champion, Watch Out Champion, Lawn Pac Champion, Weapons Of Mass Destruction Champion, Skate Boarder Champion, Lane Bowling Champion, Bugz Champion, Makai Grand Prix 2 Champion, White Van Man Champion, Parachute Panic Champion, BlackJack Champion, Stans Ski Jumping Champion, Smaugs Treasure Champion, Sofa Longjump Champion Seamus Fermanagh's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Quote Originally Posted by Pannonian View Post
    We've got someone who enjoys being PM without having to do any of the work of a PM or taking any responsibility for decisions as a PM.
    A number of insiders say that about the donald as well. Enjoys being the Leader just doesn't wish to be bothered with folderol like briefings etc. before making decisions.
    "The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.” -- Milton Friedman

    "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken

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  24. #264

    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Report finds that almost all of the late BLM protests had been peaceful, and the majority of the violence was either police violence or damage to public property.
    https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/dem...r-summer-2020/

    Quote Originally Posted by ReluctantSamurai View Post
    As expected:

    https://apnews.com/article/virus-out...3818d96c54f748



    Barr should get the cell next to his boss when the dust finally settles......
    I recall posting a few months ago about Bill Barratry (look it up, it's a good pun) leaning on prosecutors to trump up charges against protesters.
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  25. #265

    Default Re: Trump Thread

    Recent, pre-election polling on political violence we didn't get a chance to cover. Since it's from YouGov, it might be the yearly version of the surveys cited above from 2017-19.

    First, I should post an update from within the original article I linked in my earlier post, the one from the beginning of October.

    [Update: Since this article published, we’ve received new polling data that strongly suggests the trend is not as large as originally thought. On the question of justifying violence, new data from the same source as the 2017 to 2019 trend suggests there has not been a significant shift in attitudes since December 2019, though there is still a notable increase from 2017. On the question of justifying violence in the event of losing a presidential race, there has been a small increase but not as large as the one we originally described. We’re reviewing the new data and will update further.]
    This vague update slotted awkwardly in the very middle of the article can be worth whatever it is. Now, on to the new polling, conducted in early October. If there is continuity in YouGov methodology, then these 2020 results follow the clear trend in gradually-rising condonation of political violence. Importantly, the YouGov findings continue to contradict the 2020 Nationscape results, which found much higher levels of tolerance for violence (see image in earlier post). An interesting element of this October survey is that it asks respondents how they feel about political violence framed as retaliatory. In that case, the proportions finding justification in violence double.

    Click image for larger version. 

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    Tangentially, but perhaps responsively to the curiosities of some members, at the end of the writeup is a list of democratic principles (from which propositions are sampled as polling questions for respondents, but I'm interested in the propositions themselves here):

    The foundation of Bright Line Watch’s surveys is a list of 30 statements expressing a range of democratic principles (the full list is provided below). Democracy is a multidimensional concept. Our goal is to provide a detailed set of measures of democratic values and of the quality of American democracy. We are also interested in the resilience of democracy and the nature of potential threats it faces. Based on the experiences of other countries that have experienced democratic setbacks, we recognize that democratic erosion is not necessarily an across-the-board phenomenon. Some facets of democracy may be undermined first while others remain intact, at least initially. The range of principles that we measure allows us to focus attention on variation in specific institutions and practices that, in combination, shape the overall performance of our democracy.
    Elections

    Elections are conducted, ballots counted, and winners determined without pervasive fraud or manipulation
    Citizens have access to information about candidates that is relevant to how they would govern
    The geographic boundaries of electoral districts do not systematically advantage any particular political party
    Information about the sources of campaign funding is available to the public
    Public policy is not determined by large campaign contributions
    Elections are free from foreign influence
    Politicians who lose free and fair elections will concede defeat

    Voting

    All adult citizens have equal opportunity to vote
    All votes have equal impact on election outcomes
    Voter participation in elections is generally high

    Rights

    All adult citizens enjoy the same legal and political rights
    Parties and candidates are not barred due to their political beliefs and ideologies
    Government protects individuals’ right to engage in unpopular speech or expression
    Government protects individuals’ right to engage in peaceful protest
    Citizens can make their opinions heard in open debate about policies that are under consideration
    The law is enforced equally for all persons

    Protections

    Government does not interfere with journalists or news organizations
    Government effectively prevents private actors from engaging in politically-motivated violence or intimidation
    Government agencies are not used to monitor, attack, or punish political opponents

    Accountability

    Government officials are legally sanctioned for misconduct
    Government officials do not use public office for private gain
    Law enforcement investigations of public officials or their associates are free from political influence or interference
    Government statistics and data are produced by experts who are not influenced by political considerations

    Institutions

    Executive authority cannot be expanded beyond constitutional limits
    The legislature is able to effectively limit executive power
    The judiciary is able to effectively limit executive power
    The elected branches respect judicial independence

    Discourse

    Even when there are disagreements about ideology or policy, political leaders generally share a common understanding of relevant facts
    Elected officials seek compromise with political opponents
    Political competition occurs without criticism of opponents’ loyalty or patriotism

    To measure perceived democratic performance, the survey asked, “How well do the following statements describe the United States as of today?” Each respondent was then presented with 14 statements of principle, randomly drawn from the set above, and offered the following response options:

    The U.S. does not meet this standard
    The U.S. partly meets this standard
    The U.S. mostly meets this standard
    The U.S. fully meets this standard
    Not sure
    Last edited by Montmorency; 12-03-2020 at 01:24.
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  26. #266
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    There are plenty of examples of "GOP Fuckery" on this forum. Here's more of the same with a big sprinkling of topping from Democrats:

    https://truthout.org/articles/two-de...drones-to-uae/

    With the exception of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), every Republican senator present voted against the pair of Democrat-led resolutions. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) joined the GOP in voting against both resolutions, while Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) voted in favor of blocking the F-35 sale but against preventing the sale of Reaper drones to UAE — a partner along with the U.S. in the Saudi-led assault on Yemen.

    As HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed noted, “the defense unit of military contractor Raytheon — which is crucial to the drones being considered — is based in Arizona,” a possible reason behind the two Arizona Democrats’ votes.
    The proverbial 'military-industrial complex' is alive and well in 2020...
    Last edited by ReluctantSamurai; 12-11-2020 at 19:20.
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  27. #267
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    "Monsters are due on Maple Street":

    https://www.militarytimes.com/news/y...isinformation/

    On Monday, the Twitter handle @stormis_us posted that “The F-16 in Michigan was shot down and I now believe that 50,000 Chinese troops were in fact bombed and killed by anti-personnel bombs. At the Maine/Canadian border.”

    The information seems farcical on its face, but the handle, which states “THE TRUTH and FACTS. A Warrior for GOD and Christ, #VETERAN, #WWG1WGAWORLDWIDE, #MAGA, #TRUMP2020, #Conservative” has nearly 50,000 followers, with more than a mere few believing this post.
    Just when you thought it was safe to go out again.....
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  28. #268
    Stranger in a strange land Moderator Hooahguy's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    So this is definitely a good step in the right direction: "Biden team asks Senate Dems to recommend public defenders, civil rights lawyers for federal bench."

    Dana Remus, Biden's pick to serve as White House counsel when he takes office next month, sent a letter to Democratic senators this month soliciting their input on district court seats in their states, saying that the new administration would be emphasizing nominees who are demographically diverse and don't have the corporate law or prosecutor pedigree that is typical of a federal judge.
    "With respect to U.S. District Court positions, we are particularly focused on nominating individuals whose legal experiences have been historically underrepresented on the federal bench, including those who are public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys, and those who represent Americans in every walk of life," Remus wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Hill.
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  29. #269
    Darkside Medic Senior Member rory_20_uk's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    I would also like to see the Innocence Project getting asked to work with the Office of Pardons to help clear out of prison the many who have either been wrongly incarcerated or else are victims of the "three strikes and you're out" era of virtue signalling. If nothing else, getting such persons out of jail would save money, even if righting social wrongs and just being the right thing to do aren't big issues.

    An enemy that wishes to die for their country is the best sort to face - you both have the same aim in mind.
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  30. #270
    Senior Member Senior Member ReluctantSamurai's Avatar
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    Default Re: Trump Thread

    High Plains Drifter

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