I was mainly devils'-advocating, up until this guy.
With this guy, I can find no fault. If you watch his 60 Minutes interview, it seems heartfelt and authentic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grj328-hlhA Plus, if he was born Palestinian and is now a Buddhist, that means that he willingly chose to endure the risk of getting killed as an apostate.
Is it possible that some pieces of the administration are trying exactly to convey a point, that they "cannot give a toss"? Because that is what transpires from many signals.
You know, some interpretation of "realism" as in "proposing the beast as normalcy in a blindness towards morals"?
It seems as if brutality is actively proposed as a value.
Could anyone with a legal background explain to me why a judge hasn't declared all deportations to be on pause until legality is established for this pattern of detaining people without charging of anything, flying them out of the country before a petition can be filed wrt their detainment, and then claiming that because they're out of the country the US Gov't is powerless to facilitate their return?
IANAL, but, aiui, judges are generally limited to providing relief to the people in the case at hand. This generally works ok, the precedent gets set, and people knowing they will loose in court change their behavior.
At some point it seems like this can raise questions about whether they are flagrantly ignoring habeas corpus. But I'm sure we will all learn soon that governments disappearing people is what the Founders originally intended.
IANAL as well. This could work as massive interstate RICO case.. This is exactly how the FBI finally took down the entire mafia/five families in power.
I would reply with the point made by the Supreme Court of the USA, that the "courts cannot interfere with prerogatives of the executive branch". Which of course leaves big questions about power and apparent abuse of the same, and about what cynics call "collaterals".
One detail in clearer terms: if «federal courts [had] no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way», where lies the responsibility of the State towards its victims?
They did. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that while the President is in charge of foreign policy, and can deport people however, these people have to see a court room before they are deported. Yesterday, Trump made various statements that heavily leaned towards not obeying that order. The rest of the Republican Party supports these actions.
judges have been declaring a lot of things in the US, but the executive has stopped pretending that law enforcement is independent. you can produce judgements until you're blue in the face, but nothing happens unless you have somebody to enforce it.
Well also, the party in power has spent the last 30 years specifically packing courts at all levels with friendly partisan judges. And openly talking about doing so while doing it.
Left-wingers appoint left-leaning judges; right-wingers appoint right-leaning ones. Are you somehow asserting that left-wing is a "ground truth" and that only the right is partisan? You can observe the same thing happening when the fifth circuit messes with democrats in power as when the ninth messes with republicans.
The Democratic party did not and does not have the stomach for doing the same, even when their voters have called for it. If you think otherwise, prove it.
This is a direct response to what began as systematic abuse of the court system by left-wingers and is an attempt to restore the status quo. You can find probably the most prominent early example of this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_(Supreme_Court)
Nearly a century ago, FDR was already threatening to pack the court if the justices didn't quit striking down his blatantly unconstitutional legislation. It continued steadily from there with the Warren court bench-legislating at a historic scale.
You are misrepresenting what the actual status quo is to make an attempt to restore it appear malicious or power-hungry.
Respectfully, talking about the Democratic party 100 years ago is an incredibly shaky basis for your argument.
Packing courts with partisans is malicious and power hungry no matter how you spin it. "Restoring balance" is rhetoric used by all kinds of historical leaders you do not want to be compared to...
It's not really, because courts move slowly. We're just now starting to see the repair of some things like chevron deference. Wickard v. Filburn still hasn't been overturned. It's just as inconsistent to say "we should leave things tilted forever" as it is to say "we should restore balance".
Exactly. The myriad of unconstitutional behaviors, and decisions which ignore precedent and the laws as written which are friendly to what Trump is doing is hardly conservative or liberal. It is tilted for sure, but in a way which needs correcting - in the direction of a society where the powerful have to obey laws.
This is a pretty loaded question. Innocents is something many would disagree with. Anyone who immigrates illegally at any time is guilty. Concentration camp is also a pretty controversial term, and one I would disagree with.
I do not care for Trump's actions, and I don't believe I wrote an explicit defense of them. I will happily defend the overall policy of sending every single illegal back. The recent comments to which y'all are replying aren't addressing Trump's disregard for law, they're addressing your claim that the right has been abusing or weaponizing the justice system.
> Anyone who immigrates illegally at any time is guilty.
I don't see Elon getting sent to a prison that nobody ever gets released from against the orders of the supreme court. It sounds like you're just apologising for fascism at this point.
Yes, I'm defending "illegals". No I don't need an excuse - the constitution of the united states requires that legal/illegal be decided by a court, not the executive.
Sending people to concentration camps is not deporting. It's human trafficking.
> A federal judge on Wednesday said he has found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court for violating his orders to turn around planes carrying deportees to El Salvador.
Allegations which musk denies. I have no idea if it’s true but the allegations revolve around work authorization not illegal immigration.
El Salvador’s prison is not a concentration camp. If you claim otherwise, prove it.
Judge only found probable cause and wanted more information. This is also not targeting Trump himself. Your statement is factually inaccurate.
You are in fact defending crime. If your position is “illegals are fine” we aren’t going to see eye-to-eye. I will continue to support sending every last one of them back.
right now the right winger courts are appalled at what the right winger executive is doing, so I don't think it's the right time to be "both sides"ing this.
I know I have repeatedly emphasized this fundamental problem in various conversations lately, but it is a fatal flaw of our system of laws, which is stupid and broken and exists only in former English colonies. Under our hallowed and majestic system, a person has to gain standing to ask the court for relief, which often means the easily foreseeable bad thing has to have already happened to them.
(Submitter here.) I had not seen it. I have been checking the Daily Nous for years as a small team outlet for professional philosophers. I find it strong when academicians and professionals feel they have to interrupt the normal stream of their occupations because of an extraordinary something that calls for a shift in attention...
> I would argue people complaining about seeing this twice are trying to pull the article without coming out as a bigot
I would argue that you probably need to step away from the keyboard, if you're willing to jump to the conclusion that someone truthfully posting a very customary "this is a dup" comment is a bigot.
Okay, it seems like you're talking about me. I don't particularly support Trump and didn't vote for the guy but his immigration policy is one place I agree. I believe that every single illegal should be deported and probably barred from re-entry or citizenship as a punitive deterrent. I do not believe anyone besides Trump will actually do this.
I do, however, disagree with Trump's targeting of pro-Palestinians. If Mahdawi originally immigrated illegally we should block a pathway to citizenship, as we should for every other current or former illegal. However, this appears to be done for the wrong reasons.
Tarring everyone who dislikes illegal immigration and believes the "soft" solutions have utterly failed as a bigot is inaccurate and unproductive.
There's already no path to citizenship for anyone that entered the US without a visa or parole, and if deported it already eliminates the eligibility for a visa for 5 to 20 years.
There are periodic amnesties granted every so often. The prior administration also radically expanded temporary protected status by hundreds of thousands of people to protect them from deportation. Near the end of his second term, Obama attempted to do this for millions of immigrants. We also issue I-601A waivers, the U visa, and of course the mass abuse of the asylum system.
I think this should be pretty straightforward: we need a somewhat more streamlined immigration system. However, we should still cap the overall proportion of immigration any country can represent, should limit uneducated, unskilled labor, and should block anyone who immigrates illegally from ever obtaining lawful permanent residency, any benefits or privileges, and certainly citizenship.
It's dehumanising. They have committed an illegal act. The respectfully term would be "illegal immigrants." It's the difference between "black people" and "blacks." The latter was also once incredibly common parlance.
This is BS. I call people illegals or blacks just like I call them millennials or Christians. This is still standard parlance. You have to make a case as to why it’s dehumanizing if you want people to listen; you can’t just say it.
> You have to make a case as to why it’s dehumanizing if you want people to listen; you can’t just say it.
He (and his fellow travelers) assert it, therefore that is the way it is. It's an obnoxious but super-common way of driving ideological change (and keeping people on the outside).
For the most part, all these formulations (illegal, illegal immigrant, undocumented immigrant, person experiencing un-documentation) have an objectively equivalent meaning. The newer ones are kinda foolish attempts to use language games to change people's beliefs and perceptions, and really only function as shibboleths.
Correct, we could ban undergrads reading Wittgenstein and half of this BS would go away.
I generally ignore this because these changes both carry some level of significance in how people think, linguistic determinism wise, and because they turn into Havel’s Greengrocer type situations.
I did make a case, I thought that anyone using HN would have a good enough reading ability to take the inference about human first language from my examples. I understand you might have missed it because of your emotional reaction, evidenced by your jumping straight to swearing at me.
It's not bullshit, though, it's actually also extremely common parlance if you care to get out of your bubble. Watch a speech from a Democrat and you'll see that they probably prefer terms like "undocumented migrants." Look at style guides from publishers like the Associated Press and you'll see that they specifically warn against using agressive language like "illegals." This is not a fringe idea and it's strange to argue for your own term on the basis of it being "common" without recognising how commonly people feel that it is inappropriate, and without having the decency to offer a case as to why you feel they are wrong.
Maybe you use the term blacks just like you use Christians. Ok? That's specifically ignoring the explicit requests from various advocacy groups and ignoring the historical problems associated with the use of the term. If you're still making the case that you aren't a bigot this looks very unconcinving. Especially when you start talking about banning philosophy books just because you can't handle questions being raised about language. The world and its people are various and it's time that you learned you have to share it with people who have different views. You are on the wrong side of history today.
As a starting point? Sure. Marry a citizen or get a job, get residency, then apply for citizenship. Guy was ticking the correct boxes, not sneaking across the border.
Thanks to HN's naive and draconian policy prohibiting political discussion (which is itself a clear political statement) there is little point to discussing concerning issues like this as anyone expressing an opinion will be downvoted, shadow-banned, etc.
Let it also be noted that Garry Tan is overtly conservative (rails on X about many of the same social issues than animate Trump supporters) and PG holds strongly right wing (largely Burkean) views on many subjects.
edit: The discussion has already been flagged/suppressed. There is zero contemptuous discussion, only a few reasonable back and forth threads about various things.
> Thanks to HN's naive and draconian policy prohibiting political discussion
No such policy exists. There was a brief experiment with such a policy, years ago, and it was terminated early when it proved unworkable.
It is true that most, especially high-controversy, political discussion is outside of what the community here views as simultaneously being intellectually stimulating and something that is likely to be discussed without descending into an emotion-driven flamewar with of hyperbole, lies,and people talking past each other that has no value. And, fairly frequently, the controversial political topics that don't die right away to community moderation reinforce this point.
The strengths HN has a forum on some issues over places loke Twitter or Reddit or even yelling at people on a street corner simply are not there for many political controversies.
Do you consider people being deported without trial to be something "controversial"? I think most people consider bans on such things to be a basic principle of british common law and (with a few notable exceptions) a centuries old norm for western civilization.
> Do you consider people being deported without trial to be something "controversial"?
Is there, in fact, significant controversy over it?
Then, yes, it is controversial.
> I think most people consider bans on such things to be a basic principle of british common law
I don't think most people have any idea what “british common law” is, much less have a particular opinion about what it has to say about American immigration policy. And, AFAICT, British Common Law at the point it was last relevant to American law, that is, at the time of US independence, was somewhat unsettled on the matter, with leading scholars disagreeing over whether the power of removal was purely discretionary, required stating good cause, or might be subject to more stringent limits as to justification for certain aliens, see, e.g., the discussion at https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C18-8...
Habeas corpus was a universal right under English common law (and statute). Anybody who was detained (including in preparation to deport them) could demand a hearing to determine whether that detention was lawful. Even if the sovereign had total discretion to deport aliens, there was still a requirement to show that the person was in fact an alien. And one of the 17th century habeas acts (1679?) had severe penalties for hustling somebody out of the country as a way of avoiding the hearing.
The previous time the alien enemies act was exercised (putting Japanese Americans in camps during WW2) is widely viewed as having been highly inappropriate and regrettable act. Ronald Reagan officially apologized and paid $20K to the families of each person victimized.
> The previous time the alien enemies act was exercised (putting Japanese Americans in camps during WW2) is widely viewed as having been highly inappropriate and regrettable act.
This is often incorrectly cited as the last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, but EO 9066, under which the exclusion, and subsequent forced relocation of, Americans of Japanese descent from large swathes of the country, and some others, occurred does not cite as authority and was not tied to the Alien Enemies Act (which, by its own terms, only applies to aliens, not citizens.)
There were invocations of the Alien Enemies Act in the earlier proclamations of Dec. 7 and Dec. 8, 1941, but the exclusions and forced relocation under military authority under EO 9066 was broader and not based on the Alien Enemies Act.
I get that EO 9066 wasn’t directly tied to the Alien Enemies Act, but the internment itself still relied on wartime powers and ended up targeting Japanese Americans unjustly. Do you think the legal specifics change how we view the regret over those camps today?
Also FWIW Reagan's apology was addressed both to citizen and non-citizen victims of the camps.
> Do you think the legal specifics change how we view the regret over those camps today?
I think whether or not, and how, it was tied to the Alien Enemies Act is more than a little relevant to considering what purpose it can serve in discussing the Alien Enemies Act.
How we view the regret over the camps is, outside of that, mostly irrelevant to the context in which the issue was raised in this discussion.
> How we view the regret over the camps is, outside of that, mostly irrelevant to the context in which the issue was raised in this discussion.
How do you arrive at that conclusion?
The Japanese internment camps held both citizens and non-citizens. The camp in El Salvador currently holds mostly non-citizens but Trump issued a statement where he expressed enthusiasm for putting "home growns" in the camp as well. It is speculated that "home growns" refers to US citizens.
Obviously EO 9066 was necessary because the alien enemies act wasn't sufficient to intern citizens, and both citizens and non-citizens were put in the camps. Trump's comment about "home growns" suggests that he may issue a similar order, which in my view makes the two situations quite analogous with respect to the principles of law involved in taking people into custody without trial.
Tan is not especially conservative; he, like others, has witnessed a failure to address those social issues turn SF into a dump. There is a great difference between noticing the same objective problems as some Trump supporters - which are nigh impossible not to if one does live in SF - and supporting the same solutions. There is also a difference between the same underlying values and worldview and being willing to consider some of those solutions because the progressive options have spectacularly failed.
PG is not someone I'd consider remotely right-wing. I periodically see tweets of his surface and he seems strongly opposed to the current administration.
Who said the following, Garry Tan or Donald Trump?
“Soft-on-crime policies have turned SF into a free-for-all. Shoplifting, car break-ins, and open drug use aren’t victimless. We need a DA who’ll enforce the law and cops who aren’t afraid to act.”
Probably Tan? You are wholly ignoring my point: these are factual and obvious issues. Identifying them and proposing obvious solutions isn't being a Trump supporter. Trump does not have a monopoly on every position besides radical progressive.
Said progressives had their chance - more than enough chances - at fixing the issues in SF "their way". When one solution fails, it is natural and sensible to try others. This is why you can see SF voters shifting their positions too. I do not think that an incredibly leftist city magically turned into trump supporters.
It's not helpful for the left to act like Trump has a monopoly on legitimate use of law enforcement and maintaining some level of order.
Not trying to ignore your point. Generally the "right wing" view of crime is that it is solved by increasing coercive (authoritarian?) measures such as policing and punishment, with the implicit (sometimes explicit, as below) idea that it is the moral failings of the "criminals" that lead to crime, rather than systemic forces.
Tan (net worth $100M) explicitly rejects the systemic forces perspective and focuses on the moral failings of the weakest in society:
“Crime isn’t some abstract social problem—it’s people choosing to break the law. Stop excusing shoplifters and drug dealers as ‘victims of circumstance.’ We need consequences, not endless debates about root causes.”
I think I'd actually read many left-wingers more charitably here; the mainstream democrat opinion is still that systemic forces impact crime rates and should be addressed but not that those justify discarding policing or order in the mean time. That's a uniquely radical progressive take, by which the SF government was unfortunately captured. I think Tan's statement here is more a strong reaction against the failed progressive version seeking to drag the overton window in SF back towards normalcy. Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but Tan and YC have actually stuck around, unlike other people and companies who have simply left, so I'm guessing they're approaching this in good faith.
This aligns pretty well with my personal view. Maybe we can go figure out root causes later. Depending on those causes and the possible means to address them, maybe we can enact policy changes to reduce the amount of crime in the future. All that is, however, secondary to what we must do today: return to zero-tolerance policies for petty crime to make the city liveable again.
I'd argue that it's not at all radical, and that what characterizes SF's unique challenge has more to do with urban planning, geography, and climate than anything else:
Affluent areas are on big hills with little mass transit, which concentrates both mass transit and poverty in specific low lying areas, which also happen to suffer from minimal or bad urban planning. The climate makes SF attractive to unhoused people, and so they are drawn to the tolerant atmosphere and tend to thrive there even while dealing with addiction and substance abuse, mental health issues, etc. (compared to other places).
In other places they might be inmates or might be significantly malnourished, but SF offers a better balance, which is why so many find themselves there. Mild weather in winter and summer, a sanctuary city mentality, and the high value of personal freedom that led to the Castro and Haight being epicenters for social progress and culture over the years. Cosmopolitanism and tolerance abound, and so of course we'll see our underclass more active, more overt, less beaten down, and notably more offensive to those who seek a country club atmosphere.
SF has 30% lower mortality rate for homeless people than other sanctuary cities like Chicago. The problem is that the right-wing perspective presents the downtrodden effectively as rats who are a scourge on society, so most people overlook that people (yes they are human beings) migrate to SF for a better life, and in spite of the challenges they face, many find it.
Please don't misquote me; I didn't call people lunatics. There are radical wings to both the left and right. You can argue that, but that's true is that the problems in SF have objectively gotten much, much worse. All the problems you're calling out are true, and many of the reasons you're saying homeless stay are true. What's also true is that there's a big discontinuity in crime rates and decay of public order that matches much more closely with changes in policing and justice along with some social programs.
I quoted you with the > symbol and Trump with normal quotes. Apologies for the confusion.
> decay of public order that matches much more closely with changes in policing and justice
I don't think anyone is claiming that SF could not implement Singapore style policing (for example) and see improvements in "public order".
Right wing solutions abound, everything from putting people in rehabilitation camps, mental hospitals, mandatory jail time for minor offenses, inpatient substance abuse facilities, chemical castration of the poor, deportations to El Salvador, etc.
Many in the US have a right wing impulse when thinking about certain types of criminality, typically the kinds of crimes committed by the underclass. This impulse builds on disgust, fear and dehumanization, but the foundational element is moral judgment of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. I think it's helpful to have a mental heuristic to reduce susceptibility to this kind of thinking.
Consider, for example, the amount of insider trading that occurred in financial markets recently from all of the pumping of markets with various tariff announcements. The money stolen via insider trading would be more than enough to buy a 3000 square foot home and personal chef services for 15 years for every single homeless person in the bay area. Let's not pretend that smashed car windows are the only kind of crime that matters.
In today's world with such rampant fraud and white collar crime everywhere, anyone who uses their platform to focus people's attention on the crime of the weakest among us clearly has a very right wing view of whose lawlessness needs to be stopped and whose should be permitted.
I don't like Singapore's solution; I think it's too authoritarian. Most people agree that there are benefits to a police state in terms of public order but we consciously forsake those in exchange for liberty.
What does nothing for liberty, and also nothing for public order, is allowing open-air drug use. Is failing to prosecute property crime. Is catch-and-release policing because the DA won't do squat. I don't think the common man cares about this due to dehumanization of the poor, it's due to the fact that we are the ones actually victimized by this. Joe average is much less affected by John Wallstreet trading on insider information. His car getting busted into and robbed? Packages getting stolen from his front porch? His wife getting harassed and terrified by drugged-out schizos, while unable to so much as carry a handgun for her own defense? Those victimize the common man and so the common man cares about them.
Saying this is a right-wing impulse is, I think, precisely what put Trump in office. Twice. The democrats were largely subverted by progressives and ceded this monopoly on the idea of public order to the republicans. Why is it such a stretch to say that yes, we believe that the common man should be protected from wage theft or pollution, and also we believe that he should be protected from violent or criminal impulses?
The reality of the situation is that while yes, insider trading or other white-collar crime has an impact on the average American, it's much less tangible. And ultimately, it's less emotionally harmful and poses no risk of violence. Please don't mistake me; we should strongly punish both. But it's responses like this to ordinary people showing up to city hall meetings or political fora and saying, "What about all this crime that's happening to me?" It's these responses, in the vein of, "Why would we care when there are Madoffs to catch?" that turn people away from the left.
> Saying this is a right-wing impulse is, I think, precisely what put Trump in office. Twice. The democrats were largely subverted by progressives and ceded this monopoly on the idea of public order to the republicans. Why is it such a stretch to say that yes, we believe that the common man should be protected from wage theft or pollution, and also we believe that he should be protected from violent or criminal impulses?
You may be right about this.
But if you zoom out, how is it that we are at a moment in civilization with unprecedented wealth, unprecedented technology, unprecedented nutrition, unprecedented medical care, unprecedented education and access to information, and yet politicians gain power at the federal level by railing against petty street crime?
Right-wing impulse thinking is generally what is most desirable to people who have already fully "made it" financially want -- things like a country club atmosphere (no visible poverty or crime), a suburban style layout (private over public transit, low density housing, private security, etc.)
For most people, such an arrangement is suboptimal. Higher density housing is much less expensive and safer, public transit is much more efficient, economic heterogeneity an opportunity for economic interaction and small business creation, etc.
In the US people have been told they need to live in the suburbs and have a big mortgage on a massive property (often 1000+ square feet and one bathroom per person) to escape the dangers of urban crime. They often purchase expensive cars and spend 2-3 hours per day commuting to an office, tying up most of their leisure time.
This of course reduces government revenue in urban, higher density areas, which does lead to increased crime. But you can see how it's a cycle perpetuated by right-wing impulse style thinking. Many Americans are already very bought into this mentality with respect to housing, but they do not realize the extent to which it shapes other aspects of their worldview.
To a significant extent, the financial allocations of people across the US for many decades is invested in perpetuating suburban property values and social values (fear of urban density, fear of economic diversity, fear of crime, etc.).
People like Garry Tan with $100M net worth should be the ones focusing on bringing the fruits of our modern civilization to more people, not calling for them to be punished. It's a bad look and it has the same effect as Trump's rallying cry against the weakest -- it promotes the narrative that suburban, country club isolation from economic diversity is humane and desirable, and it pretends that rather than living in times of unprecedented abundance, we face such scarcity that we should abandon our empathy for the weakest among us. I'm not sure how things could get more ugly.
Politicians gain power at the federal level by railing against petty street crime because people feel the local level has been so totally captured by people divorced from their priorities. So, they turn to the feds hoping they can fix things instead.
I don't think wanting a safe neighborhood clean of debris and crime is necessarily "right-wing", and this is precisely my point. A few years ago I co-founded a non-profit working mostly with inner-city youth, got to know them and their parents well. One of the primary complaints their parents had was the fact that "justice" initiatives and policing changes had increased the level of crime in bad neighborhoods which victimized them. They weren't any less hurt than the suburbanites who wanted to avoid their cars getting burgled. They weren't less-affected because they didn't live in 1000+sqft houses commuting an hour each way.
I don't think crime exists because of low revenues in inner cities. Everything I know about American history shows it flowed the opposite way: people expanded because they didn't want to be around crime and other inconveniences of living close into cities; that crime didn't show up because people expanded.
I don't think Tan wants to punish people intrinsically, I think he wants to focus on the 99% of people who are victimized by crime rather than the 1% who commit it. This isn't really about country-club isolation, it's just as much, maybe more, about people living in cities being able to live in peace. Without feces on the streets, without fear of property or violent crime.
Social spending on poor people predisposed to these types of crime has only gone up over the past decades. Crime hasn't magically fallen in proportion with that spending. This suggests that it's not the silver bullet for solving this problem. Additionally, SF has spent huge amounts of money on "housing-first" policies which have broadly failed because they don't recognize that a large number of the homeless aren't really that willing to seek treatment or to go to inpatient psych care where they belong.
And lastly, the middle class is still the bulk of America. Telling them that they must sacrifice their dreams of raising a family in peace, consign themselves and their families to petty crime so Fred Junkie can buy fent, accept their wives and daughters won't feel safe being out past dark, is just a non-starter. I consider it deeply immoral, but politically, it's simply not expedient. No party that holds up this as its moral paradigm can be expected to win.
> A few years ago I co-founded a non-profit working mostly with inner-city youth
I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your reply and give major credit to you for being personally and directly involved. Much respect.
People wanting to be able to live in a safe environment free from violence and coercion is the essence of the social contract. We create institutional structures like a judicial system and penal system in an attempt to create fair systems that create the desired incentives for all.
There are certainly a small number of people who suffer from mental illness and substance abuse challenges that render them incapable of participating in the social contract in the same way as other people. Society has replaced private charity with state welfare which also includes care for the elderly, for orphans, etc.
I think the defining characteristic of a properly functioning social contract is that it provides an incentive for everyone to cooperate and to preserve the status quo. SF is at a disadvantage because of how badly other cities treat the underserved. I've heard stories even about private hospitals in SF putting very ill homeless patients in a taxi and sending them to the public hospital (in violation of a multitude of laws and ethical standards), and a similar scenario exists with other cities that are less hospitable to the have nots.
Thus SF has become a sanctuary city. Much like a bird sanctuary that offers habitat to beings that would otherwise starve or die off, SF provides habitat for humans who simply would not have anywhere to go.
In the past we've had laws that criminalize drugs and prevent many modes of treatment, creating a drug epidemic in the US far worse than exists in places that provide care without moral judgment. But in the US moral judgment is insatiable and sells politically.
That's why I am trying to help identify what I call the "right-wing impulse", the idea of the downtrodden as the political "other" that must be feared and stopped. While any kind of dehumanization rhetoric is harmful and cuts of empathy and critical thought, dehumanization targeting the weakest in society has been strongly on the rise in the US in recent years.
In my view, the post-911 response of "see something, say something" and widespread, state sponsored suspicion of brown people fueled what would eventually become Trump's anti-immigrant (fundamentally anti-brown) movement. The US Government spent billions on advertising telling us to fear or neighbors.
The right wing impulse is what the public is trained to have by that kind of advertising. The idea that we should be suspicious, fearful, and that policing and surveillance is the solution.
Much like an abundant apple orchard will attract all kinds of species with the smell of blossoms and fruit, an abundant society will attract people from all walks of life. It will give hope to those who are too damaged to be contributors to society and whose role it is to receive charity. I think we need to change our impulse response from the right-wing one to the realization that it is our good fortune that makes our cities places where those with no hope go to find hope.
This is pretty-well considered; you're right that the SF's policies and climate go a long way to contributing to the problem. And yes, if other cities treated them better, SF's problem would be smaller. Sometimes this is due to a lack of services, to be sure, but SF's services are so unsustainably expensive that even were we to radically increase taxation and scale this federally, it wouldn't work. The "NGO-industrial complex" through which this is washed is the big culprit here, I think. But so is the fact that we do a bad job of caring for those who cannot participate. They cannot really live on their own, cannot keep their housing clean or well-maintained. At some level, the only thing to be done here is to move them to in-patient care, at least until they are psychologically stabilized.
This is really hard to do nowadays, legally speaking. The changes that made it so are entirely understandable: after reports of the incredible institutional abuse of the mentally ill, after the age of lobotomies being the craze, it's no wonder everyone agreed we were due for a change. But the pendulum swung too far, and this is helpful neither for the homeless nor for those who live near them. Psych hospitals are objectively not great and we should improve them. But living out on the street, hopelessly addicted or mentally ill with no treatment, isn't really better. I'm afraid we've let the perfect become the enemy of the good, let the valid conclusion that state psych wards are not nice places blind us to the streets being worse for at least some people.
This doesn't apply to those who are legitimately just down on their luck, obviously; for them, housing-first policies can work much better.
No arguments with you that state-sponsored suspicion is bad. That said, Trump just won all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, an extremely Latino-dominant area that was a democratic stronghold. He's consistently performing better than any other republican in my lifetime amongst many minority groups (though with a heavy bias towards men), so he must be tapping into something more than anti-brown.
I see what you're saying about this being at some level a right-wing impulse, and distrust of the other is much more right-wing versus the classical left-wing openness. I just don't know that you will ever get people to be substantially open to those whom they see as victimizing them: this moves past the right-leaning "I don't like this other" to the fairly neutral "I don't like this person who is harming me." If I am mugged, my empathy for that person is zero. Maybe it should be different, and that may soften with time, but it's extremely hard to give people sermons on why they should really feel for the guy who just took their wallets at knifepoint.
All that said I agree with most of the issues you've identified. I'm a big fan of localism, moving things to smaller governance areas, because that does seem to resolve many of the scaling issues of democracy. My hope is that helps us apply empathy more consistently where it's deserved: it's much easier for me to look at folks in my city whom I know and figure out how to help them out than it is to do this for folks up in Washington, or over in South Carolina, or wherever.
The other side of this is crime committed by people besides the homeless. I think for that, you'll seldom get much sympathy, and that's incredibly unlikely to change. This is because most of us who are still sympathetic to the homeless are creating an exception to our dislike of people who wrong us, not defaulting to empathy as our first response. I'm not sure how realistically this is fixable. As much as government rhetoric doesn't help, most people get pissed when someone cuts them off in traffic. They don't think, "Wow, I bet that person is having a bad day, or has somewhere to be." And there's no government rhetoric telling them to flip that guy the bird.
I can see the value in telling people to avoid the us for travel and work, but I'm not sure I see much people can do to change this situation other than being more cautious?
> but I'm not sure I see much people can do to change this situation other than being more cautious?
The rate things are going, y'all need to revive the Underground Railroad or, to use a more historically accurate comparison, what a few German citizens did during 1933-1945 - hide foreigners in your homes to prevent them being sent off to extermination camps.
It's not particularly constructive to talk about "extermination camps" when there is no particular evidence of that. Disrespecting rule of law is bad but an aggressive deportation policy after years of ignoring it, given that we don't have the infrastructure to support eleven million cases, is at least understandable in motivation. It's the only practical way to deport all of them, not a few thousand like most admins end up doing, though I disagree with these means of addressing the issue as opposed to forcing self-deports.
> It's not particularly constructive to talk about "extermination camps" when there is no particular evidence of that.
Yet. That's the thing. Remember the "Hang Mike Pence" chants, the gallows they brought Jan 6th? The administration and its fanbase are not shy of calling for terminal violence.
I'm German, we all learn in school how the 1933-1945 regime started. And it didn't start with extermination campaigns directly back then as well - it started with confiscating and burning books, with one of the first targets being the Hirschfeld Institute that was researching LGBT questions. And over time, pressure ratcheted up, and target lists increased. People were snatched from the streets, secret police rounded up houses, and eventually they ended up corralling off entire neighborhoods, swiftly disposing of the people in the extermination camps.
Are we just pretending that calls for political violence aren't more or less de rigueur in today's political climate? Years of "fiery but mostly peaceful" protests, of people celebrating the multiple assassination attempts on Trump, etc. I'm "both sidesing" this not out of a pathological compulsion to defend right-wingers but because pretending this is unique to the right wing means we'll misidentify the underlying cause and fail to fix it.
> It's not particularly constructive to talk about "extermination camps" when there is no particular evidence of that.
Just FYI: Trump's border czar Tom Homan literally said he plans to "eradicate" supposed "foreign threats" on Fox News [1].
I seriously don't know how many more masks have to fall before people finally take this administration and its actors beyond Trump serious. There is no way to downplay, deny or otherwise misinterpret Project 2025. It is happening right in front of your eyes.
If the only practical way to deport the "right" amount of people is to disobey the courts and catch innocent Americans in the dragnet and deny them of due process, then maybe we shouldn't do that.
You say that their motivations are understandable, but so are the reasons behind extermination camps. They are ruthlessly efficient. Having a reason for doing something does not make it right, just, or legal.
At the end of the day, we have sent dozens of immigrants with legal status and no criminal history to El Salvador's version of Guantanamo Bay, where people do indeed die with regularity. Here's something from last year:
So, we're sending Americans of a certain stripe (color) to camps in other countries where there is no escape, and where it is not unlikely they will perish.
This is such a straw man. The motives behind extermination camps aren't, actually. The reasonable response to someone entering your country illegally is to remove him. This is proportionate and just. I think Trump is very much skirting the rules and figure courts will smack him over it, but it's about time we changed the system so illegals can be quickly removed without fifty thousand appeals. Otherwise the system does not work and we are conceding our borders to a flood of third-worlders, which is a bad idea.
It's also essential we alter our asylum system such that anybody who skips over another country to get here is automatically denied. If someone is fleeing guatemala and has to travel up through central America to get here, he should not be granted asylum. Stop in any one of those countries you passed along the way.
Note that legal status can be revoked for anyone besides a citizen. This is actually one of the less illegal moves trump's admin has made. I have a problem with what appears to be targeting based on support for palestine but not with the core concept: they all have to go back. Every single one of them.
> conceding our borders to a flood of third-worlders
Feels a bit like a mask off moment.
there's a mountain of evidence that shows immigrants are the backbone of important parts of our economy, pay taxes, and commit crimes at a far lower rate than native born people.
The laws and processes around immigration are a significant factor in creating "illegals." Why not adjust our laws to accommodate normal, innocent people who come here simply to work, live, and survive?
If we applied more resources to processing immigrants and making it easier to come here legally it would be a boon to our population, economy, and subjectively, our culture.
The opposite is true for deporting 11 million people. The cost outweigh the benefits at every single turn, unless your ultimate benefit is removing the supposed "third worlders" i.e. brown people. (aside: why is a person from the third world an inherent negative?)
The border should be permeable to people escaping oppression or looking for a better life. It's not like we're hurting for space or money, we just actually have to DO something.
Here is some great fact-based review of our immigration policies (from a source typically opposed to my worldview, mind you)
on your final point, regarding Palestinian support: what about the perfectly legal immigrants that we have deported because of political views? That seems particularly fascist to me.
No, there's not. George Borjas' "We Wanted Workers" is a pretty good summary of why. He analyzed the annual benefits of immigration to America in 2015 and found it came to about $2.1T. However, 98% of that went straight to those same immigrants. The remaining $50B, 2% or so, wasn't really surplus. He estimated a net transfer from workers ($516B loss) to the capitalist class ($566B).
There is a reason Sanders, when asked about open borders, called it a "Koch Brothers policy". If you are an average person, mass immigration is a really shitty policy, doubly so when we no longer need the same level of new people to run factories. High-skill immigration where people eagerly assimilate is a neutral or good thing; a huge number of mostly single young men is not. I consider the latter point particularly relevant, as increasing the number of men versus women is a socially disastrous policy from everything I know of history.
How will unskilled immigrants create a boon for our economy? How will that help our population when housing prices are already so high and so many are out of work? How will it help our culture, objectively or subjectively? This isn't an attempt to ask for demanding answers to questions so I can "gotcha" later, I'm legit curious, particularly on the culture point, how you think it would help.
I used "third-worlder" as code for 1. uneducated, 2. poor, 3. usually a single man, and 4. culturally dissimilar. Being an American is not defined by a piece of paper. We all know what it is and what it looks like. Our virtue is that, unlike a european nation, that's not constrained by ethnicity. A somali can never really be a briton, but he can be an American. However, that doesn't mean we are without defining attributes; we replaced the old-style combination of ethnicity and culture with just culture. As such, we must cling all the harder to that culture and those shared values, precisely because it's what lets us admit white, black, brown, red, and yellow without diluting or destroying what makes America herself.
You say "we're not hurting for space". I say I resent the idea that we should tear up more of our beautiful country for more people, or pack in ever closer like sardines in a can.
I actually really respect you linking cato; that's a pretty solid summary you linked. I think perhaps I miscommunicated my position somehow. I am not opposed to immigration. Given that our population will end up declining otherwise, I think at the very least, it's fine to admit enough people to maintain it. I do not think that importing tons of any one group at a time is good; that breeds ethnic ghettoes which tend to produce poverty and slow assimilation. I do not think that importing tons of young, single men is good; that's a legitimate social risk. I think the "who will pick the strawberries" argument has slowed investments we should have made in automation and robotics over the past decades and we desperately need to catch up on that, as over a sufficiently long time, the rest of the world will "catch up". We already see this with cost of chinese labor rising, even cost of Mexican relative to other latin american countries. We can not simply find the next cheapest country forever.
I do not support deporting legal immigrants over support for Palestine. That act would make more sense if we were discussing an actual enemy nation, e.g. china, but obviously it's much easier for Trump to beat up on the little guy who's barely a state than actually stand up to a credible threat. There is a reason I didn't vote for Trump and don't consider myself a supporter; my hope is we can bring a bit more common sense to non-maga republicans' and democrats' visions of immigration to remove his base of support.
I've sent it, and if our numbers don't agree, then I'm inclined to believe the more recent study with more various reliable sources. Tax revenue is a net positive for Americans. You can't repatriate what you pay in taxes. Tax revenue can be used to build affordable housing (egads) among a myriad of other public works.
> If you are an average person, mass immigration is a really shitty policy, doubly so when we no longer need the same level of new people to run factories.
This is not true at all. It's simply fact that immigrants are taking jobs that Americans otherwise _do not fill themselves_. Perhaps that's because of the below-minimum wage compensation, or perhaps it's because Americans are used to a certain amount of comfort. On top of this, as you note, we're below our replacement rate, and that rate is going to fall, just as it has over the years both here and in other developed economies. You seem to have a problem with the "wrong type" of people coming here, and that itself indicates to me that your problems with immigrants go beyond pure economics.
> How will unskilled immigrants create a boon for our economy? How will that help our population when housing prices are already so high and so many are out of work? How will it help our culture, objectively or subjectively?
Housing prices are irrelevant to immigration. The level of inflation we're seeing is not because of a population spike. It's a valid concern, though. Immigrants buy stuff when they're here and they pay taxes. They create businesses and generate economic value, regardless of whether they repatriate anything.
Re:culture - Let's say culture is art, food, and attitude. Would I rather have white people taco night (which admittedly I do love), or semi-authentic mexican taco night? When I lived in FL, I had easy access to so many amazing mexican, peruvian, brazilian, cuban, haitian, etc. etc. etc. restaurants. Artists from other countries create works with different perspectives that are unique and thought provoking -- inherently different because of where they were raised, and because their experience is inherently different than mine.
Immigrants are also extremely entrepreneurial and create small businesses that benefit their local communities. Restaurants, yard work, painters, contractors, etc. Not that those are the only types of businesses they create or can create, that's just offhandedly from personal experience.
Let's talk for a second about the "young men" problem -- rather, the lack thereof. These people are no different than you or I. Even the most disparate of cultures across this green earth have commonality between them. We are humans, we bleed the same, we value family/community, we value integrity, we value productivity. Can you imagine yourself as a young man in Mexico living under the threat of death, torture, kidnapping etc. because you refuse to play ball with the cartel? Or because a family member has slighted them in some way? Stood in the way? What if you had the exact same aptitude for learning and productivity as you do now? Can you not place yourself in the shoes of these young men? Why are/were you better than them? Because you were born on the right side of a line?
Why are we afraid of young men? Young men are a bulk of the workforce. Young men historically do some of the hardest, most dangerous jobs. What makes them different than you or I other than (presumably) the color of their skin? Their nation of origin? Jack squat. Dispel with this myth that young brown men are scary and present a threat to your "society" and "culture." Some sources:
> But anecdotal impression cannot substitute for scientific evidence. In fact, data from the census and other sources show that for every ethnic group, without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated and the least acculturated.
If they're not committing crimes; if they're working for the good of themselves, their families, and their host nation, what the hell is the problem? I'll take this point seriously when we start having significant demographic issues because of too many men (like China, e.g.).
First generation immigrants will ALWAYS have the hardest time acclimating to the culture. I was lucky enough to have many friends with 1st generation immigrant parents. Some here legally, some not. They spoke our language, however broken, and their children were red white and blue Americans. What kind of culture shock exists between Mexico and the United States? Peru? El Salvador? Brazil? To pretend we're so different that they cannot assimilate is frankly xenophobic, and I cannot presently see it another way.
> You say "we're not hurting for space". I say I resent the idea that we should tear up more of our beautiful country for more people, or pack in ever closer like sardines in a can.
The last thing I support is the desecration of our federal lands and national parks (which is currently happening and is a crying shame). We do not need to build there to build housing. The American obsession with living on a large plot of land where you can hardly see the neighbors through the trees must end. We must be okay with apartments. Our cities must be planned better and our policies must change. Shelter is a human right, not a commodity to be bought and sold by the capitalist class.
On the point of automation, it's absurd to think "who will pick the strawberries" == a lack of automation. We will automate anything and everything as long as the gains outweigh the opportunity cost. Workers are the most expensive part of any operation, and we've automated swaths of farming already. See corn, wheat, etc. In the future, perhaps strawberry picking will be automated, but the reason it's not now is not because we let too many young men in to pick them.
Your arguments are not without reason, and I greatly respect any conservative (small 'c') who's willing to stand up to the stupidity and cruelty of the Trump admin. We're in total agreement about political speech deportations.
Something you haven't addressed is the exorbitant cost (human and monetary) of deporting 11 million people. The Trump admin is completely okay deporting teenagers through cases of mistaken identity to El Salvadorian Gitmo. The cost will be staggering. These people are already here and we are thriving as a nation. What would it mean to naturalize these people? What would it mean to at least give them a path to citizenship that doesn't take 10 years and thousands of dollars? Cruelty seems to be the point. Xenophobia seems to be the reason. This is a purely political issue, and innocent people are being caught in the crossfire for no reason other than to score a few points, win some power, make some millions.
I'll close by saying we have huge problems with immigration. Our border is militarized and our processes incentivize illegal immigration. Border states do not receive enough funding or federal direction for how to handle immigrants, and are left with disgusting tactics like bussing to spread the pain. The true root is our policy, and if we were actually interested in solving the problems, we'd throw more money and resources at it, rather than pretending it's possible to deport 11 million people without engendering something akin to a holocaust.
Question, since I can't seem to find the answer anywhere: is he actually discussing deportation or is he effectively talking about using Salvadoran prisons on a contract basis? That's probably not especially humane; then again, neither are existing private prisons. We do have crazy crowding and overflow problems so I can understand the motivation though I doubt El Salvador is providing much in the way of better conditions.
El Salvador is chosen because no matter what even the Supreme Court says or should this administration be yeeted out of office, as long as Bukele doesn't say otherwise, there is nothing short of a military invasion that can bring any of these prisoners back.
But when visas are getting revoked from equating "hey guys, maybe war crimes against Palestinian civilians are bad" with terrorism I do not think we can trust that any legal precedent will be leveraged only for its stated purpose.
> Edit: apologies but I must leave the desk for a few hours - I will not be able to try and help moderate the submission for a while. As always, I recommend being cold headed, rational and productive.
Do you mean voting on comments like a regular user? You're not one of the official moderators (dang and tomhow), but your phrasing seems like you're putting on airs like you are one.
I mean also taking care of monitoring posts and trying to steer towards and objective of discussion towards assessment, as opposed to visceral reactions, through replies.
When I submit something I try to take some relative responsibility towards the submission - through participation. When I submit something that has undesirable sides (as in, we wish this was not news), I take further responsibility in trying to make the discussion work.
> airs
We are not children. ;) By the way, you are obliged at least by the guidelines to assume we are not, whenever a doubt arises. And in general, it is more hygienic for you if you avoid going around with lowly traits painted on your glasses.
No, Mr. Marrek. My words are very much chosen, to the extent that my time allows. I am very certainly not using CollectiveBot to express my own thought.
I am not sure about what you could not understand. "I am sorry, as I would like to submit news about more pleasant matters, but reality is more pressing; I see that available information tell us that some events of potential particular concern emerge, as special cases in the running trends; I believe that it is best to transmit the information to this public, also as many of us have some relation with the source of those events and trends".
I have often .... (what is the word for it, disrupted? enlightened?) communities highly focused on a single topic with a meta conversation about general topics. It is of course great to have [say] a physics community and talk about physics but also rather sad that such gathering of analytical people cant talk about other things that very much need their attention. It gets rather absurd where people who talk for many years and are deeply familiar with the others perspective inside the domain NEVER talk about anything outside of it. It is how these online gatherings function and why they work so well but it prevents building quality relationships in the time tested ancient way.
We are missing out on truly hilarious insights, when you present professionals from one discipline wiht topics from another. A biologist might judge the fitness of the economy by fertility and average life span.
Not sure what the solution to the riddle is but I suspect walled gardens are the problem. How to code a "bring your own community everywhere" I have no idea.
The expectation of mine is that there should be a "technical" perspective to general topics. What I mean is there need to be more critical thinking and intelligent analysis, just as is the case with all technical topics. Just consider the other post about decensoring pixelated videos with Ai. If the same kind analysis and style of thinking about the topic is brought to political discussions... that's what I mean. For example, intelligent sociological analytical perspective of the political thing at hand. An unconditional exercise of critical thinking...
However, political discussions seem to not even devolve from a higher standard, but remain at the most infantile level of emotional outbursts. Oppiniated without interest in analysis. Well... likely exaggerating, but anyway. (perhaps my bias)
So it's best proposed to a community who is used to suppress low quality posts (more than others).
> However, political discussions seem
to require extra care at this stage.
By the way, and importantly, I would not call this submission a political matter, because it is not a "how to administer the State" matter (let alone partisanship): as I stated in the introductory post, I see these events as emerging changes in the state of the World and its dynamics, that require assessment from an attentive public.
Not really. Maybe "resource for news and comments for intellectually curious people, with an orientation towards an active participation or just exploration in the current world - involving technology and entrepreneurship".
I have already made a statement in my introductory post on why I decided to submit this.
With this guy, I can find no fault. If you watch his 60 Minutes interview, it seems heartfelt and authentic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grj328-hlhA Plus, if he was born Palestinian and is now a Buddhist, that means that he willingly chose to endure the risk of getting killed as an apostate.
Something must be done.