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The Tangent, Derail, and Argument Thread

If your goal is to stop new members wandering into an echo chamber, then making said echo chamber harder to find is going result in fewer people wandering in.

Do you actually believe that deplatforming and censorship don't work?
As should be clearly indicated by the message quoted in the post you replied to, the goal in question is to prevent mass shooter levels of radicalization. As mass shootings only take one nutjub, the better path is largely to leash the nutjobs in how far off the deep end they can go, rather than concentrate them so they can keep getting more and more extreme without warning. The more public the discourse, the better, because it can be monitored when it's public.

And if there is no echo chamber, because there's no need for it from not having the mainstream primary public discourse platforms banhammer dissent from Silicone Valley morality into the underground, then people aren't wandering into an echo chamber. They're running into crazy new ideas, and the counterarguments to those ideas. You're never getting rid of echo chambers to an effective degree without total censorship authority like China has, which no Western country possesses, and when the question is "how do we stop the radicalization into mass shooters", it's extremity that is what is being targeted with this questioning, not scale. It doesn't matter how many alt-right people there are in this case, what matters is how far off the deep end they go.

When we are talking about the extremes of radicalization, the solution is to prevent echo chambers where the extremes are driven further. To have disruption in radicalization from the opposed viewpoint being present. When we're talking the pervasiveness, how often people able to be considered part of some group, then confining them to echo chambers works better, as there will be fewer in absolute numbers, but there will then be a higher rate of outliers like mass shooters because these echo chambers breed genuine extremism. And if they manage to gain power despite such confinement, it will be used for far worse abuses, regardless of how limited it is. And they won't be fixable, because they justifiably assume conspiracy against them, where permitting them to speak in the most public of places (and get shitcanned by the public, but they're able to speak and being shat on by their peers instead of giant corporations they have no ability to impact) would undermine that assumption.

Ultimately, the reason Stormfront exists is because we already ban neonazis off all the major public platforms. If they weren't, they wouldn't have these highly-concentrated echochambers that people who only touch on some of the positions get forced into and made to adopt all the nonsense because they can't talk to people outside the echo-chamber. If you just oppose trans normalization, the advocacy of treating them as no different from cisgender persons despite their demands for medicinal treatment and wish for them to be recognized as a medical abnormality like every other case of needing medical intervention for a comfortable life, and get banned off Twitter and Facebook for this difference in why and details of how to accommodate them, then get stuck with /pol/ as your only place of discussing politics, you'll end up drifting to far more extreme positions, and far more of them. Because you no longer get exposed to the humanizing of transgender persons, and begin being exposed to the ideas of purging the lesser-able instead of accommodating for what they're below par in, alongside all the other extremism without opposition.

And yes, that's me describing my view own on transgenderism. Accommodate them as a medical abnormality. Like every other situation where people need chemicals pumped into them to feel comfortable with life. We do it for highly specific mental deficiencies in stress management and mood stability, what logical reason is there to not include people who feel an incongruity with social expectations of the sexes and which one they physically are that is severe to the point of impairing social function? Lets them benefit from all the existing systems for handling medical abnormalities, and the arguments that this is somehow dehumanizing are themselves arguments that dehumanize all the other abnormalities. Like my own autism. So if you think my position on transgenderism is "transphobic", you're implicitly ableist in a way that is specifically applicable to me, personally, by thinking that being categorizing as a medical abnormality for neurological abnormalities causing significant divergences from social norms is a bad thing in its own right. Or that abnormality is equivalent to inferior, which also disparages me and those like me for our fundamental difficulties with comprehending social interaction as it occurs among the neurotypical.
 
Saw an interesting and rather intelligent debate regarding democracy vs. authoritarianism in the SArS discord, then some idiot showed up and started misgendering people, accusing them of being anarchists and being an hysterical ass in general.
 
I'll gust leave it here.
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I'll gust leave it here.
JcMni3z.jpg
Think you may be confused. This is the thread for continuing arguments from elsewhere that were derailing the original thread, not the random shitpost thread. We have one but this isn't it
 
And yes, that's me describing my view own on transgenderism. Accommodate them as a medical abnormality. Like every other situation where people need chemicals pumped into them to feel comfortable with life. We do it for highly specific mental deficiencies in stress management and mood stability, what logical reason is there to not include people who feel an incongruity with social expectations of the sexes and which one they physically are that is severe to the point of impairing social function? Lets them benefit from all the existing systems for handling medical abnormalities, and the arguments that this is somehow dehumanizing are themselves arguments that dehumanize all the other abnormalities. Like my own autism. So if you think my position on transgenderism is "transphobic", you're implicitly ableist in a way that is specifically applicable to me, personally, by thinking that being categorizing as a medical abnormality for neurological abnormalities causing significant divergences from social norms is a bad thing in its own right. Or that abnormality is equivalent to inferior, which also disparages me and those like me for our fundamental difficulties with comprehending social interaction as it occurs among the neurotypical.

Medical abnormality, eh. Is that another way of saying freak now?

Seriously by that standard eventually everyone not on some narrowly defined spectrum of behaviour will be put into an asylum because they're 'a medical abnormality'. You sure you want to use that argument, @Morphile?
 
Medical abnormality, eh. Is that another way of saying freak now?

Seriously by that standard eventually everyone not on some narrowly defined spectrum of behaviour will be put into an asylum because they're 'a medical abnormality'. You sure you want to use that argument, @Morphile?
Are you suggesting that all people with mental disorders should be put in an asylum? Are you saying I deserve to be put in a mental asylum? Because in that very quote, I point out that I'm autistic myself. Which is a large chunk of why the sort of response you're giving here pisses me off. Because I find it demeaning to all the people like me specifically that you're implying have something truly wrong with them with your out-of-hand denial of even considering taking transgender persons as a medical condition instead of a demographic. Without any logic to why they shouldn't be among the same ranks. You are the one to bring up mental asylums, not me. All I mentioned was existing systems to handle such abnormalities. No details, that's all on you, and it says a lot about you that you immediately jump to mental asylums. At best, you presume extremely abhorrent behavior of me alongside a large failure of reading comprehension.

If trans people, both transgender and transsexual, have significant neurological abnormalities from the norm for their physical sex, the "female brain in a male body" claim, then it stands to reason that a neurological examination would be a straightforward diagnostic tool... Which implies them as having a neurological disorder, as it is a condition in need of diagnosis with neurological examination, with defined symptoms, both behavioral and structural. This is further supported as there is a demand of medical treatment, the usage of hormone therapy and reconstructive surgery to resolve the incongruity between their neurology and the rest of their physiology. All I'm saying is that, to my knowledge, trans people have been well defined with many properties of mental disorders, including the presence of claimed neurological differences from their biological sex's standards that form a diagnostic condition, and thus they ought to be accommodated under medical practice, not demographic legislation. It's a "what box do they go in, demographic or medical, so we can handle their needs properly" question, to me.

If the medical experts say the transition is the only treatment that gets anywhere and counseling is a wash, so be it, I'm perfectly fine with that. But that should be on the medical experts. Not minors. Not twitter-obsessed nutcases. Not people who just claim they should be a certain way, without any standards to be held to.
 
Nope, because you put 'medical abnormality' yourself. I just want to make sure you realize what a slippery slope that is.

Suddenly looking down your nose at transgendered persons doesn't seem so funny at all, huh?
 
Nope, because you put 'medical abnormality' yourself. I just want to make sure you realize what a slippery slope that is.
I'm autistic. I'm pretty damn sure I'm in the line of fire a hell of a lot before them, or not exactly far off in the slightest.

If the point was to bring up where the train of logic ends, then this is something that needs mentioned in the same post, instead of as a way of dismissing everything I said. If you're not actually making that argument yourself, then this must be clarified within the same post, otherwise I'm incapable of arguing against your point because you gave no indication of what it was.

Suddenly looking down your nose at transgendered persons doesn't seem so funny at all, huh?
Again, I am autistic, you goddamn moron. I'm wanting them level with me. Explicitly so, in the medical abnormality box with me, because they fit the box, to my knowledge, drawing from the trans rights movement's own data. Not placing myself above them. Seeing where they are now as ridiculous because it's arbitrarily above me, without any logical reason for that, and I hate the philosophy and religious reasons brought up because they're unfalsifiable belief-based reasons based on spirituality and metaphysics. And the emotional arguments, as mentioned previously, read of an awful lot of ableism demeaning to me, specifically, and a hell of a lot of other people.
 
Dude you're autistic, not debilitated. Stop saying you're a medical abnormality like you're some kind of figure of sympathy. One of my younger sister is lower on the spectrum than you to the point where she have to be looked after her whole life.

Also, stop putting transgendered people into your category, whatever that means.

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As should be clearly indicated by the message quoted in the post you replied to, the goal in question is to prevent mass shooter levels of radicalization. As mass shootings only take one nutjub, the better path is largely to leash the nutjobs in how far off the deep end they can go, rather than concentrate them so they can keep getting more and more extreme without warning. The more public the discourse, the better, because it can be monitored when it's public.

And if there is no echo chamber, because there's no need for it from not having the mainstream primary public discourse platforms banhammer dissent from Silicone Valley morality into the underground, then people aren't wandering into an echo chamber. They're running into crazy new ideas, and the counterarguments to those ideas. You're never getting rid of echo chambers to an effective degree without total censorship authority like China has, which no Western country possesses, and when the question is "how do we stop the radicalization into mass shooters", it's extremity that is what is being targeted with this questioning, not scale. It doesn't matter how many alt-right people there are in this case, what matters is how far off the deep end they go.

When we are talking about the extremes of radicalization, the solution is to prevent echo chambers where the extremes are driven further. To have disruption in radicalization from the opposed viewpoint being present. When we're talking the pervasiveness, how often people able to be considered part of some group, then confining them to echo chambers works better, as there will be fewer in absolute numbers, but there will then be a higher rate of outliers like mass shooters because these echo chambers breed genuine extremism. And if they manage to gain power despite such confinement, it will be used for far worse abuses, regardless of how limited it is. And they won't be fixable, because they justifiably assume conspiracy against them, where permitting them to speak in the most public of places (and get shitcanned by the public, but they're able to speak and being shat on by their peers instead of giant corporations they have no ability to impact) would undermine that assumption.

Ultimately, the reason Stormfront exists is because we already ban neonazis off all the major public platforms. If they weren't, they wouldn't have these highly-concentrated echochambers that people who only touch on some of the positions get forced into and made to adopt all the nonsense because they can't talk to people outside the echo-chamber. If you just oppose trans normalization, the advocacy of treating them as no different from cisgender persons despite their demands for medicinal treatment and wish for them to be recognized as a medical abnormality like every other case of needing medical intervention for a comfortable life, and get banned off Twitter and Facebook for this difference in why and details of how to accommodate them, then get stuck with /pol/ as your only place of discussing politics, you'll end up drifting to far more extreme positions, and far more of them. Because you no longer get exposed to the humanizing of transgender persons, and begin being exposed to the ideas of purging the lesser-able instead of accommodating for what they're below par in, alongside all the other extremism without opposition.

One disagreement I have here, purely from reading space battles, is that multiple shooters had active Facebook accounts where they loudly announced their politics and talked with like minded individuals, and were not de-radicalised by the general public. ("screw your optics, I'm going in").

Also Facebook already cloisters people into media bubbles, and is frequently criticised for driving political polarisation in the USA. Facebook already allows "nutjobs" to congregate and share ideas as well as well as acting a vector to find sites that incubate horrible ideas and advocate terrorism (e.g. 8chan, private discords.). Twitter is horrible for detailed discussion, but great at starting flamewar.

And social media sites, without a pre-programmed report button for extremist content, struggle against this content since they have a limited staff of human moderators to this, lack standardised rules for dealing with said content as well as a way to alert them to said content, and are faced with a problem that cannot be automated. When Tumblr off all sites has a nazi problem, can tell reporting needs to be updated.

I also am less concerned with the risks of a social media ban hammer due to the sites past and present history. The opposition to Islamic terrorism has barely worked, and has nothing to remove a thriving muslim community from the site. You can still find a ton of horrible ideas and practices on the site, like giving children bleach enamas. I do find the threat of large numbers of conservatives being force off such sites to be credible due to said sites past history and their nature as profit seeking entities.

I frankly do not find the scenario of people only partially agreeing with the far right, getting kicked offsite by a freshly recruited hyper-vigilant left wing moderator team, being able to find far right sites and unwilling to post anywhere else, to be particularly probable. I also have a different view to you on the nature of social media sites.

I also do not believe allowing sites like Storefront public outreach groups on sites like Facebook to be an effective way of radicalisation. I in fact believe it will have opposite result.

And yes, that's me describing my view own on transgenderism. Accommodate them as a medical abnormality. Like every other situation where people need chemicals pumped into them to feel comfortable with life. We do it for highly specific mental deficiencies in stress management and mood stability, what logical reason is there to not include people who feel an incongruity with social expectations of the sexes and which one they physically are that is severe to the point of impairing social function? Lets them benefit from all the existing systems for handling medical abnormalities, and the arguments that this is somehow dehumanizing are themselves arguments that dehumanize all the other abnormalities. Like my own autism. So if you think my position on transgenderism is "transphobic", you're implicitly ableist in a way that is specifically applicable to me, personally, by thinking that being categorizing as a medical abnormality for neurological abnormalities causing significant divergences from social norms is a bad thing in its own right. Or that abnormality is equivalent to inferior, which also disparages me and those like me for our fundamental difficulties with comprehending social interaction as it occurs among the neurotypical.

In which I ramble on unresearch and probably get a lot of things wrong:

I do not believe people wth abnormalities are inferior, and am not neutrotypical myself.

I will point out there good political and historical reasons for trans individuals to oppose this label. And I will warn you, this will involve discussions "intersectionality".

For example, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness in the USA, with many people alive today who still remember this. And then it was removed from the DSM in the 1970s, long before the Gay Rights movement had political power, by professionals who pointed out that homosexualities negative effects on the person came from outside persecution rather the official definition of what constitutes a mental illness.

I will then point out to day this day in the USA you have parents involuntarily sending their children to conversion camps to "cure" their homosexuality. I will point out children who do not conform to official gender roles are also sent there involtunary, including trans individuals, and treated in ways with horrible and illegal until they learn to act normal. And the supporters of this idea tend to be members of the Republican Parties political big tent, which in turn blames mass shootings on the mentally ill, opposes child rights and is willing to tolerate the child beatings.

I will remind everyone that mental illness is legally defined by how it impacts the users wellbeing and function, not psychological abnormal. And a standard conservative argument is that trans people are mentally ill because they are conflicted with social rules, with the trans individuals are in the wrong and must be "cured", which tends to involve treating them like garbage until they mentally break and surrender to the consensus, living an unsatisfying life to avoid further bullying. (Which ironically is an argument against trans individuals being mentally Ill, since they can adapt to social environments and by doing so they are by definition high functioning. Low functioning mentally ill people are far less able to fit in to avoid bullying than someone who can successfully blend in.).

In practice, wether or not to classify trans individuals as mentally ill or not is a political minefield due to the runoff of the previous generations political battles.

I will counter argue trans individuals can transition, and upon transitioning they cease having a mental disorder and become neurotypical. Most legally recognised mental disorders are not permanent, and having a mental disorder and being neurodivergent are not the same thing. Also most trans individuals do not identity themselves as being mentally distinct from ordinary people, and so I have decided to do the politically correct thing and treat them as ordinary people.

PS: Can you provide me with a definition of mentally abnormal. I used the term mental illness/disorder because I am aware of said words definitions, but I am unaware of one for mentally abnormal and therefor ignored it in the above.
 
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so bigots are mentally ill? well that makes sense

My knowledge of the mental health field is purely amateur so do not take me for an authority.

But no. Most terrible people do not have mental disorders. Mistreating others is an all to human trait, as is the banality of evil, as well as stupidity and ignorance. Blaming social problems on the mentally ill has a long unpleasant history, and classifying bigotry as a mental illness stretches the definition to the point of absurdity. So let's not go there, even if this is the tangent and derail thread.

If you want to ask about the origins and root causes of bigotry, please start a new thread.
 
what constitutes a mental disorder is socially determined, by whatever criteria of "normalcy" has been established. Like every other disorder.

It's there in the name. "Dis-order." This word comes from a time in which people believed that there was a normative order in nature -- a way things should be, wired into the nature (ha) of nature itself. Ditto with "deformation."

This is not part of the modern scientific paradigm, in which everything is as perfectly ordered as everything else.

So saying so-and-so is or is not a disorder doesn't actually say anything other than say that it does or doesn't meet certain criteria that have been socially established.
 
So the entire US just surpassed Argentine Navy-level incompetence:

 
Yes. But were they?

As a tangent and another Forum, in Whitehall anti-Vaxers have been nickname as Nurgle Cultists, the Korean sex scandals and Epistein have had Slaneesh repeated invoked, and the USA's hawk faction have been nicknamed the Khornate caucus.

I only recall the above happening once there, where in the straigh pride parade someone called gay pride events slaneeshi due to being over sexualised.

I will then try to defend SV here, and bring up the Satanic panic of the 90's, how the idea of secret cults of sexual deviants who worship demons is something the USA's far right actually believes, with the religious right blaming homosexuality on demons. Also for example both Alex Jones and an official Catholic exorcist blame sexuality immortality on demons, with Alex Jones fully believing in demon cultists who sacrificed children and practice and promote homosexuality.

And then I will the above paragraph with the SB Korea sex scandal thread, with fake demon worship being replaced with 40k Slaanesh references.

Sn main advantage is here is being more atheistic, centrist and pro gay rights, driving antigay positions out of the sites mainstrwm culture. But if someone both agree with Alex Jones and likes 40k, why wouldn't they use such references?
 
The major differences are that Trump had a far slimmer margin, and the US Presidential elections were never meant to be popular vote. On paper, it's still electors as discrete seats, and that 2% is largely an artifact of politically-homogenous major cities sinking huge swaths of the Democrat vote into a tiny number of elector seats. Effectively, Trump represents the Rustbelt and rural areas, as opposed to high-density areas that the electoral votes are specifically meant to disadvantage for the sake of not leaving the rural areas to be fucked. It's a balance of power baked into the election system itself, the US is very much representative and not democratic in nature. There's a lot of things in the US election system meant to quiet the majority for the sake of preventing a tyranny of them. The entire reason the Senate exists is to further this.

Also, Hillary being the Democrat candidate has a few hefty elements of bullshit of the same flavor via Superdeligates. She probably would have gotten the nomination without that shit, which does not make it acceptable and in fact makes it look worse. Also the fact that the Superdeligates are literally party members with zero accountability to any constituency, while the Electoral College is about geographic representation so that there aren't regions left completely fucked because not enough people live there for them to matter.

Actual direct proportions are shit for a functioning government. Devolves the whole political system to pandering to the densest population centers while completely ignoring, if not actively damaging, everyone who's an "outlier".

A really minor quibble,. which isn't specifically addressed to you, is the following.

Historically rural areas had a larger total population than urban areas. So high density areas would have historically been outvoted in direct democracy, and preventing urban dominance was less a factor historically than preventingly highly populated states from outvoting other ones.

A larger point, that isn't specifically addressed to you is the following:

Why is a tyranny of the minority more acceptable acceptable? Because as populations get more and more urbanised, systems based on representing total land area rather that the total population gets increasingly less democratic. Because legacy rules that subject an ever growing demographic majority to perpetual disenfranchisement seem to me a far bigger problem than a "tyranny of the majority".
 
Why is a tyranny of the minority more acceptable acceptable? Because as populations get more and more urbanised, systems based on representing total land area rather that the total population gets increasingly less democratic. Because legacy rules that subject an ever growing demographic majority to perpetual disenfranchisement seem to me a far bigger problem than a "tyranny of the majority".
Because at least when it's the farmers calling the shots, we have fucking food and water. This is NOT the case when it's the big cities calling the shots, as demonstrated well by California routinely fucking over its own agriculture by diverting water to the cities, which then fucks over the non-metropolitan populations as the agricultural sector draws groundwater to avoid a collapse of crop growth.

Furthermore, this is just the top level being talked about when the electoral college is being questioned. Why should the US federal government be direct democracy, instead of functioning in a representative fashion, while the States, Counties and Cities pass their own local laws, for their own local needs? Extend this down, why should the individual states function on a direct democracy when concerns of the ENTIRE state come up, as with California's droughts? The layers of government exist because there's conflicting interests between populations that are governed, and the systems are supposed to allocate representation to these interest groups moreso than to actual populations.

Yes, this is very much an argument against direct democracy as a whole. Because direct democracy is dysfunctional bullshit, as demonstrated well by California, which continues to go for rural-fucking water-rationing and continuing to run down a clock on agricultural failure instead of desalination plants, because they can't wrangle the thirty-year commitment of political will to build the things. Demagoguery is far too easy to pull off, and assuring a large educated populace far too much a difficulty. A representative government can be structured to keep the reliably-educated elites from fucking over the wider public, at least via government, by having the access to government power rely on the people at least not actively hating the guys in charge. Keeping a largely-educated public is damn near utopian in its own right, having a political system predicated on that isn't any better than the vast reliance on good-faith acting behind Anarcho-Communism.

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Generally, I feel the ideal state for the politicing "face" is problem-focused campaigning with per-party voting and some ranked vote system, rather than solution-focused with anything approaching a direct candidate vote. Trump would presumably campaign more on the trade war stuff in such a condition, as there's a very definable problem of outsourcing and other sorts of money exiting the country, rather than the difficult-to-gauge immigration issues, which are so opaque that the opponents to immigration are at least more coherent in their talking points than the supporters. The common thing there is a lack of distinction between illegal entry, overstayed visitors, legal entry, and the difference between low-skill and high-skill in each case, so arguments about high-skill legal entry end up side by side with ones about low-skilled illegal entries, making for a set of positions that's really bizarre because of conflating wildly different groups and stating the benefits of each are universal.

Opponents of immigration, meanwhile, focus on low-skilled immigration and the issue of illegal entry, giving them a coherent position that's wildly exaggerated, but references real problems one can point at and say "there exists a problem" without a single lie. Which is... A lot better for winning over those who don't dig through data. The guy against immigration's saying a person's whole town got fucked because of uncontrolled Latino immigrants eating all the labor jobs, and they can actually walk around and see overwhelmingly Latino construction crews who are, in fact, taking up jobs their friends and family could use. Never mind they're in a small town in Texas and those Latinos have been living there since the border crossed them, that'd take actual critical thinking. The guy who's pro-immigration, meanwhile, speaks of the far more abstract matter of the cost of factory goods and that you'll totally be able to get a better job. Something not of concern to a person who barely got a High School Diploma who needs to actively budget to afford food, who's very much viciously interested in being the person to get that factory job themselves.

Granted, it's more a thing with the Rustbelt, but the point that the Republicans talking about immigration have something real and obvious to point to, even if its relevance in the grand scope of things is ultimately rather minor, while the Democrats talking about immigration are saying things that very quickly follow into "yeah, get fucked some more, Rustbelt" by implying that low-skill jobs will be filled up by them, to benefits that people already digging for scraps of a hollowed-out city's job market won't see, or are "on-high" ideology about diversity and helping the world as a whole. Or mention benefits utterly irrelevant to them. What's a broke 30-something in Detroit care about R&D positions getting some well-educated Europeans to fill?

...Seriously, how the fuck is the Democrat position on Immigration supposed to be attractive to anyone outside the white-collar world the politicians live in? There's people who are going to be stuck competing with those Latino immigrants for work, and indeed are already feeling the squeeze enough to notice what's currently there, what the fuck is going to make them want to vote for people who are all but outright calling for them to be fired? Yes, we quite literally don't have enough people in our own country willing to work some of the farms, but that's a reason to expand the legal limits and get shit set up for when people are stuck entering without clearing the proper channels, not one to say "welp, might as well give up border control" like a lot of the big voices on it are calling for.

That's what "Abolish ICE" actually means. Literally, it's saying "shut down the agency responsible for border control". And those "Concentration Camps" are literally required for any system of immigration control to work, because there has to be somewhere to put those caught on unusual routes while the paperwork gets filed. There's just... So much of the immigration debate that leaves egg on the face of the Democrats. The drinking out of toilets thing? Grey-water flushing, there's a sink built into the tank the toilet-water goes through before entering the toilet, with little paper cups and everything. At least after renovations went through. The "tinfoil blankets" is a weird budgeting thing, they're actually amazing thermal insulation in the short term. Not exactly comfortable to sleep in and not intended for prolonged use at all, but the very opposite of freezing by very painstaking design (they're mostly made for hypothermia patients in desperate need of very quickly increasing their core body temperature).

And, of course, cutting the budget of ICE isn't going to make the system shut down at any plausible level. More facilities were opened specifically to reduce crowding, after all, most you're going to do is make conditions worse as they desperately race to the bottom operational budget, fuck livability, fuck health, just flat-pack the people caught crossing the border if need be. The solution to the problem is to increase the funding and lay down an actual reform of the system, give ICE the money it needs to treat the immigrants humanely and clear out the likely-carefully-designed shitshow that went off with the Trump administration going hardball. There's a very deep rabbit hole of causes, and Mike Pence likely was aware of all of this stuff when he suggested to start prosecuting every illegal entry. Flick a switch, damn near every kid gets separated for at least a little bit (giving wonderful leverage to force a confession, just to ratchet up the pointlessness of a trial even further), nothing dubious about the legality and many of the things behind it are to avoid far more obvious abuses.

One of them is a court order that came out of some Hatian kids that got sucked into the foster care system of Florida because of some interesting choices in what order to handle claims that mandates that the children be kept in licensed facilities if they can't be kept with a relative, such as that relative undergoing a criminal prosecution. ICE has access to very few such facilities, there's huge delays in verifying relations thanks to the suddenly-present backlog in need of it, and many times the parents are put through what's basically a Kangaroo Court to stick them on record as breaking the law for crossing the border (there actually is such a law being held to proper legal standard, but it's such a forgone conclusion that it doesn't really justify the separation clause being applied, and making the prosecution is something new under the Trump administration), and it just so happens that this policy switch and budget crunch have choked ICE's understaffed paper-pushers to the point a lot of the kids get completely lost in the system.

Spectacular case of numerous layers of malicious compliance, with the people campaigning against it seemingly entirely ignorant of what they'd break in trying to fix it *turns gaze upon The Squad*. It's almost like a guy who knows the ins and outs of the system is trying to make it as painful as possible for the immigrants to warn away further entries. *PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNCCCCCCCEEEEEEEE*
 
Because at least when it's the farmers calling the shots, we have fucking food and water. This is NOT the case when it's the big cities calling the shots, as demonstrated well by California routinely fucking over its own agriculture by diverting water to the cities, which then fucks over the non-metropolitan populations as the agricultural sector draws groundwater to avoid a collapse of crop growth.

Furthermore, this is just the top level being talked about when the electoral college is being questioned. Why should the US federal government be direct democracy, instead of functioning in a representative fashion, while the States, Counties and Cities pass their own local laws, for their own local needs? Extend this down, why should the individual states function on a direct democracy when concerns of the ENTIRE state come up, as with California's droughts? The layers of government exist because there's conflicting interests between populations that are governed, and the systems are supposed to allocate representation to these interest groups moreso than to actual populations.

Yes, this is very much an argument against direct democracy as a whole. Because direct democracy is dysfunctional bullshit, as demonstrated well by California, which continues to go for rural-fucking water-rationing and continuing to run down a clock on agricultural failure instead of desalination plants, because they can't wrangle the thirty-year commitment of political will to build the things. Demagoguery is far too easy to pull off, and assuring a large educated populace far too much a difficulty. A representative government can be structured to keep the reliably-educated elites from fucking over the wider public, at least via government, by having the access to government power rely on the people at least not actively hating the guys in charge. Keeping a largely-educated public is damn near utopian in its own right, having a political system predicated on that isn't any better than the vast reliance on good-faith acting behind Anarcho-Communism.

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Generally, I feel the ideal state for the politicing "face" is problem-focused campaigning with per-party voting and some ranked vote system, rather than solution-focused with anything approaching a direct candidate vote. Trump would presumably campaign more on the trade war stuff in such a condition, as there's a very definable problem of outsourcing and other sorts of money exiting the country, rather than the difficult-to-gauge immigration issues, which are so opaque that the opponents to immigration are at least more coherent in their talking points than the supporters. The common thing there is a lack of distinction between illegal entry, overstayed visitors, legal entry, and the difference between low-skill and high-skill in each case, so arguments about high-skill legal entry end up side by side with ones about low-skilled illegal entries, making for a set of positions that's really bizarre because of conflating wildly different groups and stating the benefits of each are universal.

Opponents of immigration, meanwhile, focus on low-skilled immigration and the issue of illegal entry, giving them a coherent position that's wildly exaggerated, but references real problems one can point at and say "there exists a problem" without a single lie. Which is... A lot better for winning over those who don't dig through data. The guy against immigration's saying a person's whole town got fucked because of uncontrolled Latino immigrants eating all the labor jobs, and they can actually walk around and see overwhelmingly Latino construction crews who are, in fact, taking up jobs their friends and family could use. Never mind they're in a small town in Texas and those Latinos have been living there since the border crossed them, that'd take actual critical thinking. The guy who's pro-immigration, meanwhile, speaks of the far more abstract matter of the cost of factory goods and that you'll totally be able to get a better job. Something not of concern to a person who barely got a High School Diploma who needs to actively budget to afford food, who's very much viciously interested in being the person to get that factory job themselves.

Granted, it's more a thing with the Rustbelt, but the point that the Republicans talking about immigration have something real and obvious to point to, even if its relevance in the grand scope of things is ultimately rather minor, while the Democrats talking about immigration are saying things that very quickly follow into "yeah, get fucked some more, Rustbelt" by implying that low-skill jobs will be filled up by them, to benefits that people already digging for scraps of a hollowed-out city's job market won't see, or are "on-high" ideology about diversity and helping the world as a whole. Or mention benefits utterly irrelevant to them. What's a broke 30-something in Detroit care about R&D positions getting some well-educated Europeans to fill?

...Seriously, how the fuck is the Democrat position on Immigration supposed to be attractive to anyone outside the white-collar world the politicians live in? There's people who are going to be stuck competing with those Latino immigrants for work, and indeed are already feeling the squeeze enough to notice what's currently there, what the fuck is going to make them want to vote for people who are all but outright calling for them to be fired? Yes, we quite literally don't have enough people in our own country willing to work some of the farms, but that's a reason to expand the legal limits and get shit set up for when people are stuck entering without clearing the proper channels, not one to say "welp, might as well give up border control" like a lot of the big voices on it are calling for.

That's what "Abolish ICE" actually means. Literally, it's saying "shut down the agency responsible for border control". And those "Concentration Camps" are literally required for any system of immigration control to work, because there has to be somewhere to put those caught on unusual routes while the paperwork gets filed. There's just... So much of the immigration debate that leaves egg on the face of the Democrats. The drinking out of toilets thing? Grey-water flushing, there's a sink built into the tank the toilet-water goes through before entering the toilet, with little paper cups and everything. At least after renovations went through. The "tinfoil blankets" is a weird budgeting thing, they're actually amazing thermal insulation in the short term. Not exactly comfortable to sleep in and not intended for prolonged use at all, but the very opposite of freezing by very painstaking design (they're mostly made for hypothermia patients in desperate need of very quickly increasing their core body temperature).

And, of course, cutting the budget of ICE isn't going to make the system shut down at any plausible level. More facilities were opened specifically to reduce crowding, after all, most you're going to do is make conditions worse as they desperately race to the bottom operational budget, fuck livability, fuck health, just flat-pack the people caught crossing the border if need be. The solution to the problem is to increase the funding and lay down an actual reform of the system, give ICE the money it needs to treat the immigrants humanely and clear out the likely-carefully-designed shitshow that went off with the Trump administration going hardball. There's a very deep rabbit hole of causes, and Mike Pence likely was aware of all of this stuff when he suggested to start prosecuting every illegal entry. Flick a switch, damn near every kid gets separated for at least a little bit (giving wonderful leverage to force a confession, just to ratchet up the pointlessness of a trial even further), nothing dubious about the legality and many of the things behind it are to avoid far more obvious abuses.

One of them is a court order that came out of some Hatian kids that got sucked into the foster care system of Florida because of some interesting choices in what order to handle claims that mandates that the children be kept in licensed facilities if they can't be kept with a relative, such as that relative undergoing a criminal prosecution. ICE has access to very few such facilities, there's huge delays in verifying relations thanks to the suddenly-present backlog in need of it, and many times the parents are put through what's basically a Kangaroo Court to stick them on record as breaking the law for crossing the border (there actually is such a law being held to proper legal standard, but it's such a forgone conclusion that it doesn't really justify the separation clause being applied, and making the prosecution is something new under the Trump administration), and it just so happens that this policy switch and budget crunch have choked ICE's understaffed paper-pushers to the point a lot of the kids get completely lost in the system.

Spectacular case of numerous layers of malicious compliance, with the people campaigning against it seemingly entirely ignorant of what they'd break in trying to fix it *turns gaze upon The Squad*. It's almost like a guy who knows the ins and outs of the system is trying to make it as painful as possible for the immigrants to warn away further entries. *PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNCCCCCCCEEEEEEEE*
From what I understand, California's agriculture/rural sector needs to get smacked down hard regarding water because they insist on using cheaper but more water intensive methods, to grow crops that shouldn't be grown there, and thus use far more than their share of the limited water supply of the state in pursuit of higher profits. As in the rural areas use 4x as much as the urban areas. Not per-person, total. Basically, they need to ban almond farming. It takes a gallon of water per nut, and they insist on growing them in an already drought prone area, and then bitch when other areas want to charge them for the water use.
 
From what I understand, California's agriculture/rural sector needs to get smacked down hard regarding water because they insist on using cheaper but more water intensive methods, to grow crops that shouldn't be grown there, and thus use far more than their share of the limited water supply of the state in pursuit of higher profits. As in the rural areas use 4x as much as the urban areas. Not per-person, total. Basically, they need to ban almond farming. It takes a gallon of water per nut, and they insist on growing them in an already drought prone area, and then bitch when other areas want to charge them for the water use.
Good luck getting a ban going on almond farming, California is one of the states that has the highest amount consumption of 'trend' foods like almond milk and 'avocado toast'. And when change is proposed its blocked because gotta give our voters their meme-foods to show off how 'forward thinking' they are.
 
NGL California has no business farming for profit period, the land could never support it and were seeing the results of trying now.
that said farming is possible and desirable for local needs but just that and not one drop of water more

This is also true for too much of fly over country, see great American desert
 
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