It's difficult to me to see what people thought was so great about the beatniks. All of Kerouac basically consists of "look how much fun you can have in a trusting society by tearing it down."
Obama actually pioneered non-judicial deportations. Under his administration, 75% of removals took place without the established immigration hearing process.
Many (most?) ICE deportations taking place today are after "due process" "judicial" hearings, that is, a final order of removal being issued by an immigration "judge." This is generally ignored by news reporting.
The news does not contextualize what is going on. Indeed, you can safely strike the word "unprecendented" from almost all journalism. But it's not only a problem with this story, but most stories. Selective outrage is applied based on the cause and enemy du jour. You are honestly better off not watching the news unless you are willing to do extensive deep dives on a topic, because regardless of your party affiliation or personal feelings or what outlet you subscribe to you are being fed a line of propagandistic BS.
and yes, the way the system evolved is a problem, but as that article pointed out this change started in the mid-90s. Obama actually deported half the number of people as under Clinton and Bush, see Table 1[0]
Also most of the people Obama deported were at/near the border as he prioritized that over interior arrests. You can see the big change in Figure 1[0]
Turning people around at/near the border is a completely different than arresting people who have been in the US for years, even decades.
So the "whataboutism" is a complete red herring, and that's without even getting into fixed quotas, no guardrails or accountability for ICE agents, no consequences for murder, unlimited surveillance budget, hiring unqualified agents and putting guns in their hands, and I could go on and on.
You seem to conveniently ignore the 4th amendment violations and the ignored court orders.
Obama had “fast-track” deportations but also convenient ignore that this administration is doing it under the aliens enemies act which is a wartime authorization and most importantly deporting people to “third” countries.
What fourth amendment violations do you think are unprecedented?
The Alien Enemies Act is one of our oldest laws and was passed by John Adams during peacetime to suppress perceived foreign influence from migrants.
Deportations to third countries are pretty clearly the only solution to cases where immigrants have a final order of removal that has been suspended due to problems in their home country, or where their home country refuses to accept them; the alternative of leaving them in a perpetual limbo is absurd. What else would you do?
The FBI in particular is notorious for warrantless raids and break-ins, a practice that has seemingly subsided more because of the modern ease of electronic surveillance than because of the bad publicity and court actions.
> Indeed, you can safely strike the word "unprecendented" from almost all journalism
"Border patrol murders unarmed subdued citizen in broad daylight on film and then lies about it" I think is pretty unprecedented. at least as far as I know.
> Many (most?) ICE deportations taking place today are after "due process" "judicial" hearings
There’s more than a thousand fatal US police shootings every year with various levels of justification, many impacting people totally innocent of anything, even if we accept your propagandized mischaracterization of what happened. (I don’t blame you for this. It’s being pushed hard, and the other sides propaganda is no more truthful.)
Aside from regular shootings, Obama (perhaps not so famously) killed a 16 year old US citizen overseas in a country we were not at war with, then refused to explain why. Off the record, officials said he should have had a better father (who had been killed in an earlier drone strike.) Somehow, everyone failed to turn out for this and similar abuses of power.
There’s nothing new or unusual about this.
> CITATION NEEDED.
I already provided you a citation showing that 75% of deportations in a prior administration happens without any due process, showing that even if this statement wasn’t true (obviously the weaker version is) then it’s not at all unprecedented. Yet all the rage is in the here and now.
It’s also worth noting that, as I alluded to, immigration court is administrative anyway, not judicial. “Immigration judges” are just DoJ employee, not judges.
The most concerning thing about this is how many people have been radicalized into believing committing felonies by interfering with, harassing, and assaulting LEO is not only legal but safe. Even blocking them is a crime. At this point we’re at a situation where millions of people believe the laws we passed as a representative democracy are so illegitimate violence - not just peaceful protest - is justified against the state. This is a really bad sign and it’s getting people killed.
> There’s more than a thousand fatal US police shootings every year with various levels of justification, many impacting people totally innocent of anything, even if we accept your propagandized mischaracterization of what happened. (I don’t blame you for this. It’s being pushed hard, and the other sides propaganda is no more truthful.)
What usually happens when a municipal, county, or state law enforcement officer (and until recently, federal) kills someone in the line of duty?
Most of the time there’s a brief internal investigation and then nothing happens to them, because they’re given enormous latitude and discretion, even when the victim was totally innocent. If you want a very notorious and similarly politicized example, look at what happened to the federal agent that killed Vicki Weaver: the feds refused to do anything to them, and the local case was initially shut down due to sovereign immunity for federal agents and then later abandoned.
If you want a more recent famous case, consider the shooting of Craig Robertson: the FBI says he was armed and shot him dead, agents cleared after an internal investigation and we’ll never know if he was armed or not (I’d guess yes.) That’s it.
I found this very distressing and dispiriting when I read it was mostly used books from sources like BetterWorldBook. That undoubtedly means many rare books have been permanently destroyed, even some last remaining copies. The least they could do is release the dataset.
Rare and unique books usually end up at specialty dealers, not generic websites. But it is possible that some hard-to-get items could be lost, and there's no way to know without an inventory.
Materially impeding law enforcement operations, interfering with arrests, harassing or assault officers, and so forth is not 1A protected and is illegal. There’s lots of this going on and some of it is orchestrated in these chats. They may nevertheless be civil disobedience, maybe even for a just cause, but I have no problem with people still being arrested for this. You obviously cannot have a civil society where that is legally tolerated.
It isn’t just people walking around holding signs or filming ICE. Can we please distinguish these cases?
I regularly leave my backpack with my laptops in it in the front seat of my car in the south US and nothing has ever happened in ten years of doing this.
It's crazy to me other people just live with this. Dramatic action is needed and possible.
Requiring voters have identification is very controversial in the US. The Democratic party generally opposes it. Even in states requiring ID, there are almost always options to bypass it (by signing an affadavit, for example), and in almost no case does an ID prove citizenship - the US doesn't actually have a "US citizen database" anywhere, and people can be legal citizens with a right to vote with no ID.
> There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech.
Wrong. In the USA that speech would have been protected. It obviously does not meet the imminent lawless action standard and is not meaningfully incitement.
What she actually said was:
> “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the ba***s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
This is clearly someone just angrily ranting. It's absurd nonsense to pretend otherwise. Imagine arresting everyone who said "punch Nazis" because that's "incitement." The UK is one of the worst speech control regimes in the world on any honest scale - even in most third-world dictatorships at least the state isn't strong or coordinated enough to go after most people for this stuff. Sorry, most of the world doesn’t punish angry hateful off the cuff comments with prison. You are an outlier.
If you have to ask, you didn't even look very hard. I'm not a historian and I learned about this stuff in World History class. Hell, there's even movies about it (unless you think there just happened to not be any children in all those villages they burned down in the movies?)...
There’s revisionist claims that all the primary sources, even those corroborated by people of the cultures in question, are either just invented propaganda or actually just isolated instances because actually, everyone throughout all time and space is on board with 2025 Western social norms. I think that’s what he’s alluding to. It’s not a very fruitful path of discussion. Archeological confirmations and independent testimony can all be safely ignored by this view as well.
But we are talking about specifically torture for sport, not just burning them alive. You can find many firsthand accounts of this throughout different times and places in different cultures. Steppe peoples and groups like the Comanche were particularly notorious for it, they seemed to find it funny.
It's not revisionist to point outthat a LOT of ancient texts, especially those describing particularly horrifying actions, were propaganda written by the enemies of the cultures in question - or embellishments written hundreds of years later.
I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you just take every text at face value, especially since it's the kind of thing that gets repeated (and embellished for shock value) far more than other historical accounts.
Uh-huh. Here's the problem. Here's the way this almost always works: "Author X would have been BIASED because he belonged to Culture X that fought these people - so this is all fictional propaganda!"
Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!
The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.
Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
You are making pretty bold and sweeping statements.
Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?
Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.
> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.
Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:
"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."
Right... The historical texts were propaganda for the few people who could read and write ... for what, exactly? I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?
The few people who could read and write were the educated ones - mostly those in power or close to them. So exactly the people you needed to influence to get something done. And of course written texts could be read aloud to those who cannot write.
What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?
What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?
> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?
Ah. There was an interesting YouTube video I watched the other night that claimed the dark ages didn’t actually exist. Easily refutable, but I assume this is the kind of stuff you’re referring to?
Yeah. That’s another good example. There are fads and trends in some academic circles that burst out into the Internet scene and become common “actually” rejoinders. Of course, some older claims about the Dark Ages were exaggerated and simplified. This led to an “actually the Dark Ages weren’t even real” reaction in a few papers which spread online. Of course there was a marked decline in social organization during that time period regardless.
reply