On the subject of "why not more violence?", two comments.
The first, which I'm sure is basically a talking point for this crowd, is that this is an extremely valuable question to ask, and the fact of it has deep insight if you think about it. We all like to point out how many guns there are in America: the left says "oh no" and the right says "those are rookie numbers". But the fact is, we have like 10x the guns in this country but we do not have 10x the murder rates of other countries. In fact, one of my favourite accidental redpills that Scott Alexander dropped, is that if you exclude the super violent inner city ghettos as outliers (a reasonable thing to do if you want a stat representative of anyone who _doesn't_ live in them), the US gun violence rate is slightly less (but within margin of error of) Canada's. The presence of hundreds of millions of extra guns WITHOUT hundreds of millions of extra violent crimes is pretty suggestive evidence _against_ guns causing violence
The second is that I think that pointing to some kind of American exceptionalism culture-wise misses a pretty important and under-discussed point, which is that a) the US can police violence extremely effectively _when it wants to_; and b) the uncertainty of anarcho-tyranny is a force multiplier for the tyrant.
We live in a surveillance state. The government runs facial ID databases, FBI probably already knows the guy's full identity, already reading his emails, already wiretapped his cell phone, etc. They _will_ eventually get him, they _will_ eventually find him guilty, they _will_ eventually imprison him. They might even give him the Bradley Manning treatment in prison (which I am sincerely convinced is an actual thing and not a joke or a conspiracy theory; after all, finding a discreet agent for this exact purpose was a published MKULTRA goal).
Will they get every murderer? No, because they don't want to, and it's not worth their time. But can they get any specific assassin, if they really want to? ABSOLUTELY. And any rational agent will be weighing this in their risk calculations. I think this provides an extremely powerful disincentive to this kind of overt violence.
For supporting evidence, consider how frequently the government overtly leverages this exact thing for the enforcement of lower level things, especially civil offenses. There's probably a 50 year backlog on health inspections at restaurants, eg., but the risk of failing one _and being forced out of business_ encourages compliance more than meticulously auditing every restaurant once a year and fining $1000 for each failure ever would.
And that incentive is going to apply _more_ at higher levels than at lower ones. Is this going to stop some street thug from street thugging? No, he _doesn't matter_ to the government, in fact, some parts of the government find his street thugging to be instrumentally useful.
But it will _absolutely_ stop CEO assassin wars. As higher profile people, they're more likely to attract the government's ire. And as wealthy, high status people, they have more to lose. Even if the government can only muster the resources to stop, say, five of these a year, when 100 CEOs _want_ to assassinate their rivals, they're going to think "do I risk the 5% chance that I'm the one they Make An Example Of?" and decide to just do nefarious underhanded business tactics instead that only risk civil liability
All true for rational actors. People who are in for headline-grabbing violence are often fine with getting killed in the process though, so being made an example of is not really a disincentive for them (and actually probably is an incentive since they want to be famous). But yeah, the expected value of using violence in business is very very negative for all American business people of any note.
The point I was making was a little more than that, I was suggesting that it is marginally more negative than it would be in most other countries in the world, both because those countries have less state willingness and capacity to police such crimes, and because the expected value of the risk increases proportional to how much you have to lose (since, yknow, you lose more if the risk attains)
" The presence of hundreds of millions of extra guns WITHOUT hundreds of millions of extra violent crimes is pretty suggestive evidence _against_ guns causing violence"
I'd wager that simply means we're well well over the saturation point where nefarious actors have fairly ready access to the tools of the trade, and more guns simply doesn't affect that. If 90% of our guns were removed by magical fiat today, the criminals would still get theirs, as it is an essential tool of the trade, with the bonus that they're now 90% less likely to take return fire.
Countries that have not yet reached that saturation point will soon, as anywhere with difficult to impossible acquisition find their criminal needs filled with home manufacture.
Final comment, I've probably deployed this canned rant on OSD before
> When people debate whether to make laws “tougher”, the discussion usually assumes that there’s a see-saw, and you just get to pick its position. You can push down on one side to make crime lower, and on the other side you’ll get tougher laws. Or you push the law side of the see-saw down to make laws looser (whatever that means in context) and you’ll get more crime.
> But that’s not actually a good description of reality. For any given set of laws, there are all sorts of other factors that will massively increase or decrease crime rates without changing the law. And that means that laws-on-the-books probably aren’t a major factor for determining actual, on-the-ground levels of violence. Here’s a neighborhood-level map of murders in Baltimore:
When people debate government policy they are always always always talking about Unicorn Governance (https://fee.org/articles/unicorn-governance/), not real governance, and as an engineer who has to care about implementation details, this grinds my gears so hard.
Sometimes gun people bring this up as a talking point, in the vein of: "oh, California, your 100 gun laws didn't stop this crime but I'm sure the 101st one would definitely fix everything". People understand this intuitively when they get enough distance from the issue. But for some reason, people will always talk about whether the law should or shouldn't be 'tougher', without bothering to think through any of the practical considerations of what that would imply (or if it's even possible).
For a potentially controversial example, the most recent instance of this that is annoying me is the talk around Trump deporting 11 million illegals. My liberal friends are horrified at this, my conservative friends are salivating at this. And all I can think is, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions of people who didn't want to leave, he failed, and then he tried a holocaust, and he failed at that too. If even LITERALLY HITLER couldn't accomplish this, how do you think Trump will? Besides, the Jewish people in Nazi Germany didn't have 5 rifles in every household, Americans do. Mass deportations? Good luck with that". It _doesn't matter_ what the law says. It _doesn't matter_ what policy changes. It _doesn't matter_ what executive order he signs. It is just impossible, on a sheer practical logistical level, to deport 11 million people, many of whom have access to arms, who don't want to leave. You lack the physical manpower, you lack the logistical capacity, you lack the money, hell, you probably lack the rifles. There's about 300k armed soldiers in the US military, many of whom are occupied with existing deployments. If even _one percent_ of those illegals take up arms, they're fielding an army just as big as what the actual US army could spare to oppose them.
In a twist of supreme irony, this is actually a perfect example of the second amendment _working as intended_.
Related thought that I've almost certainly shared here before:
People, when debating what government policy _should_ be, always seem to assume a nearly 100% compliance rate. They seem to assume everyone will definitely follow the rules, and maybe a few will try to scam the system but nothing some basic police work can't do.
Except... that never happens. No policy in any organization ever in the history of the world has ever had 100% compliance rate. Even Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia did not have 100% compliance rates: you can tell because of how many people they executed for not complying.
The real world is messy. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. If your plan requires perfect compliance, then it's already failed. I wish more people intuitively understood this
----
Back when arguing about COVID was in vogue, something that people would tell me, was an argument along the lines of "of course masks / lockdowns / vaccines didn't work, because people like you didn't follow the rules, and they won't work if a bunch of people are breaking them". Well, a bunch of people are going to break every rule. If you're saying "masks only work if 100% of people wear them", that's just another way of saying "mask _policies_ don't work", because there is no rule that 100% of people will follow. Some people will misunderstand them. Some will try and fail to follow them. Some will maliciously break them for personal gain. Some will maliciously break them for nothing more than the thrill of breaking rules.
Any policy, any plan, that does not account for this, has already failed. And, as an addendum, if the plan for accounting for this involves basic force, threats of violence, and repression, well, those strategies are pretty effective but history shows they are rarely _100%_ effective.
The smarter idea is to have a plan that still works, or at least partially works, if you only have say 80% compliance
No, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions was Dwight D. Eisenhower with Operation Wetback. He successfully deported over 100,000 illegals. Yes, his tactics needed refinement but you ignored his entire operation to force a Trump/Hitler comparison.
Additionally, you're talking apples and oranges with Nazi Germany. Hitler wasn't trying to deport people who had recently arrived from other nations and could just be sent right back where they came from. He was trying to deport people who had lived there for years - generations in some cases - and had literally nowhere else to go. Additionally, some of those who emigrated from Germany in the period from 1933-1939, went to Poland, Austria, Hungary and etc. and found themselves targeted yet again when Hitler invaded.
I'm not sure where this concept of door-to-door deportations came from anyway. I could be wrong, but I don't recall Trump ever claiming he would do such. His deportations will start with the criminals whose immigration status is currently being ignored. Places like CA and OR are literally just releasing these people right back onto the streets and that needs to stop.
Come here illegally and commit a crime? Get shipped right back home. No one's going to raise an army over that.
> Additionally, you're talking apples and oranges with Nazi Germany. Hitler wasn't trying to deport people who had recently arrived from other nations and could just be sent right back where they came from. He was trying to deport people who had lived there for years - generations in some cases - and had literally nowhere else to go. Additionally, some of those who emigrated from Germany in the period from 1933-1939, went to Poland, Austria, Hungary and etc. and found themselves targeted yet again when Hitler invaded.
I am making no claims regarding morality, or deservement, or anything like that. I hope it's clear to everyone that I am most certainly NOT saying that the Jewish people in 1930 Germany should have left, or that they deserved to be on the receiving end of law enforcement when they didn't. Whether any individual Jewish person should or shouldn't have left is a function of their specific life situation, and it's really not my place to comment on that, since their lives are not my life.
The point of risking Godwin's law is to point out that when you want to move millions of people, and they don't want to move, either they don't move, or you use violence on them until they either move, or stop moving. Those are the options. There are no other options. I am, in fact, pretty against violence, and so would softly advocate _against_ mass deportations of millions of people, on "I don't want my neighbourhood to become a war zone" grounds
Although I will very mildly make a claim that a lot of the illegals should not leave. From their personal points of view, leaving is the wrong decision, based on the practical, real-world constraints and incentives they face. Whether it is the right decision _for all of us_, well, as a _legal_ ~~immigrant~~ nonimmigrant resident alien, with no viable path to staying here long term, part of me wants everyone who breaks immigration rules to be physically removed, so to speak. At the same time, there are definitely violently criminal illegals, and there are definitely respectable, productive ones, and my preference would be to get rid of the first category and keep, as much as possible, the second category
I am simply pointing out that moving millions of people who do not want to be moved is a Very Hard Problem
> you ignored his entire operation to force a Trump/Hitler comparison.
No, I ignored it because I didn't grow up in America and don't know anything about American history. I have never heard of this thing before, and will go read up about it later tonight
> I could be wrong, but I don't recall Trump ever claiming he would do such. His deportations will start with the criminals whose immigration status is currently being ignored. Places like CA and OR are literally just releasing these people right back onto the streets and that needs to stop.
That seems both a lot more reasonable and a lot more achievable. The idea of door to door deportations, at least in _my_ mind, comes from all the people around me who insist he's going to deport 11 million illegals. Since most of those illegals _are not_ committing violent crimes, any real plan to do that would necessarily involve those kinds of operations.
Most likely, all the people around me are wrong / disconnected from reality. I am only reporting on what they're saying, I'm not reporting on what is real. I am complaining about the failures of basic logic and critical thought _in the minds of the people around me who are saying these things_, which is a completely different thing from whether or not those things are actually real.
In fact, my entire point is that they're not real, and these people are dumb for thinking they are
Frankly, a lot of people on _both_ sides are heavily disconnected from reality, as you've pointed out. There are far left and far right both claiming that he's just going to suddenly, overnight, deport 11m people, to the joy of some and chagrin of others.
But I'm not sure where anyone got that notion except in their wildest dreams.
It's definitely going to be a very long process starting with people who are violating the law because those are the situations that are most feasible to deal with - we've already got them in custody, we just need to ship them home.
I'd assume that the scope would expand from there to people that we've somehow confirmed are here illegally and we know where they are. For example, people who have registered to vote/drive without citizenship. We know where they are - they gave us their addresses. Some 56k of them in Oregon alone. They're also criminals if they've actually voted, but at the very least they have the capacity to be criminals because there's literally nothing stopping them from voting.
There are also illegals who have been given funds and housing. We know their statuses and where they are too.
Outside of that, you're correct that it's just not feasible, but I've never heard Trump himself say that he would go after every last illegal. Anything else would require what Eisenhower's plan was most criticized for: racial profiling. You simply can't go up to every Hispanic looking person, assume they're here illegally, and demand their papers.
But again, that's the wet dream of the leftists (who _want_ to see Trump become Hitler just to prove themselves right), and the more emotional right-wingers (who are terrified of what illegals will do to them and their family). And yet, that was never Trump's plan to begin with.
What you're laying out is significantly more reasonable than what the people around me are saying, and I was not intending to criticize or argue against what you are laying out.
I am heavily skeptical that this process would succeed. If nothing else, the legal due process of immigration court would take forever, and need to be bypassed, and that raises all kinds of practical (and a handful of moral) issues.
If that process did succeed though, it would be a massive benefit in the long term.
One major thing you may not be factoring in (or you are and assuming them away for reasons I am unclear on), is that none of this happened in a vacuum. The illegals didn't get housing and funding randomly, and they didn't scam it from the government. There are large numbers of people, and many organizations, both government and private, who are actively working to facilitate this. They will actively work to oppose anyone who tries to stop this. Without a plan to prevent them from stopping this, this will be stopped.
What does that plan look like? Honestly, I don't have the first idea. As it is, whenever someone digs deeply into one of these things, it makes no sense, and what we find implies a gigantic infrastructure supporting it.
For example: A german blogger I read recently relayed a story from Germany. Apparently, the German government recently changed their gibsmedats policy and instead of giving prepaid debit cards to illegals, they're giving gift cards to grocery stores. Idea being, we're only going to cover costs for things you need.
In response to this, NGOs have popped up offering to exchange these gift cards for prepaid debit cards at par. Given that there is both an overhead cost to operating these exchanges, and an optionality cost (eg you're giving them $50 that can be spent on anything and receiving $50 that can only be spent on food), someone somewhere is operating this at a loss. And apparently, that someone in this case is the German federal Green Party.
How do you, as the government, stop something like this when it's the government itself doing it? I haven't the first idea
And more importantly, how do you do this in a way that doesn't create legal precedents that will be weaponized against you as soon as you leave office? I don't want Trump to just somehow completely bypass due process, for example, because in 2028 when the dumb voters put Newsom in office, suddenly whatever mechanism bypassed due process for illegals will be used against Republicans
We've already seen a taste of what is to come with the Mayor of Boston. She made a comment about not supporting deportations and Trump's pick for BP head reminded her that it's a federal offense to harbor illegal aliens and that he would happily arrest her.
She quickly changed her tune.
Arresting any number of people who are responsible for misappropriating government funds to harbor illegal aliens would go a long way towards curbing that behavior.
At the same time, D.O.G.E. is going to find where those funds are coming from and going to and they're going to put a stop to it.
Without the ability to steal tax payer funds, and with the risk of jail time for doing so, most of this behavior will stop. This will also paint a bullseye on the remaining organizations who manage to use private funds and don't care if they serve jail time. Illegals will lose trust in them because the government could use them as sting operations to locate more of them for deportation.
And all of this already exists so no precedent is being created here. It's already federally illegal to harbor non-citizens. If the precedent we set is that politicians are now actually arrested when they violate federal law then I'm 100% for that, regardless of which side they're on.
> We've already seen a taste of what is to come with the Mayor of Boston. She made a comment about not supporting deportations and Trump's pick for BP head reminded her that it's a federal offense to harbor illegal aliens and that he would happily arrest her.
> She quickly changed her tune.
> Arresting any number of people who are responsible for misappropriating government funds to harbor illegal aliens would go a long way towards curbing that behavior.
I hope that trick continues to work. It might!
But the thing is, there are _hundreds of thousands_ of people in this country being paid, full time, to work on facilitating illegals breaking the law. Nobody is going to arrest all of them. If you did, it would probably backfire, as it would be very easy to for them to turn that into martyr propaganda. These organizations probably already have contingency plans for how to continue operations in secret if their leadership gets arrested.
> At the same time, D.O.G.E. is going to find where those funds are coming from and going to and they're going to put a stop to it.
No they're not. D.O.G.E. has no power. What they're going to do is write (very high quality, well-researched, and generally reasonable) reports on how the government could save some money, and then give those reports TO THE PEOPLE WASTING THAT MONEY in order to get them approved. No middle management bureaucrat will ever, ever, EVER, approve a cut to his own budget. And D.O.G.E has no real power, and very little practical power, to enforce that.
> Without the ability to steal tax payer funds, and with the risk of jail time for doing so, most of this behavior will stop.
Most of the 'stealing' is just grey area enough that a lot of people don't agree that it is stealing. This is a big problem. You don't solve it with a government report. Most voters won't read government reports so how would government reports change their minds?
Don't get me wrong. I really hope you are correct. But I'm cynical enough to know nothing ever works that way
> And all I can think is, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions of people who didn't want to leave, he failed, and then he tried a holocaust, and he failed at that too.
WTF, are you talking about? The Jews wanted to leave, they wanted to leave so much they were trying all kinds of ways to sneak out, Hitler wouldn't let them.
A few random comments, I'll split them up based on subject for independent reply trees.
First one, re: ghost guns: iirc, the legal definition of ghost gun is just any gun that's untraceable. So, playing the government technicality game, if you file the serial number off, that's now a ghost gun. If it takes 90 minutes to file off a serial number, I have some serious questions about one's technique 🤣
The whole fixation with "untraceable" ghost guns strikes me as odd. Do the antis really think that there are a bunch of unsolved murders where the killer got away but left a gun at the scene, that it's possible to guarantee a link from the gun to the killer, and that people wouldn't change their behavior in response? To further illustrate the silliness of it all, this guy used a 'ghost gun' and still got caught.
Part of the reason we don't see as many businessman attacks is the depressing fact that to really change the system, you need to kill tens of millions of people who believe the circle can be squared, you can have your cake and eat it too, and There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch.
On the subject of "why not more violence?", two comments.
The first, which I'm sure is basically a talking point for this crowd, is that this is an extremely valuable question to ask, and the fact of it has deep insight if you think about it. We all like to point out how many guns there are in America: the left says "oh no" and the right says "those are rookie numbers". But the fact is, we have like 10x the guns in this country but we do not have 10x the murder rates of other countries. In fact, one of my favourite accidental redpills that Scott Alexander dropped, is that if you exclude the super violent inner city ghettos as outliers (a reasonable thing to do if you want a stat representative of anyone who _doesn't_ live in them), the US gun violence rate is slightly less (but within margin of error of) Canada's. The presence of hundreds of millions of extra guns WITHOUT hundreds of millions of extra violent crimes is pretty suggestive evidence _against_ guns causing violence
The second is that I think that pointing to some kind of American exceptionalism culture-wise misses a pretty important and under-discussed point, which is that a) the US can police violence extremely effectively _when it wants to_; and b) the uncertainty of anarcho-tyranny is a force multiplier for the tyrant.
We live in a surveillance state. The government runs facial ID databases, FBI probably already knows the guy's full identity, already reading his emails, already wiretapped his cell phone, etc. They _will_ eventually get him, they _will_ eventually find him guilty, they _will_ eventually imprison him. They might even give him the Bradley Manning treatment in prison (which I am sincerely convinced is an actual thing and not a joke or a conspiracy theory; after all, finding a discreet agent for this exact purpose was a published MKULTRA goal).
Will they get every murderer? No, because they don't want to, and it's not worth their time. But can they get any specific assassin, if they really want to? ABSOLUTELY. And any rational agent will be weighing this in their risk calculations. I think this provides an extremely powerful disincentive to this kind of overt violence.
For supporting evidence, consider how frequently the government overtly leverages this exact thing for the enforcement of lower level things, especially civil offenses. There's probably a 50 year backlog on health inspections at restaurants, eg., but the risk of failing one _and being forced out of business_ encourages compliance more than meticulously auditing every restaurant once a year and fining $1000 for each failure ever would.
And that incentive is going to apply _more_ at higher levels than at lower ones. Is this going to stop some street thug from street thugging? No, he _doesn't matter_ to the government, in fact, some parts of the government find his street thugging to be instrumentally useful.
But it will _absolutely_ stop CEO assassin wars. As higher profile people, they're more likely to attract the government's ire. And as wealthy, high status people, they have more to lose. Even if the government can only muster the resources to stop, say, five of these a year, when 100 CEOs _want_ to assassinate their rivals, they're going to think "do I risk the 5% chance that I'm the one they Make An Example Of?" and decide to just do nefarious underhanded business tactics instead that only risk civil liability
All true for rational actors. People who are in for headline-grabbing violence are often fine with getting killed in the process though, so being made an example of is not really a disincentive for them (and actually probably is an incentive since they want to be famous). But yeah, the expected value of using violence in business is very very negative for all American business people of any note.
The point I was making was a little more than that, I was suggesting that it is marginally more negative than it would be in most other countries in the world, both because those countries have less state willingness and capacity to police such crimes, and because the expected value of the risk increases proportional to how much you have to lose (since, yknow, you lose more if the risk attains)
" The presence of hundreds of millions of extra guns WITHOUT hundreds of millions of extra violent crimes is pretty suggestive evidence _against_ guns causing violence"
I'd wager that simply means we're well well over the saturation point where nefarious actors have fairly ready access to the tools of the trade, and more guns simply doesn't affect that. If 90% of our guns were removed by magical fiat today, the criminals would still get theirs, as it is an essential tool of the trade, with the bonus that they're now 90% less likely to take return fire.
Countries that have not yet reached that saturation point will soon, as anywhere with difficult to impossible acquisition find their criminal needs filled with home manufacture.
Final comment, I've probably deployed this canned rant on OSD before
> When people debate whether to make laws “tougher”, the discussion usually assumes that there’s a see-saw, and you just get to pick its position. You can push down on one side to make crime lower, and on the other side you’ll get tougher laws. Or you push the law side of the see-saw down to make laws looser (whatever that means in context) and you’ll get more crime.
> But that’s not actually a good description of reality. For any given set of laws, there are all sorts of other factors that will massively increase or decrease crime rates without changing the law. And that means that laws-on-the-books probably aren’t a major factor for determining actual, on-the-ground levels of violence. Here’s a neighborhood-level map of murders in Baltimore:
When people debate government policy they are always always always talking about Unicorn Governance (https://fee.org/articles/unicorn-governance/), not real governance, and as an engineer who has to care about implementation details, this grinds my gears so hard.
Sometimes gun people bring this up as a talking point, in the vein of: "oh, California, your 100 gun laws didn't stop this crime but I'm sure the 101st one would definitely fix everything". People understand this intuitively when they get enough distance from the issue. But for some reason, people will always talk about whether the law should or shouldn't be 'tougher', without bothering to think through any of the practical considerations of what that would imply (or if it's even possible).
For a potentially controversial example, the most recent instance of this that is annoying me is the talk around Trump deporting 11 million illegals. My liberal friends are horrified at this, my conservative friends are salivating at this. And all I can think is, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions of people who didn't want to leave, he failed, and then he tried a holocaust, and he failed at that too. If even LITERALLY HITLER couldn't accomplish this, how do you think Trump will? Besides, the Jewish people in Nazi Germany didn't have 5 rifles in every household, Americans do. Mass deportations? Good luck with that". It _doesn't matter_ what the law says. It _doesn't matter_ what policy changes. It _doesn't matter_ what executive order he signs. It is just impossible, on a sheer practical logistical level, to deport 11 million people, many of whom have access to arms, who don't want to leave. You lack the physical manpower, you lack the logistical capacity, you lack the money, hell, you probably lack the rifles. There's about 300k armed soldiers in the US military, many of whom are occupied with existing deployments. If even _one percent_ of those illegals take up arms, they're fielding an army just as big as what the actual US army could spare to oppose them.
In a twist of supreme irony, this is actually a perfect example of the second amendment _working as intended_.
Well said
Related thought that I've almost certainly shared here before:
People, when debating what government policy _should_ be, always seem to assume a nearly 100% compliance rate. They seem to assume everyone will definitely follow the rules, and maybe a few will try to scam the system but nothing some basic police work can't do.
Except... that never happens. No policy in any organization ever in the history of the world has ever had 100% compliance rate. Even Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia did not have 100% compliance rates: you can tell because of how many people they executed for not complying.
The real world is messy. No plan survives first contact with the enemy. If your plan requires perfect compliance, then it's already failed. I wish more people intuitively understood this
----
Back when arguing about COVID was in vogue, something that people would tell me, was an argument along the lines of "of course masks / lockdowns / vaccines didn't work, because people like you didn't follow the rules, and they won't work if a bunch of people are breaking them". Well, a bunch of people are going to break every rule. If you're saying "masks only work if 100% of people wear them", that's just another way of saying "mask _policies_ don't work", because there is no rule that 100% of people will follow. Some people will misunderstand them. Some will try and fail to follow them. Some will maliciously break them for personal gain. Some will maliciously break them for nothing more than the thrill of breaking rules.
Any policy, any plan, that does not account for this, has already failed. And, as an addendum, if the plan for accounting for this involves basic force, threats of violence, and repression, well, those strategies are pretty effective but history shows they are rarely _100%_ effective.
The smarter idea is to have a plan that still works, or at least partially works, if you only have say 80% compliance
No, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions was Dwight D. Eisenhower with Operation Wetback. He successfully deported over 100,000 illegals. Yes, his tactics needed refinement but you ignored his entire operation to force a Trump/Hitler comparison.
Additionally, you're talking apples and oranges with Nazi Germany. Hitler wasn't trying to deport people who had recently arrived from other nations and could just be sent right back where they came from. He was trying to deport people who had lived there for years - generations in some cases - and had literally nowhere else to go. Additionally, some of those who emigrated from Germany in the period from 1933-1939, went to Poland, Austria, Hungary and etc. and found themselves targeted yet again when Hitler invaded.
I'm not sure where this concept of door-to-door deportations came from anyway. I could be wrong, but I don't recall Trump ever claiming he would do such. His deportations will start with the criminals whose immigration status is currently being ignored. Places like CA and OR are literally just releasing these people right back onto the streets and that needs to stop.
Come here illegally and commit a crime? Get shipped right back home. No one's going to raise an army over that.
> Additionally, you're talking apples and oranges with Nazi Germany. Hitler wasn't trying to deport people who had recently arrived from other nations and could just be sent right back where they came from. He was trying to deport people who had lived there for years - generations in some cases - and had literally nowhere else to go. Additionally, some of those who emigrated from Germany in the period from 1933-1939, went to Poland, Austria, Hungary and etc. and found themselves targeted yet again when Hitler invaded.
I am making no claims regarding morality, or deservement, or anything like that. I hope it's clear to everyone that I am most certainly NOT saying that the Jewish people in 1930 Germany should have left, or that they deserved to be on the receiving end of law enforcement when they didn't. Whether any individual Jewish person should or shouldn't have left is a function of their specific life situation, and it's really not my place to comment on that, since their lives are not my life.
The point of risking Godwin's law is to point out that when you want to move millions of people, and they don't want to move, either they don't move, or you use violence on them until they either move, or stop moving. Those are the options. There are no other options. I am, in fact, pretty against violence, and so would softly advocate _against_ mass deportations of millions of people, on "I don't want my neighbourhood to become a war zone" grounds
Although I will very mildly make a claim that a lot of the illegals should not leave. From their personal points of view, leaving is the wrong decision, based on the practical, real-world constraints and incentives they face. Whether it is the right decision _for all of us_, well, as a _legal_ ~~immigrant~~ nonimmigrant resident alien, with no viable path to staying here long term, part of me wants everyone who breaks immigration rules to be physically removed, so to speak. At the same time, there are definitely violently criminal illegals, and there are definitely respectable, productive ones, and my preference would be to get rid of the first category and keep, as much as possible, the second category
I am simply pointing out that moving millions of people who do not want to be moved is a Very Hard Problem
> you ignored his entire operation to force a Trump/Hitler comparison.
No, I ignored it because I didn't grow up in America and don't know anything about American history. I have never heard of this thing before, and will go read up about it later tonight
> I could be wrong, but I don't recall Trump ever claiming he would do such. His deportations will start with the criminals whose immigration status is currently being ignored. Places like CA and OR are literally just releasing these people right back onto the streets and that needs to stop.
That seems both a lot more reasonable and a lot more achievable. The idea of door to door deportations, at least in _my_ mind, comes from all the people around me who insist he's going to deport 11 million illegals. Since most of those illegals _are not_ committing violent crimes, any real plan to do that would necessarily involve those kinds of operations.
Most likely, all the people around me are wrong / disconnected from reality. I am only reporting on what they're saying, I'm not reporting on what is real. I am complaining about the failures of basic logic and critical thought _in the minds of the people around me who are saying these things_, which is a completely different thing from whether or not those things are actually real.
In fact, my entire point is that they're not real, and these people are dumb for thinking they are
Frankly, a lot of people on _both_ sides are heavily disconnected from reality, as you've pointed out. There are far left and far right both claiming that he's just going to suddenly, overnight, deport 11m people, to the joy of some and chagrin of others.
But I'm not sure where anyone got that notion except in their wildest dreams.
It's definitely going to be a very long process starting with people who are violating the law because those are the situations that are most feasible to deal with - we've already got them in custody, we just need to ship them home.
I'd assume that the scope would expand from there to people that we've somehow confirmed are here illegally and we know where they are. For example, people who have registered to vote/drive without citizenship. We know where they are - they gave us their addresses. Some 56k of them in Oregon alone. They're also criminals if they've actually voted, but at the very least they have the capacity to be criminals because there's literally nothing stopping them from voting.
There are also illegals who have been given funds and housing. We know their statuses and where they are too.
Outside of that, you're correct that it's just not feasible, but I've never heard Trump himself say that he would go after every last illegal. Anything else would require what Eisenhower's plan was most criticized for: racial profiling. You simply can't go up to every Hispanic looking person, assume they're here illegally, and demand their papers.
But again, that's the wet dream of the leftists (who _want_ to see Trump become Hitler just to prove themselves right), and the more emotional right-wingers (who are terrified of what illegals will do to them and their family). And yet, that was never Trump's plan to begin with.
What you're laying out is significantly more reasonable than what the people around me are saying, and I was not intending to criticize or argue against what you are laying out.
I am heavily skeptical that this process would succeed. If nothing else, the legal due process of immigration court would take forever, and need to be bypassed, and that raises all kinds of practical (and a handful of moral) issues.
If that process did succeed though, it would be a massive benefit in the long term.
One major thing you may not be factoring in (or you are and assuming them away for reasons I am unclear on), is that none of this happened in a vacuum. The illegals didn't get housing and funding randomly, and they didn't scam it from the government. There are large numbers of people, and many organizations, both government and private, who are actively working to facilitate this. They will actively work to oppose anyone who tries to stop this. Without a plan to prevent them from stopping this, this will be stopped.
What does that plan look like? Honestly, I don't have the first idea. As it is, whenever someone digs deeply into one of these things, it makes no sense, and what we find implies a gigantic infrastructure supporting it.
For example: A german blogger I read recently relayed a story from Germany. Apparently, the German government recently changed their gibsmedats policy and instead of giving prepaid debit cards to illegals, they're giving gift cards to grocery stores. Idea being, we're only going to cover costs for things you need.
In response to this, NGOs have popped up offering to exchange these gift cards for prepaid debit cards at par. Given that there is both an overhead cost to operating these exchanges, and an optionality cost (eg you're giving them $50 that can be spent on anything and receiving $50 that can only be spent on food), someone somewhere is operating this at a loss. And apparently, that someone in this case is the German federal Green Party.
How do you, as the government, stop something like this when it's the government itself doing it? I haven't the first idea
And more importantly, how do you do this in a way that doesn't create legal precedents that will be weaponized against you as soon as you leave office? I don't want Trump to just somehow completely bypass due process, for example, because in 2028 when the dumb voters put Newsom in office, suddenly whatever mechanism bypassed due process for illegals will be used against Republicans
We've already seen a taste of what is to come with the Mayor of Boston. She made a comment about not supporting deportations and Trump's pick for BP head reminded her that it's a federal offense to harbor illegal aliens and that he would happily arrest her.
She quickly changed her tune.
Arresting any number of people who are responsible for misappropriating government funds to harbor illegal aliens would go a long way towards curbing that behavior.
At the same time, D.O.G.E. is going to find where those funds are coming from and going to and they're going to put a stop to it.
Without the ability to steal tax payer funds, and with the risk of jail time for doing so, most of this behavior will stop. This will also paint a bullseye on the remaining organizations who manage to use private funds and don't care if they serve jail time. Illegals will lose trust in them because the government could use them as sting operations to locate more of them for deportation.
And all of this already exists so no precedent is being created here. It's already federally illegal to harbor non-citizens. If the precedent we set is that politicians are now actually arrested when they violate federal law then I'm 100% for that, regardless of which side they're on.
> We've already seen a taste of what is to come with the Mayor of Boston. She made a comment about not supporting deportations and Trump's pick for BP head reminded her that it's a federal offense to harbor illegal aliens and that he would happily arrest her.
> She quickly changed her tune.
> Arresting any number of people who are responsible for misappropriating government funds to harbor illegal aliens would go a long way towards curbing that behavior.
I hope that trick continues to work. It might!
But the thing is, there are _hundreds of thousands_ of people in this country being paid, full time, to work on facilitating illegals breaking the law. Nobody is going to arrest all of them. If you did, it would probably backfire, as it would be very easy to for them to turn that into martyr propaganda. These organizations probably already have contingency plans for how to continue operations in secret if their leadership gets arrested.
> At the same time, D.O.G.E. is going to find where those funds are coming from and going to and they're going to put a stop to it.
No they're not. D.O.G.E. has no power. What they're going to do is write (very high quality, well-researched, and generally reasonable) reports on how the government could save some money, and then give those reports TO THE PEOPLE WASTING THAT MONEY in order to get them approved. No middle management bureaucrat will ever, ever, EVER, approve a cut to his own budget. And D.O.G.E has no real power, and very little practical power, to enforce that.
> Without the ability to steal tax payer funds, and with the risk of jail time for doing so, most of this behavior will stop.
Most of the 'stealing' is just grey area enough that a lot of people don't agree that it is stealing. This is a big problem. You don't solve it with a government report. Most voters won't read government reports so how would government reports change their minds?
Don't get me wrong. I really hope you are correct. But I'm cynical enough to know nothing ever works that way
> And all I can think is, the last time a leader tried to forcibly deport millions of people who didn't want to leave, he failed, and then he tried a holocaust, and he failed at that too.
WTF, are you talking about? The Jews wanted to leave, they wanted to leave so much they were trying all kinds of ways to sneak out, Hitler wouldn't let them.
A few random comments, I'll split them up based on subject for independent reply trees.
First one, re: ghost guns: iirc, the legal definition of ghost gun is just any gun that's untraceable. So, playing the government technicality game, if you file the serial number off, that's now a ghost gun. If it takes 90 minutes to file off a serial number, I have some serious questions about one's technique 🤣
The whole fixation with "untraceable" ghost guns strikes me as odd. Do the antis really think that there are a bunch of unsolved murders where the killer got away but left a gun at the scene, that it's possible to guarantee a link from the gun to the killer, and that people wouldn't change their behavior in response? To further illustrate the silliness of it all, this guy used a 'ghost gun' and still got caught.
Doing it correctly takes longer than people think. So I am told.
Part of the reason we don't see as many businessman attacks is the depressing fact that to really change the system, you need to kill tens of millions of people who believe the circle can be squared, you can have your cake and eat it too, and There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch.