you can abolish ICE and still enforce immigration law. it’s called e-verify + fines to employers of the unverifiable. (i would like our immigration laws to be more hospitable than they are. But effective enforcement of our current laws does not require detention or violence.)
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“no peace this side of the grave,” what are the implications for winning the nobel peace prize?
he is an officer and a gentleman.
The residents of the house in this video behave with extraordinary control and courage.
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yes.
i don't actually want ICE to be better trained, if it is these guys doing the training.
the future is a mashup of Terminator and Idiocracy.
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i like it when Alan Greenspan appears in the news. it makes me feel young again.
this is still the fucking around stage, only nobody's having fun.
one person can’t run a country. the vesting clause in the constitution is written in what has turned out to be a catastrophically stupid way. 1/
representatives jobs aren’t to know everything there is to be known. their job is to understand the values and interests of their constituents, manage expert technocrats to find feasible expressions of those values and interests, and work with colleagues to get those expressions passed. 2/
admittedly, this is nothing like what contemporary US Congresspeople actually do, since we’ve made fundraising and campaigning their core work, and Gingrich fired their experts. 3/
the US has institutionally deviated very far from anything that can be described in theory (in practice is now obvious) as a plausibly functional democracy. but that doesn’t mean plausibly functional democracies are impossible! /fin
at least in parliamentary democracies the political elites who decide often represent supermajority coalitions. in FTPT systems with strongly sorted parties, the coalitions become electorally cynical median voter chasers, largely detaching elections from governance. 1/
that said, we could keep a popularly elected executive and escape the curse of the orthogonal marginal voter if we adopted a spoiler-resistant electoral system like approval voting for posts where individual electeds must serve the whole community, rather than representing part of a minipublic. /fin
the arsonists run on being tough on fire. that is their whole trick. to those who take them at their word, every fire they set strengthens the case for their necessity.
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this is an artifact of how we do democracy, not inherent to democracy. in a system with two-strongly sorted parties, the people most indifferent to the dimensions of party contestation become the incoherent deciders. that isn’t true of other ways democracy can be and has been organized.
it’s kind of a commonplace in American discourse that no faction actually identifies as fascist, so (the next claim always is), the label amounts to a slur. 1/
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but this faction fully and openly embraces fascist aesthetics and directly resuscitates slogans of historical fascists. though they may try to split hairs, i think that in substance they do rather proudly identify as fascists. /fin
i wonder about the incentives we’re creating here.
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leaving on a jet plane.
for a minute there, it seemed he was a lame duck rather than a horseman of the apocalypse.
morons learn lessons.
come spring the ice melts.
the fundamental mistake the contemporary right makes is to confuse the product of successful institutions with personal characteristics of the people that perform them. since they think good outcomes are about good people, they happily dismantle the institutions under which people become good.
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