I think after the election we will have completely forgotten about this conduct while we still have to live with the spying on innocent people, non-sense travel restriction, and human-rights violating immigration system for years to come.
Making a scene of this decision just seems like stirring a storm inside a teacup, all the while we are experiencing a hurricane from the patriot act.
But we can discuss violations of what it is widely regarded should be universal human rights.
Here's a list of some that I consider should be universal human rights, which are often violated by immigration systems:
- The right of young children to be with their parents
- The right of spouses to be together and start a family
- The right to get married
- The right to legal due process, including appeals and representation
- The right to work for essentials for survival such as food, shelter and medicine
- The right to enter private transactions for things like shelter
- The right to access the prevailing currency system (basic banking in the modern world)
- The right to leave an abusive job, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to leave an abusive relationship, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to stay in the country where you were born, raised and have never known anywhere else
- The right to vote in the country where you were born and raised
- The right to protection and safety when talking to the police about a crime where you are a victim or witness
This statement might be technically true in legal terms (I am not a lawyer so I don’t know), but there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], ratified by all 193 members of the United Nations. That is a good place to start. Additionally the UN has more in depth declarations (e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child[2]; which my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them).
1: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
2: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx
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PS. I truly encourage everyone to read the Declaration of Human Rights[1] in their native language. It is such a beautiful read and gives you a sense of shared humanity. It is not that long, and has over 500 translations. In my native language the translation is really clear and easy to follow.
> my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them
A fine example answer to "How does the immigration system violate human rights?"
It begins with a legal dilemma: E.g. asylum is a human right, but how to determine who is eligible? In a timely manner that is. Especially if you have thousands of applicants and (almost) no documents. How do you house people in the meantime? What rights do they have?
Well, if it's a human right, then everyone. But it's not, which is why you have this twisted logic.
There is no right to freely cross borders.
Just as any bird has the "right" to go wherever it wants and any other animal hat the right to go wherever it wants, I have the natural right to go wherever I want.
I'm a free human. As I'm born on this planet, it's my right to go wherever I want to go on this planet.
That governments want to take away that right of mine, that liberty, is just one example of how governments are using the tyranny of power to force people to their will.
That governments are just the thugs with the best weapons is just Realpolitik. This still doesn't invalidate my right to freely cross borders. I never signed away these rights.
Though I might be stupid to try to exercise it.
Remember your rights are my responsibility. They don't work in a vacuum nor can you make up your own rules.
It means everyone has a right to put in a claim to asylum and have it assessed properly by the authorities.
> There is no right to freely cross borders.
In some circumstances, yes there is.
If there's a war in country A, and non-combatants flee to neighbouring country B out of genuine necessity for safety, yes that border crossing is widely regarded as a human right.
It derives from the basic right to life.
Doesn't mean country B will respect it.
Immigrant have no right to just live in another country, refugees fleeing war have that right as long as the danger remains.
Asylum is a human right https://ijrcenter.org/refugee-law/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Article 14
But regardless if that is right or not, siblings have pointed out that open borders are in fact common-place in many parts of the world today, e.g. EU and USA’s internal borders are open. And (as sibling has also pointed out) historic precedent or existing examples are not necessary to justify any belief. Abolishing slavery did not need a historic precedent, neither did gay rights, and theoretically neither does open borders.
Doesn't that always happen step by step, with "early adopters" arguing on grounds of morality and other arguments, until eventually enough people start to believe something has a high moral value and should be raised to the level of a human right, enshrined in law?
Those who would argue for open borders as a human right are like "early adopters" of that idea.
We would all fit easily on Iceland, but most would die of dehydration or starve in a short amount of time.
I could be an early adopter of "cheese for everyone", but I would need to get a lot of cheese first to make that happen.
That said a world wide safety net would be a good thing to advocate for on moral grounds, no?
The EU has open borders for all EU citizens, and for the most part it's faring ok. There has not been a Europe-wide social safety net crisis as a result of this freedom, and crucially for this argument: there isn't an EU wide social safety net. It has freedom of movement without a universal safety net.
The USA's states are effectively countries. All USA citizens have open borders to travel between states in the USA. For the most part, it's faring ok and there has not been a USA-wide social safety net crisis caused by this freedom either.
Iceland and cheese for everyone: That sounds like what's called the slippery slope fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
That was set with our Constitution, and thoroughly tested in the 1860s. The idea has never really been seriously tested again since.
It’s a quite different setup from the EU.
I don't know. I think the people that are going to believe these kinds of stories at face value would have found this story on their own regardless. It is not like the NY Post is some obscure paper. It may make this story stronger with those that are already inclined to believe this stuff.
I think by this time people have already made their decision on whom they are going to vote and they will use any story that agrees with their decision as proof that they are right.
IIRC Trump was impeached for supposedly threatening to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine unless they investigated this incident.
Several governments and other organizations were concerned because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma properly, having laid the investigation he inherited from his predecessor dormant. The demand to fire him wasn't something that Joe Biden came up with himself out of the blue, and at the end of the day it was most likely to Burisma's detriment.
It's not an impeachable offense to threaten to withhold foreign aid for valid reasons that further the interests of the United States. It was (and should be) an impeachable offense to illegally withhold aid that was already meant to have been delivered, and to do so for personal gain.
They just said they checked his calendar and could find no such meeting, then later backpedaled and said they couldn't discount the possibly that it happened and just wasn't on the official schedule.
The computer repair guy’s story is just comically implausible. https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
You want a real corruption scandal? How about the $10 million bribe paid to the Trump campaign by a state-owned Egyptian bank right before the 2016 election (and immediately after candidate Trump met privately with President Sisi). Which the DOJ never finished investigating because Trump-appointed officials instructed them not to. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donat...
It tells you that the story is being maneuvered for political advantage, because obviously. It tells you nothing at all about whether or not it's true.
What this story demonstrates more than anything is that Giuliani and Trump are getting pathetically desperate, because it is looking likely they will lose and both are facing significant criminal liability once they aren’t shielded by the Barr DOJ’s position that a GOP president enjoys absolute impunity and by the pardon power (which has already been corruptly used to let other Trump henchmen off the hook for crimes committed in his name).
If Twitter et al really want to be public resources they need transparency in their decision making and possibly independent oversight. If they want to just be regular businesses they need to take responsibility for the bullshit they propogate.
Straddling these two lanes hasn't been working for society and it seems like regulation or breakups are close to inevitable.
Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong, maybe a civil war increases shareholder value for Facebook? Because the way they went about this is another escalation. Nothing drives engagement like military engagements, right?
Here is a good example. Right wing media likes to point at the homelessness problem in CA and claim that that is proof that Democrats are bad at governing. The homeless issue is a fact, supported by data. And CA being a Democratic state is also a fact supported by data. But pointing to both those facts and claiming it as proof that Democrats==bad is a bad faith argument. Blue states have higher GDP, higher levels of education attainment, and lower poverty rates than red states. And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars. I could make a similarly bad faith argument, and point out that West Virginia has the highest number of opioid overdoses per capita, therefore Republicans==bad. But I don't need to do that because the statistics that most reasonable people would agree to use as an arbiter of state level success are already in agreement with my position.
As you can see from the length of the above paragraph. These bad faith arguments require a decent amount of effort and/or knowledge to effectively counter. So as we move into this post-fact world, can you really blame people for just sticking to the 'narratives'?
This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Stephen Colbert's perception of reality has a known liberal bias.
> And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars.
But the overheated housing market is the criticism, and is completely valid. California is correctly criticized for letting housing costs get so bad that people who are making twice the US median income are nonetheless sleeping in their cars.
And California may be the worst, but it is actually a problem which is more severe in blue states than red states on average. Housing costs more in NYC than Austin, and more in Chicago than Charlotte, despite having a lower median income.
So sticking to the "narratives" doesn't get you there. It causes you to ignore the problems in your own back yard. You have to look at the facts, even when they're inconvenient, and admit it when it's your team making a mistake.
Everyone is wrong about some facts. Surely I'm wrong about some facts, as I'm not omniscient.
However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts. Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.
When half the country disagrees with the other half as to who that is, I'm not sure "clearly" is the right word to use.
And if you don't entertain the possibility that it could be you, it will be you.
Nearly 48% of the electorate did not vote for either major party candidate. The two parties are both very much minorities. There aren't simply two sides to every story.
There's actually significant ideological diversity within each of the two major parties, though there are certainly attempts by powerful people on both sides to stamp out any dissent.
And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
That's not a thing I said.
I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil. The enthusiastic party voters are a subdivision of the minorities. Indeed many votes are more defined by what they're against than what they're for.
Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.
> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.
But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.
Is the best policy to combat climate change a carbon tax which is refunded to the population, or a WPA-style "Green New Deal"? According to most economists it's the former, according to AOC it's the latter.
School choice programs have a strong record of giving low income families with children in failing public schools a better alternative, but public school teachers unions are a large Democratic voting block and major campaign donors, so they have a perverse incentive to oppose such programs even when they're succeeding, e.g. by shutting down the popular one in D.C.
Immigration has a multifaceted economic effect. High skill immigration tends to bring domestic economic benefits, because the immigrants spend much of the money in the domestic economy and pay more in taxes than they consume in services. Low skill immigration tends to have the opposite effect, and to suppress wages for unskilled labor or increase unskilled domestic unemployment. If you combine the two the total effect is positive, because the former effect is larger. But the Democratic party has a stronger incentive to promote the latter, because unskilled immigrants from socialist-leaning countries are more likely to vote for Democrats, so they regularly conflate the two and adopt policies that promote the latter, even if it harms the domestic population.
You can undoubtedly find some Republican to argue that all immigration is bad and some Democrat to argue that a carbon tax would be a good answer to climate change, but there remains much wrongness on both sides. The filter bubbles show people who live on one side or the other the reasons why some subset of the other side is wrong and not the reasons why some subset of their side is wrong. It creates an impression that isn't true.
Even the premise is basically nonsense. If one Republican says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change is a hoax, does that mean Republicans are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because it is real? We know which one will be on CNN. If one Democrat says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change will cause human extinction in twelve years without a Green New Deal, does that mean Democrats are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because humans won't go extinct if we don't immediately raise taxes to 75% and spend the money on government windmills? You know which one will be on Fox.
Start with something simple: the in-person attendance and TV viewership of the President's inauguration. This is completely irrelevant to policy and has no long-term implications whatsoever. Yet somehow it became a major "partisan" controversy, when it was never controversial in the past for Presidents of any party. Of course crowd size estimation isn't a perfect science, but this particular controversy had nothing to do with science. And if you're going to tell me the problem there was "both sides", I'll have to disagree.
This is just one example of extreme reality denial. What makes it notable is again that the dispute was of no particular importance in the grand scheme, and yet reality was still vehemently denied.
I mean, this kind of shit comes right out of George Orwell, where the test of party loyalty is how you can make yourself believe things that are obviously false.
What was the attendance at Lincoln's inauguration? FDR's? Who knows. Who cares! The only person who truly cared was Donald J. Trump himself. But Republicans have been primed to take anything critical of what he says as a partisan attack by the "liberal media". Every fact, no matter how trivial, is now a political controversy.
The issue is that they both do it. For example, the left made quite a kerfuffle about "Trump" separating families at the border, but the truth is the separation policy was preexisting and what changed was only how many detentions there were when he started to detain everyone crossing the border illegally. They also like to play word games, like saying "no existing policy of separating all families crossing the border illegally" which is intentionally misleading when what changed wasn't the separation of those in detention but rather the detention of everyone crossing the border illegally.
Which isn't even to say that family separation was a good policy, but the persistent implication that it was a policy established under Trump is ridiculous and politically-motivated.
No, that's not the issue. That's never been the issue. As I said much earlier:
"Everyone is wrong about some facts." "However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts."
There's neither time nor space here to numerically compare mistruths of the 2 major parties. I would just like to see acknowledgment of the general principle that 2 groups of people can be ignorant in some ways while having very different levels of ignorance. For example, compare high school children and elementary school children. Generally speaking, high schoolers have a lot more knowledge than grade schoolers, and yet high schoolers still have quite a bit of ignorance. The 2 groups are not at all equal. This is a very common situation, and "both sides are wrong about things" is not a useful description of that situation.
Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.
Left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias takes this on in the context of climate change in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri...
He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.
> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...
> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.
There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)
Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow. I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.
In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.
I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/world-... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-climate-repor...
But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.
Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.
> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science
Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?
Homeless is not a weird metric to use. It's absolutely a failure of government in the worst possible way. Democrats deserve all the criticism in the world for tolerating that situation.
Still, you're correct that there is bad faith: the bad faith is that Republicans care about homelessness, which they generally do not either.
Democrats deserve criticism for the failures of Democratic-controlled governments, and Republicans deserve criticism for the failures of Republican-controlled governments. In my opinion, they're both bad. Are they "equally bad"? Maybe not, but I won't accept that homelessness is a weird metric. There's a lot of bad faith is ignoring one's own faults.
This doesn't really give the impression of actually deeply caring about homelessness...
I agree with this. The Constitution is outdated in the extreme. We're long overdue for something new.
> A divorce is coming and it’s better for everyone if it’s peaceful when it happens.
A divorce? I don't think that's going to work. Who gets custody of Wisconsin?
Some warlord from Michigan?
You can make a pretty decent argument that this is already happening.
Actual police mostly have better procedures for this sort of thing, but still sometimes get the wrong guy or go to the wrong address. Somehow I doubt such groups will do better than them.
Which could, if you ask me, be a risk in case trump wins but it is rather clear that the election was fradulent (not saying it will be, but let's assume for the arguments sake it was). In which case the military would have to decide which "president" to follow, or to follow congress, or the senate, or someone else. Which could tear the military appart, let alone to speak of the national guard.
Anything short of a clear landslide for one of the two candidates is going to result in a seriously tense/chaotic situation. Best to hunker down and hope the civilians sort their shit out before giving an order you know is going to result in a lot of resentment and formerly good, dependable people being locked up for insubordination (best case), or entire organizations dissolving in an orgy of mutiny, violence, and/or desertion (worst case).
As far as a split goes, it wouldn't be "clean." Unlike in the 19th century, individual units aren't constituted from people drawn from the same geographic area. There's a centralized bureaucracy managing personnel, so most units really are a cultural melting pot made up of people from all over the country. So I don't see the military splitting, I see it falling apart.
I just hope that the outcome will be chrystal clear, hopefully democrat. And that if it is not unit cohesion is strong enough to prevent the US forces from falling apart.
If they had just left it alone, maybe attached the standard "this might be false" disclaimer, it would likely have passed as yet another partisan thing, but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.