I think it's largely a matter of how regular these events are. Finnish winters are universally cold, with lots of snow. So car-owners switch to winter-tyres in advance of snow/ice, trams always work, and suchlike.
In the UK, either in Scotland where I lived as an adult, or Yorkshire where I grew up snow was something that lasted for a few hours most of the time, and so people weren't used to it. If it snowed enough that the roads were covered busses would be cancelled, trains wouldn't run, and schools would be closed.
That is my conclusion too. When something is rare it isn't worth preparing for it when you can shut down. When something is common you have to prepare for it.
If it ever drops below 0C close to the equator (and near sea level) pipes should be drained and everyone do without water - this happens so rarely that it isn't worth the cost to figure out how to handle that. When you live in a place where it goes below 0C for weeks on end every winter that isn't acceptable and so you have to pay the extra costs of putting pipes inside buildings (or far underground) and insulating and heating those buildings to keep the pipes warm.
Not sure if it’s evident in broader statistics yet, but I think that because Tesla got the early adopter market (tech savvy people), they are now losing that same market first.
I had a party at my house a couple months ago, mostly SF tech people. I found the Tesla owners chatting together, and the topic was how much FSD sucks and they don’t trust it.
I asked and no-one said they would buy a Tesla again. Distrust because they felt suckered by FSD was a reason, but several also just said Elon’s behavior was a big negative.
I own six EVs (three cars, one of which is a Tesla, and three motorcycles). My first EV was my Tesla.
We're on the cusp of trading the Tesla in for a Rivian most likely. I should be Tesla's target customer, but instead I'm exactly who you described:
- I don't like the brand. I don't like Elon. I don't like the reputation that the car attaches to me.
- I don't trust the technology. I've gotten two FSD trials, both scared the shit out of me, and I'll never try it again.
- I don't see any compelling developments with Tesla that make me want to buy another. Almost nothing has changed or gotten better in any way that affects me in the last four years.
They should be panicking. The Cybertruck could have been cool, but they managed to turn it into an embarrassment. There are so many alternatives now that are really quite good, and Tesla has spent the last half a decade diddling around with nonsense like the robot and the semi and the Cybertruck and the vaporware roadster instead of making cars for real people that love cars.
The astonishing thing is that they haven't released a new car in six years and _do not appear to have one in the works_ (unless you count the Model Y facelift, but really that's pushing it). I think that's pretty much unheard of for an active car manufacturer over the last few decades.
Like, what are they _doing_? Do they still have R&D at all?
The other thing is various other companies built pretty much what Tesla was promising like the Rimac Nevera and the Yangwany U9, showing it was quite doable if Tesla had put some enthusiastic engineers on it and said go do it?
Their ~mission was cheap cars for masses. There are plenty of high end EVs out there. It's nuts when smart people compare 7 year old 35k Tesla to a brand new 80k Polestar or 100k Lucid.
> instead of making cars for real people that love cars.
Whoosh. They've been saying Tesla is an AI company for nearly a decade. AI has been propping up entire US economy for last few years. EV bandwagon has left long time ago.
Saying all that I wouldn't mind even cheaper Tesla - small screen, 1 camera instead of 11, fully offline, fully stainless steel, fully open source - basically minimally tech and maximally maintainable and maximum longevity.
They make cars that mostly do their job. They don't make AI that does its job. They're not an AI company, they're a car company pretending they're not a car company.
> Saying all that I wouldn't mind even cheaper Tesla - small screen, 1 camera instead of 11, fully offline, fully stainless steel, fully open source - basically minimally tech and maximally maintainable and maximum longevity.
What you describe would probably cost more money, not less. The market is small and analog tech is actually more expensive to produce with than digital tech.
> basically minimally tech and maximally maintainable and maximum longevity.
Kind of implies it.
Tech is used to lower prices, not raise them, if you want minimize tech, and you want to make it as maintainable by end user or relatively cheap mechanics, and you want it to last as long as possible, that is going to cost a lot. Or you basically want a Lada Laika, the old ones, that could be repaired super easily. Anything with microchips is going to suffer if those chips die, and they aren't going to be easy to repair.
> Anything with microchips is going to suffer if those chips die, and they aren't going to be easy to repair.
AFAIK Tesla is already moving towards that direction with unboxed manufacturing - it's where same chip can be either window controller or brake controller. Having single chip + open source firmware would eliminate this issue.
I'm sure they would be if the stock price had ever showed any signs of being based in reality.
But for now Elon can keep having SpaceX and xAI buy up all the unsold Teslas to make number go up.
If that ever stops working, just spin up a new company with a hyper-inflated valuation and have it acquire Tesla at some made up number. Worked for him once, why not try it again.
And at this point he can get even fraudier, with the worst possible realistic outcome being that he might get forced to pay a relatively small bribe and publicly humiliate himself for Trump a bit.
But there's really no more consequences to any sort of business fraud (for now) as long as you can afford the tribute.
I partially agree. FSD seems fine to me but I wouldn’t buy a second Tesla. Tesla seems to have stopped caring about being a car company that caters to nerds/tech enthusiasts.
Mine has been an extremely well done vehicle and I was (and kind of am) bullish on FSD as a driver assistance technology, but a car is a 6-7 year investment for me and I have big doubts about their direction. They seem to have abandoned the idea of being a car company, instead chasing this robotaxi idea.
Up until 2023/2024 was fine for my 6-7 year car lifecycle. Tesla was really cool when they let you do all sorts of backwards-compatible upgrades, but they seemed to have abandoned that.
I’ve found it incredibly disappointing seeing their flailing direction now.
Rivian seems to still have a lot of the magic that Tesla had. They’re definitely a strong contender for my next vehicle in a year or two.
Those are overall visitations. There's no indication that they're vacationing or tourists. Does Chicago have more global business interests than Rome?
My Mother went to Chicago every year for Emergency Room training. Was she a tourist? Or was she there because Chicago, for all it's problems, has one of the most competent and practiced set of ER doctors in the entire country?
If you were to take exports as a good proxy for “global business interests”, then the USTR would show you that Chicago exports 57.9B in goods, making Chicago’s exports almost 1/3 of Rome’s entire GDP.
Does it really matter? Both tourism and business fall under the same ESTA Visa Waiver programme. In both cases you have people visiting without any visa but just an online application at cpb. I dont even think they stamp passports anymore during entry in the US. It's all digital now.
“The Biden administration has also carried out the most administrative returns in at least 15 years—more than 505,000 from FY 2021 through February 2024. For comparison, nearly 685,000 migrants were administratively returned over the previous two administrations, from FY 2009 through FY 2020.”
That does not sound like a lack of enforcement to me.
My parents (Canadian) won’t visit, and haven’t since Trump’s first term.
Keep in mind these are people who were educated in the US (Cornell, RPI, Florida State), and as kids, we used to spend at least a month a year in the US on vacation with their college friends. So not historically haters.
I don't think "illegals" means "people receiving money under the table", especially in the context of this thread. It sounds like they're referring to people living illegally in the country. Hence my question about "illegals" receiving benefits when usually we need to have documents to receive any state/government benefit.
I was referring to the same people. The reason I said that is that employing someone who’s undocumented exposes the employer to enforcement risk, so many choose to keep the relationship hidden.
That’s how most undocumented people in the country survive: by working for employers who are breaking the law.
In terms of undocumented individuals benefits, that’s a common and almost entirely false claim.
While it is a complicated space (because of State vs Federal), the vast majority of “Illegals” are not eligible for the vast majority of benefits in the United States, with the exception of some emergency services.
There are some exceptions for victims of human trafficking and there like.
The problem is how many people enthusiastically voted for this madness, lawlessness and cruelty, and are still cheering it on.
You can say "vote, vote, vote," and maybe it will work in 2026 or 2028, or 2030 or whenever, but the root problem is not going away: you are still surrounded by people all over the country who want this.
Margin of victory was ~2M votes, about how many voters 55+ die in a year. Hopefully enough voters have aged out or learned their lesson next time around (considering election results we've seen in the last week or so [1]). You're never going to convince unsavory voters to vote with empathy, the subject brain structure does not support it (anterior insular cortex, primarily), you can only hope they're aging out of the electorate at a reasonable pace (and not being replaced).
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." (Planck's Principle [2] applied to voting)
It's comforting that maybe this mentality is correcting itself one funeral at a time.
But what really makes me sad is how this mentality so quickly swept into the country to begin with. 30 years ago, the vast majority of Americans would be horrified at the thought of people being assaulted on the street in broad daylight, black-bagged, kidnapped and disappeared forever by masked, non-identifying thugs. Fast forward 30 years, and (chances are) my neighbors want this and are absolutely giddy at the thought of it happening here!
Regardless of who votes for what, how did my country turn into this?
First, your country has been divided since at least the mid-19th century. Every war has a winning and losing side, but the losers don't simply vanish. Their mentality persists throughout generations, even if it remains in the background, and is ignored by the other side.
Secondly, all this technology you've built and allowed the world to use can and has been exploited by your enemies to your own detriment. The same systems you've built that allow manipulating people into buying things are also ideal channels for spreading propaganda and disinformation. Information warfare is not new, but modern technology has made it more effective than ever at manipulating groups of people, sowing dissent, and generally causing chaos and confusion within a nation.
So, putting those two together, it's not difficult to see how acts of information warfare could be used to fuel the deeply rooted social divide, directly causing or strongly contributing to the internal sociopolitical instability you've been experiencing for the past decade.
Meanwhile, your enemies can sit back and enjoy the show of an imploding nation. They know that you're untouchable via traditional warfare, which is why these tactics are so perfect. They do require a long time to come into effect, but they're highly effective, very cheap to deploy, and the best part is that they're completely untraceable to the attacker. It's still debatable whether there was Russian interference in your elections, and how effective it actually was, even though there is evidence for it. It's still debatable whether Chinese-operated social media platforms are a national security threat or not. Were J6 protesters rioters or patriots? And so on about every controversial sociopolitical topic.
This confusion is exactly the intended effect. Your regular checks and balances, your laws, ideals and values, make no difference if your communication channels are corrupted.
I don't see how you can get out of this mess, and I expect things will get much worse before they get better. Not just for you, but globally. These same tactics are also deployed in other countries, by the US as well. Though, ironically, countries that are cut off from the global internet have an upper hand in this conflict.
Tribalism, identity politics, low education and lack of respect for education and intellectualism, and late stage capitalism. A cautionary tale, for sure. People are angry, rightfully so, but at the wrong people. Thank Reagan (economics) and Gingrich (politics) for a lot of this we’re facing.
Deepfriedchokes is right; we need stronger, more robust systems to protect humans from other humans, because we cannot trust the human (broadly speaking).
The Biden admin (no idea if Biden himself was involved) literally sued Texas to stop Texas from enforcing border law. This same admin also essentially redefined "asylum" to be economic asylum rather than "I'm afraid that if I go back to my country I'll be killed" which is how people typically thought of asylum.
You can absolutely think that what's happening now is an overreaction, un-American, gross, illegal, and morally wrong.
But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
Is that ugly and uncomfortable? Yes, absolutely. Will things get better by ignoring it? Absolutely not.
>If you just want to see the people who voted for this as "the enemy" and "evil" you're basically doing the same tribal "othering" that's lead to these outcomes you don't like.
"If you point out problems, you yourself are actually the problem. I am very rational."
It is incredible, because a lot of people dismiss it so eagerly.
Let me try to phrase it differently: ostracization rarely yields positive results, and is more likely to lead to opposite of desired course of action through future radicalization.
In other words, saying that bad people are bad is - as paradoxical as it might be - less likely to making anyone better than make bad people even worse.
Sorry, I absolutely appreciate the explanation instead of a snark remark, but I don’t understand.
What was tired or supposed to work out? Not ostracizing is not exactly a solution (grandparent comment haven’t made suggestions as to what to do instead), and alternatives aren’t one possible approach but a giant spectrum of possible reactions. Instead of saying “you’re a bad person” a lot of different things can be done, right?
Or do you possibly mean that we collectively tried everything and nothing ever worked out, so we’re fairly positive this is wishful thinking? Or am I misunderstanding something, or falling to some fallacy here?
Okay so what's the solution then that doesn't involve having to disappear the half of the country that you don't agree with? I'm super open to better solutions. I just rarely hear any other than magical thinking. "All these evil shitbags will get reeducated and agree with me now" if it's not that, what is it?
> But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
Anyone who's read about the history of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s should understand how it's possible. We can still feel disappointed and helpless that the same mentality is rearing its head again, especially in a country that itself sent people overseas to fight it 100 years ago.
Off and on throughout my life as an American, I thought my fellow Americans could be sometimes be described as arrogant, sometimes uninformed, sometimes overconfident, sometimes over-patriotic, sometimes selfish. But never needlessly cruel and cold-blooded like millions are today. This is new and terrible. It's absolutely sickening to walk outside in my neighborhood, look at 10 houses and think maybe 3 or 4 of them are homes to people who are OK with what is happening.
>But if you're unwilling to try and understand how it's possible that over half the country voted for someone who would enact policies that lead to what we're seeing now, you're simply not paying attention.
Actually it was more like 25% of those eligible to vote, not "over half the country."
We shouldn’t need to count on voters dying to avoid outcomes like this. Our institutions are broken if they can’t protect the public from a mentally ill public official on a power trip.
The point is that we are not talking about protecting the public from a few mentally ill public officials. These officials didn't just appear out of the ether, they were voted for by tens of millions of voters who want this. Even if the officials go away, those voters are not.
I'm not sure this is the correct perspective on voting. Voters are often passionate about one or two key issues - crime, Israel v Palestine, cost of living, immigration policy, coal towns, Ukraine, military spending, or whatever is most important to them.
If they voted for Trump it doesn't mean they agree with him on immigration and crime. They just have to think it's less important than the positions they do agree with. An effective argument to win over those voters isn't "you're evil and should have better opinions," it's "immigration policy is important too and this one is really bad, plus Trump is doing a bad job on your pet issues."
I disagree. Can you talk someone out of their religion? Their identity? Their belief system? In most cases, you cannot. Exceptions exist, certainly, but are not the norm in this regard. This could include those who are proudly racist, proudly misogynist, or take joy or satisfaction in the harm or pain of others. Are they evil? I think that distinction is a waste of time to be honest. All that matters is: “can you convince these people to vote differently?” If not, any time or effort you spend on them is wasted, and the evidence is robust a lot of these people will keep voting as they have, regardless of argument made.
Swing voters exist. Moderates exist. Single-issue voters exist. Occasional voters exist. These are observable facts about the world.
The four groups exist in large enough numbers that they decide elections. Die-hard party loyalists exist, committed non-voters who'll never ever vote exist, but they're fixed quantities and are practically irrelevant.
I agree with the statement that what really matters is whether you can convince someone to vote differently - but, yes, of course you can! Trump has run three times and only won twice. Obviously there's something that can convince people not to vote for Donald Trump, because it has already happened.
The replacement voters are currently teenagers. They haven't "learned their lesson", they aren't old enough to have experienced politics at all. They were 6 years old when Trump was elected the first time. This is their reality and we can't expect that the electorate gets more sensible because old people rotate out.
Complete hopium. I remember twenty years ago as we witnessed the second term of W and the talks about the republican party's base dying out and losing their support with it. Yet 21 years later they are going stronger than ever with just mayhem and chaos to show for it. Nothing constructive accomplished in two decades. They either obstructed when out of power or favoured the billionaire class when in power. Yet they rebranded themselves as the "revolutionary" party and suckered enough idiots to vote for them enthusiastically.
You are fucked, American friends. And we're all fucked with you and because of you. When you sneeze the rest of the world catches a Covid sized cold so you're taking down the rest of us with you.
We must always vote. Our voter turnout for elections in the US is approximately shit.
We must also do other things, too: Voting isn't the end-all, be-all solution to everything. (And that's OK; we can do more than one thing at a time.)
But the absolute necessity of actually-voting is a constant, and I'm equipped with a profound amount of intolerance towards any idea that may suggest otherwise.
Or, they live in one of the 40-something states where the election margins are large enough that it doesn't matter whether they vote.
My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.).
By what mechanism do you think that refusing to vote will improve your favored diminutive party's odds in your state?
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2. Or maybe it's about cost, instead?
What does it cost to vote in your state? How much time, and how much money, does a voter need to put forth in order to cast a vote in [wherever you are]?
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3. Are you a masochist? (Are you sure about that?)
I predict that California will “go blue” in the presidential elections for at least the rest of my lifetime. Someone who “votes red” in California can say that their vote doesn’t matter, and a reasonable person would understand why they feel that way.
You don’t seem like a reasonable person, or you’re also suffering from some nihilistic delusion, possibly.
The most sure method any of us can individually enact to help to ensure that our favored candidate is not elected is to declare that it doesn't matter, and then just give up and not vote.
Your vote always matters. Your vote gets tallied up along with all of the other votes, each of which individually have exactly equal weight compared to your own vote.
By extension: Any suggestion to the contrary is delusional.
The vote that is never cast is absolutely worthless. You're correct.
(I vote every single time unless my ballot would simply be empty. I'd like to say "I'll see you at the polls!" but that is seemingly a lost cause -- it's apparent that only one of us has any chance at all of imparting any change at this level, and that this person is not you.
But you do you. The folks who aren't nihilists will do what we can to steer the ship without your help.)
I don't think this framing is very helpful. Whatever you believe about the people who pulled the lever for Trump, which included an unprecedented number of Latino and Black voters, they exist, and they're not persuaded by your disapproval. I think a really big problem we have on my side of the aisle is the belief that there's a celestial referee who will call offsides on the Republicans if we can just find the right argument at the right amplitude.
What led into our current circumstances was several years of uncontrolled, chaotic immigration, caused in large part by specific articulable decisions Biden's administration made. People felt like the situation had gotten out of control, and they weren't wrong. Every day I'd commute into my office and pass multiple corners and Ike off-ramps(!) staffed by a woman and several of her tiny children, out in the cold, trying to sell bottles of water.
My reaction to that wasn't "deport them". I'm a liberal Democrat. But we're kidding ourselves if we think a natural reaction to that situation was "this is fine".
The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability. It was not: people fucking hate inflation. By a large factor inflation was the most important issue in the 2024 election. But the second-most important issue was immigration (like it has been throughout Europe over the past 10 years) and then after that the issues sharply trail off in importance.
Could you please qualify both: the several years of chaotic annd uncontrolled immigration as well as Biden betting on employment vs inflation with the policies that you are referencing?
For example, while I’m aware that the Biden admin ended title 42, it had only been policy for a few years, ending this policy simply removes us to the Obama era. Although I certainly don’t intend to strawman what you are saying, Obama immigration certainly wasn’t chaotic and uncontrolled. These statements don’t comport with my reading of the facts, as well as inflation, since I understand this to be a global phenomenon. I am genuinely interested
> The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability.
There is credible theory (shared by a very balanced labor economist I follow) that the immigration crisis helped tame the inflation crisis, besides boosting the economy enough for a soft landing:
Right, so, I'm not making a normative claim about the right about of immigration. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call myself an "open borders" person, but I'm very pro-immigration. Pro-immigration in the sense of believing we benefit from the mix of new Americans we get over our southern border, not in the weird doublespeak sense of appreciating skilled immigration from Europe.
But from 2021-2023, we experienced a destabilizing sudden amount of immigration. We'd had immigrant-friendly policy during Obama, but I don't recall many dozens of Venezuelan refugees on the doorstep of our Village Hall. Obviously, that happened in large part because southern governors bussed people (often without their informed consent) to northern states. But so what? All that says is that we were experiencing something the southern states had been experiencing all along.
My big point here is just: it's not enough to say how strongly you feel about immigration in 2021-2024. Enough people hated it that it motivated a materially important bloc of voters. I disagree with those voters. But I also disagree with people upset about inflation, and I feel like we generally understand that those of us on my side of the employment/inflation question were just, you know, wrong. In an electoral sense.
I was looking at yearly immigration numbers and there is variation in the reporting, which is to be expected, but from what I can see, the census bureau sees a fairly stable number of immigrants (undocumented and otherwise) year over year from 2010-2025, and many sources agree, although CATO intstitute indicates a rather large increase (around %40) in this time period.
Can you please share some information as to why you feel the 21-3 numbers to be destabilizing?
I am an internet person, but I am aware of your general career and hold some personal respect for you which is why I am asking you fairly directly for your information. Correcting my knowledge is truly my goal and to be very blunt, I am sensitive to the issues of immigration (all types). Personally, my main concern with my country's treatment of this issue lies in the preservation of due process for these people who are seeking to become my countrymen. It doesn't surprise me that they might desire freedom and self-determination, which is something that I readily empathize with. It is important to me to treat people fairly and with dignity in civil society and especially regarding our government, and this includes citizens who are troubled by it. As such I am very interested in realizing an accurate portrayal.
My take (from the sibling comment): the actual immigration problem was not as bad as the perception of it. And possibly that perception was deliberately cultivated across the masses.
For several northern metros, the actual immigration problem was distinctively worse than anything that occurred under Obama. If we can't talk about it without lapsing into cope, we don't have much of a chance to persuade the people voting against the perception you're talking about.
Well I asked about this and now you're saying "It was actually worse" and invoking cope. If I promise to have zero follow up questions can you tell me why you think this?
I do live in a northern municipality and we have a number of Venezuelan people here, which is why I mentioned the TPS Act.
I became more closely aware of the TPS when I talked to one of the guys about his country. This was a couple of years ago, but I still see his car (he has a Toyota with a "Venezuela" badge on the rear over the "TOYOTA" he ripped off of it, which is how I figured he was Venezuelan)
But I was wrong about the time frame of the bill which apparently did come into effect during Biden admin, giving them rights to work.
Sorry about that inaccuracy, it never mattered to me who did it since it seemed like we were helping these people out quite a lot, and I liked him.
At no point did mismanaged immigration during the Obama administration cause a crisis in my local municipality or force us to reallocate funds or scramble to find housing for over 100 people that were otherwise living in makeshift tents outside a police station. I think you'll find it pretty easy to pull up news stories; October 2023 was the peak of it in Chicagoland but you'll see stories running all the way into the middle of the next year.
(I liked Biden too and am directionally supportive of TPS; especially for Haitians, but broadly for everyone. My belief in the fundamental moral rightness of that program makes me less tolerant of the ineptitude with which the programs were managed, not more so: Biden's mishandling of this will probably set similar efforts back for the next 20 years.)
Thanks, I was editing the comment but I will stop to prevent any wiggle over here.
We have some number of immigrants where I am in a rather conservative small town in a large greater metro area. We have a local history of missionary and aid work, sponsoring people from terrible places like Sudan during the Save Darfur movement, and even farther back to bring Christian european people into the country. I sometimes see people in my daily life like (as you mentioned) a Haitian man who works in an industrial facility, people from Guatemala and Honduras live very close to me, some have bought into businesses and such.
From my perspective its the working rights that do the most to help people out, since amnesty applicants are prohibited from working for a waiting period and have to rely on whatever charities or aid is available, which varies.
I think over the long and even the median term, we benefit from arbitrarily-skilled migration over the southern border. I'm to the left of the median Democrat on immigration. But in the short term of 2023 and 2024, we had chaos and direct costs. Black voters in the west side of Chicago noticed that services for their neighborhoods, and for Black homeless people in particular, we underfunded, while large allocations for housing and wraparound services for migrants were expedited on an emergency basis.
We could have taken in an integer multiple more migrants than we did in 2023. But we'd have to have the programs in place to do it. Instead, they built a clownfire clusterfuck of policy and procedure all while sending gravely mixed signals about the likelihood of success for economic migrants, which were (quite reasonably, and, in fact, correctly) interpreted by those people --- people smart and tenacious enough to cross the Darien Gap on foot! --- as a flashing green light.
It's not that the country doesn't have the capacity for those people. It does. But only if the mechanisms are in place to on-board them --- sufficient immigration judges, temporary housing, routing throughout the country, tracking. We had absolutely none of that, and the southern governors knew it and called the bluff.
I think people who care about Democratic party electoral success should be extremely wary of self-soothing explanations about how we did everything right and it was Republican misrepresentation and sabotage that got us here. I don't agree with conservatives on immigration and don't think the institutional Republican party is a good-faith actor on this issue, but that doesn't matter --- the only thing that matters is what the median voter thinks the next Democratic president will do on immigration. If they believe it's the same thing Biden did, that's going to cost us.
Oh as someone going through my own personal (legal) immigration-related crisis in the '21 - '24 timeframe, I totally don't think any party on any side of aisle was or is doing immigration right :-)
"Look at what you're going through doing it the legal way while illegals are getting put up in 5-star hotels on your tax dollars" was a line I heard a few times. I was very aware of the havoc due to immigrants being bussed across states. At the time I chalked it up to increased border crossings like everybody else.
But also for this reason I had looked into it and realized that the Biden admin's hands were tied by the laws as they existed. And when both parties finally managed to reach an agreement to fix some of the laws, it was torpedoed by a specific party to support a "campaign premise."
I realize I implied upthread that it was "only perceptions", which was incorrect. But if the immigration data does not support the events that transpired, something somewhere is screwy. And its not a stretch to imagine, given the torpedoing above, that it was deliberately managed.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to address this with me, I do appreciate it and I think I've a clearer view on perspectives. The language and rhetoric is harmful to society all while we are achieving the worst outcomes. We are doing a bad job. I can see that there is something grievously wrong with our country. For what its worth, I'm writing here as I would to a close friend in case you feel a question about my sincerity.
I hear what you're saying, I also agree and think you're very correct that it matters what the median voter thinks. Infrastructure and process to manage people we are bringing here is a requirement. Personally, I very firmly want to afford people due process and dignity, both of which they deserve. I'm frustrated by the lack of real information and constant opportunistic black-and-white rhetoric. It can't be that either "You're racist" or pulling up the ladder or conversely "Illegals are rapists and bring crime" and so forth. This has become a convenient wedge issue and it is disheartening, since we are toying with people's lives.
A lot of perceptions of immigration are fueled by (political) media attention and the situation on the ground varies depending on where you are. I clearly recall media stories about a New York City's Roosevelt Hotel used for asylum housing, this is part of the mechanisms like temporary housing and it was then weaponized by disingenuous trolls and politics. I feel like even when the public or individuals do provide the needed parts, we still get bad results. Even if corporations use E-Verify, we still get identity theft and fraud. There was even a Police officer in Maine this year who was deported after DHS' E-Verify cleared him for work status. The only way around that I can see would be a national biometric ID and that might not even do the trick or without considerable downside.
In 2025, We have a militarized terror campaign when the same people controlling the government could have repealed the 1980 Asylum Act, deployed satellites over the southern border amd deployed drones with thermal vision to monitor and intercept crossings, border agents, better background checks for employees, or whatever else for the same cost and effort of what we're doing right now.
Last year, Democrats negotiated to fund border security, immigration judges, ICE funding and increased staffing, Asylum reform, surveillance towers on the border (the wall I guess?) and more in a 2024 National Security Emergency Appropriations act in exchange for supporting Ukraine's war against invasion, but Donald Trump convinced the Republicans to kill it. It seemed like everything they had demanded and more.
Right now the USS Gerald Ford is sailing towards Venezuela and I'm no mind reader but it seems not unlikely that we're going to blow up another country, creating a different kind of chaos and destabilizing the region before washing our hands as soon as next week. I honestly don't think that anything less than Blackhawks in the sky across America would be deemed acceptable and I don't think it ends there. They're saying we're demanding gender mutilation and free healthcare for illegal immigrants on USDA.gov right now.
If you're interested, I would be grateful to know whatever ideas you have. You've worked with adversaries, sometimes you have to shut off and disconnect compromised systems. Are we really in the place that (it seems to me) we need to deport all non-citizens and halt all immigration or else they scare people into worse?
I think it's also possible for the party to maintain marginally unpopular positions to support their principles --- that's what the GOP does on reproductive health care --- but when you do that you have to be cognizant that you're paying a price and you have to make that cost up somewhere else. And then, you have some control over how painful that cost is.
I don't think there's a set of policies that puts our shared principles on immigration "into the black" (so to speak) with the median US voter. Immigration is unpopular worldwide right now, and some of that unpopularity is just human nature, some of the same forces that drive NIMBYism. But you can minimize the costs by changing up how you communicate on these issues, and I think the best way to do that is to empathize (even as you disagree) with the beliefs of the people who disagree with you.
There are lots of places where conservatives disagree with me where I have zero empathy and zero fucks to give about how they feel. But when we're on the wrong side of an issue electorally, when the margins are as slim as they are, and when the issue is as salient as it is (it was the 2nd highest polled issue in weighted exits in 2024), it behooves us to be more careful.
That makes sense, and I agree with your assessments about the voting population's priorities. But maybe the inflation / immigration aspects were much more intertwined than we realized.
Maybe (being very generous to him) Biden didn't do a tradeoff between inflation vs employment... maybe the gamble was that increased immigration would boost the economy enough that citizens were not as bothered by the immigrants.
In other words, the very valid "its' the economy stupid" theory would imply that if people can comfortable provide for themselves and their families, they'd be less bothered by what they saw as competition for jobs.
Unfortunately time was not on their side, and inflation did not drop fast enough.
But there might be another angle. An interesting aspect of the economic sentiment and inflation hysteria preceding the election was that data showed that the majority of Americans thought they themselves were doing well, but other Americans were suffering. So the statistical reality was much better than the statistical perception.
But maybe we still underestimate the size of that effect: it exploited a critical flaw in an otherwise successful economic strategy -- its reliance on "the outsiders." During the time things were improving but still painful, the perception of these outsiders could be exploited to distract from the improvements happening and foment a backlash.
Note it could very well have just happened by accident, but if not... that shows the power of mass perception. The events happening with media platforms leading up to the election may have been (and still are) much more consequential than we realize.
> Maybe (being very generous to him) Biden didn't do a tradeoff between inflation vs employment... maybe the gamble was that increased immigration would boost the economy enough that citizens were not as bothered by the immigrants.
> In other words, the very valid "its' the economy stupid" theory would imply that if people can comfortable provide for themselves and their families, they'd be less bothered by what they saw as competition for jobs.
Have you not looked at Canada recently? They've done exactly what you're suggesting, and the result is a country that is now completely unaffordable for Canadians, with the median home price now over $800k. Is that the kind of future you want for Americans?
I'm not actually recommending anything. (Edited to add: I can totally see how unchecked immigration can be disruptive.) I'm saying that looking back, there is a credible theory along with evidence that increased immigration helped boost the US economy and maybe even manage inflation. That seems to be an insufficiently discussed aspect.
I'm not at all familiar with Canada, but a Google AI overview for "canada housing affordability crisis due to immigration" suggests that immigration is one of the smaller factors (11%?) in driving house prices up. The citations include these:
The conservative message machine is determinative, and they would find something to effectively raise a storm about: immigration, inflation, etc. If Biden cut inflation, they would have demonized him regarding employment. Or just make something up - they can say anything at this point, and the Dems and others have made themselves helpless. They will always find something - Biden and Dems were being called pedophiles in 2000, the election was stolen, etc.
Remember that the GOP stopped immigration reform in Congress for many years, including killing the agreed-upon bipartisan immigration reform bill at Trump's behest during the election. If your theory is correct, that would have disqualified the GOP among those voters.
I don't think that's true. It was easy to call in Trumps first loss, i remember telling my dad: Economy goes bad, he'll be right back. Immigration may have mattered enough, and likewise Bidens cognitive decline. Lastly people didn't like Kamala in the primary, and they dont like candidates forced on them. That was many things stacked against a dem victory, and it was still close.
The dems main ongoing weakness as an extreme generalization, is choosing marginal hills to die on, and using hyperbole for everything.
The dems' huge screwup was abandoning the working and middle classes, instead choosing to be "The Other Party For Billionaires, But With Different Identity Politics".
I don't know, man. That is definitely true, but they didn't win by a landslide. And a lot of their edge came from the MAGA Latinx vote. This ICE/CPB action is a total self-own. That Latinx vote is going to disappear, and we've already seen the results in the 2025 elections.
I think the right will turn on itself in 2026. We could even end up with three parties, only one of them able to obtain a majority (Democrats). There's a plausible version of the future where the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.
If they turn on themselves it will not be over immigration. This is the one issue where they are almost all in wild agreement. A massive, overwhelming majority of Republicans agree with these cruel treatment of immigrants[1].
They might disagree on the economy or tariffs or jobs or whatever, but there's no infighting here. They fully back this cruelty.
The biggest division right now seems to be support Israel. And if we up the attacks in Venezuela, I do think the America first folks will get louder in their divisions.
Losing in 2026 barely matters. Existing dem leadership has no desire to end the filibuster, which means we get one bill a year that is full of technocratic approaches. The Trump administration, backed by the supreme court, is accruing more and more power to simply ignore the will of Congress. Even if the dems get some guts and defund ICE, the Trump administration has already demonstrated that it is happy to just illegally distribute or withhold funds wherever it likes.
The only way out of this is replacing dem leadership in congress with people who give a shit, winning the presidency in 2028, killing the filibuster, and then going on a serious denazification effort to restructure our institutions so that this sort of shit can't happen. Court packing. Total dismantling and rebuilding of federal law enforcement. Recreating a functional congress.
There is no way that the republicans split. They are 100% captured by MAGA. The only possible splitting point is with the Fuentes wing, who'd just like to murder all the jews in the country in addition to all of the latinos.
There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
The plan to defeat fascism can't be "never lose a single election ever for the rest of time." Political leaders did absolutely fuck all to consign Trump to the garbage bin of history in 2021 and now we've got a fascist president motivated entirely by two things: hurting as many people he hates as possible and putting up tacky gold shit in the white house.
The election was fairly close. The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
All that said, as an American living abroad who votes left, the use of terms like “kidnapped” and “abducted” to describe immigration-enforcement actions seems really weird to me and my expat peers. There are quite a few democratic, developed countries high on freedom-ranking lists that widely deploy law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants and visa overstayers. Sure, deplore lack of due process when actual citizens get caught in the net, but so much use of these loaded terms isn’t even about that, it’s criticizing actions against non-citizens.
> The winning candidate got elected by a coalition of people with differing views on an number of individual items within his platform. That does not equate to certain approval by the majority of the American population of any of the things the linked article recounts.
There may be differing views on other topics among the party, but Republicans broadly support this vision of cruelty and these actions against immigrants[1] by huge margins. It's probably the one single vision they are united behind.
- 74% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the Trump administration is doing the right amount to deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. Another 12% say it’s doing too little and 13% say it’s doing too much.
- Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans approve of sending additional U.S. troops to the border (88%) and increasing deportations (86%). More than six-in-ten strongly approve of these actions.
- 80% of Republicans approve of cutting federal funds to cities and states if they do not cooperate with deportations
- 72% of Republicans approve of suspending asylum applications, with 38% saying they strongly approve.
Only that first stat aligns with what you are claiming. Wanting more border / deportations is fully inline with wanting to control immigration. Likewise cutting funds to states not supporting federal law isn't fringe. And asylum applications are clearly broken.
You can want all of those things and still be against eg ice agents raiding a school. It would be more accurate if it focused exclusively on the more egregious ICE activities.
It looks like the difference in the popular vote was 2,284,967 votes towards R. Do all of those 2,284,967 voters demonstrably overlap with that 86% of the polled Republicans? If not, then claiming that a majority of Americans support every incident in the linked article based on the last election, lacks basis.
I'm not saying anything about the majority of the American population. Just that Republicans broadly support these actions. I hope we never get to the point where a majority of the overall public support this.
95% of people don't care about anything (but not always the same 95% on every issue). Revolutions are typically caused by 3% of the population outweighing the other 2%, while the 95% do nothing.
Do you not think there might be a relationship between the lack of due process and the choice of terms?
Like, maybe the defining difference between arrest and abduction is whether the action is the output of an accountable system of justice, rather than whether the people doing it are the right kind of people and the people having it done to them are the wrong kind of people.
For some years now there has been a segment of the American left, particularly visible on social media, who believes that strictly enforcing immigration laws at all is bad. This predates the current guy, as well as his administration as the former guy. So, when I read an article by someone like the writer here whose online activity has other shibboleths of a left more extreme than found in mainstream parties in many other democracies, my assumption is he is coming out of this trend and the current events, as appalled as he is by them, is not the ultimate cause of his use of that loaded language.
No, my point was that in a close election that depended on a party building coalitions between heterogenous groups of voters, the people in favor of any particular action taken by the elected government may be a minority of the population, not even a slight majority.
Sure, but in a healthy society, such extreme opinions should never even be close enough to a minority large enough to be elected into power. Hopefully, anyway.
Many of these people are documented permanent residents or US citizens being grabbed without warrants, without being read rights, without charges, and without an opportunity to present documentation.
ICE are wearing masks, refusing to identify themselves, abducting citizens and non-citizens alike. They are accusing citizens of assault and then releasing them without charging - a pretty good indication that they lied.
They are conducting warrantless searches. There is a case where they rammed the car of a U.S. citizen (clearly seen on video), promptly took her into custody, accused her of hitting them, and then released her without charging her.
They are profiling people based on race and ethnicity.
The abductions look like kidnappings. They don’t look like law enforcement actions.
In the USA, we have come to expect a certain level of formality, transparency, and adherence to due process when it comes to how law enforcement operates. Or, at least that's what we tell ourselves the standard is. Granted, we've been backsliding in this department for decades, which really started accelerating during the War On Terror. It's not new with this administration. But, we have strayed a long, long way away from the idealized "uniformed cop visibly walking the beat on the street."
The whole "masked plainclothes men jumping out of an unmarked van, dragging someone off the street into the van, and swooping away" thing is what the villains in the movies did, not the good guys.
Yup immigration was arguably the concrete issue of the election and these were the campaign promises. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that this is what mass deportation would look like.
A plurality of the people who voted went for Trump not a majority. He won 49.8% of the vote. When you include everyone who is eligible to vote he only got 31.8% of the total electorate. A large percentage of the electorate doesn't vote.
If you don't vote, you agree with the majority. Plain and simple! If you want to show your protest, go vote and explicitly vote with an invalid ballot or a third party. Don't give yourself the convenient "out" of staying home and then feeling like you're such a counterculture warrior for doing it.
Dials are easy to pop off and clean behind. What sucks with the flat buttons is they wear out in 10 years now you get cleaning solution behind the plastic into the internals.
Pull out my phone to turn on the heat on my stove ? A simple and satisfying mechanical motion that’s in my muscle memory since forever ? Hard to express how much I would hate that !
Growing up in the middle of Canada, I heard about schools closing due to weather, but ours only closed if it was below -40C.