State of the Discussion

Maybe not moral insanity just brazen bull (I propose the unit of 1 Ph* for this kind of thing, subdivision to be determined)
https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-gateway-federal-funds-rename-dulles-penn-station
Now he also wants to rename the already renamed Gulf of Mexico after himself. But will he do after renaming Greenland? How will he call America?
If he was still alive, this guy instead of Kim Jong Un would probably be his role model (although he'd be unable to poperly pronounce the name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saparmurat_Niyazov

*after Phalaris whose main claim to fame was a brazen bull.

You could go the route of Fantastic Mr. Fox:

Badger: In summation, I think you just got to not do it, man. That's all.
Mr. Fox: I understand what you're saying, and your comments are valuable, but I'm gonna ignore your advice.
Badger: The cuss you are.
Mr. Fox: The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?
Badger: No, you cussing with me?
Mr. Fox: Don't cussing point at me!
Badger: If you're gonna cuss with somebody, you're not gonna cuss with me, you little cuss!
Mr. Fox: You're not gonna cuss with me!
[Both start snarling at each other, and then settle down]
Mr. Fox: Just buy the tree.
Badger: Okay.

I can tell from the increasing frequency of F-bombs in my comments that it's time for me to take a little break from current events.

We are governed by greedheads and sociopathic weirdos. It is what it is, and it is what it's gonna be until we can figure out how to change it.

And, nonetheless, we all still need to live our lives as best we can.

Stay safe and sane out there, keep on keeping on, and don't let the bastards get inside your head. Saying that to myself as much as anything else.

Here's the thing. This statement right here:

"We're prioritizing the types of people we're arresting. We're going after the worst of the worst. And we're not just going out there willy-nilly picking up people."

Is bullshit.

Miller has set a quota for deportations that is orders of magnitude greater than the number of criminal undocumented people. ICE and CBP folks are getting bonuses for making their quotas. So they grab anyone who is brown or has an accent.

Immigration enforcement is not the job of local police. We don't ask ICE or CBP to enforce traffic violations etc., and we should not ask local cops to do immigration work. For all the reasons discussed in the piece.

You don't need 6 or 8 guys to arrest a criminal undocumented alien. You don't need an MRAP, or a sound cannon, or "less lethal" ordinance to arrest a criminal undocumented alien.

ICE has to go to somebody's house to arrest someone? OMFG, what a burden.

How did the local cops get that person in jail in the first place? They got a warrant and went and took physical custody of them. In many cases, they went to their house and arrested them.

Without an MRAP.

So I think ICE is capable of doing the same.

These guys have killed people, blinded people, shot people, rammed into people's cars, beaten the shit out of people, threatened people with guns drawn. It's an exercise in dominance. Aimed in particular at blue cities in blue states.

Fuck that.

Want co-operation? Stop terrorizing people. Short of that, get the fuck out.

And I appreciate that Homan is a kinder gentler version of Bovino, but we have the man on tape taking a $50K bribe.

That's the best Trump and Miller can come up with?

These guys have a long history of killing and abusing people and coloring outside the legal lines. The only difference now is they're killing white people.

Time to burn it down and start over from a clean slate.

anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.

I suspect that, for most people, ICE and Border Patrol are indistinguishable. The difference is just too inside baseball for most of us. Made worse by the detail, for those with a clue about the difference, by the fact the Border Patrol's remit only runs within 100 miles of the border, which Minneapolis isn't. Not that those sorts of niggling legal details make any difference to the Orange Nero.

lj - I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we’ve been told are minimally trained.

Well, it's not as if DHS has not had a problem with the sort of people that hairshirthedonist mentioned being employed in their ranks for a lot longer than just this last year. The US Justice Department was doing its best to rid itself of right-wing militia members under Biden after finding that there were hundreds of Oath Keepers working in federal law enforcement:

https://www.pogo.org/investigates/hundreds-of-oath-keepers-have-worked-for-dhs-leaked-list-shows

Truthout highlighted one particularly telling quote from the report when they covered it shortly thereafter:

The Oath Keepers’ overlap with agencies within DHS is ideologically consistent with the way that many of these agencies operate. Border Patrol and ICE carry out the U.S.’s most cruel anti-immigration policies, for instance. As one Border Patrol agent wrote, per the report, “Most Border Patrol Agents are Oath Keepers, we just haven’t signed up yet.”

(I'm not linking to that article only because I don't want to end up in the spam filter.)

In 2022 Biden issued an executive order (EO 14074) aimed at screening out white supremacists and others with dangerous biases against minority groups, and Raskin and Casten were pushing Garland to fully implement the EO in 2024 ahead of the elections. That did not get done in time.

Naranja Nero rescinded that EO along with pretty much every other order issued by Biden, and deactivated the database that was put together to track these sorts of things:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12515

So any new recruits who are ideologically oriented towards white supremacy and white nationalism are going to find that there are plenty of others already there to welcome them in.

Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.

However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit

we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020. 

I’d observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job

CBP has a history of shooting people. Also of doing the "stand in front of the vehicle so I can say my life was threatened" thing.

I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.

From lj's Guardian link:

At the New School, Tooze made a similar argument. He cited another favourite statistic: whereas the US’s total installed solar capacity is on the order of 250GW, “China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200GW of photovoltaic panels in a single year.” In those Chinese solar panels Tooze sees a climate-era analogue to the Soviet T-34 tanks. At development and climate meetings, he said, you can go a long time without hearing anyone acknowledge that China matters vastly more to the climate-change story than anything happening anywhere else, very much including the US. The point of all this, Tooze insists, is not to chasten liberal self-regard – or not only that. The point is to get people to confront our radical new reality.

Tooze told me that the climate book he started working on after Crashed, which is now nearing completion, will argue “that if we’re serious in the west, if you’re serious about climate, then you have to face the popular front question”. In other words, many of the same countries that chose 80 years ago to ally with the Soviet Union to fight Germany will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.

Interesting, no? I wasn't expecting to read something like that.

I'm sure the "black helicopter" types are ready to use all the guns they've been telling everyone they needed to overthrow an oppressive government and protect our constitutional rights.

Right? Isn't that what they said? I mean, they have to be really upset about this stuff, don't they?

IANAL, but this opinion seems extraordinarily blistering.

It's not unusual for a judge to cite the US Constitution in a ruling. Even citing the Declaration of Independence isn't unknown. (Although quoting multiple of its complaints against George III probably is.) But this?

The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.

or

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.

or

With a judicial finger in the constitutional dike,

It is so ORDERED

Zing!

Don't worry, nous, I remember when McKinney cited Freddie de Boer explaining that this was a guy who understood the left. (though I'm not suggesting you are doing the same with Krugman, it just always comes to mind when I think about who one cites and why)

About the Krugman link, Tooze and Klein both note, with astonishment, that the tariffs on India is higher than the tariffs on China.

A section I didn't highlight but was interested in, was Tooze's comparison with defeating Germany without Russian help to dealing with climate change without the Chinese on board, which was certainly thought provoking.

Fun chinese proverb for y'all
宁为太平犬，不做乱世人
Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.

I think there is a lot to be said for "a multipolar order, which isn’t a single order but is multiple different orders that are overlapping, very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a mesh " Just for openers, it avoids the risks which are inherent in having a single point of failure.

That, I think, is the lesson of the moment. We had a (relatively) stable world order. With lots of disorder in local areas, but overall stability. But it was based (like it or not, believe it or not) on an implicit assumption that the US, for all its flaws and complicity in local disruptions, would act to keep the overall system stable. But that, whether we recognized it or not, made the US a single point of failure.

Worse, and definitely not recognized by anyone, it turned out the single point of failure was a single individual: whoever happened to be President of the United States. The failing at that one point has been an unfolding disaster, not only for the population of the US, but for the general stability of the world. The collapse has been slower on the international level. But it also looks less reversible.

As an aside, I would point out that the Chinese far prefer stability to chaos (both at home and abroad). They have chafed at America's dominance internationally. But I suspect they are starting to be concerned along the lines of "Be careful what you wish for." Having a loose cannon leading the US is ending the era of American dominance. But the chaos that accompanies the way that is happening....

Actually, that New Yorker piece is extremely interesting. It chimes with some of the stuff people have talked about here, but there's obviously a lot more detail about the defining characteristics of what has worked and not worked in the past.

And since I'm posting links, here's one (I don't have a gift button, but let's hope it's viewable) from the New Yorker, called What MAGA Can Teach Democrats About Organising - and Infighting. I haven't read it, but it sounded as if it might (or might not) be of interest to the ObWi commentariat:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/02/what-maga-can-teach-democrats-about-organizing-and-infighting

My campus is one of the campuses that had a pro-Palestinian encampment that was taken down with a massive law enforcement action. (I was not there. I had students and colleagues on either side whose perspectives and reasons for their involvement I can sympathize with. It was a complex situation. No one actually involved on either side wanted anyone else on campus to be physically threatened or harmed.)

I'm not going to get into a big post over this because bc has enough to respond to on other lines. I merely note that the public-at-large's understanding and descriptions of what was going on on campuses bear little resemblance to what it was actually like. The media accounts read like mock epics without any of the irony.

The actual drama and foment was tiny right up to the point where the helicopters and riot police showed up in overwhelming numbers and stormed in like they were dealing with a violent mob.