Election 2024 Part III: Out with the old!

[Sommerswerd]

Wait, what? They deported parents but kept the children???

Yes, the theory behind the policy was extreme deterrence through terror/cruelty. They would make an example of the first batch of families by confiscating their children and sending them back to their countries of origin, where they would then spread the message of the horrific results of trying to enter the US with your children, thus terrifying anyone else out of wanting to come to the US.

It didn't work. All it did was split up families, some permanently, as the US government has been unable to locate all of the parents/children for reunification.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Honestly the whole citizenship at birth you have newer made any sense to me. I mean, what is stopping someone literally entering your country pregnant just so that they can give birth and turn their kid into a citizen even if said kid would have absolutely no claim to it at all in any other circumstance? It's just a system that seems almost purpose designed for abuse.

Well,

Birthright citizenship is guaranteed to most people born on U.S. territory by the first part of the Citizenship Clause introduced by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (adopted July 9, 1868), which states:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

People do make trips here to earn citizenship for their babies. they do so because being a US citizen often has more value than many others.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Honestly the whole citizenship at birth you have newer made any sense to me.

"Jus soli" (right of the soil) is a pretty common doctrine, particularly in nations that consider themselves "free" countries. The idea is a "free" country cannot produce slaves and/or second class persons. A free country only produces free "equal" persons with equal rights, ie citizens.

The famous English case Somersett vs. Steuart led to the poetic saying that (paraphrasing) "once a slave breathes the air of England he is made free", and similar. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution (which was part of group the laws that ended slavery in the US) states (paraphrasing) that all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens. One of the points of the law was to instantly grant unquestionable citizenship to all of the newly freed slaves.

I mean, what is stopping someone literally entering your country pregnant just so that they can give birth and turn their kid into a citizen

Well... border agents, laws, Courts, Judges, police, government... and so on... not to mention parental responsibility... The parent is still subject to deportation. So unless they are going to abandon their child in the US, they would take them back to their country of origin.

But I think that is besides your rhetorical point... Your point I believe, is that a person could enter/remain in the US as a non-citizen, without proper legal permission, give birth, while inside the US, and that baby would be a US Citizen as of right, under the jus soli provision of the US Constitution, found in the 14th Amendment. If that is your point then you are correct.

even if said kid would have absolutely no claim to it at all in any other circumstance?

What circumstance do you imagine supersedes the US Constitution? This isn't a technicality we're talking about here, its the Supreme law of the Land.

It's just a system that seems almost purpose designed for abuse.

Again, the principle that a free country does not allow second class persons to be born there is a very sound, moral principle. No rule or set of laws is perfect. The alternative is to allow people to be born in the US who don't have the rights of a US citizen. That is completely untenable and immoral for a free society.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

"Jus soli" (right of the soil) is a pretty common doctrine, particularly in nations that consider themselves "free" countries. The idea is a "free" country cannot produce slaves and/or second class persons. A free country only produces free "equal" persons with equal rights, ie citizens.

If a person is born or your soil that does not mean your country has produced that person. Not unless said person is born to citizens of your country. If weed sprouts in an orchard that does not make it fruit.

It's basically giving people a cheat code to get your citizenship. And what confuses me most about your response is that you seem to act as if your country has some sort of moral duty toward foreigners that makes this a good thing rather than a really bad idea and cheat code.

 

[Gorbles]

And what confuses me most about your response is that you seem to act as if your country has some sort of moral duty toward foreigners that makes this a good thing rather than a really bad idea and cheat code.

It sure is strange how these people who just observe how "both sides are bad" frequently come out with incredibly strong conservative takes.

 

[Birdjaguar]

It sure is strange how these people who just observe how "both sides are bad" frequently come out with incredibly strong conservative takes.

It is because they know their side is terrible and they need to create the illusion that the other side is equally terrible. Projection. Today I heard Trump speak in NM (on the radio). He said Kamala was a liar, spreading hatred and division in the country and ignoring the constitution, in addition to many other silly things. One was that within 12 months of him being elected energy prices (for all types of energy) would be 50% lower.

 

[JollyRoger]

I mean Trump's mother tramped to America to squeeze out a future weed - so I can kind of see the point being made

 

[Sarin]

It is because they know their side is terrible and they need to create the illusion that the other side is equally terrible. Projection. Today I heard Trump speak in NM (on the radio). He said Kamala was a liar, spreading hatred and division in the country and ignoring the constitution, in addition to many other silly things. One was that within 12 months of him being elected energy prices (for all types of energy) would be 50% lower.

It's actually because they're not American and their political opinions on many things like national sovereignty, healthcare or employees' rights can be totally outside the narrow range of American political discourse, and can often be conservative on one thing while way left of Sanders on other. You're just projecting the, for many non-Americans insane and one-dimensional, American political axis on them.

 

[Cutlass]

And imperials will argue local control is just racism. Unlike racism, which is antiracist if one's friends are getting paid. <shrugs> Oh boy, oh boy, what winners.

Whole zeitgeist is stacked poop.

Local control has always been one of the most important and effective tools of racism in the US. So when people are demanding local control, and then enacting racist policies, you should be able to figure out how the motivation looks.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Perhaps, but the "both sides are bad" moniker happens in the US even more so. There is a stark difference between Trump and Harris whether or not those living elsewhere in the world can see it or not. Whatever national, regional, political mental mechanism one uses to evaluate the US politics doesn't change the reality of those differences. Within the US it is heavily projection. They have learned that from Trump. Yes, I may well be "projecting" what is happening here, over there, but saying "both sides are equally bad" is just weak sauce and wrong at face value of the Trump Harris match up. They are entitled to their opinions just like MAGA folks are entitled to theirs.

 

[Gorbles]

It's actually because they're not American and their political opinions on many things like national sovereignty, healthcare or employees' rights can be totally outside the narrow range of American political discourse, and can often be conservative on one thing while way left of Sanders on other.

I strongly doubt that. Speaking also as non-American.

 

[Cutlass]

Honestly the whole citizenship at birth you have newer made any sense to me. I mean, what is stopping someone literally entering your country pregnant just so that they can give birth and turn their kid into a citizen even if said kid would have absolutely no claim to it at all in any other circumstance? It's just a system that seems almost purpose designed for abuse.

I don't understand how it could be otherwise. The reason to deny someone citizenship and the vote is to deny them liberty and the rights to own property. What's to stop a country from allowing in "guest workers", who remain their for extended periods of time, have families, lose their connections to their homelands, and maybe never leave. Now their children, born in the new country, know no other home. But ate not citizens, and have no rights, where they live. Where they have always lived, the only place they know.

It is fundamentally unjust to not allow people full citizenship in the land of their birth. Because now laws are just going to be made which keeps them as second class, and exploited. With no legal remedies.

And if a handful of people take advantage of it? So fudging what?

 

[Farm Boy]

Local control has always been one of the most important and effective tools of racism in the US. So when people are demanding local control, and then enacting racist policies, you should be able to figure out how the motivation looks.

There is always an excuse to take.

 

[choxorn]

Precisely, exactly like that. That's actually a comparison that has been made pretty often, amusingly, even if it seems to never register in the heads of those who do it.
That the wokes can't manage to understand that they elicit the exact same sort of rejection by exhibiting the exact same sort of behaviour, is in fact an example of the sort of cognitive dissonnance that I talked about in a previous post when pointing that opinions have more to do with emotion than reason, and also an example of what can cause irritation in the electorate and turn them off from voting a certain way (which is also a point being discussed). It certainly isn't restricted to Trump's supporters.

*sigh*

Look, I won't deny that sometimes, the "wokes" can be preachy and pushy and insist on an opinion that's fairly unpopular as being the only true and valid and morally correct opinion, and I get how that can be annoying. But like, you know what the big difference is between those types and the fundamentalist religious right? The woke left doesn't have any kind of institutional power in government, and no prominent officials are trying to pass laws to enforce "wokism" or whatever you wanna call it, compared to the countless attempts (some successful, some not) by the right to ban abortion, or make it basically illegal to be visibly LGBTQ in public, or teach kids about social movements or about a version of history and contemporary politics that doesn't heavily whitewash things. The woke left doesn't make up police forces who have the power to inflict state-sanctioned violence, and when I hear about politically motivated mass shootings, it's basically always a right-winger shooting up a black church or a synagogue or a gay nightclub or something. The woke left is just some people on Twitter who sometimes overreact to minor offenses.

This is why I can't take it seriously when someone says the "wokes" and the fundies are the same. Offend left-wing sensibilities and you might get people calling you names on the internet; offend right-wing sensibilities and someone might actually try to kill you.

Electoral college: set that way so that a few very populous states don't end up stomping all the wee states.

That's how it is *supposed* to work.

All it means is that the only votes that count are in a few swing states, and usually the ones that get the most attention are the most populous ones (like Pennsylvania, or Georgia, or Arizona) because they have more votes. Most of the low-population states aren't swingy so their votes mean nothing.

Why is this a better system than just one person = one vote, exactly?

 

[Strong Reaction]

If a person is born or your soil that does not mean your country has produced that person. Not unless said person is born to citizens of your country. If weed sprouts in an orchard that does not make it fruit.

It's basically giving people a cheat code to get your citizenship. And what confuses me most about your response is that you seem to act as if your country has some sort of moral duty toward foreigners that makes this a good thing rather than a really bad idea and cheat code.

Strange argument you have considering the "founders" of the country were essentially a bunch of migrant peasants and serfs fleeing poverty in a go nowhere caste system who then applied a similar stratified class system (Great Chain of Being applied to race) based on race in the continent they migrated to. They then displaced the indigenous peoples and excluded non whites from citizenship for centuries, so it seems the idea of who is and who is not a true citizen is a bit arbitrary. The idea of "foreigners" coming to the US and abusing its law on citizenship in a country that was founded by foreigners is ludicrous.

So immigrants are comparable to weeds that don't produce fruit, seems like you already have a strong opinion on immigration.

 

[Takhisis]

I agree there are other biases, but there is this thing called intersectionality which I think works best if one regards it all
as structural bias with respect to e.g. race and gender and age etc.

Inserting the word structural before racism may sound good, but the structural is rapidly dropped by those in a rush or by those thinking that
dropping it would increase the likelihood of remedial action, thereby making the conflation of personal racism with structural racism inevitable.

The other thing about bias is that it is universal and therefore less unhelpfully confrontational.

Which is why I'd prefer structural bias or perhaps systematic bias.

Some bias is inevitable, but it can be minimised, and most people agree on the desirability of doing that.

I think you're missing the point, given that I wasn't arguing about the ‘structural’ bit.

Of course you have titles like "the democratic republic (of Congo)", but what is a non-democratic republic supposed to be?

Need I remind you that the communist-style ‘democratic republic’ is a ‘Λαοκρατική Δημοκρατία’ in Greek? Yes, the concepts of laos and deme in modern Greek don't quite correspond to their derivatives in modern English.

Yes, the theory behind the policy was extreme deterrence through terror/cruelty. They would make an example of the first batch of families by confiscating their children and sending them back to their countries of origin, where they would then spread the message of the horrific results of trying to enter the US with your children, thus terrifying anyone else out of wanting to come to the US.

It didn't work. All it did was split up families, some permanently, as the US government has been unable to locate all of the parents/children for reunification.

Oh, dear. Kelsen would have a fit.

The famous English case Somersett vs. Steuart led to the poetic saying that (paraphrasing) "once a slave breathes the air of England he is made free", and similar. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution (which was part of group the laws that ended slavery in the US) states (paraphrasing) that all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens. One of the points of the law was to instantly grant unquestionable citizenship to all of the newly freed slaves.

And yet you have the case of some people, mostly in US offshore colonies territories, who are US nationals and as such foreign to all other states and yet also not US citizens.

 

[Akka]

This is why I can't take it seriously when someone says the "wokes" and the fundies are the same. Offend left-wing sensibilities and you might get people calling you names on the internet; offend right-wing sensibilities and someone might actually try to kill you.

*sigh*

Yeah, the "wokes" tend to be less violent than the far-right. Differences of value exists, that's why we have different political parties and a whole range of opinions (that's one of the reason why many people who can't stand them, will still vote left and still prefer them compared to far-right, like yours truly). That's also not what the point was about.
Where the "wokes" and the "fundies" are the same, and where the actual point was, is about the cult-like self-righteousness, willingness to enforce their opinion regardless of what others might want, impossibility to understand they might be wrong, refusal to even consider it's possible to discuss the fundamental of their faith, and the denial of facts/lack of acceptance of reality check.
The MINDSET, you know, the thing I explicitely specified if you bothered to pay attention. And, again like I said if you bothered to pay attention rather than just trying to score a gotcha, it is a major reason why people being exposed to it ends up having a bad opinion and getting repulsed by it (which was, you know, the actual central point of the exchange).

Also, if you think that only the right has access to institutional power, you might want to actually take off your blinders, gets a less biased look at society as a whole and try to not filter out everything that might give a more nuanced view.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Yeah, the "wokes" tend to be less violent than the far-right.

In my experience, neither has much of a sense of humour.

 

[Gorbles]

Also, if you think that only the right has access to institutional power, you might want to actually take off your blinders, gets a less biased look at society as a whole and try to not filter out everything that might give a more nuanced view.

What US political institution is at all left-wing?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Trump, sitting in a chair next to right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson for what was billed as a live interview event, told an arena of thousands of supporters Thursday that President Joe Biden was a “stupid bastard” and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, was “a sleaze bag.”

He also said that he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, “do anything he wants” in his second administration related to healthcare policy, noting that his newfound political ally “wants to look at the vaccines.”

“He really wants to with the pesticides and the, you know, all the different things. I said, he can do it,” Trump said of the former independent presidential candidate. “He can do anything he wants. He wants to look at the vaccines. He wants — everything. I think it’s great,” Trump continued.

In a lengthy and uncompromising riff on Cheney, Trump seemed to insinuate that the former congresswoman would be less of a “war hawk” — as Trump referred to her — if she was in a war herself with guns “trained on her face.”

“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” Trump said. “Okay, let’s see how she feels about it. You know when the guns are trained on her face — you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building,” Trump continued.

Trump explicitly told the Arizona crowd that he will only lose next Tuesday’s election if there is “cheating,” setting the stage to dispute a potential loss.

“Just keep the cheating down,” he said. “The only thing can stop us is the cheating. It’s the only thing that can stop us.”

The next president of America ladies and gentlemen.