Plagues don't stop at Fucking fences. This is cruel and abhorrent but it's also stupid as Fuck.
This won't just affect the people you put in cages you idiots.
But when the newspapers start saying "The measles outbreak that killed 6 children in Albuquerque started in a nearby immigrant detention camp", people don't start saying "Let's improve healthcare in the camps", they say "Get these filthy diseased immigrants out of our country!"
Not necessarily. There is evidence that what Trump is doing is making people MORE supportive of immigration, and whatever else he's against/for.
Trump now seeking to change the Flores settlement and keep children detained (with or without families) indefinitely, because jesus fucking christ of course he is:
I feel as close to certain as makes no difference that throwing out Flores is specifically a response to that "yes, you fucking have to give kids soap and blankets, what were you assholes thinking" court ruling. Don't need to abide by court decisions around a settlement if you don't recognize the settlement itself!
So Americans sitting on their asses about this is pretty much silent consent at this point, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
What do you want? Half the country actively supports it and the other half is doing some combination of donating to/volunteering for organizations that help, protesting, pressuring elected officials, and waiting for the next election. Like, if you're looking for people to storm ICE facilities, a) that's a good way to get shot, b) I don't really know what you'd do with the people you freed, and c) it's frowned upon to even talk about on these forums.
So Americans sitting on their asses about this is pretty much silent consent at this point, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
What do you want? Half the country actively supports it and the other half is doing some combination of donating to/volunteering for organizations that help, protesting, pressuring elected officials, and waiting for the next election. Like, if you're looking for people to storm ICE facilities, a) that's a good way to get shot, b) I don't really know what you'd do with the people you freed, and c) it's frowned upon to even talk about on these forums.
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
So Americans sitting on their asses about this is pretty much silent consent at this point, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
What do you want? Half the country actively supports it and the other half is doing some combination of donating to/volunteering for organizations that help, protesting, pressuring elected officials, and waiting for the next election. Like, if you're looking for people to storm ICE facilities, a) that's a good way to get shot, b) I don't really know what you'd do with the people you freed, and c) it's frowned upon to even talk about on these forums.
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Are general strikes even legal in the US?
I think so? I know there are some weird rules about when public workers can strike, but I think it's fair game for private workers.
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Are general strikes even legal in the US?
I think so? I know there are some weird rules about when public workers can strike, but I think it's fair game for private workers.
A general strike is a strike of workers across, ideally, all industries. AFAIK the US does not allow them. From what I can gather they are not specifically illegal but it is apparently illegal to strike in some way not connected to a labour dispute, so they are basically illegal. That's as far as I found from some googling.
By law, no. But he'll try. And then it's up to Congress or SCOTUS to prevent it.
And while I think they will, I don't like that the chance they won't is as high as it is.
You would think this'd be a bridge too far, but at this point, I'm honestly not sure which bridge would be too far where I think there's not a statistical chance that Congress and SCOTUS would not say no.
The Hong Kong protesters have no other way. Americans who are good people are planning to use Democracy to fix this.
Good news is we still have procedures in place to self correct the problem. Bad news is that the problem is determined to undermine those procedures.
A shame we cannot do a clean install of an updated operating system. Our existing OS is legacy spaghetti code that has trouble running on current processors and retains vulnerabilities present since the beta version.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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WACriminalDying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered Userregular
So Americans sitting on their asses about this is pretty much silent consent at this point, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
What do you want? Half the country actively supports it and the other half is doing some combination of donating to/volunteering for organizations that help, protesting, pressuring elected officials, and waiting for the next election. Like, if you're looking for people to storm ICE facilities, a) that's a good way to get shot, b) I don't really know what you'd do with the people you freed, and c) it's frowned upon to even talk about on these forums.
I mean, I think that was more of a suicide by cop rather than a proper attempt at something.
For what it's worth, this take is not consistent with Willem's manifesto that he left behind. The letter is very good, I would highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
By law, no. But he'll try. And then it's up to Congress or SCOTUS to prevent it.
And while I think they will, I don't like that the chance they won't is as high as it is.
You would think this'd be a bridge too far, but at this point, I'm honestly not sure which bridge would be too far where I think there's not a statistical chance that Congress and SCOTUS would not say no.
I'm not even sure what this would look like in practice.
Trump via Twitter: "I hereby, with all the power vested in me, officially declare birthright citizenship to be not a thing any more."
Everyone Actually Involved In the Process of Granting Birth Certificates: "lol whut"
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By law, no. But he'll try. And then it's up to Congress or SCOTUS to prevent it.
And while I think they will, I don't like that the chance they won't is as high as it is.
You would think this'd be a bridge too far, but at this point, I'm honestly not sure which bridge would be too far where I think there's not a statistical chance that Congress and SCOTUS would not say no.
I'm not even sure what this would look like in practice.
Trump via Twitter: "I hereby, with all the power vested in me, officially declare birthright citizenship to be not a thing any more."
Everyone Actually Involved In the Process of Granting Birth Certificates: "lol whut"
You forgot the "except the racists looking for an excuse" clause.
In theory? Sure, you're right. That'd even, eventually, be legally the case. To the person looking over the counter at the person who decides if they filled out a form correctly it is a license for them to be abused and discriminated against.
I think the plan is to drive the metaphorical bus through the opening in "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" of the 14th amendment.
And considering how much concern there would be by the original authors of this amendment that the wording would introduce birthright citizenship for chinese and native americans, the originialists on the SC have enough of a figleaf to shut it down if they'd like.
It just seems like whatever harm they want to do they can already do right now, and there's already effective immunity.
If you have brown skin, you're going to get rounded up and detained, regardless of how you became a citizen. They're already "accidentally" deporting citizens and people with legit visas.
I'm just unclear on the precise mechanism by which this proposal gets translated into actual harm, since they're already doing all the harmful stuff. Obviously if it was a coordinated effort by the US to implement this change through proper legal avenues, and everybody at all levels were on board, this would be a major thing. People who were born here would not automatically qualify for citizenship, they would not get birth certificates, they would not get the same legal status.
I'm just legit not sure what the effect of Trump saying YOINK is going to have on any of that stuff.
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I'm just legit not sure what the effect of Trump saying YOINK is going to have on any of that stuff.
The most likely effect is it potentially muddling court challenges.
Unless the ACLU or something similar is able to get a judicial injunction (likely, but not guaranteed, cause this reality sucks), it makes the argument that the child is a natural born citizen as a defense against deportation harder to pull off.
Mostly though, I agree it's not going to have an effect, other than Trump riling up his base.
The massive irony is that if they got rid of birthright citizenship completely (ie, EVERYONE needs to be naturalized), I doubt a majority of the fuckers that'll cheer this on would be able to pass the citizenship requirements. And I'd bet the house that Trump wouldn't.
So Americans sitting on their asses about this is pretty much silent consent at this point, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
What do you want? Half the country actively supports it and the other half is doing some combination of donating to/volunteering for organizations that help, protesting, pressuring elected officials, and waiting for the next election. Like, if you're looking for people to storm ICE facilities, a) that's a good way to get shot, b) I don't really know what you'd do with the people you freed, and c) it's frowned upon to even talk about on these forums.
It is entirely realistic to recognize that not everyone, even those with strongly held beliefs, are willing to give up all they love on a quest to perhaps fight and die in order to attempt to correct a wrong, even one as big and as vast as this concentration camp bullshit.
And when history looks back on this (yes yes, let's skip the hot takes about how naive/adorable it is that I think there will be history, or books, or people), frankly, I think it will be difficult to contrast against Nazi Germany. Articles and essays will be written. "Where were the people who would stand up?", "What good were all those guns to protect against the tyranny that they voted into office?", "What the fuck, media?", etc.
While it may sound a bit on the doom and gloom side, it's said more with a sigh of resignation. It's one thing to talk the talk, it's another to cast aside possibly everything one has worked for and perhaps even their life in order to fail to topple a system backed by the might of the US military.
But it isn't something we can be blind to either. The world is watching, and fair or not, I think these times will be found wanting, and not just by the geese perpetrating this horror show.
People need to be held accountable for the things that they did when this administration is defeated at the ballot box.
People also need to be held accountable for the things they didn't do, that they failed to do, that they waffled on and had stern words about while innocents suffered and died.
It just adds to how tired and sad I feel about this all.
First they came for the Muslims, and we said NOT TODAY, MOTHERFUCKER!
So say somebody forces someone to sign documents giving up their US citizenship and has them deported, based on Trump's tweets.
What process is there to find the person and reinstate their citizenship, hmm?
There's going to be a lot of harm caused that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to be reversed.
In terms of the actual bureaucracy involved, renouncing one's citizenship is surprisingly hard for most people. I've looked into it before, mainly because the Conservatives in Canada are sufficiently hostile to dual citizens that having it is a real liability when they're in power, but it's a pretty drawn out process even before the fact that the renunciations can be vetoed by Washington.
I don't think some fill-in-the-blank form ICE guys printed off that morning is going to carry a lot of weight in the State Department.
That said, I can totally see ICE refusing to recognize citizens that are acknowledged as such by the rest of the government, given, y'know, that's already happening in spades...
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Are general strikes even legal in the US?
This is not exactly a necessary factor in Civil Rights related protests
See: The Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th Century.
Now you could argue that the direct connection there between the unjust law being broken the the subject of the protest (say, black protestors refusing to leave a whites-only lunch counter) is key to a civil disobedience protest, but fundamentally speaking you're focusing on the wrong side of things if your question about a protest method's legitimacy is "do we have permission to protest this way?" because the answer is typically "No, that's part of why you are protesting to begin with."
My suspicion is that the time and money required to go on strike or drive to a detainment camp and charge the gates could more effectively be spent donated to charities and political campaigns actually designed to fight this stuff in an organized fashion.
If the half of the country opposed to this drove to their nearest camp and ran at the gates, you would just have a whole lot of dead people.
If that half of the country instead worked for campaigns and reliably voted for the right politicians, the entirety of state and federal governments would change to Democratic control in 2020.
"Why aren't you guys literally giving your lives to right this injustice?" is a nice slogan for folks living in another country and watching this from afar, but it's stupid advice by every possible metric.
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MeeqeLord of the pants most fancySomeplace amazingRegistered Userregular
No one beats the US military right now. Certainly not the citizenry of the US. If these blights (the camps) are going to get removed, its not going to be by force because absolutely no one on this planet is going to go toe to toe with the US military and win. Even if every "militia" armed with small arms tried, they'd lose. Badly. People have no idea how lethal modern militaries are compared to civilian arms.
The only way is Democracy. Attacks on camps will not remove them, they will only result in dead civilians.
My suspicion is that the time and money required to go on strike or drive to a detainment camp and charge the gates could more effectively be spent donated to charities and political campaigns actually designed to fight this stuff in an organized fashion.
I'm struggling to see how this is different from the "white moderate's argument" MLK spoke of in his time. Is this not the definition of being more concerned with order than justice? Everyone's sitting here saying "wait for next election" while people are goddamn dying in illegal detention.
First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season.
Cool. Name a detention center, I will meet you there, we will charge to our deaths together.
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I think the issue of "why don't we see protests the size of Hong Kong" is a mix of American Complacency in general plus the level of sprawl that disperses the populace in such a manner that a protest like Hong Kong becomes a lot more planning intensive and requires more effort to consolidate instead of being organically able to arise.
I think it's also the fact that there is already a major political party organized largely around this issue. We don't need to spread awareness, people are mostly aware. We don't need to convince people, a majority of the population is on board. There isn't a lot of complacency. What we lack is the physical mechanism to actually change anything right now.
Like, there is literally nothing any given individual can do, or even a large number of individuals can do, that will free a single detainee right this moment. If I decided, "fuck it, I will sacrifice my life to save a child in a cage," there is no way I can actually do that. At best, I wind up dead or in jail and maybe there's a news story about me.
What I can do individually is give time and money to, say, legal charities who can fight this in the courts. Or to politicans who will fight for election and then win actual power.
There is no level of civil disobedience that will result in detainees being released, because the people who have the power to do that don't give a shit about civil disobedience. There is no level of protests that will make Trump change his mind, or make CBP stop being racist assholes, or make Stephen Miller stop encouraging ethnic cleansing. If we want things to change, we need to wrest power from those people, and the only way to do that other than literal revolution (read: lots of dead people) is elections.
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That Martin Luther King Jr quote always seems to be misused. He used democratic means to achieve his goals. He organized huge protests not guerrilla resistance. And for the same reason as liberals are not charging the camps to get shot: he didn't want to get thousands of people killed.
Sit-ins. General strike. Even a 5% work stoppage is economically significant. People are pretending like the tools used in the 20th century somehow don't exist. Is it a risk? Is it scary? You bet your ass.
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Are general strikes even legal in the US?
This is not exactly a necessary factor in Civil Rights related protests
See: The Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th Century.
Now you could argue that the direct connection there between the unjust law being broken the the subject of the protest (say, black protestors refusing to leave a whites-only lunch counter) is key to a civil disobedience protest, but fundamentally speaking you're focusing on the wrong side of things if your question about a protest method's legitimacy is "do we have permission to protest this way?" because the answer is typically "No, that's part of why you are protesting to begin with."
Nah, if you are calling for a general strike you are gonna run into two simple problems:
1) not everyone is gonna join you
2) the small number of people who do are gonna get the shit kicked out of their lives
And 2 feeds into 1.
I think it's also the fact that there is already a major political party organized largely around this issue. We don't need to spread awareness, people are mostly aware. We don't need to convince people, a majority of the population is on board. There isn't a lot of complacency. What we lack is the physical mechanism to actually change anything right now.
Like, there is literally nothing any given individual can do, or even a large number of individuals can do, that will free a single detainee right this moment. If I decided, "fuck it, I will sacrifice my life to save a child in a cage," there is no way I can actually do that. At best, I wind up dead or in jail and maybe there's a news story about me.
What I can do individually is give time and money to, say, legal charities who can fight this in the courts. Or to politicans who will fight for election and then win actual power.
There is no level of civil disobedience that will result in detainees being released, because the people who have the power to do that don't give a shit about civil disobedience. There is no level of protests that will make Trump change his mind, or make CBP stop being racist assholes, or make Stephen Miller stop encouraging ethnic cleansing. If we want things to change, we need to wrest power from those people, and the only way to do that other than literal revolution (read: lots of dead people) is elections.
Also, and I think it's important to point out, people have been protesting this shit, and still are. When the recordings of crying children first came out, and the images were not able to be hidden, there was mass frustration, protest, and senator calling. It's the reason they backed down to this half measure and are only now going after Flores. People are protesting ICE in their local areas all the time (there was just a video last week of an ICE agent getting in trouble for trying to force his way through protesters blocking his entrance). When ICE came for the people in the factory in Mississippi, their neighbors took care of their children in the interim, and the outcry from it caused them to release a large portion of the parents. We have shared article after article of people blocking ICE from grabbing people, circling busses and cars to stop people from getting snatched, intervening to protect people from their rights being abused, etc. We have the ACLU receiving record donations to fight this bullshit in courts, local organizations receiving influxes of cash to help those displaced. In 2018 we flipped the only part of government we could flip, hard.
You don't see mass protests like you do in Honk Kong because this shit is more dispersed. Hong Kong has a square mileage not that much larger than the city I live in, the protests are massed cause that's where people are. These ICE detention centers are spread throughout the country. And even with that, you do have protests at many of these locations, continually. Some of them have even been closed because of it.
Like yes, it's still happening and its disheartening as fuck that it is, but to say people are being complacent is I think unfair. Especially when like 40% of the population supports this shit.
Edit: Hell, one of the reasons they have started trying to move these detention center into military bases is to keep people away from them, and to keep them out of the public eye. Because everytime it rears up, people get pissed all over again. Cause this shit is fucked up, they know it is, and they know it upsets people when they see it.
Like, there is literally nothing any given individual can do, or even a large number of individuals can do, that will free a single detainee right this moment. If I decided, "fuck it, I will sacrifice my life to save a child in a cage," there is no way I can actually do that. At best, I wind up dead or in jail and maybe there's a news story about me.
The most effective piece of direct action would probably be to get a job as a guard and sneak pictures out. No doubt they are hiring lots of people and not background checking very much,
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Not necessarily. There is evidence that what Trump is doing is making people MORE supportive of immigration, and whatever else he's against/for.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/20/americans-are-growing-more-accepting-immigrants-take-note-democrats/
This seems to hold true for immigration, racism, free trade...
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I feel as close to certain as makes no difference that throwing out Flores is specifically a response to that "yes, you fucking have to give kids soap and blankets, what were you assholes thinking" court ruling. Don't need to abide by court decisions around a settlement if you don't recognize the settlement itself!
What do you want? Half the country actively supports it and the other half is doing some combination of donating to/volunteering for organizations that help, protesting, pressuring elected officials, and waiting for the next election. Like, if you're looking for people to storm ICE facilities, a) that's a good way to get shot, b) I don't really know what you'd do with the people you freed, and c) it's frowned upon to even talk about on these forums.
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What do you expect them to do?
Someone did try this.
They are dead now.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/14/man-dies-as-police-shootout-follows-firebomb-attack-on-immigration-centre
A million people are on Hong Kong streets at what has been practically a moment's notice. While they're more viscerally connected, they've proven a salient point - they have power. In their case, the function of the Chinese state won't allow for change in the way ours does.
Everyone going about their business is simply saying "it's not me yet, so this is ok."
I mean, I think that was more of a suicide by cop rather than a proper attempt at something.
I work with/for conservatives who support this. So a strike or walk out or sit-in or whatever is just gonna be me not having a job. I guess I'm selfish, though.
Narrarator: He can't.
Are general strikes even legal in the US?
I think so? I know there are some weird rules about when public workers can strike, but I think it's fair game for private workers.
A general strike is a strike of workers across, ideally, all industries. AFAIK the US does not allow them. From what I can gather they are not specifically illegal but it is apparently illegal to strike in some way not connected to a labour dispute, so they are basically illegal. That's as far as I found from some googling.
By law, no. But he'll try. And then it's up to Congress or SCOTUS to prevent it.
And while I think they will, I don't like that the chance they won't is as high as it is.
You would think this'd be a bridge too far, but at this point, I'm honestly not sure which bridge would be too far where I think there's not a statistical chance that Congress and SCOTUS would not say no.
Good news is we still have procedures in place to self correct the problem. Bad news is that the problem is determined to undermine those procedures.
A shame we cannot do a clean install of an updated operating system. Our existing OS is legacy spaghetti code that has trouble running on current processors and retains vulnerabilities present since the beta version.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
For what it's worth, this take is not consistent with Willem's manifesto that he left behind. The letter is very good, I would highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
I'm not even sure what this would look like in practice.
Trump via Twitter: "I hereby, with all the power vested in me, officially declare birthright citizenship to be not a thing any more."
Everyone Actually Involved In the Process of Granting Birth Certificates: "lol whut"
You forgot the "except the racists looking for an excuse" clause.
In theory? Sure, you're right. That'd even, eventually, be legally the case. To the person looking over the counter at the person who decides if they filled out a form correctly it is a license for them to be abused and discriminated against.
What process is there to find the person and reinstate their citizenship, hmm?
There's going to be a lot of harm caused that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to be reversed.
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And considering how much concern there would be by the original authors of this amendment that the wording would introduce birthright citizenship for chinese and native americans, the originialists on the SC have enough of a figleaf to shut it down if they'd like.
If you have brown skin, you're going to get rounded up and detained, regardless of how you became a citizen. They're already "accidentally" deporting citizens and people with legit visas.
I'm just unclear on the precise mechanism by which this proposal gets translated into actual harm, since they're already doing all the harmful stuff. Obviously if it was a coordinated effort by the US to implement this change through proper legal avenues, and everybody at all levels were on board, this would be a major thing. People who were born here would not automatically qualify for citizenship, they would not get birth certificates, they would not get the same legal status.
I'm just legit not sure what the effect of Trump saying YOINK is going to have on any of that stuff.
The most likely effect is it potentially muddling court challenges.
Unless the ACLU or something similar is able to get a judicial injunction (likely, but not guaranteed, cause this reality sucks), it makes the argument that the child is a natural born citizen as a defense against deportation harder to pull off.
Mostly though, I agree it's not going to have an effect, other than Trump riling up his base.
The massive irony is that if they got rid of birthright citizenship completely (ie, EVERYONE needs to be naturalized), I doubt a majority of the fuckers that'll cheer this on would be able to pass the citizenship requirements. And I'd bet the house that Trump wouldn't.
It is entirely realistic to recognize that not everyone, even those with strongly held beliefs, are willing to give up all they love on a quest to perhaps fight and die in order to attempt to correct a wrong, even one as big and as vast as this concentration camp bullshit.
And when history looks back on this (yes yes, let's skip the hot takes about how naive/adorable it is that I think there will be history, or books, or people), frankly, I think it will be difficult to contrast against Nazi Germany. Articles and essays will be written. "Where were the people who would stand up?", "What good were all those guns to protect against the tyranny that they voted into office?", "What the fuck, media?", etc.
While it may sound a bit on the doom and gloom side, it's said more with a sigh of resignation. It's one thing to talk the talk, it's another to cast aside possibly everything one has worked for and perhaps even their life in order to fail to topple a system backed by the might of the US military.
But it isn't something we can be blind to either. The world is watching, and fair or not, I think these times will be found wanting, and not just by the geese perpetrating this horror show.
People need to be held accountable for the things that they did when this administration is defeated at the ballot box.
People also need to be held accountable for the things they didn't do, that they failed to do, that they waffled on and had stern words about while innocents suffered and died.
It just adds to how tired and sad I feel about this all.
In terms of the actual bureaucracy involved, renouncing one's citizenship is surprisingly hard for most people. I've looked into it before, mainly because the Conservatives in Canada are sufficiently hostile to dual citizens that having it is a real liability when they're in power, but it's a pretty drawn out process even before the fact that the renunciations can be vetoed by Washington.
I don't think some fill-in-the-blank form ICE guys printed off that morning is going to carry a lot of weight in the State Department.
That said, I can totally see ICE refusing to recognize citizens that are acknowledged as such by the rest of the government, given, y'know, that's already happening in spades...
This is not exactly a necessary factor in Civil Rights related protests
See: The Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th Century.
Now you could argue that the direct connection there between the unjust law being broken the the subject of the protest (say, black protestors refusing to leave a whites-only lunch counter) is key to a civil disobedience protest, but fundamentally speaking you're focusing on the wrong side of things if your question about a protest method's legitimacy is "do we have permission to protest this way?" because the answer is typically "No, that's part of why you are protesting to begin with."
If the half of the country opposed to this drove to their nearest camp and ran at the gates, you would just have a whole lot of dead people.
If that half of the country instead worked for campaigns and reliably voted for the right politicians, the entirety of state and federal governments would change to Democratic control in 2020.
"Why aren't you guys literally giving your lives to right this injustice?" is a nice slogan for folks living in another country and watching this from afar, but it's stupid advice by every possible metric.
The only way is Democracy. Attacks on camps will not remove them, they will only result in dead civilians.
I'd like to believe that's possible. But the Weimar Republic was a Democracy, too, and we all know how that went down.
I'm struggling to see how this is different from the "white moderate's argument" MLK spoke of in his time. Is this not the definition of being more concerned with order than justice? Everyone's sitting here saying "wait for next election" while people are goddamn dying in illegal detention.
Like, there is literally nothing any given individual can do, or even a large number of individuals can do, that will free a single detainee right this moment. If I decided, "fuck it, I will sacrifice my life to save a child in a cage," there is no way I can actually do that. At best, I wind up dead or in jail and maybe there's a news story about me.
What I can do individually is give time and money to, say, legal charities who can fight this in the courts. Or to politicans who will fight for election and then win actual power.
There is no level of civil disobedience that will result in detainees being released, because the people who have the power to do that don't give a shit about civil disobedience. There is no level of protests that will make Trump change his mind, or make CBP stop being racist assholes, or make Stephen Miller stop encouraging ethnic cleansing. If we want things to change, we need to wrest power from those people, and the only way to do that other than literal revolution (read: lots of dead people) is elections.
"I thought all these guns you bought were for fighting against a tyrannical govt? They're detaining and deporting citizens."
"Yeah, but they're brown."
Nah, if you are calling for a general strike you are gonna run into two simple problems:
1) not everyone is gonna join you
2) the small number of people who do are gonna get the shit kicked out of their lives
And 2 feeds into 1.
Also, and I think it's important to point out, people have been protesting this shit, and still are. When the recordings of crying children first came out, and the images were not able to be hidden, there was mass frustration, protest, and senator calling. It's the reason they backed down to this half measure and are only now going after Flores. People are protesting ICE in their local areas all the time (there was just a video last week of an ICE agent getting in trouble for trying to force his way through protesters blocking his entrance). When ICE came for the people in the factory in Mississippi, their neighbors took care of their children in the interim, and the outcry from it caused them to release a large portion of the parents. We have shared article after article of people blocking ICE from grabbing people, circling busses and cars to stop people from getting snatched, intervening to protect people from their rights being abused, etc. We have the ACLU receiving record donations to fight this bullshit in courts, local organizations receiving influxes of cash to help those displaced. In 2018 we flipped the only part of government we could flip, hard.
You don't see mass protests like you do in Honk Kong because this shit is more dispersed. Hong Kong has a square mileage not that much larger than the city I live in, the protests are massed cause that's where people are. These ICE detention centers are spread throughout the country. And even with that, you do have protests at many of these locations, continually. Some of them have even been closed because of it.
Like yes, it's still happening and its disheartening as fuck that it is, but to say people are being complacent is I think unfair. Especially when like 40% of the population supports this shit.
Edit: Hell, one of the reasons they have started trying to move these detention center into military bases is to keep people away from them, and to keep them out of the public eye. Because everytime it rears up, people get pissed all over again. Cause this shit is fucked up, they know it is, and they know it upsets people when they see it.
The most effective piece of direct action would probably be to get a job as a guard and sneak pictures out. No doubt they are hiring lots of people and not background checking very much,