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Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

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Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#341
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting ICE raided the outside of a Home Depot. Like, of all the immigrants, the immigrants that stand outside of Home Depot do the hardest physical labor. There’s no heart to what’s going on.

I’m not sure I understand. Are you saying ICE should deport on.. merit basis? Leave the hardest working immigrants be and deport the lazy ones?

There’s a million ways to skin a cat. The process you choose informs everyone of the problem you are prioritizing.

For example, you are deporting labor. Ostensibly Because of fairness and justice - they are in the country illegally. Ergo they should go.

No one should be above the law.

This has zip to do with gangs and criminality though.

But why this process ? Why not punish people who are employing them ?

This is more efficient and even more just. People are employing workers they know are here illegally and undercutting minimum wage.

Or why not raise minimum wage so more people will be willing to work those jobs ?

People act on incentives - and america is a country with a concentration of some of the hardest working and smartest people in the world.

It has a tradition of valuing this and converting those strengths into its own.

Now I have enough of a background in econ, business and politics to see through the narratives.

I also know you can’t sell all those interventions, not the least because none of these address the issue of gangs and criminality and eating pets.

Which brings us to the issue that your rationale, the ones which are debated online - are downstream from whatever controversy and theory that’s going to show up as soon as a new distraction is needed.

I mean, just Take a look at your original question,

“Leave the hardest working and deport the lazy ones ?”

America is built on immigration of the hardest working, most driven people from across the globe.

America is a machine for hardworking people to move ahead. That’s its promise.

And this is the question its citizens are unironically asking.

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#342

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

Recent anecdote from Popehat, about the 1992 riots in Los Angeles:

> /4 So “cover me” to the LAPD means “if someone pops up with a gun and shoots at me, shoot at them.” Apparently to the Marines it means “lay down a curtain of suppressive fire using your rifles.” Hilarity ensued.

https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3lr2w7wo3...

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#343

There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

There's an entire division of the military that is literally police. They serve a similar function to their civilian counterparts. There's also intelligence and logistics units.

2/7 is an infantry battalion. They have no training or experience policing.

I was a member of an infantry battalion once tasked with doing policing in a foreign country. Let me just say that the outcome was exactly what you’d expect. We were very effective at responding with overwhelming force to attacks by an insurgency but pretty ineffective at keeping the peace.

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One fights the enemies of the state "At stake is a fundamental component of the framework of US constitutional democracy. It begins with the principle, enshrined in law, that military forces exist to protect the country from existential threats — such as an invasion or rebellion — not to enforce the law. Most fundamentally, the founders of the American republic understood very clearly that concentrated military pow…

Well I hate to disparage a large group of people, but how often have you spoken to an American who understands this type of social-legal history of the country, and values it? Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc). You'll p…

[deleted]

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#345
post #222

As a Hungarian, told my friends in November: "the election results, Project 2025, the newly elected president, etc... is the same old story we have already seen with Orban 10+y ago. But don't worry, the US has a much better established democracy, shit can't really go as wrong as in Eastern-Europe" Well, I'm not so sure about that last part anymore.

To anyone who watched or lived through the ascension of Orbán and Erdogan in the 2000s it was very eerie how similar the playbook was for Trump.

The same steps, in the same direction, the competitive authoritarian[0] playbook was clearly in full play, during the first term Trump started to openly attack the free press, subjugate some democratic institutions, etc. but guardrails were still holding, some GOP Congress people could pushback, the VP wasn't entirely in the cult, the cabinet had some level-headed people.

Now in the second term there is nothing holding back, not the Congress nor Senate, not the Judiciary, not the cabinet, not the elites, not the press, and seemingly the people aren't able at all to comprehend and pushback on how authoritarian it all is.

The plan trudges along, crisis will keep being fabricated so Trump's grip on power increases, this one in LA is definitely going to be used to salami slice more and more power into the Executive, under the veil of "homeland security".

You're entering a new phase of Trump's authoritarianism, Americans, and there doesn't seem to have any power actually powerful enough to fight back.

[0] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745953

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#346

If illegal immigration is such a problem, why not fine businesses 5x salary for using the labor, for as long as it was used? There are a lot of systems in place to verify working status at this point. It eliminates any incentive to hire this cheaper labor willing to work for lower wages. The people coming will be coming for a variety of reasons but it won't be to take the jobs of the uneducated Americans

crackdown on immigration is exactly to allow business to profit from informal and legal immigration.

it's so widely know im unsure if you're really oblivious or being sarcastic. sorry.

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#347
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> military forces exist to protect the country from existential threats — such as an invasion or rebellion — not to enforce the law. serious question: are Countries such as Italy, France etc not a democracy? All of them are, verbatim from wikipedia, "a military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population.". Ditto for spain Guardia Civil, and many of the countries listed in that same wiki page: Alg…

> serious question: are Countries such as Italy, France etc not a democracy? They are, but not in the the "framework of US constitutional democracy." A system for which we have more evidence of stability than either of Italy or France's modern republics. (Note, too, les gendarmes' heritage: imperial France. Also, gendarmes aren't usually deployed overseas. They are, in a sense, more similar to the FBI than the U.S. M…

I have always found confusing the existence of the gendarmes. They are indeed a vestigial force of the XIXth century, and should be transformed into a regular police force.

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LA just can't seem to catch a break. Floods last year, fires earlier this year and now this I'm in LA right now. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't know anything is up.

Living in LA is so great. The only thing I regret in my life is not getting here sooner.

[flagged]

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also, notably, a legacy of Reconstruction. Put another way, we're dismantling infrastructure built to prevent civil war.

> a legacy of Reconstruction Quite the opposite. It was passed in 1878 because of the backlash against Reconstruction, shortly after federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, and was intended to prevent something like Reconstruction from happening again.

> It was passed in 1878 because of the backlash against Reconstruction, shortly after federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, and was intended to prevent Reconstruction from happening again

You're right. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest it was a product of Reconstruction. It was absolutely part of the process of post-civil war renormalisation.

Re: Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests

#350
Everything is a constitutional crisis now, because nobody really knows what a constitutional crisis is. We're just numbing people down and normalizing the words until they mean nothing, because we aren't using them when they really matter. The details of this do not seem like they warrant calling it a constitutional crisis. When we actually face one, there won't be words we can use to describe it anymore, because we've wasted them.
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