Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025
On this day in 1996, Gary Kasparov lost the first game of a six game match against Deep Blue.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
The Department of Justice just established the “Joint Task Force October 7“.
Among other things, it seeks the arrest and extradition of the Hamas leadership living abroad.
I was not aware that doing this was an option.
Oh, and it also targets Hamas supporters in the US (including those on college campuses).
Something about supporting terrorists, I guess.Report
The Justice Department targeting Americans for having political opinions? What could possibly go wrong.Report
Let’s split the difference: Only people on visas should be affected by laws against support for Hamas.Report
Ah yes, only admitting people with the right politics can’t go wrong either.Report
Maybe we could set up something like “intellectual diversity centers” making sure that *ALL* politics are welcome, not just the “right” ones.Report
Weird to see conservatives embracing DEI.Report
“Diversity” *WAS* the compromise position.Report
And of course, peoples without visas are NOT “subject to the jurisdiction of the USA”, as the Administration was repeatedly told us, so they have nothing to be concerned aboutReport
Maybe we could set up something so that undocumented tourists have the same rights as sovereign citizens.Report
Musk is tweeting out that DOGE found that FEMA payments are still being made to house undocumented tourists in NYC in contravention of the law.
The guy running FEMA tweeted out that these payments have now been stopped and “Personnel will be held accountable”.
There’s an interesting follow-up: “@USCongress should have never passed bills in 2023 and 2024 asking FEMA to do this work. This stops now.”
And *THAT* makes me wonder: Wait, there were laws passed to do this? What is the exact wording of the laws?
Because if the law says “paying for housing for undocumented tourists”, that money still goes to pay for housing for undocumented tourists. At best, it can be redirected to the detainment centers fixing to remigrate the tourists back to their home countries.Report
So it was in contravention of the law, and also Congress made a mistake passing bills requiring it?Report
If this is anything like other Illegal Actions By The Government it’ll turn out to be “the law required that the disbursing organization file a form KX-3902B and have it fully approved before any funds were disbursed, and we’ve found a form was only provisionally approved at the time of review, which is clearly a violation of the law!”Report
Check out the latest polls. A new Pew poll has Trump’s approval ratings at -4.Report
Freddie, raising rabble:
Hayes is the host of a show on MSNBC, while Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. I say this as neutrally as I can – this is, correspondingly, as clear of a dispatch from elite establishment liberalism as you could ever find. And the conversation, to me, is deeply frustrating. It reflects the inability of contemporary liberals to embed moral reasoning in a broader framework of feasibility, legal defensibility, political sense, and simple pragmatism.
[…]
Who’s going to re-build Los Angeles? Undocumented labor, that’s who:
If [the elite establishment liberalism] express this just slightly differently, you can see that it’s exceptionally racist. “You know what would be great? If we let a bunch of people of color into our country and have them do hard, dangerous, demeaning jobs. And get this! We’re going to sneak them in secretly, so they won’t be protected by minimum wage laws, OSHA, regulations on work hours and overtime, and all manner of other labor protections. And most of them are going to be paying into Medicare and Social Security but won’t ever be able to practically draw from those programs that they’ve contributed to. They’ll also be constantly subject to personal, economic, and sexual exploitation because they won’t be able to call the police due to their undocumented status.
And that’s from an ‘Open Borders’ guy… no wonder everyone hates him.Report
I don’t think Freddie is wrong in the abstract but I do think he’s wrong about the actual beliefs that lead to what I think is fairly called total intellectual dishonesty.
My take is that progressives like Hayes and Blitzer on some level believe that immigration is a human right exercised by immigrants themselves, whatever the particulars of the legal regime they are (or more pertinent, are not) following. From this perspective answering no to anyone who wants entry is itself a violation of those human rights. They’re just also smart enough to understand that this framing is incredibly radical and would never be acceptable to the wider electorate, and so they pivot to neoliberal economic arguments as a sort of red herring.Report
Not sure what makes the existing Neo-Liberal regime of exploiting labor a red herring though. Seems like an ordinarily colored herring.Report
I see it as a red herring because it is a way to defend mass unskilled immigration without arguing their implicit but unstated actual position, which is about human rights trumping parochial and/or nationalistic concerns, not really about economics at all. I think their position on the subject would be what it is no matter what the economists (or the Economist) says.
Edit to add, I’m sure Larry Summers actually does hold the ‘neoliberal’ position on the merits, but I do not think thats the case for name your progressive pundit.Report
Ok, it’s probably me not aligning the subject, verb, objects here… are we saying that when people like Chris Hayes invoke ‘unprotected’ labor to do things he’s being disingenuous so that normie libs will cheer-on exploited labor in the name of cheap strawberries and back-breaking work?
And Freddie is being intellectually dishonest for calling that out?
That’s how I’m reading it and it doesn’t quite compute, so where am I off track?Report
Probably my fault for not explaining my thoughts well. They go something like this:
-Hayes et al are not moved by any of the economic arguments in play re: immigration.
-For them it isn’t about GDP or growth or full employment or prices of goods and services (or jobs “Americans won’t do”).
-What they do believe in is a universal rights ideal that anyone can immigrate anywhere and it is the host country’s obligation to accommodate.
-This is probably bolstered by attitudes about what the developed world, Westerners, white people, whoever, owe to the denizens of poorer countries.
-To the extent any exploitation or other moral issues arise from how immigration plays out in practice, their answer is to make every entrant a citizen and/or provide legal status allowing them to benefit from all protections.
-However, they also know that this position is a total non-starter politically.
-Instead they argue for immigration from a perspective of neoliberal economics as a means of winning the argument without actually owning or making the case for their true position.
-This is what causes the weird tension that Freddie is picking up on, and that renders their arguments nonsensical to anyone paying even a little bit of attention to the larger political context and partisan divides.
-Freddie’s mistake is taking the argument Hayes et al are making at face value.
-To me it’s obvious that they really care about all the mushy stuff, not about having people to work at illegally low wages rebuilding LA.Report
I only skimmed the Freddie piece, so I don’t know if that part is fair, but with the rest, I agree, and what’s strange about it is that the economic arguments for immigration never work politically, and are even less likely than usual to work in this moment of populism and nationalism.
I sometimes wonder why people don’t use historical arguments, which can be pretty easily couched in the sorts of language that populists and nationalists love. Basically, why not just point out that for much of this country’s history, the borders were effectively open, and immigrants, who make up most of our ancestors, came in droves, and helped to build this country into an economic and military powerhouse. Ethical arguments generally have little political force, at least in this country, so it would make little sense to make pro-immigration arguments on those grounds, but one could argue in today’s political parlance that immigrants helped to make America great, and in a world of increasing global competition, if we want to make America great again, we are going to need as many people as we can get.Report
I think having the discussion on those kinds of terms would be more productive. Yglesias has his One Billion Americans book that I have not read but as I understand it makes some arguments in that direction.
What it inevitably runs into though is that in the age of jet travel hundreds of millions of people could be here in a relative blink of an eye. Even our own, relatively open door past of mass immigration is not a parallel for what that might look like.
Nevertheless I’d take the honesty of that kind of conversation over what we have today.Report
I thought that Freddie article paired very interestingly with what I could see of his article where he talks about how progressives (himself included) need to accept that they have to take an L on the immigration subject.Report
The issue is that a “neoliberal economics” argument assumes that all the labor involved is trading on the same terms, and (as Freddie points out) this is not the case for nondocumented immigration into the USA.Report
Agreed. That’s where your green card at the border suggestion comes in, and where the total unwillingness to accept that sort of arrangement from the wider electorate follows.Report
He’s got the same idea that I do — which is that they should just be handing out Green Cards at the Tijuana border stop, meaning that all those people coming in to work can file wage-theft lawsuits, file OSHA complaints, sign up for welfare, call the cops when needed…a few years of that and suddenly we’ll find that Americans aren’t such bad hires after all. (Or, more likely, there’ll be fewer jobs overall but a lot fancier machines to do the work.)Report
Good point; could do that. Lots of new and different consequences.
“That’s why Bernie Sanders used to be a pretty passionate immigration restrictionist, because of the way that undocumented labor undermines the fight for better labor conditions.”Report
You’ll lose your ardor for better labor conditions when the price of clothing goes up!Report
Heh, how I long to remove the hidden thumbs on food production that the NeoLibs pretend are for ‘farmers’.Report
Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t the thumbs on the agriculture side conservatives pretending the subsidies were for “farmers” while the Neolibs were on the other side of that deal pushing food stamps (which actually do go to hungry poor people)?Report
Bush the Lesser, of all people, proposed (a lot of) migrant workers visas, for a period of X months every year, so workers could come and take temporary jobs in agriculture, construction, etc. . They would come without their families (minimizing the services costs), and would leave every year at the end of their visa, returning the following year, when work would be again available. The GOP killed the idea faster than an AK-47 shot bullet.
The undocumented workers didn’t want to move permanently to the USA. They wanted to make enough money to support their families back home, to go back to them in the low season, and to retire back home. That system worked for decades.
Until it worked no more. It became too difficult, too expensive, too dangerous, to come and go. The yearly migration became a permanent move. Families no longer could stay back, so they too moved to the USA, requiring schools, hospitals, services.
And once the whole family was in the USA, and children grew here, there was no reason to go back, and nowhere and no one to return to. Twenty years ago, W wanted to implement a win-win-win solution. But he couldn’t, and here we areReport
In the 90s, that’s how our restaurant workers did it. We had them for six months at a time. They lived 8 to a two-bedroom and they hot bunked it and used castoff televisions for entertainment and only needed a little bit of the devil’s lettuce to get them through their days off.
The only Americans willing to work for the same wages were alcoholics and ex-felons.Report
Was there supposed to be a link?Report
There was… but I’m oppressed here without a proper click-button com-box for link formatting.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-have-to-take-some-kind-of-an-lReport
Pretty sure it was this one.Report
Thom Hartmann adds grist to the Power Play mill.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartmann/p/the-supreme-court-is-corrupt-congress-87a?r=v677&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=emailReport
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/blue-state-law-red-state-law
I only knew knew about Britt’s velvet pushback because of a tip from a TPM Reader. I’m pretty confident there are similar reports from other Senators and representatives in similar positions. As Philip Bump notes here, NIH funding in red states is more likely to go to colleges and universities than in blue states. But it’s the pattern I want to highlight: blue states going to the courts and red states (or at least their political stakeholders) trying to work directly with the administration. As I said, I don’t think this will survive as an across the board policy. There are too many pro-Trump or Trump-adjacent stakeholders affected. But it’s a view toward a different kind of politics or state we could be heading toward: cash and prizes for supporters and nothing for opponents.
There are different and important permutations to this model. We start with cash and prizes for red states and nothing for blue states. But if institutions in blue states declare their love for Trump maybe something can be worked out. These are powerful inducements for political subservience and compliance. I had a number of knowledgable observers tell me last night that that was the obvious next step.
We’ll have to see where and how this plays out. My understanding is that there are both strong administrative law arguments against this and, in addition to that, an additional statute forbidding it which I’m told was put in place after Trump tried something similar in his first term. Of course, the administration’s global strategy seems to be that laws restricting his use of his executive powers are all unconstitutional. This amounts to saying that the opponents have a strong case on the law, even with right-wing judges. But we need to see if the law still matters.Report
Chuck Schumer is a coward.
https://www.salon.com/2025/02/10/schumer-signals-that-senate-democrats-will-collaborate-with-to-avoid-government-shutdown/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2fGcAhQDdeypzxNj1sh5oneDzC404D6kV3IMBGkkuedFgzMLu9DQIkcTw_aem_XCIHIRKxwdb7IV2K5dAH4wReport
What about Mitch McConnell?!? Why don’t you ever complain about him?!?Report
I did. A lot. He’s a coward as well. As is John Thune who replaced him. But I do t expect Thune to buck the system that made him appear powerful. I expect better from my own team.Report
Trump wants to kill Medical Research: https://jabberwocking.com/trump-wants-to-wipe-out-medical-research/Report
The American Prospect digs deep: What Trump Could Learn From Hitler on NIH Funding.Report
Judge McConnell ruled that Trump Admin is defying its order: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/trump-unfreezing-federal-grants-judge-ruling.html
We are in a very bad placeReport
We are.Report
Around 40% of Americans think this is the bee’s knees.Report
New polls! Right Direction vs. Wrong Track has Wrong Track up 3%!Report
Scoop: FBI finds secret JFK assassination records after Trump order.
I still can’t find a copy of the plan, though. I can find multiple reports of the plan having been delivered! Just nothing with the details of the plan.Report
Someone needs to keep Skinner distracted so we can bust into his office and sneak a peak at those documents.Report
The discovery of an additional couple thousand records that were never provided to a board before is just an additional conspiracy smorgasbord.
Were the documents deliberately withheld?
Are they faked and the FBI has been working with AI on creating them furiously since the hangover wore off back in November?
Was it just an oh-gosh-silly-us mistake?
If it was that last one, that info had best never get out to the public. That’s information that could cause harm to our national security.Report
Is there any timeline on when/if something substantive will be released?
I’m dying to yell ‘we’re through the looking glass here,people..’ at everyone I know.Report
I’m pulling my beard out trying to find *ANYTHING* substantive on that.
The only thing I’ve found is something saying that the 2,400 records’ existence was announced passingly in the plan itself… WHICH I CAN’T FIND A COPY OF.
Jeez louise. We need to have somebody FOIA the dang plan.Report
From a box mysteriously labeled: CIA Grassy Knoll site survey.Report
Trump doubles down on permanently exiling Palestinians from Gaza: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/world/middleeast/trump-gaza-us-takeover.html
Is it worth it Jaybird?Report
October 7th?
I’d say that it obviously wasn’t.
Do you think that it was worth it?Report
Game recognizes game: Trump drops Eric Adams corruption probe: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/nyregion/eric-adams-charges-doj-trump.htmlReport
To the surprise of no one with half a brain cell, Hamas decides to stop the hostage release despite Israel releasing hundreds of Palestinians for small numbers of Israeli Jews released by Hamas. Hamas has also tortured and starved their hostages while Palestinians are being released to Israel in full health. Fish Hamas:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/middleeast/hamas-says-postponing-next-hostage-release-intl/index.htmlReport
Apparently, the fact that Americans are among the hostages has Trump upset. So he’s said that Hamas has a deadline by noon on Saturday and if the hostages aren’t all released by then “all hell is going to break out”.
Did he even listen to Garth Brooks singing “Imagine” at Jimmy Carter’s funeral?Report
Trump’s idiocy about Gaza is going to do nobody any good. Not the Palestinians, not Israelis, not Americans, and not Jews world wide. It will just put millions of people in great danger.
At the same time I don’t understand the strategy of the Palestinians or their allies anymore. Even before Israel existed, the Palestinians pursued a strategy of “if we are violent enough, all the cowardly Jews will go away or if we cry enough some group will take all the Jews away.” This didn’t work in 1929 when there were only 150,000 Jews in Eretz Israel and it didn’t work on 10/7/23 when there were over 7 million Jews in Eretz Israel and it was an affluent country with the best army and intelligence services in the region and a lot of social cohesion.
Yet, despite following the same losing strategy for nearly a century, the Palestinians and their allies adhere hard to it. Every defeat just causes them to double down and increase waving their flags with stores in SF boasting about selling “authentic Palestinian olive oil.” There seems to be a real psychological need among the Palestinians and their allies that Israel be defeated with keyboard warriors boasting that the Jews will be allowed to remain if contrite enough. The entire thing is so delusional and ludicrous, I don’t know how to respond to it. They definitely don’t want to admit that Israel is here to stay or that Jews have a right to self-determination even as Israel and Saudi Arabia normalize relations.Report
If you’ve got God on your side, you can’t lose.
It’s gonna turn the corner any minute now. We just have to be faithful.Report
For the Islamists, that is definitely the case. Even for the more secular ones, I think they are still shell shocked because they lost to the Jews repeatedly. “Lose to the Jews, who loses to the Jews?”Report