The funniest thing Venezuela could do at this point would be to treat it like a declared war and sue for peace in the UN and promise to unilaterally cease all aggression and return all territory. Plead for 'status quo ante bellum', aka, 'returning the situation that existed before a war'. Aka, 'Sorry, and let us pretend our invasion never happen'

Which normally is how you lose a of aggression war and try to keep the same government, but in this case, as Venezuela has neither committed no aggression and seized no territory, would mean nothing at all.

BTW, if these actually are being detained because we're at war with their 'country', which is apparently Venezuela (?), that both Venezuela and the US are signatories to the Geneva Convention, and this is literally the exact sort of humiliation propaganda photograph you are not allowed to do with prisoners of war.

A quick search to see see if anyone else noticed this...yup:

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/kristi-noems-el-salvador-prison-photo-op-might-have-violated-the-geneva-convention/

Anyone remember how Iran, who had captured US sailors who had wandered into their waters, showed pictures that they were being humanely treated? And the right tried to pretend that was a violation of Geneva, and everyone pointed out 'Showing capture soldiers being feed and treated well' might be propaganda, but it's the exactly what Geneva wants, 'prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated and protected against acts of violence, intimidation, insults, and public curiosity'. You're _allowed_ to produce propaganda bragging how well you treat your prisoners. (As long as you don't force them to participate. You can ask for volunteers to do that, but you cannot punish them if they do not, or for what they say in that propaganda. Although, obviously, you probably won't distribute it if they don't say good things.)

Well, conservatives, in case you're wondering, this. This is what you are not allowed to do. On top of the obvious intended humiliation, this is fairly clearly a photo op that all these prisoners were forced to take part in, and even forced to partially disrobe for. And it's intended to show people how _badly_ they are being treated.

And that's just the photo part. Obviously, mistreatment itself is a worse crime. Also, their government (Venezuela?) need to be notified, and captured POWs must be allowed, within the week, to write home.

Imagine if we lived in a country where posting a picture which looks like it came straight out of a concentration camp, full of people who have not been charged with a crime that we shipped to another country, makes you look good.

It's 8 for them to remove them just because one person decides, if it's 6 or 7 they have consult a supervisor.

It is worth pointing out that this basically means they are counting everyone who lives with a claimed member of TDA as themselves a claimed member of TDA, because they'd hit all 6 points of 'Association' and probably have at least Symbolism (b) in that there are certainly social media posts that include pictures of people they live.

Same logic with family members: Documentations and Communications (a) is worth 6 and is literally just phone calls. Add a picture in there, there's 8. Your brother, who you don't associate with, is living in another state, is in a gang you have nothing to do with, and he posted a picture to his social media, and the called you to bail him out and you refused? Tada, eight points, you're a gang member.

And that's assuming that their idea of what gang symbols or gang tattoos are make sense. Which they don't. They have managed to college at least three people for gang tattoos who are gay tattoo artists or makeup artists. Tren de Aragua, for the record, is not weirdly progressive gang that is fine with gay gang members.

At least one of them had entered the US to _attended a prearranged asylum hearing_. He petitioned for asylum, at the border, like he was supposed to, did the proper paperwork, the US let him in, he's working through the system, like he's supposed to, and Trump grabbed him off the street and shipped him overseas.

Meanwhile, and it's worth point this out: The guy that Trump Administration is 'oops we accidentally sold this guy to El Salvador despite having a judge's order' was randomly pointed at back in 2019 by other people being investigated by immigration as a member, INS arrested him, an immigration judge (Remember those?) not only said he was not a member but determined that he _could not_ be deported because he was at risk of being murdered by gangs, and he needed to stay in the US until a proper refugee status could be worked out.

He almost certainly was deported because he had 'credibly statements identifying him as a member' (As in, a judge, said they were nonsense) and he was 'indicted for being a member' (An indictment for a crime later he was _found innocent of_ by a judge.)

We HAVE an immigration court in this country. They are completely ignoring it because they have decided to pretend a law says something different.

Well, no. They're completely ignoring it because they are, and this cannot be emphasized enough, actual fascists who are deliberately attempting to torture people because it makes them look strong to their fascism followers. They are starting with randomly accusations of some members of this outgroup (brown immigrants) being gang members, as sort of a test, and they're offshoring their torture to another country. Baby steps. They will move on.

That is, literally, what is happen in this country right now, and people need to understand that.

It's also worth explaining that about 75% of this system was _already in place_, and INS has always been extremely fascistic. This is something we built, over the last two decades, to operate mostly like this, and it has absolutely no problem shedding the tiniest vestige of due process and leap whole-heartedly in this.

This is on top of the fact the entire article is trying to paint 'Hamas revised the numbers down' as proving they are a bad actor, when in fact revising the numbers down is...exactly what they should do if they have gotten more information.

They're pretending Hamas did it to 'retain credibility', that Hamas was somehow forced it into it or people would stop believing them.

As opposed to 'Hamas, in the chaos of war, sometimes has wrong numbers, and has fixed those'

They don't present any evidence of their interpetation, they do not present any actual specific example of the corrected deaths to let anyone even make their own determination.

Granted, they don't even even present any evidence the number did change. In fact, they _literally do not list the numbers_ that they assert have changed. Or link to the PDFs!

It's purely 'This person said the number changed, and this other person has suggested that it was because the first number was deliberately dishonest but they felt they couldn't get away with this dishonestly anymore'. Just utter vibe-based reporting.

It cannot be emphasized how much this guy has _never_ been coherent, and how much he has fallen apart over the past decade on top of that. He's just a blathering idiot, and I don't mean he's wrong (I mean, he is), but he absolutely has no ability to sit down and produce a coherent paragraph or lay out an argument from start to end.

This is totally distinct from the fact I politically disagree with him! His brain is fricking mush. He can _mostly_ read a speech, but it's incredibly obvious when he leaves the text and start rambling.

This is the sort of person that, if you ran across him in at a party, you would immediately try to get away from because he's started rambling about how horrible windmills are or how batteries can electrocute you.

It is _absurd_ we elected someone this incoherent as president, and even more absurd we did it again.

I honestly think Canada should have justified their retaliatory tariffs not as retaliatory, but due to the fentanyl going the other way.

Which is higher. The US is a net exporter of fentanyl over the border.

Actually, the funniest possible thing would be for Canada to say 'Yes, there are things coming across the border illegally, this is a good thing Trump has set up, indeed, we demand a formal treaty that _automatically_ scales tariffs based on outlawed things smuggled over the border.'

Anything illegal. Not just drugs, but _guns_.

Which would not only put Canada far ahead, but Mexico also.

What does that have to do with the fact that the Telegraph (And thus Yahoo News) is repeating very obvious unsubstantiated propaganda about how some pro-Israel guy said he looked at some stuff and found some discrepancy that he's apparently not going to make public in any way, and then most of the article is about another pro-Israel guy talking about what those people probably found.

That cannot possible be 'news' in any sense. 'This guy said he discovered some stuff, although produced no evidence of that, and we have another guy here to guess at what he probably discovered!'

Well, we are now at the time of year where the Fed reports on how things look, and a lot of companies are required to make _legally accurate_ predictions about future revenue.

This is the things they're saying on anonymous surveys to the Fed:
https://www.dallasfed.org/research/surveys/tssos/2025/2503#tab-comments

Um...not looking so good.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps saying on Truth Social that people are fighting his tariffs on fentanyl. I would quote the entire thing, but it's an unreadable mess: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114266599439835683

But here's the first sentence: 'Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.'

I'm...pretty sure we haven't put tariffs on fentanyl to make it more costly to distribute and buy.

Yahoo News, wow, that sounds official. Except that's just Telegraph repost, but I guess they sound official, too. Except the story is based on reporting by this site: https://honestreporting.com/

Hmm. That...actually doesn't appear to be any sort of neutral researcher group.

You might notice the distinct lack of any, like, confirmed information in that story. It's just quoting these guys. Hell, half of them are not quotes of _them_, it's the quotes of Andrew Fox _talking about_ what those other people's research, which he has not seen at all, must have uncovered.

What the utter hell? How can anyone take this seriously?

I really like how the article talks about how hard it is to compare the lists cause they're in PDFs and they have to do it by hand. Wow, that sounds like something that _should be made available on the website_, doesn't it? They could easily reformat and show the last three lists as a table, show the changes, show the ages, show the supposedly corrected birthdates and ages, show any evidence that a person was in Hamas .

Except that's actually just Andrew Fox _guessing_ what this other group must have done, so we don't even know they did that.

Really feels like the Telegraph should have gotten that, as the story, instead of just quoting these guys about this, or quoting a guy talking about those guys talking about this.

It's worth reminding people how absurdly random the death penalty is when you actually look at the crimes committed, and that whether or not the government goes for it (When they can) is about 90% determined by the ratio of the societal power and position between the victim and the accused. The higher the ratio, the more likely it is to be demanded.

This usually is noticeable via racial disparity, but here we have an example of such a high class person that a well-educated upper-middle white person can be put to death for murdering him!

Seriously, someone should actually check if we've ever executed someone of his social status before. I'm not sure we have, and if we have, I'm sure it wasn't just for one murder. (Hell, the number of people executed for just one murder is pretty low to start with.)

That's a law enforcement agency arresting, for months or years, people who not only have not committed a crime, but no crime actually existed at all.

They just _mysteriously_ looked at the person and decided they were here illegally.

You don't think that's meaningful?

Oh, just be clear: This is indeed extradition in a legal sense.

When we talk about extradition in the country, we usually think of the _specific_ legal process that is commonly used.

But extradition, under international law, is any prisoner handoff between governments that is done via some sort of transfer agreement, whether or not that includes a court proceeding at either end.

Wait, they're arguing that the prisoners in El Salvador are no longer under US control? That they are not merely holding our prisoners, but we transfer authority to them ? I assumed their defense was the exact opposite, that El Salvador was basically operating as a private prison.

I feel that has very serious legal implications that they have not thought through at all. Specifically, the United Nations Convention Against Torture:

Article 3

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

*ahem*
https://www.state.gov/reports/2023-country-reports-on-human-rights-practices/el-salvador/

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and femicide; substantial barriers to sexual and reproductive health services access; trafficking in persons, including forced labor; and crimes involving violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.

You see that word torture right there? The 'competent authorities', aka, the US State Department, appear to have made a very clear statement in 2023 about whether people detained by the El Salvador government are in danger of being tortured. It is the Current Official US Foreign Policy Conclusion that there are credible reports that prisoners in El Salvador are tortured. On their own website. (Guys, you might want to take down the 'things that will be used as evidence of crimes against humanity' from your website before 'Black guy that got a medal'. Just saying.)

The US government, in court, just claimed they have violated Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture. As a _defense_.(1)

Oopsie-doodle. Bet that's going to play well.

The UN Convention Against Torture, incidentally, was signed by the president and ratified by Congress. It is US law.

Article 3 is a restriction on the government, like a lot of the constitution, and like the constitution, there's no actual stated penalty for the government breaking it, but the courts ABSOLUTELY can force the government to follow it.

1) This is, incidentally, why when the Bush administration ferried prisoners overseas to be tortured, it pretended either it still had authority over them and just allowed them to be 'interrogated' by others, or that it never had authority over them at all. Or, sometimes, that the place did not torture. But the Bush administration actually understood laws existed.

I think you give the game away when you ask if I know what ‘important rights’ are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits.

No, actually, I was just being sarcastic, about the incredibly limited imaginations of privileged people who cannot conceive of actual right violations, so instead they glom on to 'Someone said something and other people got angry'.

Being invited to speaking at a university is not a right at all. No one has a right to be platformed by the government. At all. Ever. It's a privilege.

Now, the government is indeed also forbidden from discriminating based on viewpoints in how it hands out privileges (Something to remember when we're talking about visa.), but if we are going to judge _this_ sort of viewpoint judgement on government platforms as a right violation, we need to understand that this happens near continuously, in literally every context that the government platforms a speaker.

In fact, 'guest speaker at a college' is one of the few circumstances where content of their speech is not the determining factor to their platform in the first place! Usually the government explicitly platforms someone because they knew exactly what that person would say.

There is something very suspicious this specific form of platforming is the violation of someone's right. Surely the fact that a person _invited to give the commencement speech_ is going to talk only on topics the school wants and is picked because of of holding that position is even more discriminatory based on viewpoint!

Surely we should be complaining about that! I'm not sure how to make it fair, there are practical time limitations, but perhaps everyone who wants could enter their name and we randomly select half a dozen speakers to do five minutes. (You may notice that something like this is how it works in the very few places that the government does, without restriction, platform people, like city council meetings.)

See how dumb this is? There is no free speech access to a government platform.

You can make coherent arguments that colleges should platform people with various political positions as part of academic freedom and exposing students to ideas. But you cannot make that argument they have a _right_ to be platformed on any coherent first amendment grounds.

China, Japan, and South Korea have teamed up to respond to US tariffs.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-03-31/china-japan-south-korea-will-jointly-respond-to-us-tariffs-chinese-state-media-says

I repeat. China, Japan, and South Korea.

In case people are not aware of the relationships between those three countries, none of those countries really like each other that much, mostly because of historic reasons and arguments over said history and how it is understood. All three relationships have slowly been strengthening recently, but this is, frankly, a huge and somewhat unprecedented step. Absolutely no one saw this coming.

It's entirely possible we're about to lose basically all of our East Asian influence to China.

It is not “illegal”. However as a condition to entering this country we make immigrants sign legal docs saying they don’t support terrorism.

We do not. We make them sign documents that say they do not provide material support to terrorists, and that they are not member of terrorist groups. Material support, in case it is unclear, is providing money or other resources.

There is absolutely no legal prohibition on expressing support for terrorists on people entering the United States.

As we can tell by the fact these people have not been detained and their visas and green cards were not revoked by claiming this.

We know what part of the law they were removed under, one of the questioned (I mean, literally, courts have questioned it, just never have grounds to remove it) clauses where the US government can remove people because they cause political complications for the US government.

Not because they support terrorism.

They are not being removed for supporting terrorism, and it is absurd we are talking as if that is the question. The US government is claiming that in _press conferences_, and then claiming other things in actual legal documents, and we really, really, REALLY need to start understanding that when Trump makes legal claims in press conferences and then doesn't make them in court, those legal claims were utterly baseless.

That should be the default behavior after over a decade of Trump: If he says something related to the law, but then goes to court and say something else, we need to stop pretending the legal thing he said before going to court has any meaning at all! That's not a real thing! He made it up!

A decade of this, people!

...did you just compare firing this guy to 9/11?

Like, that's the only logical way to read what you said, right?

American's actions in the middle east is to 9/11 as this guy writing an column is to this guy getting fired

This is astonishingly trite, but also, wow. That's really where you're going with that, huh?

Yes, Jaybird, actions that people do can cause other people to do things to them. Weirdly, that doesn't mean that all responses are justified by all actions, or that all actions are justified.

Why do you think supporting terrorism via _speech_ is illegal and the government can punish people for that _speech_? Also, would you like to explain exactly how that is defined in such a way that the government cannot simply declare anything it wants as terrorism?

There are people in this country running around with flags indicating support of an unlawful government that illegally seized control of part of America in furtherance of an ideology that enslaved and terrorized a population for centuries, and then, for the next century, proceeded to commit acts of terror against that same population, and anyone who supported them.

Do you think we should deport those people? I know I've joked about having the National Guard called out to carefully detain those people and explain the Civil War is over and they need to lay down their muskets, but that was a joke.

Also, and just to be clear: Chuchill did not support terrorism, in any manner, although it's unclear what you even would hypothetically think that means. He pointed out that 9/11 was basically a logical outcome of US foreign policy, have if we're going to keep bombing them, they're eventually going to start bombing us, a thing that quite a lot of people at the time pointed out.

He just did pointed that out without carefully rephrasing, in every sentence, how it was still some horrific tragedy that should not have happened and he is in no way saying it was justified. This was apparently the required standard at the time, and he didn't do it.

But he did not, at point, say 'You should give them money or material support or go join them' or anything like that.

It’s among the reasons that trying to treat everything from FedSoc judges or jurists to conservative provacateurs to just normal liberals who don’t toe the line on some issue or another as safety threats was so self evidently a mistake from the outset. Anyone with a memory longer than a nat could see where this was going. People at these places are reaping what they spent 15 or so years sowing.

People at college protesting speakers for the content of their speech is not, and never will be, even vaguely in the category of the US government revoking visas and detaining people for the content of their speech.

The fact 'for the content of their speech' is in both those doesn't make them the same thing. Protesters at a university are the sort of the entities that have speech rights, like the right to protest others, under the constitution, whereas the US government is the entity that is restricted under the constitution.

People like him and numerous pro-Palestinian/Israel skeptical types were in many ways the OG victims of 21st century cancelation campaigns.

So, to be clear: The thing that happened for the past 20 years is that people that the left disagreed with were 'canceled', in the sense that sometimes they were not given a specific large platform, or a platform at a college. This rarely actually happened, and generally what happened is protestors tried to stop it but failed. But some of them did, manage to heckler veto things, at which point those people were generally given much larger platforms talking about how they were canceled.

Meanwhile, we have Ward Churchhill, someone who did lose his job, because, fun fact, when the right attacks you, you do actually lose your job. We also have Canary Mission running around making sure that anyone with pro-Palestine positions, or that merely criticism the behavior of Israel, do not get jobs.

Somehow you've even managed to mention FedSoc judges in there. I feel this is extremely obvious, but judges are not canceled. They are, indeed, in position of authority in society. It's the opposite of being canceled. The fact people are complaining about them is not harm.

This entire discussion is just willful inability to look the _actual results_ of the behavior of the sides, and notice that one side actually is able to get people 'canceled' in a meaningful sense, as in ruin their life, and the other is mostly able to get universities to hire slightly more security people and very rarely force people to change venues for their massive speaking engagements.

The irony about the Niemoller quote that’s the subject of this piece is itself head spinning. When was the last time someone worked up about the current environment prominently stood up for the rights of someone they disagreed with, just on the principle of the thing?

...There is an idea, among conservatives and a bunch of liberals too, that the only rights of people are being able to spew their ideas in whatever location they want, into the faces of people who are already there. Maybe that is a right, I don't know, and I don't particularly care.

But if it is a right, it's a pretty unimportant one, as opposed to the all the people who think it is The Most Important one. Because conservatives seem to think that is where rights start and end. Mostly because literally no other rights of theirs have ever been threatened. The worst thing that ever happens to them is people get mad when they say things. And sometimes get mad enough that those people try to stop them! Oh noes!

Do you know what actual important rights are? Things like not having your healthcare forbidden by law, and the ability to get housing and jobs despite who you are, and not being shot by the police. Oh, and ability to vote, that's also important. Those are all more much important than having the ability to make a speech in one specific place and not having people yelling over them, especially when they can literally just go somewhere else and give that speech. (Unlike the other side, which gets detained and eventually deported for op-eds.)

You may notice there's no consideration of whether or not those people agree or disagree with me politically in there, because the thing under discussion is nothing to do with political beliefs. I don't know their political beliefs!

In fact, in any sort of rational politics, what people want from the government is what we talk about, not the political beliefs of the people who want those things.

You think being undone by the courts means the Trump Administration isn't fascism?

Fascism currently slightly constrained by other parts of the government from doing individual actions is still a fascist administration.

I have little respect for “process” arguments because we wouldn’t apply them in other situations.

It really boggles the mind how we are in a world where Canary Mission is getting students kicked out of school and deported for writing this op-ed:

https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj

and you are standing there pretending this is something that would normally get students kicked out of school if it was about anyone but Jews. At least, that is what I understand you are saying.

When in reality, it wouldn't get anyone kicked out of school _except_ pro-Palestinian people. Who _are_, in the actual world, getting deported.

Is Columbia and Trump’s crackdown of the pro-Palestinians the ‘Canary in the coalmine’ (link at bottom, their answer is “yes”) or is it a lot more reasonable?

Why are we asking about canaries when the Trump administration has asserted the right to detain people and ship them to foreign gulags without a trial of any sort?

If they can assert that someone, with no evidence or court proceeding, is not an American citizen and is a gang member, and ship them to an El Salvadorian gulag, then we are actually at fascism, we do not need to argue it is coming. In fact, even if they _aren't_ allowed to do that, even if the court stops them, it is still fascism. It is just a fascist executive that is very slightly constrained by courts.

And I frankly could care less watching Columbia actively destroy itself and every single ounce of respect anyone ever held for it. Because, frankly, it never deserved any of that to start with.

You want to talk about academic freedom, let's talk about it for the colleges that _don't_ instantly and cowardly cave.

The thing is, there was not one German far-right movements. There were multiple ones. Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Revolution#Currents

I will try to summarized a very complicated thing I barely understand.

There were the Young Conservatives, which seemed to just be...anti-modernism in the sense they were anti-democratic and pro-authoritarianism. Often very corporatism, often harken back to Divine Right. Think Peter Thiel and all the other techbros that seem very sure the best system of government is one where someone Really Smart is eternally in charge.

There were National Revolutionaries, who embraced modernity and just wanted a revolution for some reason, after which they were sure we'd be happy people with modern technology but simple lives. These guys eventually argued _against_ the Na.zis. There's not really an analog here. Honestly, these guys do not sound too far from modern 'normal' conservatives except they were slightly anti-capitalist.

And there was the group I focused on, the Völkisch, who came up with the base-level horrific part of Na.zi ideology, the idea that German blood belonged to German land, and vis versa, and everyone was not 'volk' was the problem. And part of volk was an understanding of gender roles.

But, anyway, to the question: The far-right didn't really care about queer people in the 1920s. They were much more into ultra-nationalism and nativism.

No one actually cared about them. Yes, there were laws against them, laws that at various times and places were implemented or ignored, but no one actually _cared_. Berlin was incredibly gay. You want to be gay in some small German town...well, people would probably pretty strongly suggest you move to Berlin.

I can't find any real information about how the rest of the German right felt about this, I suspect logically the Young Conservatives saw that as part of the modernity they despised, but I don't think they really did anything.

And same with the rest of the world, who were increasingly seeing queer people as an oddity, not a threat. The acceptance of gay people isn't a slope, it's a cycle. Indeed, the entire cycle would cycle, during the Great Depression, going back to presenting queer people as dangerous.

The Völkisch were _out of cycle_. Like I said, they were a reactionary movement, at least partially in reaction to social rules about gender loosening, which had just sorta hit Germany at the end of WWI.

The exact same reactionary movement that, once integrated into Na.zism, resulted death camps.

Like, there's a hypothetical Germany without the Völkisch, where the left falls to infighting and ultranationalism still takes over and they go to war again because of their war debts, but they _aren't_ genocidal lunatics. The Völkisch are the thing that makes fascism _fascism_, and not just general totalitarianism.

And incredible hypocrites considering that they, to an individual, all screamed holy heck about “teh emailz” a decade ago.

I also feel the fact that Hegseth fired a bunch of military leaders because they might _hypothetically_ be incompetent because they were women and minorities and might possibly have gotten the job that way is relevant. And how he repeatedly emphasized that, from now, it was all about competence, pure competence, not any sort of affirmative action.

You know what Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr. did not do? Discuss upcoming military operations on unsecured channel.

If we're talking about _competence_.