Same.

The problem with taking him "seriously and literally" is he says everything on every issue, sometime even in the same speech.

Thank you. That's a wonderful summation.

It's also right after we were breathlessly and repeatedly told Biden was showing no signs of age.

The other massive issue is: How big a problem is this? It could be first-sign-of-fascism-torture... or it could be extreme outliers selected for being extreme outliers.

Trump's people could illegally arrest/imprison/deport 100 US citizens this year and it would be a serious improvement because the system averages 200.

We have about 11 million illegal immigrants living in the USA at the moment. In a normal year ICE will deport about a quarter of a million. If Trump tries to deport our way out of this mess then we will see a massive uptick in deportations that will be easily noticeable, negatively affect the economy, and won't be hidable.

If you want to worry about illegal immigrants then worry about hundreds of thousands, not dozens.

It's more vague that just "8".

"...if a person scores 8 points or higher based on symbolism but has no points from other categories like criminal behavior, authorities must consult a supervisor and the Office of Principal Legal Advisor before proceeding..."

All of the "auto convict" boxes are "10" and Leavitt says in that interview that they're not used this way.

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

We have a lot of chaos in the system and people who don't know what they're doing. I am reluctant to take a case or three selected for being extreme outliers and say they're the norm.

How many points are needed for deportation? For "knowing" that someone is in a gang?

They don't have a coherent plan. Full Stop.

There are people focused on the tax cut. There are people focused on "reforming" gov. There are people focused on Israel. There are people focused on Ukraine/Russia. There are people focused on "making vaccines safe".

There are no doubt several also focused on enriching themselves.

The people focused on vaccines don't understand vaccines. The people focused on Ukraine/Russia apparently get a lot of their info from Russian "news" feeds. The people focused on the tax cuts either don't know or don't care about the economic side effects. Ditto whoever is feeding Trump ideas on tariffs.

This is a clown show, there are no realistic "long term plans".

The interesting part will be what happens when they run into facts. What happens when Putin refuses to make peace. What happens when they try to dismantle vaccines. What happens when the various department heads discover they need the next two layers of management back because they were doing useful things.
What happens when Trump running wild with tariffs crashes the economy.

Trump isn't going to accept responsibility for anything bad, but hopefully the voters will.

These stats are why I claim that Israel deliberately attacking civilians isn't supported by the numbers. I get that this is really grim and really brutal, but it's also expected with Hamas' style of fighting.

So if 15 ambulance/medical personal die, Israel is doing a good job if 3 of them were Hamas and a great job if 5 of them were.

It's in NY. State will be fortunate to get life.

I'd call it more a political assassination than a class thing.

The most important stat is civilian:military ratios.

My link is to a listing of estimates. The various ratios bounce around over time but between 80% and 66% civilian seem a good median. So between 4:1 and 2:1 civilian:military. At the moment the list leans towards the former but I suspect an edit war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war#Civilian_to_combatant_ratio

IMHO the stat "women and children" is so vague to be worthless. We need to know how many of those "children" are male and how many are female.

The unfortunate reality is a 4:1 ratio is doing better than expected in this kind of war even before factoring in Hamas deliberately putting it's own civilians in danger.

Israel seems to be doing a good but not great job by the standards of urban war.

I put down only facts. I gave no personal evaluation at all.

However since you asked:

I am strongly in favor of serious immigration reform. I view our policies as self conflicting, self destructive, and unrealistic.

In that context imho it's unclear whether ICE is doing a good job or bad job because their job is basically impossible. They're dealing with really bad records because they're dealing with people who are forced to hide from the system. By definition that means they're "marginalized".

We're in prohibition territory. I have no clue whether a "better run and better resourced" (whatever that means) ICE would be better or even worse because we have too many people who are unwilling to follow the law.

I'm not sure whether a "reformed" ICE would be a good thing or a bad thing even in view of that record I just posted.

The Good:
1) Tariffs on China.
2) What he's done with Israel.
3) Dismantling DEI and understanding it's like opposing someone's religion.

The Neutral (or with holding judgement):
1) I'm not going to put paper straw in there because it's a nothing burger.
2) I'm also not going to include cozying up to Russia as a bad thing because it looks like that's going to blow up.
3) I'm also going to withhold judgement on damage to rule of law because that's yet to come to a head... but lots of potential on this one.

The Bad:
1) Various tariffs for the sake of tariffs.
2) Mistreating our various allies (this would be a long list btw)
3) Hiring anti-vac people to head up Health.
4) General lawlessness and basically being at war with the judicial system.
5) Hiring people who are incompetent and firing the competent people below them who are needed to carry out policy.
6) General chaos and unwillingness to use governmental tools in appropriate ways. Rather than Musk's group we should have a copy of what Gore did as VP.
7) Getting rid of large amounts of gov competency without any effort to do a cost/value eval on it first (note I would have included bureaucracy reform as a good thing last time)
8) Apparently taking Russian info war stuff as legit information.
9) Going serious Tax-Cut and Spend.
10) General lack of stability. I think he's suffering from some age related dementia.

Some of this is chaos of administration transfer, having very new people in their jobs, and a negative relationship with the press.

However the overall summation is really bad. He's ripping up decades of international good will, and doing a lot of damage to the gov, and the economy. Whether that also includes rule of law is a work in progress.

At the moment I'd say he's probably going to end up the 2nd worst President we've ever seen and he's got an outside shot at #1.

From 2012 to early 2018, ICE wrongfully arrested and detained 1,480 U.S. citizens, including many who spent months or years in immigration detention.[86] A 2018 Los Angeles Times investigation found that ICE's reliance on incomplete and error-prone databases and lax investigations led to the erroneous detentions.[86] From 2008 to 2018, ICE was sued for wrongful arrest by more than two dozen U.S. citizens, who had been detained for periods ranging from one day to over three years. Some of the wrongfully detained U.S. citizens had been arrested by ICE more than once.[86] The inaccurate government data that ICE used had shown that both immigrants and U.S. citizens were both targets of being detained.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement#Wrongful_detention_allegations

So they screw up about 200 times a year.

They deport about 750 people a day. Last year 271,484

So they mess up less than one time out of a thousand.

You can if you want... although this kind of stuff is the big reason I didn't vote for him.

At some point this will come to a head, but I expect he'll have to lose some popularity before that. Probably also need to lose Congress.

What the next administration will also be very interesting. A lot of lines are going to be crossed, we're going to have a lot of criminal activity done during this administration.

InMD: We either live in a world where people can deal with these kinds of questions, including when they’re asked in ways many may deem offensive, or we can’t.

The human brain is a patter matching device. There is a temptation to draw a line between something we don't like and something else we don't like and claim they're connected.

That kind of reasoning often says more about the person talking than the event. So when Jerry Falwell claimed 911 was the fault of the US because we tolerate gay rights, I don't feel the need to respond in a logical way.

If we're trying to draw a line between 911 and US foreign policy, then let's link to what OBL claimed the motives were.

In no specific order, we have...
1) US support for Israel
2) OBL's strategy to expand his group.
3) Sanctions against Iraq
4) US troops in Saudi Arabia
5) Global warming.
6) Tolerance for Homosexuality.
7) Tolerance of Alcohol
8) Charging Interest rates.
9) Tolerance of Gambling
10) Tolerance of Drugs
11) Tolerance of Sex
12) Conflict in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Lebanon and the Philippines
13-16) American cultural imperialism (Hollywood, Women's rights, Media Companies, and having a larger GDP than Muslim nations).

His culture and worldview were very different. He didn't have a rational outlook from our point of view. He was a Jihadist and wanted to make more Jihadists and was deeply offended by people who weren't.

Should we be offended by a question that says we're to blame for us being terrorized? Yes we should. It's not like we will give up everything on that list to make OBL happy.

We're not going to remake our culture so it's not offensive to him. That's not an excuse for him to murder thousands of civilians. Nor is it an excuse for some asshat to claim the dead weren't civilians because he personally doesn't like our foreign policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks

The key thing in that post is how they handled the 17 protesters.
https://statements.cornell.edu/2025/20250311-pathways-to-peace-disturbance.cfm

We've gone from "student speech codes can prevent the n-word because we don't tolerate racism" to "protesters can call for Jews' extermination because free speech".

If University Presidents had longer terms then we might be able have the same person say both of those things.

The problem is racism is supposed to be a political club only used against the Right. It's not supposed to be a Left v Left issue.

Interesting.

"Targeting Civilians" would be "shooting Civilians because you know they're civilians".

Hamas routinely uses ambulances as troop carriers (see link). If you light one up because it's getting close to you and might have solders, then that's a different issue.

It might still be a war crime (Ianal) but it also showcases why urban warfare is so nasty and why it's expected to have a lot more civilians than soldiers get killed.

https://nbcmontana.com/news/nation-world/hamas-admits-using-ambulances-to-transport-weapons-terrorist-in-leaked-phone-call-palestine-israel-war-strike-fighting-gaza-strip-middle-east-humanitarian-crisis-israel-defense-forces

Chris: We know civilians are being targeted...

We don't even know how many civilians are dead. If Israel is targeting civilians then it's weird that the death rate is lower than the birth rate.

Israel kills it's own soldiers, that is not proof that it's targeting it's own soldiers.

Chris: ...as an occupied and/or besieged populace, it is legal for them to strike out at the people occupying besieging them.

The purpose of 10-7 was to attack civilians. So no, it was not "legal". Hamas killed every Jew they could get their hands on, so the word we should be using is "genocide".

Trying to argue that the Jews are responsible for their own genocide is antisemitic.

Chris: Many throughout the world see their actions as part of the resistance movement...

And what are they resisting? Hamas' charter explains that they're resisting the idea of Jews in the Middle East. That this is popular doesn't change that it's antisemitic on the face of it.

Chris: Who, then, gets to decide which attacks on civilians are terrorism, and which aren’t?

This is an effort to claim everyone is morally equal.

If Hamas had Israel's ethics, Hamas would have broken out of Gaza and only killed the Israel soldiers guarding the place. If Israel had Hamas' ethics, then all of Gaza would be lifeless.

Hamas is an openly genocidal organization and they live up to their charter attacking all Jews they can.

Israel either doesn't attack civilians at all (their claim) or it does so rarely it doesn't show up in the numbers.

Big picture the Palestinians are dialed up to eleven by the existence of Jews and a Jewish state. They "resist" through terrorism. The conflict comes down to antisemitism.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that it's challenging to avoid antisemitism and/or supporting terrorism when supporting the Palestinian cause. The big way to do that is to claim that everyone is a terrorist and everyone is genocidal, but this is an abuse of language.

Given that we deport immigrants for supporting terrorism, we should expect that people supporting Hamas are F-ing around with their immigration status.

The Jewish equivalent of Hamas would be plans to kill everyone in Gaza. If we had faculty arguing for this I'd expect the administration would treat them like they'd treat someone arguing for a return of slavery, i.e. they'd find a way to fire them.

Where the challenge comes for College administrators is whether or not they're going to put up with antisemitism.

One way for College administrators to deal with all this is to bite the bullet and admit their college isn't going to be welcoming to Jews, that they do support anti-Jewish terrorism, and then deal with the consequences.

If that's not what they're going to do, then they should confront the problem that Hamas is both popular in certain groups but supporting it is massively antisemitic on the face of it.

Chris: How would we classify Israel’s killing of citizens in Gaza?

I would call it a war. It's expected that civilians are going to die in an urban war.

Do you think civilians are being targeted by Israel? If so, then why?

DavidTC: You think being undone by the courts means the Trump Administration isn’t fascism?

We're a few steps short. I think we have a lot of chaos, incompetence, & fringe people. I also think there is a general lack of respect for the law and/or ignorance of the law.

I doubt this will end well, but I also doubt it will end with the US giving up elections.

DavidTC: Why do you think supporting terrorism via _speech_ is illegal...

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

DavidTC: 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?

This is also arguing for "there are grey lines" while ignoring that killing hundreds of civilians because they're Jews isn't even close.

DavidTC: He pointed out that 9/11 was basically a logical outcome of US foreign policy,

What he argued was the people who died in 9/11 shouldn't be considered innocent civilians, so killing them is fair game. Arguing that the terrorists are correct for killing civilians is crossing lines.

If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.[5]

Chris: Should the university allow debate about who is a terrorist...

You are pointing out that there are grey lines. You are correct, so the technical answer to your question is "yes".

However killing hundreds of Jewish civilians because they're Jews isn't even slightly close to a grey line, nor is that disputed.

Churchill was fired because of his academic work.

True. And if he hadn't been an American citizen, he would have been deported for supporting terrorism.

The university realized they had a terror supporting lunatic in their staff and they did a deep dive (well, just looked at) his work and bounced him. That they didn't technically bounce him for his views is besides the point.

When you select for those views you're also selecting for substandard work in fields affected by those views. Further the U was looking for a reason to fire him because of his views.

The current situation has had the University tolerate this set of terrorism supporters for years. Because Jews. Trump shouldn't need to get involved because the University has had more than enough time to clean house themselves.

Instead we've had their administration testify to Congress that they don't need to clean house and advocating genocide/terrorism is protected speech. So apparently supporting Hamas and arguing that Jews need to put up with terrorism doesn't break any codes of conduct and behavior that would in other situations be illegal should be shielded from the authorities by the administration. Because the First Amendment, and Jews.