Trump pardons Joe Arpaio

Yet again, Reason proves antithetical to actual reason.

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America’s first Uncle Joe sure kept a lot less people up at night.

Image result for petticoat junction uncle joe

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Detaining people with out due process and solely on SUSPICION (usually based on race), including actual American citizens, is deplorable It’s a gross abuse of civil liberties. He was told to stop it and continued. Even if one wants the laws regarding immigration enforced, these methods were found to be unconstitutional. I can’t even begin to imagine the mental gymnastics one would take to be OK with this, other than already being convinced illegal Hispanics are “bad”.

I wonder what percentage of Trump hotel workers are of Hispanic heritage and what would happen if they walked off the job one weekend. Of course, that is a hard ask, as people need their jobs, even if working for a piece of shit. Still, the point is he is profiting from the same people Arpaio is demonizing and subjecting to unlawful enforcement. Two sides of one mouth.

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What trump does as president does not matter one bit to the blind haters who voted for him. trump represents an idea, a slap in the face of doing things in the slow but steady process of American democracy. That process maybe gone forever now that this unhinged idea that trump actually represents some new direction or way to govern is afoot. Chaos and anarchy has been given a blessing to reign. This permission to hate is lodged in the mean small minds of people so otherwise weak they were powerless. Now destruction and vicious behavior has been turned loose, out of it’s cage and free to wander about destroying anything they don’t understand we are beginning to be as pointlessly cruel and uncaring as ISIS.
Roger Stone has issued the warning, don’t mess with trumpism or blood Will be spilled. We haven’t gotten to wearing the patch of the Star of David or Lavender Triangles Yet because he has started by targeting people whose very skin is the target. It’s early days in the trump Reich but it’s started to move and it’s going to be hell to stop.

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Ideal Libertarianism relies on the theory of every person being a perfectly rational actor which puts its philosophical value and probability for existence somewhere between flat earth theology and the temperance movement.

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You got it in 1.

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I think it’s even simpler than that. They are convinced all Hispanics are bad, and see no reason to differentiate their treatment of “illegal” vs. “legal” ones.

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Well, the anarchist ones have. But there are non-anarchistic movements among the libertarian left, such as Council Communism and Left Communism.

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Yup.

A few of the better ones are joining the ACLU Liberals in paralysed handwringing, but most of the “libertarians” are joining team fash, unsurprisingly.

Ken “Popehat” White’s twitter feed is as you’d expect: he’s occasionally retweeting mockery of far-right idiocy to maintain “neutral” status, while his own tweets focus on highlighting any bit of leftist misbehaviour he can find. And, of course, lots of hair-splitting nazi-normalising freeze peach arguments.

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White America largely ignored or condemned it, and people were sacked.

Because you don’t have a real union movement.

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He’s been tweeting a bit on the Arpaio pardon:

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/901236259988819968

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/901238023467282433

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/901244980404011008

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/901255294952497153

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/901256194479628288

https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/901271317126696961

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Yeah; he’s willing to criticise the Trumpists, and is slowly drifting leftwards a little bit. Not enough for him to meaningfully oppose nazis, but at least he isn’t overtly on their side.

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Yup.

Claims to oppose nazis, then devotes a few thousand words to why those who actually oppose nazis are Doing It Wrong.

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Does this surprise anyone? Is it shocking in anyway?

I had a conversation with a boss once:
Me: people don’t change.
Her: yes they do. People change all the time.
Me: no. People do not change. The adjust. They grow. They evolve perhaps. But they don’t change.
Her: no you are wrong. People change every day.
Me: ok. Tell you what. Let’s hit pause and get back together in oh. Let’s say 20 years and pick this back up.
Her: why?
Me: because you will say people change. I will remind you that people don’t change. Get it?

45 showed us who he is a long time ago. As maya angelou would say “believe him”. He is not going to change. He is a bigot, a narcissist, a chauvinist, and a elitist. He isn’t going to change.

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“Anarcho-capitalism” has got to be the biggest misappropriation of a political term since the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei* came up with “National Socialism”. As an political phenomenon, it’s actually existed in various places for a significant part of human history, except it generally gets called “warlordism”, which is a much more accurate description.

* The Austrian one, apparently, not the Weimar one. Hitler’s mob copied them. Never knew that until I looked up the spelling and got sucked down the wikihole.

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that’s a key part of this whole “papers please” ice crackdown ( which arpaio and many other have fallen in line with. )

if you can make some set of people scared to ask for any rights, you’ll have yourself the cheapest workforce you can get. bonus points if you can define a group that’s easily identifiable based on immutable physical attributes.

it’s part of why capitalism and white supremacy, etc. so often go hand-in-hand.

and its also wonderfully self-serving: you don’t pay that group anything because they don’t deserve it, and you make a lot of money because you so obviously do.

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The above comments have taught me that Trump’s power to pardon applies only to federal crimes. That’s useful knowledge.

So: the millisecond Arpaio wanders into California, or another friendly state – and you know he will, at some point – we get him for something minor (malfunctioning taillight?), escalate that with some kind of misdemeanor (resisting arrest?), then “find” he’s carrying something illegal (Trump-shaped ecstasy pills?). Oh, and the body cams will malfunction, 'cause we’re California and we’ve got the brains and the cojones to screw with any cloud-connected device, anywhere, when we want to.

Sigh. So that’s what things would be like if Professor Farnsworth had invented the fing-longer. A man can dream, though. A man can dream.

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Its like a pure anarchist environment which doesn’t work in reality. In practice institutions emerge to fill the gap, like the HKL bank in The moon is a harsh mistress or the Mafia in Snow Crash. Both are likely to be bad for the populace because institutions want to look after their own interests.

But you can still push for libertarian principles. The current vote on marriage equality in Australia is (IMHO) a libertarian issue and well supported by the populace.

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