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Comment by luxuryballs

9 days ago

the government uses force for everything it does, it doesn’t need to resort to violence if you comply, (and yes it feels gross to type that) I hate to appear to defend something I hate but it’s because I understand the nature of it not because I approve of it: the point still remains that the people who facilitated the illegal entry knew without a doubt that this was going to happen afterwards, however far you want to extrapolate that onto their motives I don’t intend to speculate on here

Everything you write here assumes that the world is far more rigid and full of inevitability than can be justified.

  • it only assumes that the government is aware of their own laws and has half a brain to realize what that means, what I wrote is being proved true right now

    • * It assumes that the government's priorities are malleable enough that it will eventually decide to prioritize these laws, but not malleable enough that they could change them. This is self-contradictory.

      * It assumes that a person's immigration status is not malleable and cannot be normalized. This is strictly false.

      * It assumes that immigration laws are static. Again, strictly false.

      * It implies that all force is equal in violence, which is something I usually only hear from high schoolers who have just encountered libertarianism and love it

      * It suggests that there is no moral agency in acting on behalf of the government, only in acting against the backdrop reality of this monolithic slab of granite.

      * It suggests even that the violence currently taking place is for the purpose of enforcing laws. This isn't true for the U.S. citizens by birth or naturalization who are being unlawfully detained, it isn't true for the thousands of non-citizens with legal status who are being detained and moved across state lines. It isn't true for the non-citizens who are being arrested literally while attending the process of maintaining their legal status. It isn't even true for those without legal status who are having their doors kicked in without warrants, and it isn't true for those without legal status who are being detained and tortured. None of this is actually according to the law, it's just what they can get away with and make a spectacle of violence.

      I'm not even exactly clear who the nebulous group of people is that you want to blame for getting people caught up in the government's violence. I guess if you're mad at coyotes, sure, be my guest? If you're mad at anyone involved in the process of asylum you're mad at people following the law. If you're mad at people helping their neighbors you've lost the plot. If you're mad at state or city governments not enforcing federal laws for then either you don't like federalism or you don't understand it, but at best your assumption is historically contentious.