mozz

Do you intentionally try to start arguments with your comments?

Yeah, that’s fair. This issue is somewhat personal for me and so I get more short tempered or rude about it than I really should. I apologize about being inflammatory about it.

That said, let me try again more polite: I think I was pretty explicit that the issue isn’t that I know the article is lying; it is that it’s presenting true facts in an engineered and wildly misleading fashion.

They intentionally baited the spouse of a US citizen to leave the country to strip the person of due process

This is another very misleading construction (and one that echoes another one in the article that I didn’t bother touching on.) Since you have been deeply involved in immigration activism, you are surely aware that this isn’t anything specific to this case or even a new Biden thing - it’s just always how it works; to renew your visa you have to leave the US, apply for renewal at the embassy, and then if they approve it you can come back in. It’s a heart-stopping and somewhat punitive process but pretending that the State Department somehow decided to apply it in only this case is flat out wrong. That’s how it works for everyone. The fact that the article pretends that they somehow singled out this guy and tricked him into going through that same process is another example of its open dishonesty.

When the appellate court reversed the trial decision, the Biden administration could have let the issue rest, gave an apology, and issued the visa.

Again, if you want to tell me that US immigration is vindictive and racist, I definitely won’t disagree. Going from there to implying they asked Biden what to do about this specific immigration case and had him decide, seems unlikely to me. Choosing to ignore things that we do know that he definitely did do to change policy seems partisan. Choosing to pick out ways in which he’s now trying to change policy to undo some of the maybe unjust things that happened in this case starting back a few years ago, at a systemic level, and trying to pretend that means he’s lying and wants to hurt people (instead of trying to now change the policies to help people), seems dishonest (and again in a way that’s specifically likely to help some people who really do want to hurt migrants, very very badly). To me.

I have begun to identify arguing against something that isn’t quite what your opponent is saying, as a way of disagreeing with something that it’s hard to muster up any good faith arguments against, as one of the key hallmarks of bad faith debating on Lemmy.

1. Obviously I am not saying that any part of the article is purely made up; I am saying this is a specific technique of highlighting individual data points to paint a misleading picture, and then giving what I feel is additional context which gives the lie to the picture that they’re trying to paint. And, I would add that it’s also using wildly inaccurate phrasing to communicate technically-not-lies to dial even further up the level of dishonesty that can be achieved. But no, I’m not aware of any of the data points actually being lies or made up.
2. I think I made my explanation pretty clear already
3. Because the State Dept actually does work for Biden, whereas the DOJ is very specifically separated from direct control by the executive weighing in on individual cases even though it’s part of the executive branch
4. If you have actual gang tattoos that’s an indication of criminality. Again, for all I know, that part is crap and US immigration is just being racist against innocent tattoos; I’m just pointing out that there is such a thing as gang tattoos and I would support using them as a reason to make a bad inference about the person.
5. “Unrestricted power” is patently false; no less than 3 different courts spent quite a while evaluating whether to restrict the State Dept’s power in this case, and presumably they’ll still be able to do that and US immigration will still have to show a judge good reasons if they want to remove someone from the country in the future. The issue is just where are the boundaries and restrictions on the power. Also, “separate families” is grossly misleading, since it could lead a reasonable reader who wasn’t up to speed on the minutiae of immigration policy to claim (as multiple Lemmy users have done to me in the past) that Biden is continuing and even expanding the policies of removing children from parents that were so infamous in the Trump administration.

Heyo, let's go

announced a "keep families together" campaign

I don't even know what you're talking about here. "Announced a keep families together campaign" is horseshit. (Edit: see below) He started a specific task force to go through all the kids still in custody, try to find their families (which given the general chaos and sloppiness level of the bureaucracies involved on both sides of the border was pretty fucking difficult) and give them back. Before that they were just in custody, basically just waiting to grow up in a lifetime of orphaned misery. Now they're home, when they could even find the families.

(Edit: I see it; I read more of the article. (a) What I was talking about was reuniting the confiscated kids with their families, not the more recent campaign (b) is it possible perhaps that this specific campaign a few days ago was specifically a reaction by Biden to change policies in a way so that spouses in the US would be a bigger factor in visa decisions, specifically because of actions like this example over the course of the last few years that Biden wanted to make a change to?)

his administration pushed the issue

Want to explain a little more what you mean by this?

granted the state department the ability to deny visas to people legally married to US citizens.

The State Department can do whatever it wants with renewing or denying visas. Then, if something wrong happens, someone can challenge it in court, which is exactly what happened here -- and lawyers from both sides get to present a vigorous case; in this case the lawyers for the government side (part and parcel of a pretty racist and careless system which Biden didn't create, the reform of which I would be 1,000% behind the idea of but which getting rid of Biden will make 10 times worse) made their argument for his MS-13 membership.

Painting this whole thing that "forget Biden's policies, let's find something that a government lawyer argued in one particular case that many judges agreed with once they saw the details and pretend that Biden told those particular lawyers to do exactly that and that that one event represents a good representation of his whole policy, and that the outcome was definitely wrong (which -- again -- it might have been), and a huge new thing he enacted personally and not a continuation of longstanding US immigration policy of fucking up people's lives sometimes, and that something he actually did specifically order which I talked about up at the beginning which affected many many people in an unequivocally good way just kind of didn't happen"... and then summarize it with specific misleading words to make it sound even worse than that whole weirdly slant-on-top-of-slant construction... it doesn't sit well with me, sir. No sir I do not like it.

Yeah, but a big part of the Goebbels game is to create an overall picture of separate events that paint the larger falsehood you want to create. For anyone other than the single-digit percent of people who decide to click on the article, the headline forms one more little thing they're scrolling past that paints an overall picture of "Biden is malicious on immigration and trying to hurt people," which I think is actually one of the most successful totally-made-up realities they've managed to get into the public consciousness to try to depress support for him among people that would otherwise be inclined to.

I'm a little suspicious of the meat of the article, too -- like how much connection is there between these particular lawyers who made this filing, and Biden (presumably he didn't weigh in on this particular case, but are they even State Dept lawyers? The article says so, but I thought usually the lawyers for this kind of thing would be rank and file DOJ immigration lawyers, maybe I am mistaken)

Are the tattoos that they said justified non renewal really totally innocent non MS13 tattoos that the racist immigration apparatus freaked out about, as his lawyers are claiming? (easily possible but also not guaranteed to me simply because his lawyers are claiming it)

But the meat of the article is maybe at the "IDK I have some questions" level, whereas the headline is what'll have honestly most of the impact on the public consciousness, and it's well up into "get the fuck out of here with that explicit propaganda" level.

Well, that's an impressively misleading headline.

If you mean denying a visa to the spouse of someone who's in the United States, say so. "Separate families" in this context is very obviously an attempt to imply he's doing something much darker which he isn't doing. Biden actually started the task force to find and reunite those separated families, although the policy itself had already been abandoned, being too evil to continue for all that long under even the Trump administration.

As with a lot of these stories, I am interested to know why someone who is supposedly deeply concerned with the plight of migrant families is specifically attacking one of the parts of the US government equation that is trying to do something good for them, and instead creating (with quite a bit of success) a whole Goebbels-style reality where he's doing the exact opposite, partly by blaming him and specifically him for anything any part of the fairly racist and unreasonable US immigration apparatus ever does even down to the individual level, and ignoring the question of what the Biden administration itself is doing to shape policy, to the benefit of the team that actually is thirsting and sharpening their knives for what terribly overly malicious things they might get to do to migrants as an affirmative goal of theirs (and not a minor one) under a second Trump administration.

I can’t help but think that this whole framing and construction is slanted as hard as it can possibly be to make this sound like a bad thing

The combination of “time for many of us to stand up for the majority in the middle” to make people on the left suspicious, along with framing in terms of a wealthy donor “dropping” an honestly not all that large amount of money into “an election already awash” with dark money and “outside spending” to make people on the right suspicious, is honestly very well done.

I highly doubt they are putting LLMs on their little throwaway drones. The US military has actually been working on “let’s figure out what that thing is and blow it up automatically” technology since at least as far back as the 90s; e.g. modern warship defense systems use it to be able to react faster than a human can to blow up an incoming missile.

Personally I am much more worried about it working exactly as intended.

Bro I’m telling you, you gotta set up your lemmas a little bit and get everything in order before you get to the QED

And anyway Stanislaw Lem did it better

Perfectly right, and the only thing I would add is take the battery to your city’s hazardous waste recycling thing, don’t just throw it in the trash can

Sir we’ve had some complaints, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave

Yeah but not like millions or more, is my point

When the food stops being is when it gets real for real