Still not playing my position. But things like this are very important: Dan Nexon: How Many Hidden Thresholds of Soft Authoritarianism have we Already Crossed? http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/02/how-many-hidden-thresholds-of-soft-authoritarianism-have-we-already-crossed: 'For example, aspects of liberal international ordering have already substantially unravelled—but it seems like many international-affairs experts either don’t realize it or, at the other extreme, think that ongoing mutations in international order presage some kind of collapse into multipolar chaos.... Our tendency to think in “all or nothing” terms... obscures a great deal of alteration in political orders. Even the kinds of events—such as impeachment—that I once thought would change this dynamic seem to be resolving into collective anticlimax. Meanwhile, Trump has transformed, in a way unlike any other modern president, the Republican party into his own personal patrimony. And the self-abasement of Senators before the Mad Emperor now just seems like par for the course.... But it’s worth noting that many of the most vulnerable people already live in an illiberal state, and Trump’s policies have overall broadened and deepened the extent of American pocket authoritarianism. To wit: 'The strangers trying to arrest his mom’s boyfriend weren’t wearing uniforms or badges, and they didn’t have a warrant. So 26-year-old Eric Diaz did the only thing he could think of: Outside his front door, on the otherwise quiet Brooklyn street, he confronted the plainclothes officers. Then, one of them shot him in the face—just below his right eye...
...“He literally points the gun at my brother and didn’t even hesitate,” Kevin Yañez Cruz, who witnessed the scene on Thursday morning, told WABC. “Just pulled the trigger.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed that agents discharged “at least one firearm” in the altercation, which landed two officers and two others in the hospital, agency officials said in statements to local news outlets. Diaz and the man they were targeting are now in their custody in the hospital, activists say.
Not surprisingly, the situation is intertwined with New York’s refusal to cooperate with Trump’s ethnic cleansing. This leads to policies that put due process considerations first, as they should be. But, of course, ICE blames respect for basic civil liberties for what happened in this case:
Gaspar Avendano-Hernandez, the longtime boyfriend of Diaz’s mother, had been deported back to Mexico twice, ICE officials said.... Immigration officials issued a detainer request.... New York, like other “sanctuary cities,” does not comply with these orders, which many courts have said violate due process. “This forced ICE officers to locate him on the streets of New York rather than in the safe confines of a jail,” ICE spokeswoman Rachael Yong Yow said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. A team of officers tracked him down to a residential street in Gravesend, an ethnically diverse neighborhood in south Brooklyn, arriving around 8 a.m. Thursday to try to arrest him. He would not budge. “He resisted because they didn’t show him no papers, like, ‘Oh, I’m the police,’ no badge, no nothing, no warrant, no nothing,” Yañez Cruz told WABC. They Tasered him. At that point, two sons of his live-in girlfriend, including Diaz, stepped outside, unarmed, to check on what was happening. The officers didn’t say anything at all, Yañez Cruz told the station. According to ICE, that’s when the two agents were “physically attacked.” The ICE spokeswoman did not identify Diaz or say whether he was among the attackers...
#noted #2020-02-22
