cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/151111
With the dust is settling from their defeat on Tuesday, it’s becoming clearer that there was some incredible malpractice going on in the Democratic party. As shown in the tweet I linked, Biden delayed dropping out even though his team knew it was going to be a complete blowout for Trump. Then, we have Harris’s campaign spending over a billion dollars and still losing all of the swing states she needed to win.
For all the Democrats who would never vote Republican and would have never voted third party, are you now considering voting third party in future elections? If not, what would it take?
If you can better define and quantify your expectations, I might be willing to take the other side of that bet.
Sure. 100,000 people hauled away by the cops when they haven’t done anything or committed what we would now consider a crime. Mass deportations of currently legal immigrants, or serious charges for people who participated in a protest but nothing else, is the obvious possibility.
That and laws or federally enforced law-facsimiles of some kind that mean you get punished just for a certain viewpoint that would be fine now. It could be a crime for a social media company or a private citizen to debunk election fraud claims from 2020, or something similar to that.
So, 100,000 people arrested or otherwise taken from their homes under a new or previously unimplemented legal pretext? I think we need to add a narrow timeframe over which these detentions would occur, like a single week. Is this number separate or inclusive of people who get deported on some immigration basis?
1.1 million people were officially “returned” to Mexico in one year of Operation Wetback. So, let’s say Trump suddenly revokes the legal status of and deports at least that many people, times some factor to account for population increase, in the first year of his term.
A lot of people have been arrested at peaceful protests under Biden, so it seems like we’re already at a grim baseline condition. Not sure what the bet is here.
Maybe there are some bills or amendment text floating around you can point to that if passed and successfully enforced would meet this expectation? That includes beating first amendment challenges, right?
Are you guaranteeing all of these scenarios or just any of them? Or should each one be a separate bet?
Is there a betting community on Lemmy where we could post our bet?
Yes.
Why? 100,000 people over the course of a few months isn’t enough of a problem for you?
Separate. I’m excluding people who already don’t have a legal right to stay in the US. I think the number of people who are technically already vulnerable to deportation, who will be deported, will be much greater than 100,000. As you pointed out, that’s already going on. It’s hard to measure in a number how much additional cruelty Trump will add to that by doing a “better” job at rooting out and deporting those people, so I’m not including that. The 100,000 is only people who would have been able to stay in the US, or out of prison or extralegal punishment, who now will not.
I phrased it as “serious charges” on purpose. Lots of people get arrested at protests and then released, either without charges or with some kind of misdemeanor. Biden didn’t invent that, and usually it’s being done by local cops who often don’t even like Biden, and definitely don’t care what he thinks about what they should be doing to the protestors.
I said “serious charges.” We can quantify it as a year or more in prison, or something similar or worse that’s extralegal. That happens on a very occasional basis here, to a handful of people like the cop city protestors, or to that handful of climate protestors in the UK. I expect that under Trump, the scale of serious charges and prison time or worse for these protestors or some other type of “enemy” will dramatically increase. That’s why I quoted the 100,000 people number as a total for all of this extralegal action, deportation and imprisonment and all.
Just to give you a sense of “or worse,” what he did last time was issue an order for the National Guard to start shooting them. They didn’t, last time, and I expect that they probably still won’t in a lot of cases. I think he may create new federal law enforcement agencies which will obey that type of order.
It sounds, to me, like you’re saying that Biden is causing BLM protestors to get arrested and held for a couple of days in the local jail, and that’s already happening so what’s the difference if Trump is creating a new federal law enforcement agency to give them felonies or just shoot them. If I’m hearing you right about that, then I think that indicates a lack of understanding of the grave differences between a Biden presidency and a Trump presidency. That’s what I’m trying to impress on you.
I think a lot of this will be extralegal. We can quantify it by saying that if people start getting criminal charges because of what they said on social media, or what they allow to be posted on their social media site, because it was anti-Republican in some sense, the bet is passed. I don’t know exactly what the legal structure if any will be surrounding it, so I don’t want to involve that into the equation. Whether or not the physical people start going to the physical courtrooms or prisons is the relevant factor. Trust me, if it starts happening, we won’t need to quibble. You’ll know it when you see it.
It’s two scenarios. One is 100,000 people getting deportation or prison time for things that are currently absolutely clearly legal, such as being Hispanic or attending a protest. The other is people receiving charges for expressing, or amplifying or not, a political viewpoint. We can limit that second one to social media, as a way of making it more concrete. We can make those two things as two separate bets, I guess.
How much were you thinking? I don’t really want to bet, to be honest. I’m happy to give you some amount of money if it doesn’t happen. I’ll be so happy that I won’t give a fuck. If I win, we can set it up that you have to give that amount of money to some kind of charity or operation that’s trying to resist. I don’t want the money. It’s not a fun thing for me to talk about.
I did a quick search and the most recent statistic I found was that at least 7.36 million people were arrested for all offenses in the US in 2022. That is about half of the peak annual rate in the nineties. The sad reality is that 100,000 more arrests spread out over a year just isn’t that much. If you are clarifying the scenario as “100,000 people getting deportation or prison time for things that are currently absolutely clearly legal, such as being Hispanic or attending a protest”, then that is specific enough for me to agree to a six month window.
I agree on the terms for the second scenario, that there’s new legislation or policy under Trump that leads to social media users or operators getting criminally charged merely for social media posts that are critical of the Republican party.
I’ll bet $50 against each scenario. I’m fine with not paying each other. The loser can pay that much to the organization of the winner’s choice. If I am successful I will probably choose a smaller group that provides legal assistance to immigrants and asylum seekers or maybe a strike fund. I don’t know. The point is I won’t expect you to give money to something bad.
I said 100,000 who receive at least a year of imprisonment, or deportation, or something similarly severe like getting shot. Someone just getting arrested, I don’t really care about. They already do that, and the damage isn’t always nothing, but I was talking about life-altering punishments.
There were 64,142 felony or class A misdemeanor sentences pronounced in 2022. A year is about the bottom end of prison time for a felony, so that’s probably an okay estimate for the number of people who received that punishment level in 2022.
https://www.ussc.gov/about/annual-report-2022
I’m fine with the six-month timeframe you said. If it goes from 32,000 cases to 132,000 cases then you’ll agree that’s a problem.
You know what? Sure. I’ll shake on it if you will. If we’re still around and on Lemmy at the end, hit me up and we’ll see how it happened.
🤝