Rebecca Burke, the British cartoonist who was detained in a prison by ICE for 19 days earlier this year, gave an interview about her ordeal to the Guardian yesterday. It includes some illustrations she produced during her time in detention, such as this one, of her cell:
One thing I don’t think I’d realized when her story was initially reported was that she was detained while trying to leave the US. Quotes after the jump:
The Canadian officials told Becky they’d determined she needed a work visa. She could apply for one from the US and come back, they said. Two officers escorted her to the American side of the border. They talked to the US officials. Becky doesn’t know what was said.
After six hours of waiting – and watching dozens of people being refused entry to the US and made to return to Canada – Becky began to feel frightened. Then she was called into an interrogation room, and questioned about what she had been doing during her seven weeks in the US. Had she been paid? Was there a contract? Would she have lost her accommodation if she could no longer provide services? Becky answered no to everything. She was a tourist, she said.
An hour later, Becky was handed a transcript of her interview to sign. She was alone, with no legal advice. “It was really long, loads of pages.” As she flicked through it, she saw the officer had summarised everything she told him about what she had been doing in the US as just “work in exchange for accommodation”. “I remember thinking, I should ask him to edit that.” But the official was impatient and irritable, she says, and she was exhausted and dizzy – she hadn’t eaten all day. “I just thought, if I sign this, I’ll be free. And I didn’t want to stay there any longer.” So she signed.
Then she was told she had violated her tourist visa by working in the US. They took her fingerprints, seized her phone and bags, cut the laces off her trainers, frisked her, and put her in a cell. “I heard the door lock, and I instantly threw up.”
It strikes me as touching – and sad – that both Burke and the Canadian entrepreneur Jasmine Mooney report feeling guilty about the relative ease with which they were released. Both of them are worried about the women they were detained with. Some of the women were able to purchase basic art supplies from the commissary, and Burke spent her time drawing for them:
On her first day in the facility, Becky asked for a scrap of paper and a pen, and began to draw the inmates on the table next to her. She was immediately inundated with portrait requests. A Mexican woman called Lopez, who had a photo of her children stored on one of the iPads, told Becky she would buy her some paper and colouring pencils from the commissary if Becky drew her kids. She soon became the dorm’s unofficial artist-in-residence, with women huddling around the dirty mirrors to make themselves look presentable before they sat for her. They would decorate their cells with Becky’s drawings, or send them to their families.
Burke also detailed what she remembered of why the other women had come to be detained. One woman, who’d been living in the US legally since 1976, was detained when returning from a trip to her country of origin—an old visa issue that had been resolved years ago suddenly became an issue again. Another woman, a Romanian, said she was visiting Peace Arch park on the US/Canada border, walked onto the American side while taking selfies, and was taken into custody by U.S. border patrol.
It’s nearly 40 years since I’ve stopped in Blaine or visited Peace Arch Park, my memories might be wrong, but I though walking back and forth across the line and seeing how artificial and meaningless the line is, between these two close neighbors and good friends, was the whole fucking point.
— Warren Terra (@warrenterra.bsky.social) April 6, 2025 at 6:33 AM
I am glad Ms. Burke is home and that she’ll be using her experience to create art in an effort to help the women who befriended her. I am sorry she’ll likely never visit the US again, but I can’t blame her. The quote in the headline of this post is taken from her words. It seems like a lot of other tourists from abroad have gotten the message that America is shut, if this chart from an independent data analyst is accurate:
Playing around with CBP airport processing data this morning to see how much air travel by non-US passengers is cratering.
— Jeff Asher (@jeffasher.bsky.social) April 5, 2025 at 2:16 PM
This not only makes me worry for the US green card holders I know, or the people from outside the US who regularly attend academic conferences inside the country. It also makes me anxious for myself – will I face the third degree when returning to the US for a visit to family? Or, will the US’s cruelty toward foreign tourists and legal residents result in retaliatory actions by other countries when Americans try to cross their borders or apply for a residency permit? I can’t imagine we’d get much help from this US State Department if that were the case.
Open thread.
Rose Judson
NB: I am completely schnockered on allergy medication right now so there may be way too many comma splices and other errors in the post. I am just going to let them stand. Have a cat by way of apology.
Baud
Gotta hit your quota.
Bostondreams
I think they may actually look at your social media at this point. So it is indeed a dangerous time.
different-church-lady
@Rose Judson: Apology accepted, with extreme prejudice.
Gin & Tonic
This is sure to do wonders for World Cup attendance next summer.
Chetan Murthy
Rose, I think it’s fairly clear we should all expect to be mistreated at the border. I purchased a new smartphone (OK, last year’s model) so that I can have a spare phone to leave at home (my current phone is 2yr old, and normally would be good for at least another 2yr, but …..) while I travel. And I plan to follow the guidance I’ve heard from friends and somewhat from places like the EFF:
(1) burner phone and laptop with burner Google account
(2) “add” my regular Google email, so I can see it, etc
(3) “add” whatever other apps and stuff I need
(4) right before taking off to return to the US, factory-reset both devices, reinstall, and don’t add back the Google email
The idea being, I can then happily open up the devices.
Also, a friend told me that I could carry an encrypted USB key with whatever data I needed, and they couldn’t demand I decrypt it. THAT IS ALMOST CERTAINLY INCORRECT. I think we should assume that every device we carry will be inspected, and upon pain of detention we must decrypt everything.
Another reason to get a burner phone, is so I can -practice- setting up that secondary Google account, reloading those apps, reloading data from the cloud. B/c how many times do we do it? Not many. And we need to be able to do it flawlessly or we might have trouble getting home (everything, including passing customs, requires a smartphone these days).
ETA: in case it’s not obvious, the point of using “factory reset” is that it’s typically intended so that people can resell (or return) the device. Which means it’ll wipe everything. Smartphones are based on Unix/Linux, and the filesystem doesn’t delete data completely until it overwrites with new data [with flash it’s complicated, but that’s a reasonable assumption] so you need to ensure that the entire flash storage got overwritten (or there might be something there a cyber forensics tool could discover).
ETA2: I’m a law-abiding citizen. I’ve never been arrested. But I remember that Youtube video of that former detective explaining why you “never talk to the cops”.
Trivia Man
@different-church-lady: Comma Cat is a fair trade
schrodingers_cat
Why did she have to go through Border Patrol or the Customs if she was leaving the country? Was this a land border? Because when you fly out of the country you don’t have to go through customs.
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy: I have not left and returned to the US this year, but I have never had to use my phone for anything when returning before. Probably helps that I have Global Entry.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: I don’t have global entry and I entered the US twice once from India and once from the UK in the last 6 months and I didn’t need my phone.
I did need my phone in India, because my Indian visa was on my phone.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic:
Now ponder how many teams won’t be allowed to compete.
NWSL are on international break and several players chose not to go play for their national teams because they fear not being able to return to their club teams here in the States.
I don’t think they’re wrong.
Kent
Honestly, I’ve never been more glad for dual-citizenship.
My daughter is currently awaiting hearing about grad school acceptance which is at this moment a complete shit show due to Trump. Her backup plan if grad school falls through is to go work in Chile for year or two using my wife’s connections.
Our kids all have dual-citizenship with both American and Chilean passports. She was born in the US but has Chilean citizenship through her mother. So traveling to Chile she enters on her Chilean passport which is easy and high-tech. It is like the US, you just scan your passport on the machine when entering and walk through. And when she returns to the US she enters on her US passport and does the same.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: I haven’t left the US since 2007, but a friend tells me that now there’s a CBP app, and you need to take selfie with the app to transmit; they do some facial reco or something with it.
Of course, one should print out copies of everything: boarding passes, all authorizations, etc. and carry them too.
ETA: he explained that when you go to the immigration agent, you show them your phone with the app open, and that’s how they verify you.[1] Again, I haven’t traveled since 2007, so this is all hearsay.
[1] at which point, they can just reach and grab it, b/c you held it wrong or whatever. The idea that you have any agency in granting consent is pretty much gone. At least, that’s how he described it.
Suzanne
My favorite sign that I’ve seen from yesterday’s protests: WE’RE ALL THE COUCH NOW.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: My last trip was in January 2025 and I have no idea what your friend is talking about. Its optional. According the the CBP website.
twbrandt
I saw the Godfather Part II last night. This is the one that recounts the origin story of Vito Corleone, and shows the 9-year-old Vito entering the US in 1901, sailing past the Statue of Liberty and being processed through Ellis Island with thousands of other immigrants from all over Europe. The contrast with today couldn’t be greater.
Now, considering how the Corleone family turned out in the story, this may not be exactly a good argument for a generous immigration policy :), but the contrast was startling.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: He could be mistaken, but he’s never been one to exaggerate. And …. he’s traveled much more recently. Like, last month.
schrodingers_cat
@Chetan Murthy: Check my comment I updated it. It is optional, supposed to make it easy to go through customs.
NeenerNeener
@Gin & Tonic: Doesn’t LA have an Olympics coming up within 47s reign of error too?
schrodingers_cat
@twbrandt: My Italian landlord had stories to tell about how Italians (he is Sicilian) were treated in NY. His father was among the last Italians to immigrate via Ellis Island before it was shuttered by Rs and their restrictive immigration policy over a 100 years ago.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: I should also add two more tidbits:
(1) A certain very large internet company’s guidance to their employees visiting China, was that if the CN authorities took their devices to make copies, they were not to use the devices, instead to call a certain ph#, where they would be given instructions on where to mail the devices to have them destroyed, how to get replacements.
(2) that company told their employees during Trump I that they should use the same procedures upon entering the US.
A Ghost to Most
It’s interesting watching the details fill in on something I’ve been expecting since 2002. It’s heartening to see Americans rise to the occasion.
catclub
Yep. Am I under arrest? Can I leave?
Nothing else.
New Deal democrat
Per Jeff Asher,
https://bsky.app/profile/jeffasher.bsky.social/post/3lm2zcbmpwc2x
”Playing around with CBP airport processing data this morning to see how much air travel by non-US passengers is cratering.”
The attached graph of “Change in non-US passengers processed by CBP at ORD, JFK, LAX, ATL, & IAD over 30 days” relative to same 30 days a year prior shows that in January about the same number of foreigners were entering US airports as in January 2024. During March it had declined by 150,000.
Now multiply that by 12 for an estimate of the hit to US tourism, plus all the ripple effects.
Chetan Murthy
@schrodingers_cat: Also this: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/4/2/2314052/-Opted-out-of-customs-photo-got-flagged-for-inspection
Rose Judson
@schrodingers_cat: Yes, she was at a land border between the US and Canada.
Salty Sam
They have a similar (or maybe it’s the same) app for clearing and entering a boat into US waters. We used it on our return from Puerto Rico. Very simple to use- notify CBP of one’s arrival and wait for instructions. CBP in Ft. Lauderdale cleared us in on the app, no need for an officers visit or inspection of the vessel.
sentient ai from the future
@Chetan Murthy: sonim xp3900 – Android based, but stripped down and no touch, you can sideload if you find apps that work with the UI, no Google play store or Gmail by default. Also IP65 and rugged as hell. And usually about $50
Ship your actual phone if you need to. Or spin up a nextcloud instance so that you can access all your shit from where you arrive.
Deputinize America
If asked to turn in my phone for inspection when I return to the benighted shithole from abroad, my answer is going to be a simple “fuck you – I’m a lawyer and there’s proprietary client data on here”. If it results in my detention, so be it – there will be an injunction filed from my office so quickly that heads will spin.
eclare
@Suzanne:
That’s good.
I don’t see me traveling internationally for a long time. I lost my passport decades ago and even in 2015, my last trip overseas, got extra attention from customs personnel. I don’t want to risk that extra attention now.
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy: I’ve mentioned before, I have a phone I use in Ukraine that stays in Ukraine, it doesn’t travel to the US with me.
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy: There is some e-passport app. My son uses it because he doesn’t want to pay for Global Entry, but it is entirely optional.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: I applied for Global Entry a couple days ago. Turns out, there are no appointments thru June 30 in SF (at the airport). None at all. I emailed them, and if I fail to schedule an appointment, my application can be canceled. No idea of how long I have. No idea of when there’ll be slots opening-up.
Sigh. Just incredible. Or not, actually, b/c fucking US Government.
cain
@Gin & Tonic:
There will be no attending the world cup. I think by the that time there will be a complete rejection of the U.S. globally. Safer to have it in North Korea
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Another sign from yesterday:
https://x.com/JessicaUSAF/status/1908739619291611197
MCat
@Rose Judson: That is one exquisite kitty. And look at that glossy lustrous coat. Thanks for the photo. It immediately made me feel better.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chetan Murthy:
Pro tip:
Sign up for an appointment, doesn’t matter if it’s a moronic amount of time down the line.
Then, make it your life’s mission to recheck for appointment times every day, multiple times a day. There’s always cancellations and you’ll be surprised at how quick you can grab one.
But, you hafta be diligent. Sure it’s a pain but it gets you into the appointment much, much sooner.
Chetan Murthy
@cain: There’s a young guy I know in France, who got an internship in the US for next fall. I was very plain with him that he needed to ensure that -all- his paperwork was in order, b/c bad shit could come down on him otherwise. Bad, bad shit.
Chetan Murthy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: aha. OK. Can I assume that it doesn’t matter where the appointment is either? B/c I plan to cancel it anyway?
Baud
@A Ghost to Most:
👍
Jacel
@NeenerNeener: Unlike the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where the Eastern Bloc countries were absent, I suppose under Trump the only teams in the country to compete will be the US and Russia.
cain
@Chetan Murthy:
I’ve never had to show my phone. They scan your finger prints and take your pictures and the agent asks asks questions and then it’s done.
Baud
@Jacel:
Trump will demand the US Team let Russia win the medal count.
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: especially if he has Algerian roots
schrodingers_cat
@cain: Yep, my experience as well.
Steve in the ATL
@eclare: you know what you did!
And we are getting your rain now. Thanks.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chetan Murthy:
That I’m not sure about. I only scheduled the appt for my airport (Denver). Then did what I explained and within a week, I had an appointment.
You got nothing to lose I suppose from scheduling one elsewhere, then keep looking. Again, no clue about that.
Bupalos
I don’t think we’re going to make progress against democratic decline until some of what’s in this post starts to become more concrete in the minds of the engaged citizenry. One of the most common statements we saw in spaces like this after the election was a kind of affirmation that “I’ll be fine, because I have (ethnic, gender, socioeconomic) privilege. Things will be fine for me. I can be and need to be an ally for others who are actually at risk.” It’s an absolutely noble sentiment but it’s also contains some denial. And I think it does contain more than a grain of our functional apathy and possible democratic destruction.
This was only ever very relatively true. The market crash will bring some of that home. Everyone is at risk of a severe negative turn in their fortunes and life possibilities. Institutions (including negative institutions like racism) that functioned a certain way are going to be destabilized and may not operate the way you expect. I think a little more recognition and acceptance that enlightened selfishness is one of grounds upon which pro-democratic solidarity needs to be built would not be a bad thing. When people aren’t fighting this decline on someone else’s behalf, but rather first and foremost on their own, to defend the things they themselves love, the things most important within their lives, then we’ll have a much better chance.
And I think that will happen.
Chetan Murthy
@Steve in the ATL: Well for sure that. But from his surname, I suspect his ancestry is Italian. In any case, if pretty white girls from Canada and Wales are getting detained ……
Chetan Murthy
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: haha, the reason I asked about -where- to schedule, is that literally there were no appts at SFO out thru 12/31/2025. None.
But I see your logic, and I’ll make it a habit of checking in the morning with my tea.
Harrison Wesley
I haven’t been outside the USA in many years, but any future trip will be one-way.
cain
@Chetan Murthy:
I applied for global entry way back and got an appointment fairly quickly. Then it expired and I reapplied and it showed up on the mail with no appointment needed.
Nelle
A bit of a tangent here. But we’ve found out my nephew (the one picked up by ICE) is being held in a private prison in McFarland, California. His sisters were able to visit and say he is well enough. He’s an amiable, sweet guy who has not a lick of common sense and gets into trouble by trying to please others and do whatever is asked of him. Even by disreputable characters (though nothing violent). They say that they will deport him; no surprises there. I don’t think they are in a hurry to do so, though, as they can charge taxpayers for his stay and they may find him to be a pleasant prisoner. What I hope is that he is deported to his native DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), rather than being dumped in a different country.
Baud
Did someone say swastikars?
Bupalos
@Harrison Wesley: Who knows what’s to come, but it’s generally safer to be inside the declining empire than it is to be outside it. A global economic downturn is going to cause existing fault-lines in the places we’re thinking of as more stable right now to really rumble, and it won’t take long. It’s also going to cause hatred of Americans in a lot of places. Indeed it’s worth remembering that this is America’s current expression of a trend that is global, under world-historical pressures that are global.
Chetan Murthy
@Nelle: Ugh. I cannot imagine what you and his parents are going thru. Ugh. I hope that he emerges quickly and safely, and yes, to DRC is that’s the safest place for him to go.
Sweet jesus, we’re so terrible.
Lobo
How to react to all this crap:
Do something and do what works for you.
Bupalos
@Baud: That’s fine by me, I don’t think the prospect of buying a swastikar under the protective gaze of a bunch of skinhead whackadoodles is going to do a whole lot for Elon’s numbers.
Baud
@Lobo:
Makes sense to me.
robtrim
America’s nascent oligarchy is finding that fascistic impulses exist even in so-called liberal democracies.
The idea of putting people through the psychological and physical wringer appeals to many individuals. It provides a sense of power and superiority – especially when the victims are “others” who have no expectation of civilized treatment. Trumpism is a school-yard, “let’s get even” drama. DEI and other liberal standards will no longer protect you. The book, “Lord of the Flies” illustrates the primitive impulses that are at work. Locking people up provides lizard brains with joy.
eclare
@Steve in the ATL:
You’re welcome. I could post photos of the Overton Park golf course flooding that would make you cry.
Baud
A Ghost to Most
Totally OT: Ovi now holds the record.
Baud
@A Ghost to Most:
Good timing. Wayne is on the outs for betraying his country for Trump.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: And yet Ovechkin’s “roof” is Grisha (Putin). Sigh.
Bupalos
Probably worth noting that “Lord of the Flies” is largely a work of refracted and warped conservative propaganda that doesn’t reflect the reality of human group dynamics or psychology.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Yeah, can’t have it all.
eclare
@Nelle:
This is so awful. I hope he is released quickly, even if it’s to be deported.
arrieve
@twbrandt:
Thank you for reminding me of this! I took my class of immigrant English learners on a trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island last week, which they loved. (Honestly, they give me faith in the idea of America when I’m losing it, which is all the time right now.) The detail in the movie was excellent–the interviews in the Registry Room, the quick buttonhook eye exam looking for trachoma, the quarantine in the huge hospital complex. I found video on YouTube and just shared it with them.
Melancholy Jaques
@Bupalos:
The most common thing I heard from normies post November was – if I may summarize & paraphrase – “Everything Democrats say about Trump is an exaggeration. He was president before & things were fine, the economy was better. It won’t be bad this time either. I’m tired of all the arguing.”
That will take some time to change.
Chetan Murthy
@arrieve: I’m reminded of two things about this:
(1) A LOT of Americans didn’t think much of those immigrants back then
and (2) of course now, the descendants of those Americans are totes cool with those immigrants and their descendants, it’s just the immigrants of today that they don’t think much of.
surfk9
My wife and I were supposed to go on a cruise in early May. It is a cruise with a bunch of celebrity chefs. The cruise is from Miami to Cozumel Mexico. We decided to cancel as I have some health issues. But just as important we did not want to deal with any hassles with TSA and CBP. We are both active in the CA Democratic Party and worried that somehow the agencies would harass us.
The good news is that we were able to book tickets to the Pebble Beach Food and Wine Festival next weekend which features many of the same chefs as the cruise. No flying or TSA or CBP and we will be able to stay in our Airstream in Monterey which usually has great weather this time of year.Yay!
suzanne
@Nelle: What a nightmare. I’m so sorry.
eclare
@arrieve:
The movie Brooklyn, with Saoirse Ronan, tells the story of an immigrant in the 1950’s. It’s very good.
https://youtu.be/5B0sm0XCtK8?si=UD_A4xLed4mMF56P
Baud
@Melancholy Jaques:
People always complain about our messaging. The bigger problem is that people hear us and choose not to believe us. Changing our message won’t make people who don’t want to believe us believe us.
Chetan Murthy
@Melancholy Jaques: A guy I know was telling me (back in Sept) that nothing would change, things would be fine/fine/fine. Heh, he also believed that Brexit would have no effect on the UK either. Ah well. At least he’s pretty liberal otherwise.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
If we weren’t desperate for allies, I’d vote him off the island.
sab
@Bupalos: I read Lord of the Flies when I was twelve, and at the time I thought ‘well isn’t that just like a bunch of boys’.
sentient ai from the future
@Baud: when there is an entire media ecosystem dedicated to directly propagating confirmation bias for free floating grievance, that is a powerful enough pull away from being able to directly engage with arguments that don’t take those grievances as a given.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for US?
Last time I had to re-enter the country was in 2022 and I don’t recall having to use my phone for anything. That was from South Africa, and we were going to take a trip back this summer because that’s where our adopted child if from but we’re not going. We’re afraid they won’t let him back into the country.
Weirdest experience I had coming back into the U.S. was Autumn 2016. Made a work trip to Canada and on re-entry the guy who cleared me said “Welcome home” in a tone that implied I must be like overjoyed to have left whatever hellhole and come back to the greatest country in the world…which if I’d been coming back from war torn Syria or something, maybe I could see but Canada? In my mind I’m like dude, it’s Canada! Life is just as good, probably better, there as in the US. Like America is the only place he could conceive of anyone living happily in or even visiting. At the time it was funny but now those guys…don’t want to interact with them at present.
arrieve
@Chetan Murthy:
My students are mostly from Latin American but also China, Iran, Indonesia, Ukraine, Russia. Some of them have been here a few months, some of them more than twenty years. And all kinds of legal status. And I have heard a fair amount of disparagement and resentment of recent immigrants from those who have been here longer. They don’t want to work, they just want to sign up for benefits.
In general my students are incredibly kind, generous and hard-working people and I consider myself lucky to work with them. But they aren’t a monolith. We talk about a lot of issues in class and I try not to assume how they will feel about certain topics, because they will often surprise me.
arrieve
@eclare: I love that movie!
trollhattan
@Baud:
We had that in the Sac burbs last weekend–protesters and counterprotesters, of the usual stripe.
The only way they can help Elmo is buying his cars and I just don’t see any of them ditching their F-150s for Model 3s. For the record, I wish they would.
Harrison Wesley
@Bupalos: I’d be going to the Old Country where I have a shitload of relatives (who all, fortunately, speak English).
SC54HI
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
This is the way. Cancellations come up all the time but you have to be diligent in checking frequently – got appointments for myself and my spouse by doing this.
robtrim
@Bupalos: I guess I got something else out of it. Adolescent boys are rarely civilized.
martha
@Chetan Murthy: I’m embarrassed to admit that we could not get appointments in Denver to save our lives a few years ago. So we “spent” some Southwest frequent flyer miles and had our appointment in Albuquerque. Flew in, the appointment took 20 minutes for both of us, flew out an hour later. Definitely a first world solution to the problem.
Kelly
I agree but it has been hard to accept.
When I was a teen my Dad’s main fishing buddy was a Oregon State Police officer. His wife cut Mom’s hair. I have a cousin that was a Salem police detective, now retired. I went on many whitewater rafting trips with him and his cop buddies. Cops are good buddies to have on sketchy raft trips.
I was usually the liberal around our campfires. One of the cops that went a few trips was a Democrat. My falling out with my cousin began during the 2004 Kerry presidential campaign. Cousin did two tours in Vietnam. Vietnam veteran Kerry was a traitor for his antiwar stand. He and some of the other cop buddies had been marinating in Fox News/ Rush Limbaugh bs. My last trip with my cop buddies was 2007. The Democratic cop is still OK but the rest are pickled.
dirkreinecke
There is a story about school boys who had “borrowed” a fishing boat and got stranded on an island and what really happened. It is a nice positive story.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
Maybe British public school boys would behave differently (look at the history of the British Empire) but any story tells us a great deal about the author of the story.
Martin
@Baud: There is a profound lack of imagination in terms of how bad things are and how bad they can get. That is true of this place as well – during the Covid runup, people could not believe that it would kill a million people. Like, that was simply not possible. Now, people here didn’t take that disbelief and turn it into denialism about the disease, but it did turn into a series of revelations every time the death count went up that the federal government and our fellow citizens would allow that to happen.
While I think that we will recover economically, we won’t recover geopolitically. That era is over and we might get it back in 1-2 generations. And Democrats didn’t predict that (not that people would have believed that either). But look at our elected Democrats who said Trump presented an existential threat but didn’t organize, make plans, take actions commensurate with that statement. They didn’t believe their own statements. That’s kind of what Booker was saying during his filibuster. And that’s not that uncommon. That’s happened to me loads of times, and I see it here routinely.
It’s one of the problems that education has grappled with forever. You can teach people things with words, and they may be able to feed it back to you correctly, but they learn with actions. They have to experience it for it to really take. And we don’t practice that. It’s one of the reasons why I think calls for mandatory civilian participation aren’t necessarily bad ideas. I want to avoid the mandatory part, but we need the participation part. Without it, it becomes too easy to fill in your own narrative, which of course is going to reinforce why you aren’t participating – that’s a natural feedback loop. (Hank Green this week coined an interesting term – skeptical hedonism – being skeptical of anything that might cause you an inconvenience.)
Baud
@dirkreinecke:
Eton boys are made different.
WTFGhost
@sab: It’s good fiction, insofar as it explores what many young experience, and see, as a kind of Stanford Prison Experiment. It does have a fatalistic view, that hasn’t been borne out in any (nb: surviving) such group that has existed. (Morbidly, I don’t know if they ever had any “never found” because they went all LotF all over each other.)
So most groups of people, who see that things are going south, pull together, and understand rules and the need to enforce them. That means, for example, that an adult should supervise, and say stuff like that… life really isn’t that dark, even though it looks that way, sometimes.
Marc
@Chetan Murthy: I’ve used an a free “Official” government app called Mobile Passport Control to re-enter the country with/without my family numerous times. Basically, enter all of the information you’d have to give them anyway, make a customs declaration, take a selfie, set it all up, then when you get a cell signal, submit. One usually ends up in line behind the few Global Entry holders. Then hold up your phone (you can do it individually or as a family, I think) with the QR code showing, they ask a few questions, and that’s it, often no customs inspection at all. Like you, I carry a burner phone, but I manage it by keeping separate backup images, one of which is intended for international travel (music, books, maps, pictures, frequent flyer stuff, Mobile Passport, but no account passwords or social media, all of which CBP is welcome to keep).
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
So fucking true.
Baud
Kelly
Oh my, that fits all the environmental controversy’s that come to my mind quickly. Also the COVID social distance, closures and masking tantrums.
Harrison Wesley
@Kelly: I had some cop drinking buddies who were very right-wing, but we didn’t talk politics. Serious drinkers have better things to do.
NetheadJay
@Martin: Hank Green is very good at that sort of insight and coming up with a good term for it.
Annie
@twbrandt:
and then there’s Geno Auriemma, winningest coach in college basketball history, who came here with his parents at age 7.
Harrison Wesley
@WTFGhost: ….and then there’s the Donner Party…..
Baud
@Martin:
Agree. The hope is the next four years teaches people not to take things for granted. It’ll be an expensive lesson but a necessary one.
Nelle
@Martin: In January of 2020, I believed AL and started preparing. As usual, my son accused me of hysteria. Anytime I over prepare, I’m being melodramatic. The son was born after our Alaska years when we needed to be able to survive on our own if the plane went down over the bush. When a trip to town to get groceries took three hours by plane, over two mountain ranges. I do like a stocked pantry.
Also, I’m likely influenced by family history. My family, then living in Ukraine, had a comfortable life, complete with a nanny for my father, the youngest. Lots everything and went through trauma. Arrived in Canada in the early 1920’s with a few clothes. They received a lot of kindness from those Canadians. I figured that bad times could come for me and mine too.
Baud
@Annie:
@Harrison Wesley:
Quite funny as back to back comments.
Harrison Wesley
@Baud: “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn from no other.”
Baud
Avalanche!
Harrison Wesley
@Baud: I don’t think they had a coach.
Kelly
@Harrison Wesley: Rafter’s can talk all night about oars. “Aluminum shafts are simple, inexpensive and good enough.”
“The flex and feel of expensive, composite, counterweighted is well worth the money”
“Hand crafted solid ash oars are things of beauty and utility.”
Bupalos
Also worth noting that the Milgram study in addition to being unethical was almost entirely fabricated
This plainly and simply isn’t reflective of normal psychology or normal human group dynamics.
trollhattan
Swear these 21st century nazis all use one playbook.
‘Tis a shame, awful lady, that your country seems able to administer its laws unlike certain others I shall not name.
WTFGhost
@Harrison Wesley: Or those people in The Onion, who were stuck in an elevator for 45 minutes, and “maybe we resorted to cannibalism a little early, but you don’t know what it was like in there!”
(Technically, it may have been my fault. I said I was a cannabal, no, a canna_VORE, for cannabis, you see, right before that elevator incident, but… it’s best not to worry overmuch about personal responsibility. Especially not when they had two titanium sporks in the elevator with them.)
trollhattan
@WTFGhost:
Yellowjackets is a modern take flipping the script by the stranded survivors being predominantly teen girls.
And we all know about teen girls.
Melancholy Jaques
@Martin:
I’d say it’s more hedonistic denialism. Skepticism requires evidence. These people refuse to believe evidence & get pissed at anyone trying to present it to them.
Ohio Mom
@Nelle: Has anyone hired an attorney on behalf of your sweet but gullible nephew?
Every time you comment on the latest thing that has happened to him I get nauseated on your family’s behalf.
Queen of Lurkers
@Chetan Murthy: I re-entered US at a large airport in TX last month after a short visit to Europe. Re-entry is now by facial recognition. I don’t know whether that’s for all citizens or whether that’s because I travel out of the country at least once a year and CBP have a huge file on me. Previously, I would have to scan my passport. This time, I did not even have to do that. The camera took a picture and I was just allowed through. This is regular re-entry; I do not have Global Re-Entry or anything fancy.
schrodingers_cat
@Queen of Lurkers: Same here.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:Yeah, but how many of these mokes can afford to buy a Testicle?
Money talks, bullshit walks.
Queen of Lurkers
@Rose Judson: I read the Guardian article on Samantha Burke. Her treatment was unquestionably horrendous. Nonetheless, I was also struck by the level of unspoken privilege Ms. Burke assumed when she thought she could, on a tourist visa, perform casual labor for a stranger in exchange for room and board and that this did not constitute a financial transaction. It’s also worth noting that when she admitted that this is what she was planning to do in Canada too, it was Canadian authorities who determined that she could not enter Canada as a tourist and returned her to the US.
I am a brown person and was on an F-1 (student visa) for a very long time in the previous century. (It takes a while to get an advanced degree.) F-1 holders are not allowed to work off campus and cannot work more than 20 hrs a week on campus. The rules governing who can or cannot work, and what constitutes work, have always been strict. It was particularly hard to make it through the summer break because university financial support was confined to the semesters; finding on-campus summer work was always a nightmare. I am sure many students took risks. I was not one of them because the consequences of violating the rules of the student visa were dire and not worth the risk.
The current regime is choosing to enforce in the harshest way possible what has been in the books for a long time.
schrodingers_cat
@Queen of Lurkers: Cosigned. I didn’t attend my cousin’s wedding and I had a fucking GC because I didn’t want to leave the country when my citizenship application was being processed as I didn’t want to miss any USCIS dates for biometrics and interview.
Queen of Lurkers
@Chetan Murthy: I had a naive friend say, when I was in despair in February, “Don’t worry; Trump’s bark is worse than his bite.”
I don’t know what she thinks now.
Princess
@Baud: Proud Boys staking out the dealership — that’s really going to bring suburban moms concerned with climate change and safety into the Tesla showroom with open checkbooks, NOT.
Kristine
@Suzanne: Mine was from Salem, OR: “It was the fuckaroundest of times, it was the findoutest of times.”
Twisted Dickens is the best Dickens.
Jay
@Queen of Lurkers:
The Companies that run these websites know where these sorts of “arrangements” are legal, where they are illegal, and where they go for the most part, unenforced.
Some of the Companies (profit) go to great lengths to use legalese to hide the fact that some of the trips they offer, are illegal.
These trips are often offered as Home Stays, Farm Stays, Habitat (Reno) Stays, Cultural Stays. Members of the websites pay for their listings, customers pay for the bookings.
As for “privledge”, last year a group of Canadian Indigenous youth went on a Band, (several Bands), approved Cultural Stay Program to New Zealand. There they would learn about Maori culture, language and tribal structures. Did not happen.
Turns out there were no Maori’s involved, accommodations and food did not match what was shown, communication was cut off, and the kids were used as free labour, for long hours and subject to abuse.
Word in the local community got out and several Maori Tribal Groups rescued the kids. Eventually they got exposed to some Maori culture, most came back home, several bought a Ute and stayed for a couple of months touring New Zealand.
Liminal Owl
@sab: I read it when I was twelve, too—but I was in an all-girls situation, and the book felt no less realistic for that.
(@Bupalos: your point is well taken too, though.)
Gretchen
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that, as state legislatures defunded state colleges, those colleges have relied heavily on international students coming and paying out-of-state tuition, essentially subsidizing in-state students. Not many Chinese parents are going to think it’s a good idea any more to send their kids to the University of Kansas or Kentucky or whatever.
Martin
@Gretchen: Yeah. Universities that hadn’t learned the lesson before 2007 (we were one) learned it then – the state is going to keep cutting subsidies, and also keep the brakes on tuition. The only escape hatch is to create other sources of revenue to fill the gap.
If you want to know why universities have hired so many administrators, that’s why. Some was to clear time for faculty to get grants by offloading some of their busy work, and the rest was to tip up new revenue streams. UCLA built and operates a fucking hotel now. Summer camps and the like are common. Some privates simply have real-estate ventures attached to them. Non-resident tuition creates demand that throws off cash and fills seats that the state won’t. So it’s easier to get into these universities from outside the state than inside, because the legislatures won’t subsidize demand. No wonder people are mad.
Professional MS programs are among the most lucrative though. They are highly stripped back academically and very expensive. We funded half of our TA pool from our professional MS programs.
And yes, the non-resident programs are quite volatile for the reason you state. Note, a lot of blue state universities can replace some of their foreign non-resident tuition with out of state tuition as there is a market for parents sending their daughters to places like CA instead of having them stay in red states that have stripped abortion protection. It is not something the CA universities have advertised but it’s getting known that CA publics are required to provide chemical abortion services in student health for free if requested.
Redshift
@Baud:
From some things I’ve read, that’s exactly what’s going on. Captain Crazypants promised mass deportations, but having ICE raids and other relatively legitimate methods was getting him news stories about how deportations were only up a little (because the massive “invasion” was a lie.)
So he basically told ICE, CBP, etc. to get the numbers up, no questions asked (and of course no one would be punished for anything) and here we are.
brendancalling
“It also makes me anxious for myself – will I face the third degree when returning to the US for a visit to family? Or, will the US’s cruelty toward foreign tourists and legal residents result in retaliatory actions by other countries when Americans try to cross their borders or apply for a residency permit? I can’t imagine we’d get much help from this US State Department if that were the case…”
These are my worries as well.
Captain C
@Gin & Tonic: Assuming FIFA doesn’t just yank it from us.
YY_Sima Qian
@Gretchen: It used to be that a foreign degree from whichever university (including diploma mills) would give an applicant a leg up in the PRC job market, but that was 15 years. Now, even a degree from an Ivy does not give much advantage over graduates/post-graduates of elite Chinese institutions such as Peking, Tsinghua & Fudan Universities. a PhD from of a state university in the US could still be valuable if in the right discipline or program, but that may not last much longer, especially w/ the Repubs in Congress advocating stop issuing student visas to PRC citizens.
YY_Sima Qian
Well, I just received my PRC Permanent Resident status, so that I can stay & raise my family in China for the foreseeable future. If Trump really wrecks the global economy, & I get laid off from my US MNC employer (whether due to US action or PRC retaliation), in theory it will be much easier for me to try to find a job in China, as opposed to having my PRC visa tied to my current employer’s sponsorship & face the decision of having to uproot my family to return to the US & try to find a job there.
I do appreciate the irony, having emigrated to the US 35 years ago, became a green card holder 30 years ago, & US citizen 15 years ago. I never thought I would ever seek PRC PR status.
YY_Sima Qian
LOL! Maybe this is Lutnick’s attempt at blinking his eyes in a held hostage video, charging how absurd the policies are w/o openly criticizing Trump. Of course, he could resign in protest any time, & dirtied himself by associating w/ Trump to begin w/ (Face the Nation snippet through the link):
Steve LaBonne
@YY_Sima Qian: Will we have the suicide nets too?
Steve LaBonne
@YY_Sima Qian: Quite a story. A reverse brain drain is just beginning that will impoverish and diminish the US for generations. I hope things work out as best they possibly can for you and your family.
ronno2018
I am just so angry the website she used does not have an upfront warning about visa rules!
Yes, you can sneak through as a tourist but, hell, don’t do it.
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: Like I said, big Great Leap Forward energy. I’ve already scouted out a location for my backyard steel furnace.
Jay
@ronno2018:
There are worse cases.
https://bsky.app/profile/taenia.bsky.social/post/3lm36r4xqqc2y
YY_Sima Qian
@Steve LaBonne: I started the process early last year, as the post-Pandemic hangover struck home for my just how much my current life in the PRC is dependent on the PRC residence permit sponsored by my U.S. MNC employer. It became more urgent as the prospect of Trump’s return became more real. This was all about obtaining & keeping as many options as possible, in this increasingly tumultuous & unpredictable world.
No plan become a PRC citizen again, that would foreclose other options, & China has its own set of uncertainties, to say the least. Then again, since I never went through the tortuous process w/ the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs to give up my PRC citizenship (very few emigrants ever bother), perhaps it is unnecessary, & the CPC regime can choose to treat me as a PRC citizen if they really want to, the current USG sure isn’t going to look out for my interests. I gave up my PRC residence registration & PRC citizenship card a decade ago, which is what matters at the practical level.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: LOL! & get a BB gun for the sparrows!
Steve LaBonne
@YY_Sima Qian: Survival for a lot of people is going to depend on having options. Good luck. America setting itself on fire makes me want to put my head through a wall. I’m glad I’m old.
YY_Sima Qian
@Steve LaBonne: Given current slate of kleptocrats in charge & plutocrats seeking to benefit, suicide nets in factories operating on forced migrant labor is not out of the question.
Ironically, Foxconn & Apple were sufficiently chastened by the bad PR around the world & w/in the PRC to have implemented enough changes quickly that suicides stopped being an issue in short order.
YY_Sima Qian
Trump is a uniter, not a divider! Taiwan Strait edition.
Any Taiwanese that calls the PRC “China” & not “the Mainland” or “Mainland China” has pro-independence leanings, likely to be or once was a DPP supporter, & is certainly not motivated by Chinese nationalism.
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: The suicide thing was a bit overblown as the rate was pretty much equal among workers as the general population. That’s not saying there wasn’t a problem there, but it wasn’t quite the problem it was made out to be.
I will also pre-condition some people for the follow-on to Lutniks gaffe. They’re going to come out and say that they’ll use robots do to all of that work. The problem was that as of a few years ago, we didn’t have robots capable of doing the work, in part because tolerances in Apple’s devices are very small. At one end you have automated equipment like pick and places which can be that accurate, and at the other end you have traditional assembly robots that can’t be, and the iPhone is kind of in the middle, at least according to one expert in the field that believe knows what he’s talking about.
That isn’t to say it won’t eventually be automated or isn’t gearing up as we speak, but until recently the product sat just out of reach of what we had equipment capable of doing. Scaling that up will be its own challenge as Apple had DMG Mori build a secret factory just to make CNC mills for them because they were buying so many of them. I would imagine they would face a similar problem here. Nobody has ever made 200 million units annually of a durable good before. Creates a lot of new problems to solve.
Sphex
@Bupalos: the Stanford Prison Experiment wasn’t Milgram, it was Zimbardo. Milgram’s study on how folks tend to obey authority figures was not fraudulent nor misrepresented, although I also suspect the findings were of the time, and I suspect that in this day and age we’d see different results.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Yeah, it was overblown. My Alma Mater had 6 suicides in the same year from a student body of ~ 40K, although that was an outlier year, too. It just conformed to the prevailing narrative & zeitgeist.
I think mobile assemblies are pretty automated these days, tiny screws kept to a minimum precisely to enable automation. Xiaomi has shown off its “dark factories” (because such factories are so automated that they can turn off the ceiling lights that only humans need) for mobile phone assembly. Huawei has then, too. The Foxconn & Luxshare factories assembling iPhone can’t be far behind.
The degree of automation in cover glass fabrication, for example, has reached the degree that the Chinese manufacturers only need 20% of the labor of a decade ago. Visual quality inspection that required well trained human inspectors 5 years ago are becoming fully automated, the vision system & the AI (pattern recognition, really) have become that good. Samsung’s assembly factories in Vietnam are even more automated than in the PRC, despite the lower labor cost.
Jay
@YY_Sima Qian:
I always take those “numbers” with a large serving of salt.
When I was MPS for DTI, ( a touchscreen and keypad MFGR” a key problem, when I was sent there by the Parent Company, was that 40% of the films were rejected from the floor for defects.
QA would eventually clear up to 35% of the films, but that brought in issues of compatibility and damage inflicted by extra handling.
The solution was to have QA clear those films, immediately, and then send them back out to the floor, with the QA paperwork. That was not done before.
Failure rate dropped to 5%, and there was a QA person’s name, to call for review and add training.
Test gauges for inclusions and defects were also dated, logged and swept. New gauges, old ones were purged, then new ones issued.
someguy
My wife and I were planning to visit the US this summer for the first time in a few years. I’m American and she is Chinese. So obviously that won’t happen. We’ll be meeting friends in Canada, and some people are visiting us from the States. They tend to sound really naive. I understand that the rules are that you don’t need to provide passwords to immigration officials, but the whole problem is that those officials are not bound by the rules. I’m used to living under an autocratic government, so I’d suggest that you assume you have no rights and are facing potentially life changing consequences crossing the border. I typically delete social media apps before crossing the border into China and then just reinstall them after. I’d do the same there
YY_Sima Qian
@Jay: I work in the mobile consumer electronics industry, including cover glass fabrication, I have been working in & visited these factories for the past 2 decades, and have seen the evolution, I can vouch for the numbers. Right now, human inspectors still serve as back stop to verify the small percentage of parts flagged by the automated system as borderline, but the number of inspectors have dramatically decreased. The push for automation is a rational response to the rising wages (3X for PRC manufacturing labor in the past 2 decades), and the fact that the Chinese millennials don’t want to work as assembly line operators, either.
YY_Sima Qian
@someguy: I don’t use any non-Chinese social media mobile APPs, & I only peruse X & BlueSky through web browsers via VPN, & I don’t post there. Simplifies life quite a bit.
But yeah, better to spend you money in Canada.
YY_Sima Qian
Navarro unhinged, but I repeat myself:
Trump wants to balance every bilateral trade in goods (but why omit services), countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Argentina & Zimbabwe offering the U.S. 0% tariffs will not achieve that economically illiterate outcome.
Even if Trump temporarily drops the punitive tariffs to these countries, he will just come back in a few months when the goods trade deficit remain stubbornly high to extort even more concessions.
Martin
@YY_Sima Qian: To drive the point home – all non-value add jobs will seek automation. 100%. So all mass manufacturing jobs will seek automation. Every one. It’s just a question of whether the robotics are capable and whether the robotics are affordable.
The only manufacturing jobs that will avoid automation are those that add value – artists, craftsmen. There aren’t many of them. That’s what US manufacturing needs to understand, and either they don’t or they pretend not to. The factories that make those robots are themselves lights-out. The end-state is for it to be lights out all the way down.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: I think manufacturing processes are still adding value via material conversion or assembly, much more so than the business & financial processes. What can’t be automated or left to AI are the truly creative activities (assuming AGI/ASI fails to measure up to the hype, as is highly likely), which as you say are far fewer in number. The path forward will require a lot more socialism to ensure that the value created by automation & AI are not concentrated in the hands of few techno-authoritarian feudal lords, which is clearly the notion in the heads of the TechBros around Trump.
It will also require true energy abundance to realize true “Abundance” in general, since everything is downstream of energy, & that means renewal & nuclear (even fusion) energy at colossal scales. A Star Trek future (TNG, anyway), so to speak.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: If the robots do all that work, it’s not a lot of jobs, is it? That’s the kind of manufacturing we have already.