It's a public health matter. If you don't care about public health then I personally don't care what you think.

That sounds like a child's argument - "it's not fair!".

It's basic public health logic - is it a net benefit to the population to add fluoride to the water supply and at a suitable price point or is there a more effective method to achieve the desired outcome?

Meanwhile, we have toxic tyre pollution being released into the very air that we breathe which has no known benefit to the population's health and has been shown to lead to heart/lung problems and early deaths. Is that fair?

You can buy bottled water, or a filter and many people have wells.

Despite people knowing about the effectiveness of brushing teeth with fluoride toothpaste, there are benefits (less cavities in young people) to having a certain level of fluoride in the water. Presumably, not everyone is good at brushing their teeth, yet we can improve dental health by adding in some fluoride in those areas that have low or no fluoride naturally in their water supply.

Hold up, all that stuff is completely unattested (and would have to be facts tried before a jury anyway). ICE does not have the power to decide on whether someone is a "domestic abuser" or whatever. They were just serving a warrant.

But more: What if the suspect was in court on an immigration concern? The judge would have been empowered to enjoin the deportation, no? You agree, right? That's what courts do? In which case, wouldn't the ICE agents be the ones guilty of "obstruction" here?

The point of the Rule of Law is that you don't empower individuals to make decisions about justice, ever. You try things before courts, and appeal, and eventually get to a resolution.

Trying to do anything else leads to exactly where we are here, where one arm of government is performatively arresting members of another for baldly partisan reasons.

> It sounds like the arrest isn't because of any official act of the judge, but rather over them either not telling the ICE agents where the person was or giving them the wrong information about their location.

No, that is the excuse. They found a technicality on which they could arrest her, so they arrested her because they wanted to arrest her. Needless to say people don't get tried on this kind of "look the other way" "obstruction" as a general rule. This case is extremely special.

It is abundantly clear that this arrest was made for political reasons, as part of a big and very obvious public policy push.

I didn't say I was ok with anything, don't put words in my mouth. I was asking why the thing that has always existed is a big issue now. For this administration specifically, the thing that has always existed wasn't an issue that demanded these actions the last time they were in office, just 4 short years ago. See what I'm pointing out? There are other reasons that things are being done.

Companies exploiting labor to maximize profit is as old as this country itself. Slave labor, child labor, god awful minimum wages, union busting. What's your point? Why is this an issue now when it has always existed?

If you want to reverse exploitation of cheap labor I suggest you turn to strategies which do not treat human beings like cattle or some kind of infestation to be shipped en mass elsewhere.

An economically viable solution to this problem would be simply force companies to pay all laborers, foreign or domestic, legal or illegal, a living wage, eliminating the benefits of bringing in illegal labor and maintaining a humane society. Furthermore, we should probably only trade with countries which have equal labor protections as our own, so as to ensure that jobs aren't offshored to save money, at least at the expense of human rights.

I'm sorry, I just can't buy that "treat a bunch of people like animals" is the humanist, labor friendly, perspective.

Merit is not easily definable.

Standardized tests are bullshit, IQ tests are phrenology, class rankings are not comparable across school districts. Someone who was president of every club at school may be less able than a kid who had to flip burgers in the evenings to help make rent.

Merit to a university may mean "someone whose charisma and social connections will bring great repute to the institution" more than "a child prodigy who will burn out at 27 and end up fixing typewriters in his parent's garage because they actually had an undiagnosed mental illness growing up".

Merit may mean "a middling student smart enough to pass who will stick around working as a post-doc temporarily forever because they have no ambition beyond performing slave wage labor in exchange for the cold comfort of the known and familiar".

Any definition of merit is going to be irredeemably faulty. Like recruiting sporting talent based solely on stats without considering if the talent is an asshole who will destroy the atmosphere in the clubhouse and immediately get arrested for DUI after being signed.

I thought we wanted to let the market decide?

The government funding aspect is irrelevant. Nearly every business in the country receives some form of government funding either direct or indirect and they hire based on a wide variety of criteria. I was once hired to a position I would need time to be a productive in because I am a ham radio guy and my boss wanted someone to talk radios with.