Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.
A NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested (in jest) that the next Democrat administration send armed IRS agents to gated communities in Florida, to "investigate tax fraud".
But this is exactly why all citizens should be concerned about the infringement of rights happening in Minnesota. If it is allowed without prosecution, you are next.
Right, if a future democratic president starts sending masked government thugs out to assault and kidnap American citizens we all know that 100% of the people who are defending the current ICE atrocities will suddenly be outraged about government tyranny.
a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts
that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things, generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then we wont hold it against you the first time"
*the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to value judge your actions in superficial ways
Which is why its backwards and makes no sense that we allow / cater to "well nothing said I couldnt do that" as a reasonable defense. The value judgement system should go both ways. then a lot less would need to be written down to begin with, because it wouldnt be an arbitrary set of rules on every front but the codification of a specific value judgement system with clarifications on how to align yourself to it.
We really shouldnt be allowing things like, "this is a location dedicated to peace and non-violence" and then section 32 subsection C part 2 (a) says "we can kick the shit out of you if you photograph the premises". Just a random made up example for communication purposes, but it applies to all sorts of things. Personally, I think it should apply to social media. there was a implied sense of privacy to it, that people could not see my information if i did not approve it - and then the fine print says except for the company running the page who can sell the information to whoever they want. Like WTF was that about? I wont say its an ignored thing, there plenty of outrage over it - but i think its incredibly fundamental to whats going wrong and feeding this information overload in a dangerous / stressful way.
Companies shouldnt need 10 pages of TOS to say all the obvious things, and appealing to this idea that only whats written down is what matters shouldnt allow for just any arbitrary set of things to be written down and called reasonable
Less about value judgements. More about outsourcing to people/brands we trust.
When it comes to software licenses, we aren’t lawyers, so the informed people will use a primer created by a trusted 3rd party. Maybe GitHub’s “which license is right for me?” Page.
Who to vote for in local elections is usually decided via one of the following: (1) I know/met the person, (2) I trust the party they affiliate with, (3) I trust the newspaper/news source which recommended them.
Academic papers are usually thick, long, and inaccuracies are difficult for anyone not in that field of expertise (or something relevant like statistics) to identify. Most people require an overview of the article by an expert. Hopefully (but unlikely) they can choose one which is impartial / minimally biased and who can give an opinion on how definitive or significant the findings are.
The last 2 decades have been spent with companies learning to exploit this. For example, every large tech business would prefer all your code was MIT/BSD and they have spread advice to this effect.
The other caveat is if you're a historically persecuted minority group, then those assumptions toward law enforcement don't usually apply. And now the political opposition to the current US administration is also feeling that way.
I have never considered this perspective, but this fits very well with people's actions. Thank you for sharing.
To me, the system of codified law and courts makes intuitive sense, and most people misunderstand or abuse the system. But other people's intuitive understanding of the law as you mentioned is a much easier way to understand and actually IS a rough approximation of what the system does.
the bigger caveat here is where some people can do "bad" things but the law doesn't apply to them. This breaks social contract and exposing law as a tool for the powerful to control the masses (this is still true, but by not doing it blatantly, the contract can still be somewhat upholded).
In an ideal world, when this happen, it should be anarchy until a new set of government, that uphold the law equal to everybody, is enacted. But we don't live in ideal world.
Honestly, and I say it without a shade of irony, it might be for the best, if the collective 'we' stop attempting re-enact fictional events and lives in alternate worlds. It would do everyone, and I do mean everyone, a good solid needful, should they just stopped and thought about what they are doing and the likely course of the events given their actions.
It would be orders of magnitude more productive if we did that.
I’m saying people should watch a powerful series about state violence and masking with real world lessons that can be taken away. I’m unsure what you mean by how we shouldn’t re-enact fictional events. Are you talking about my suggestion? Or are you saying we should end acting? Or is it something g else?
Apologies. I may have come too strong possibly, because I do it myself sometimes by referencing shows as a means to convey relatable message to the audience. Lately, however, I started to think that the shorthand those references introduce may be more of a problem than not. I am not even familiar with the particular show you are referencing.
I think my concern was that we think too much in terms popular culture. That itself is a problem. Still, as problems go, it is not urgent. Hence my apology.
All good. I would say Watchmen (the show) is one of those ones in particular that is truly above the noise however. I even hesitate to call it “pop culture.” It’s “high art” if I can be pretentious about it, and a powerful mirror for us.
At a time when state violence in the US is brandished so loudly and proudly, it feels like a very important piece of media for folks to watch.
They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen their entire lives and they are probably right.
Yeah I also expect they are correct on that assumption. If history is any guide Dems will take very few if any concrete actions to correct these wrongs if/when they ever get back into power again. I'm sure they'll give some rousing speeches and press conferences though.
What should happen is that everyone who is flagrantly violating the law and looting the federal govt right now should be quickly and aggressively prosecuted. Real concrete legislative reforms should be enacted to limit future corruption and dangerous adventurism by demented leaders.
Zero disagreement. Rules of engagement should be clear to everyone. How can you possibly play the game if the rules keep changing based on political expediency. And we all know.. that that kind of a game is rigged from the start.
That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
People rarely recognize that force can be turned on them until it happens. If one side uses force and the other refuses to, you cannot expect the first to grasp that force is always a two way street, because for them it is not real until they feel it.
Force can be turned on even if there was no force before. Biden didn't have anything like the current ICE, but Trump just made one out of thin air and then turned it on people.
Linking to actual sources would reveal that the keywords the IRS was looking for were politically biased, yes, but across the spectrum. The keywords included "Tea Party", "Patriot", "Progressive", and "Occupy." https://www.npr.org/2017/10/05/555975207/as-irs-targeted-tea...
Purely semantic arguments aren't helpful to anyone.
The word "bias" clearly has two senses in this context. The original term from signal processing indicates a persistent offset, which got appropriated in politics to reflect the idea of a "lean" in coverage. So now "Bias" means "politically charged in some direction or another".
So you can have a "biased" term ("occupy") next to another biased term ("tea party") in a search. And it's reasonable to call the whole thing a collection of biased terms even though by the original definition I guess you'd say they cancel out and are "unbiased".
Language is language. It may not be rational but it's by definition never "nonsense". Don't argue with it except to clarify.
My favorite was the one where Florida Republicans made it legal to deny medical treatment based on religious or moral belief, and a surgeon stopped administering anesthetic to Republicans.
Come on now, you didn't expect someone linking to that trash website to actually read any of it did you? Grokipedia tries to downplay the progressive part but does still mention it.
A democratic administration would be extremely unlikely to do that, I think. Democrats are usually middle–of–the–road, don't–upset–anyone types. Radical centrists, if you will. That's why the elections of people like Mamdani are so shocking.
There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from their base to hold people accountable for what happens during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new blood that runs on that. You have state governors like Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future accountability in mind.
What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current government overreach aren't worried about the coming backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future elections? Even when there is no more Trump?
> Do they think they'll just win all the future elections?
There's a degree of that. But really it's learned behavior; MAGA literally sacked the Capitol in a violent insurrection and Democrats managed to botch the response to that. The only reason we're talking about future malfeasance is because Democrats didn't punish past malfeasance, thereby shifting the Overton window. And of course this goes back further than Jan 6 -- Trump might actually get a pardon from the next Democratic president if history repeats.
> Do they think they'll just win all the future elections?
Let's say the administration require physical in-person voting due to supposedly mail-in vote fraud and similar in past elections, like when Trump lost.
Then they place a bunch of ICE agents outside of each voting location, checking any immigrants and others they've declared unwanted that are about to vote. Suddenly a lot of democratic voters no longer feel safe voting.
That’s not something which really happened: conservative groups screamed about it loudly but the investigation found that the IRS was looking at liberal groups, too.
"Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.
That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.
Almost every major US criminal constitutional rights case started with an actual criminal, or at least someone unsavory. Miranda was a rapist. Gideon of Gideon v. Wainwright was a burglar. Brady of Brady v. Maryland was a robber and possibly a murderer. These cases helped form the foundation of what due process actually means in the United States. But contemporary discussion surely included a lot of commentary like "Why would anyone be opposed to prosecuting murders, rapists, and violent criminals?" And that commentary was just as irrelevant then as it is now.
It's not about whether the US deports criminals. It's about how we go about doing it.
Obama managed to deport more illegal immigrants than Trump. The difference is the local cities and states were working with ICE, rather than weaponising it to try and get a Democrat president.
You forget that Obama wasn’t an idiot and did everything above board. Sanctuary cities existed back then, federal agents still enforced immigration rules just without Gestapo-like sh*t stirring. Trump wanted to provoke Minneapolis with aggressive highly visible tactics, and he got what he wanted.
That is ridiculous, Republicans are sending in poorly trained masked federal agents "en masse" into liberal, being as rough and visible as possible. That is the very definition of sh*t stirring. This is just what MAGA wanted: to beat up and shoot some libs.
If it was really about illegal immigrants, ICE wouldn't be raiding immigration hearings, nor would they be kidnapping legal immigrants.
If it was about stopping violent criminals, they wouldn't raid restaurant kitchens and crop fields, where workers are trying to make an honest living for their family.
You can't reason someone out of something they clearly didn't reason themselves into. If they cared about the truth and evidence they wouldn't be holding that opinion right now.
Amusingly, a lot of rank and file on both sides ( and center ) of the aisle would not mind at all. However, somehow the political will in the upper echelons is just not there. Somehow.
If they really really wanted to deport 8 million illegal immigrants, there are surely more effective ways than grandstanding a bunch of masked thugs. Obama did it, surely Trump can figure it out also? I know, I know, you guys never would admit Obama was doing it because he was doing it so discretely, which is why you want Trump to make such a show of it, I guess.
Hey for audience, your numbers include asylum seekers who came here legally right?
Just want to point out that for conservatives the set “illegal immigrants” include, large numbers of legal ones because they generally thought the asylum process was too simple and shouldn’t count.
"The despondent faces and screaming, wailing and pleading from these men, women and children in cells will forever haunt me. But perhaps more haunting still was the sound of agents nearby laughing."
Yes, very not Nazi. And the press is not the reason people in Minneapolis are livid and putting their lives on the line, out in the freezing cold. Instead of getting angrier and angrier as "useful idiots" continue to do the same all across the country and in ever greater numbers, maybe take the chance to revisit your assumptions and pull yourself out of whatever dark propaganda pit you're in.
FWIW they were murdered in hot blood. A cold–blood murder is one where you plan the murder at home and execute it. A hot–blood murder is one where you kill someone because you are enraged in the moment, which is what happened here twice.
In the US, the 8th Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, which courts have interpreted again and again as requiring that punishment be proportionate to the conduct. Weems v. United States (1910), for example, struck down a 15-year hard-labor sentence for a man who engaged in criminal fraud.
Do you think Alex Pretti or Renee Good deserved 15 years of hard labor for disobeying ICE? How about just five years? Because what actually happened was they were executed on the spot.
There is no FAFO exception in the US Constitution.
Oh, just spontaneously died then? You know if you play the video backwards it shows ICE applying lifesaving bullet removal techniques on Mr. Pretti and Mrs. Good
You mean "you're right, saying the victim was cruelly and unusually punished isn't a good argument here."
You've just presented a new argument.
Many, many people are killed by LEO each year; how many are considered 6th amendment violations? (None. LEO is not out there "administering judgement", they are responding to deadly-force encounters, guns, etc)
We’re not sure what your point is. “Things of a similar nature have happened in the past” is not a particularly strong argument.
> In every state of the US (and most countries), people disobeying law enforcement will die. If you want to live, you comply, and you fight in court.
This is naked bootlicking. You only support it because you view it as “your team” or “your tribe” and do not feel threatened by it. Tables turn in time. Maybe you are not old or wise or well-read enough to recognize that.
ICE has been breaking a lot of laws in Minnesota and ignoring Constitutional rights. Neither of the shootings have been justified based on video evidence, and the administration has blatantly lied and engaged in covering for the agents involved so far.
Pretti was a cluster like I said. I don't think he should have been shot, but it's going to be really hard to find anyone guilty.
They're hands on with an armed person who is resisting them, and he is shot in the chaos. I personally believe the first shot was by the officer who drew, but was unintentional and I don't think he realized it was his own gun.
The time from him being disarmed to the first shot was well under a second, wasn't it? Not enough time to send a memo to everyone about the current status of the armed opposition.
I’m curious how you came to this conclusion. Maybe you generally believe that federal agents do not have a responsibility to deescalate / not put themselves in situations where lethal force could even become something within the realm of being discussed? They are, after all, the ones with the guns and therefore a responsibility to not escalate.
This belief, that federal agents should be held to a higher standard, and not agitate or escalate, seems to be the dividing line. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
The most damning moments in that encounter to me were when he switched the hand his phone was in before moving in front of the car while interacting with the wife, clearly giving himself the opportunity to unholster his gun, and then moving in front of the car, and then seeing in the video that his hand was already on his gun before the car started moving forward, and then calling her a “fucking bitch” after unloading a clip into her side window.
Not that any of that matters, because in the end they have effective immunity because the government refuses to perform a public investigation, and even invites more similar violence by effectively celebrating the occasion.
And you’re a part of the problem by enabling all of this with your sniveling justifications.
> The violence in Minnesota--that is, law enforcement killing people who are not obeying them--is nothing new. Happens in every state every day.
Sure, agreed.
> ICE deporting people isn't new, either.
Yeah, agreed.
> What's new is the folks trying to stop federal agents from doing their jobs...
Nah. Cops of all flavors have been lying (even under oath) about how they beat the shit out of (or assaulted with chemical weapons (or killed)) someone because "I was afraid for my life", "I was being obstructed during the discharge of my lawful duties", and similar for ages. That's nothing new.
What is probably new is the scale of the deployments of killer cops. What's definitely new is the extent of the media coverage of the obviously-illegal-but-roughly-noone-will-be-punished actions of many of those cops.
That these cops are injuring folks, stealing and breaking their property, kidnapping folks, and killing folks is one huge fucked-up thing. The other huge fucked-up thing is that approximately noone will ask "So, why aren't these cops immediately in jail awaiting trial? Why don't the courts think this is obviously illegal? What has gone wrong here?". Instead, this will generally be pinned on either the Trump Administration, or Trump personally... so once he's out of office, folks will go "Job's done!" and nothing will change to fix the underlying long-standing problem. [0]
[0] Do carefully note: I'm absolutely not saying that the Trump Administration (or perhaps Trump, himself) is blameless. They absolutely are responsible for the flood of poorly-trained ICE officers who pretty clearly have orders to engage in domestic terrorism. I'm pointing out that these domestic terrorists absolutely should be immediately sent to jail for what they've done. Trump and the Trump Administration have pretty much nothing to do with the fact that USian cops can kidnap, brutalize, steal, and murder with almost complete impunity... that's a long-standing problem.
Normalizing state-sanctioned extra-judicial murder along with a message of compliance? Maybe go find videos of where compliance got people killed because the fact is the slave catchers enjoy brutality and murder.
No, that's the thing. We accepted for a long time. Literally not one thing about any of this is new, except the politicians and reporters decided we need to focus on Minneapolis this month.
The same thing has been going on the same way for decades.
Because DHS thinks it's agents are special and need protection from doxing that politicians, judges, police, FBI agents don't have? Maybe ICE doesn't like receiving free pizzas and threatening phone calls? Maybe they were inspired by Hamas so they could go around being violent with little repercussions?
> In every state of the US (and most countries), people disobeying law enforcement will die. If you want to live, you comply, and you fight in court.
This is one of the worst takes I have ever seen, to the point that you must just be trolling.
Disobeying law enforcement is not a death sentence. It is often not even illegal. Just because LEO shouts "I am giving you a lawful order" does not in fact make it a lawful order. And this certainly is not happening in most other countries.
The desire to be part of the Trump Tribe has made people forget what actually made America great.
ICE aren’t law enforcement and can’t legally effect traffic stops. Their orders to Good were not lawful as they had no PC related to immigration violations.
They’re customs enforcement. That’s distinct legally and practically from law enforcement. They have no legal right to effect traffic stops, for example. They can search people only insofar as the border proximity exemption is in effect; I would assume Minneapolis is outside of this range.
If the claim is that you can fight it in court then I want to know how you'd do that. Because from where I sit there are mountains of procedural barriers to actually doing this. A lot of people assume that you can just get some remedy in court, but this is often not true.
When an ICE agent shot and killed a kid their Bivens claim was still denied.
...many people get off because of police procedure problems.
I see it constantly in my courtroom youtube feeds. Judge: "And what was the probable cause?"
Prosecutor: "(some bullshit that's not legit PC)"
Judge: ::incredulous look:: "Mr. Criminal, I'm going to dismiss this case based on lack of probable cause. I suggest you take this opportunity to fix your problems and stay out of my courtroom...blah blah blah"
The smaller the crime (like obstruction, not exactly murder or anything), the more likely it works. I think because police often use small crimes as retaliation.
There's no mountain-sized barrier, you just have your attorney bring up probable cause with the judge.
This only works for excluding evidence acquired illegally. Cases are not dismissed based on lack of probable cause. You also cannot exclude the person even if the method of their arrest was illegal. Watching some court room feeds online doesn't actually teach you meaningful things here.
And what you describe only helps you avoid a conviction. It does not actually remedy the violation of your rights. If a federal agent just beats the shit out of you for no reason and then you are not charged then the mechanism of suing them is Bivens, which has been gutted by the courts.
> Cases are not dismissed based on lack of probable cause.
I must insist that they are.
"Police must have probable cause to arrest you, and when officers lack sufficient facts and circumstances to justify arrest, courts dismiss resulting charges. Arrests based on hunches, profiling, or insufficient information violate Fourth Amendment protections."
One of the first Google results for my search. Several others say the same.
4th amendment violates are cured by the exclusionary rule, which only applies to evidence. "Oopsey-doopsey your arrest was illegal" does not actually turn into a complete dismissal automatically.
And with Bivens basically dead you cannot sue the agent for violating your rights.
There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as due process is followed and the person's rights are not infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud. Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia), so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute for it unless the victim complies.
Another great way to do this would be to preemptively arrest your political enemies with a pretext of assumed fraud and use that as a fishing expedition. Then you could spread your retribution by trying to violently suppress anyone who got in your way and use that as a pretext to send in the army to raid some billionaires' compounds.
I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants, and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.
Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.
If you genuinely believe that the Good incident was self-defense and doesn't even warrant a trial, you aren't capable the critical thinking necessary to participate in a lawful society. You are parrot of authority without autonomy.
> He's already been stuck and dragged by a vehicle in a previous incident, so he's well aware it's a weapon, and he has good reason to fear it.
That's one take. Another is that he needs serious remedial training as he's put himself in a stupidly risky spot in direct violation of ICE policies at least twice now.
"ICE officers are trained to never approach a vehicle from the front and instead to approach in a “tactical L” 90-degree angle to prevent injury or cross-fire, a senior Department of Homeland Security official told NBC News."
The clear footage we have is of the car hitting the agent. The car starts moving, when previously stopped, in violation of a lawful command, and travels directly into an agent. He can't see the tires from his viewpoint, so that doesn't influence his actions. He was hit by a car and returned fire.
You want him to be found guilty of a policy violation? Do you think there's real consequences for that?
He's not guilty of a crime. Look at some legal analysis or something, it's not hard to find.
> U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.
> The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
My translation: "Jenny Carolina Lopez: I'm taking my daughter V.M.L. (unredacted) with me to Honduras."
The judge received a petition from non-family that said a US citizen was being deported. He inquired, and found out that it was the mother's choice, not ICE's.
"On April 25, 2025, Judge Doughty issued a memorandum order addressing the emergency petition. 2025 WL 1202548. The order acknowledged the serious due process concerns raised by the petition and scheduled a hearing for May 16, 2025, to determine whether the government had unlawfully deported a U.S. citizen without providing a meaningful opportunity to challenge her removal. Despite the scheduled hearing, on May 8, 2025, the parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal, and the case was closed without a ruling on the merits."
"Some time that night, an officer who was supervising Julia and her daughters at the
hotel instructed Julia to write down on a piece of paper that her U.S. citizen daughter Jade will
travel to Honduras with her. When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be
immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade
would be deported to Honduras with her. Under duress, Julia did as instructed and wrote down in
Spanish: “I will bring my daughter [Jade] with me to Honduras.”"
> He inquired, and found out that it was the mother's choice, not ICE's.
That's directly contradicted by your link; "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
> does the difficulty in surfacing a case
I have no difficulty at all finding this case; I replied to your comment about five minutes after you posted it.
> A Trump-appointed Federal judge clearly did not find that excuse compelling.
A Trump-appointed judge set a hearing about a situation where he was told a US citizen was being deported. I would expect any judge to care about that, regardless of who appointed them. Because we don't actually deport US citizens, it turns out.
> The same org claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin who was attempting to massacre ICE, remember. They lie; that's a matter of public record.
They didn't allege in that document that it was coerced. They allege that they didn't give them enough options to contact family etc. She had an option to leave the child in the US.
> "the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."
This shows that the child going to Honduras was a choice by the mother. Under duress? Sure, she's getting deported. Tough choice. But she made it, not the government.
> That's directly contradicted by your link; "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
No it's not. What, you think the judge never saw the piece of paper? You think active cases are closed without involving the judge?
> I have no difficulty at all finding this case; I replied to your comment about five minutes after you posted it.
Sure, but it didn't fit the criteria. This US citizen wasn't deported by the government. Their mother was, and she chose to take the child with her.
> A Trump-appointed judge set a hearing about a situation where he was told a US citizen was being deported.
He's quoted as having a "strong suspicion" that a US citizen was deported.
> The same org that is claiming what?
DHS claims it was a voluntary deportation. But DHS also claimed Alex Pretti was an assassin. They're simply not credible.
> They didn't allege in that document that it was coerced.
I directly quoted it. Here it is again:
"When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."
> You think active cases are closed without involving the judge?
Again, "the case was closed without a ruling on the merits".
> Sure, but it didn't fit the criteria.
Given the above, and your other comments on incidents even Trump, Miller, and Noem are walking back their statements on, I'm not certain you're really reading anything.
> "When Julia objected, the officer threatened Julia that Jade would be immediately sent to a foster home in the United States if Julia did not write a note stating that Jade would be deported to Honduras with her."
The officer "threatened Julia" that the US citizen would stay in the US and not go with her during her deportation.
"Threatened" is a word written by her attorney. I would have said "explained."
Yes, those were her two options. Leave the US citizen in the US, or don't leave it. She made a choice. We didn't deport the kid.
I'm glad you showed how you're here to defend the fascism, which includes the fascism of claiming borders. This is why I said do your own research....no need to give more energy to questions asked in bad faith.
I did my own research, while you still won't provide a name that's supposedly so easy to find. Not one case where we actually deported a citizen, with 1.2 million forced removals.
Keep researching. You simply gave up because you're stuck in believing the narrative you're carrying. You get no points for bad faith arguments and upholding any system based on oppression.
> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind liberal-sounding fronts.
The problem I was listening to a historian discuss the other day is that we're stuck in a cycle of:
1. Republican breaks norms/laws
2. Democrat cleans up after, but by *not* breaking norms, doesn't go far enough to actually undo all the damage
3. We end up with a more broken governmental configuration, and head back to (1)
Theres a reason 99% of actions taken by democrats are just "strongly worded letters" and how they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against.
Most Democratic politicians are in on the game too. Its all just political theater and their in-group rotates out who gets to be the bad guys.
Yes Democrats clean-up by not breaking norms, but as mentioned they never go far enough because they legitimately do not want to go too far due to corporate interests and the elite.
I am left leaning but do not align with the majority of the Democratic party because they are in on this too. They have the tools to be much more antagonistic to the GOP but they purposely don't use them
I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what someone else broke by breaking the rules.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember that this is how everything used to get done. Check the old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their voting patterns.
Can you expand on this, because I'm not understanding what your grief with the 2016 DNC is. I'll help speed the process saying: 1. I voted for Bernie in the primary 2. I fully recognize -- and we all should -- that the DNC is not beholden to us to run the primary in a particular way. Until some point in the 20th century nominees were literally decided in backroom deals without primaries influencing anything. So the idea that they "robbed" us of the Bernie candidacy doesn't hold sway with me (if that's what you're arguing) even though I supported him myself.
The issue isn't not choosing Bernie, it's knowingly picking the only candidate who could possibly lose. Because as GP said, they're in on the game. The goal wasn't to pick who they sincerely believed to be the best candidate for the country, including both fitness and likelihood of winning. So it's theatre, as they pretend to put the populace first, but clearly they don't.
No, I didn't imply that anywhere. Not sure how you read that. They knew she was a very poor pick in terms of "good for the whole populace" and "maximizing the chances of winning", yet chose her despite that, not because of it. The theater is the pretending that they have the best for the populace in mind, which directly contradicts this.
One willing to break the norms and campaigning on this in Trump-like weasel words would landslide the next election. Not a chance in hell that'd be allowed to happen though, as big tech, the DNC, and the rest of the capital class would put a stop to their platform long before.
How tedious. I don't disagree, fundamentally, with your message, but this internet smart guy thing people do where they use things like $variables to signal that they are above everything and anyone who things X is bad or good just isn't smart enough to see things in the abstract really sucks. And I am very glad you are mildly bemused by people getting shot in the streets, the deterioration of democratic norms that might spiral into more violence and actual, real life, people getting fucked up. Very cool of you.
On occasion, it is worthwhile to take a step back and recognize that what is happening is not new or novel. Likewise, it is useful to recognize a pattern when it presents itself. It is extra useful ( and helpful ) that this is brought to the attention of other people who may still be going through the steps of processing of what seems to be happening.
If it helps, I appreciate going meta after me, but there is not much to dissect here. I stand by my bemused. You may think it is some soft of grand struggle and kudos for you for finding something to believe in, but don't project onto others.
I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense other than the human condition is a grand struggle for peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated inhumanely.
I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on: people really should consider how power is going to be used against them when calculating how much of it to give up in the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.
<< But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.
This may be the source of disconnect. While it might seem like I am amused by suffering, this is explicitly not the case. I shudder at the thought that people would take my argument as meaning that.
All I am saying is: things exist after their original purpose has been served ( or not served ). But those things continue to exist, because we, as a species, can't seem to help ourselves.
That weird drive within us is what I would call bemusing ( and not amusing ).
Interesting discussion to read this between you and the other poster because it showcases an almost perfect example of the way disagreements almost always appear: There is some disconnect in a definition which was implied and not stated clearly, and one side thinks their intention to be clear while the other infers what they believe to be an obvious intent shown.
On a different webforum one or the other might become agitated and emotional, at which point it does not matter what the intent was, now it only matters to "be right". Great that it was just resolved cleanly.
> The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.
This is different from what parent post describes. Parent means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used domestically, but the administrator remains the same.
Corollary: building a benign system that doesn't make the levers of control as small and close to the user as possible, is inviting someone with ulterior motives to use those controls.
And you think they won't be used against me if I don't help build them?
Seems unlikely.
If the implication is that the tools won't exist if I don't build them, that's beyond a pipe dream. We'll never get a globe of 8 billion people to agree unanimously on anything. Let alone agreeing not to build something that gives them power over their adversaries.
I will offer a benign example. A new team member was given a task to generate a dashboard that, as per spec, in great detail lists every action of a given employee within a system that generates some data for consumption by those employees.
As simple as the project was, the employee had the presence of mind to ask his seniors some thoughtful questions of what makes sense, what is too intrusive, what is acceptable. He felt uncomfortable and that was with something that corps build on a daily basis.
Now.. not everyone wakes up thinking they are building database intended to enslave humanity as a whole, but I would like to think that one person simply questioning it can make a difference.
Why would that be a given? If we remove tiktok and replace it with anything else, that replaced influence does not automatically negate my will? Case in point, when I call my mother to talk a new car purchase, does her disliking my choice automatically mean I either influenced and therefore have no will?
Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won’t be?
I have been arguing this point for several years now -- but wrt to the Democratic party's relationship with guns. The same justification used to limit the second amendment is the same justification that can be used to limit the 1st, 4th, etc.
Both parties seem to be on an authoritarian bent over the last 10-15 years, which sucks.
The mechanism to do it properly is the feds working with local and state officials where there's a full breadth of accountability and judicial coverage. Some states and cities have explicitly rejected doing this, some opting to purposefully make it harder. Trump instead of being diplomatic and trying to work with them has aggressively sent goons in to do flashy operations and pushed federal enforcement to the limits of the law.
ICE and border patrol wasn't really designed either legally or in training for these sorts of large operations, so it's created lots of dangerous situations like how to do crowd control broadly under laws like "interfering with a federal investigation", while commanders are pushing them hard for results.
I am not disagreeing with you. Paraphrasing your own words, the mechanisms exist, but they have been intentionally blunted. We can argue whether it was a good idea to blunt it, but it does not help that the administration used that blunt tool regardless.
I've always said the root problem to most of America's problems has been in action by congress. Congress could have fixed the border long ago but they let each administration either ignore it, make it far worse by actually welcoming people to violate the law, or try to fix themselves without the proper tools.
There's also no doubt that "sanctuary cities" idea helped create this dangerous situation but I personally respect state/local rights and disagree with the Executive Branch simply forcing feds into their streets to subvert it. This 100% needs local/state police coordination. Immigration enforcement is far from an unpopular idea (it was in fact the most popular thing in the election), it just needs to be done right and across the board.
How fitting that you bring up pedophiles and rapists, and trusting the system, while Trump is sitting in the white house. Do I need to point out the irony?
