Comment by iugtmkbdfil834 5 days ago
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.
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
> from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen
I feel like this is basically the case in everything.
* A lot of people don't read the article before commenting.
* Nobody reads TOS for things.
* Most people don't read academic papers.
* MIT or BSD license is easy, but how many people here have actually read the whole GPL, Apache, or Mozilla licenses.
* Voter turnout in Municipal elections here in Ontario is incredibly low.
There is too much information out there for one person. Everything is done with value judgements.
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.
I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest everyone go watch the Watchmen series on HBO
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.
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.
I expect none of that to actually happen.
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.
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.
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
I'm repeatedly shocked by the images of these ICE agents dressed like they are soldiers in a war zone.
I was just thinking how in my country immigration officials would be probably wearing formal clothes and have clipboards and paperwork.
Your comment about armed IRS agents made me laugh / reminded me about this.
His brilliant columns is the only reason I would ever consider a NYT subscription.
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...
They really did. Here’s the OG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linchpins_of_Liberty_v._United...
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?
They've also shown plans to sabotage or cancel the next two major elections.
> 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.
Will the democrats still win?
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 the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.
In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.
"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.
Obama even gave Tom Homan a medal for his work.
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.
> infamously against “Tea Party” activists
that claim was disproved by the way
but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone
Speaking of historically illiterate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is called "boomerang theory" in sociology
> 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.
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.
Yeah.
I don't subscribe to the hypocritical vies that people are expected to have "free will" and "freedom", while also being "influenced by the algorithm".
Its either one or the other. Personally I think its the former, and Tik Tok is just confirming to people what they want to hear.
<< Its either one or the other.
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?
I am not certain you considered edge cases here.
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.
Afaik only one side of the aisle asks for Russia's help with offensive cybersecurity.
Sure, but I was under impression those mechanism already exists. The question, as it were, comes to enforcement.
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?
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.