Comment by mekdoonggi 5 days ago
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.
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.
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
> Everything is done with value judgements.
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.
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.
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?
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...
Of course you like it, the whole point of grokipedia is to give a slant for people who share Musk’s political views. The vandalism is endemic.
Eh? Every political page on Grokipedia is vandalized by Grok.
Your comment just tells us that your worldview is consistent with that of an intentionally right-biased source manufactured by a pedobot.
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.
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.
The difference is that the Obama version was done with due process, i.e. constitutionally.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You aren't seeing them because you aren't looking for them. And you're making excuses for the ones you see. Go find them. Do searches.
> 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.
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.