Comment by amarant
Comment by amarant 5 days ago
What is it like in the US these days? I'm on the outside (occasionally) looking in, and it looks like something out of European history class! The ice seem to have roughly the same priorities and roughly the same methodology as the SA had in the beginning.
Is stuff really as bad as it looks or are media somehow exaggerating things? I mean I saw the pretti videos and it certainly seems to corroborate what media is saying. But I'm curious to hear Americans view on matters?
As a European I'm also somewhat confused. I always thought that the reason the second amendment was made into such a big deal was because Americans felt they needed to be able to protect themselves in case the government ran amok.
Isn't this the exact scenario those arguments were talking about? Have all the second amendment supporters been employed by ice/agree with what they're doing, or was it just empty talk?
Stuff seems rough over there, if they actually are, take care everybody! Also please tell me how things actually stand inside the US cause it's making very little sense right now.
People are experiencing wildly different Americas depending on their circumstances and level of political involvement.
If you're a tech worker and you still have a job and you think AI is pretty cool and you don't follow news very closely, things seem okay...ish. You are maybe dimly aware of some social problems, but they're all somebody else's problems.
If you're one of the many many thousands of people who have been abducted by federalized lunatics, or you have a child or family member in one of our concentration camps, things seem urgently and unimaginably bad.
If you're politically involved, things seem tenuous, at best. You likely know someone who either feels justifiably terrified by what's going on, or someone whose life has been seriously impacted by it.
I've spent several months successfully combating one of YC's contributions to all this mess. Tonight, federal law enforcement fired pepper rounds, flashbangs, and tear gas into a crowd of protestors who were noisy -- not violent, not even causing property damage, just noisy. One of the officers aimed the tear gas weapon directly at a protestor's head and caused a serious head injury (the kind that causes convulsions and foaming at the mouth after impact). And, they'll get away with that.
The local police department was flying half a dozen drones directly over this, but they are only there to surveil and look for an excuse to put on riot gear.
There were an assortment of reporters there, but most of them have editors or owners that won't run much of a story about any of it. A few politicians showed up, but they made a short speech and then left immediately. The building where this all happened is in a city center, so, just a block away, life and traffic continues as normal and most people are entirely unaware.
So that's also why nobody's really been making an organized 2A effort either. For most people, this isn't "real", in the sense that it isn't something they're experiencing, and for those that are experiencing it, they're trying to walk a tightrope that resists the current administration without spiraling into a widespread civil war.