If you require a tech angle: how about the fact that smartphones have enabled this incident to be recorded from many angles by everyday citizens? A couple of decades ago we'd likely only have the government's word for it. How long before AI messes up that trust?
EDIT: what do you know? This post has disappeared from the front page. Currently in the 57th spot on page 2. And yes, "Eat Real Food" remains exactly where it was.
If you didn't already know about HN's moves to minimize visibility of government wrongdoing, well, you do now.
Example: https://www.instagram.com/jackmposobiec/p/DTQJKG9AJWT/
Nor did I claim there was. My point is simply that there is a very obvious pattern to what passes this subjective "gratifies intellectual curiosity" test among those with the ability to flag posts from the front page.
Case in point, this thread is now being visibly flagged off the homepage:
"ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543420
It's inarguably tech-relevant and for the intellectually curious. And yet...
All that their "anti-politics" flags really do is to make HN more of a "head-in-the-sand" echo-chamber for right-wing ideologies.
It's not necessarily "right-wing" per se, for example during COVID questioning the party line on masks and vaccines could catch you massive downvotes and flagging. It's this technocratic neoliberal cryptofascist thing the people who have always actually run Silicon Valley adhere to.
The biggest vulnerably of the entire social media model is the "engagement pyramid" where the number of viewers is much larger than the number of upvoters is much larger than the number of commenters.
HN gets ~5 million monthly unique visitors, or 150,000 per day (conservatively assuming each visitor only shows up once, so that number is probably much larger). But if you look the top post right now has around ~1,500 upvotes, and ~200 comments (and, if you look, comment sections frequently have single users commenting repeatedly, so less than 200 actual people commenting).
This makes it very easy and very worth it to run even loosely coordinated commenting/upvoting rings. 10 people can easily downvote a new post off the homepage, give the impression that the community disapproves of a certain opinion, disrupt conversation, etc.
What's funny is that proposing this is often treated as a claim of a wild conspiracy theory. But the weakness in most conspiracy theories is that they require high levels of coordination among similarly large groups of actors, often for little reward. In this case it's almost more outrageous to claim that this isn't happening (especially since I have personally seen teams of people coordinate to get their startups work on the front page). I suspect even 3 very coordinated people could do a lot to control the front page (or alternatively increasingly large N of increasingly less coordinated people).
The fact is, the current authoritarian political movement in the USA is being largely funded and driven by political extremists in our own community, who have become billionaires through tech, and are using their significant resources to inflict their personal fantasies on the rest of the world, without it's permission.
By all accounts, our own Peter Thiel hand selected the current vice president for his position. The very person that today claimed at a press conference that ICE agents have "absolute immunity" and are therefore presumably allowed to murder anyone they want in cold blood without any recourse or accountability. Elon Musk's involvement here needs no explanation.
Musk, Thiel, and their ilk that are often referenced by labels such as "Dark Enlightenment," "Techno Fascists," and "Neo-monarchists" are from and part of our community. Many of us were or still are engineers and business leaders that work or worked for or with them to give them the power and resources they now have. Some of us are even likely working at places like Palantir, developing government surveillance tech designed to accelerate the systematic dismantling of privacy, freedom, and democracy.
To now pretend that this has nothing to do with us and we don't talk about things like this when people are being shot in the street, and murderers are being protected by a corrupt government that was in part selected and installed by our own community is morally reprehensible. As a community, we need to take some responsibility here, and not censoring uncomfortable facts will be a good starting point.
Moreover, hacker culture is rooted in a historical ethos of freedom, anti-authoritarianism, and inclusion. If any of that ethos still persists, it goes completely at odds with the current status quo, where we refuse to talk about this issue, while members of our community continue to inflict widespread harm on the world.
I think what certain users dislike (for some reason) is government politics or social justice politics unless it's a topic they care about.
The current administration frequently gets away with pretending like they're not "political" and that only the people reacting/responding to them are political even though they are definitionally political.
And the kinds of things that are defined as political seem to only be completely valid criticisms of the government, because they're "controversial".
The number of people who claim to be non-political and are actually just conservative libertarians (I know what site I'm on) feels like it's sky-rocketed, and I would like to see HN and other platforms start calling this out. No one is non-political in the same way that no one is "color blind". Your politics are just unpopular, and you know it.
To add a more personal opinion here which I also think is correct, all of this is intentional and deliberate and I'm sure there are people "in the know" who this is so obvious to but I'm only 25 and I only start wrapping my head around this stuff by the day. The admin clearly shaped conditions for something like this to happen but also create plausible deniability. You take people who aren't properly-vetted, and want this job, you know what will happen. Especially when you do it at scale, for a long enough time, it's an inevitability. What's the reason? Well the most scary thing I've noticed is how it's drawn a line. The other side, they're human and maybe find themselves trapped in a position but the chips are coming down. This is forcing people to take a stand that they might not agree with to remain in their community, their families, and even keep their careers, to take the step themselves of being ok with cold-blooded murder.
All this to say, for the "bad thing" to happen, it doesn't just happen, it needs to be tested and proved and honestly, no one knows exactly how to get there (though we have some historical examples to look at). So the administration is testing, proving, prodding, deliberately to shape things so the conditions for the "bad system" can arise. A bit the breaking the seals in revelation except the seals are our moral composure as a society and the rule of law. This is a big step in that direction of badness and viewing r/conservative on Reddit (very botted), you can see how dire the party line has become. That's my theory at least.
The militia that DHS has deployed in search of immigration law violators has spilled over into confrontations with US citizens partly because of the lack of accountability, transparency, and training. By making these newbie teams of gung ho militia anonymous and independent of any oversight, the DHS administration has lit a fuse for an inevitable explosion.
I don't know what was said between the agents in the moments before events unfolded that lead to Renee Nicole Good's death on camera(s). I do suspect (and speculate) that a spontaneous decision was made, inside the cab of the officer's vehicle, by one of the three officers involved (who was in charge?), to exit the pickup, move forward to demand immediate compliance, to exert force under a sudden assertion of authority.
To me, watching the videos, it appeared that in that critical moment of deciding to prosecute the Good woman, the agents had exhausted their patience with the scattered crowd of citizen 'observers', annoyed by the entire exercise of locals with their camera phones and their ignorant application of so-called civil rights. The impatience and aggression is clear and visible in one of the videos, which show the sudden exit from the pickup, the aggressive approach to the driver's side door, the three commands from one officer to "Get out of the car!" (with the third command adding an emphatic expletive).
This emotional behavior exhibits the result of explicit psychological conditioning, the development of mistrust and hostility towards citizenry which imho is purposefully encouraged to unify the team. The team is coached to make the militia into a cohesive unit that will hold itself elite, empowered, enabled to enforce retribution for whatever slight a team or team leader may perceive.
They have been told they are righteous in their mission. They have been told that they bear the full authority of the federal government, and that they have the right to detain and/or arrest anyone who they perceive is obstructing them in performing their duties. They have been coached and prepared for battle, not just focused on the criminal illegal immigrants that are their purvue, but for anyone who appears to be in their way.
Without accountability, and without interview access to the agents involved, we'll never know what was said and decided between those three officers. Only they know how and why and when they decided to take down the Good woman, instead of moving on to the next task in their team's agenda. Only they can speak to their intentions, what they thought their probable cause was, or even if they considered probable cause, arrest, prosecution.
Maybe they only wanted payback. Maybe they were just frustrated and thus determined that the team's morale needed lifting with a good old application of force under the auspices of authority. Maybe yanking a woman out of her vehicle and taking her into custody in full view of all these citizen journalists would help spread the word that ICE is not to be messed with.
But we'll never know, because the entire apparatus of the federal government is no longer to be trusted, not to investigate and report on itself.
Donald Trump wants a national police force accountable to no one but himself.
> If you didn't already know about HN's moves to minimize visibility of government wrongdoing, well, you do now.
Yet another reason to always browse the "front page" of HN using https://hckrnews.com which is chronological and uncensored.
(There are also site-based penalties, much mainstream news has a modest penalty, and occasional other filters usually for highly-submitted topics.)
I'm gonna say the same thing I said the last time someone made national news by dying on camera at the hands of law enforcement officers in Minneapolis: The world may by some people's estimation be better without the deceased in it but that does not excuse the keystone coppery that cause it to happen when, where and how it did at the hands of law enforcement.
The world would be better without those people in it.
https://dps.mn.gov/news/bca/bca-statement-regarding-investig... ("BCA statement regarding investigation of ICE fatal shooting in Minneapolis")
https://web.archive.org/web/20260108163819/https://dps.mn.go...
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44333094>
Email mods (<hn@ycombinator.com>) if you have concerns.
Why waste your time? Dang or Tom will link you to the same pseudo intellectual analysis and claim there is no bias.
Meanwhile, we have eat good food and iran protests plastering the front page, while the news of a an unprovoked murder of a US citizen by masked agents of the state gets buried with flags.
We all know the answer.
We had a tweet about killing communists up on the front page for two days, but this topic remains flagged.
What status quo does that represent? Unless we will openly admit that the status quo referred to is fascism, and hackernews largely represents that.
The Minnesota ICE murder story has had multiple submissions and discussion. The Palantir-founder tweet-based story only one AFAIU. HN deprecates repeated discussion of a given topic.
(Dang and other mods discuss this point often.)
Again, I'm describing HN's dynamics, and how to intervene effectively should you care to do so. I'm not defending it, though I'll grudgingly admit it works pretty well much of the time. Politics (of virtually any stripe or national focus) tends to be far more failure-prone, however.
> "According to my sources, the FBI was initially open to a concurrent investigation with the MN Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (the state agency that would do this investigation)."
> "Trumpy U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen heard about this and intervened, barring the FBI from cooperating with local police."
https://bsky.app/profile/radleybalko.bsky.social/post/3mbwfz...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jade_Helm_15_conspiracy_theori...
Here is an article with more information about use of force investigations related to state vs fed, including the use of vehicles.
https://www.startribune.com/are-federal-immigration-agents-h...
Edit: why disagree? I'm adding more information about the process of accountability for fed vs state use of force than the original article even has.
Ironically, that describes your link.
> As it stands right now, the claim that it is important seems more like conspiracy theory unless you have more information to share.
The head of Minnesota's state investigations agency seems to publicly think it's important.
This is a very good demonstration of the epistemic purpose of this term and the uses it is put to.