The classic example here is what happens when someone is being stalked by an abusive ex-partner who works in law enforcement and has access to those databases.
This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
Google/Alphabet knows quite a lot about your sentiments, what information you've seen, your relationships, who can get to you, who you can get to, your hopes and fears, your economic situation, your health conditions, assorted kompromat, your movements, etc.
Schmidt is actually from OG Internet circles where many people were aware of privacy issues, and who were vigilant against incursions.
But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks. Or perhaps he was going to have enough money and power that he wasn't personally threatened by private info that would threaten the less-wealthy.
We might learn this year, how well Google/Alphabet protects this treasure trove of surveillance state data, when that matters most.
Google or any other US company will not be defending your's or anyone's else's data. It's not only that they doesn't want to(which they dont) but they simply can't.
You must comply with the law and you do not want to currently piss off anyone's at the top.
[0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...
the ad game is not about profiling you specifically, it's about how many people in a group are likely to click and convert to a sale; they're targeting 6 million people, not you specifically, and that's balanced by how much the people who want the ads are willing to pay.
palantir or chinese social credit, etc., is targeting you specifically, and they don't care about costs if it means they can control the system, forever.
That platter of details is not shown to you, the consumer.
What you are experiencing is that your ad profile isn't valuable to most bidders, ie you don't buy stuff as much as other people do, or your ad profile is somehow super attractive to stupid companies that suck at running ads who are overpaying for bad matches.
It is not evidence that google knows nothing about you.
Google is pleased that you think they don't know you. It helps keep the pressure down when people mistake this system for "Perfectly target ads". The system is designed to make google money regardless of how good or bad their profile of you is.
Stop pretending like Schmidt was or is "one of the good guys." They all knew from day one what the score was.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...
> But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks
I feel that as the consumer surveillance industry took off, everyone from those OG Internet circles was presented with a choice - stick with the individualist hacker spirit, or turncoat and build systems of corporate control. The people who chose power ended up incredibly rich, while the people who chose freedom got to watch the world burn while saying I told you so.
(There were also a lot of fence sitters in the middle who chose power but assuaged their own egos with slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot)
Just invoking Richard Stallman will prove it because the smear campaign on him was so thorough.
Linus seems to be the only one that made it out.
You’re doing literally what I described
The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.
The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.
And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.
And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).
Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.
But yes, individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated and coexisted. I'd say this is because they were merely different takes on the same liberating ground truths. Or at least liberating-seeming perceptions of ground truths...
Here’s a question - since you have such strong feelings did you write the editor of the piece for their explanation?
erm hes a creep, claimed to be rapist... not many redeemable qualities.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...
He's got a whole lotta people doing over-time trying to bury this.
> So she didn't have any problems "escaping" the relationship.
A woman claimed she was raped by her partner. She left that partner some time later. You questioned it because she didn't leave him immediately and left him after allegations of cheating, completely ignoring the complexity of being in an abusive relationship, and expressing skepticism of the woman for not immediately leaving him. That is really shameful and gross to do.
And even here you are expressing skepticism "Tell me what difficulty she had". You clearly are out of your depth here, clearly ignorant about the dynamics of abuse, and are saying some really nasty stuff about a woman you know nothing about, and now digging in your heels when it's pointed out. You have no place to question anything about this woman's relationship.
And no I will not question the claim. What is wrong with you?
Here's another source:
https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/former-google-ceo-s...
An interesting thing is how most of the photos that the media is using to cover this are sexualized images of Ritter and pics of Schmidt in a suit.
EDIT: It's really interesting that your link mentions nothing about any rape charges. These inconsistencies are why I am confused and asking questions. These inconsistencies should have you asking questions, too.
> So she didn't have any problems "escaping" the relationship.
It's pretty telling that you don't have a sense of the power dynamics that come with sexual violence like this, especially, as I said, with somebody like Eric Schmidt.
Tell me what difficulty she had escaping the relationship. You act like you know more than I.
I pulled my link from the list of sources there. You can check those sources too.
All that said I was pretty unkind and scattered, and I apologize for that.
Eric had also once said in a CNBC interview "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
How about Musk? He felt he had a right to hoover up data about people from every government agency, but throws a massive temper-tantrum when people publish where his private jet is flying using publicly available data.
How about Mark Zuckerberg? So private he buys up all the properties around him and has his private goon squad stopping people on public property who live in the neighborhood, haranguing them just for walking past or near the property.
These people are all supremely hypocritical when it comes to privacy.
he got mad at gawker for deliberately outing him right as he went to meet the saudis for negotiations. a country that literally executes gay people. at best it strained the negotiations and made things awkward, and at worst could have put him in peril.
you dont just out people without their consent, and that goes for rich or poor.
Nah fuck him. If you're closeted and funding anti-queer causes and politicians you deserve to be outed.
Or perhaps don't do business with people who would happily execute you? All that says to me is Thiel values money over anything else.
The insinuation that Gawker in any way shape or form "outed" him is just laughable.
Gawker is absolutely trash media, to be quite clear.
> and that goes for rich or poor
I do agree about this, for certain things - but in others, no - and indeed, courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently "public figures"... "due to their outsized influence on public affairs and opinion".
I also have significant issues with his bankrolling of Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker as an abomination of the legal system, including the right to face one's "accuser":
- Hogan had already agreed in principle to a part ownership stake and profits of Gawker.
- Lawyers paid for by Thiel pushed for him to drop that and push instead for bankrupting Gawker through damages (which were laughable, see below). (Hypothetical question, if you're an attorney, ostensibly representing Hogan, but you know the person paying your bills, Thiel, wants a different outcome for the case, when push comes to shove, whose interests are you going to represent? See the following point too).
- When the case and awarded damages -did- actually threaten to bankrupt Gawker, Thiel/Hogan's lawyers did the most illogical thing possible, if they were looking to recoup any money for their ostensible client... they dropped the one claim against Gawker that would have allowed their liability insurance to at least partially pay out.
(Re damages: The amount that Hogan had originally asked for seemed reasonable. Then after Thiel's lawyers got involved, the amount asked for was multiplied five thousand times.
This included economic damages of fifty million dollars. For a man who had made something in the order of $10-15M his entire career? Who had a net worth at its peak of $30M, and at the time of the lawsuit of $8M? I highly doubt that TV stations pulling reruns of old WWF events, lost hair commercial and other endorsements was worth that. (They separately asked for emotional damages, too, to be clear. But there was near zero justification for this economic damages claim.)
I wonder how much Thiel paid Hogan under the table for this proxy lawsuit?
- Eric Schmidt
Apparently any time they do anything horrifying, they will just declare that victim as a "terrorist" or something, and their sycophantic supporters will happily agree.
What I find amusing is that when the Snowden leaks happened and I would discuss it, when I said something like "let's pretend for a moment that we can't trust every single person in the government" I would usually get an agreeable laugh.
But using these same arguments with ICE + Palantir, these same people will say something like "ICE IS ONLY DEPORTING THE CRIMINALS YOU JUST WANT OPEN BORDERS!!!". People's hypocrisy knows no bounds.
I suppose that there could be an extremely elaborate LLM to control humanoid robots to try and fool me, but I do not believe that's the case.
Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.
Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.
Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.
Psychology is weird. As soon as something becomes a part of your identity you start living as though it is really you that is attacked, rather than the thing you stand for, no matter what it is, no matter whether it is positive or negative. The response is invariable to dig in.
Religion, atheism, vegetarianism, fascism, libertarian, democrat or republican, fan of Arsenal or rather the opposite and so on. They all tap into some kind of deep tribal sense of belonging and people will go to extreme lengths to defend their tribe at the expense of themselves. There probably is a direct evolutionary link here as well.
People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.
But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.
I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.
Sorry for the tangent.
It will take extreme mental fortitude and some degree of self isolation not to be pulled in. When I was 15 the peer pressure to start smoking, drinking and using drugs was absolutely off the charts. I stopped going to parties, basically. Until I was 13 or 14 or so it was ok and then from one moment to the next it stopped being fun. People don't like being confronted with their own idiocy and just having one reminder in a roomful of people that you're doing something stupid is apparently enough to become really aggressive against that person. Better if it isn't just you, so the first enlist some of your buddies.
That experience really helped me in many ways.
People in large groups are far more stupid than individuals, and the internet has tied people together into all kinds of weird large groups that reinforce their worst belief systems.
That political movement was basically "Fox News will save us from the Government", and of course, "Black people are their own problem"
Donald Trump can be directly traced back to shit Nixon did, and every single Republican administration since. "If the president does it, it's not illegal" is literally how Nixon tried to defend his crimes.
It's a common trope in liberal circles that Fox News was started explicitly to never ever let that happen again. Well, it worked.
IMO it goes all the way back to reconstruction being abandoned because racist people voted for horrifically racist politicians who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. America elected many politicians, including literal presidents, who thought fixing the problem of genuine traitors should be avoided.
The confederacy was a shithole, authoritarian state who's entire purpose was maintaining the institution of slavery, and the vast majority of it's supporters didn't even hold slaves. But they needed to live in a world where a black person was inherently worse than they were. The confederacy was also working to lean on the dumbest fundamentalists Christians they could find, the ones who lapped up the "God wants us to enslave black people" tripe they spouted, and millions did exactly that. The Confederacy was exploring being an explicit theocracy, but the main reason against that was essentially that the oligarchs preferred being in control.
This happened again with the Civil Rights movement, where America has responded by pretending it wasn't real, we never did anything to black people that wronged them after we banned slavery, it's all woke nonsense, why do black people keep talking about being oppressed, "Obama shouldn't have made it a race thing" when it was definitely a race thing, etc.
Half the country has been convinced that stories about Russia running disinformation campaigns are a hoaxes.
> I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate
I read a similar argument years ago about how disinformation gets into the networks. It starts with bots sharing and discussing with each other until it reaches the level to hit a few real people (useful idiots) who then share it out giving it more credence. Musk comes to mind as a key target for these types of posts now.
you think a news site about tech startups run by their incubator -- who has serious interest in seeing these companies make money -- wouldn't run shillbots 24/7?
Bots are not necessary for indoctrination, Fox does that already. But bots help creating dissent and make people busy defending against all the crap.
Another opinion that I’m sure will get me downvoted is that this is the primary reason I support gun ownership by private citizens. I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter like in Iran and Syria is overall better than the downside.
Bottom line is that human nature has not changed. Some of us westerners take comfortable lives for granted because we’ve been lucky.
This would be questionable 100 years ago, let alone today's technology. Civils just can't organize efficiently, and "heads" (like someone locally coordinating civils) can be cut off easily by a central force (like it's just a drone strike away). The only real power is that a sane military will not turn against their own people. You don't need weapons for that.
That won't stop the mass government slaughter, if anything it will accelerate it.
What is required is a constant fight against obscurantism. It's a cultural battle.
Also note of sale (underground, also trivially made on one's own) in france is also FGC-9 pistols (modern gun + ammo easily made in short time in france, all with unregulated components), and attackers in france have also used re-activated decommissioned rifles.
Your country is awash in guns for anyone who wants it.
Which I bet our luck has run out. This year and the next 5 or 10 years from now, its going to be really bad.
I don't even trust local state governments at this point.. It all seems like a big ploy on the people to keep the grift going.
it's starting right now, brother. time to put your money where your mouth is.
we'll see how many of these 2nd amendment uber alles types are actually chickenhawks real soon...
There are an estimated 100K illegal immigrants in Minnesota,[1] and about 2M in Texas.[2] With 900K in Florida, 350K in Georgia, 325K in North Carolina, etc. [3]
Why doesn't ICE concentrate on fishing where the fish are… but of course that would mean doing stuff in red states.
[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
[2] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-unauthorized-immigra...
The visible disruptive protests against ICE activity are also the sort of thing that you'd expect the sorts of voters that make a blue state blue to do, so when ICE does arrest illegal immigrants in red states, there's much fewer people who are inclined to protest it and therefore less publicity in general.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-houston-arrests-more-3...
Some of the George Floyd protests devolved into riots. That is not what is happening in MN, or TX, or anywhere. Police or federal officers using riot dispersal techniques against a protest does not suddenly make the protest a riot.
ICE and CBP do not have the remit to behave like they are doing in these situations either - they do not have the same powers as local law enforcement. Yet we see them issuing unlawful commands - like telling Good to get out of her vehicle. They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car. Pretti was shot after the weapon he had never brandished or gone for was removed from his person while he has a multitude of CBP agents dogpiling him. (We could also talk how that shot was insanely dangerous and stupid for the CBP officer to begin with, even if there had been a threat - he very easily could have shot his fellow officers.)
It doesn't matter if MPD is there. If they're absent, this doesn't suddenly give ICE and CBP the authority to police in a way that they are explicitly not allowed to do. This doesn't give them the right to shoot people when they are not actually in danger.
Fundamentally, I do not understand why you think anything in your comment is a rebuttal to the point being made. I don't understand why you think it is even relevant to the discussion at all.
I agree. Assaulting police or federal officers, harassing citizens and blocking traffic does though, and the police acts on that, not just randomly gassing people because Trump.
>ICE and CBP do not have the remit to behave like they are doing in these situations either - they do not have the same powers as local law enforcement.
Yes, they have different powers yet they employ sworn officers and those can arrest people who they believe are committing crimes in front of them.
>They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car.
Need a source for that, it's news to me.
>It doesn't matter if MPD is there.
It does though. Even in LA the mayor was not as dumb as to order LAPD to stand down and as the result zero people got shot by feds during more massive riots than in Minneapolis. Local police is more lenient and less likely to use deadly force even when met with violence, you'd imagine if mayor had any compassion for his constituents he'd sent the police to deal with them rather than leave it to feds.
The first of the things in this list has a very large gap with the rest. I have seen zero evidence there is any sort of widescale assault on police or federal officers with these protests. Some isolated incidents, yes, but isolated incidents are not riots.
Harassing citizens does not make something a riot. Blocking traffic does not make something a riot.
They might not be protected by the 1A (Well, depending on what you mean by 'harassing citizens' it very well might be, that's a very broad term) but that isn't the same thing as a riot.
> Yes, they have different powers yet they employ sworn officers and those can arrest people who they believe are committing crimes in front of them.
They can arrest people for committing federal crimes in front of them or with reasonable suspicion of a felony having occurred. This is different from what they are doing
> Need a source for that, it's news to me.
Some lawyers/law professors discussing this.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1196194852659037 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyoBDxPeMfg
> It does though. Even in LA the mayor was not as dumb as to order LAPD to stand down and as the result zero people got shot by feds during more massive riots than in Minneapolis. Local police is more lenient and less likely to use deadly force even when met with violence, you'd imagine if mayor had any compassion for his constituents he'd sent the police to deal with them rather than leave it to feds.
Your entire argument seems to be based on the idea that if cops aren't around then it's the fault of anyone but CBP/ICE when CBP/ICE fuck up. Which is a weird abdication of personal responsibility.
> Local police is more lenient and less likely to use deadly force even when met with violence,
In particular here, I'd say it's not a matter of leniency - local police undergo training at a policy academy and a supervised training period when they enter the job. In combination this can result in years of training. They also have background checks done. Most large departments also employ some form (or even multiple forms) of psychological screening. They have ongoing re-training and re-certification around all sorts of topics including de-escalation and dealing with the public.
And police still fuck it up fairly regularly. Meanwhile, ICE has 47 days of training (the number chosen, of course, because Trump is president #47...) and no-to-minimal background and psychological screening. Police are less likely to use violent force because we have attempted to select for people that will not use it unnecessarily and also provided extensive training to them on when and when not to use it.
For example, even if you believe lethal force is justified in a situation like Good's, the immediate consequences show that it was the incorrect choice for the stated claim - after she was shot in the head, the vehicle accelerated at a far greater speed and with no human control over it. Many departments now train their officers to not be in front of vehicles like this because they know that not only does it unnecessarily increase the risk to the officer, but that in a situation like this one they do not have recourse to stop it from happening - shooting the driver of a car that is right in front of you does not decrease your chances of getting run over even if they are intending to do so (and by no means do I think it is likely that Good ever intended to do so), and if they are not actively attempting to run you over, can even increase it.
It depends on your scale, in the both cases of shootings though the victims assaulted an officer before they had been shot. It's on video and in case you deny that - look up the definition of assault as a criminal act.
>Harassing citizens does not make something a riot. Blocking traffic does not make something a riot.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot
>Some lawyers/law professors discussing this.
Don't have Facebook but in the Youtube video some dude literally says "unless they have some type of a reason to detain you" at 0:50. You said "They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car.", if it was so there had been some statue saying that they are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car, this is what explicitly means. Not some dude on youtbue saying they cannot arrest you unless they have a reason to arrest you, duh.
>Your entire argument seems to be based on the idea that if cops aren't around then it's the fault of anyone but CBP/ICE when CBP/ICE fuck up.
Nope. My entire argument is that if cops were around they would have prevented people from the law school of reddit and Youtube from committing crimes against armed officers and getting killed in the process.
Good never touches the officer with her car. This is clearly the case from the close up video, and every single claim I have seen otherwise relies on a heavily compressed low resolution video taken from significant distance away. His cell phone video does not provide any evidence of him being hit, and there has been no actual evidence or documentation provided that he received any medical treatment. Conversely, we do see him walking around without any obvious issue for some time after the shooting. The medical examiner also determined that it was the 2nd or 3rd shot that killed her - the shots that went through the driver window where he was indisputably no longer in the path of the vehicle when he fired. Lethal force is not allowed to be a punitive act of revenge, it is to protect the safety of the officer and others. We can't argue that it was for the safety of anyone else, because as we saw in the video, killing her sent the vehicle even more out of control.
For Pretti, it is not cut and dry as to whether there is anything worthy of assault. His actions all seem purely defensive and more about stabilizing himself, etc., to me than anything else, but we have seen cases where I do not understand how a jury of my peers could find the actions of the defendant to be assault, so I won't rule it out. But none of that changes the fact that the firearm that he was legally carrying and had never brandished nor made a move to handle during the event had already been removed from his person when he was shot and killed while having a multitude of CBP officers on top of him.
Either way, are you claiming that these occurrences were riots? Come on. It is incredibly clear from all of the videos in both cases that these conflicts were not riots by any stretch of the imagination. What are we even doing in this conversation?
> Don't have Facebook but in the Youtube video some dude literally says "unless they have some type of a reason to detain you" at 0:50. You said "They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car.", if it was so there had been some statue saying that they are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car, this is what explicitly means. Not some dude on youtbue saying they cannot arrest you unless they have a reason to arrest you, duh.
The second link has a lawyer going into more detail about what those reasons are and the legal justifications around them. I will concede I could have worded my statement more explicitly, but my point is that there was no cause for them to ask Good to get out of her vehicle. Recording videos, protesting, etc., are not reasonable cause to start detaining people and pulling them out of their vehicles,
"Some dude on youtube" makes it sound like this is just a random video and not a clip of a news anchor interviewing a law professor. There's a reason people are saying you're arguing in bad faith.
> Nope. My entire argument is that if cops were around they would have prevented people from the law school of reddit and Youtube from committing crimes against armed officers and getting killed in the process.
Committing a crime is not immediate justification for being shot. We have due process and a multi-tiered legal system for a reason.
Why are you holding everyday people to higher standards than law enforcement? Arming them and giving them the legal right to use lethal force when necessary as part of their daily jobs comes with the expectation that they will do so with prudence. Even if Good and Pretti were not acting fully within the bounds of the law, that does not in and of itself justify or mitigate the actions of CBP and ICE here.
Okay, there is nothing left to discuss.
Whether or not her car made contact with her killer, no reasonable person would assume she had any desire to run him over. There's also no reason for anyone to believe that shooting her as she drove past prevented an imminent mass casualty attack.
So then your argument boils down to: if you brush against law enforcement with your car, even by accident, they should kill you on the spot in retaliation.
It's not a claim anyone in this thread has made though. The claim I find ridiculous is "Good never touches the officer with her car."
>Whether or not her car made contact with her killer, no reasonable person would assume she had any desire to run him over.
You are welcome not to discuss it then, I, however, see someone claiming there was no contact in face of the contact shown on video and deduct that the person is either delusional or hopes to gaslight me somehow.
That's really all that matters. We have a video that shows the distance between the two for all of the relevant points of the situation. What you might have guessed something would have been from a bad angle becomes an irrelevant metric when there is superior evidence available. I don't know why it looks like he is moving that way on a ultra compressed low resolution video shot from a distance. I don't really care, either, because I can look at the video that was shot from right at the scene, with higher resolution, less compression, and a much better angle.
You've also completely dodged the overwhelming majority of the comment where the meat of the argument was for anything that actually matters. Hell, not even the most relevant point for just Good. Even if I were to agree she had hit him with the car, the medical examiner determined the fatal shot was either the 2nd or 3rd which came through the driver window of the car.
But how were either of these riots? How do they reinforce your argument that there is rioting?
Why are you being disingenuous in how you present the argument being made to you?
Why are you arguing to hold people who are at least nominally law enforcement to a lower standard than everyday civilians when it comes to following it?
You might have, I don't.
But let's pretend you're right, MPD is completely absent, it doesn't forgive anything ICE has done, actually. It is disingenuous to act like it does.
The "bad faith" part is that it's really not relevant. I made a comment about ICE murdering civilians and you diverted to some tangent about MPD that doesn't actually detract from my original point. Because it's not relevant, I don't think it was brought up in good faith.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pHpFAAzWhTY
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-se...
I would like to hold my country to higher standards than "Eh, it's better than oppressive regimes where people get murdered for political dissent."
Unfortunately, the events we're seeing in MN may show that we're in danger of even that standard being too high for us.
Many people are trying to evade oppressive regimes where their prospects might literally mean death. The US can still be "terrible" while still not being quite as dangerous as that.
I mean, this kind of reads victim-blamey; hyperbolic example, when a person stays with an abusive partner for much longer than they should, does that imply that that relationship isn't terrible?
I 100% agree with this sentiment and that is why I strongly support speeding the asylum application process through redirecting immigration enforcement funding to bolstering the courts. Our backlog should be 0 before we start knocking door to door and stopping people for the suspicious behavior of being brown at Home Depot.
From a systems perspective, we're heavily funding the most expensive and disruptive part of the pipeline (identification and removal) while starving the part that actually resolves legal status (adjudication, asylum review, work authorization). Though maybe that's a feature of this administration, not a bug.
If the goal is public safety, prioritizing people who commit violent crimes makes sense. If the goal is restoring legal order, then yeah, the obvious first step is to drive the backlog toward zero. I don't think that's the administration's goal though.
If they have access to all this information that was volunteered, then why are they so utterly incompetent at actually deporting illegal aliens?
That said, the disturbing part of Palantir and ICE isn't just that they are reading my driver's license or my legal status, it's the fact that they know everything.
You are absolutely, unequivocally incorrect that anyone in any significant numbers wants "open borders". I know this is a meme, but it's a meme that isn't true.
What is stopping this lowlife from going after his ex-wife, or one of those cops by using databases that they have access to? We know from journalists going through the process that there's no curation or training involved to join ICE specifically.
But this goes beyond them. We know that cops can be corrupt to, we know politicians can be corrupt to, what is stopping any of these people from using private data to not only go after their spouses, but also business rivals, and people who slight them?
Same as with all other crime, we hope it's the law that stops him. We hope that more policemen want to be good men than bad.
The illusion of safety is based on the honor system. Society doesn't work without that.
It only works for people the state expects significant amounts of money from (taxes don’t count)
Don’t expect a government to help you unless you’re one of its larger donors
You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.
<< Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit?
First, note that I did not mention anyone specific, but the poster chose to read my words that described a generic state of propaganda wielded by various power centers specifically as related to Trump.
Apart from the obvious that it now forces us to read the remaining posts with that lens, it also suggests that the poster is oblivious to other sources of propaganda.
<< Surely that must be his base, yes?
I am not particularly certain where that incessant need to end each sentence with a question demanding approval/acknowledgement comes from, but I did see it pop up in other languages suggesting it is not exactly an organic growth.
That said, as phrased, if it is his base, then the answer seems to be that his base is ok with it. But, and it is not a small but, base is not an individual and I would like you to carefully consider whether applying the same lens based on political leaning is.. well.. smart. Things tend go awry with group punishments.
<< and hold them at least morally responsible
In your own words, what does that mean.. exactly?
The Supreme Court. Then congressional leadership of both parties. After that perhaps we could look to governors of large states like New York or California.
Please explain how the Supreme Court has any power to stop a President surrounded by heads of the FBI, Homeland Security - all of whom have sworn allegiance to the Man ( Trump ) and not to the Office?
As a trial attorney for 40+ years ( now retired ), it is my impression that SCOTUS is acutely aware of their powerless position vis-a-vis Trump and has tried to avoid decisions that prompt him to finally declare that SCOTUS can only offer non-binding advice to the Executive Branch.
Note: I say this while painfully aware that some ( eg Thomas and Alito ) have their own agenda and no misgivings that the pro-Trump rulings have changed the balance of power between SCOTUS and the Executive. While I am suspicious of the intentions of the other conversative Justices, I lean towards believing that they voted as they did because they knew the alterative was to deal with the crisis of the President declaring SCOTUS has zero authority over the Executive.
The people on the front lines - including the ICE thugs - are entirely disposable. They people using them have zero interest in their welfare or how this works out for them in the long term. (Spoilers - not well.)
Of course they don't understand this. But this is absolutely standard for authoritarian fascism - groom and grudge farm the petty criminals and deviants, recruit them as regime enforcers with promises of money and freedom from consequences, set them loose, profit.
That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you.
They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors.
They aren't exactly voting for democrats.
This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it.
This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument.
Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth.
THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence.
They live in a fake reality.
You either don't have a child or have an agenda that does not include your input in its future. This is the nicest and most charitable take I can have here. In short, but you are wrong in a way that you might not even understand to be possible. FWIW, I heard this line of argumentation before and, amusingly based on the argument itself, reeks of current education system.
I was raised by a hyper abusive boxer-turned-Catholic deacon and forced to be involved in the Church. I've read the Bible front to back, we don't even need to get into Fundamentalists to find insane cult behavior. I was kicked out and left on the street, homeless, because I refused to undergo Catholic confirmation at age 15. It has affected my entire life.
It's increasingly likely that the US splits up into a few regional autonomous zones, but it's unknown just how insane of a civil war that could kick off. We are very close to the moment two different armed law enforcement groups end up in a skirmish, and that will kick things off.
with the kind of images that are out in the open for everybody with their own eyes to see, if that does not move you in your heart of hearts, where no government or anyone else can touch you, there is something rotten in that person.
Governments and authority figures can show you a lot of things but the amount of people who not just accept it, but gleefully celebrate the most vulnerable people in society beaten by government thugs, there is no excuse. People can show you false images, false numbers but they can't make you feel proud for the strong abusing the weak. It's particularly appalling if you see the amount of them who call themselves Christians.
These people think Charlie Kirk was on the frontlines of personal freedom, but look the other way when a man gets tackled and shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced.
It's horrible, and inexcusable, but still crucial to understand through a framework that accounts for the effects of multi-generational propaganda peddled by the ultra-rich who have been shaping our thoughts and behaviors through advertisement and capital for hundreds of years.
Yes.. do I get to get between DEA and their intended target? No? If not, why not. If yes, why yes? The framing is silly.
The death may be tragic and very much avoidable, but it was avoidable on both ends of this interaction. There is no comparison to Kirk here at all. He came to talk to people. Pretti went there as part of a signal group coordinating to obstruct a federal enforcement agency..
Ngl.. how people choose their heroes is beyond me.
ICE is a rogue organization, our Executive and Legislative branches have gone rogue; our government no longer works for us, it works against us, and any attempt to validate the actions of this fascist attack on state sovereignty is seen exactly for what it is. There are too many video angles for you to see this tragic death as anything other than what it is.
You're right that there was no comparison to Kirk here. Alex was actually on the frontlines, intentionally putting his life on the line for human rights.
Yet, Kirk himself would have absolutely been appalled at how the US government has treated the rash of shootings in Minnesota, and how they're now being used once again to assault our first and second amendment rights. He would not be siding with ICE or Trump on this one, but since he's dead they can parade around his image and make his fan base believe this is all somehow fair and warranted.
Grow a spine.
That people ingest environmental hazards and carciogens would be viewed as a failure of da masses to abstractly consider the pitfalls of understanding the problems inherent to the logistics of foodstuffs in the context of big corporations.
The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already).
Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold.
To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".
This is hardly the only example of the UK, or other Anglophone democracies, criminalizing speech with actual prison time. I'm not happy with UK laws trying to block VPNs under the pretense of blocking porn for minors either.
There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech. The UK has actual problems with free speech (particularly the Online Safety Act), but this isn't one of them.
In whatsapp:
> She said that if Ofsted were to get involved, she would tell them it was not her and that she had been the victim of doxing
Bit more crime, there (she worked in a regulated industry around kids; lying to the regulator isn't allowed).
> She went on to say that if she got arrested she would “play the mental health card”.
PLEASE STOP SAYING YOU WILL DO CRIMES.
(I'm always amazed that so many criminals end up having these incriminating conversations on WhatsApp and similar; have they never read the news or watched any crime drama? In a vacuum she'd probably have got off!)
Wrong. In the USA that speech would have been protected. It obviously does not meet the imminent lawless action standard and is not meaningfully incitement.
What she actually said was:
> “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the ba***s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
This is clearly someone just angrily ranting. It's absurd nonsense to pretend otherwise. Imagine arresting everyone who said "punch Nazis" because that's "incitement." The UK is one of the worst speech control regimes in the world on any honest scale - even in most third-world dictatorships at least the state isn't strong or coordinated enough to go after most people for this stuff. Sorry, most of the world doesn’t punish angry hateful off the cuff comments with prison. You are an outlier.
<insert angry goose meme>
Which is an insane thing to imprison someone for a year for and to continue threatening them with prison for on account of their continued social media political criticism of their government.
Honestly I'm not sure if it would be legal for me to write this very comment quoting the original tweet if I was subject to UK law.
> she was jailed for calling for mass deportation and for migrant hotels to be set on fire
That’s literally calling for violence?
I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.
That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose.
The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
I am lucky to get to vote for people that don't believe in a religious ethno-state.
Imagine if they used your past post history against you.
Here’s one, you can easily find more.
> Kay was convicted after he used social media to call for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set alight.
Inciting murder doesn’t count as free speech _anywheree_.
The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.
The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres...
But in general in the US "offending" others is not a legal basis for arrest, as much as some in power would like it to be.
They can do what they like, and your compensation if the courts think you were harmed, comes out of your own pocket as a taxpayer.
Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome. The incentive here is that someone the government don’t like got put in a cell for a month and couldn’t speak, and they get no downsides. I wonder what will keep happening more and more.
Yeah, in my state, the Sheriff of my County is beefing with the next County's Sheriff, because among other things, that Sheriff's perspective on "is it legal" was literally, and I quote, not paraphrase. "Make the arrest. If it's wrong, the courts can figure it out." Great, slap people with the arrest, the inconvenience of being jailed, charged, and having to hire a lawyer because you don't give a fuck about doing your job. Not coincidentally, same Sheriff is openly inviting ICE to the towns in his county saying his Department will provide additional protective cover.
No they do not. Quote, from your own link:
> According to an April 2025 freedom of information report filed by The Times, over 12,000 people were arrested, including for social media posts, in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.
Emphasis mine. "Including". Not exclusively, not only, including.
Now what does the law being cited actually say[1]?
> It is an offence under these sections to send messages of a “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing” character or persistently use a public electronic communications network to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.
With additional clarification[2]:
> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.
> “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.
So you're deliberately spreading misinformation here, as was the original article by the Times and as is everyone else who keeps quoting this figure. Because by means of lying by omission they want to imply one very specific thing: "you will be arrested for criticizing the government on social media". But the actual crime statistic is about a much more common, much broader category of crime - namely: harassment. That 12,000 a year figure includes targeted harassment by almost any carriage medium, as well as crimes like "prank" calling emergency services. It means it includes death threats, stalking, domestic abuse and just about every other type of non-physical abuse or intimidation.
Of course you could've also figured out this is bullshit with a very simple litmus test: 12,000 people a year wouldn't be hard to find if the UK was mass-jailing people on public social media. But it's not what's happening.
The text of the law as well, for anyone interested: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...
[2] https://archive.md/bdEqK#selection-3009.0-3009.194:~:text=A%....
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-com...
>ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
In this case you will very likely be given an option to leave or change (not possible for ethniticity).
Wanting to be able to break the law in the future is not a just motivation.
Laws cannot an action a crime after it was committed. However,
- Civil rules can and do impact things retroactively
- Laws may not make something illegal retroactively, but the interpretation of a law can suddenly change; which works out the same thing.
- The thing you're doing could suddenly become illegal with on way for you to avoid doing it (such as people being here legally and suddenly the laws for what is legally changes). This isn't retroactive, but it might as well be.
It is _entirely_ possible for someone to act in a way that is acceptable today but is illegal, or incurs huge civil penalties, tomorrow.
I would not be surprised if SCOTUS disagrees at some point.
I mean, I've read stupid takes on this website but this really takes the cake
despots don't care about the law
>despots don't care about the law
This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.
how is it a low probability scenario?
it's happened before, in living memory (there are still people alive that survived the holocaust)
and you're seeing the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota
>the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota
This type of thinking is what is leading to the destruction of order there.
Yes, we are seeing a destruction of order in MN. US citizens being terrorized by ICE and CBP agents with 47 days of training, no understanding of the legal limits of their authority, and no consequences when they go beyond those limits.
But that's not being caused by people pushing back against the beginnings of autocracy. That's being caused by the people who want to become autocrats.
But that's also not really the point, so we can even presume they are, because the root of the argument is the same either way. Just having a title or being ordered to do something by a politician does not automatically mean they are bringing order to the country. There is a reason the founding fathers set the country up the way they did, with multiple checks and balances, separate branches, etc. They went out of their way to make it that no one branch would have unlimited power.
That means that order in this country fundamentally is based on those checks and balances being adhered to. Any unilateral shift away from that is fundamentally pulling us into a more disordered state. I wish seances were a thing because I would love to hear the founders' take on "Masked men ordered here by a unitary executive branch detain and arrest random people including US citizens for the purpose of making sure they are here legally, while also using a private ledger to determine where the citizen's legally recognized documents are valid."
But we can go even more fundamentally than that: The label on a thing does not make it the thing. They can call themselves law enforcement while still breaking the law. It happens to real law enforcement all the time - cops can and do get punished for crimes they commit, at least sometimes.
In my mind everyone would be better off if current incarnation of ICE was disbanded so these clashes didn't have to happen in the first place. You've completely switched cause and effect - ICE behavior is the CAUSE of protests, not the effect!
You have no care for the law nor for humanity. You're supporting summary execution by a stasi; you seriously need to step back and reconsider your belief system.
But you do care what caused someone to break the law - you just said that if breaking the law (murdering someone) was for keeping order then it's ok. It's very easy to see that you agree with enforcing "law" just because you agree with current administration (otherwise it's very hard to argue that what ICE is doing has anything to do with being lawful).
Currently the Federal level is blocking the State prosecuting such clear breaches of the law.
Approaching a vehicle that is already stopped, perpendicular to traffic, initially to tell the driver to move and then to make an arrest for obstruction of justice, is not a "traffic stop", and the agents in question therefore did not in any way "pretend to have local traffic enforcement powers". ICE are legally entitled to require protesters to get out of their way. That's a consequence of them being federal LEO, and of federal law prohibiting everyone from obstructing LEO (which includes things like physically shielding others from arrest, impeding their movement towards whatever place they need to get to to do their job, etc.). Protesting and asserting 1A rights is not a defense to the charge of obstruction of justice.
Those you consider to be bringing order are arbitrarily enacting violence against citizens and other people in ways that break the law and Constitution; and which are outlawed in all moral societies. Sure, strict conformance to a dictators whims is a form of order, but if you seek that sort of order in your life you should look for a dom and not attempt to impose it on others.
The clashes do not have to happen. Trump's Regime can be removed, habeas corpus resurrected, and the Constitution re-implemented.
Your mind appears to wear jackboots.
the argument isn't that states can't create ex-post facto laws (even though they can, see: any country with parliamentary sovereignty)
it's that what the law says doesn't matter when the executive no is longer bound by the rule of law
see: the United States under the Trump regime
the fact that some previous legislature has passed a law saying that "using the gay/jewish/disabled/... database for bad things is illegal" is of no consequence when the state already has the database and has no interest in upholding the rule of law
>"using the gay/jewish/disabled/... database for bad things is illegal"
If it is legal than I want to be able to use such a database as it makes law enforcement more efficient. It gets rid of inefficiency in the government. Wanting such inefficiency is wanting to allow for unlawful behavior. It's the whole using privacy as an excuse to hide from the government.
Here is someone out for a walk, ICE demanding ID, that she answer questions. She says she's a US citizen ... they keep asking her questions and one of the ICE people seem to be using a phone to scan her face:
https://np.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qbawlr/minneap...
What she says, the truth, none of it would matter if his phone said to bring her in. And after the fact? The folks supporting ICE have made it clear they've no problem with lying in the face of the obvious.
Some retorts for people swayed by that argument:
"Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"
"Let's send your mom all your text messages."
"Ain't nothin' in my pockets, but I'd rather you didn't check."
"Shall we live-stream your next doctor's appointment?"
"May I watch you enter your PIN at the ATM?"
"How about you post your credit card number on reddit?"
"Care to read your high-school diary on open mic night?"
People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them. The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal), but your church knowing your search history would absolutely be a big deal.
Until someone at or above the TSA decides they don't like you. And then they use your search history to blackmail you. Because lots of people search for things that wouldn't be comfortable being public. Or search for things that could easily be taken out of context. Especially when that out of context makes it seem like they might be planning something illegal
Heck, there's lots of times where people mention a term / name for something on the internet; and, even though that thing is benign, the _name/term_ for it is not. It's common for people to note that they're not going to search for that term to learn more about it, because it will look bad or the results will include things they don't want to see.
A very famous quote: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Many people - particularly white people, but let's not ignore that a bunch of Black and Latino folks are/have been Trump supporters - believe that they are part of the in-group. And inevitably, they find out that the government doesn't care, as evidenced by ICE and their infamous quota of 3000 arrests a day... which has hit a ton of these people, memefied as "leopards ate my face".
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/trump-ice-ar...
It's good to know in advance who they are.
Do any of these actually prompt someone to reconsider their position? They strike me as more of argument through being annoying than a good-faith attempt to connect with the other side.
If you're talking directly to one person and trying to convince them, without an audience, there are likely different tactics that might work, but even then, some of the same approach might help, just couched more politely. "You don't actually mean that; do you want a camera in your bedroom with a direct feed to the police? What do you actually mean, here? What are you trying to solve?"
Option A: "Yes!", which tells you you're probably talking to someone who cares more about not admitting they're wrong than thinking about what they're saying.
Option B: "Well, no, but...", and now you're having a discussion.
Generally speaking, people who say things like "if you have nothing to hide" either (charitably) haven't thought about it very much and are vaguely wanting to be "strict on crime" without thought for the consequences because they can't imagine it affecting them, or (uncharitably) have attitudes about what they consider "shameful" and they really mean "you shouldn't do things that I think you should feel shame about".
“Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”'Saying' is an example of 'doing', and the moderation to speech happens after the fact, including (yes) in USA. Consider the case of a person yelling fire or 'he's got a gun!' when there is none, or a death threat.
Huh? You can’t imagine boring people as a “good faith social individual”?
That's privacy in a crowd and even if they couldn't describe it, people do recognize it.
What you are proposing in every single one of these, is violating that in an overt and disruptive way - i.e.
> "Let's send your mom all your text messages."
Do I have anything in particular to hide in my text messages, of truly disastrous proportions? No. But would it feel intrusive for a known person who I have to interact with to get to scrutinize and comment on all those interactions? Yes. In much the same way that if someone on the table over starts commenting on my conversation in a coffee-shop, I'd suddenly not much want to have one there.
Which is very, very different from any notion of some amorphous entity somewhere having my data, or even it being looked at by a specific person I don't know, won't interact with, and will never be aware personally exists. Far less so if the only viewers are algorithms aggregating statistics.
E.g. "Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"
Very few people are arguing that nudity or bathroom use shouldn't be private, and they are not going to understand what this has to do with their argument that the NSA should be allowed to see Google searches to fight terrorism or whatever.
Privacy arguments are about who should have access to what information. For example, I'm fine with Google seeing my Google searches, but not the government monitoring them.
But on the internet we often do this thing where we take the weakest version or a distorted version of an opposing side's argument and ridicule that. It's not quite strawmanning because we never specified who we're arguing against, and surely we can imagine someone, somewhere on the internet has the ridiculous viewpoint. But it's not a common viewpoint (that, for example, we shouldn't have privacy in the bathroom). Doing this only gets us pats on the back from those who already agree with us and deludes us about our opponent's position.
There's a big difference between these scenarios.
Which has literally happened already for anyone who thinks “there’s controls in place for that sort of thing”. That’s with (generally) good faith actors in power. What do you think can and will happen when people who think democracy and the constitution are unnecessary end up in control…
To quote the standard observability conference line "what gets measured gets managed".
We get things like philandering individuals running on family values platforms, anti-gay individuals being caught performing gay sex acts in restaurant bathrooms, crowing about deficits and the national debt during Democrat administrations while cutting taxes and increasing spending during Republican administrations, blocking Supreme Court nominations because it's "too close to an election" while pushing through another Supreme Court nomination mere weeks before a subsequent election, etc.
The fuel running the Republican political machine is bad faith.
I spent too much of the 90s listening to Rush Limbaugh and consuming other conservative media and the exact same contradictions were prominently on display then. They absolutely excoriated law enforcement for things like the Waco siege. The phrase “jack-booted thugs” got used. But when LAPD beat the shit out of Rodney King on video, suddenly police could do no wrong.
"Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has declined by about 4 points since the day before Good’s death until today. Meanwhile, his overall approval rating has declined by 2 points and is near its second-term lows" [1].
I'd encourage anyone watching to actually pay attention to "how many people care more about party than principle." I suspect it's fewer than MAGA high command thinks.
[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-is-losing-normies-on-immi...
Two percent could swing an election. And two percent can convince another two percentage points to get angry. Never dismiss small swings out of hand.
Not to mention the extrajudicial killings
Not to mention the Epstein reports
I'm really not sure what people actually care about because for some reason they won't actually tell you
ain't no left wing causes giving them $$$, just the GOP, gun industry, and occasionally the Russians
They publicly called out a Trump appointee for saying you're not allowed to bring a gun to a protest, and have urged that there be an investigation in to what occurred.
They also then blamed it on the MN government, because for some reason CBP (250 miles from a border, and thus 150 miles away from their remit...) pretending to be police officers when they also lack a remit to do that and them then fucking things up and murdering people because of the lack of remit, lack of training, lack of screening on the hiring... is because of Walz and co.
So... better than I expected, but still pretty dogshit.
I am not American and genuinely curious on this.
That said, I'm ex-Catholic, so I don't feel super qualified to make a statement on the specific popularity of predestination among American evangelicals at the moment.
That said, in a less theological and more metaphorical sense, it does seem that many of them do believe in some sort of "good people" and "bad people", where the "bad people" are not particularly redeemable. It feels a little unfalsifiable though.
The Heritage Foundation certainly publishes, but they don't have a coherent ideology.
Project 2025 is not an work of political philosophy, it's just a roadmap for seizing power at all costs.
"To conclude: the law of conservative structure, and the key toidentifying the common components of its variants, consists offour central features. Two of those are substantive core concepts,though not always identified as such: (1) a resistance to change,however unavoidable, unless it is perceived as organic and natural;(2) an attempt to subordinate change to the belief that the lawsand forces guiding human behaviour have extra-human origins andtherefore cannot and ought not to be subject to human wills andwhims. Unlike other major ideologies, conservatism then intriguingly produces two underlying morphological attributes, instead of "additional substantive identifying features. One of these attributesis (3) the fashioning of relatively stable (though never inherentlypermanent) conservative beliefs and values out of reactions toprogressive ideational cores. This allows all substantive conceptsin the employ of conservatism, other than the two enumeratedabove, to become contingent. They are subjected to a complexswivel mirror-image technique, superimposed on a retrospectivediachronie justification of the current beliefs held by conservatives. In each instance, the consistent aim is to provide a securestructure of political beliefs and concepts that protects the firstcore concept of conservatism, and does so by utilizing its secondcore component. Finally (4) the process is abetted by substantiveflexibility in the deployment of decontested concepts, so as tomaximize under varying conditions the protection of that conception of change. Such flexibility of meaning permits a considerablefirmness of conservatism's fundamental structure when confrontedwith very different concrete historical and spatial circumstances.What may superficially appear to be intellectual lightweightedness or be mistaken as opportunism is rather the performance ofa crucial stabilizing function by means of the adroit manoeuvringof political concepts in positions adjacent to the ideational core.The morphological unity of conservatism is preserved by an identical grammar of response, but expressed through differentiatedlanguages of response." (Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory)
But the same observation applies to lots of other attitudes, too—like “might makes right” and “nature is red in tooth and claw” or whatever else the dark princelings evince these days. I feel like “logic matters” mainly pertains to a liberal-enlightenment political context that might be in the past now…
Does reality always find a way to assert itself in the face of illogic? Sure! But if Our Side is righteous and infallible, the bad outcomes surely must be the fault of Those Scapegoats’ malfeasance—ipso facto we should punish them harder…
https://time.com/7311354/donald-trump-heaven-hell-afterlife-...
Remember, Republicans represent half the country, not some isolated sect living in small town Appalachia.
This statement isn't necessarily wrong because about half of elected government officials are Republican, but I want to point out that less than 60% of eligible Americans voted in 2024, so we're talking about <30% of Americans who vote Republican.
wyoming has ~800k people. ohio has 11 million. the greater NYC area (parts of NJ, CT, etc.) has ~22 million. california has 40 million.
and as a parent poster mentioned, just slightly 1/3 of eligible voters chose trump; if "no candidate" was a choice it may have one most states, beating out kamala and trump.
Calvinists or Evangelicals?
I don't think that holds water either way.
Yet law enforcement officers are some of the most resistant to the idea, and Trump and DHS are extremely resistant to the idea of utilizing them for ICE and CBP, and have even cut funding for it.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-moved-cut-funding-ice...
When we know that the body cams are frequently used in a way that benefits the people wearing them, I find it quite telling when those people are railing against the idea and those in power actively work to block it.
When you use a computer to tell you who to target, it makes it easy for your brain to never consider that person as a human being at all. They are a target. An object.
Their stated capabilities are lies, marketing, and a smokescreen for their true purpose.
This is Lavender v2, and I’m sure others could name additional predecessors. Systems rife with errors but the validity isn’t the point; the system is.
Palantir clients: Europol, Danish POL-INTEL, NHS UK, UK Ministry of Defence, German Police (states), NATO, Ukraine, ASML, Siemens, Airbus, Credit Suisse, UBS, BP, Merck, ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Customer...
Plus, the EU is 27 countries, out of which 5 are listed on their wiki page, with various institutions.
Don't confuse "GDP not as big as ours" with "totally non-functional."
For any piece of data that exists, the government effectively has access to it through court orders or backdoors. Either way, it can and will be used against you.
To me, this is a problem that can only be solved at the government/regulatory level.
The evidence I have that causes me to believe them to be overstated, is how even Facebook has frequently shown me ads that inherently make errors about my gender, nationality, the country I live in, and the languages I speak, and those are things they should've been able to figure out with my name, GeoIP, and the occasional message I write.
They are not overstated, and they are far worse.
It’ll be a lot less amusing when Palantir thinks you’re interested in bombing government buildings.
There’s a world of difference between a government using legally collected data for multiple purposes and an individual abusing their position purely for personal reasons.
> legally collected data
In both cases, the information is legally collected (or at least, that's the only data we're concerned about in this conversation).
- government using
- individual abusing
^ Both of those are someone in the government using the information. In both cases, someone in the government can use the information in a way that causes an individual great harm; and isn't in the "understood" way the information would be used when it was "pitched" to the public. And in both cases, the person doing it will do what they want an almost certainly face no repercussions if what they're doing is morally, or even legally, wrong.
The government is collecting data (or paying someone else to collect that data, so it's not covered by the rules) and can then use it to cause individuals great harm. That's it, the entire description. The fact that _sometimes_ it's one cop using it to stalk someone or not is irrelevant.
& effectively if there is no checks on this is there actually a difference? There only difference is that the threat is to an entire cohort rather than an individual.
The whole social battle is a constant attempt to align our laws and values as a society. It's why we create new laws. It's why we overturn old laws. You can't just abdicate your morals and let the law decide for you. That's not a system of democracy, that's a system of tyranny.
The privacy focused crowd often mentions "turnkey tyranny" as a major motivation. A tyrant who comes to power and changes the laws. A tyrant who comes to power and uses the existing tooling beyond what that tooling was ever intended for.
The law isn't what makes something right or wrong. I can't tell you what is, you'll have to use your brain and heart to figure that one out.
There is also a world of difference between a government using data to carry out its various roles in service of the nation and a government using data to terrorize communities for the sadistic whims of its leadership.
Think I'm being hyperbolic? In Trump's first term fewer than 1M were deported. In Obama's eight years as president, 3.1M people were deported without the "techniques" we are witnessing.
This is why there shouldn’t be any organization that has that much power.
Full stop.
What you described is the whole raison dêtre of Anarchism; irrespective of whether you think there’s an alternative or not*
“No gods No Masters” isn’t just a slogan it’s a demand
*my personal view is that there is no possible stable human organization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#No_gods,_n...
Data collection is not the source of the problem because people give their data willingly
Do you think data collection is a problem in China, or do you think the government and rule of law is the problem?
Companies collecting data is not the true problem. Even when data collection is illegal, a corrupt government that doesn't respect the rule of law doesn't need data collection.
"well how about if the government does illegal or evil stuff?"
its very similar to arguments about the second ammendment. But laws and rules shouldnt be structured around expecting a future moment where the government isnt serving the people. At that moment the rules already dont matter
Collecting information about people doesn't really fit the same mold. It's not sensible to remove that function entirely. It's not a right. And it's not sensible to structure things with the expectation the future government will be evil
The rights weren’t invented out if thin air but to address real issues that happened earlier. Yes, every government has been evil. Power corrupts. That’s why constitutions exist, to address that problem.
Jewish Danes would like to have a word with you about that
On January 6, 2026, all South Sudanese nationals lost their TPS status and ordered to leave the US. At this point, they are all effectively declared illegal. I have not seen a single Democrat seriously argue that something should be done about this.
So what do we think people from South Sudan will actually do? Pack their bags and return to South Sudan?
My point is that a system where someone is admitted to the US completely legally, lives here for years, and is then suddenly reclassified as “illegal” is fundamentally broken.
But yes, it's disgusting that ICE has access to that data via Palantir, or that this data is being used for anything other than administering Medicaid.
It should be mentioned that "illegal" is a definitive word. There are definitely people not willing to follow the law, including political entities which are dependent on it. The moniker of privacy in this respect is a shield for illegality, because there is no reason that Medicaid data regarding SSNs should be shielded from the federal government.
To take this to its logical conclusion, Americans must concede that EU/UK systems of identity and social services are inherently immoral.
https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/census/feature/j...
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-ameri...
They won't be searching for counter evidence. It won't even cross their minds to do so.
You're on record saying one thing one time that was vanilla at the time but is now ultra spicy (possibly even because the definition of words can change and context is likely lost) then you'll be a result in their search and you'll go on their list.
(This is based on my anecdotal experience of having my house raided and the police didn't even know to expect there to be children in the house; children who were both over ten years old and going to school and therefore easily searchable in their systems; we hadn't moved house since 15 years prior, so there was no question of mixing up an identity. The police requested a warrant, and a fucking judge even signed it, based on a single data point: an IP address given to them by a third party internet monitoring company.)
Keep your shit locked down, law enforcement are just as bad at their jobs as any other Joe Clockwatcher. In fact they're often worse because their incentive structure leans heavily towards successful prosecution.
Sorry for the rant.
Or if you're currently married to an abusive partner and want to leave: how can you make a clean break with all the tracking nowadays? (And given how 'uncivilized' these guys act in public (masked, semi-anonymous), I'd had to see what they do behind closed doors.)
I'd say the classic example is when a small german man with a mustache starts looking in religious registries to find the address of certain types of people
We really are in unprecedented times when it’s looking like the big one could happen in the United States though…
This is by design to make sure ICE and CBP jobs program for psychopaths always exists. Did you think they were actually going to put themselves out of the job by going for the roots?
You can be a target of pressure through no fault of your own. For example, if you were to witness a government official commit a crime.
This is why I personally prefer more devolved spending – at the federal level it is far too much centralized power.
Are you against business registration?
All of these are subject to the similar issues with the stalker ex abusing a position of power?
You seem to be asking a question. The answer is no.
The IRS does not need to know my sexual orientation or circumcision status. Medicaid, on the other hand, may. (Though I'd contest even that.)
Problem today is ICE has no accountability of misuse data/violence, not they have means to data/violence.
I agree with this in theory, but its a fantasy to think they have this restriction at this point. ICE seems to be taking all comers, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile, giving them "47 days of training," and sending them off armed into the populace. I have seen no evidence they believe they have any restriction on anything. It's basically DOGE but with guns instead of keyboards.
The "they look like us" fallacy is so deep in this.
Which is now literally happening and people are still acting like their privacy is going to somehow prevent it.
They have money for this grift of epic scale but complain about some tiny alleged Somalian fraud to distract the gullible MAGA base. And of course there is somehow not enough money for things people actually need like healthcare.
It's clear the government cannot be trusted to use information in a reasonable way; so we should not allow them to get that information.
And yet.
>If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.
Without even getting into the subject of kids who are brought here.. I just have to say, why? Immigrants are net contributors in the US. Many of these people who are here "illegally" are in a bureaucratic maze and are attempting to follow the rules. Some aren't, sure, but we live in a society where we don't draconianly punish people for a certain level of breaking the rules in cases where there is no real harm done. And I say deportation, particularly to 3rd country like the USA is doing now sometimes, qualifies as very draconian.
Those who disrespect my countries law do not deserve to benefit from my great country.
>Immigrants are net contributors in the US
This would not change my opinion one way or the other.
>are attempting to follow the rules
Well they clearly aren't trying hard enough if they are in the country without a proper visa.
Why? All laws or only some?
> Well they clearly aren't trying hard enough if they are in the country without a proper visa.
This reads as an uninformed statement.
> This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.
And yet
> The true scope of U.S. citizens wrongfully deported is not known as the federal government does not release data on how often members of this group are mistakenly detained or even removed from the country. However, The Washington Post estimated that there are at least 12 well-known cases, drawing conclusions from court records, interviews and news reports.
-- A Look At The U.S. Citizens Who Have Been Deported By The Trump Administration So Far
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-look-at-the-u-s-citizens...
"Hey I know that guy is a criminal" does not give people the right to search their property without a warrant. Too bad if that makes law enforcement more difficult.
"Everyone who does a thing I don't like is a criminal" is obviously and intentionally fallacious bullshit.
Then again, we have ICE shooting American citizens in the streets, so I guess the law is whatever they decide it is, not least because our legislative branch is uninterested in laws.
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1191...
Edit: cael450 has already offered a specific example of this threat vector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758387
Presumably, it's because a lot of them are getting Medicaid despite not being eligible to. Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
How would this even work? You can’t just start billing things to Medicaid if you’re ineligible for it. That would be like you deciding to bill United Healthcare for something despite not being a customer. How is this hypothetical fraud supposed to work? What am I missing?
> Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
ICE isn’t auditing Medicaid. They’re trying to use records to find people to detain and deport which is an orthogonal dataset.
The only plausible explanation is that they’re using medical records as an additional source of data on people who live in houses that they’re raiding or looking at.
Which is insane. Imagine police rolling up to your front door on suspicion of something and loading up a system which has your medical records.
Why are you presuming this? There is no evidence this is happening in any widespread fashion.
> Isn't the point of every audit, investigation, etc. to find things that aren't being done correctly?
If it is being honest about it's intention, yes. I think we have seen an absolute mountain of evidence that this administration does "audits" as massive data collection waves to suit any and every purpose they want, though.
If this was about fixing things being done incorrectly, DHHS should be doing the audit, not DHS. Perhaps the latter doesn't understand the difference between the two, though, not noticing they're missing an H in their abbreviation.
Isn't the point of this data so that they can uncover exactly that? It'd be silly to say you're not allowed to look for evidence of anything unless you already have evidence of it. Also, the qualifier "in any widespread fashion" is weasel words. It makes me think you already know it is happening, and the only remaining question is to what scale.
And as the GP pointed out, it makes no sense to put the president's paramilitary agency¹ in charge of such an audit, rather than qualified auditors, perhaps from the HHS² OIG³.
1. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_He...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...
They’re single mindedly looking for undocumented immigrants to deport.
they weren't looking, they were stealing
It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ...
> a random YouTuber started knocking on quality learing center doors
"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."
Oh no, that doesn't sound like a "massive Somali fraud", does it?
(Also he's not "a random YouTuber" - he's a former prankster turned full MAGA right-wing agitator[1] and that should tell you all you need to know about his credentials and honesty.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Shirley ("he repeated a false claim", "has falsely implied", "also amplified Trump's false claim", etc.)
> It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ..
Those trials are for a completely separate fraud!
In spite of some overlap between the supposed food distribution sites for Feeding Our Future and the recent childcare center fraud, they're actually not the same fraud, uh, "event".
"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."
There is no fraud there which means the only -actual- fraud people can be complaining about re: Somalis in Minnesota must be the Feeding Our Future one.
Unless they're not complaining about that and are just making stuff up, obvs.
Look it up. And take the red pill.
First of all, the investigation for the fraud had already wrapped up years ago, with many charged. You’re falling for the propaganda that this was ongoing and swept under the rug, as pretense that apparently an occupying force is necessary because Somalians are fraudulent criminals (racist AF), despite the incredible amount of fraud (including Medicare fraud!) within the ruling party at the moment.
Second of all, the ringleader was a white woman who was convicted for this fraud, presumably preying on desperate immigrants, maybe even convincing them that “fraud was the American way”, I mean look at the president - how could fraud not be the American way?
Third of all, that YouTuber has a less than room temperature IQ, and was going around to closed daycares to prove that… they weren’t open? The rightwing grift is so powerful and so lucrative that this absolute imbecile can make it big by giving other imbeciles a justification for their deep-seated racism. Honestly, go listen to interviews with this guy. It’s astounding that anyone trusts any content he puts out, because that’s just what it is - content, not investigative journalism.
Anyway, I guess since some Somalians were involved in fraud we get to occupy cities, tearing anyone brown with an accent away from their family, maybe allowing them to prove citizenship (maybe not), and begin shooting anyone who adds friction to that process (civil disobedience)? That’s the implication of your comment.
Tell me when we can start prosecuting fraud when it’s attached to an (R), by the way.
That was another separate series of fraud trials regarding Feeding Our Future no?.
This is from "Way of the Warrior", when the dominion had managed to con the Klingons into invading Cardassia.
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We have orders to search all vessels attempting to leave Bajoran space.
KIRA: Search them for what?
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: For shape-shifters. Each ship will be scanned, its cargo searched, and its crewmembers and passengers subjected to genetic testing.
SISKO: On whose authority?
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: On the authority of Gowron and the Klingon High Council.
KIRA: The Klingon High Council has no jurisdiction over ships in Bajoran space.
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.
SISKO: Do you have any evidence that there are changelings aboard this particular ship?
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?
KIRA: Commander, Bajoran law strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels in our territory.
KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: I have my orders.
Compared to
ICE: We have orders to search all people attempting to live in America
Search them for what?
ICE: For illegal immigrants. Each center will be scanned, it's users searched, and their finances and medical history subjected to AI pattern recognition
On whose authority?
ICE: On the authority of Trump and the Federal Government
Trump has no jurisdiction over people in Minnesota
ICE: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.
Do you have any evidence that there are illegal immigrants in this particular learning center?
ICE: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?
The Constitution strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels
ICE: I have my orders.
*Technically this point in the episode it was after the Dominion/Russia interference with the high placed Dominion/Russian asset, but before the Klingons/America invaded Cardassia/Greenland.
Before BBB July 4, Medicare covered the following groups:
- Refugees
- Asylum seekers
- Immigration parolees
- TPS holders
- DACA recipients
Under the Trump administration, the following groups are now considered illegal aliens:
- Asylum seekers with pending claims or those whose claims were denied
- Immigration parolees
- Certain categories of TPS holders (for example South Sudanese TPS ended Jan 6 2026 so all people under that protection are ordered to leave)
- Certain categories of DACA recipients
And the above people are probably registered for medicare with full name and address.
Genuinely curious if they've published this information.
A robotics engineer from Germany was forcibly deported a few months back because ICE were waiting for him at the immigration office when he went to visit to further the application.
It's likely a strong moral boost to ICE; I think he helped than more than hurt them. They're emboldened now that they know their opponents will just hand over their guns and die.
> The tool – dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) – receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media reports based on court testimony in Oregon by law enforcement agents, among other sources.
So, they have a tool that sucks up data from a bunch of different sources, including Medicaid. But there's no actual nexus between Medicaid and illegal immigrants in this reporting.
Edit: In the link to their earlier filings, EFF claims that some states enroll illegal immigrants in Medicaid: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/eff-court-protect-our-...
And it is next to impossible for average people to get adequate care for their kids with autism without Medicaid and early intervention can make the difference between someone who can live relatively independently with supports and someone who will spend their adult life chemically restrained in an institution. So they are in between a rock and a hard place.
I wish I believed in god, because this shit is beyond evil.
With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.
I am not for unrestrained immigration either. But I would not look for whose child is sick so I can kick them out and leave the sick child alone.
An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
Absolutely. Especially since upwards of 80% of asylum claims are denied[0] when they actually get adjudicated. Which usually takes years to happen because there aren't enough immigration "courts."
Provide enough immigration "judges" and "courts" and we could clear up the backlog within a couple years. I'd also point out that while asylum seekers aren't (yet) legal immigrants, they are (based on Federal law[1]) legally in the United States until their case has been adjudicated -- once again arguing for increasing the number of immigration "courts" and "judges." It certainly doesn't argue for hundreds of billions of dollars for a bunch of jackbooted thugs to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, all to deport fewer people than other administrations who didn't need to shoot citizens to do so. Funny that.
[0] https://www.factcheck.org/2021/04/factchecking-claims-about-...
eventually they got their shit together.
China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.
I found this article[1] by the Brennan Center. It alleges this is an attempted federal takeover of elections but it doesn't suggest or allude to voter suppression. I'm not convinced by the article that having access to voter rolls can be considered a federal takeover of election administration (but I'm not in the know and would need things explained more verbosely).
If you have more information about the attempted centralization of election administration and its impacts on voter suppression I would be interested to know more.
1. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trum...
Regarding voter data though, if it becomes known that registering to vote as a minority will get you extra scrutiny from ICE, and perhaps a visit to your home, that would probably cause some citizens avoid voting altogether, especially if they are associated with people who are not her legally.
Either way, the federal government really has no right to that data or legitimate use for it, so hopefully they don't manage to get their hands on it.
I am just an outside onlooker, and things seem pretty bleak.
There are not non-citizens on voter rolls. They want the rolls to get data on voters.
When you ask yourself why the ultra-politicized DOJ (which isn't even the DHS...) from an administration that has explicitly called liberals the enemy is asking for voter rolls, it becomes pretty understandable why people might come to the conclusion that it is to suppress the people that have already explicitly been identified as targets.
That is incorrect, there are actually non-citizens on voter rolls, especially in the states with automatic voter registration. Example: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/scotus-al...
Of course, actually voting would be a crime: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/611 but it doesn't stop everybody: https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/state-more-than-100-non...
Ice goes down the lines at voting stations to "protect from undocumented aliens voting illegally". The government endorsed news stories will be about how many illegals were trying to vote. Meanwhile a bunch of US citizens were taken for processing due to false positives and unfortunately with such large numbers to process they aren't all released until polling stations are closed. (If only someone hadn't botched the facial recognition database update and contaminated it with a bunch of Dem voters).
If rioting against these actions occurs at a station, it's closed for safety and people in area are detained while it's sorted (the stations targeted had a tendency to vote D anyway as per voter roles).
Strange how that 'harassment' did stop US citizens from voting.
Results come in while the case for voter suppression goes to the Supreme court. Supreme court rules that while voter suppression did occur there is no legal option of redress within its permit and the peaceful transfer of power is more important than any one election A la Bush V Gore.
Less sensationally, they'll just crank up ID requirements and wait times to suppress your vote.
I don't know how they could possibly crank up ID requirements that would get in my way: I have a passport and a REAL ID driver's license.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/ices-forced-face...
Yes, I have multiple documents proving my citizenship. Never been asked though, ID always sufficed.
> so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!
I have voted in more than one state (legally, I moved) never seen any voting place asking for any documents except for state ID and voter roll check. I don't think there is any voting place where local state ID is not "legit enough".
There has been many ways to stop you from voting, contesting your vote, calling your registration into account, imitating tests that are impossible to validate if you are intelligent enough to vote, etc
Spend some time educating yourself on how voting suppression has worked historically and you wont sound so ignorant.
It is quite trivial to infer if someone is likely to have emigrated to the US due to obvious gaps in records or in their relatives' ones.
This is what Palantir does, essentially. Simple inference and information fusion from different sources.
Also naturalized and birthright citizens are far more likely than others to associate or live with others of less legal status.
Naturalized and birthright citizens quality for benefits and they and their families are at risk.
If they are allowed to detain and deport without any due process as they have asserted anyone not white is at risk.
The DHS official social media presence shared a picture of an island paradise with the caption America after 100 million deportations.
This is the number of non-whites not the number of immigrants in even the most ridiculous estimates.
The FBI has been showing up at the door of some people who dare to organize protests against ICE.
Stingrays have been deployed to protests, ICE is collecting photos of protestors for their database, and has been querying YCombinator funded Flock to pull automated license plate camera data from around the country. Trump, Vance, Noem and Miller are calling anyone who protests them domestic terrorists.
It's pretty clear this isn't just about immigration, that this is about pooling data for a surveillance state that can quash the constitutional rights of anyone who dares to oppose the current regime. We've seen this story before.
Given what kind of garbage from human gene pool gets and thrives in high politics its more surprising the show lasted as long as it did.
Now the question shouldn't be 'how much outraged we should be' since we get this situation for a year at this point, but rather what to do next, how we can shape future to avoid this. If there will be the time for such correction, which is a huge IF.
So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.
Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers.
And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.
We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.
Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.
One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
And probably easier to have Congress pass such legislation to draw a new line in the sand, even if it could be undone later, than doing things that would inescapably require a Constitutional amendment.
The problem with the other reforms I have thought of is that we're so far gone it will take more than one reform. Like campaign finance reform would have been great a decade ago. But now that kind of relies on getting back a non-pwnt and even trustworthy law enforcement apparatus, too. Same with a US GDPR / tech antitrust enforcement - would have been great a decade or two ago, but it won't particularly change much now that half the pop culture is already enamored with fascism.
But I agree that we need to be brainstorming and discussing many approaches to reform. So what specifically are you thinking of as the reforms we need?
> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states.
Doesn’t require a constitutional amendment?
That would essentially require a rewrite of the constitution.
I'm eager to discuss other avenues of reform, though. What do you see as a minimum viable path to reform?
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”
But ignoring all that, if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war. The military gets deployed, and death and destruction follow.
The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President, and removes a President who violates their will.
Congress has the power to control the President right now. If they aren’t willing to do exercise that authority, there’s nothing we can do.
Let’s say you got Congress to grant states the ability to make war on the federal government in order to provide an extra-congressional check on Presidential power (which I don’t think you can do, but just pretend you can). That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress. Otherwise an extra-congressional check isn’t needed. But in the case Congress will just remove that power from the states.
This only works even a little bit as a Constitutional amendment—even if you could pass legislation to do it.
> if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war
When state police arrest a fedgov employee for breaking state law, is that a "civil war" ? I would call that enforcing the rule of law under a system of shared sovereignty.
> The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President
If wishes were horses... Congress failing to exercise their powers for the past several decades is a big part of how we got into this situation. And sure, at any point technically they could retake them. Except it seems that the Republican congresscritters are content with the plausible deniability, while they would be more hesitant to stick their own necks out and positively affirm what's going on.
But the context of reform I am talking about is if the Democrats regain control of the Presidency and Congress. What can be done to make it so that after 4 years of relative sanity regarding separation of powers, people won't just get frustrated and start craving the simplistic answers of fascism again?
A big part of this is the many broken and unjust things about our society, but trying to fix a sizeable number of those in 4 or even 2 years is a tall task. Hence why I'm trying to focus on a kernel of the least possible required to stop the hemorrhaging, so that it might have a chance of getting done before the buntings change again.
> That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress
Look at the current state of things - Congress doesn't appear to be fully captured, just immobilized.
They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.
> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
Andrew Jackson did it 1 year into has fist term. Trump is already in his 2nd.
> it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
It’s horrible to be clear. But ending assistance to other countries is in no way morally worse than genocide, slavery, and war.
>detention camps
The last year of the Biden administration, there were about 40k people in ICE detention facilities. The number has gone up under Trump, but it has less than doubled.
Any preventable deaths of people in ICE custody are unacceptable, but the number of deaths are a little higher proportionally than under Biden.
This is all horrible and condemnable. But detaining undocumented immigrants temporarily is something every administration does (even if this administration is ramping it up) and is in no way comparable to rounding up 100k innocent US citizens for a 4 year term.
Trump is an awful, greedy, morally corrupt human being, and a terrible President. But we’ve seen and survived much worse.
RBG refused to retire and died while Trump was president. That gave them one seat. Obama could have
McConnel refused to let Obama replace Scalia after he died. I'm not sure that had to happen the way it went down.
Sure, there may be a case here or there that would go the other way, but the vast majority of cases before this hypothetical court would be decided the same way as they have been, merely with a thinner majority.
But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority.
It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely.
I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.
Part of me thinks this is fundamental to the human condition, but most of me thinks it isn't. This doesn't seem to have happened in the FDR era, or the Nixon era, for example. I think it's just fallout from the post-Reagan coalitions in the US political system.
Yes, the Democrats fumbled this and it led to the problems we have now. I'm still a lifelong Democrat voter and always will be, but goddamnit did we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Trump had no problem convincing Kennedy to step down and be replaced. Republicans know the game, the Democrats we elect don't seem to know how to play it.
Actually they don't. They say "Some states, using their own funds, allow enrollment by non-citizens" - but they never say if it's legal residents or illegal immigrants. I am not sure whether it's part of the ongoing attempt to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants, or all the states that allow that genuinely do not distinguish between legal residents and illegal immigrants, but we can not assume it by default.
But I am not sure if the states use their own money for this - why would they send this information to HHS?
If a state bureaucracy doesn't explicitly check for legal immigration status then yes the policymakers in that state are trying to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration.
When it comes to healthcare, many states don't care if you're a tourist or a resident or a one-eyed, one-eared, horned purple-people eater. They (because their constituents -- you know, the folks who pay for this -- believe people shouldn't be dying in the streets because they can't afford basic care, regardless of who they are/where they came from) provide healthcare to anyone who needs it because it's the compassionate, humane thing to do.
That some states do not do so says a lot about the folks who run and live in those states -- partly that they have little empathy for their fellow human beings. Which seems weird, given that many of those states have "leaders" and vocal residents who claim to be Christian, yet they are unwilling to engage in the very things that Jesus Christ prescribes[0][1][2] that they do.
I'm glad I'm not a Christian. If I were, I don't think I could abide such evil, selfishness and hypocrisy.
[0] https://www.borgenmagazine.com/9-quotes-from-jesus-on-why-we...
[1] https://jesusleadershiptraining.com/charity-what-did-jesus-s...
[2] https://christ.org/blogs/questions-answers/what-did-jesus-te...
I would like to ask you instead of the Word of Jesus - which is surely fascinating, but bears little relevance for the topic at hand - provide some authoritative data as to how many people actually died in the street in those 43 terrible states, for lack of Medicaid coverage, say in the last 5 years? Was it millions? Thousands? Hundreds? How does it compare with the record of California and those living-on-the-street people I am seeing there every time I visit? I think discussing actual data would be better than discussing Jesus.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=deaths+and+bankruptcies+fro...
Pretty sure it's because EFF is being a bit vague with the truth and they were using Fed funds for this, at least until quite recently.
https://paragoninstitute.org/medicaid/californias-insurance-...
To accomplish things like that, a lot of us are going to be removed. I don't think these are jokes, it's a pattern of statements to condition and normalize. A thing he has done over and over.
But when people say this for ten years at the drop of a hat, you have to forgive everyone else for not just automatically believing it any more.
For the same reasons banks rarely get any sensible fines/lawsuits.
given the current administration, i'm not holding my breath.
There are a whole raft of "ideals" the Founding fathers held that we've obviated, beginning with who got the franchise. I can confidently say that government being the payor for ~50% of all healthcare, and operating the databases necessary to monitor all the money and behavior, was certainly not among their "ideals" either.
This was predicted by many, long ago. The predictions were ignored because they were inconvenient to desires and ambitions. Yet here we are. One wonders if it were known at the time, before we constructed these schemes, that one day there would be fabulous machines that would wade through all the (predicted) streams of data, hunting people, if perhaps those predictions might have been heard.
The cynic in me says "no." At some point, as the streams of politics oscillate, they occasionally converge very strongly, and all doubts are overcome, and the ratchet makes another click.
But it's not all bad news. In the natural course of events there is a high probability that one day, you'll have such folk as you prefer back at the helm, and they'll have these tools at the ready. If you make the most of it, you'll never have to suffer the current crowd ever again!
The founding fathers would absolutely love the idea of Palantir and if you don't think so go look at who wrote the Fugitive Slave Act, who agreed with it, and who enforced it.
I mean the "tyranny of the majority?" What a crock of shit, they were the tyranny that enforced slavery for 80 years.
George Washington would have absolutely used this tech to try to steal back his "property" from free states (something he tried to do but regularly failed or didn't want to argue in the courts):
When that happens, I click the "flag" button on every comment they write and watch them fulminate.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/pam-bondi-ice-minnesota-shooting-ti...
They’re not even hiding the fact this has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with compiling lists of people to target later.
Honestly it seems crazy even state governments know party affiliation. I know it's so they know who can vote in primaries etc, but it seems like you should just be able to register to vote with your party directly.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trac...
I'm sure they'll run on not using it but when systems like this exist they tend to find applications
There is the expression the road to hell is led on good intentions line with the heads of bishops.
The current administration’s ICE chaos theater is clearly something very different than the past few administrations. Let’s not try to pretend this is normal, because it’s not. They’re doing a shock and awe campaign and maximum fear and news coverage are part of the new agenda.
I dont like any of it but patriot act, covid vaccine tracking, flock, etc are all arms of the same hydra. This is just one more expanding arm of power and control in a long history of gov attempts to control populations.
(For more context: https://www.tbf.org/blog/2018/march/understanding-the-census...)
HELP I AM SOOOO F**NG ANGRY. Sorry I just don't have anywhere to safely put this rage.
I think you would benefit from someone to talk to about this.
"he was an early designer and engineering manager at Palantir (NYSE:PLTR), where he designed the company logo"
Naturally they all are registered with the govt, and thus easy to pick up, jail, or murder.
This is the type of danger where last year amateur radio was legal, and now it gets you jailed. Thats the danger of this sort of data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708996 (4 days ago, 1 comment) HAM Radio Operators in Belarus Arrested, Face the Death Penalty
They are eligible for Emergency Medicaid, which covers emergency medical needs like labor and delivery or life-threatening conditions; hospitals that accept federal dollars for medicare/medicaid are required under federal law (EMTALA) to provide stabilizing emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay.
An example every tech worker should understand is H1-B, where as an added bonus your employer can make you illegal.
You may like immigration laws or not, there is a very clear definition on legal aliens.
You are. Why do you think licenses have expiration dates? It legally authorises you to perform specific activity within specific timeframe. Any activity without license is illegal.
By same logic you can't stay in the house you legally rented previously.
Surprised those simple concepts need elaboration.
> By same logic you can't stay in the house you legally rented previously.
If you did, you'd be called a squatter, not "an illegal". Even squatters who take over someone's home have rights. Everyone gets due process. You foolishness is that you think because they're migrants, however they're treated won't affect you. I don't care what demographic group you're in, you'll be called an illegal soon enough. Words matter, the whole law is just a bunch of words.
You conceal substance beneath a pile of semantic shenanigans. If someone stays in the country illegally, their presence in the county is illegal and law enforcement on that matter is warranted. You can call them saints if you like, it still doesn't make their presence legal. No matter if they entered the country legally and overstayed their visas, or plainly entered the country illegally. No matter how much leftist media make emotional appeals and frame it as "child dying" or any other sorts of manipulations you are trying to parrot as well - it remains illegal.
There are NO US citizens detained or "abducted" by ICE, provided they comply with due procedure for establishing their legal status. You are lying. There are possibly cases where ICE had to do checks on people who decline to confirm their status, which warrants further investigation.
I appreciate your concern regarding myself being called illegal, but let me assure you I am totally fine and will be totally fine, even being not a US citizen.
It’s tragic - the way to prevent this is to increase calm, give the federal officers some support, stop conspiracy theories (eg like the boy that abandoned by his father that people say was ‘arrested’ or your comment pretending it was a murder) and stop vigilante groups from causing chaos.
That is pretty hard to accomplish while its in a holster unless the guy was suplexed and his entire spine turned to jello giving the gun a multi-foot uncushioned drop.
"misfire was due to "a partial depression of the trigger by a foreign object combined with simultaneous movement of the slide"
Which is irrelevant when in a shielded holster like this guy has.
On top of all this, even had the gun went off, which I have found zero evidence to support, how would that guy know who's gun went off to start with? Guns don't light up with a bunch of LEDs to show you it has been fired. If you aren't staring directly at the gun, which isn't really possible in the scenario that played out, you wouldn't know whos gun went off. And even if someone was staring at the gun and saw it go off, how does a holstered gun that nobody is holding represent any sort of threat? You think the guy is controlling his gun with his mind powers?
I don't even know why im bother argueing with you because this entire thing is ludicrous. I find it hard to believe you have watched any of the video of the incident at all and came to this conclusion.
Here you go: https://youtu.be/jOMQOtOQoPk?si=73omsRIZIKDo3P8u
If you’re detaining someone who has a gun and a gun goes off it’s incompetent, maybe negligent, but not murder to react by shooting the guy who had the gun.
I don’t think anyone can draw definitive conclusions from the videos.
There’s a big difference between someone randomly clapping their hands and an agent seeing/hearing that a detainee has a firearm, then hearing the firearm discharge as they’re struggling to restrain him.
Comparing hearing a clap to a GUNSHOT is wild.
Ninety nine percent of people including you and everyone on HN would, if involved in a scuffle with an aggressive armed man would respond to a sudden gun shot by shooting the armed guy.
Yes you would respond to sudden gunshots with gunfire.
Yes agreed. Someone yells “gun gun” and they reacted thinking they were being shot at by the armed man that started an altercation with them.
But they heard "gun" and assumed it was the man who had been disarmed in plain view, and was being held down to the ground by 6 other agents. That's pathetic and disturbing. If he is that scared, he has no business holding a gun, let alone a job as a federal agent.
Even if he doesn't realize it is a misfire, why would he believe that it was Pretti who shot? How can you reasonably believe a dude that is dogpiled with a gun not in his control is the shooter?
Again, the officer that begins the shooting can literally see Pretti is disarmed. He has no gun. He watches the other agent take his gun off of him.
A more reasonable take in that situation would be thinking that some other protestor has decided to start shooting at them, not that the guy dogpiled by a half dozen agents and visibly fuckin' disarmed is the one doing it.
I am not a gun control person. I think we'll never realistically get guns away from criminals, and as long as that's the case, law-abiding citizens should be allowed to have firearms to be on even footing. Full stop.
But if we can't hold out law enforcement agencies, however nominal in nature they are, to high enough standards that they don't create the entire situation that causes them to kill someone who was never a threat to them, then they shouldn't be armed. Because we can't trust them not to slaughter US citizens.
How do you know what the officer saw? They’re tackling an armed man who attacked them. It’s very possible they might not be noticing every detail of what their colleagues are doing.
The most aggressive thing Pretti does in this encounter is step in between the CBP agent and the fallen woman. Not once does he attack them.
> It’s very possible they might not be noticing every detail of what their colleagues are doing.
I'm not saying every officer that is dogpiling on him can see. I am saying the officer that is standing directly beside the one that disarms him, that is looking directly at the gun as it is removed from his possession saw it. He is looking right at it. He watches it happen.
And then he begins shooting.
I suppose enough people will grasp at this take.
I'd say Palantir should be ashamed for facilitating this, but their entire business model is built around helping the government build an ever more invasive police state.
1) Take the medicaid data.
2) Join that with rental/income data.
3) Look for neighborhoods with cheap rents/low income and low medicaid rates.
Dragnet those neighborhoods.
Something, something, even dumber than that.
Medicaid is meant to be used only by citizens and green card holders who are eligible to be citizens.
So if ICE puts your address into their computer, they get to see something about the people inside. How much do they see? Do they get to see your medical conditions too? Could a creatively inclined person get an LLM to read medical data out of it? Who knows, there’s no transparency for this sharing.
Pretty sure this is a feature not a bug. Most people aren’t here for political topics.
You never see the "no politics please thk u" crowd when it is about protests in Iran, Chinese oppression in Hong Kong, Russian aggression on Europe or hell, when people were literally running a political campaign the EU to stop killing games. You only see people flagging political submissions when it is a particular kind of politics - just like you only see corrupt officials jailed when they are a certain kind of officials.
Connect the dots, make your own conclusions.
Or rather, most people aren’t here to have their preconceived notions challenged by reality.
Politics is a nebulous term for topics that affect a large number of the population. Tech intersects with politics all the time and deserves good faith discussion.
The government doing bad things is a political topic.
How the government is using technology to do bad things is both a political and technology topic.
This forum is for hacker news. Some people believe tech news related to politics qualifies, some don't.
Your perspective is equally arbitrary. You have no reasoning, no justification. So stop pretending you do.
I think that forums like this one should discuss politics as affected by computer code seeing as HN is one of the main (for lack of a better word) computer programmers' forums based/located in/with a focus on SV, it's not some random computer forum which specializes in some random computer programming issue.
Hacker News is not lambda-the-ultimate.org, seeing them as similar is part of that hiding behind the bush, people commenting on here actually work at companies like Palantir, Alphabet, Meta and the like, companies whose recent involvement in politics affects us all, at a worldwide level. Also see this recent FT article [1] in connection with how the leaders of those companies have gotten a lot reacher since Trump ascended to power for a second time.
> Tech titans lined up for Trump’s second inauguration. Now they’re even richer
> Silicon Valley bosses who lined up behind the US president for his inauguration have fared well under his administration
[1] https://archive.ph/https://www.ft.com/content/674b700e-765d-...
There was a time when SV and technology eschewed politics, but that time is long gone. You only have to look at how often all the big tech CEO's end up at random Whitehouse events to see how they are intimately intertwined now.
Presumably there’s so much pushback now because people are quite uncomfortable having to confront the fact that they may be the bad guys (even though they were probably the bad guys years ago as well).
Not rewriting at all.
Nien-hê Hsieh, a professor of business ethics at Harvard University says that in the 1990s, “there was a real reluctance or reticence to engage in Washington” from the leading tech companies of the day.
...
The early 2010s saw huge growth in lobbying spending by tech companies. A plateau in the late Obama years was followed by another steep increase once Trump took office. But in recent years some major players have slowed or even decreased their spending, suggesting that major corporations are becoming more sophisticated in their approach to wielding power on Capitol Hill.
https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2021/02/reve...
Looking at the vote numbers on these posts before they get flagged would suggest otherwise.
Ok, I'm not "here for political topics" but I'm here to discuss things with my peers in tech. Mostly that's tech news, yes, but not always.
Still, I was down voted a lot when I said there's too much politics here.
Technology, technology leaders, and technology companies are literally driving politics, buying elections, driving the whole US economy.
Saying what “political” topics are IS political - and it’s decidedly a right wing position. Only those with the powers protecting them get to avoid politics.
[1] When representatives spend something like 4+ hours a day fundraising, people have good reason to say "this is f-ed up." https://gai.georgetown.edu/an-inside-look-at-congressional-f...
What if I'm concerned that leaving such topics up would attract more of the kind of people that prefer discussing these topics over tech topics?
Hiding doesn't fix the problem.
If your problem is that you have no means to control what other people find important enough to talk about on a public forum, in their spare time, or that the means at your disposal to do so are insufficient to make other people saying things that make you uncomfortable go away... That isn't a problem that can or should should be fixed. Hell, the desire you've expressed could be uncharitably interpreted being contributory to part of the problem that has people around you discussing politics in the first place.
I also think there’s very few places with the power to meaningfully dialog with and among people who build stuff in Silicon Valley. I have dozens of friends, coworkers, etc who are in FAANG or the newer big tech companies, and all of them are extremely well paid, and most will insist they work for positive reasons. I believe in that most of them believe in other people, and don’t want to build a surveillance society or one that concentrates all wealth and power in a few.
For this reason, I think that some conversations on here are important to have - the impact technology is having on people who are outside the tech sphere, the effect of leaders of our companies on the economy, geopolitics, and power generally. Mark Facebook is a powerful player on the world stage. So is Paul Graham, and Sundar Pichai. Davos just took place - leaders from major economies are seeking guidance from these people who many people here work for. Let nobody say they aren’t participating in politics. Where you work matters, what you build matters. It’s not tinkering around in people’s garages anymore - they’re building the infinity gauntlet and someone is gathering all the gems. The Death Star plans are on AWS.
To pretend otherwise is to deny one’s responsibility - in the short term frequently profitable. In the long term, the pendulum tends to swing back..
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
To the latter point, hundreds of comments in, and nobody has even brought up the intellectual curiosity angle of this (what limits are in place to the Federal government using data from Federal programs for law enforcement purposes? and does it matter if the program is administered by individual states?).
Instead it's just political rage bait, including citing the Rev Niemöller poem as if we're talking about Nazis.
(It used to be part of Internet culture that the moment you compared something mundane to the Nazis, you automatically lost the argument and were mocked mercilessly. We should bring that back.)
"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 for me."
Weather is political - Climate change, fossil fuel policy etc etc.
I rest my case.
Reading them was like living in an alternate reality where nothing more notable happens than a release of new version X of a framework Y. Large portions of the tech community had exactly the same attitude that could be seen here and now - refusal to consider the societal implications of their daily work, adherence to technical solutions over the real world ones ("I'll just work remotely and use a VPN, who cares") and just simple willful ignorance.
It was around that time that I started to frequent English speaking discussions, which were much more vibrant and open. It saddens me to see the same kind of process repeat itself here.
I hate seeing these posts on HN. I hate not seeing them / getting flagged more.
It's what the brown shirts did.
All the same: https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/navajo-man-opens-up-ab...
I don't think this proves the point you think it does.
Why do you think the people violently trying to stop enforcement of the law the government was democratically elected to enforce aren’t the "boot"?
The Gestapo.
Sometimes the law and its enforcers are the bad guys. Usually around the point where they abduct, brutalize and murder with impunity
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deporta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deporta...
Because I give the benefit of the doubt, I will assume most people are not that stupid. So, the only option left is they don't actually believe it, and it's just virtue signalling to their fascist overloads. Personally, I think that's a bit pathetic, not to mention naive. Nobody has any reason to think they will be spared, citizen or not.
People are starting to get angry and if enough people are angry, this will lead to either government change or repression.
If it's repression, you're not ready for what's coming.
It's a pity our American friends haven't noticed that while yes, indeed, the worst of the worst scum got sent to the US. It is just that you had set your brain UI theme to dark mode, and did not notice that the threat isn't that kid with brown skin getting sent to concentration camp by your Gestapo, but those "we want immigrants that look like they are from Norway" folks. 1)
In the distant past, you US Americans still had libraries. You could have used them to find out what there is a reason we over here in Europe and Africa did not want the Trunps and Thiels and Musks and Karps. 2)
For those who are reading this from inside the US: At what point if EVER are you going to get out of your chair, use your second amendment rights, and get rid of your crazy fascist brainworm Nazi scum that you had been praying to?
I know. It is too much to ask for. OK OK. Outside of your comfort zone to fight back. Then go watch MELANIA, a documentation on how about rape and abuse and illegal immigration is totally fine as long as your skin has the right color and the boob job was done well.
1) I myself am German, male, straight, blonde hair. I am allowed to say that our type is the cancer of the human race. After all these hundreds of years, you STILL haven't understood you can not trust us?
2) I know Karp is not from Germany. But he wrote his doctoral thesis in Germany, and it can be summarized as "I am a totally crazy asshole and want to cause as much pain and suffering as possible onto humanity, can I please do that kthxbye?"
> How about local law enforcement just comply with ICE? Sanctuary cities and non-compliance brought this on these blue cities.
No, they "brought this on" by ignoring due process. There is no world in which your stance justifies the extrajudicial execution of a detained US citizen.
Immigrants also commit crimes at fewer rates than US born people and crime is at all time lows. Yet they sold us for years on a crime moral panic and phantom "migrant crime".
So you said, propose a solution that also involves deporting people, and I will say NO. You are wanting to target a mostly fake problem.
The statistics you are looking for is that the sum of all crimes is lower for immigrants than US born people. 13.8% of the US population are immigrant residents, so in order for the sum of immigration crime to be higher than US born people the rate would need to be close to 1000% larger, which it is not.
A missing aspect with immigration when it comes to statistics is time spent in the country. The likelihood that a person has ever committed a crime in a specific country is generally lower the less time they spend in that country, especially as that number reach zero. The apple to apple comparison would be to look at the average person of average age, in any specific demographic, and ask if they have ever committed a crime, which is not the same as committed a crime in a specific country. That would be the crime rate. An other way would be to ask the question regarding a given year, what is the probability of an individual to commit a crime. The rate of the average person lifetime will not align with the rate of any given year.
The relation between crime and socioeconomic has been thoroughly debated and research when it comes to race, with the finding that race is not related to violent crime, but only once socioeconomic factors (and other related aspects) has been controlled for. If you disregard socioeconomic factors, then race has a distinct relation with violent crime. It is only because researchers control for related factors that we get the findings that we get.
People can disagree with studies should be valid and which doesn't, or look at different meta studies and say which ones is more valid than the others, but I would recommend that one engage with the discussion rather than throw around assumptions about assumptions.
This may be the first time you are exposed to this idea, because you have been lied to repeatedly that crime is high and it's immigrants doing it, but it's well studied.
https://www.google.com/search?q=immigrants+less+likely+to+co...
> Crime is at an all time low because liberal DAs
If you take out the outlier years of 2020-2022 caused by the pandemic, crime has been declining for more than 30 years. I don't know what kind of conspiracy theories about "liberal DAs" you're on about, this only became a talking point a few years ago, and wouldn't explain why crime dropped for multiple decades starting in the mid 1990s. The trend is also not restricted to areas with "liberal DAs".
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2026/is-the-us-birth-rate-decli...
That leaves really only two choices: pull a Ceaușescu and try to remove the choice, or improve all of the things which make people feel now is not the right time to have kids. Since the former choice is both immoral and self-defeating, that really flips the discussion to why the people who claim to want more children oppose universal healthcare, childcare, making housing more affordable, banning negative career impacts for mothers, addressing climate change, etc. There are many things which factor into an expensive multi-decade bet and you have to improve all of them to substantially shift the outcome.
What does this actually mean? Do you mean "get a job instead of having kids?" Working to afford life instead of having kids seem much less humanising, if anything. Being a wife and mum is being a full person, and the main thing that's bad about it is if you are a full-time mum your spouse has to work incredibly hard to compete on the housing ladder against all the two-income families bidding against them.
Now, however, there are tons of other opportunities available. Instead of kids just happening, couples can plan them and are making decisions about their finances and other life impacts such as the case you mentioned where people might realize that they can’t afford a larger home. Prospective mothers, even if they really want kids, are also being told advanced education is key or that mothers tend to have lower lifetime earnings even adjusted for field, so the questions aren’t just “can we feed them?” but “would I avoid future layoffs if I finish a masters degree before becoming a parent?”
I think that’s great, everyone should control their life trajectory, but it means that to the extent we want to reverse the trend we need to be lowering the costs so people aren’t looking at trade offs like permanently lowering their career trajectory or locking themselves into a limited, highly-competitive corner of the housing market.
This was the case for most men as well, except they sometimes had to go and die weeping and in pain in a foreign field rather than stay at home and do what for most people is the most rewarding thing in life.
You need free time for kids and if the salaries are too low for a single income household a lot of people will end up opting out of having kids.
This isn't unique the the US. Basically every country with a whack work life balance is looking at population replacement problems.
The US is actually better off with replacement rate than a lot of countries that have industrialized since them because of the way it happened and the wars that were fought. More rapidly-industrializing countries (China, Japan, a few other Asian and SA countries) have way shorter runways despite industrializing much later than the US. And those with one child policies really just made things worse for themselves.
A very large part of what the future is going to look like in my opinion is how different countries are able to grapple with this issue and come up with solutions to the problem of a large aging population and a service, hospitality and medical industry with not enough bodies.
Legal immigration - as is today - is about 1% of the US population. That's pretty standard, and would result in an slowly increasing population.
But regardless, saying "we need immigrants" then jumping to "illegal or not" is not a logical argument. We absolutely can have a system that prevent illegal immigration, while carefully screening legal immigrants. Heck, every country in the world does this except the US.
It would be better to actually enforce the immigration laws we have right now, and see where we land. Then make changes from there.
You can hear it from the horse's mouth here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
Even Reagan granted mass amnesty in the face of such costs.
We can disagree on where the threshold of unacceptable intrusion into our lives should be. But significant change probably requires replacing the Fourth Amendment. Or--as is happening now--pretending the 4A doesn't exist and hope whoever is in power next won't prosecute them.
I don’t agree. It’s a matter of incentives. If you know entering the US illegally means you stand a high chance of being deported, have almost no ability to be employed and no access to any social services, the problem mostly solves itself.
Lots of other countries ask why the US has problems other countries have already solved and immigration is a great example of it. It’s a solved problem, our leaders intentionally don’t want it fixed.
> Even Reagan granted mass amnesty in the face of such costs.
The amnesty was an agreement that substantial legislation would be passed later than would stop illegal immigration. That’s why Reagan agreed to it. But the changes never happened.
> But significant change probably requires replacing the Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment can stay as is. Just stop people from staying illegally in the country and the 4th amendment becomes a non-issue.
I.e. one must carry paperwork at all times, risk getting detained and beaten for going out in public (especially if not white or speaking non-English), masked men may enter your property or home with no identification and take whomever they like, no accountability for ICE abuses/mistakes, etc.
What about migrants who are legal? Or tourists who just want to visit on a visa?
Does the US really want a country with no migration nor tourism?
You also seem to think this problem is solved elsewhere, but Europe continues to struggle with surges of migration from conflict zones and poorer countries.
Citizens do not need to carry papers.
Federal law enforcement (what you call “masked men”) cannot enter your property without a search warrant, nor take whoever they want without a I-200 or I-205 warrant for violating immigration law.
All migrants who are legal MUST carry proof of legal status as it’s the law - 8 U.S.C. § 1304(e). That includes tourists.
It’s not really that hard. Australia has strict enforcement of immigration laws. As does Japan. It’s never perfect but the practically zero enforcement for the past few decades in the US is a horrible situation that only encourages things like human trafficking and labor abuses.
Is that really what we want the US known for? A country where if you can smuggle yourself into at the risk of physical and sexual violence by cartels you might be able to get ahead assuming you can survive the abuse and exploitation of your labor? Immigration laws protect immigrants as much as they protect citizens.
Alternatively, you have an essentially open border, which obviously can lead to unmanageable waves of immigration that strain a country’s housing, healthcare, schools, welfare, and other resources, among other effects.
Disruption to peoples’ lives happens when we have administrations who arbitrarily decide not to enforce the immigration law (e.g. the previous administration). It sends mixed signals to potential immigrants, and leads to the outcomes we have today when we decide to resume enforcing our laws.
"US deportations under Biden surpass Trump's record"
I don't agree that this is "obvious". Immigrants bring important social and cultural capital. Who do you think is building a lot of the infrastructure in the US? The people putting a strain on the system are actually the aging baby boomer generation.
I have many other reasons for supporting open immigration that are less transactional, but the suggestions that immigrants "strain" our infrastructure is incorrect.
The standard among countries all over the world is to regulate the flow of immigration via immigration law and deportation of people who violate that law.
How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react not strain the system? I saw this firsthand in schools and hospitals where I grew up, and there are numerous examples throughout history from around the world of the disruption it can cause.
That being said, all immigration policy is out of date. The world is connected now and the policies are an anachronism.
> How could a massive influx of people happening faster than a system can react
I don't agree that this is reality. Our system is not under strain from immigration. It's under strain because we spend our money on the military instead of improving infrastructure. It's also under strain due to wealth inequality and corporate friendly policy. None of which has anything to do with immigration.
That’s a good argument for vigilantly enforcing immigration laws. Look what happens when you don’t.
Otherwise you're proving his point, which is that there's no middle ground, only "ICE raids terrorizing people" and "sanctuary cities/states where local governments refuse to do any sort of immigration enforcement and specifically turn a blind eye to immigration status".
Which would put you in the minority (16%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/am...
Even without getting into a debate of whether we should do immigration enforcement at all (a sibling reply goes into it in better detail), there's the practical effect that most people do, and if Democrats don't oblige, people like Trump will get in power instead.
I think the main benefit is the same as with any law: if you have a law with no consequences for the people who break it, you don’t really have a law. If we don’t have immigration laws, we have an open border and with an open border, we can’t regulate the rate at which people enter the country. This rate can easily exceed the amount that the country reasonably accommodate, which negative impact on housing, healthcare, welfare, transportation, civic cohesion, and education systems.
Immigration law is standard around the world, with deportation being the standard response to people who violate that law. The more interesting question here is how you think a modern country will function and continue serving the needs of its citizens when it stops enforcing its immigration laws.
Let's say you have a requirement that all TVs should be registered, so you can make sure every TV owner has a TV licence. You find an unregistered TV, but the owner has a TV licence. Does it make sense to confiscate the TV? What purpose would that serve?
Let's say you have a law that all people entering a country must be scrutinized to ensure no serial killers get in. You find a guy who hasn't been scrutinized, but he's not a serial killer. Does it make sense to confiscate the guy? What purpose would that serve?
To ensure that people go through the checkpoint in the first place? For instance, the point of airport security checkpoints is to make sure that no terrorists get on planes, but if there's no penalty for you jumping the fence, why would people even bother going through the checkpoint?
And all of this is ignoring the other purposes of immigration policy, eg. preserving jobs or whatever.
How do you feel about ICE raiding citizens homes without warrants? How about door to door raids?
If ICE cannot even follow the 4th and 5th amendments then they should be jailed themselves.
Administrative warrants are civil in nature and do not give authority to enter a house or any private space. Using them as such is in violation of the fourth amendment.
Nice job sneakily changing "immigration enforcement" to "deporting immigrants".
...and that's best case scenario, giving the benefit of the doubt.
For instance, if you believe the border should be strict to keep out serial killers, what does that have to do with removing Korean car factory workers who aren't serial killers?
Also the US and Western European countries are in much better economic and civic conditions that the immigrants can take advantage of to live better lives and contribute.
Regardless, the culture is that of a nation of immigrants. I don't see how anything here can cause major cultural shift away from that. I am willing to bet you won't be willing to elaborate either, so next goal post move please...
It sounds like you're saying that you want the country to have open borders so that everyone can come live and work here given they pass some basic checks (no criminal history for example). I am not saying that is wrong, but that's not how pretty much every country in the world operates.
Why?
> A company shouldn't even hire anyone who is not eligible to work legally in the country.
Apart from the legal punishments themselves, why not? What goal is achieved by this?
Once they are in (incl illegally so) you concede you have lost on this instance. Now you admit that forcefully removing immigrants carries too high a cost (literally + damage in the communities you remove the immigrants from + your humanitarian image). So you don't.
Somehow that balance seems really hard to get right and edge cases (criminal record) matter.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/number-deported-im...
This basically states that the figures are based on self reported ICE data and are unreliable at best.
The figure is within a rounding error, and regardless does nothing to change the CCP tech and public executions of citizens in the street in broad daylight in front of dozens of cameras.
It's like these people never got past their childhood phase worrying about the monster in the closet. In fact I do have to wonder how much of the non-Boomer+ support for this regime is just from naive kids who have zero life experience.
Undoubtedly influenced by social media, they're now realizing that what they voted for was their own future's destruction and are now abandoning him in droves.
We'll see if it's too late or not.
Delete your social media, shit is poison.
At the walkout on Monday, it was a smallish group of us out, and then like a class of high schoolers came out and joined us and it was such a nice burst of energy.
"New York City get litty! Donald Trump is shitty!" lol, they were having some fun with the chants.
Would love to see more young people come out
Say it with the class:
Propa-
-ganda
Propaganda!
We could try mandating e-verify with increasing penalties before we start asking people for papers and kicking down doors.
These are intentionally provocative and involve agents performing traffic stops and harassing people on the street for no other reason than (it increasingly appears) the color of their skin.
Lets see them deploy 3000 agents to West Texas or Hialeah for a few weeks. I am guessing those local populations might have a few problems with it as well.
Strawman. You can't blame ICE's failure to sustain due process on local law enforcement, even if you think they're against you. Their hands are clean because they avoided cooperating with ICE.
Right now you have all the cons anyway, with none of the pros. A stitched-up database that has no laws attached to prevent its misuse. Just like with gun control, law enforcement could've made their job easier decades ago.
* Personnel surge: 1,500+ new Border Patrol agents, 4,300 asylum officers, and 100 immigration judges with staff to address 5-7 year case backlogs
* Emergency shutdown authority: Presidential power to close the border and suspend asylum processing when daily encounters exceeded capacity thresholds
* Fentanyl enforcement: 100 cutting-edge inspection machines at Southwest ports of entry, plus sanctions authority against foreign nationals involved in transnational drug trafficking
* Detention and support: Funding to address overcrowded ICE facilities, $1.4B for cities/states providing migrant services, and expedited work permits for eligible applicants
* Asylum system overhaul: Faster and fairer asylum process with massively expanded officer capacity to reduce years-long delays in adjudication
This bill had flaws and reasonable people disagreed on details, but it represented serious bipartisan compromise. Republicans walked away from it after Trump opposed it and it was blocked in congress. If you think that specific bill was bad, show me the Republican legislation introduced to solve the immigration crisis. They don’t want to solve the problem because it fires up their base.
>Several Senate Republicans Issue Blunt Dismissal Of Bipartisan Border Security Bill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EzoWR944
It never had a chance of passing. It wasn't some amazing bill that everyone loved until Trump told them not to. That is a fantasy that fits the narrative.
Talking about that bill specifically though, what were the issues with it (not rhetorical)? It had the support of the Border Patrol Union and Chamber of Commerce. Yes, many Republicans opposed it when released, but that opposition came after Trump publicly told them to oppose it. Here’s a timeline:
Late January 2024: Trump publicly opposed the border deal before it was even finalized, with McConnell acknowledging in a private meeting that Trump’s opposition put Republicans in a serious bind. [1]
Early February 2024: Trump declared on social media that “only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill” [2] and pressured Republicans to kill the bill, saying they needed a “Strong, Powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border” and were “better off not making a Deal.” [3]
February 5, 2024: Bill text released
February 6-7, 2024: Within 48 hours of the bill’s release, Senate Republicans declared it dead, with McConnell saying the speaker made clear it would not become law. [4] Only four Republicans voted for it in the procedural vote, and even McConnell voted against it. [5] McConnell’s own admission: McConnell later explicitly stated that “our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all” regarding the border. [6]
The bill wasn’t perfect and had legitimate critics, but calling it a “fantasy narrative” ignores that it died specifically because of political pressure, not substance. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival” before the text was even finalized.
My point stands. If this bill was inadequate, where’s the Republican alternative? What’s their legislative proposal to fix the broken immigration system? Blocking bills is easy. Show what they’re actually proposing to solve the problem.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/25/politics/gop-senators-angry-t...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4451977-mcconnell-dealt-...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-immigration-deal-republi...
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-republicans...
[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/republicans-kill-b...
[6] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/white-house-mitch...
The immigration laws are saying that we should stop illegal immigration, but respect the legal immigration. And because of that, it means that each case should be carefully treated to discover if the person is illegal or not.
But a majority of people supporting the crack-down on immigration are more than happy to see 10 innocents being deported if it means 1 illegal being deported, and they will wave around the illegal being deported to explain that before the crack-down, the law was not respected, forgetting that the current situation is breaking the law way more than the previous one (before: 1 illegal not deported, 1 error. after: 10 innocents being deported, 10 errors).
In other words: if you care about the law, you cannot "pick and choose" and say "the laws are not respected because 1 illegal is not deported" but also "10 innocents are being deported, this breaks the law, but this does not count".
The information I can find suggests only a handful of cases, maybe a dozen, out of 600,000 or so.
I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.
This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.
edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".
(And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)
I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.
Federal district judges in mpls are releasing dozens of illegally detained individuals per day. You may not be hearing about it, but it is absolutely happening. Your not hearing about is part of the problem.
[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca8.113...
That's my point and the reason of my first comment, which answered to a comment saying
> Immigration laws, like any other laws, need to be enforced, right?
I was reacting to that by saying that we should not pretend that the motivation here is "applying the law". It is not the case and it never was. (and also that "applying the law" does imply a balance between false positive and false negative, but that suddenly, trying to avoid the false negative is strangely not applying the law)
> If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be ...
Somehow, I doubt it. You are yourself saying "they think (rightfully or wrongly)". They are not interested in evidence, they don't really care to check if what they think has any evidence supporting it, it is just convenient for them.
If there are evidence of widespread false positive, they will just hold tight to the idea that "they were traitors anyway". It is more convenient for them. (and in fact, there currently is a lot of evidence of a high number of false positive, but they deny it exactly like that)
The proof of that is that there are already plenty of red flags everywhere showing that officials are incompetent. The officials say that there are plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, and yet, the only people they manage to shoot just appear to be non-illegal with no history of extremism. Then, when it happens, they starts fabricating excuses that turn out are total lies. And then ... it happens again. Even if you buy into the idea that there are indeed plenty of bad illegal dangerous persons, you have to admit that they are awful at fixing it.
It is not technically a "widespread false positive", but it is already something that a neutral reasonable person will be incapable to deny that there is a problem. And yet, right now, these people who, according to you will totally "start to speak up", don't hesitate to bury their head in the sand and insist that it is all normal.
It is totally unrealistic to pretend that suddenly, when there is widespread evidence of false positive, they will not continue to find excuse and pretend that these evidences are fake news and lies propagated by traitors.
What is the motivation here then? In your opinion?
And speaking of false positives, could you explain what you mean by that?
The people who oppose don't care about the fact that illegal immigrants are continually breaking US law by continuing to be in the US, and often explicitly argue that laws restricting immigration into the US are immoral. There's no reason grounded in an ethic of general respect for the law why formal law-violation associated with the crackdown is more important than formal law-violation associated with the illegal immigration.
But again, this is a false dichotomy. You are pretending that the only way to stop breaking the law is by accepting an incompetent organisation (ICE) to act as bullies without having to answer for their actions (while I'm not sure if the people involved in the recent killing will be punished or not, plenty of unjustified violence happened without any consequences for the perpetrators). They are incompetent: they keep making stupid mistake, saying things that appear to be obviously wrong as soon as we see the footage, ...
If you really want "applying the law", why are you not contesting ICE for not being able to arrest illegals while not breaking the law themselves in situation where breaking the law is totally useless (and don't tell me it is not useless: cops and local authorities managed to do the same without creating the mess that ICE has created).
ICE is on record of requesting ID from _children_. I don't know if you're a parent, but my kids didn't carry ID until they were nearly adults. That's okay, though, because they're white. I don't like bringing race into this, but we're not seeing ICE ask white people for their passports.
I don't have a problem weeding out dangerous criminals, but flagging someone who had a parking ticket a decade ago is wrong. Additionally, removing TPS from groups and then subsequently deporting them up is wrong. Arresting individuals and deporting them when they are going through the proper legal avenues to become citizens is wrong.
How soon until other "undesirables" are targeted?
Did you carry proof of citizenship as a child? Do you carry it today? I don't, as my license is not a "real id" yet. They could scoop me up as I walk into Home Depot and send me off to god knows where tomorrow.
Where I'm from, I am legally required to have proof of ID with me all the time. So basically used to never leaving home without it.
No, going back to what you're saying: why is it wrong to deport somebody that came to the US illegally? Just because they were good citizens is it OK to be forgiven for crossing the border illegally? How does that make any sense?
And speaking about TPS, you know what the T stands for, right?
Yes, I too have proof of ID. It does not prove that I am a citizen. I can also tell you that children in the USA do not carry ID.
> No, going back to what you're saying: why is it wrong to deport somebody that came to the US illegally?
If they were brought here as young children, yes, it's wrong -- they're being punished for the actions of their parents.
> And speaking about TPS, you know what the T stands for, right?
Of course. Let's look at Somalia, who recently had their temporary protected status designation revoked. Their home country is currently involved in a civil war, and the US government simultaneously lists Somalia as "Level 4: Do Not Travel". There's a good chance that we're sending these people to their deaths. You are okay with this?
I guess here is the misunderstanding. I cannot get an ID without being a citizen.
You also didn't answer my question about us likely sending Somalis off to their deaths.
I did not answer it because it is a "might", not a certain thing. Also, take into account the fact that they knew it was a temporary thing when they came to the US. Now, knowing one possible outcome, they could emigrate to a third country that is willing to receive them.
And speaking of it is safe to return there, I am not familiar with what happens when the TPS status is removed, but I think it only means they’re no longer welcome in the US, not necessarily being deported to Somalia the next day. So I don’t see any contradiction.
Their TPS status was abruptly revoked and they were given two months to find another country to reside in or they will be deported to Somalia. Two months! Do you think that you could find another country to reside in and handle all of the legal arrangements within that short of a time frame?
I sincerely hope that you never find yourself in such a situation.
What I don't understand is that ICE are clearly incompetent: they shoot the wrong guys, they keep claiming they arrested bad guys and it turns out they totally misunderstood and the persons in question are not who they thought they were. Even with Pretti, ICE declared they were there to arrest a known illegal with a "significant criminal history", but turns out the Minnesota officials have said it was not the case.
This is an usual strange situation: some people want to see "less illegal immigrants", and yet, they are ok with paying big money to pay incompetent people do an half-assed job.
I guarantee you, in Europe, illegals are arrested and deported regularly, and yet, the large majority of people don't even notice. There is no masked troops doing raids. And some people push for more care in managing illegal migrants expulsion, they do demonstration, they organise events and sometimes even are present and makes small obstruction during interventions. Yet none of them are being killed.
There is a huge disconnect with reality in US right now, with a part of the population so uneducated with the "usual" migration regulation and so fed with fear that they are painting the situation as if having unhinged ICE acting outside of due process is the only alternative to "open border and lawlessness". What a joke.
All of this happens in western countries (maybe not all in US). Immigration processes are just really badly designed. Look it up, it is crazy: from some countries, the only way to be considered as "legal" require you to be "illegal" during to the time of the admin process. Even if you pretend that it just means they are just not accepted, it does not make any sense: in this case, why the process does not say "no, sorry, from this country, no one can be legal". But the process is "you want to be legal, good, come to my country and walk this way. Oh, by the way, now that you are here, you are technically illegal, let me arrest you".
The reason is that the victim of the bad design cannot complain because people say "they are illegal anyway, so their voice does not count". For this reason, some citizen noticed that the system is just stupid, and just ask that for each illegal person, we give them a chance to demonstrate if they are really not fit to be regularized. But right now, the whole system is just a waste of money, and some idiots are trying to defend it just because they are too lazy to consider fairness and justice.
edit: if you want more concrete information on why the immigration system is unfair, badly design and waste your money, you can watch John Oliver on youtube about "legal immigration"
For example, the law says that people who have close family living in US and being US citizen are allowed to apply to become US citizen themselves. To do so, they need to come to the US to apply and be present to answer the questions when their file is progressing. But this process is slow and can take years before they even start reviewing the case due to delays. So, for these people, 1) in few year, the administration will say "oh, yes, we concluded that you perfectly have the right to be here", 2) the administration requires them to stay close, so, to live in the city they are applying. And right now, they are now illegals.
In other terms, the only way for them to not be illegal is to be illegal for a while. And once they have been illegal for a while, they may became legal, which is a way for the administration to say "well, turns out that you had the right to be here all along".
On top of that, some people who tried their best to follow all the process still become illegals just because the administration was too slow or did not inform them of the correct procedure (or inform them of the incorrect procedure). It is simply unfair of you they say "these illegals are bad people not following the rules" when in fact they really want to follow the rules but somehow the rules break and someone says "oh, too bad, you did absolutely nothing wrong, but now people can point the finger at you and treat you as if you are a bad person".
Sure, this is not the case for all the illegals. But this is also a huge incentive for illegals to not even bother to try to become legals: why jumps to all the hoops and spend energy if anyway even when you should be granted the nationality, you are still considered as illegal and take the same risks. The system is broken and people don't see the point of following an unfair process.
Seriously, think about it. If _you_ were tasked with cracking down on the immigration situation, what would you do in good faith? Send masked goons to check every single individual's papers and rough up people who can't show them? Or just send men in suits to every labor operation and ask for their I-9s, at 100x less cost? It's absolutely mind-boggling to me that people even assume a shred of good faith from the current administration here. This is terrorism, not law enforcement.
We also have a lot of inconsistent enforcement because some employers love having workers who can be mistreated under the threat of calling ICE. If we really wanted to lower immigration, we’d require companies to verify status for everyone they hire. You can see how this works in Texas where they’ve had a ton of bills requiring that get killed by Republican leadership on behalf of major donors:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/05/texas-e-verify-requi...
Social services left at the State level would be subject to a smaller pool of votes for approval and are more likely to be funded by actual tax revenue instead of debt.
That is: sustainably.
Furthermore, the lack of One True Database is a safety feature in the face of the inevitable bad actors.
In naval architecture, this is called compartmentalization.
There are good arguments against this, sure, but the current disaster before you would seem a refutation.
My fear is that many of these states are locked in a bubble of lies, a culture that longs for an imaginary and idealized past that never existed. That they'll continue raising generations of people who think they need to be an independent, 'rudged' individualist when that's never been possible anywhere. And once they fail they'll settle for punching down on people different than them.
Speaking of "bubble of lies..."