So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".
The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately.
Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither of it?
When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.
When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.
The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.
So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.
I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.
It is possible to have a thing that is anti-American. So I'm not sure what good it is to reject the term altogether.
it can be anti-other things too, but its certainly anti-american
When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.
That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.
You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s
Again, /s/s/s/s
There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.
The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.
For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...
My entire post is about exactly how this is not the case, American values are defined in a document[1].
[1]https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...
Germany had the Paulskirche-, the Bismarck- and the Weymar-Constitution, all of them before that certain Leader elected into power. He got to define who is worthy/unworthy, decide how to read the document his party represents and change the definition of "un-German"
When did this happen? I didn't realize Biden wasn't inaugurated. I could have sworn he was the President for 4 years.
I know there’s a pretty strong norm against dragging people for their posting history here, but that’s in service of maximizing light vs. heat and I feel like pretending to be ignorant of recent events in order to relitigate something unrelated in the comments is wholly unproductive.
I do see this happened on Jan 7th though:
> 7:10 p.m.: Shortly after Twitter unlocked Trump's account, Trump released a video statement condemning the violence at the Capitol, saying that "a new administration will be inaugurated" and that his "focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power" to the Biden administration.
Anyway this argument has occurred a thousand times on these boards so if you saw January 6 as peaceful and harmless I can’t change your mind.
the thing about the US system is that the president doesnt do the transfer of power. they just lose power on a certain day, and congress grants it to somebody new
The American people deserve to know that President Trump
and his advisors didn’t just ask me to pause, they asked me
to reject votes, to return votes, to essentially overturn the election.
To keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and
to almighty God, I rejected that out of hand
and I did my duty that day.
- Vice President Mike Pence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Show me where this happened in every other election.
Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"
ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.
So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.
The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.
You are: someone who is biologically non-female, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.
He is: a businessman and politician.
You do: upstanding, normal folk things.
He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."
Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.
Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.
I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".
I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.
it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.
HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.
Because in this case, we're talking about maybe a few dozen (if that) relevant cases in trans youth [1]. With police/secret services abusing surveillance... it's huge enough that LOVEINT [2] is a term, and at least 50 cases were serious enough to be brought under official investigation [3].
[1] https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-for-reporters-transgender-parti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...
Because there's about 1% of people who are trans in the US [1] and most other populations, on top of that come a further about 1.7% people who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum [2].
Democrats aren't willing to throw literally millions of people under the bus. Republicans aren't just willing to cast them aside - they are knowingly driving trans people to extinction.
[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-ident...
I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.
There are now more bills attempting to "solve" the problem of trans girl's in sports (and it is girls, to be clear, trans boys are never an issue) than there are trans girls in sports. It's fucking pathetic.
Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.
For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.
A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.
That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].
I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.
As someone who's been into weightlifting and only casual observer-like in regards to testosterone therapy, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. After taking TRT/Steroids a person retains a good deal of the muscle/strength they gained even after cessation ... It surprises me to hear that this wouldnt carry over to sports where muscle/strength/power matter.
Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.
Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.
Quite the contrary. If you want to publish something going against "the narrative" (if something like that exists in the first place) has never been easier than now. Proper keywords and the far-right and their pseudomedia are going to give even the worst quackery a time in the spotlight - just look at RFK Jr.
Oh complete and utter twaddle.
Academia trends toward progressive views because the more educated you get, assuming you have principles and employ critical thinking consistently, the more ridiculous the positions of the right tend to look. You cannot look at the totality of climate change data and go "well clearly it's not man made" unless you either don't understand it, or cherry pick it to oblivion. You can't look at the history of Austerity politics, deployed both here and in the UK by our respective free market goblins (Reagan and Thatcher) and hold that it's good for anyone at all apart from those who are already wealthy.
This boogeyman of BIG SCIENCE holding down all the conservatives is complete and utter dreck. Show me literally one example of it. Show me one individual who's life was ruined and their career decimated to uphold ideological ends.
My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.
The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.
I think of that poem, First They Came:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
Then I realize I'm probably better off not.
> The police, "suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism", have arrested a number of Communist leaders.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1933/mar/28/leadersandreply...
Huh.
It reminds me of some quotes from the Tao Te Ching -
Restriction breeds the disorder it's meant to prevent (ch. 57) The more prohibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people become. The more sharp weapons, the more the state falls into confusion. The more laws and edicts are posted, the more thieves and bandits there are.
The world isn't a thing to be managed (ch. 29) The world is a sacred vessel; it cannot be manipulated. Whoever acts on it ruins it; whoever grips it loses it.
It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement.
People think it's a conspiracy of the elite, but the last part of your message is true and it makes me wonder to what extent everyone is being dragged along by everyone else and nobody can stop because nobody can stop.
I mean if I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss.
I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition.
However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).
Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.
The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.
Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)
There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.
1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.
2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.
Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:
1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras
2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance
3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime
4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us
5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way
No, I don't think we need Chat Control in the US or our government forcing ISPs and CDNs to block whole swaths of the internet just because a soccer game is on TV.
It'd be even better if there was some form of royalty structure on our data used by companies. It'd be nice if I, at least, received a royalty check each time a data broker sold my data to the CIA.
7. authoritarians and evil men can have a one-stop shop to know where to round up political opponents
8. power becomes increasingly entrenched and concentrated
9. See 7
There are dozens of ways living in a cage can improve human life.
You won't be exposed to dangerous ideas and you might get a calorie allowance. There's little danger of an unwanted pregnancy, and you might be given labor-related chores or exercises to occupy your time.
The danger with all of these systems is what happens when they are abused. That's not a matter of if, just a matter of when.
We are building a cage around society. It's so slow you don't realize the shackles being placed around your ankle and your neck. But one day, when it's too late to protest, the switch will be flipped.
We're already living in 1984. We are always just a few election cycles away from 1934.
for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.
in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.
having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.
The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.
Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.
We live in war times and will soon see it happening
Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.
It's one thing for our data to be out there such that a NSA employee could stalk their girlfriend, it's another thing for said person to be allowed to gracefully "retire" rather than be put in prison.
All these years reading about liberty and philosophy has taught me that the only way out is to make money and disappear, be an eagle, watch the lions eat the sheeple from the top of a mountain, because the sheeple don't want to be freed and worse yet, they will point at you as if you're an outlier, a misfit, a problem that must be fixed by force, their 'democratic' force
So fly high, find your peak and watch from there, we only have 100 years to live as we please, not to spend it fighting for those who don't want to be saved
Do like Nero, let the world burn and enjoy watching, from afar...
I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not really much better with other roleplaying administrations.
Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too terribly bright.
Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".
...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).
Genuinely don't think this is stoppable anymore.
On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.
People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.
In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.