Any time I see people say "I don't see why I should care about my privacy, I've got nothing to hide" I think about how badly things can go if the wrong people end up in positions of power.
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.
It reminds me of when Eric Schmidt, then CEO of google, tried that argument about people's worry of google collecting so much personal data. Some media outlet then published a bunch of personal information about Schmidt they had gathered using only google searches, including where he lives, his salary, his political donations, and where his kids went to school. Schmidt was not amused.
That questionable-sounding stunt by the media outlet wasn't comparable: Google/Alphabet knows much more about individuals than addresses, salary, and political donations.
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.
If it was his job to downplay the risk's then he absolutely deserved at least this.
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.
It was probably a decade ago and I recall using something within Google that would tell you about who they thought you were. It profiled me as a middle eastern middle aged man or something like that which was… way off.
If I were extremely cynical, I would suspect they might have intentionally falsified that response to make it seem like they were more naive than they actually were.
I suspect the more likely scenario is they don't actually care how accurate these nominal categorizations are. The information they're ultimately trying to extract is, given your history, how likely you are to click through a particular ad and engage in the way the advertiser wants (typically buying a product), and I would be surprised if the way they calculate that was human interpretable. In the Facebook incident where they were called out for intentionally targeting ads at young girls who were emotionally vulnerable, Facebook clarified that they were merely pointing out to customers that this data was available to Facebook, and that advertisers couldn't intentionally use it.[0] Of course, the result is the same, the culpability is just laundered through software, and nobody can prove it's happening. The winks and nudges from Facebook to its clients are all just marketing copy, they don't know whether these features are invisibly determined any more than we do. Similarly, your Google labels may be, to our eyes, entirely inaccurate, but the underlying data that populates them is going to be effective all the same.
I think its their currently targeted ad demographic or whatever. Its probably a "meaningless" label to humans, but to the computer it makes more sense, he probably watches the same content / googles the same things as some random person who got that label originally, and then anyone else who matched it.
male, lives in this region, has an income between X to X+40000, and has used the following terms in chat or email, regardless of context, in the last 6 months: touchdown, home run, punt, etc. etc.
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.
The idea that Google’s lack of knowledge of you a decade ago is somehow related to what they know today is naive. Dangerously naive, I would say. Ad targeting technology (= knowledge about you) is shocking good now.
Color me unconvinced. Google can't even figure what language I speak even though I voluntarily provide them the information in several different ways. I can't understand half the ads they serve me.
Google doesn't choose what ad to show you. Google serves up a platter of details and auctions the ad placement off to the highest bidder.
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.
It's not just the ads though. Am I to think that Youtube helpfully replacing a video title (whose original text I understand) by a half-assed translation into a language that I don't speak is actually Alphabet playing 5D chess ? If so, hats off to you, Google. I totally fell for it.
> 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
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)
Yeah, being unaffected by social pressure when philosophizing about what is moral and liberating is strongly related to being unaffected by social pressure regarding personal hygiene and social norms, unfortunately. Still I'd rather have the weirdos, especially this one particular weirdo, than not! Stallman has blazed the trail for us slightly-more-socially-aware types to follow, while we look/act just a little more reasonable.
There's a popular video on YouTube of him eating skin peeled from his foot during a lecture at a college. Not AI, very old, repellant to normal people.
I'm a bit awestruck. Was there any discussion about it among your peers? We might be a generation or two apart, I saw that video when I was not yet an adult and it might have been literally part of my introduction to the person that is Richard Stallman. It definitely wasn't a good first impression.
Yes, I remember that period of conscious choice, and the fence-sitting or rationalizing.
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.
Sorry, I didn't mean to write out the hacker collectivists. I said "individualist" because to me hacking is a pretty individualist activity, even if one's ultimate goal is to contribute to some kind of collective. Or maybe I just don't truly understand collectives, I don't know.
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...
It wasn’t a stunt and there was nothing questionable about it. I’m amazed by how easily people shit all over journalists - it really has to end because it is precisely how truth dies.
Here’s a question - since you have such strong feelings did you write the editor of the piece for their explanation?
Having met him one time he seemed like just a really intense dude who embodied the chestnut “the CEO is the guy who walks in and says ‘I’m CEO’.” I dunno if there’s more to it than that.
I missed this further in the article. She broke up with him four years after the first claim of rape only after she found out he was with a 22-year old. So she didn't have any problems "escaping" the relationship.
This is gross man. Abusive relationships are way more complicated than that, judging someone in this situation because you read one article about it is out of line
It's the article supplied. If you have another article that says anything different, then supply it. If you have further insight into this specific instance, give it.
It has nothing to do with reading another article and I have absolutely no insight into this instance and neither do you. You do not and cannot know what is going on in that woman's life to judge her like that, and it's really gross to try and do so.
Which is why I said I didn't understand and why I asked the questions. I made no judgement but you found it easy to judge me on even less information. How very Reddit of you
No, I do not. I literally said "I have absolutely no insight into this instance"
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.
Just a piece of advice. If a woman calls it rape it's not on her to prove it. It's on the man to prove it's not. This goes doubly when you're talking about one of the most powerful men in the world. There are dynamics at play here that none of us would be able to comprehend.
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.
Good point. Read into the case where you'll find out more instead of relying on other people to do your searching for you. When you say stuff like:
> 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.
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."
Back in the day, Google eng had pretty unguarded access to people's gmails, calendars, etc. Then there was a news story involving a Google SRE grooming children and stalking them through their google accounts...
Thiel lost his shit because Gawker mentioned he was gay in an article on their site. Something _everybody_ in Silicon Valley already knew. Then he goes and forms what essentially amounts to a private CIA.
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.
i hate defending thiel since hes literally destroying society, but he didn't get mad at gawker just for outing him
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.
So he was willing to make a business deal with the country that executes gay people, as long as HE wasn't in danger? Legitimizing their regime is perfectly OK if it doesn't affect him? The fact that he was negotiating with them makes that incident look even worse for him, not Gawker
Maybe his social media profiles at the time (public, because I'm not "friends" with him) shouldn't have included photos and posts about gay cruise ship vacations.
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?
And this is what every hacker on the planet should be doing: exposing all of the secrets of the rich parasites. Leave them no quarter, no place too hide.
> This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
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 find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now, building up to almost everything in the current cultural moment.
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.
I think in part this is because it would require them to admit that they've been had, which is even worse than to have to admit you're a terrible person. Being terrible is one thing, most people can handle that. Being so utterly dumb that you've been carrying water against your own country and effectively are in every sense of the word a useful idiot is a thing most people would shy away from.
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.
In some sense, it is a part of one's identity, for one can't easily separate the worldview from the person. But we enter a strange era when your identity is challenged and remoulded by a non-human entity.
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.
I don't think it is a tangent at all, it just underlines the principle in even more stark ways than the other ones do: tribalism is a very powerful button to press and we're in an era now where you can be a 'tribe of one' with your mentality manipulated by extremely personalized targeting to steer you in a particular direction, no matter where you were born or what your original affiliations are.
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.
Russia may be a factor, but I have always maintained the american right wing has enough natural and innate stupidity it could have anyways self created maga.
The Tea Party was an astroturfed political movement that started freerunning on hatred, and still hasn't stopped. MAGA is just that political movement still running.
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.
> I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now
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.
i have been screaming that this is possibly the #1 information systems problem/failure that has led us to where we are and i have seen no thought leaders or solutions emerge. it's imo the top impact vector and the most critical thing that must be addressed to take the foot off the gas. it's the other side of the double edged blade of open and free internet and we are so far beyond trusting that open and free on its own is going to naturally sort itself out. nothing is being done to combat this, everyone that has the wits and intelligence to problem solve in this arena is head down reading about the next claude code update.
i'm terrified/hopeless tbh, this fucking sucks. i've always seen this as the number one thing that is destabilizing countries around the world. this shit is not contained to the US and other countries will follow our course in the coming years without efforts to solve for russia/iran/china and their damn ass bots. these things are way more sophisticated than people think and most people cannot discern the difference. they can and do simulate arguments in comment sections to play up a winning side in a believable way.
Well, they might as well be if you can't reason with them. There are some prime examples right here on HN who defy the imagination in terms of how far they will go to defend the indefensible, to come out swinging to make sure you realize that they will go to any length to stand for their 'principles'. And they probably believe the reverse is true as well, they see the rest of us as the ones that are terribly wrong, misguided and the subject of propaganda.
already happening mate. credible reporting says 20-40% of social media ain't people.
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?
I mean, tens of millions of people voted for this. So even if social media sentiment is mostly bot-driven, it's provably backed up or supported by what real people deeply believe and want and will continue to vote for in mid-terms.
Yes, exactly. But, I’ll admit it took me until the republican primary before the 2016 election for this to register in my mind. I was born in the US in the 80s & fell into the “what you see is all there is” bias (and hadn’t read enough history before then either).
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.
> I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter
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.
You don't need gun freedom to avoid mass government slaughter like in Iran. I live in France and I feel safe even though I can't defend my home with a gun. The door is pretty strong and if I go outside I know that the worst thing that can be against me is a knife or a dog, something I never saw used against someone with my own eyes, only in the newspapers.
What is required is a constant fight against obscurantism. It's a cultural battle.
You can buy black powder guns over the counter in france and easily make or import the black powder from elsewhere in the EU. A black powder revolver is damn good for self defense, just needs maintained more frequently so the powder doesn't go bad.
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.
> 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.
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...
> Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.
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.
ICE officials are pretty consistently saying that they do more visible immigration enforcement in places where the local police are forbidden by local or state law from giving information about people they arrest to ICE, compared to places where the local police do this happily. Legally-forbidding local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement is a prototypically blue-state policy that red states do not generally do.
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.
Can't talk for all Red states, but in Austin, TX the city police is arresting even people who try to interfere with traffic, even more so people who interfere with federal agents so there is a little chance someone reads reddit, figures there is nothing going to happen if he or she lays hands on a fed and get lit. Now, I've seen quite a few of videos from Minneapolis and there were literally 0 MPD officers in any of those. I wonder where is the police in the blue states, definitely not on the streets where riots are going on.
I feel like calling protests that are overwhelmingly peaceful riots tells me everything I need to know about the chances of this conversation being productive. Framing the language in a way that intrinsically devalues the fundamental first amendment right to assembly and speech puts all of this into a very obviously biased conversation.
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.
>Police or federal officers using riot dispersal techniques against a protest does not suddenly make the protest a riot.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
> I have seen zero evidence there is any sort of widescale assault on police or federal officers with these protests.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's not credible to claim that Good got in her car that day with the intent to run over ICE and cause a mass casualty event. Her actions immediately preceding her death were 1) parking her car perpendicular to the road, rather than lining up with officers and building up speed; and 2) waving at and talking to her killer-to-be.
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 credible to claim that Good got in her car that day with the intent to run over ICE and cause a mass casualty event.
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.
Well, you probably have seen the video where the officer is being pushed by the car to the point he is sliding backwards yet you keep arguing he is not touching the car. I don't see any point in trying to persuade you or figuring what you think is moving him this way, you are not going to change your opinion nor will I.
Or we could look at the video where we can actually see the distance between the officer and the vehicle.
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?
I don't have a Tiktok account so I don't really have a means to search that, and it's tough to find stuff on YouTube because the recent murder is (understandably) hogging the headlines and the top searches, and I cannot be bothered doing more than a cursory search considering I don't really think you're arguing in good faith anyway. Regardless, I don't really think this is the slam dunk that you seem to think it is. You "not seeing MPD interact with protestors" is hardly strong evidence of anything.
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.
So you yourself have not seen MPD yet first accused me of only seeing four videos and then accuse me of arguing in bad faith (I don't even know what that would mean in this context, you believe I've seen MPD in the four videos I have seen but lie about it?). Good talk.
I pulled the number "four" out of my ass, sorry if that wasn't clear. I was trying to say that if you saw some videos that don't have MPD then that's hardly very compelling evidence of anything.
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.
"I've proposed a hypothetical situation based off evidence I won't provide and now I'm going to demand sources refuting it because you said 4 TikTok videos is basically subjective bullshit" is just... not how honest discussion works. Come on.
What do you expect, me presenting the videos with no police in Minneapolis? These are pretty popular on this site. I can show you some from APD dealing with rioters:
No, I was expecting you to engage with some degree of intellectual honesty in the first place. The complaint was clearly and unequivocally not that you didn't present "evidence".
Of course they can perform more than one task at the time, the question is why have they started prioritizing Minnesota? Which dont have a lot of illegal immigrants.
Great question, most Trump supporters are extremely unhappy he’s not doing the mass deportations he promised and instead just doing tiny stunts in Minnesota. Basically neither the right nor left are happy with this admin.
Considering the AG demanded the voter rolls for MN to remove ICE it becomes obvious what game is being played. It’s a shame the USA is a terrible place.
If it was actually a terrible place the illegal immigrants would leave on their own volition and it wouldn't be necessary to have federal police find them and forcibly arrest and deport them.
I think that's a bit reductive. There are plenty of economic, political, or familial reasons for not leaving.
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?
> Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.
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.
Yeah, I agree. The emphasis on expanded field enforcement is backwards. If millions of people are "illegal" primarily because they are stuck in multi-year backlogs, then the failure is in the court and asylum system, not in a lack of raids.
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.
I agree the administration's goal is not to restore legal order or even public safety. Hate makes you stupid. Hating a people makes you really stupid. I don't think it really has a goal, not even Project 2025 or whatever. It's too stupid. It's like a teenager breaking its own xbox because its gf didn't text it fast enough. Nonsensical anger directed towards random innocents.
Without going into a long tangent talking about each point, I would like to point out that ICE doesn't actually seem terribly concerned with whether or not the people are illegal aliens or criminals. The last two people they murdered were US citizens, there are many US citizens, some natural born, that have been detained.
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.
Yeah I don't give a shit about the illegal immigrant situation. I don't want that agency to have all of my information for no reason at all. There's is no world in which that is appropriate, regardless of your views on immigration.
It's not even that big of a leap. We've seen a off-duty ICE agent drunk driving his child, getting stopped by the cops, implied threats to one of the officers for being black with payback, spent the whole time saying "come on man" using his position as a federal officer as a way to get out of trouble, and ends to the point that I wanted to make, complained about his and I quote "bitch ex-wife" for divorcing him.
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?
Depends where, I think. Where your neighbors are mostly honorable, it mostly works. There are plenty of nice neighborhoods, and no shortage of bad ones either, sadly.
That assumes that the people who enforce the law want good people to be police officers, and that has never been the case. It is certainly not the case with our current ICE officers.
It doesn't assume anything. It's literally what's happening right now. All of your neighbors don't want to steal all of your stuff. Think about the fact that this is only true in certain places, regardless of what laws exist. Laws have very little effect on criminal behavior. Your peers being cool people are all that really protects your safety and your property.
Sounds like the solution to crime is therefore to mitigate the factors that precipitate it. If people steal in order to meet their basic needs, then providing basic housing and medical care to all should see a reduction in crime.
Also always keep in mind that what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. This includes things like your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.
The reaction from the masses: "But that isn't true today, anything could happen in the future, and why should I invest so much work on something that's only a possibility?"
People do not have justifications for most choices. We watch YouTube when we would benefit more from teaching ourselves skills. We eat too much of food we know is junk. We stay up too late and either let others walk over us at work to avoid overt conflict or start fights and make enemies to protect our own emotions. If you want to know why Americans are allowing themselves to be gradually reduced to slavery, do not ask why.
It's disingenuous to say Americans are "allowing" themselves to do anything in the face of countless, relentless, multi-billion corporate campaigns, designed by teams of educated individuals, to make them think and act in specific ways.
This. As much as I would like to say 'individual responsibility' and all that, the sheer amount of information that is designed to make one follow a specific path, react in specific way or offer opinion X is crazy. I am not entirely certain what the solution is, but I am saying this as a person, who likes to think I am somewhat aware of attempts to subvert my judgment and I still catch myself learning ( usually later after the fact ) that I am not as immune as I would like to think.
Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit? Besides of course, Trump himself. Surely that must be his base, yes? Then followed by Americans at large. It’s surely not, say, Canada’s responsibility, no? There’s a spectrum of responsibility, and you can find out who is at the top of that spectrum of those that think the thing is bad, and hold them at least morally responsible. In this case, yes, that is individuals.
There are, admittedly, layers do this post I don't think I have time to properly analyze, but I will do my best to be brief.
<< 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.
> Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit?
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.
His base are the 0.01%. They could end this tomorrow by phoning their pet senators and having a quiet word.
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.
30 million Americans on the low end believe the earth is only thousands of years old and specifically deny the existence of plate tectonics and continental drift
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.
<< is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority"
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.
> Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime
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.
A valid perspective, and I agree that a democracy only works as long as its citizens remain civically engaged. Unfortunately, I think it's too late for the US in its current form, and it might not be long before we see it split up into smaller regions, unless something suddenly kicks Congress into gear and people break ranks to impeach and disparage the Trump administration.
I can’t understand republicans in congress. They’d rather be a powerful dung eater than a respectable ex-congressman. Jan 6th should have been the last straw.
Its never too late, eventually things will turn and when that happens, you will be in either the right position, or the wrong position, depending on your actions.
That optimism doesn't readily apply to collapsing empires. If Congress doesn't get its shit in gear, the US is over. Our president is a hair away from sending military to arrest multiple governors of US states. Trust in this current government and Constitution are at an all-time low.
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.
This is all true and happening. But it's not optimism. It's inevitability. We have historical context for change. The would goes though polarities like this through the course of time that's why it's important to stay true to humanity.
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.
The problem is that by the time some people encounter these shocking images and videos of mass human torture, their priors have already been developed to reject their eyes and ears in favor of what the people with whom they've entrusted their safety tell them.
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.
<< shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced.
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.
Anyone who stands up to a tyrannical government and a wannabe dictator's secret police is a hero to me. He died a hero. He was helping a woman who was being maced by a group of lawless masked thugs masquerading as law enforcement who are unwelcome in the neighborhoods they patrol. Any other perspective requires being ignorant of the context.
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.
I can point to countless times in history where belief in the Christian God was used to murder, subjugate and torture "others". The reality is that, regardless of what nice things Jesus may or may not have said, Christianity as an institution has always been used as a tool for power and coercion. That goes for all Abrahamic religions.
I sometimes imagine that HN was a professional collective. Maybe working with the supply chain of foodstuffs. Carciogenic foodstuff would be legal. Environmental harzards getting into foodstuff would be legal. But there would be a highly ideological subgroup that would advocate for something that would very indirectly handle these problems. And the rest of the professional collective are mixed and divided on whether they are good or what they are actually working towards. A few would have the insight to realize that one of the main people behind the group foresaw these problems that are current right now 30 years ago.
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 older I get the more disconnected I feel from some of the posters on this site. I can't remember exactly when I joined, 2012ish maybe? But the takes people have seem to be getting wilder and wilder.
Most users here are American, have you seen what is happening in America?
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".
Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for about a year in the UK for posting an inflammatory anti-immigration social media post which was deemed illegal under UK law, and is currently being threatened (https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2157938/lucy-connolly-pris... ) with being returned to jail for posting social media content attacking the current UK government.
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.
Can’t even incite murder anymore without being put in prison; it’s political correctness gone mad!
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!)
> There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech.
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.
"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."
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.
My interpretation: advocating for privacy without making effort to avoid a large part of the society goes "crazy" will not protect you much on the long term.
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.
EU is literally debating about "Chat Control". Its purpose is to scan for child sexual abuse material in internet traffic. But its at the cost of breaking end to end encryption.
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.
They want to declare "Antifa" a terrorist organization. So anyone that is against fascism (ANTI-FAscist) will be labeled a terrorist. Let that sink in for a moment.
> Parlour, of Seacroft, Leeds, who called for an attack on a hotel housing refugees and asylum seekers on Facebook, became the first person to be jailed for stirring up racial hatred during the disorder.
> Kay was convicted after he used social media to call for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set alight.
It's fascinating - I seem to remember seeing this interaction happen time and time again with GP. I wonder why they keep leaving out the calls for arson.
These are both true statements, but there's a huge difference in scale.
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.
Yes, that was egregious and well-publicized. I've seen another case of a small-town sheriff arresting someone for a Facebook post that absolutely was not a threat of violence. Both were released and I believe the latter won a lawsuit for wrongful arrest.
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.
If the sheriff who arrested this person has zero personal consequences that make him change his behavior, then it is de facto legal for them to arrest you for your speech.
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.
> If the sheriff who arrested this person has zero personal consequences that make him change his behavior, then it is de facto legal for them to arrest you for your speech.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The US is currently descending into fascim. With each passing day, we see more bold and obviously illegal actions that we would not have dreamed up in our wildest nightmares.
Wait, so you think government that will make some "ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more" illegal is probable enough to consider such hypothetical situation, but government that will ignore law is where you draw the line?
> 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.
ICE's remit is dealing with immigration. They are not general purpose law enforcement, despite this administration seemingly using them as such.
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.
Then why would the head of DHS offer to the state governor to pull them out of the state if Minnesota turned over its state electoral and other records to Trump's administration, in defiance of court orders and laws prohibiting it?
This guy's one of those I called genetically incapable of freedom. I have seen him in the past claiming he works in his free time out of his own wish to create locked down computing devices. Imagine what kind of person does that out of genuine desire instead of being paid a good sum by a FAANG for.
> This type of thinking is what is leading to the destruction of order there.
Are you sure it's this kind of thinking that's at fault? I would've said that it's actually caused by giving people without training and any serious screening extreme power with absolutely zero accountability. Would love to hear your take on this though.
Yes, I am sure it plays a factor, giving people justification for their actions. The issue is that restoring order is not easy. And when the people making disorder are antagonistic to the people restoring order that clash leads to unfortunate scenarios. Lack of training (specifically direct experience of dealing with such behavior) or screening plays a role in how order is restored but these are reactive actions. In my mind everyone would be better off if we all maintained order so these clashes didn't have to happen in the first place.
> In my mind everyone would be better off if we all maintained order so these clashes didn't have to happen in the first place.
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!
Obviously rushing to the aid of a fellow human who was assaulted by a masked person for no reason other than to act out that person's longing for violence might be "disorderly" to you. To the rest of us it's called compassionate, human, democratic. It isn't against any written law in USA, any law passed by a democratic legislative body.
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.
> Nothing can justify disorderly protests. I don't care about what caused someone to break the law. I care that law is enforced.
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).
Good to hear you're onboard with prosecuting Federal agents pretending to have local traffic enforcement powers and murdering citizens during illegal traffic stops.
Currently the Federal level is blocking the State prosecuting such clear breaches of the law.
> Good to hear you're onboard with prosecuting Federal agents pretending to have local traffic enforcement powers and murdering citizens during illegal traffic stops.
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.
"Disorderly" protests are protected by the first amendment. No justification is needed. That is the law. Enforce that law and stop ICE from harassing people just for exercising their fundamental rights.
The people "making disorder" are operating democratically within the former USA constitution.
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.
> There weren't ex post facto laws being passed during the holocaust.
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
No, this argument is about the database of past events being prosecuted in the future.
>"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.
The thing also is, it doesn't matter what the truth is. If the computer says you did a thing, the thugs (ICE) will do what they want.
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:
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.
I think the "nothing to hide" argument is made for a different reason.
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.
> The NSA knowing your search history is no big deal (as long as you're not looking for anything illegal)
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.
> People are unafraid of the government knowing certain things because they believe it will not have any real repercussions for them.
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".
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.
Generally speaking, I think the point of statements like this is to shoot down the trite and thought-free cliche "if you have nothing to hide". And the point is rarely to convince the person you're speaking to, it's usually to get people who might otherwise be swayed by hearing the trite and thought-free cliche to think for a moment.
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.”
I feel "people should not have have consequences for what they say", and "people should be able to avoid consequences for what they have done", are separate concepts. One does not require believing in the other. For example I believe the former, but for the latter I believe everyone should be punished when they break the law.
People should have consequences for what they say, but not from the government. You should never be prosecuted for what you say, no matter how vile. But other people are free to exercise their rights in response, including freedom of association.
So if public figures with a sizeable following start calling for you and your family to be chased down and gutted like animals, should they legally be allowed to do that? Do you actually believe that?
> I feel "people should not have have consequences for what they say", and "people should be able to avoid consequences for what they have done", are separate concepts.
'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.
Not as clever as it may sound. It is perfectly possible that someone has nothing to hide in a good way, whereas someone without anything to say for himself cannot be easily imagined as a good faith social individual. So in a way this is comparing apples to bad apples and claiming they are perfectly equal.
Quite. I think a lot of Americans are acculturated (partly via movies and TV) to constant one-upmanship and trying to end disagreements with zingers. Look how many political videos on YouTube are titled 'Pundit you like DESTROYS person you disapprove of!' You see the same patterns in Presidential 'debates' and Congressional hearings. It's all very dramatic but lacking in real substance.
Which are quippy and dismissed because they fundamentally misunderstand privacy. There is such a concept as "privacy in a crowd" - you expect, and experience it, every day. You generally expect to be able to have a conversation in say, a coffee-shop, and not have it intruded upon and commented upon by other people in the shop. Snippets of it may be overheard, but they will be largely ignored even if we're all completely aware of snippets of other conversations we have heard, and bits and pieces have probably been recorded on peoples phones or vlogs or whatever.
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.
I'm pro-privacy and I still think these retorts just make it sound like you've put zero effort into understanding what the "nothing to hide" people are trying to articulate.
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.
"I've got nothing to hide." is a rather extreme statement. The people who say it don't mean it literally. But saying something they don't mean aren't really helping their points across. I think OP’s retorts are simply to show how absurd the “I’ve got nothing to hide” claim is, regardless of how effective the retorts are.
I'm not out to defend "I've got nothing to hide", but those who say it are usually saying it about a specific policy (e.g. the NSA monitoring searches). It's usually clear what the context is and that's what you have to argue against to actually engage and convince someone. They probably do mean quite literally that they have nothing to hide from the government. It's not an extreme statement in context.
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.
Law enforcement are civilians like you or me. It was a big mistake to grant them special rights. If they can arrest people then it should be legal for you and me to arrest a LEO. Why should any person have special rights in a Democracy?
> 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.
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…
It doesn't even need malicious intent. If nobody rational is monitoring it, all it will take is a bad datapoint or hallucination for your door to get kicked in by mistake.
The same people saying that will also defend police wearing masks, hiding badges, and shutting off body cameras. They are not participating in discussions with the same values (truth, integrity) that you have. Logic does not work on people who believe Calvinistic predestination is the right model for society.
It's amazing how quickly the party of small government, states rights, and the 2nd amendment quickly turned against all their principles. It really shows how many people care more about party than principle.
It's not that amazing. The Republican party has repeatedly demonstrated my entire life that their goal is power and all stated ideals can and will be sacrificed as needed to achieve that goal.
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.
They haven’t turned against their principles. Party is the principle. You’re just confused because you thought their stated principles were real.
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.
> shows how many people care more about party than principle
"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.
The people who still support the orange troll live in an echo chamber where they've been sold the bullshit that quran waiving communist terrorists and the deep state are behind all of this, and it's a con job.
I guess this is an example of FAFO? This is what the NRA wanted, now they got to find out how what happens when there are too many guns and too many idiots with guns masquerading as law enforcement. The guy had every right to have a gun, and the masked tyrants had no right to kill him for it.
They are not where I would hold them to if they were truly a principled organization and not largely a political tool for the far-right on any and every talking point, but we got far more out of them than we usually do.
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.
A lot of American Christians aren't hyper committed to the specific theology of whichever flavor of Christianity they belong to, and will often sort of mix and match their own personal beliefs with what is orthodoxy.
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.
I don't believe there is any sort of conservative intellectual movement at this point. The right believes they have captured certain institutions (law enforcement, military), in the same way they believe the left has captured others (education/universities, media), and will use them to wage war against whichever group the big finger pointing men in charge tell them to.
"What are we to infer from Oakeshott's favoured 'cook' metaphor?First, that conservatism is about doing, and about understandingwhat one is doing, not about thinking in the sense of planningwhat to do.12 Second, that conservatism is unreflective to the extent that it does not deal with packages of coherent ideas abouthuman beings and their societies, but is a method of recognizingreality through experiencing it, intellectually unintelligible for nonparticipants. Third, and consequently, that it is non-transmittable,unless this be done by direct instruction in its practices. Fourth,and not least, that it is futile to conceptualize about human conduct, political or otherwise, in manners typical of Western politicalthought. Philosophy is simply 'experience without reservation orpresupposition'.13 The world of the conservative—the world ofpractice—is unsystematic and contingent, though there is withinexperience an inner, self-contained, coherent world." (Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory)
"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)
Trying to map the current Republican party, despite calling themselves conservatives, to anything that Freeden would recognize in 98 does not seem to be particularly productive.
Some, probably; not all (and certainly not the current president, who in his more senile moments muses about how his works have probably earned him hell [0]).
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…
Calvinistic predestination is a TULIP sense (Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints) is an extreme minority position, like 7% to 5% of the American Church (Reformed Camp)
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.
And honestly, with a Congress that allows every state, irrespective of population, two Senators, it is somewhat skewed. I mean San Jose, California is about double the population of the entire state of Wyoming.
i don't know why this is downvoted, it's a legit complaint.
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.
I didn't downmod, but it's probably because they are represented by population in the House, a coequal chamber which approves the budget (and the Speaker of which is next in line for POTUS after the VP). States have equal representation in Senate so one high-population state can't write laws that only benefit them, or are disadvantageous to smaller states.
Republicans are overwhelmingly Christian, and even though Calvinism, or its branches, may not be the religion a majority of Republicans “exercise”, predetermination is a convenient explanation of why the world is what it is, and why no action should be taken - so it gets used a lot by right wing media, etc.
Police absolutely should have body cameras - quite frequently they’ve proven law enforcement officers handled things correctly where activists have tried to say otherwise.
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.
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.
The true problem is that it happens no matter who is in charge. It's like that old phrase about weapons that are invented are going to be used at some point. The same thing has turned out to be true for intelligence tools. And the worst part is that the tools have become so capable, that malicious intent isn't even required anymore for privacy to be infringed.
From everything we are seeing, the tools are not actually that capable. Their main function is not their stated function of spying/knowing a lot about people. Their main function is to dehumanize people.
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.
The nazi's were easily able to find jews in the Netherlands because of thorough census data. Collection of that data was considered harmless when they did it. But look at what kind of damage that kind of information can do.
This is the moment for Europe to show that you can do gov and business differently. If they get their s** together and actually present a viable alternative.
The simple response to that line of thinking is: "you don't choose what the government uses against you"
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.
For me, the angle is a bit different. I want privacy, but I also sense that the people who are really good at this (like Plantir) have so much proxy information available that individual steps to protect privacy are pretty much worthless.
To me, this is a problem that can only be solved at the government/regulatory level.
In principle, I agree with your point; in practice, I think the claims made my these surveillance/advertising companies are likely as overstated as Musk's last decade of self-driving that still can't take a vehicle all the way across the USA without supervision in response to a phone summons.
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.
> 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.
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.
The parent's example is of an individual using that "legal" state collected data for nefarious purposes. Once it's collected, anyone who accesses it is a threat vector. Also, governments (including/especially the US) have historically killed, imprisoned and tortured millions and millions of people. There's nothing to be gained by an individual for allowing government access to their data.
There is 0 difference. None. There's not even a line to cross.
> 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.
Musk and his flying monkeys came in with hard drives and sucked up all the data from all the agencies they had access to and installed software of some kind, likely containing backdoors. Even though each agency had remit for the data it maintained, they had been intentionally firewalled to prevent exactly what Palantir is doing.
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.
Even if you trust the intentions of whoever you're giving your data to, you may not trust their ability to keep it safe from data breaches. Those happen all the time.
The source of the problem is the respect of the rule of law and due process
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.
yeah, this is exactly it. all the arguments kind of boil down to
"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
The Rights are not intended as preemptive. You don't have a right to free speech b/c otherwise maybe the government regulation of speech will get out of hand. You have it because it's espoused as a fundamental right. Same with separation of church and state. It's like "Well maybe a future evil government will regulate the church poorly, so lets ban it completely". It's just seen as an area the government shouldn't delve in entirely.
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.
Are we supposed to structure out society so we're safer in the case that the Chinese invade and use all our institutions against us? There is a risk-benefit tradeoff to make. Crippling society and institutions in preparation for an a worst-case scenario future hypothetical is not sensible. To get things done you operate from the standpoint that the democratic government is responsive to the desires of the people. The adversarial perspective is self sabotaging
I think the real problem is that the government is not structured in an accountable way and things like DOGE can happen. These things basically don't happen in other democracies. The Japanese don't all have assault rifles in their basement b/c they're waiting for the day the Diet is going to harvest their data to oppress them
I do not think this is really about privacy as much as it is about our broken immigration system. Let’s look at a simple case where both Democrats and Republicans largely agree.
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.
Undocumented immigrants often have legally-resident and/or citizen family members who are eligible for Medicaid.
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.
This is the same thing I thought when liberal-minded folk talked about giving the Federal government more power over States in order to enact some good work, or to achieve some policy win. Yes, for now, I thought, but you can't assume a good natured centralized power will persist, and when it doesn't, what is your alternative? I have watched as liberal minded folks rediscover the value of State Sovereignty and power in the face of an autocratic Federal executive, bearing arms when the an autocrat sends masked agents to terrorize your city. Lean into it, I say. Winner take all Federal system means no alternative but to win at all costs, rather than live and let live. We need more, smaller, States. We need more Representatives than 1 per 700,000 citizens...by 10x
> This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.
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.
I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph, but there is no reason at all for any part of the US government that isn't CMMS to have any access to Medicaid data, writ large, at all. And even CMMS should only see de-identified data. It's absolutely absurd to think that law enforcement has any reason to see anything in any MC database.
One interesting point about the volume of data that might be available about any individual is that law enforcement will only look for data points that suit their agenda.
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.
> 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.
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.)
> 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.
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
It’s usually not a great example because it’s basically the one thing that is “never going to happen here”. Normally the one about abusive law enforcement offices stalking ex-partners (or helping their buddies stalk their ex-partners) is better because it happens fairly regularly.
We really are in unprecedented times when it’s looking like the big one could happen in the United States though…
I never really understood that angle - do you think the Germans would have thrown their hands up and not killed anyone because they lacked accurate data on who was Jewish?
And (with a heavy dose of purposeful suspension of disbelief), if ICE does deport those people they've determined are "illegal", does anyone believe that the agency will scale down and stop? There will be new "enemies of the state"
They won't run out of people to deport, because all those jobs (and occasionally, benefits) the illegals profit from will still exist. If you remove the people but not the incentive you just get new and different people.
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?
"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"
~ Edward Snowden
Are you saying that, because there is one way in which people are vulnerable, that it doesn't matter if we add more ways they are vulnerable? Because that makes no sense whatsoever.
I don’t agree. I’m fine ICE can see my data, as long as there are process enforced to track those usage and I have a right to fight back for their misuse.
Problem today is ICE has no accountability of misuse data/violence, not they have means to data/violence.
> I’m fine ICE can see my data, as long as there are process enforced to track those usage and I have a right to fight back for their misuse
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.
I'd rather ICE (or whatever government agency) not see my data... because, even if there are processes that are enforced, there might not be tomorrow. If that data isn't collected in the first place, that threat vector disappears.
The business is equally blamed. But ever aince Uber showed up and violated laws in all jurisdictions, we always focus on the cops and not the criminals.
The "they look like us" fallacy is so deep in this.
ICE and DHS already were bloated and somehow grew from not existing 25 years ago to a $100 billion budget. Then the big Trump spending bill added another $200 billion to their budget. And there’s no accountability for who gets that money - it’s all friends and donors and members of the Trump family.
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.
But there are people trying to hide their locations even though they are here legally; because ICE has made it very clear they don't care if you're here legally or not. They arrest and deport US citizens. They arrest and deport people that show up to court to become US citizens.
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.
>This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.
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.
> 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
I'm very sorry but even criminals have access to our constitutional rights.
"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.
Rank dishonesty. I'm hiding my location because I don't want you to have it when it's inevitably hacked. Friends are hiding it because they have Antifa-friendly posts on their social media. Etc.
"Everyone who does a thing I don't like is a criminal" is obviously and intentionally fallacious bullshit.
More immigration has drastically improved this country. I don't understand your position at all. ICE is far worse for our culture than then people providing me an actual livable diet.
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.