The CCP would state literally the exact same argument to justify their actions : "It's very disingenuous to imply that these people are being arrested for purely political reasons, they are causing social unrest and preventing harmony. They are not being targeted because of their identity, but because of their actions".

And it's just as bullshit when China says it and when the Feds say it. There is no justification for black-bagging people. When that happens, it is almost always for political reasons. If it wasn't, then they could use normal legal channels instead of violating the law.

By the way, civil disobedience is always illegal. That's what the "disobediance" means.

There is a very clear difference between "Arrested for disagreeing with Donald Trump" and "Arrested for participation in an illegal act". You know what the difference is. Everyone knows China's crackdown on dissidents is entirely different from people participating in the riot getting arrested by Federal agents in unmarked cars.

How do you know that they were participating in a riot?

By the way, in Oregon, Federal agents are not allowed to carry out such actions without registering beforehand with the State. So this was literally an illegal arrest made by agents of a completely unrelated agency being used in order to do what Donald Trump wants instead of following the process of the law.

China's crackdown on dissidents is very similar, they also use the tactic where they push peaceful protests into riots and then use that as an excuse to arrest everyone.

Federal agents can enforce federal law anywhere in the US. They don’t need the state’s permission to, for example, arrest someone for vandalizing a federal courthouse. What you’re referring to is federal agents enforcing state law, which is also allowed but requires registration in Oregon[1].

That’s not a defense of the current situation; we should be putting more limits on what federal agents can do (like requiring them to identify themselves during an arrest).

[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-heck-are-federal-law-enforc...

Yes. Federal crimes. Rioting, unless it is specifically vandalism on a federal building, is not enforceable by Federal agents, because it isn't a federal crime.

When I'll see the warrant signed by a federal judge against these people for a federal crime with probable cause, then maybe. But so far, no one was served with a warrant.

Federal officers can make warrantless arrests if they have probable cause to believe the individual has committed a crime, just like normal officers. It's hard to tell if these arrests meet that threshold, but it's at least possible that all laws are technically being following here.

Again, that's not to say this isn't a bad situation. I'm explicitly advocating for changing the laws that allow this to be even possibly legal in the first place.

Sure, if they had probable cause. Do you think that those federal agents just witnessed that a federal crime was committed?

In the video I’ve seen, there’s not enough context to tell whether they have probable cause. Which by the way does not require that they “just witnessed that a federal crime was committed”.

Xinjiang’s situation didn’t start in a day, and neither did Hong Kong’s. We’ve been watching HK boiling for the past year and things have finally overflowed. It’ll only get worse from here. America is following a similar course. Massive detention camps for citizens aren’t a problem yet because they haven’t been built. But people are being picked up and who knows what’s happening, journalists are being arrested just for reporting the facts, people are being shot and permanently injured or killed just for standing by the protests. And while not intended for citizens, America already has detention camps in use, but we’re exempt from them for the moment (although some citizens are being rounded up [1]). It’s not impossible or even difficult for the feds to decide to take problem A and solution B and say, hey, we can apply this method here.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/07/23/us/u...

There is no recent history of the US interning and torturing parts of their own population because of their religion or ethnicity. That is in a totally different category than foreign policy or stuff they did while Mao’s policies starved 20 million+ people to death or student protests were suppressed by rolling tanks over them.

No, people just get detained and disappeared in China, with families sent to labor camps if you're Uighur minority. That doesn't happen in the United States.

Does the United States have problems? Yes. Are those problems on the same level as China? No.

If we are going to allow law enforcement to behave like this, you don't really have a check on people being disappeared. Even if the secret police are absolutely perfectly 100% scrupulous in only taking "bad guys" off the street for good reason, anybody could impersonate them, because they don't have identification or keep records.

For the sake of argument, stipulate the US is not right now on the same level as some despotic states. What is going to tell us that we've arrived, next week or next year, if anonymous security forces can grab people off the street with no accountability? What sounds the alarm, that the feds are not doing things correctly, or that someone is pretending to be the feds, who kidnap people?

Sure, specifically detention of people in the US isn't as big of an issue as in the PRC.

However, the US has absolutely huge issues that are much worse than anything comparable in China. Such as, I don't know, fabricating intelligence and feeding it to propaga- I mean corporate media in order to justify a war to kill over a million innocents.

The US is not better than China as far as human rights. There are some things that the Chinese do much worse than America, such as due process, in general - not in extreme cases, where both don't hesitate to extraordinarily rendition you into a black site. However, China also doesn't have the habit of turning a few million innocents into pink mist every decade or so, so there's really no argument of moral superiority you can make here. US problems are certainly on the same level as China.

And as far as detention, the direction the US is going certainly isn't the right one, either.

China right now has little power projection ability, and invading anywhere would likely start a very costly war with the US. If China had the same global military dominance as the US does now, it would be much, much more aggressive. It openly wants to outright conquer Taiwan, just for starters. There's a whole Wikipedia category on Chinese border disputes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Territorial_disputes_...

Now we're getting somewhere. I agree, China likely isn't doing so because they lack the power. Same way, the USG isn't putting people into re-education camps largely because the people won't let it do so.

If you want to limit the ability of superpowers to kill millions with impunity, then really the best solution is to have a bipolar world.

It doesn't happen for entire families, but black people in the US are also detained in large numbers for minor charges and sent to prison where they become forced laborers. It's not as openly targeted, and it's happening to lots of non-black people as well, but it's not nothing. It is an important part of US manufacturing at this point.

I think if this would happen in any country the US was not friendly with it would be "labour camps" and slavery in the US press.

I’ve been to some of the protests in Portland. It’s hardly a riot. There’s been some spray painting, but for the most part it’s cops beating the shit out of peaceful people.

I’d suggest you look at some local reporting from people like https://mobile.twitter.com/tuckwoodstock

Note that a riot is a really loosely defined term, literally any civil unrest or any gathering which the authorities don’t agree with can be labelled as “a riot”.

The actual charges given to people after a “riot” are usually unrelated (jaywalking, illegal lodging, etc.) and are mostly dropped before this goes through the courts.

I haven’t looked at the figures but I would be very surprised to find the percentage of protestors arrested for the Black Lives Matter cause that are guilty of rioting is more then a single percent. To reword: I claim (though I don’t know the figure) that less then 1% of people arrested during a “riot” are found guilty of rioting.

> If they were not involved in what is a violent and largely unlawful civil disobedience they would not be apprehended.

Civil disobedience is always unlawful, the clue is in the name. Also violence against property (protesters) is not the same as violence against people (police) though they are often deliberately conflated.

It's sometimes moral to break the law, that's how law gets changed; civil disobedience is good trouble, necessary trouble.

I am not supportive of the riots in Portland, but it makes me incredibly uncomfortable to have agents of the federal government a) there at all, when it should a local and state issue, b) grabbing protesters/rioters off the streets, searching them, intimidating them, and releasing them without charging them with anything.

I wrote a response, but then I focused on your username, so I assume you're being ironic.