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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_1X7MVrnPY

Same as with all other crime, we hope it's the law that stops him. We hope that more policemen want to be good men than bad.

The illusion of safety is based on the honor system. Society doesn't work without that.

It only works for people the state expects significant amounts of money from (taxes don’t count)

Don’t expect a government to help you unless you’re one of its larger donors

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.

> But perhaps he had a different philosophical position. Or perhaps it was his job to downplay the risks

I feel that as the consumer surveillance industry took off, everyone from those OG Internet circles was presented with a choice - stick with the individualist hacker spirit, or turncoat and build systems of corporate control. The people who chose power ended up incredibly rich, while the people who chose freedom got to watch the world burn while saying I told you so.

(There were also a lot of fence sitters in the middle who chose power but assuaged their own egos with slogans like "Don't be evil" and whatnot)

Just invoking Richard Stallman will prove it because the smear campaign on him was so thorough.

Linus seems to be the only one that made it out.

You’re doing literally what I described

The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.

The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.

And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.

And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).

Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.

But yes, individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated and coexisted. I'd say this is because they were merely different takes on the same liberating ground truths. Or at least liberating-seeming perceptions of ground truths...

erm hes a creep, claimed to be rapist... not many redeemable qualities.

[0] https://about.fb.com/news/h/comments-on-research-and-ad-targ...

the ad game is not about profiling you specifically, it's about how many people in a group are likely to click and convert to a sale; they're targeting 6 million people, not you specifically, and that's balanced by how much the people who want the ads are willing to pay.

palantir or chinese social credit, etc., is targeting you specifically, and they don't care about costs if it means they can control the system, forever.

That platter of details is not shown to you, the consumer.

What you are experiencing is that your ad profile isn't valuable to most bidders, ie you don't buy stuff as much as other people do, or your ad profile is somehow super attractive to stupid companies that suck at running ads who are overpaying for bad matches.

It is not evidence that google knows nothing about you.

Google is pleased that you think they don't know you. It helps keep the pressure down when people mistake this system for "Perfectly target ads". The system is designed to make google money regardless of how good or bad their profile of you is.

Stop pretending like Schmidt was or is "one of the good guys." They all knew from day one what the score was.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...

Here’s a question - since you have such strong feelings did you write the editor of the piece for their explanation?

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.

Eric had also once said in a CNBC interview "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

How about Musk? He felt he had a right to hoover up data about people from every government agency, but throws a massive temper-tantrum when people publish where his private jet is flying using publicly available data.

How about Mark Zuckerberg? So private he buys up all the properties around him and has his private goon squad stopping people on public property who live in the neighborhood, haranguing them just for walking past or near the property.

These people are all supremely hypocritical when it comes to privacy.

he got mad at gawker for deliberately outing him right as he went to meet the saudis for negotiations. a country that literally executes gay people. at best it strained the negotiations and made things awkward, and at worst could have put him in peril.

you dont just out people without their consent, and that goes for rich or poor.

Nah fuck him. If you're closeted and funding anti-queer causes and politicians you deserve to be outed.

Or perhaps don't do business with people who would happily execute you? All that says to me is Thiel values money over anything else.

The insinuation that Gawker in any way shape or form "outed" him is just laughable.

Gawker is absolutely trash media, to be quite clear.

> and that goes for rich or poor

I do agree about this, for certain things - but in others, no - and indeed, courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently "public figures"... "due to their outsized influence on public affairs and opinion".

I also have significant issues with his bankrolling of Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker as an abomination of the legal system, including the right to face one's "accuser":

- Hogan had already agreed in principle to a part ownership stake and profits of Gawker.

- Lawyers paid for by Thiel pushed for him to drop that and push instead for bankrupting Gawker through damages (which were laughable, see below). (Hypothetical question, if you're an attorney, ostensibly representing Hogan, but you know the person paying your bills, Thiel, wants a different outcome for the case, when push comes to shove, whose interests are you going to represent? See the following point too).

- When the case and awarded damages -did- actually threaten to bankrupt Gawker, Thiel/Hogan's lawyers did the most illogical thing possible, if they were looking to recoup any money for their ostensible client... they dropped the one claim against Gawker that would have allowed their liability insurance to at least partially pay out.

(Re damages: The amount that Hogan had originally asked for seemed reasonable. Then after Thiel's lawyers got involved, the amount asked for was multiplied five thousand times.

This included economic damages of fifty million dollars. For a man who had made something in the order of $10-15M his entire career? Who had a net worth at its peak of $30M, and at the time of the lawsuit of $8M? I highly doubt that TV stations pulling reruns of old WWF events, lost hair commercial and other endorsements was worth that. (They separately asked for emotional damages, too, to be clear. But there was near zero justification for this economic damages claim.)

I wonder how much Thiel paid Hogan under the table for this proxy lawsuit?

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...

He's got a whole lotta people doing over-time trying to bury this.

> So she didn't have any problems "escaping" the relationship.

A woman claimed she was raped by her partner. She left that partner some time later. You questioned it because she didn't leave him immediately and left him after allegations of cheating, completely ignoring the complexity of being in an abusive relationship, and expressing skepticism of the woman for not immediately leaving him. That is really shameful and gross to do.

And even here you are expressing skepticism "Tell me what difficulty she had". You clearly are out of your depth here, clearly ignorant about the dynamics of abuse, and are saying some really nasty stuff about a woman you know nothing about, and now digging in your heels when it's pointed out. You have no place to question anything about this woman's relationship.

This is why social media is a sham. Please don't reply. I'm done.

And no I will not question the claim. What is wrong with you?

Here's another source:

https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/former-google-ceo-s...

An interesting thing is how most of the photos that the media is using to cover this are sexualized images of Ritter and pics of Schmidt in a suit.

EDIT: It's really interesting that your link mentions nothing about any rape charges. These inconsistencies are why I am confused and asking questions. These inconsistencies should have you asking questions, too.

> So she didn't have any problems "escaping" the relationship.

It's pretty telling that you don't have a sense of the power dynamics that come with sexual violence like this, especially, as I said, with somebody like Eric Schmidt.

Tell me what difficulty she had escaping the relationship. You act like you know more than I.

I pulled my link from the list of sources there. You can check those sources too.

All that said I was pretty unkind and scattered, and I apologize for that.

- Eric Schmidt

Here is someone out for a walk, ICE demanding ID, that she answer questions. She says she's a US citizen ... they keep asking her questions and one of the ICE people seem to be using a phone to scan her face:

https://np.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qbawlr/minneap...

What she says, the truth, none of it would matter if his phone said to bring her in. And after the fact? The folks supporting ICE have made it clear they've no problem with lying in the face of the obvious.

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.

There are an estimated 100K illegal immigrants in Minnesota,[1] and about 2M in Texas.[2] With 900K in Florida, 350K in Georgia, 325K in North Carolina, etc. [3]

Why doesn't ICE concentrate on fishing where the fish are… but of course that would mean doing stuff in red states.

[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...

[2] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...

[3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-unauthorized-immigra...

The visible disruptive protests against ICE activity are also the sort of thing that you'd expect the sorts of voters that make a blue state blue to do, so when ICE does arrest illegal immigrants in red states, there's much fewer people who are inclined to protest it and therefore less publicity in general.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-houston-arrests-more-3...

But let's pretend you're right, MPD is completely absent, it doesn't forgive anything ICE has done, actually. It is disingenuous to act like it does.

The "bad faith" part is that it's really not relevant. I made a comment about ICE murdering civilians and you diverted to some tangent about MPD that doesn't actually detract from my original point. Because it's not relevant, I don't think it was brought up in good faith.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pHpFAAzWhTY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Enpt8TewBwU

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0yUAZRnPURs

Some of the George Floyd protests devolved into riots. That is not what is happening in MN, or TX, or anywhere. Police or federal officers using riot dispersal techniques against a protest does not suddenly make the protest a riot.

ICE and CBP do not have the remit to behave like they are doing in these situations either - they do not have the same powers as local law enforcement. Yet we see them issuing unlawful commands - like telling Good to get out of her vehicle. They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car. Pretti was shot after the weapon he had never brandished or gone for was removed from his person while he has a multitude of CBP agents dogpiling him. (We could also talk how that shot was insanely dangerous and stupid for the CBP officer to begin with, even if there had been a threat - he very easily could have shot his fellow officers.)

It doesn't matter if MPD is there. If they're absent, this doesn't suddenly give ICE and CBP the authority to police in a way that they are explicitly not allowed to do. This doesn't give them the right to shoot people when they are not actually in danger.

Fundamentally, I do not understand why you think anything in your comment is a rebuttal to the point being made. I don't understand why you think it is even relevant to the discussion at all.

I agree. Assaulting police or federal officers, harassing citizens and blocking traffic does though, and the police acts on that, not just randomly gassing people because Trump.

>ICE and CBP do not have the remit to behave like they are doing in these situations either - they do not have the same powers as local law enforcement.

Yes, they have different powers yet they employ sworn officers and those can arrest people who they believe are committing crimes in front of them.

>They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car.

Need a source for that, it's news to me.

>It doesn't matter if MPD is there.

It does though. Even in LA the mayor was not as dumb as to order LAPD to stand down and as the result zero people got shot by feds during more massive riots than in Minneapolis. Local police is more lenient and less likely to use deadly force even when met with violence, you'd imagine if mayor had any compassion for his constituents he'd sent the police to deal with them rather than leave it to feds.

The first of the things in this list has a very large gap with the rest. I have seen zero evidence there is any sort of widescale assault on police or federal officers with these protests. Some isolated incidents, yes, but isolated incidents are not riots.

Harassing citizens does not make something a riot. Blocking traffic does not make something a riot.

They might not be protected by the 1A (Well, depending on what you mean by 'harassing citizens' it very well might be, that's a very broad term) but that isn't the same thing as a riot.

> Yes, they have different powers yet they employ sworn officers and those can arrest people who they believe are committing crimes in front of them.

They can arrest people for committing federal crimes in front of them or with reasonable suspicion of a felony having occurred. This is different from what they are doing

> Need a source for that, it's news to me.

Some lawyers/law professors discussing this.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1196194852659037 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyoBDxPeMfg

> It does though. Even in LA the mayor was not as dumb as to order LAPD to stand down and as the result zero people got shot by feds during more massive riots than in Minneapolis. Local police is more lenient and less likely to use deadly force even when met with violence, you'd imagine if mayor had any compassion for his constituents he'd sent the police to deal with them rather than leave it to feds.

Your entire argument seems to be based on the idea that if cops aren't around then it's the fault of anyone but CBP/ICE when CBP/ICE fuck up. Which is a weird abdication of personal responsibility.

> Local police is more lenient and less likely to use deadly force even when met with violence,

In particular here, I'd say it's not a matter of leniency - local police undergo training at a policy academy and a supervised training period when they enter the job. In combination this can result in years of training. They also have background checks done. Most large departments also employ some form (or even multiple forms) of psychological screening. They have ongoing re-training and re-certification around all sorts of topics including de-escalation and dealing with the public.

And police still fuck it up fairly regularly. Meanwhile, ICE has 47 days of training (the number chosen, of course, because Trump is president #47...) and no-to-minimal background and psychological screening. Police are less likely to use violent force because we have attempted to select for people that will not use it unnecessarily and also provided extensive training to them on when and when not to use it.

For example, even if you believe lethal force is justified in a situation like Good's, the immediate consequences show that it was the incorrect choice for the stated claim - after she was shot in the head, the vehicle accelerated at a far greater speed and with no human control over it. Many departments now train their officers to not be in front of vehicles like this because they know that not only does it unnecessarily increase the risk to the officer, but that in a situation like this one they do not have recourse to stop it from happening - shooting the driver of a car that is right in front of you does not decrease your chances of getting run over even if they are intending to do so (and by no means do I think it is likely that Good ever intended to do so), and if they are not actively attempting to run you over, can even increase it.

It depends on your scale, in the both cases of shootings though the victims assaulted an officer before they had been shot. It's on video and in case you deny that - look up the definition of assault as a criminal act.

>Harassing citizens does not make something a riot. Blocking traffic does not make something a riot.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot

>Some lawyers/law professors discussing this.

Don't have Facebook but in the Youtube video some dude literally says "unless they have some type of a reason to detain you" at 0:50. You said "They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car.", if it was so there had been some statue saying that they are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car, this is what explicitly means. Not some dude on youtbue saying they cannot arrest you unless they have a reason to arrest you, duh.

>Your entire argument seems to be based on the idea that if cops aren't around then it's the fault of anyone but CBP/ICE when CBP/ICE fuck up.

Nope. My entire argument is that if cops were around they would have prevented people from the law school of reddit and Youtube from committing crimes against armed officers and getting killed in the process.

Good never touches the officer with her car. This is clearly the case from the close up video, and every single claim I have seen otherwise relies on a heavily compressed low resolution video taken from significant distance away. His cell phone video does not provide any evidence of him being hit, and there has been no actual evidence or documentation provided that he received any medical treatment. Conversely, we do see him walking around without any obvious issue for some time after the shooting. The medical examiner also determined that it was the 2nd or 3rd shot that killed her - the shots that went through the driver window where he was indisputably no longer in the path of the vehicle when he fired. Lethal force is not allowed to be a punitive act of revenge, it is to protect the safety of the officer and others. We can't argue that it was for the safety of anyone else, because as we saw in the video, killing her sent the vehicle even more out of control.

For Pretti, it is not cut and dry as to whether there is anything worthy of assault. His actions all seem purely defensive and more about stabilizing himself, etc., to me than anything else, but we have seen cases where I do not understand how a jury of my peers could find the actions of the defendant to be assault, so I won't rule it out. But none of that changes the fact that the firearm that he was legally carrying and had never brandished nor made a move to handle during the event had already been removed from his person when he was shot and killed while having a multitude of CBP officers on top of him.

Either way, are you claiming that these occurrences were riots? Come on. It is incredibly clear from all of the videos in both cases that these conflicts were not riots by any stretch of the imagination. What are we even doing in this conversation?

> Don't have Facebook but in the Youtube video some dude literally says "unless they have some type of a reason to detain you" at 0:50. You said "They explicitly are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car.", if it was so there had been some statue saying that they are not allowed to force a US citizen out of their car, this is what explicitly means. Not some dude on youtbue saying they cannot arrest you unless they have a reason to arrest you, duh.

The second link has a lawyer going into more detail about what those reasons are and the legal justifications around them. I will concede I could have worded my statement more explicitly, but my point is that there was no cause for them to ask Good to get out of her vehicle. Recording videos, protesting, etc., are not reasonable cause to start detaining people and pulling them out of their vehicles,

"Some dude on youtube" makes it sound like this is just a random video and not a clip of a news anchor interviewing a law professor. There's a reason people are saying you're arguing in bad faith.

> Nope. My entire argument is that if cops were around they would have prevented people from the law school of reddit and Youtube from committing crimes against armed officers and getting killed in the process.

Committing a crime is not immediate justification for being shot. We have due process and a multi-tiered legal system for a reason.

Why are you holding everyday people to higher standards than law enforcement? Arming them and giving them the legal right to use lethal force when necessary as part of their daily jobs comes with the expectation that they will do so with prudence. Even if Good and Pretti were not acting fully within the bounds of the law, that does not in and of itself justify or mitigate the actions of CBP and ICE here.

Okay, there is nothing left to discuss.

That's really all that matters. We have a video that shows the distance between the two for all of the relevant points of the situation. What you might have guessed something would have been from a bad angle becomes an irrelevant metric when there is superior evidence available. I don't know why it looks like he is moving that way on a ultra compressed low resolution video shot from a distance. I don't really care, either, because I can look at the video that was shot from right at the scene, with higher resolution, less compression, and a much better angle.

You've also completely dodged the overwhelming majority of the comment where the meat of the argument was for anything that actually matters. Hell, not even the most relevant point for just Good. Even if I were to agree she had hit him with the car, the medical examiner determined the fatal shot was either the 2nd or 3rd which came through the driver window of the car.

But how were either of these riots? How do they reinforce your argument that there is rioting?

Why are you being disingenuous in how you present the argument being made to you?

Why are you arguing to hold people who are at least nominally law enforcement to a lower standard than everyday civilians when it comes to following it?

You might have, I don't.

Whether or not her car made contact with her killer, no reasonable person would assume she had any desire to run him over. There's also no reason for anyone to believe that shooting her as she drove past prevented an imminent mass casualty attack.

So then your argument boils down to: if you brush against law enforcement with your car, even by accident, they should kill you on the spot in retaliation.

It's not a claim anyone in this thread has made though. The claim I find ridiculous is "Good never touches the officer with her car."

>Whether or not her car made contact with her killer, no reasonable person would assume she had any desire to run him over.

You are welcome not to discuss it then, I, however, see someone claiming there was no contact in face of the contact shown on video and deduct that the person is either delusional or hopes to gaslight me somehow.

You going to tell us J6 was a peaceful tour group next?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-se...

Many people are trying to evade oppressive regimes where their prospects might literally mean death. The US can still be "terrible" while still not being quite as dangerous as that.

I mean, this kind of reads victim-blamey; hyperbolic example, when a person stays with an abusive partner for much longer than they should, does that imply that that relationship isn't terrible?

I would like to hold my country to higher standards than "Eh, it's better than oppressive regimes where people get murdered for political dissent."

Unfortunately, the events we're seeing in MN may show that we're in danger of even that standard being too high for us.

I 100% agree with this sentiment and that is why I strongly support speeding the asylum application process through redirecting immigration enforcement funding to bolstering the courts. Our backlog should be 0 before we start knocking door to door and stopping people for the suspicious behavior of being brown at Home Depot.

From a systems perspective, we're heavily funding the most expensive and disruptive part of the pipeline (identification and removal) while starving the part that actually resolves legal status (adjudication, asylum review, work authorization). Though maybe that's a feature of this administration, not a bug.

If the goal is public safety, prioritizing people who commit violent crimes makes sense. If the goal is restoring legal order, then yeah, the obvious first step is to drive the backlog toward zero. I don't think that's the administration's goal though.

If they have access to all this information that was volunteered, then why are they so utterly incompetent at actually deporting illegal aliens?

That said, the disturbing part of Palantir and ICE isn't just that they are reading my driver's license or my legal status, it's the fact that they know everything.

You are absolutely, unequivocally incorrect that anyone in any significant numbers wants "open borders". I know this is a meme, but it's a meme that isn't true.

Are you saying it's OK for Federal officers swarm your house without a warrant, and then just shoot you for that?

I suppose that there could be an extremely elaborate LLM to control humanoid robots to try and fool me, but I do not believe that's the case.

Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.

Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.

Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.

Psychology is weird. As soon as something becomes a part of your identity you start living as though it is really you that is attacked, rather than the thing you stand for, no matter what it is, no matter whether it is positive or negative. The response is invariable to dig in.

Religion, atheism, vegetarianism, fascism, libertarian, democrat or republican, fan of Arsenal or rather the opposite and so on. They all tap into some kind of deep tribal sense of belonging and people will go to extreme lengths to defend their tribe at the expense of themselves. There probably is a direct evolutionary link here as well.

People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.

But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.

I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.

Sorry for the tangent.

It will take extreme mental fortitude and some degree of self isolation not to be pulled in. When I was 15 the peer pressure to start smoking, drinking and using drugs was absolutely off the charts. I stopped going to parties, basically. Until I was 13 or 14 or so it was ok and then from one moment to the next it stopped being fun. People don't like being confronted with their own idiocy and just having one reminder in a roomful of people that you're doing something stupid is apparently enough to become really aggressive against that person. Better if it isn't just you, so the first enlist some of your buddies.

That experience really helped me in many ways.

People in large groups are far more stupid than individuals, and the internet has tied people together into all kinds of weird large groups that reinforce their worst belief systems.

There is no evidence. There is just playground whining.

That political movement was basically "Fox News will save us from the Government", and of course, "Black people are their own problem"

Donald Trump can be directly traced back to shit Nixon did, and every single Republican administration since. "If the president does it, it's not illegal" is literally how Nixon tried to defend his crimes.

It's a common trope in liberal circles that Fox News was started explicitly to never ever let that happen again. Well, it worked.

IMO it goes all the way back to reconstruction being abandoned because racist people voted for horrifically racist politicians who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. America elected many politicians, including literal presidents, who thought fixing the problem of genuine traitors should be avoided.

The confederacy was a shithole, authoritarian state who's entire purpose was maintaining the institution of slavery, and the vast majority of it's supporters didn't even hold slaves. But they needed to live in a world where a black person was inherently worse than they were. The confederacy was also working to lean on the dumbest fundamentalists Christians they could find, the ones who lapped up the "God wants us to enslave black people" tripe they spouted, and millions did exactly that. The Confederacy was exploring being an explicit theocracy, but the main reason against that was essentially that the oligarchs preferred being in control.

This happened again with the Civil Rights movement, where America has responded by pretending it wasn't real, we never did anything to black people that wronged them after we banned slavery, it's all woke nonsense, why do black people keep talking about being oppressed, "Obama shouldn't have made it a race thing" when it was definitely a race thing, etc.

Half the country has been convinced that stories about Russia running disinformation campaigns are a hoaxes.

> I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate

I read a similar argument years ago about how disinformation gets into the networks. It starts with bots sharing and discussing with each other until it reaches the level to hit a few real people (useful idiots) who then share it out giving it more credence. Musk comes to mind as a key target for these types of posts now.

you think a news site about tech startups run by their incubator -- who has serious interest in seeing these companies make money -- wouldn't run shillbots 24/7?

Bots are not necessary for indoctrination, Fox does that already. But bots help creating dissent and make people busy defending against all the crap.

Another opinion that I’m sure will get me downvoted is that this is the primary reason I support gun ownership by private citizens. I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter like in Iran and Syria is overall better than the downside.

Bottom line is that human nature has not changed. Some of us westerners take comfortable lives for granted because we’ve been lucky.

That won't stop the mass government slaughter, if anything it will accelerate it.

Which I bet our luck has run out. This year and the next 5 or 10 years from now, its going to be really bad.

I don't even trust local state governments at this point.. It all seems like a big ploy on the people to keep the grift going.

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.

What is required is a constant fight against obscurantism. It's a cultural battle.

Also note of sale (underground, also trivially made on one's own) in france is also FGC-9 pistols (modern gun + ammo easily made in short time in france, all with unregulated components), and attackers in france have also used re-activated decommissioned rifles.

Your country is awash in guns for anyone who wants it.

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...

You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.

>ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.

In this case you will very likely be given an option to leave or change (not possible for ethniticity).

Wanting to be able to break the law in the future is not a just motivation.

I mean, I've read stupid takes on this website but this really takes the cake

despots don't care about the law

>despots don't care about the law

This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.

how is it a low probability scenario?

it's happened before, in living memory (there are still people alive that survived the holocaust)

and you're seeing the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota

>the early stages of despotic rule literally today in Minnesota

This type of thinking is what is leading to the destruction of order there.

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!

Currently the Federal level is blocking the State prosecuting such clear breaches of the law.

Approaching a vehicle that is already stopped, perpendicular to traffic, initially to tell the driver to move and then to make an arrest for obstruction of justice, is not a "traffic stop", and the agents in question therefore did not in any way "pretend to have local traffic enforcement powers". ICE are legally entitled to require protesters to get out of their way. That's a consequence of them being federal LEO, and of federal law prohibiting everyone from obstructing LEO (which includes things like physically shielding others from arrest, impeding their movement towards whatever place they need to get to to do their job, etc.). Protesting and asserting 1A rights is not a defense to the charge of obstruction of justice.

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).

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.

Those you consider to be bringing order are arbitrarily enacting violence against citizens and other people in ways that break the law and Constitution; and which are outlawed in all moral societies. Sure, strict conformance to a dictators whims is a form of order, but if you seek that sort of order in your life you should look for a dom and not attempt to impose it on others.

The clashes do not have to happen. Trump's Regime can be removed, habeas corpus resurrected, and the Constitution re-implemented.

Your mind appears to wear jackboots.

the argument isn't that states can't create ex-post facto laws (even though they can, see: any country with parliamentary sovereignty)

it's that what the law says doesn't matter when the executive no is longer bound by the rule of law

see: the United States under the Trump regime

the fact that some previous legislature has passed a law saying that "using the gay/jewish/disabled/... database for bad things is illegal" is of no consequence when the state already has the database and has no interest in upholding the rule of law

>"using the gay/jewish/disabled/... database for bad things is illegal"

If it is legal than I want to be able to use such a database as it makes law enforcement more efficient. It gets rid of inefficiency in the government. Wanting such inefficiency is wanting to allow for unlawful behavior. It's the whole using privacy as an excuse to hide from the government.

Yes, we are seeing a destruction of order in MN. US citizens being terrorized by ICE and CBP agents with 47 days of training, no understanding of the legal limits of their authority, and no consequences when they go beyond those limits.

But that's not being caused by people pushing back against the beginnings of autocracy. That's being caused by the people who want to become autocrats.

But that's also not really the point, so we can even presume they are, because the root of the argument is the same either way. Just having a title or being ordered to do something by a politician does not automatically mean they are bringing order to the country. There is a reason the founding fathers set the country up the way they did, with multiple checks and balances, separate branches, etc. They went out of their way to make it that no one branch would have unlimited power.

That means that order in this country fundamentally is based on those checks and balances being adhered to. Any unilateral shift away from that is fundamentally pulling us into a more disordered state. I wish seances were a thing because I would love to hear the founders' take on "Masked men ordered here by a unitary executive branch detain and arrest random people including US citizens for the purpose of making sure they are here legally, while also using a private ledger to determine where the citizen's legally recognized documents are valid."

But we can go even more fundamentally than that: The label on a thing does not make it the thing. They can call themselves law enforcement while still breaking the law. It happens to real law enforcement all the time - cops can and do get punished for crimes they commit, at least sometimes.

Laws cannot an action a crime after it was committed. However,

- Civil rules can and do impact things retroactively

- Laws may not make something illegal retroactively, but the interpretation of a law can suddenly change; which works out the same thing.

- The thing you're doing could suddenly become illegal with on way for you to avoid doing it (such as people being here legally and suddenly the laws for what is legally changes). This isn't retroactive, but it might as well be.

It is _entirely_ possible for someone to act in a way that is acceptable today but is illegal, or incurs huge civil penalties, tomorrow.

I would not be surprised if SCOTUS disagrees at some point.

The people on the front lines - including the ICE thugs - are entirely disposable. They people using them have zero interest in their welfare or how this works out for them in the long term. (Spoilers - not well.)

Of course they don't understand this. But this is absolutely standard for authoritarian fascism - groom and grudge farm the petty criminals and deviants, recruit them as regime enforcers with promises of money and freedom from consequences, set them loose, profit.

That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you.

They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors.

They aren't exactly voting for democrats.

This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it.

This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument.

Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth.

THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence.

They live in a fake reality.

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.

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.

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.

<< Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit?

First, note that I did not mention anyone specific, but the poster chose to read my words that described a generic state of propaganda wielded by various power centers specifically as related to Trump.

Apart from the obvious that it now forces us to read the remaining posts with that lens, it also suggests that the poster is oblivious to other sources of propaganda.

<< Surely that must be his base, yes?

I am not particularly certain where that incessant need to end each sentence with a question demanding approval/acknowledgement comes from, but I did see it pop up in other languages suggesting it is not exactly an organic growth.

That said, as phrased, if it is his base, then the answer seems to be that his base is ok with it. But, and it is not a small but, base is not an individual and I would like you to carefully consider whether applying the same lens based on political leaning is.. well.. smart. Things tend go awry with group punishments.

<< and hold them at least morally responsible

In your own words, what does that mean.. exactly?

It's increasingly likely that the US splits up into a few regional autonomous zones, but it's unknown just how insane of a civil war that could kick off. We are very close to the moment two different armed law enforcement groups end up in a skirmish, and that will kick things off.

with the kind of images that are out in the open for everybody with their own eyes to see, if that does not move you in your heart of hearts, where no government or anyone else can touch you, there is something rotten in that person.

Governments and authority figures can show you a lot of things but the amount of people who not just accept it, but gleefully celebrate the most vulnerable people in society beaten by government thugs, there is no excuse. People can show you false images, false numbers but they can't make you feel proud for the strong abusing the weak. It's particularly appalling if you see the amount of them who call themselves Christians.

These people think Charlie Kirk was on the frontlines of personal freedom, but look the other way when a man gets tackled and shot in broad daylight for trying to help a woman who's just been maced.

It's horrible, and inexcusable, but still crucial to understand through a framework that accounts for the effects of multi-generational propaganda peddled by the ultra-rich who have been shaping our thoughts and behaviors through advertisement and capital for hundreds of years.

Yes.. do I get to get between DEA and their intended target? No? If not, why not. If yes, why yes? The framing is silly.

The death may be tragic and very much avoidable, but it was avoidable on both ends of this interaction. There is no comparison to Kirk here at all. He came to talk to people. Pretti went there as part of a signal group coordinating to obstruct a federal enforcement agency..

Ngl.. how people choose their heroes is beyond me.

ICE is a rogue organization, our Executive and Legislative branches have gone rogue; our government no longer works for us, it works against us, and any attempt to validate the actions of this fascist attack on state sovereignty is seen exactly for what it is. There are too many video angles for you to see this tragic death as anything other than what it is.

You're right that there was no comparison to Kirk here. Alex was actually on the frontlines, intentionally putting his life on the line for human rights.

Yet, Kirk himself would have absolutely been appalled at how the US government has treated the rash of shootings in Minnesota, and how they're now being used once again to assault our first and second amendment rights. He would not be siding with ICE or Trump on this one, but since he's dead they can parade around his image and make his fan base believe this is all somehow fair and warranted.

Grow a spine.

That people ingest environmental hazards and carciogens would be viewed as a failure of da masses to abstractly consider the pitfalls of understanding the problems inherent to the logistics of foodstuffs in the context of big corporations.

The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already).

Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold.

To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".

This is hardly the only example of the UK, or other Anglophone democracies, criminalizing speech with actual prison time. I'm not happy with UK laws trying to block VPNs under the pretense of blocking porn for minors either.

> she was jailed for calling for mass deportation and for migrant hotels to be set on fire

That’s literally calling for violence?

There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech. The UK has actual problems with free speech (particularly the Online Safety Act), but this isn't one of them.

In whatsapp:

> She said that if Ofsted were to get involved, she would tell them it was not her and that she had been the victim of doxing

Bit more crime, there (she worked in a regulated industry around kids; lying to the regulator isn't allowed).

> She went on to say that if she got arrested she would “play the mental health card”.

PLEASE STOP SAYING YOU WILL DO CRIMES.

(I'm always amazed that so many criminals end up having these incriminating conversations on WhatsApp and similar; have they never read the news or watched any crime drama? In a vacuum she'd probably have got off!)

Wrong. In the USA that speech would have been protected. It obviously does not meet the imminent lawless action standard and is not meaningfully incitement.

What she actually said was:

> “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the ba***s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”

This is clearly someone just angrily ranting. It's absurd nonsense to pretend otherwise. Imagine arresting everyone who said "punch Nazis" because that's "incitement." The UK is one of the worst speech control regimes in the world on any honest scale - even in most third-world dictatorships at least the state isn't strong or coordinated enough to go after most people for this stuff.

<insert angry goose meme>

Which is an insane thing to imprison someone for a year for and to continue threatening them with prison for on account of their continued social media political criticism of their government.

Honestly I'm not sure if it would be legal for me to write this very comment quoting the original tweet if I was subject to UK law.

I am lucky to get to vote for people that don't believe in a religious ethno-state.

I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.

That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose.

The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.

Imagine if they used your past post history against you.

https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...

https://winslowlawyers.com/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-com...

The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.

The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/charlie-kirk-meme-tennessee-arres...

But in general in the US "offending" others is not a legal basis for arrest, as much as some in power would like it to be.

They can do what they like, and your compensation if the courts think you were harmed, comes out of your own pocket as a taxpayer.

Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome. The incentive here is that someone the government don’t like got put in a cell for a month and couldn’t speak, and they get no downsides. I wonder what will keep happening more and more.

Yeah, in my state, the Sheriff of my County is beefing with the next County's Sheriff, because among other things, that Sheriff's perspective on "is it legal" was literally, and I quote, not paraphrase. "Make the arrest. If it's wrong, the courts can figure it out." Great, slap people with the arrest, the inconvenience of being jailed, charged, and having to hire a lawyer because you don't give a fuck about doing your job. Not coincidentally, same Sheriff is openly inviting ICE to the towns in his county saying his Department will provide additional protective cover.

No they do not. Quote, from your own link:

> According to an April 2025 freedom of information report filed by The Times, over 12,000 people were arrested, including for social media posts, in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988.

Emphasis mine. "Including". Not exclusively, not only, including.

Now what does the law being cited actually say[1]?

> It is an offence under these sections to send messages of a “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing” character or persistently use a public electronic communications network to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.

With additional clarification[2]:

> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.

> “They may also be serious domestic abuse-related crimes. Our staff must assess all of the information to determine if the threshold to record a crime has been met.

So you're deliberately spreading misinformation here, as was the original article by the Times and as is everyone else who keeps quoting this figure. Because by means of lying by omission they want to imply one very specific thing: "you will be arrested for criticizing the government on social media". But the actual crime statistic is about a much more common, much broader category of crime - namely: harassment. That 12,000 a year figure includes targeted harassment by almost any carriage medium, as well as crimes like "prank" calling emergency services. It means it includes death threats, stalking, domestic abuse and just about every other type of non-physical abuse or intimidation.

Of course you could've also figured out this is bullshit with a very simple litmus test: 12,000 people a year wouldn't be hard to find if the UK was mass-jailing people on public social media. But it's not what's happening.

The text of the law as well, for anyone interested: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wales-englan...

[2] https://archive.md/bdEqK#selection-3009.0-3009.194:~:text=A%....

Yes, arrests for social media activity occur in the UK under laws like the Communications Act 2003 and Malicious Communications Act 1988, targeting offenses such as sending offensive/menacing messages, false communications, hate speech, or child grooming, with thousands arrested annually, though charges and convictions vary, and new laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 add further regulatory scope.

Here’s one, you can easily find more.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr548zdmz3jo

> Kay was convicted after he used social media to call for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set alight.

Inciting murder doesn’t count as free speech _anywheree_.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...

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…

https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/27/politics/nsa-snooping/

Some retorts for people swayed by that argument:

"Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"

"Let's send your mom all your text messages."

"Ain't nothin' in my pockets, but I'd rather you didn't check."

"Shall we live-stream your next doctor's appointment?"

"May I watch you enter your PIN at the ATM?"

"How about you post your credit card number on reddit?"

"Care to read your high-school diary on open mic night?"

There's a big difference between these scenarios.

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.

A very famous quote: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

Many people - particularly white people, but let's not ignore that a bunch of Black and Latino folks are/have been Trump supporters - believe that they are part of the in-group. And inevitably, they find out that the government doesn't care, as evidenced by ICE and their infamous quota of 3000 arrests a day... which has hit a ton of these people, memefied as "leopards ate my face".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/29/trump-ice-ar...

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.

It's good to know in advance who they are.

Do any of these actually prompt someone to reconsider their position? They strike me as more of argument through being annoying than a good-faith attempt to connect with the other side.

    “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.”

Huh? You can’t imagine boring people as a “good faith social individual”?

'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.

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".

That's privacy in a crowd and even if they couldn't describe it, people do recognize it.

What you are proposing in every single one of these, is violating that in an overt and disruptive way - i.e.

> "Let's send your mom all your text messages."

Do I have anything in particular to hide in my text messages, of truly disastrous proportions? No. But would it feel intrusive for a known person who I have to interact with to get to scrutinize and comment on all those interactions? Yes. In much the same way that if someone on the table over starts commenting on my conversation in a coffee-shop, I'd suddenly not much want to have one there.

Which is very, very different from any notion of some amorphous entity somewhere having my data, or even it being looked at by a specific person I don't know, won't interact with, and will never be aware personally exists. Far less so if the only viewers are algorithms aggregating statistics.

E.g. "Can we put a camera in your bathroom?"

Very few people are arguing that nudity or bathroom use shouldn't be private, and they are not going to understand what this has to do with their argument that the NSA should be allowed to see Google searches to fight terrorism or whatever.

Privacy arguments are about who should have access to what information. For example, I'm fine with Google seeing my Google searches, but not the government monitoring them.

But on the internet we often do this thing where we take the weakest version or a distorted version of an opposing side's argument and ridicule that. It's not quite strawmanning because we never specified who we're arguing against, and surely we can imagine someone, somewhere on the internet has the ridiculous viewpoint. But it's not a common viewpoint (that, for example, we shouldn't have privacy in the bathroom). Doing this only gets us pats on the back from those who already agree with us and deludes us about our opponent's position.

To quote the standard observability conference line "what gets measured gets managed".

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_control

Palantir clients: Europol, Danish POL-INTEL, NHS UK, UK Ministry of Defence, German Police (states), NATO, Ukraine, ASML, Siemens, Airbus, Credit Suisse, UBS, BP, Merck, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Customer...

https://www.palantir.com/partners/international/

Plus, the EU is 27 countries, out of which 5 are listed on their wiki page, with various institutions.

Don't confuse "GDP not as big as ours" with "totally non-functional."

Yes, things are different in totalitarian states.

For any piece of data that exists, the government effectively has access to it through court orders or backdoors. Either way, it can and will be used against you.

To me, this is a problem that can only be solved at the government/regulatory level.

The evidence I have that causes me to believe them to be overstated, is how even Facebook has frequently shown me ads that inherently make errors about my gender, nationality, the country I live in, and the languages I speak, and those are things they should've been able to figure out with my name, GeoIP, and the occasional message I write.

They are not overstated, and they are far worse.

It’ll be a lot less amusing when Palantir thinks you’re interested in bombing government buildings.

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.

>They arrest and deport people that show up to court to become US citizens.

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.

And yet.

>If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.

Without even getting into the subject of kids who are brought here.. I just have to say, why? Immigrants are net contributors in the US. Many of these people who are here "illegally" are in a bureaucratic maze and are attempting to follow the rules. Some aren't, sure, but we live in a society where we don't draconianly punish people for a certain level of breaking the rules in cases where there is no real harm done. And I say deportation, particularly to 3rd country like the USA is doing now sometimes, qualifies as very draconian.

Those who disrespect my countries law do not deserve to benefit from my great country.

>Immigrants are net contributors in the US

This would not change my opinion one way or the other.

>are attempting to follow the rules

Well they clearly aren't trying hard enough if they are in the country without a proper visa.

Why? All laws or only some?

> Well they clearly aren't trying hard enough if they are in the country without a proper visa.

This reads as an uninformed statement.

> This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.

And yet

> The true scope of U.S. citizens wrongfully deported is not known as the federal government does not release data on how often members of this group are mistakenly detained or even removed from the country. However, The Washington Post estimated that there are at least 12 well-known cases, drawing conclusions from court records, interviews and news reports.

-- A Look At The U.S. Citizens Who Have Been Deported By The Trump Administration So Far

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-look-at-the-u-s-citizens...

"Hey I know that guy is a criminal" does not give people the right to search their property without a warrant. Too bad if that makes law enforcement more difficult.

"Everyone who does a thing I don't like is a criminal" is obviously and intentionally fallacious bullshit.

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.

& effectively if there is no checks on this is there actually a difference? There only difference is that the threat is to an entire cohort rather than an individual.

The whole social battle is a constant attempt to align our laws and values as a society. It's why we create new laws. It's why we overturn old laws. You can't just abdicate your morals and let the law decide for you. That's not a system of democracy, that's a system of tyranny.

The privacy focused crowd often mentions "turnkey tyranny" as a major motivation. A tyrant who comes to power and changes the laws. A tyrant who comes to power and uses the existing tooling beyond what that tooling was ever intended for.

The law isn't what makes something right or wrong. I can't tell you what is, you'll have to use your brain and heart to figure that one out.

There is also a world of difference between a government using data to carry out its various roles in service of the nation and a government using data to terrorize communities for the sadistic whims of its leadership.

Think I'm being hyperbolic? In Trump's first term fewer than 1M were deported. In Obama's eight years as president, 3.1M people were deported without the "techniques" we are witnessing.

> 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.

Problem today is ICE has no accountability of misuse data/violence, not they have means to data/violence.

I agree with this in theory, but its a fantasy to think they have this restriction at this point. ICE seems to be taking all comers, the lowest of the low, the vilest of the vile, giving them "47 days of training," and sending them off armed into the populace. I have seen no evidence they believe they have any restriction on anything. It's basically DOGE but with guns instead of keyboards.

since you can’t turn ICE around overnight, I don’t think Americans should authorize ICE more data and power NOW.

https://exhibits.lib.berkeley.edu/spotlight/census/feature/j...

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-ameri...

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.

"Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has declined by about 4 points since the day before Good’s death until today. Meanwhile, his overall approval rating has declined by 2 points and is near its second-term lows" [1].

I'd encourage anyone watching to actually pay attention to "how many people care more about party than principle." I suspect it's fewer than MAGA high command thinks.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-is-losing-normies-on-immi...

Not to mention the extrajudicial killings

Not to mention the Epstein reports

I'm really not sure what people actually care about because for some reason they won't actually tell you

Two percent could swing an election. And two percent can convince another two percentage points to get angry. Never dismiss small swings out of hand.

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.

ain't no left wing causes giving them $$$, just the GOP, gun industry, and occasionally the Russians

They publicly called out a Trump appointee for saying you're not allowed to bring a gun to a protest, and have urged that there be an investigation in to what occurred.

They also then blamed it on the MN government, because for some reason CBP (250 miles from a border, and thus 150 miles away from their remit...) pretending to be police officers when they also lack a remit to do that and them then fucking things up and murdering people because of the lack of remit, lack of training, lack of screening on the hiring... is because of Walz and co.

So... better than I expected, but still pretty dogshit.

Yet law enforcement officers are some of the most resistant to the idea, and Trump and DHS are extremely resistant to the idea of utilizing them for ICE and CBP, and have even cut funding for it.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-moved-cut-funding-ice...

When we know that the body cams are frequently used in a way that benefits the people wearing them, I find it quite telling when those people are railing against the idea and those in power actively work to block it.

I am not American and genuinely curious on this.

That said, I'm ex-Catholic, so I don't feel super qualified to make a statement on the specific popularity of predestination among American evangelicals at the moment.

That said, in a less theological and more metaphorical sense, it does seem that many of them do believe in some sort of "good people" and "bad people", where the "bad people" are not particularly redeemable. It feels a little unfalsifiable though.

The Heritage Foundation certainly publishes, but they don't have a coherent ideology.

Project 2025 is not an work of political philosophy, it's just a roadmap for seizing power at all costs.

"To conclude: the law of conservative structure, and the key toidentifying the common components of its variants, consists offour central features. Two of those are substantive core concepts,though not always identified as such: (1) a resistance to change,however unavoidable, unless it is perceived as organic and natural;(2) an attempt to subordinate change to the belief that the lawsand forces guiding human behaviour have extra-human origins andtherefore cannot and ought not to be subject to human wills andwhims. Unlike other major ideologies, conservatism then intriguingly produces two underlying morphological attributes, instead of "additional substantive identifying features. One of these attributesis (3) the fashioning of relatively stable (though never inherentlypermanent) conservative beliefs and values out of reactions toprogressive ideational cores. This allows all substantive conceptsin the employ of conservatism, other than the two enumeratedabove, to become contingent. They are subjected to a complexswivel mirror-image technique, superimposed on a retrospectivediachronie justification of the current beliefs held by conservatives. In each instance, the consistent aim is to provide a securestructure of political beliefs and concepts that protects the firstcore concept of conservatism, and does so by utilizing its secondcore component. Finally (4) the process is abetted by substantiveflexibility in the deployment of decontested concepts, so as tomaximize under varying conditions the protection of that conception of change. Such flexibility of meaning permits a considerablefirmness of conservatism's fundamental structure when confrontedwith very different concrete historical and spatial circumstances.What may superficially appear to be intellectual lightweightedness or be mistaken as opportunism is rather the performance ofa crucial stabilizing function by means of the adroit manoeuvringof political concepts in positions adjacent to the ideational core.The morphological unity of conservatism is preserved by an identical grammar of response, but expressed through differentiatedlanguages of response." (Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory)

But the same observation applies to lots of other attitudes, too—like “might makes right” and “nature is red in tooth and claw” or whatever else the dark princelings evince these days. I feel like “logic matters” mainly pertains to a liberal-enlightenment political context that might be in the past now…

Does reality always find a way to assert itself in the face of illogic? Sure! But if Our Side is righteous and infallible, the bad outcomes surely must be the fault of Those Scapegoats’ malfeasance—ipso facto we should punish them harder…

https://time.com/7311354/donald-trump-heaven-hell-afterlife-...

Remember, Republicans represent half the country, not some isolated sect living in small town Appalachia.

This statement isn't necessarily wrong because about half of elected government officials are Republican, but I want to point out that less than 60% of eligible Americans voted in 2024, so we're talking about <30% of Americans who vote Republican.

wyoming has ~800k people. ohio has 11 million. the greater NYC area (parts of NJ, CT, etc.) has ~22 million. california has 40 million.

and as a parent poster mentioned, just slightly 1/3 of eligible voters chose trump; if "no candidate" was a choice it may have one most states, beating out kamala and trump.

Calvinists or Evangelicals?

I don't think that holds water either way.

Are you against business registration?

All of these are subject to the similar issues with the stalker ex abusing a position of power?

You seem to be asking a question. The answer is no.

The IRS does not need to know my sexual orientation or circumcision status. Medicaid, on the other hand, may. (Though I'd contest even that.)

This is why there shouldn’t be any organization that has that much power.

Full stop.

What you described is the whole raison dêtre of Anarchism; irrespective of whether you think there’s an alternative or not*

“No gods No Masters” isn’t just a slogan it’s a demand

*my personal view is that there is no possible stable human organization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism#No_gods,_n...

https://kemendo.com/GTC.pdf

If you can, let me know

The "they look like us" fallacy is so deep in this.

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.

They won't be searching for counter evidence. It won't even cross their minds to do so.

You're on record saying one thing one time that was vanilla at the time but is now ultra spicy (possibly even because the definition of words can change and context is likely lost) then you'll be a result in their search and you'll go on their list.

(This is based on my anecdotal experience of having my house raided and the police didn't even know to expect there to be children in the house; children who were both over ten years old and going to school and therefore easily searchable in their systems; we hadn't moved house since 15 years prior, so there was no question of mixing up an identity. The police requested a warrant, and a fucking judge even signed it, based on a single data point: an IP address given to them by a third party internet monitoring company.)

Keep your shit locked down, law enforcement are just as bad at their jobs as any other Joe Clockwatcher. In fact they're often worse because their incentive structure leans heavily towards successful prosecution.

Sorry for the rant.

Or if you're currently married to an abusive partner and want to leave: how can you make a clean break with all the tracking nowadays? (And given how 'uncivilized' these guys act in public (masked, semi-anonymous), I'd had to see what they do behind closed doors.)

This is why I personally prefer more devolved spending – at the federal level it is far too much centralized power.

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.

Data collection is not the source of the problem because people give their data willingly

Do you think data collection is a problem in China, or do you think the government and rule of law is the problem?

Companies collecting data is not the true problem. Even when data collection is illegal, a corrupt government that doesn't respect the rule of law doesn't need data collection.

"well how about if the government does illegal or evil stuff?"

its very similar to arguments about the second ammendment. But laws and rules shouldnt be structured around expecting a future moment where the government isnt serving the people. At that moment the rules already dont matter

Collecting information about people doesn't really fit the same mold. It's not sensible to remove that function entirely. It's not a right. And it's not sensible to structure things with the expectation the future government will be evil

Jewish Danes would like to have a word with you about that

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.

Which is now literally happening and people are still acting like their privacy is going to somehow prevent it.

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.

I'd say the classic example is when a small german man with a mustache starts looking in religious registries to find the address of certain types of people

We really are in unprecedented times when it’s looking like the big one could happen in the United States though…

This is by design to make sure ICE and CBP jobs program for psychopaths always exists. Did you think they were actually going to put themselves out of the job by going for the roots?

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.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmjRhmk800U

You can be a target of pressure through no fault of your own. For example, if you were to witness a government official commit a crime.