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.