Comment by casenmgreen
5 days ago
It seems to me this is probing behaviour.
It is a low-risk, initial probe, to test the bounds of what currently is considered normal.
If it fails - it it is rejected - it was not controversial (parking fines) and so the cost is low.
If it succeeds, the boundary of normal has been moved, and then civilian reporting of crimes for money will be extended to other crimes.
Given USA now has authoritarian Government of Donald, this is obviously and incredibly bad.
An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.
In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.
You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.
The State defines profoundly unjust new "crimes", and then sets everyone watching everyone, in return for pay, to accuse each other - and this in the "mass deportation", and "due process not necessary" environment now brought into being by Donald.
However, in this case, the idlers are the Nazi's killing people's lungs, and the citizens are accepting the incentive provided by the people to catch the killers?
This line of reasoning makes no sense. It's a slippery slope fallacy.
> An obvious thought is that it will come to be used by ICE to incentivize civilians to report on "illegal immigrants", as defined by Donald.
How would this program lead to that? If this didn't exist why wouldn't it be possible for ICE to make something similar for reporting "illegal immigrants"?
> In Nazi Germany, Anne Frank was betrayed, revealed to the Gestapo, sent to a concentration camp and died there, because two Dutch brothers accepted the incentive provided by the Nazi party, the reward for doing so, to hand in Jews.
Again, besides using money as a incentive what is the relevance here? Are you saying that using money as incentive is inherently bad?
> You do not use civilians for law enforcement because when misused it fundamentally and profoundly undermines civil society.
Everything can be misused. Are you saying that we shouldn't do anything about anything? Do you think that laws and rules would stop the likes of Hitler?