Comment by tombert

6 hours ago

> This ICE stuff is that scaled up to a multi-billion dollar federal agency with, apparently, no accountability for following the law at all.

Apparently any time they do anything horrifying, they will just declare that victim as a "terrorist" or something, and their sycophantic supporters will happily agree.

What I find amusing is that when the Snowden leaks happened and I would discuss it, when I said something like "let's pretend for a moment that we can't trust every single person in the government" I would usually get an agreeable laugh.

But using these same arguments with ICE + Palantir, these same people will say something like "ICE IS ONLY DEPORTING THE CRIMINALS YOU JUST WANT OPEN BORDERS!!!". People's hypocrisy knows no bounds.

How do we know whether they're people or bots?

  • Well in my case I was referring to actual vocal conversations I've had with humans, either in person or on MS Teams.

    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.

    • Yet. But another year or two of progress on AI deepfakes and you will be talking to a bot and be none the wiser.

  • I mean, tens of millions of people voted for this. So even if social media sentiment is mostly bot-driven, it's provably backed up or supported by what real people deeply believe and want and will continue to vote for in mid-terms.

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  • > Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.

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

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

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

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

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

    • ICE officials are pretty consistently saying that they do more visible immigration enforcement in places where the local police are forbidden by local or state law from giving information about people they arrest to ICE, compared to places where the local police do this happily. Legally-forbidding local police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement is a prototypically blue-state policy that red states do not generally do.

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

    • Great question, most Trump supporters are extremely unhappy he’s not doing the mass deportations he promised and instead just doing tiny stunts in Minnesota. Basically neither the right nor left are happy with this admin.

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  • Without going into a long tangent talking about each point, I would like to point out that ICE doesn't actually seem terribly concerned with whether or not the people are illegal aliens or criminals. The last two people they murdered were US citizens, there are many US citizens, some natural born, that have been detained.

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

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

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

    • To add onto that, Palantir is a private company. They have no business having that much of my data without my consent, with no way to opt out.

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  • The "crime" is the same severity as driving drunk or bringing a gun into a restroom in a National Park.

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

  • > Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.

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

    • Yeah, I agree. The emphasis on expanded field enforcement is backwards. If millions of people are "illegal" primarily because they are stuck in multi-year backlogs, then the failure is in the court and asylum system, not in a lack of raids.

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

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

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Yes, exactly. But, I’ll admit it took me until the republican primary before the 2016 election for this to register in my mind. I was born in the US in the 80s & fell into the “what you see is all there is” bias (and hadn’t read enough history before then either).

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

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

  • > I think having a chance at stopping mass government slaughter like in Iran and Syria is overall better than the downside.

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

  • Apparently even if you legally own a gun they'll shoot you just for owning it anyway, so I'm not sure that will help.

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

    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.