Comment by iugtmkbdfil834
9 hours ago
Allow me to offer some words of wisdom. If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people, you can rest assured that given enough time, those weapons will be used against you. I am watching all this with a mild sense of bemusement.
A NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie suggested (in jest) that the next Democrat administration send armed IRS agents to gated communities in Florida, to "investigate tax fraud".
But this is exactly why all citizens should be concerned about the infringement of rights happening in Minnesota. If it is allowed without prosecution, you are next.
Right, if a future democratic president starts sending masked government thugs out to assault and kidnap American citizens we all know that 100% of the people who are defending the current ICE atrocities will suddenly be outraged about government tyranny.
a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts
that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things, generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then we wont hold it against you the first time"
*the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to value judge your actions in superficial ways
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I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest everyone go watch the Watchmen series on HBO
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They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen their entire lives and they are probably right.
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Zero disagreement. Rules of engagement should be clear to everyone. How can you possibly play the game if the rules keep changing based on political expediency. And we all know.. that that kind of a game is rigged from the start.
That said, I was thinking more about people all of us building tools that got us into the situation we are in now.
People rarely recognize that force can be turned on them until it happens. If one side uses force and the other refuses to, you cannot expect the first to grasp that force is always a two way street, because for them it is not real until they feel it.
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His brilliant columns is the only reason I would ever consider a NYT subscription.
Would probably be very popular, outside the kind of people whose donations fund political campaigns.
If Dem could win big soon the lawfare against Trump business could be huge. DOGE purge alone was making a lot of bad blood.
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Did you just link to grokipedia?
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My favorite was the one where Florida Republicans made it legal to deny medical treatment based on religious or moral belief, and a surgeon stopped administering anesthetic to Republicans.
Conservative and progressive groups.
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A democratic administration would be extremely unlikely to do that, I think. Democrats are usually middle–of–the–road, don't–upset–anyone types. Radical centrists, if you will. That's why the elections of people like Mamdani are so shocking.
People who care about their community?
There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from their base to hold people accountable for what happens during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new blood that runs on that. You have state governors like Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future accountability in mind.
What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current government overreach aren't worried about the coming backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future elections? Even when there is no more Trump?
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Not massively different to Obama weaponising the IRS against the Tea Party.
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Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.
In any case it’s also historically illiterate, the IRS has long been used as a political weapon, infamously against “Tea Party” activists.
"Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.
That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.
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> Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.
And ICE says they only go after illegals.
Speaking of historically illiterate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as due process is followed and the person's rights are not infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud. Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia), so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute for it unless the victim complies.
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I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants, and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.
Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.
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> infamously against “Tea Party” activists
that claim was disproved by the way
but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone
No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind liberal-sounding fronts.
This was spun as "targeting conservatives".
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The problem I was listening to a historian discuss the other day is that we're stuck in a cycle of:
They said this pattern goes back to Nixon.
Theres a reason 99% of actions taken by democrats are just "strongly worded letters" and how they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against.
Most Democratic politicians are in on the game too. Its all just political theater and their in-group rotates out who gets to be the bad guys.
Yes Democrats clean-up by not breaking norms, but as mentioned they never go far enough because they legitimately do not want to go too far due to corporate interests and the elite.
I am left leaning but do not align with the majority of the Democratic party because they are in on this too. They have the tools to be much more antagonistic to the GOP but they purposely don't use them
I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what someone else broke by breaking the rules.
I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember that this is how everything used to get done. Check the old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their voting patterns.
How tedious. I don't disagree, fundamentally, with your message, but this internet smart guy thing people do where they use things like $variables to signal that they are above everything and anyone who things X is bad or good just isn't smart enough to see things in the abstract really sucks. And I am very glad you are mildly bemused by people getting shot in the streets, the deterioration of democratic norms that might spiral into more violence and actual, real life, people getting fucked up. Very cool of you.
On occasion, it is worthwhile to take a step back and recognize that what is happening is not new or novel. Likewise, it is useful to recognize a pattern when it presents itself. It is extra useful ( and helpful ) that this is brought to the attention of other people who may still be going through the steps of processing of what seems to be happening.
If it helps, I appreciate going meta after me, but there is not much to dissect here. I stand by my bemused. You may think it is some soft of grand struggle and kudos for you for finding something to believe in, but don't project onto others.
I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense other than the human condition is a grand struggle for peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated inhumanely.
I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on: people really should consider how power is going to be used against them when calculating how much of it to give up in the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.
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I have been arguing this point for several years now -- but wrt to the Democratic party's relationship with guns. The same justification used to limit the second amendment is the same justification that can be used to limit the 1st, 4th, etc.
Both parties seem to be on an authoritarian bent over the last 10-15 years, which sucks.
This is called "boomerang theory" in sociology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
> The imperial boomerang is the theory that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens.
This is different from what parent post describes. Parent means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used domestically, but the administrator remains the same.
Tik Tok wasn't built to be used as a weapon though.
Are you sure about that?
Yeah.
I don't subscribe to the hypocritical vies that people are expected to have "free will" and "freedom", while also being "influenced by the algorithm".
Its either one or the other. Personally I think its the former, and Tik Tok is just confirming to people what they want to hear.
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Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won’t be?
> those weapons will be used against you
On the matter of social media "moderation," this is the phase you're actually in, right now.
This seems to be an argument that defense spending is never legitimate?
Corollary: building a benign system that doesn't make the levers of control as small and close to the user as possible, is inviting someone with ulterior motives to use those controls.
>If you help building weapons to be used against $currently_designated_bad_people
Democrats would really love some extra help from WikiLeaks right now, if only not Bidens administration who helped to extradite Julian.
Afaik only one side of the aisle asks for Russia's help with offensive cybersecurity.
And you think they won't be used against me if I don't help build them?
Seems unlikely.
If the implication is that the tools won't exist if I don't build them, that's beyond a pipe dream. We'll never get a globe of 8 billion people to agree unanimously on anything. Let alone agreeing not to build something that gives them power over their adversaries.
I will offer a benign example. A new team member was given a task to generate a dashboard that, as per spec, in great detail lists every action of a given employee within a system that generates some data for consumption by those employees.
As simple as the project was, the employee had the presence of mind to ask his seniors some thoughtful questions of what makes sense, what is too intrusive, what is acceptable. He felt uncomfortable and that was with something that corps build on a daily basis.
Now.. not everyone wakes up thinking they are building database intended to enslave humanity as a whole, but I would like to think that one person simply questioning it can make a difference.
The $currently_designated_bad_people however are criminal illegal aliens. Sometimes we have to create mechanisms to go after pedophiles and rapists, and we just have to trust the system well enough to assume these tools won't be used to go after good people. I mean the bar for ICE is so outrageously high it's hard to see a world where it's lowered far enough to go after someone like me.
Sure, but I was under impression those mechanism already exists. The question, as it were, comes to enforcement.
The mechanism to do it properly is the feds working with local and state officials where there's a full breadth of accountability and judicial coverage. Some states and cities have explicitly rejected doing this, some opting to purposefully make it harder. Trump instead of being diplomatic and trying to work with them has aggressively sent goons in to do flashy operations and pushed federal enforcement to the limits of the law.
ICE and border patrol wasn't really designed either legally or in training for these sorts of large operations, so it's created lots of dangerous situations like how to do crowd control broadly under laws like "interfering with a federal investigation", while commanders are pushing them hard for results.
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How fitting that you bring up pedophiles and rapists, and trusting the system, while Trump is sitting in the white house. Do I need to point out the irony?