My experience is that it is always important to criticize free speech absolutism, especially when people behave as if it were an atemporal concept. In reality, most of the world for most of the time has had various compromises between protecting individuals and society on one hand and free speech on the other.
That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.
Today's world have people working for 8 hours a day (minimum) / 5 days a week while making little to no progress on their overall livelihood, and at the same time people (read - the privileged) have more "consumables" yet no one is ever truly happy anymore, resulting in insane concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
Also, the past isn't just defined by slavery. There are plenty of examples we can learn from the people before us.
Wow, that must be quite expensive! You said the files alone are a few PB. So at least 2PB / 8 servers ~= 250TB per server, which would probably put each server at > 20k $ (unless you’re putting it together with duct tape and scraps, but even then the disks will cost a ton).
Not exactly. Attachments are only fetched from Discord as the user requests them. This means that the vast majority of attachments are never stored on my server. Right now, I only have about 280TB of attachments locally on my own infrastructure. You can see more stats here: https://searchcord.io/about
While I get your point, it doesn't carry too much weight, because you can (and we often read this) claim the opposite:
Linear regression, for all its faults, forces you to be very selective about parameters that you believe to be meaningful, and offers trivial tools to validate the fit (i.e. even residuals, or posterior predictive simulations if you want to be fancy).
ML and beyond, on the other hand, throws you in a whirl of hyperparameters that you no longer understand and which traps even clever people in overfitting that they don't understand.
So a better critique, in my view, would be something that the JW Tukey wrote in his famous 1962 paper: (paraphrasing because I'm lazy):
"better to have an approximate answer to a precise question rather than an answer to an approximate question, which can always be made arbitrarily precise".
So our problem is not the tools, it's that we fool ourselves by applying the tools to the wrong problems because they are easier.
My maxim of statistics is that applied statistics is the art of making decisions under uncertainty, but people treat it like the science of making certainty out of data.
I indeed find the lesson that it describes unbearably bitter. Searching and learning, as used by the article, may discover patterns and results (due to infinite scaling of computation) that we, humans, are physically uncapable of discovering -- however, all those learnings will have no meaning, they will not expose any causality. This is what I find unbearable, as it implies that the real world must ultimately remain impervious to human cognizance; it implies that our meaning- and causality-based human reasoning ultimately falls short to model the world, while general, computation-only methods (given ever-growing computing power) at least "converges" to a faithful (but meaningless) description of the world.
See examples like protein folding, medicine research, AI-assisted diagnosis, self driving cars. We're going to rely on their results, but we'll never know why those results work. We're not going to reject self-driving cars if those cars save lives per same distance driven and/or same time driven; however, we're going to sit in, and drive, those cars blind. To me, that's an unbearable thought, even apart from the possibility that at some point the system might break down, and cause a huge accident inexplicably. An inexplicable misbehavior of the system is of course catastrophic, but to me, even the inexplicable proper behavior of the system is an unsettling thought -- because it is inexplicable.
Edited to add: I think the phrase "how we think we think" is awesome in the essay. We don't even know how our reasoning works, so trying to "machinize" those misconceptions is likely bound to fail.
Arguably, "the way our reasoning works" is probably a normal distribution but with a broad curve (and for some things, possibly a bimodal distribution), so trying to understand "why" is a fool's errand. It's more valuable to understand the input variables and then be able to calculate the likely output behaviors with error bars than to try to reduce the problem to a guaranteed if(this), then(that) equation. I don't particularly care why a person behaves a certain way in many cases, as long as 1) their behavior is generally within an expected range, and 2) doesn't harm themselves or others, and I don't see why I'd care any more about the behavior of an AI-driven system. As with most things, Safety first!
Well they do say they calculate propensity scores, but the whole language of the blog post is very hand-wavy. Warning over and over again that something is not causal proof, and then dramaticizing it as if it were proof is just unprofessional.
If you have a fraud model, just show the model and the data and the validation - everything else is marketing fluff.
This article is basically a showcase of why one shouldn't take sociology seriously. Thin ideological concepts packaged in a veneer of scientific sounding terminology, performed as an exercise to basically only allow the ideological in-group to "understand" it. The entire field seems like an elaborate suppression technique against the ideological outgroup (and apparently quite a successful one at that.
Meanwhile sociology was hardest hit by the replication crisis and I see no sign that they have done anything to improve replicability of their "research"
Do you have some sources for Sociology being hit harder than, say, Psychology, in the replication crisis? I personally don't even know of a many labs replication attempt from them (Sociology). So we probably don't know.
That said, Sociology is the attempt to explain the most complex thing in the universe (collective behavior arising out of sentient individuals), so if you think there's a better way, I'd be extremely excited :)
It’s not often that I diss content, but if there was ever a summary of a topic written that tried to sound like it was a novel idea by labelling everything under the sun, this is it.
Maybe I’m not smart enough to understand it, but honestly after 4 tries I still don’t get what the point is.
Also, the topic of “reflexive” came about in the early to mid 20th century, so for many people here, our parents have always existed in this reflexive modern. That doesn’t mean things have gotten more complex in the last generation
I find experience to be a bad explanation here, because a course can absolutely teach you all these things that are discussed in the article.
Sewing? The course will explain and show you, after which you gain experience by practice.
Making financial decisions? This rests a lot on knowing facts about how financials work, and a course is absolutely one correct way of learning those.
For experience, I'd rather think of things like - how do you cope with the death of a loved one? How do you decide who to be or what to do? How do you manage your emotions, streghts and weaknesses?
America's arrested rather a large number of people in recent weeks—university students, mostly—for expressing viewpoints on the I/P conflict. The current Administration is claiming, and no one's yet stopped them, that First Amendment rights don't apply to non-citizens such as international students.
- "You’re not arrested for posting this"
For what it's worth, it's widely reported that ICE is trawling social media to find targets (targeted for their speech/viewpoints). HN itself is one of their known targets.
Chris Krebs just yesterday had his security clearance revoked solely for saying the 2020 election was fair and not rigged.
His coworkers at SentinelOne (almost certainly most of who are citizens) also had their clearances revoked, despite never speaking out on the topic, purely as a North Korea style "punish the whole family" approach to strike fear into people of guilt by association, so that those who have spoken out in any shape or form become social pariahs.
Citizens having their career taken away for saying an election wasn't rigged, or for happening to work at the same place as someone who said this.
If you think the status quo hasn't yet changed to "In countries like China, Russia and the US, speaking out against the government puts both your livelihood and that of those in your vicinity at serious risk", you're dead wrong.
There are many reasons to question Krebs’ tenure and not all of them have to do with ignoring the state of election security, The Disinformation regime, viewpoint discrimination, or election interference.
However many of my issues with CISA are based on my own professional work in security, and that of accomplished professors like J Halderman & M Blaze saying our election infrastructure is insecure.
We’ve been saying the same thing in hackerdom for 30 years!
If my career has been completely about the security of federal & military systems, then some lawyer like Krebs saying our infrastructure is secure when it’s running Windows 7 is a giant slap in the face, particularly given all of the censorship.
You wanted evidence. Here goes:
The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA was bringing to bear has been over the top.
At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election security said the opposite.
This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of insecurity.
Those of us in security are convinced that all this unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying about election security isn’t being open and truthful with the American people.
- NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking. [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020 titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but this matches the description in the thread. The full URL is not available in the provided web results, and I cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise link.]
- Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134 educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines
- Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters is not provided in the web results. These letters were sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a government or senator's website.]
- A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016 election.
Ending the statement with 'There is a list of things' and not providing it strongly suggests that you don't actually have any data or hard facts to back up your claims.
You are a random person on an internet forum, the onus is in you to provide data to back up incredible claims.
The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA was bringing to bear has been over the top.
At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election security said the opposite.
This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of insecurity.
Those of us in security are convinced that all this unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying about election security isn’t being open and truthful with the American people.
- NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking. [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020 titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but this matches the description in the thread. The full URL is not available in the provided web results, and I cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise link.]
- Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134 educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines
- Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters is not provided in the web results. These letters were sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a government or senator's website.]
- A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016 election.
>Chris Krebs just yesterday had his security clearance revoked solely for saying the 2020 election was fair and not rigged
Considering how Republicans control all three branches (to an extent), the "2020 election fraud" was a key talking point of Trump, and how stealing an election would be a historic crime in American history....the justice department has done nothing so far.
The Republican House spent a year or so investigating Hunter Biden to obtain a gun plus tax charge (also with the hopes of tying Biden to a crime) but not trying to find who stole the 2020 election?
To that end, I am quoting a portion of the text on the WH at the end of my comment here.
Anyone would be right to question CISA’s misallocation of resources to narrative control, and little emphasis on actual cyber security work. That CISA was getting in bed with former IC folks doing Censorship Ops, not computer security, is a very bad look.
There is a reason CISA is viewed as a joke with the federal space and it has everything to do with the lack of performance for a 2-3B dollar agency.
“ Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his Government authority. Krebs’ misconduct involved the censorship of disfavored speech implicating the 2020 election and COVID-19 pandemic. CISA, under Krebs’ leadership, suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combatting supposed disinformation, and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission. CISA covertly worked to blind the American public to the controversy surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Krebs, through CISA, promoted the censorship of election information, including known risks associated with certain voting practices. Similarly, Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines. Krebs skewed the bona fide debate about COVID-19 by attempting to discredit widely shared views that ran contrary to CISA’s favored perspective.”
For a supposedly intellectual site that I clearly am at best in the middle tier of intellectual ability, this place is shockingly passive and accepting of the converging futures of authoritarian AI and the marked collapse of political discourse, if not rule of law.
Maybe I'm just a dumb one that speaks up, everyone else has gone dark forest.
Lets say that a ton of us got a leaky look at what the likes of thiel datamimed from the humanity dataset. The last mile of the enlightenment wrecks all those romantic ideas of eternal progress by technology, self actualizationa and retardation repair by education pretty thoroughly. Those that are not in the know mimic those that are or just develop a amoral stance to whether and survive the times which are a changing. It turns out the civil liberty lessons do not survive the contact with the lovecraftian reality beneath. This whole 10 year ride since 2016 was not foreseen, predicted, effectively countered and not even mitigated by protecting cultural artifacts and institutions against the decay. The science whose prediction power is zero, who has no eclipse to show, is not one.
Dictatorships tend to do worse economically, the biggest example was the Soviet bloc which fell for economic reasons mostly.
You can accelerate this effect by doing sabotage. The WW2 CIA sabotage manual contains a lot of ideas that have pretty good ratio of problems created to personal risk.
That’s the truth, if we remain silent we will be targeted eventually. I am extremely disappointed by the lack of tech colleagues calling this out. I took an oath of ethics to do no harm and I see many people willing to use technology to find and silence critics of the government.
Fuck Donald Trump and his gross, weird, pathetic mafia.
This regime is a rogue autocracy strangling anything good about this once great country.
I hope every single person responsible for the many crimes they have committed (and they have committed crimes) faces justice, if not in this life, then the next one.
IME the authoritarian politics had much more support here; I'd say it was the majority of voices heard. It diminished considerably when Trump was elected and then took office.
But the silence has been a long-standing problem: HN has long been largely silent on the social and political dangers of IT - really an outrage; here are the people most responsible, and the outcomes are predictable. That would include especially disinformation and misinformation, and propaganda more generally; and also the power of social media. Those are what makes it impossible to do anything.
When things became so polarized, years ago, shutting down discourse everywhere, HN didn't work to solve the problem - they stopped talking too. Again, a big failure of the people with the knowledge, skill, and power. But shutting down discourse is not politically neutral - it's a great help to the corrupt and evil to hide what they do and prevent people from responding to it. Democracy dies in darkness, I've heard.
There's this macrocycle of fatigue related to Godwins law for, what, 30 years of online discourse.
The undeniable long term trend during this period has been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process, legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and majority minority slowly building a core base of manipulatable populism.
Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil on national television with no pushback or consequences beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot) was a crystallizing moment.
This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins law style hyperbole.
The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But the fact that the only functional political bulwark against trump is the second by second ticker of financial health of the oligarchs is really depressing.
That would be great, but I don't see it. HN has already been obviously violating GDPR and all other right-to-forget laws since forever by not allowong for account deletion, and everytime this has been brought up, dang has pretty much confirmed they don't care ("it would look bad if there were deleted comments [and that's more important than these laws]").
It turns out that in real life you don’t have any right to be forgotten, and trying to legally manufacture one is not only nonsensical, it’s impossible.
HN is a public forum, if you don’t want your statements here being public, don’t post.
There are many cases where laws that are made for humans before certain tech are not sufficient once certain tech arrives.
You don’t need the right to be forgotten outside of specific tech because human brain forgets by default, paper rots, and all of the above is restricted geographically and does not scale.
The right to be forgotten is a natural consequence of reality - nothing is by default permanent. It's digital systems that have perverted reality by persisting information beyond its normal short lifetime.
If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is permanent.
We can "what if" ourselves into any position we want. The fact is that digital surveillance is here and does collect information about people in a scope that is qualitatively different than putting information in books.
Books have limited print runs. Many books in libraries are only borrowed and perhaps read a few times. Niche titles more so. Books go out of print and are hard to search for arbitrary text.
The ease of making copies of digital data, the ease of indexing them is totally different from books, just as writing, clay tablets, scrolls and books were from a purely oral society.
I have a hypothetical. Let's say you attend a rally and give a hate speech and the entire event is live-streamed / recorded for posterity. Can you use "right to forget" laws to impel all sites hosting that video record to blur out your face in the original videos?
What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?
Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool for suppressing information.
The whole idea behind right to forget is that people don't live their entire lives under condemnation for something they stopped doing. You can debate whether or not permanent ostracism is effective as a deterrent, but let's not ban the removal of gang tattoos.
Will that matter in a world of AI? Can't the connection be made - for example based on writing style, political opinions, time of day you post, networks you use, etc etc.
You could be indoctrinated or paid to give the speech. You might regret it or change your mind. The video doesn't have to be real, it could be generated, it could be someone with the same name who looks like you.
Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years ago. Should you be that guy forever?
When I asked dang about GDPR this is how he explained HN’s stance on not allowing broad comment and account deletion
> Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways.
> Re "aren’t these comments owned by the person who wrote them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and also philosophically. From my perspective, two other factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2) posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper.
> Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours is that we're trying to balance the community interests of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not to have their comments deprived of context, and the interest of the community in preserving its archive) with the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work—we end up taking care of requests manually for people every day—but we're committed to both sides of it because it seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.
huge shock that y combinator doesn’t give a shit about legal risk considering the huge chunk of its successful startups were just law-breaking mobile apps.
To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop the blood feud.
IMO both approaches should have been more measured, but who do you think will propose the ceasefire agreement?
This is not true. People who claimed the election was rigged were asked to back up their claims with evidence. Typically they never did, although a smaller number made an effort...but the profferred evidence was nonsensical. I am not just talking about talking heads widely quoted on TV or social media posts, I read a lot of election litigation.
I think the anti-mask people had some valid points, but they sank their own boat by ranting about 'masktards' and 'face diapers' while also demonstrating callous indifference to the large number of deaths.
If you check their work based on the publicly available data, you find that based on their logic there was a clear case for Trump cheating. Right wing media reporting the story, of course, did not.
Can you give some examples of things related to those topics you think are equivalent to what is happening right now? Are you referring to facebook and twitter censorship of those topics?
>To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged,
No they weren't
Not in the amount of court cases, elected politicans stating the view, and January 6th
When a few Democrats starting objecting to the 2016 results. Joe Biden, in congress during the certification, slammed the gavel down and said "it's over"
There's a difference between truth and lies - an actual, material, essential difference. It's not politics, it's truth.
People can take any relativistic position they want, but that difference is essential to anything and everything: The truth about database i/o performance is essential to your project; the truth about climate change is essential to preventing catastrophe; the truth about Covid was essential to saving millions of lives - and many died and much blood is on the hands of the liars.
But the liars were not, and shouldn't have been, arrested, deported, extorted, threatened, etc.
> To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop the blood feud.
Did anyone have their, and their coworkers', security clearance revoked just for saying either of those? (There are other activities that could have been taken by people saying the election was rigged that could have led to a loss of security clearance, but I don't think that just the statement did it.)
Yes, lots of people got fired for claiming those in the Covid days. The selective memory of the majority opinion here on HN is deeply distressing, but understandable due to blind tribal support for the democratic party.
Large swathes of people were first identified for being antivax when they self-registered under the religious exemption scheme and then were harassed and fired. It was cunningly done with the media paying no attention.
So people in government claiming it was rigged should probably lose their jobs, as they were advancing harmful narratives related to their jobs. Journalists were (rightly) ridiculed, but there is a significant difference. I might not use a mechanic who is antivax; I would advocate a doctor be fired.
Nobody was made that people thought the election was rigged. They were frustrated with their lack of evidence, and then mad at their attempt at an insurrection. And then really pissed off at their complete lack of accountability afterwards.
Same thing with Covid. Nobody was mad if you thought masks were stupid. They were mad if you didn’t wear your mask, putting immunocompromised people at risk for your own selfish reasons.
There’s a difference between speech and actions. Doing things that actually, literally, kill people is a problem.
It doesn't matter if they're citizens or not if the government is skipping court thus not being required to prove it either way. Then when they oopsie you to another country they have to at least try to pretend to get you back but the courts need to show "deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs".
Which is a long way of saying the executive can blackhole anyone it wants to a foreign country and no one is going to do anything because god forbid we step on the executive's role to give up people in our country to other countries.
>Which is a long way of saying the executive can blackhole anyone it wants
Do you have examples of the executive doing this to citizens or are you being hypothetical here?
Countries generally grant far fewer rights to non-citizens. Have you considered how allowing non-citizens to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
"You are believing the trash talk and allowing it to intimidate you. You are helping them by spreading it and legitimizing it."
I take this as "Just ignore the rhetoric and threats from Republicans because they are empty and you're helping them spread the hate which gets more them support"
>Because if enough people chant that, then it will become a real possibility.
I'm not sure what you mean. Can you provide an example?
> "Just ignore the rhetoric and threats from Republicans
No, you need to stop them. You need a plan for victory. Testifying that they have unstoppable power is an indulgence in cowardice. At halfime, do athletes say 'we can't possibly stop them!' It's just someone acting out their fears.
Or are you dismissing overt signalling of fascism as "just owning the libs"? Are you just cherry picking communication you feel safe about and ignoring the huge glaring signs being flashed by dozens of appointees? Are you pretending Obama and bush established legal precedents for classifying citizens as enemy combatants for rendition, denial of due process, and murder by drone without trial? That we don't have a better than 1984 turnkey oppression and total.monitorinf infrastructure for any despot of sufficient motivation which this admin has amply stated affection towards?
Language is important from leaders. So is consistency and some degree of integrity. Even disingenuous cowtowing to appearances and political norms constrains power and abuse.
I'm not sure what you are saying, but I'm not dismissing it, I'm saying we need to stop repeating their propaganda of terror and intimindation as if it's true. Be effective, not spread the poison of helplessness and fear.
He's married to a citizen which gives him an avenue towards legal residency and full citizenship.
It doesn't matter anyways because the government admitted he was deported due to a administrative error and because they actively undermined and sidestepped the courts authority on several occasions, there is effectively nothing stopping them from doing it to full blown citizens. Honestly, it sounds like it's just a matter of time if this keeps up.
I agree it's bad, and yes, the government admitted they shouldn't have done it. But regardless, the question was about if it has happened to a citizen, not a person who maybe could be a citizen one day but is not, and you responded with them "doing just that" when they did not, in fact, "do just that".
I'm not sure why there's a need to mislead when what's actually happening is bad enough.
It's not a need to mislead. You're grasping at a technicality. Citizenship is irrelevant if you're not given the chance to demonstrate it, which he wasn't, and again, he was actually deported because of the administrative error, not an on-purpose action, the correctness of which is irrelevant.
You're arguing whether a car wrapped around a tree has a bad alternator. Surely a fact useful to someone, somewhere, and worth knowing. But also certainly not the reason there's a problem.
100% this. To echo another poster below, it's really important to read the Supreme Court's own words here.
>"The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. "
From https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
I suspect that is one of the main reasons behind the order. It's very obvious that citizen vs legal resident matters very little here, if due process is not given.
So.. the very post you share prooves it's not happening. Incredulously, I gotta wounder: Did/ do you really believe your link supports your claim that it's been happening?
So, I think, the courts ruled just 2 days ago that people can get sent abroad so long as they get to 'petition' it in... Texas. Right? So like, if their was an investigation, it closed one day prior to the interview; which is why she didnt say what you think she did. Trump said Would do it, and supposedly now he Can do it. All this is 'fact'in her eyes prior to the interview. An important distinction, no?
So you think it’s sane to do nothing and wait till it’s happening when they are explicitly saying they are looking for ways to make it happen? Really?
At this when they say something absurdly unhinged and unthinkable and if you still don’t believe they will try it.. well.. maybe you’re in the market for a bridge?
If they can ignore due process in this case what's to say they cannot do it to proper citizens? It's clear they're probing their way into creating a blueprint to get rid of people critical of trump.
>He's married to a citizen which gives him an avenue towards legal residency and full citizenship.
You seem as if you're trying to leverage that to actual citizen rights... "look, he could be a citizen someday, so that means he has these same rights reserved to citizens". But it does not work that way.
>there is effectively nothing stopping them from doing it to full blown citizens.
Be sure to raise the alarm when they do. I'd be curious if it ever got that far. I think that some on the left worry that it might not, because if they don't have the absurd slippery slope argument then many people would never be concerned about this at all.
It happens to be the case that he's not a citizen or claiming to be a citizen, but he wasn't given due process, and there's absolutely nothing stopping them from picking anybody up off the street, claiming they're here illegally, and shipping them off to an El Salvadoran prison.
All people in the us, legal or illegal, citizen or not, have fourth amendment protections, and if you strip those rights from anyone, you remove them from everyone.
Do they? We generally don’t give noncitizens the right to own a gun in the us, so clearly we are selective about applying the 2nd amendment protection. The 4th may need adjudication.
And just what process is due a person under risk of deportation? People say "due process" quite often without even giving any thought to what the term means, and I doubt that 1 in 4 could give a casual definition.
One might think that the only process due to such a person would be the opportunity to contest that they were a citizen and to provide evidence to that claim. Was he denied this? Did they slap a muzzle on him as he tried to scream "but my birth certificate's in the sock drawer, just take a look!"? If the agents who detained and deported him ran any sort of check that would have discovered his citizenship in time to prevent a deportation (had he been a citizen), this seems about all the process that could or should be due.
PS Am I the only one that notices how the news media always describes him as "from Maryland" when he wasn't born there, didn't attend school there, etc?
> They should have the due process to prove they are here legally.
This sounds like a nonsense statement. Non-citizens are only ever here legally at the pleasure of the United States. If we allow them in for 2 weeks, or 3 months, or whatever on a visa... we can change our minds and cancel it early.
The idea that they can have some absolute temporary right to be here ignores what it means to be a non-citizen. You have no right to be here, just a temporary privilege that can be revoked at any point for entirely arbitrary reasons.
>And yes, they were denied that.
I've heard no evidence that this was the case. "Due process" rights are, in many cases administrative. No trial, no judge.
>Even if you imagine due process is for citizens only,
I did not say this, and I do not imagine it. I just happen to know what due process rights actually are.
>you can't prove citizenship status without due process,
Was he denied his opportunity to prove citizenship to the agents who detained him? Did he try to get them to look in his wallet for papers, but they ignored that? Did he beg them to just look in his closet and see his birth certificate? That would be denial of due process.
>Otherwise, nothing's stopping ICE from just claiming you're not a citizen
So you claim. But it's absurd to think that will happen. If you believe it will happen, then just wait and sound the alarm when it does. I'll be genuinely surprised.
> Was he denied his opportunity to prove citizenship to the agents who detained him? Did he try to get them to look in his wallet for papers, but they ignored that? Did he beg them to just look in his closet and see his birth certificate? That would be denial of due process.
Really? The things that are happening now are so absurdly insane that nobody could have imagined them just a few years ago, and you are still gullible enough to say something as silly like that...
> sound the alarm when it does
The loons will just move the goalposts yet again. So what would that achieve?
> It's absurd that people who aren't citizens would be sent back to their home countries
I’m obviously referring to everything the current administration is doing not this specific case.
> common ground with the left
I’d consider myself a moderate centrist. Maybe mildly center-right.
> Do you even know why you want
If the only way of stopping them from coming is to surrender democracy to an authoritarian government staffed by exceptionally deranged and incompetent individuals, well.. let them come then..
> I contend that there's no chance of me ever being deported
Probably. As long as you don’t burn down any Teslas or say nasty thing about the president it’s very unlikely..
> of unease you feel right now continues until 2029 and beyond.
So you are willing to give up democracy and the rule of law (and economic stability for that matter..) just to get rid of some immigrants you don’t like?
If we don't have due process, in that, you can't go and defend yourself in public court, nobody here is really legal or not. It doesn't matter if your birth certificate is in the other room. Without due process it's whatever the ICE agent that's bagging you feels like. What are you gonna do? You don't get due process, you get no court hearing, you get the pleasure of getting onto a plane and flown out to a slave labor prison in El Salvador. Also Garcia had full legal permission to be here but it shows they never checked it and thus he was whisked away like we can expect other's to be if things stay on the current path.
>If we don't have due process, in that, you can't go and defend yourself in public court
That's not due process. Due process rights do not guarantee you any sort of court hearing or trial. It does not require a judge. 90% or more of due process is administrative in nature. The bureaucracy infringes your due process rights when they don't "go through the motions" of how to handle a particular situation. How should they handle deporting someone? By checking that they're not deporting a citizen. If they failed to check, if they failed to give him the opportunity to prove citizenship, they denied his due process rights. Did they do this?
>It doesn't matter if your birth certificate is in the other room. Without due proces
You miss the point. I wasn't asking if his birth certificate was there or not. I'm asking "did they give him the chance to claim as much, and did they follow up and make sure it wasn't there". If they didn't give him the opportunity to make the claim, if they ignored such a claim, this is a denial of due process.
And there was no denial. If you had more than a second grader's understanding of due process, you wouldn't be so confused here.
> What are you gonna do? You don't get due process,
"Look Mr. ICEman, you're making a mistake. We can clear this up in minutes, pull my wallet out and take a look at my identity documents, some of which indicate I'm a citizen. It'll only take two minutes to reveal me as a liar if that's not the case."
And if they refuse, then my due process rights have been denied.
>Also Garcia had full legal permission to be here
He showed up without such permission, then weaseled his way into getting contested permission after the fact. Which was always the case under previous policy, there was no practical way to send them back if they made it 100 yards across the border.
You keep saying other people have no idea what due process is, and you keep implying that asking a police officer really nicely not to arrest you is due process. Due process is given via the judicial system. The executive branch doesn't have the authority to be judge, jury and executioner. The police don't get to determine your rights, the courts do.
>and you keep implying that asking a police officer really nicely not to arrest you is due process.
I didn't imply this, in fact if you go up a few comments, I specifically say that due process rights are often administrative in nature. If the bureaucracy lets everyone file paperwork and processes it the same way every time, but when you show up with your paperwork to file it they throw it away without looking at it and say "we're already rejecting it"... that's a due process rights violation. In fact, that's pretty much the textbook definition of it. It's not that hard to understand. The "but he didn't even get a trial!" whiny-assed ijits don't seem to get that, or you. The "police officer" has already arrested you (though not in this case, because it wasn't an arrest, and not a police officer). They're allowed to do that, that's their job. Even when they do it to the wrong person.
Did the police officer check if he was a citizen or not? When (if?) he protested that he was, did they double-check? If those things didn't happen, no due process was skipped, ignored, or infringed. You don't know what due process is either... it's just this phrase you've heard and read from time to time in popular news media without ever thinking about it.
> The executive branch doesn't have the authority to be judge, jury and executioner.
Since these aren't criminal cases, they don't get a judge, jury, or executioner. They get a deportation. And by law, the executive branch really does have this legitimate power and authority. Deportations aren't penalties for crimes.
>The police don't get to determine your rights, the courts do.
This is a strange, distorted view. The courts aren't used to create new rights, only to determine the correct interpretation of rights when there is a dispute. It won't go your way at all. No matter how many times the media calls him a "Maryland man" despite being from El Salvador.
Would his being a citizen have mattered to any of the procedures prior to his rendition? The government never made any effort to prove that he was here illegally (which is important since he wasn't), and he never had an opportunity to offer a defense.
He's a permanent resident. Splitting hairs over citizenship when he was here legally massively misses the problem with blackholing people here legally.
> Splitting hairs over citizenship when he was here legally massively misses the problem with blackholing people here legally.
And on top of that this case should be horrifying to anyone regardless of whether they want to split hairs because:
A) they admitted he was deported in error
B) they are now effectively trying to argue there is no way to get him back
So even if you believe they would never knowingly do this to an actual citizen they are only one slightly different mistake from disappearing a citizen, whether or not it has happened yet.
And then lastly and most importantly IMO it is wildly un-American to believe anyone (regardless of citizenship or legal status) is not entitled to due process.
He's *not* a permanent resident; he's on "withholding of removal" status since 2019 [*]. It's not splitting hairs to discuss that, but you're right that the govt is (deliberately) pursuing a "camel's-nose-under-the-tent" approach first on a small class of people where Congress and INA haven't defined a direct clear path to PR or becoming a citizen, unlike a GC would since both his wife and child are US citizens.
He was granted "withholding of removal" status in 2019, which protected him from deportation to El Salvador (for fear of gang violence/extortion, which is why he came to the US).
The current DOJ acknowledges that at the time (2019) the "[first Trump admin] government did not appeal that decision [to grant withholding of removal], so it is final". It also seems like they never previously made any allegation that he was a gang member, and that they don't have any solid proof now that he is (other than supposedly one informant who incorrectly claimed Garcia lived in NY, so basically no credible evidence whatsoever).
By jumping the gun on deporting Garcia without due process, the current admin seems to unwittingly be forcing the issue to the Supreme Court very soon. (UPDATE: SC has just ruled unanimously 9-0 that the admin must try to release Garcia.) Looks like the SC's going to be very busy this May-June.
[*] Withholding-of-removal is a pretty rare status, rarely granted by court (>99% rejection rate), much rarer than Green Card, and applicants have to demonstrate credible fear. [0] This procedure is defined in INA § 208 (INA = Immigration and Nationality Act) [1]
As of 12/2024 there were over 100,000 individuals (from Cuba, China, Venezuela, Mauritania, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.) with orders of removal remaining free in the US due to various special interest statuses, including withholding of removal, according to a report from FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform). [2]
(Does anyone have stats on what historically happened to people in withholding-of-removal (what % became citizens, what % got GC, what % voluntarily left, what % got deported, what % moved to a different status etc.)?)
What about that guy who got deported to El Salvador even though he was legally here and the court had also ordered he not be sent back to El Salvador for his own protection? I’m pretty sure the admin admitted it was a mistake then refused to bring him back.
The Supreme Court resolutely batted that down 9-0 in a few days.
>> The [District Court] order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
The only question at this point is how detailed in demands the District Court can be.
The administration attempted to push the boundaries of executive power and lost in court, as has been happening.
Turns out, conservative justices with lifetime appointments aren't too legally thrilled about an unbridled executive either.
Yes, that is where my quote came from. From your own quote:
> The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.
Which is such a ridiculously bullshit line of thought. This wasn't some person who willingly went to some random country, this is someone the executive illegally put there against the person's will in coordination with said foreign government. I can guarantee you that any order with teeth will be struck down by SCOTUS on this line of thought.
I'm not sure why people obtusely intepret Supreme Court rulings as though they're part of the current administration.
The court is obviously saying that (1) it's correct and necessary to bring him back but that (2) the District Court doesn't have unbridled authority to order any foreign policy-influencing remedy it wants.
I.e. a US court couldn't order a president to sign a treaty
If the administration tries to foot drag further, the Supreme Court will likely order more specific remedies.
By not taking the L here, the administration is just burning whatever conservative goodwill they might have started with on this Supreme Court.
They're already disobeying the court, including both the lower court's order and the supreme court's order to attempt repatriation, as well as the lower court's order to provide information on the victim's location and attempts to retrieve him. They disobeyed numerous court orders to rehire people they fired and re-fund things they defunded.
What makes you think the administration cares about goodwill after that? Disobeying direct court orders is crossing the Rubicon. There's no going back to the illusion that judicial judgements will be respected by this administration.
> They tried to weasel around the verbal vs written order...
On numerous occasions (not just the one you mention), they did not obey the direct order by the time specified, meaning they directly disobeyed the court. For example, post-supreme-court-order, they were obliged to provide the lower court with a status update of the victim, and a list of things they've done so far to retrieve them. They directly violated that court order.
It's important to draw a bright, flashing distinction between:
1. Arguing that you think you should not have to comply with an order, but then complying if you don't receive a ruling in your favor in time.
2. Directly violating a court order, and then tossing out a cynical pretext as an excuse which hasn't been preapproved by the judge (they're called that for a reason).
Unless a stay is placed before the deadline, you must comply with every single court order, by the court-ordered deadline, no matter what you think.
At least, that's how it was before. Now the USA has crossed the Rubicon, with the government itself ignoring court orders at will, in order to imprison political enemies.
It was a decent liberal democracy while it lasted.
I think the SCOTUS was right on the money this time, and I am well to the left of any of its members. My read of their verbiage about effectuation/article II was a suggestion to the District Court judge to eliminate any wiggle room the administration would try to exploit.
This order was toothless, and the administration has already flouted it.
All John Roberts is doing is asking Trump to go further next time. Whether it's intentional or just cowardice on his part doesn't really matter to the rest of us.
It matter to me, since there are 2-3 conservative justices on the current Supreme Court that are likely to tire of administration excesses.
A long game player might even say Roberts is angling for that, by tailoring consensus opinions that nonetheless leave room for the administration to demonstrate further stupidity.
- "Do you have examples of the executive doing this to citizens or are you being hypothetical here?"
"Do you have examples of this severity-11 CVE being used in the wild, or are you just being hypothetical here?" It's a horrifically exploitable bug, were it left unpatched.
It's not some fringe conspiracy theory that this is how the law works and how the law would work on contact with US citizens; the Garcia SCOTUS concurrence explicitly underscored this perversity,
- "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens [sic!], without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene... That view refutes itself."
> Do you have examples of the executive doing this to citizens
Feels like moving the goalposts. First they were going to clear out "illegals" by any means, now the line includes any non-citizens. Granted maybe you personally didn't say both though.
> Have you considered how allowing non-citizens to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
Is it meaningfully different from allowing citizens to "spread discontent"? Why not just start taking everybody's 1st amendment rights, by the same logic? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there's long precedent that non-citizens are granted most of the same rights, including freedom of speech and assembly.
If non-citizens are being supported, instructed, etc by their government in spreading discontent, there are probably laws like espionage for that; you don't have to take away everybody else's freedom to stop them.
I am aware of some US citizens being deported by mistake under previous administrations, but there was a general consensus that those were genuine mistakes, examples of negligence rather than policy: https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-citiz...
>Countries generally grant far fewer rights to non-citizens. Have you considered how allowing non-citizens to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
The most powerful person in the country lied and still is lying about elected fraud, undermining the basis for our Democratic system and was rewarded with a 2nd term.
Median voters voted for Trump because they wanted a regime change after feeling the economic shock of covid. This is the trend across basically every democratic country. Polls on the issue itself show that this split is not 50/50 though the actual number escapes me.
I've seen a few news articles on arrests and the headlines are attention grabbing "Ivy League Student arrested for protesting" and it's worrisome to see.
However then buried in the article is something like they overstayed their visa, etc. Take a sibling comment's link to an article with a "second student arrested" in the title. As in that seems like there isn't a "large number". This is nothing like the reports of arrests in Russia. Especially as some of these pro-Palestinian protestors advocate violence or intifada pretty freely. I've seen that with my own eyes.
If I were a foreign national protesting and advocating for violence against any other country or people group I'd expect to be denied a visa or possibly deported for participating in such events. It'd be arrogant not to expect that outcome IMHO.
Visa applications in European Union countries often include things such as "indicators of good civil behavior". Take the quotes from that sibling comment's linked BBC article:
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
> She had previously been arrested in April 2024 for taking part in protests at Columbia University, according to DHS.
> "It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America," said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in a statement.
> "When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country."
And cases like Rumeysa Ozturk's are different. I also believe DHS should have to abide by the courts as well. Her case is also getting national and international attention and legal help.
By your logic, in the grand scheme of thing, it’s ok to deport elcritch and then say “elcritch’s” case was different and provide it with national and international attention and legal help.
Full disclosure, i’m not arguing in good faith. As a Canadian I don’t believe the US has a future, so I’m merely highlighting an argument which is symptomatic of the country’s downfall.
You could construe my logic that way, but no I’m saying the DHS was likely wrong in that instance and it caused uproar and backlash. Unlike other nations where few would care if the government overstepped. Governments will always overreach, it’s how people pushback which matters.
Also I’m more likely to be arrested and deported for silently praying in the UK.
However there’s also political tactics of “look at that poor student being deported” when said student was calling for jihad, intifada, and antisemitism and violating visas on top of that, which was sort of my original point.
Heh and is Canada fairing any different? Remember when Trudeau froze bank accounts for truckers protesting Covid lockdowns or whatnot. Maybe Trudeau shutting down parliament to seemingly avoid scrutiny. Hopefully it’s just news sensationalism and not the downfall of Canada.
> As in that seems like there isn't a "large number".
---
> “But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
---
You have to say "No" loudly and clearly at the _first offense_, and not wait until it's too late.
Poignant quote. Should we as a society accept students who are calling for violence and intifada on Israel or Jewish people in general? If anything some of those pro-Palestinian protests were more reminiscent of the 1933 “German Firm” boycotts the quote mentions than not:
> A boycott sign posted on the display window of a Jewish-owned business reads: "Germans defend yourselves against Jewish atrocity propaganda. Buy only at German shops!" Berlin, Germany, April 1, 1933.
It seems that a number of these students have been participating in events and protests calling for violence. After all there’s probably 10’s of thousands of student protestors, and likely many of them foreign students too. So it doesn’t seem like a “deport all Muslim students” either.
Peaceful protests are one thing, but I’ve seen some of these protests in person and it’s clear they’re not all peaceful demonstrations. Also supporting Hamas and Hezbollah is not supporting peaceful innocent freedom fighters. Both groups are clear and open on their stance for genocide against Israelies.
However we shouldn’t deport students who are peaceful and haven’t called for violence against others. It’s great that those cases are being called out and publicly criticized
. But not every one of these cases are an innocent student getting caught up either. What is happening is Gaza is terrible all around. It shouldn’t be used as an excuse to call for more violence against Jews or Muslims.
"By looking at property damage and police injuries, we also conclude that this pro-Palestine movement has not been violent. That is true of both the national protest wave in general and of the student encampments in spring 2024 in particular. The rhetorical core of this pro-Palestine movement has not been a call for violence against Jews, but rather a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end to violence being inflicted upon them. To substantiate this point, we considered two sources of evidence: 1) the banners, signs, and chants seen or heard at pro-Palestine events; 2) the demands issued by organizers of over 100 student encampments."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14742837.2024.2...
The way it works in American culture is quite simple. You are allowed to say whatever you like, but certain acts (like vandalism, or causing bodily harm to another individual) are criminalized. What we find in practice is that the truly awful people commit these crimes in addition to speaking awful things. We avoid punishing the merely incorrect.
This isn’t quite true. The last language from the Supreme Court, in Brandeburg vs. Ohio ( 1969) was “imminent lawless action”. There’s also standards for the public airwaves, which are regulated by the FCC. maybe not as important as they used to be, but still there and the major networks which are also broadcasters abide Also there’s specific exceptions like threatening the President, and “obscene” material, such as porn.
The there’s the question of private ownership of the platform. You certainly can’t say whatever yiu want on YouTube, for instance.
It’s hardly an equal fight, Gaza is an occupied and colonized territory that has limited ability for resistance. We wouldn’t be having this same discussion about South Africa overthrowing their apartheid.
There is a difference in a foreign national engaging in political speech and a citizen. If anything allowing foreign nationals to adjust political speech here while supporting violence or terrorism would be inappropriate and unwise. After all, it's easy for a foreign power to send radicalizers to a foreign country to influence or topple them. Well trodeen history there. Sending radical students is much more effective than a few thousand Twitter bots.
Of course, and as it stands foreign nationals on Visa's in the US don't have the same rights as citizens. Not that they shouldn't have some degree of free speech, but they can also be scrutinized and deported for advocating for violence and terrorism.
That scrutiny is a waste of federal resources since you're basically extending the notion of advocating violence to supporting any side in any war - perhaps meta should just go ahead and remove all posts on both sides.
No I’m not, but in case you missed the news several of the pro-Palestinian protests were violent or openly called for violence. Similarly with the posts in question.
as a person of jewish faith, I ask that you please not falsely conflate these two completely different concepts
someone who opposes jewish people in general is bad, but someone who opposes the ongoing genocide of palestinians is good
your usage of "or" here would indicate that the above good person is grouped together with the above bad person
> If anything some of those pro-Palestinian protests were more reminiscent of the 1933 “German Firm” boycotts
structuring your metaphor like this, strikes me as an example of DARVO [0], considering what is being done to innocent palestinians. how many israelis patronize businesses based in palestine? how many such businesses do you patronize?
As someone who came from a pretty authoritarian country- let me assure you that people there do routinely criticize their government, mock them all the time. Governments often do not have the bandwidth to deal with the volume of criticism, and even when they do- they wisely realize that letting people vent a little online is better than complete crackdown. I myself routinely did this in Facebook, where many in my friend list were government employees and (ex-ruling) party members.
I am in fact far more afraid of pro-palestine speech from USA as an immigrant than I was in my home country- and please trust me I am not exaggerating here.
>I am in fact far more afraid of pro-palestine speech from USA as an immigrant than I was in my home country- and please trust me I am not exaggerating here.
I would have laughed at this until pretty recently. How wrong I was.
Likely he means expressing any pro-Palestine sentiments. Doxxing is very common and if Ivy League deans were taken down, immigrants are likely to be deported for expressing any empathy towards the Palestinian.
But the people doing the doxxing complain that any criticism of Ire* for their war crimes makes them feel like there is no place they are safe, I don't buy it but the complainants have a lot of allies.
As someone said above, "America's arrested rather a large number of people in recent weeks—university students, mostly—for expressing viewpoints on the I/P conflict. The current Administration is claiming, and no one's yet stopped them, that First Amendment rights don't apply to non-citizens such as international students."
America is changing. What was true before isn't necessarily true now, and may get worse, depending on election outcomes.
People who have spoken out against the genocidal apartheid regime are being black-bagged in the street by plainclothes officers all across the United States. The gap between the supposedly enlightened West and Russia grows smaller by the day.
Right. We don't have to arrest. We can just disappear anything you say critical of our masters, I mean, our overlords, I mean, our government, I mean, a foreign government, I mean, a foreign government that hacks American companies and sells the hacks to Middle Eastern dictators who breed an ideology that trained people to attack our own country, I mean...
Yea but there's also not much point in critiquing the government here. What we ever been able to do about it except riot? We can endlessly discuss the failures of government and as it stands I don't think we will never see these failures distinguish candidates in the voting booth. Which is confusing, because you'd think the democrats would have wanted to win this time.
Well, Israelis are not abruptly incompetent and culturally allergic to progress, with a predictable habit of grovelling to whichever tyrant comes next — but they certainly do share some methods.
Still not sure what you mention. Hard to say that Israelis don't grovel to whatever tyrant comes next when they are currently ruled by a tyrant who would rather endanger his citizens and commit war crimes than gold and election he knows he'll lose. Also they have elected him over and over again despite how he endangers them and funded their current biggest enemy Hamas, in a cynical ploy to weaken his more moderate opposition at the time, the PA
I understand, but I don't perceive them as tyrants in the "Russian" sense. That’s not to excuse anything, of course. There’s this strange tendency among Russians to almost embrace suffering—and to try to drag everyone else down with them. It’s as if it doesn’t matter that they live in poverty or that their country is ravaged by oligarchs and mafia. What matters is that Russia is big and strong. That seems to be their default mindset.
But back to my original point. A few days ago, I happened to come across some pro-Israel propaganda, and honestly, I was stunned. It was just an Instagram profile claiming to be part of a pro-Israel lobbying organization, but the content was deeply disturbing. They were pushing a heavily distorted narrative, even going so far as to post photos and names of students, accusing them of supporting terrorism. It was all incredibly manipulative. The presentation was slick and more polished than rusias work of course, but the whole thing strongly reminded me of their methods.
Yeah unfortunately we thought the end of history would be the global spread of liberal democracies, but it's the global spread of this kind of stuff instead
To be honest, I think things have just become more visible and easier to interpret for those who are paying attention. I don't believe people have really changed.
The "end of history" theory today comes across, if not arrogant, then at the very least deeply naive.
Any difference is going to disappear in only a few years. What matters is the direction the US taking. This happened to Russia about 14 years ago, and it’s happening to the US now.
You have a point with democratic backsliding - but then your rights hinge on the impartiality of the judicial system (as a whole, and eventually, not necessarily individual decisions evidently). It’s pretty obvious that the legal systems even in flawed democracies is still vastly better than in those autocracies.
Checks and balances are a crucial feature of American democracy.
It's almost as though the framers of the Constitution foresaw the possibility of the two elected branches of government (executive and legislative) being monopolized by the same group, at some point.
And that the very flexibility of regular, open, direct elections also required a check to protect the fundamental rights of all people in the country.
They may have foresaw it but they did little if anything to prevent it. They lamented that political parties would probably be the downfall, and here we are...
The prevention is literally in the Constitution! Do you think other branches of government would be deferring to the Supreme Court if it weren't spelled out that they must?
> You do realize that this is where things are going, right?
This has been going on for decades.
> Have you not heard of the arrests and recent deportations of student protestors?
The legality of which will be decided (hopefully) by the courts. If this turns out to be legal, the fault doesn't lie at the hands of Trump and his cronies, but at a broken system we've had - for decades. Getting rid of him won't solve this. Having checks and balances will.
Much of his and Elon's actions are within the power that has been legally granted to them. And that is the problem. Congress is not limiting those powers. Voters are another part of checks and balances, and they happily wanted to give him those powers.
The problem isn't Trump. It's the country. Been broken for a while, but it took time for someone to clearly demonstrate how broken it is.
The western endorsement of the genocide in Gaza has been some of the best PR Putin could ever have hoped for.
It simultaneously underlined the viciousness, the lack of moral credibility and extreme hypocrisy of western leaders in the eyes of the nonaligned world (e.g. the global south), none of whom sanctioned him.
If you are not constantly posting fake and not recieve money from foreign entities you are not being arested at all in Russia. You may get a fine, and that's not always the case.
In today's world, it's all complicated, to tell the truth. If you think very deeply, then with the help of foreign money, if there is a lot of it, you can even destroy the country without doing anything illegal, just paying for advertising and comments with coverage of only facts that are beneficial to you and excluding the unprofitable ones.
People often think that bot farms are only from Russia and China, but on the other side, paid commenters are also used. Unfortunately, it will only get worse with modern AI.
For me, there is not much difference between these names. Anyway, choosing a name doesn't change the actual events... Yes it's not good. But it's bad saying only about war aggression and not saying at all about bloody coup and bloody nationlist crimes.
It's not very complicated. Russia invaded Ukraine, occupied large parts of its territories, and forcibly annexed it. Russia is the aggressor and the war criminal. These are all objective facts.
Not really, I'm Russian currently located in Russia and I can openly say that I hate our government. Though it would obviously be much worse if I actually had a big audience, in which case yeah there may be repercussions
... and they're trying to end birthright citizenship. I.e. people who are literally not immigrants (were born here and perhaps have never lived anywhere else) are already being lined up for this.
It's not unreasonable to see the situation as "Then they came for the Jews, and the administration finally deported the people who were coming for the Jews".
The president's literal argument for doing it is that the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
I'm not a big fan of either side's rhetoric, but clearly the horseshoe has become a ring.
> I'm not a big fan of either side's rhetoric, but clearly the horseshoe has become a ring.
Either side? Tell me which "side" does that sound like?
- hostility towards non traditional sexuality
- immigration being used as the scapegoat for economic problems
- strong feeling of national exceptionalism
- assault on women's productivity rights
- politicizing of science
- deportation for political reasons
- "Roman" salutes
It brings parallels with some things happening in Europe some time ago.
> activist groups are coming for all of American life.
I wonder who's actually going for all of American life though. Let's take Birthright citizenship, which has been established in 1868. Is that American life enough for you?
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
And guess who goes against this American way of life value? An orange grandpa married to an immigrant. You really can't make this up.
> Either side? Tell me which "side" does that sound like?
Up until you got to the "Roman" salutes, it sounded like both sides in the US.
Or rather, it will sound like whichever side you aren't. That's the point.
But using "Then they came for the Jews" when you're discussing deportation of these particular people is perhaps a new level of absurdity in the discourse.
> "Roman" salutes, it sounded like both sides in the US.
The liberals / Dems can barely organize a picnic. They can't agree on anything. There is no Fox News, there is nobody they bow down to. The obsequiousness to Trump is unprecendented.
> If a president stretched the limits of executive power to go after guns, half of the country would cheer for it.
That's speculation about specuation about an undefined interpretation. We are bounded by law, including by the Constitution.
> The Constitution is a living document, and the line is constantly pushed back and forth on its interpretation and enforcement.
There is variation in interpretation, but within bounds. If you want to eliminate Constitutional gun rights, you would need to repeal the 2nd Amendment.
Ok, but if we want to repeal it there's a defined process for that. The president doesn't just get to declare people's citizenship invalid, that's Nazi shit. That's why I call Trump and everyone who tacitly or explicitly supports him a Nazi. He's trying to rule by executive fiat to enforce white nationalism.
> The president's literal argument for doing it is that the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
What is American life? Why can't people criticize whatever they want - that is American life.
> "Then they came for the Jews, and the administration finally deported the people who were coming for the Jews"
The vast majority of antisemitism is on the right. The administration does nothing about it (and supports and legitimizes much of it).
Also, the Jews will be next. By attacking critics of Judaism, they are entrapping Jewish people (and others) in legitimzing this oppression, and in making themselves into targets of hate. Then when the white supremecists turn on them, and say Jews are conspiring to control American, what will these Jewish supporters of arrests, oppression, and deportations say?
Most of the pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist content I see is denouncing Israeli war crimes and genocide. No one is bashing Jews because of their ethnicity or religion.
Also a lot of this comes from the Jews (who are then attacked for being confused or..... antisemitic)
We're not at the point of people hunting Jews because they're Jews. We are at the point when opposing targeting/killing medics, press, children or hospitals may result in being kidnapped from the street and either locked up without charges or trafficked to the torture camp.
I do not disagree with your comment in general, I disagree with you putting "Judaism" while the almost all the critique and rebuke is aimed at the Israeli war crimes or the Zionist supremacy ideology.
Got called a "self-hating Jew" for the first time on Mastodon a year ago, for criticizing Israel.
Unfortunately for those of us in the diaspora, Israel has really muddied the waters by convincing people that anti-Israel = antisemitism, because it's given real antisemites cover. E.g., like when the ADL came to Musk's defense after his Nazi salute because he officially supported Israel.
Almost all far-right / neo-nazis groups with a long (real) antisemitism trajectory like the ones Elon Musk supports are now pro-Israel and pro-Gaza genocide. Sounds weird, but it makes total sense, as:
- The Zionist project is an ethno-state, just like those groups want for their countries. This also echoes the Zionist-nazi collaborations before WWII to move jewish population out of Germany to Palestine.
- Israel works as an spearhead of the global imperialism configuration, if you support imperialism on the Middle East -as those groups and their bourgeoisie do- you must support Israel.
- European neo-nazi groups are militant against immigration, and a big chunk of that immigration to their countries is muslim, so they are more than open to the Israel narratives against the muslim world... even the most extremist ones that de-humanizes Gaza children ("those children are future terrorists").
> I do not disagree with your comment in general, I disagree with you putting "Judaism" while the almost all the critique and rebuke is aimed at the Israeli war crimes or the Zionist supremacy ideology.
It's good that you brought this up!
It's a common right-wing tactic to conflate themselves with the purest version of something that is highly regarded and hide behind it. E.g the Nazis conflated themselves with "pure" Germanness, the fascists in Italy conflated themselves with "pure" Italianness, the same way now Israel conflates itself with Judaism/Jewishness. Then it naturally follows that if you attack Israel's genocide of the people in Palestine, you are attacking Judaism/Jewishness. If you question Netanyahu's genocidal ultra-supremacist ideology (which many Holocaust survivors, Jewish themselves, have done repeatedly), you are anti-Jewish, and so on.
A similar thing is happening in the US where the current administration is trying to position itself as America-first, so naturally any critique on them must be anti-American, right? You will find that this playbook is always the same. First will be immigrants, then non-traditional sexual orientations and women's reproductive rights, then the press and universities and finally just whoever they feel like.
Fortunately, if history goes to show us anything, it's these hate-fueled-orders always end up imploding.
> Fortunately, if history goes to show us anything, it's these hate-fueled-orders always end up imploding.
That's taking the 'in the long run' analysis to an extreme.
In WWII, after hundreds of millions died - including over 10 million murdered by the hate-filled - major parts of the world were devestated, and the free world united in a massive war, the hate-fueled were stopped. They didn't implode.
The idea that they will implode is a common fantasy that you (and many others) won't have to do anthing, face their fears, fight an uncertain fight. If you really believed they would implode, the fight would be certain. They won't stop until you stop them.
> And the same way now progressives conflate Zionists with White supremacists / Nazi
Nazism and Zionism are both ultra-right-wing nationalistic ideologies. The conflation doesn't stop on the surface though, but it runs deep in the actions of the two states: The Nazi state during WW2, and the Israeli state:
Yes Zionists are the Nazis and Hamas are the good guys I got it. Thanks for all the links I read each and every one of them , especially Wikipedia articles about Nazi concentration camps I've never heard of that.
I am sure I won't hear the end of it how the torture concentration camp of the Nazis is completely different from the much more civilized and completely different torture detention camp of the Israelis. Israelis' of course, have a high regard for their prisoners' well being, especially considering they call them "animals": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr24GcCDgyM
> Yes Zionists are the Nazis and Hamas are the good guys I got it
I probably shouldn't bite, but here it goes:
Here are some stats even before the current war started.
I am sure when some Nazis were killed by the French Resistance, somebody Nazi apologist was saying: "see, French are also bad, because they are killing the poor Germans". However, there is a very important distinction:
And nobody says Hamas are the good guys: both the leaders of Hamas
and Netanyahu and his genocidal posse are sought to be trialed by the ICC for war crimes (https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu).
- Both are far-right ideologies based on some feeling of superiority (racial or national/religious)
I mean, yeah, there are differences in the "flavor", like fascism in Italy was different from Nazism in Germany and is different than the contemporary genocidal Zionism by the Palestinian state, but the similarities are far more than the small differences.
Not sure what "fair exchange" would mean here. It looks like
a) A war / protracted conflict , not some kind of one sided genocide. Jews haven't killed thousands of Germans or tried to bring down the German state. Also, if there is one side that is sympathetic to Nazi ideology it is actually historically the Palestinian side (see Mufti relations with Hitler and his contributions to the final solution).
b) One side is clearly stronger than the other side (however, the weak side is doing everything it can to bring the casaulties numbers up. We know Hamas is doing this).
Israel is not going to try get more Israelis killed just so progressives become happier.
Israel is bulldozing Palestinian houses, bombards working hospitals, forbids (and shoots) humanitarian aid, starves the opponent, stops their electricity, and calls them animals. Why not respond to that?
> Not sure what "fair exchange" would mean here. It looks like
Again, when a nation occupies another nation's territory, it's normal that there are resistance movements. The numbers actually suggest not a war of army vs army but instead warfare on Palestinian territory, in which thousands of innocent Palestinians are caught in the crossfire.
Are those 13,000+ children that Israel killed part of Hamas? Is everybody in Palestine Hamas? Or is it the excuse of a Zionist-apologist for bombarding innocents?
> Israel is not going to try get more Israelis killed just so progressives become happier.
Well, actually again, you are conflating the actions of the genocidal Israeli state and of the wanted war criminal Netanyahu, with the will of the Israeli people, who repeatedly protested against his genocidal regime.
Zionism is the same as Nazism, a type of fascism, predicated on the fact that some are "better" and "chosen" and have a right to and deserve more than others just because of their race/skin color/nationality/religion.
> The president's literal argument for doing it is that the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
American life is defined by the acceptance of dissent and the encouragement of even distasteful free speech. If that's not American, what even is American?
That said, I think your take is also empirically supported. There is this [1] very interesting study which comes to the same conclusion. It uses broadcast range of radio towers to do a quantitative analysis on the potential effects and finds few. Interestingly enough, I have seen other studies with similar designs that do show persistent effects of exposure to broadcasts, so I’m favorable to the idea that this one really is a valid null finding.
[1] https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20100423-atrauss-rtlm-radio-hat...
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