Do you have any actual evidence that these types of services are being offered for that type of price point, though?
The reason I'm asking is that I actually believe the price point is much lower. It's probably much easier to get on the front page of HN of you time the submission + upvotes well enough.
And importantly the DoJ attorneys who would be responsible for investigating g the murders resigned because they were prevented from performing the standard procedure investigation that happens after every single shooting. They were instead directed to investigate the family of the person who was shot:
We are through the looking glass, folks. This will be dropped and ignored like so many other outrages unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.
> unless we demand answers from Congress, and hold SCOTUS responsible for partisan abdication of their constitutional duties.
You can demand answers from Congress, but until a significant portion of the GOP base demands answers, they are just going to ignore your demands. As of now 39% of Americans support the administration. Also, you can't hold SCOTUS responsible, only Congress can.
Currently they are attempting to strip our second amendment rights. They murdered a man in the street, from hands up to shit in the back in under 20 seconds, merely for lawful possession and in direct violation of the 2nd amendment. The President is bumbling around today mumbling "you can't bring a gun to a protest" when yes the 2nd amendment directly allows that.
A lot of people that care a lot about the 2nd amendment saw the photo of Pretti's gun on the ICE rental car seat, and they saw a well-used, well-cared-for weapon that was clean and seen a lot time at the range. They saw that it can happen to somebody just like them.
The core belief of the Trump administration is that there are two groups: an in-group which the law protects but does not bind, and an out-group which the law binds but does not protect. --Someone far more insightful than me
As often happens these days, I’m confused at the hysteria here.
Police messed up and someone got killed. I feel like outrage is warranted if nothing is done about it, but after seeing the videos I’m fairly confident this won’t get swept under the rug. Will we retract our outrage when a conviction is delivered? Is there a reason we expect nothing to come of this?
Because the people doing the investigating are on the side of the people who committed the crimes. And the people who voted for them seem predisposed to vote for them again, even if this gets swept under the rug.
News cycles go fast. Outrage is quickly forgotten. Now more than ever, as there are new outrages coming on the heels of the last.
ICE, a federal agency and not a state or municipal police force, had a man face down and unarmed. There were what, half a dozen of them? He was completely subdued. They then shot him in the back.
The reason I think it was a mistake is that the shooting happened right after one of the agents yelled “gun gun gun”. I am not involved in law enforcement, but as far as I know that is typically yelled when a person is threatening with a gun, not when they’ve been disarmed. Then when the agent(s) hear “gun gun gun” they panic and start shooting.
The way ICE was engaging initially did appear unreasonably hostile from the context that I saw, though the videos I saw did not appear to contain the entire engagement. Also police should be trained well enough to not panic in that situation, ideally. But it really doesn’t seem as simple as “random street execution” based on what I’ve seen.
He was face down on the ground and they already pulled his gun off him. They clearly do this regardless of which angle you’ve seen. He was not a threat.
I am actually pretty understanding of the pressures that LEO’s face and how unless I actually experience it I can’t fully get it, despite my political leanings. But that video was truly something to behold and I regret seeing it frankly.
This wasn’t a warzone. This was a bunch of “trained” federal agents subduing one person and then deciding to kill him. Blame poor training, blame poor judgment, it doesn’t matter. If this is what we are to expect in a situation like that, then ICE needs to withdraw and be held accountable.
All of this in the name of enforcing borders with our southern neighbors…in Minnesota? Which definitely bears mentioning, because clearly ICE was sent there to retaliate against Walz and not actually as some sort of legitimate effort to deal with illegal border crossings. The insult to injury of all this is this man died ultimately because Trump wanted to sent Walz a message.
This is the key disagreement. Making this statement requires mind reading and it isn’t something we can assert one way or the other. We can only look at the evidence and make a guess.
For me, when I assess situations like this, I try to find an explanation that doesn’t require anyone to be cartoonishly evil, since very few people are actually cartoonishly evil in practice. In this case, similar to aviation incidents, there are two cascading failures, neither of which in isolation would have resulted in death, but both of which together did.
Speaking of aviation, it would probably help if there was an NTSB style agency for police killings. If there was an analysis of that type presented publicly I think it could make people feel better.
I'm an outsider, I can well understand the ever growing outrage.
In a nutshell, to date, US ICE & DHS interactions have resulted in 10 people shot **, 3 people killed, and established a pattern of high level officials immediately blatently lying and contradicting video evidence.
That pattern includes obvious attempts to avoid investigation, to excuse people involved, to not investigate the bigger picture of how interactions are staged such that civilian deaths are inevitable.
It's good to see the citizens of the US dig in and demand that federal forces and federal heads of agencies be held accountable for clearly screwed up deployments and behaviours.
** My apologies, I just saw a Wash Post headliine that indicates it is now 16 shootings that are being actively swept under a rug.
Is your ignorance intentional? The FBI raided the ICE agents home to remove incriminating paraphernalia and blocked normal investigative processes. Heads of various agencies staffed by Trump loyalists called the victim a domestic terrorist while a video showed him being shit kicked and not meaningfully resisting before being executed by an agent who I would be doing a service to by calling undisciplined.
The entire fact that ICE is in Minnesota instead of a border state with heavier illegal immigration on patrols performing illegal 4th-amendment violating door to door raids is already a complete abomination in the face of American’s rights and their constitution.
And you disapprove of outrage over an innocent man being extrajudicially executed in the face of all of this?
Let me know how the boot tasted so at least I can learn something from this
A lot of people would disagree with your use of the word “police.”
They wear masks, don’t get warrants before entering houses, regularly arrest American citizens, and are operating far from anything a reasonable person would call an immigration or customs checkpoint.
Also, they’ve been ordered in public (by Trump) and private (by superiors) to violate the law, and have been promised “absolute immunity” for their crimes (by Trump).
One other thing: Trump and his administration have made it clear (in writing) that ICE’s mission in Minnesota is to terrorize the public until Governor Walz makes a bunch of policy changes that the courts have declined to force. So, there’s no reasonable argument to be made that they’re acting as law enforcement.
> Will we retract our outrage when a conviction is delivered? Is there a reason we expect nothing to come of this?
I doubt the Trump DOJ will want to prosecute this. Now, if Democrats win in 2028, maybe the Newsom (or whoever) DOJ will-but Trump might just give everyone involved a pardon on the way out the door. And I doubt a state prosecution would survive the current SCOTUS majority.
So yes, there are decent reasons to suspect “nothing to come of this” in the purely legal domain. Obviously it is making an impact in the political domain.
This is what I don't understand about American authoritarians. Historically speaking, if you try to take away the liberty of Americans, they respond with lethal violence.
Britain tried to tax Americans without government representation, and they started sending the tax man home naked and covered in tar, feathers, and third-degree burns. These stories are then taught to schoolchildren as examples of how Americans demand freedom above all else.
If the powers that be keep doing whatever they want without consequence, eventually there will be consequences, and those consequences very well could be the act of being physically removed from their ivory towers and vivisected in the streets.
according to urban dictionary, wolfenstein as a verb means
To kill or utterly destroy a large group of enemies with an extreme overabundance of weapons and items, including throwing knives to the head, poison, stabs to the neck or back, kicks to the chest, shoves off of high ledges, multiple headshots, artillery, panzer rockets, flames, dynamite, mines, construction pliers, airstrikes, or even slamming a door into someone's chest. Wolfensteining a group of enemies requires that every kill be performed using a different method
According to Urban Dictionary, cat as a noun means:
> an epic creature that will shoot fire at you if you get near it. you can usually find one outside or near/in a house. its main abilities are to chomp and scratch but they can also pounce, shoot lasers out of their eyes, be cute, jump as high as they want, and fly. do not fight one unless you are equipped with extreme power armor and heavy assault cannons. […]
> I think that is what he is doing, I think it's an accurate expression of his thinking.
It isn’t. It is like saying “you can do that but you will eventually get beat up.” That is not saying “people should beat you up.” There is a world of difference in those 2 statements. Your accusation hinges on the worst possible - debatably possible at best tbh - interpretation of their statement. It is bait, it is dishonest, and you’re being intentional about it.
This is not a difference of opinion, this is not curiosity, you are just being difficult.
They were prevented from following just policy, and were being forced to perform actions that go against professional ethics, politically driven prosecutions unconnected from fact or law.
People resigned to send the message to the public: the integrity of the office had been compromised, and the lawyers (lawyers!!) couldn't stay due to their ethics. This is a difficult thing to understand for people that lack ethics.
I as someone with power over you will repeatedly force you to do an illegal and or immoral act. I have doubt you have the balls to resign rather than follow along, but if you do resign I hope you don't say you were forced out. Be honest.
It is going to get a lot worse. Trump's eventual goal is to send the military to all Democrat-controlled cities. Back in September Trump gathered military leaders in a room and told them America is under "invasion from within". He said: "This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within."
They are demanding "show me your papers" to citizens, often chasing, arresting and jailing them for being brown, and turning the US into a police state.
Because they are Americans? Under the Fourth Amendment, police cannot demand ID from a pedestrian for no reason. Other constitution violations include 1st amendment (Rümeysa Öztürk), ICE memo allowing officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant (violation of 4th), denying due process (Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments), etc.
Doesn't matter. You can't suspend constitutional protections when they are inconvenient. And it isn't just violations of the constitution, it is also destroying our relationships with European allies, destroying the planet by ignoring climate change, destroying the environment, destroying our health, destroying American competitiveness by defunding research, destroying consumer protections, etc. And what you were asking, did you ask how bad it is, objectively?
Not sure constitution works like that, that a suspicious person can simply run and you can't check ID.
The opinion to allow visa holders as the Turkish person to exercise political activism is funny, too. Don't you think it's the citizens who the country should look after?
Europe is confused, but is finally coming around to understanding that they need to be able to protect themselves. Let's hope we make it on time :).
You can't really turn around climate without China and India. You may try to cripple yourself to attempt it though, but you'll lose even harder then.
I can also tell you that I've seen public funding on various science projects in EU. While it's convenient for the scientists to live off of these projects, then rarely if ever does much or any value come out of it. No companies nor products. Most of the "digital product" is provided to us by US companies, we don't come even close to having anything like it. EU leaders also somehow think that economic development is a matter of their "decision", but as career public servants they have little to no private experience, and just run public funds in "social circuits" that don't produce much.
The right for the Turkish person to engage in free speech either exists or not. If VISA holders don't have free speech then it must be advertised very clearly so people can avoid taking on a US Visa.
That's your interpretation of the constitution. There are other/more laws and circumstances that nuance the situation (you'll find these if you look into that case).
It's similar to the protesters interfering with law enforcement doing their work: you can't protest anywhere at any time. If you take this strict view of the constitution, you could do many currently illegal things, e.g get out of prison by simply hugging a prison guard and following him out, saying that you are protesting in this particular way; say that you are protesting 24/7 and whistle or make other noises throughout the night, which otherwise would be violate noise ordinance. And so on and so on.
You are commenting to the wrong post. The Turkish person wasn't in any rally, she didn't leak any state secrets, she simply wrote an essay criticizing Israel. Either visa holders have a right to free speech in which case this is illegal,or they don't have a right to free speech in which case it must be advertised far and wide so people can avoid visiting the USA.
No, the video gives nuances into how law and constitution works. I.e, regarding whether visa holders have the right to free speech or not, she was deemed not to. If you look into that case, you'll find the specific reasons.
Presidential pardons have no impact and their liability for state-law murder charges (though federal seizure of crime scenes and destruction of evidence might, in practice.)
Yes, but In re Neagle (1890) is SCOTUS precedent granting federal agents immunity from state criminal prosecution for acts committed while carrying out their official duties (and the act at question in that case was homicide). Now, its precise boundaries are contested - in Idaho v. Horiuchi (2001), the 9th Circuit held that In re Neagle didn’t apply if the federal agent used unreasonable force - but that case was rendered moot when the state charges were dropped, and hence the issue never made it to SCOTUS. Considering the current SCOTUS majority’s prior form on related topics (see Trump v. United States), I think odds are high they’ll read In re Neagle narrowly, and invalidate any state criminal prosecution attempts.
In re Neagle (while, unfortunately, it does not state as clear of a rule as Horiuchi on the standard that should be applied) conducts an expansive facts-based analysis on the question of whether, in fact, the acts performed were done in in the performance of his lawful federal duties (if anything, the implicit standard seems less generous to the federal officer than Horiuchi’s explicit rule, which would allow Supremacy Clause immunity if the agent had an actual and objectively reasonable belief that he acted within his lawful duties, even if, in fact, he did not.)
But, yeah, any state prosecutions (likely especially the first) is going to (1) get removed to federal court, and (2) go through a wringer of federal litigation, likely reaching the Supreme Court, over Supremacy Clause immunity before much substantive happens on anything else.
OTOH, the federal duty at issue in in re Neagle was literally protecting the life of a Supreme Court justice riding circuit, as much as the present Court may have a pro-Trump bias, I wouldn't count on it being as strong of a bias as it had in Neagle.
I just realised another angle: 28 U.S.C. § 1442 enables state prosecutions of federal agents to be removed to federal court. Now, if Trump pardons the agent, does the federal pardon preclude that trial in federal court? To my knowledge, there is no direct case law on this question; there is an arguable case that the answer is “no”, but ultimately the answer is whatever SCOTUS wants it to be.
That depends, the civil service has a lot of leverage because most of them cannot easily be fired. And POTUS needs the civil service to execute his policy goals so his fellow party members and possibly himself can get re-elected.
Therefore there is considerable leverage for allied servants to form an alliance that more or less offers their allegiance in exchange for non-prosecution. I would expect especially DHS to basically become a non-functional (or even seditious) department if they prosecute those guys and they could purposefully make the president look bad by making his security apparatus look incompetent.
> Therefore there is considerable leverage for allied servants to form an alliance that more or less offers their allegiance in exchange for non-prosecution.
Won't help if the prosecuting sovereignty isn't the one they work for (state vs federal charges.)
Also won't work if the agency is disbanded and they are dismissed en masse before the prosecution happens.
They don't need to overthrow democracy, they just need to use jurisdiction removal to have the state charges placed in federal court, and then appeal it up to SCOTUS who will overturn the decision.
The US couldn't win a war in the middle east with trillions of dollars, thousands of soldiers dead, and tens of thousands substantially wounded. Hasn't won a war since WW2. Is everything going swimmingly? Certainly not. There are 340M Americans, ~20k-30k ICE folks, and ~1M soldiers on US soil. These odds don't keep me up at night. 77% of US 18-24 cohort don't qualify for military service without some form of waiver (due to obesity, drug use, or mental health issues).
I admit, US propaganda is very good at projecting an image of strength. I strongly doubt it is prepared for a civil ground war, based on all available evidence. It cannot even keep other nation states out of critical systems. See fragile systems for what they are.
There are 340 million Americans, but 80 million of them voted for this administration, and another 80 million were not interested either way. Only about 20% of the population voted to oppose it.
If you're imagining a large scale revolt, figure that the revolutionaries will be outnumbered by counter-revolutionaries, even without the military. (Which would also include police forces amounting to millions more.)
I have no confidence in the gravy seals of this country, broadly speaking. What’s the average health and age of someone who voted for this? Not great, based on the evidence, especially considering the quality of ICE folks (bottom of the barrel).
Well, they are entirely Presidential pardon proof, but each state usually has its own pardon provisions. Unlikely to benefit ICE agents as a broad class in any of the places where conflicts over their role are currently prominent, though.
The person in front said "I've got the gun, I've got the gun", and I can tell that quite clearly in the videos.
> here antifa community organizers are escalating non stop in hopes that someone dies [...] in hopes they can radicalize people
I think this rhetorical frame highlights how many people don't believe in protest. Expressing disdain for trampling of civil liberties is not 'escalation' any more than the curtailment of fourth amendment rights that inspire the protests.
I am not attacking you (I believe we should all be able to express how we feel with respect to the government). I just want to highlight a reason why you may feel that this level of unrest is meant to "radicalize people".
The person in front said "I've got the gun, I've got the gun", and I can tell that quite clearly in the videos.
That means there is an even better version that what I saw and heard which means normies will figure out fairly quick this was not malicious intent. Perhaps malicious incompetency but certainly not an intentional execution.
I just want to highlight a reason why you may feel that this level of unrest is meant to "radicalize people".
I would accept that if these were just protesters, stood at the side of the road holding up signs but a number of them are far from it. They have formed military squads, dox agents and attack them at home and in their personal vehicles, coordinate their attacks between multiple groups of "vetted" agitators. They are tracking their personal vehicles and their family members. They are blocking traffic and forcing people out of their cars. At best this is an insurgency being coordinated from out-of-state agitators and at the behest of the state governor. They are egging people on to break numerous laws, obstruct federal agents, throw bricks at agents or anyone they think is an agent, use bull-horns at full volume in the ears of anyone supporting the agents. I could go on for hours regarding all the illegal shenanigans. So yeah these are people trying to radicalize others and trying to get people hurt or killed. This is primarily occurring in sanctuary cities where the government is actively encouraging their citizens to attack federal agents. That is not even close to anything that resembles protesting and is not anywhere near a protected right.
I also blame President Trump for not invoking the insurrection act and curtailing this very early on.
Some people say "he was a protestor and protestors who bring a gun to a protest deserve to be shot (FAFO)".
You say he's not a protestor, so as an observer he deserves to be shot because somehow he was interfering.
And your characterization of citizens forming "military squads" is also fascinating. What does that mean to you, in detail? Does it mean... uniforms? central coordination? simulated exercises? None of those are the case here.
Who are the out of state agitators?
Why do you think the governor is involved? I think you've been watching a lot of Cam Higby & friends. This is their rhetoric. And I know some ppl who've changed their name to Tim on Signal to troll you back.
Feel free to listen to the actual speeches of Mayors Kaohly Her and Jacob Frey. They have consistently urged staying peaceful and resisting the provocations to violence of both the agents and outside provocateurs. They know we're under the knife of the Insurrection Act and everything is under a microscope. We know it too.
The incredulity that people like you have about the level of organization points to your lack of involvement in your own communities. Have you ever organized a PTA fundraiser to raise $25,000 for school activities? Have you ever had to sign up three children across one daycare, an elementary school, and a middle school for summer camp activities, six months in advance, coordinating all the different schedules? Let me tell you -- doing these things develops a lot of skills that then carry over very easily into organizing a patrol at pick-up and drop-off at the Spanish immersion daycare. That's the "military force" you're up against. In my neighborhood an old lady organized her senior building to send people over to stand around the Spanish immersion daycare daily, because ICE/CBP keep showing up even though all the employees have work authorization and have been background checked.
You're right: it's not protesting. It's just showing up for your neighbors. Bearing witness, even in a Christian sense.
Thanks for your response, I think we disagree on a few things but I appreciate your arguments.
My main question is how you might frame the protests (comprising legal and potentially illegal behaviors) in the context of how the US was founded, or in the French revolutions. Were we in the 1750s, would your assessment about how to go about protesting be the same?
Here, I'm not making arguments about what is or is not similar, just trying to understand how you view historical political upheaval from the perspective of the people who lived in those times.
My main question is how you might frame the protests (comprising legal and potentially illegal behaviors) in the context of how the US was founded, or in the French revolutions. Were we in the 1750s, would your assessment about how to go about protesting be the same?
The founding of the nation was far more violent and laws were sparse but I am sure you know how complex of a question you are asking. There are multi-volume books and movies created around that mess. I would never want a return to those times and behaviors that we are purportedly evolved beyond.
What I do not understand is why people in some cities are defending violent illegal immigrants. I am told it is for voting purposes to get more delegates but it can't really be worth it. At least in my opinion it would not be worth it. All of that said I am not in favor of kicking people out that have been here for decades and that had properly integrated into our society. That I could see people protesting if they were in fact just protesting.
> What I do not understand is why people in some cities are defending violent illegal immigrants. I am told it is for voting purposes to get more delegates but it can't really be worth it. At least in my opinion it would not be worth
My issue with the current tactics is a loss of our Bill of Rights privileges (note this doesn't depend on citizenship), which really can only go poorly from here.
> What I do not understand is why people in some cities are defending violent illegal immigrants.
There's an easy argument about maintaining Constitutional rights for every person—once we stop doing that, we're essentially finished as a democracy.
The majority of people being removed are not criminals of any sort whatsoever. It's tricky to get data about this as DHS is releasing very political statements[1] but many have been in the US for decades and have no criminal records in Minnesota. Also, Minnesota is not a liberal state—being a Democrat means different things in different parts of the country, and things are quite 'centrist' there; I say this to discourage porting sensibilities from other states.
1. DHS Highlights Worst of the Worst Criminal Illegal Aliens Arrested in Minnesota Yesterday Including Murderers, Drug Traffickers, and an Illegal Alien with TWENTY-FOUR Convictions - (this is the title of the relevant webpage)
edit - To distill my perspective, I am worried that we will lose our rights, not because I am alarmist, but because this has happened in several democracies this century, notably Turkey (but also cf Hungary, Poland, the Philipnes). Even amongst undemocratic nations, strongmen are upending institutions (China, but also more recently in West Africa).
The only way the US can escape is by continually standing up for what rights we still have.
> why people in some cities are defending violent illegal immigrants
Most are not violent.[1] Many of them are “here for decades and that had properly integrated into our society” just like you said, or are attempting to integrate and be here legally, so people are defending them. If the government can trample one group over the worst crimes of a few of its members, it can trample any group for any reason, so we must stand together to protect our freedom.
ICE is not targeting violent illegal immigrants. They are targeting legal residents, immigrants with pending asylum cases that allow them to stay, US citizens that happen to look like immigrants maybe, people that are legally recording their activities in public from a safe distance, all kinds of people really.
they are protesting masked armed thugs running around their neighborhood smashing windows and dragging people out of cars because they happen to feel like it. running up to people and pepper spraying them in eyes for saying things they dont like. and yes, shooting them.
I think everyone can understand someone saying 'wtf, no' in those circumstances. except you.
Circling back to this, the Minnesota state police moved in and gave the violent rioters a few minutes to disperse. Those that did not have been rounded up, arrested and jailed. I have no doubt they will be released in a matter of hours but it should be peaceful for a few hours at least and the origin of these people will be documented and possibly how much some of them were paid.
congress isn't going to do anything. All it would take is about 20 republican sentors to bring this shit to a halt. They are not doing anything, they all have blood on their hands.
At this point I think the only thing that will work is organizing a month where the nation stops spending money and going to work.
Cynical responses like this are meant to make the speaker sound smart, but actually what you're doing is making further tyranny more likely, because you're deliberately overlooking that-- whatever the existing problems with the FBI-- there is a significant difference between their behavior now and their behavior before.
Not even bothering to run the established investigation playbook when law enforcement kills a civilian is a major departure, and one worth noticing. But if all you do is go "same old same old", then you can safely lean back in your chair and do nothing as the problem worsens, while calling yourself so much smarter and more insightful than the people around you.
I would disagree to a certain extent. "Law enforcement is not your friend" is a good mindset as a citizen. You should never hand them information without a lawyer and you should always push for oversight.
I agree that the "same at it ever was and always will be" attitude isn't great. It's defeatist and I choose not to live my life that way, even if it would be much easier mentally.
I think part of the reason I see this attitude so often is that, especially since 9/11, a large portion of the US population has decided that the police and military are infallible and should be trusted completely, so any large-scale attempt at reform runs into these unwavering supporters (and, in the case of the police, their unions).
I don't agree law enforcement is not the problem. Its the people in the system that are making these problems worse. You start blaming systems and then its a catch all that does nothing.
I won't disagree that the people inside the system are making it worse but the system is currently setup to incentivize bad behavior.
- Overly broad qualified immunity
- The power of the police unions
- Lawsuit settlements coming out of public funds
- Collusion between prosecutors' and the police
These are all issues that need to be resolved to restore the sanity in policing.
At the federal level, the FBI needs to be reigned in...somehow. They all to often work outside the bounds of their defined role and powers. This isn't a new problem and one could argue it has been an issue since the beginning.
Furthermore, going back as far as I remember, if you take part in a protest the police personally disagree with they will use violence against you regardless of your occupation.
Nothing cynical, that’s just the truth. They’re called law enforcement for a reason, not emergency hugs.
Whether they behave like civilized people or like thugs should be besides the point regardless of your political leaning in the matter of the system. Naturally from a basic human perspective civilized law enforcement is much more preferable than the alternative, but they aren’t your friends!
The only significant difference is that law enforcement is treating white people the way they've always treated everyone else. Which is a difference in degree, but not character.
They've always treated white nationalists and other weirdos like this. I mean, the whole "any infraction is a grounds for execution" ROE is very reminiscent of Ruby Ridge, for example.
But the kind of white people we have here have never really had anything in common with those people so now that the Feds are coming after people of the sort of political persuasion they identify with for the first time since, the 1970s it "feels" like they're just now going after white people.
ICE just hired 12000 Ruby Ridge types as their untrained SA brownshirts. It is inevitable that they have no understanding of basic civics and rage against lawful protestors they see as the enemy.
Back in the 1980s we had jokes about the KKK being a barbecue club for law enforcement. The punchline of the joke invariably hinges on the ambiguity as to whether they're there on the job as informants or "organically".
I guess nothing matters and there's no point to expecting any sort of justice from the system. And at least now I can laugh at those other people being hurt. (</s>)
This is exactly my point. Yes, COINTELPRO was really bad. But it was intelligence and disruption, they weren't executing people on the street and then bragging about how they'd get away with it. Do you not see the difference?
Sorta, if you live in a blue city—so really just a city at this point-then it wraps around a small amount and your local police are, at least when it comes to this crap, largely on your side. ICE is making huge messes and leaving it to the local PD to clean it up which is not exactly endearing. Nobody likes when a bunch of people come in and start pissing in your Cheerios. Especially when those Cheerios are "rebuilding trust with your local community."
Have any of you tried talking to a police officer in real life? If you're just polite to them they treat you like they're your private protection force.
Moreso in blue cities, I have no idea what point you're making there other than crime you've seen on TV is scary.
There is no protected class from malevolent government. Everyone from oligarchs down to the have nots can be targets. Let's not keep relearning that lesson.
The lack of a legal limit means they are never safe from justice catching up, even decades later. This lawless administration won't last. Some perpetrators may die of natural causes before that point, but 2026 and 2028 elections aren't far away.
When the crime is murdering people in cold blood, I will take nailing the “lowliest of perpetrators” (e.g. cold blooded murderers) to the fucking wall.
Yes, I hope future administrators go up and down the chain of command looking at everyone who was involved in the cover-up, and charges them with conspiracy to commit murder, but a future Democratic administration will at least identify and prosecute the murderers themselves. While Republican administrations will conceal the identity of the killers and continue to have them out on the streets
Don't get me wrong, I'd gladly take any small victory. But thinking of it in terms of 2026 or 2028 just means you've kicked the can down to 2030 or 2032.
I mean, these will likely be state cases no matter what.
The question is, can the State of Minnesota put together enough evidence to convict these agents for murder and conspiracy to commit murder without the involvement of the federal government?
If so, we could see cases brought as early as this year.
If not, then the next question is can Democrats get them enough information by controlling one branch of the federal government. In that case, we could imagine a prosecution brought in 2027.
Otherwise, if we need Democrats to control the executive branch to get enough information it might be 2029.
I don’t think it will take long, because the State of Minnesota will have put the case together and be waiting to go. So the question will be how quickly can they get any necessary evidence, incorporate that into their case, and then bring charges.
>The question is, can the State of Minnesota put together enough evidence to convict these agents for murder and conspiracy to commit murder without the involvement of the federal government?
They'd have to fight the feds for jurisdiction and will unfortunately likely lose that fight.
> They'd have to fight the feds for jurisdiction and will unfortunately likely lose that fight.
That’s simply not how the system works. There’s no one assigned entity with “jurisdiction” over a crime.
The state and federal governments are dual sovereigns and each are empowered to enforce their own laws. It doesn’t even violate double jeopardy for the Feds and a state to prosecute the same actions.
The only thing that matters is if the state can obtain enough evidence that they feel they could secure a conviction before a jury of the shooter’s peers.
The federal sovereign can usurp the state sovereign's courts jurisdiction and use jurisdiction removal[] to try the state charge in federal court. This is exactly what happened when Lon Horiuchi was charged by a state for killing (sniping) an innocent unarmed mother with a baby in her hands, and part of how he got off free.
Given the feds are always keen to do this when possible, it's not for nothing that they do it.
No, you didn't understand. Poster claimed they would have to fight the feds for jurisdiction. You argued they didn't. Then I set you straight that they would have to fight for court jurisdiction.
Just parroting back what I've said then simply declaring I don't understand it (despite explicitly acknowledging the state charge would be tried in federal court) just looks terribly misguided when you lied with your smug quip "that's not how it works", when apparently you pretend as if you knew all along jurisdiction was relevant and would be fought over.
In case anyone thinks you're kidding, Kash Patel's embarssing sychophancy includes publishing a election denial children's "book" portraying Trump as a king and himself as a hero.
51 senators voted to confirm this unqualified moron to lead the top law enforcement agency.
It's literally not a joke, probably the most egregious example of a completely unqualified doormat that will do whatever dear leader wants. It's also by design, no roadblocks for the fanta menace.
Stop acting like we're talking about two kids who did an oopsie
Small town cops in third world countries are more professional than any of these ICE clowns, these mistakes happened because they keep hiring the lowest if the low, both in term of intelect and morality
Sounds like something for an investigation to figure out - wonder why they are fighting that so hard. Also sure sounds like a lot of victim blaming considering he died without ever doing anything warranting his death.
You can add other "real" statements like "the sky is blue" and "water is wet" it still doesn't make it right lol. You can't say "both sides" when one side is a federal agency showing 0 accountability/responsibility/restraint/professionalism and the other is just a dude with a phone who gets between these thugs and a bystander
They fucked it up from A to Z, stop licking the boot.
The "bystander" was walking along with the officers blowing a whistle, and the guy that got between that bystander ("bystander") carried a gun. I don't think it's wise to interfere with police work by walking with them and doing that whistle thing and it's neither wise to bring a gun into this situation.
I'm sure the officers to whom this happened aren't happy either as this turned out, but I don't think they are the the only ones to blame.
Similar with the woman who was shot: should you be doing any police getaways or even driving towards any police officer?
legally. Also the gun he visibly did not reach for. And the very same gun that was carried out of the scene seconds before the first shot was fired.
> I don't think it's wise to interfere with police work
So what? If they were trained for anything other than escalation nothing would have happened, they're ""professional"" ""law enforcement officers"" from a federal agency, not a biker gang
> I'm sure the officers to whom this happened aren't happy either as this turned out
One of them literally claps his hands, it's on video, lmao, you can't make that shit up
> Similar with the woman who was shot: should you be doing any police getaways or even driving towards any police officer?
The one who got killed by a shot to the temple which basically proves the officer was completely out of the way at that time. The one where the officer then illegally fled the scene, packed up his house and then later pretended to be heavily injured and have "internal bleeding" despite being seen totally unharmed multiple times earlier.
What do you think of these sub 80iq ICE retards who just tried to break in the Ecuadorian consulate? Just doing their job I assume? Come on, keep on gargling these balls, idk if you expect to get a medal or something...
How it went down was while the gun was taken away, somebody yelled "gun", then guns were drawn, then the victims gun went off which triggered police starting shooting. If this were the events, the first shot was what unfortunately triggered the tragedy that followed, as the law enforcement officers probably thought that the person being arrested was shooting.
To me this looks like an unfortunate sequence of events rather than your judgement from the high horse of perfect information.
If you go to a protest, best leave your (legal) weapons at home, don't interfere nor resist law enforcement.
Also, if you want a better government, you should vote one in the office and not fuel these events after the fact.
> then the victims gun went off which triggered police starting shooting.
None of the videos show that at all, the victim's gun is safely brought away, clearly visible from multiple point of view
What's also clearly visible is that a masked gentleman from ICE get his gun out, instantly put his finger on the trigger and aim for the victim's back/head
> rather than your judgement from the high horse of perfect information.
Again, they're not a biker gang, they should be well trained and not shoot when someone yells "gun". Some seem to have been scared by their shots coming from their fellow brain dead colleagues.
> don't interfere nor resist law enforcement.
Yes, lick the boot and let the popo do whatever they want regardless of legality
Of course when all you do is gargle the popo's balls, follow orders, believe state propaganda and turn a blind eye when provided with video evidences the whole thing is a simple "unfortunate sequence of events", meanwhile in any other advanced societies it would be an instant scandal with severe repercussions on everyone involved
The people involved can't recreate the past, now with better information. But I can tell you that showing up in a protest with a gun, and also putting your hands on a law enforcement officer aren't good ideas.
Overall, restricting police work but calling these protests, aren't a good strategy either. The presidential vote is over, the majority wants this. It's you who's subject to the losing side's propaganda.
> Overall, restricting police work but calling these protests, aren't a good strategy either.
Happens all the time in dozens of civilised countries without anyone getting magdumped.
> The presidential vote is over, the majority wants this.
Majority... of voters. He's at less than 40% approval right now. And even if, that's not how democracy works, elections aren't a 1 time card to do whatever the fuck you want for the next X years
> It's you who's subject to the losing side's propaganda.
I don't even live in that shit hole, I have no horses in the race, simply eyes to see. Only a rotten americanoid brain could see this and be like "oh well it's really unfortunate BUT ... he kinda deserved it you know, guns and shit"
If you approve of interfering with police work then we won't be finding middle ground here. Perhaps the special ingredient in the US is the popularity of carrying weapons, it's know to cause other shootings as well.
As for approval ratings, I'm sure you know elections work: they happen periodically and the approval ratings don't have a direct effect on current events. Also, deporting illegals (what these protests are against) was on the campaign platform, so it's nowhere near "whatever the f. you want".
As you, I also have "eyes to see" which still makes the basis I'm coming from. And I'm also not American.
It's a good thing FBI has capacity to do more than one thing at a time. Also Trump agreed to allow MNPD to handle the wrongful death investigation.
Two things can be true: the "resistance" rings in MN are behaving like the insurgents the US has fought for decades in the Middle East, and ICE agents wrongfully killed a man.
> the "resistance" rings in MN are behaving like the insurgents the US has fought for decades in the Middle East
This is a horrifying and very unpariortic thing to say about people who are trying to prevent their daycares from being tear bombed, prevent masked thugs from beating detained law-abiding citizens before releasing them without charges, from masked thugs killing law-abiding people for exercising basic rights.
King George would have used that language. We sent him the Declaration of Independence, and the list of wrongs in that document is mostly relevant again today.
If you are framing this as insurgency, I place my bet on the strong people fighting bullets with mere whistles and cameras, as they are already coming out on top. If they ever resort to a fraction of the violence that the masked thugs are already using, they will not lose.
I was not aware of that fake daycare propaganda until someone else exposed its meaning later in the thread.
As a parent, you should know that believing this obviously false propaganda requires both 1) a weird and overly specific interest in daycares, and 2) not enough normal healthy exposure to kids to understand what daycares don't let weird freaks come inspect the children. Namely, repeating this obvious lie gives off pedo vibes, and I would never let you near my children after hearing you gobble up that propaganda uncritically and then even going so far as to spread it. Ick
Most child care centers are locked and have obscured doors or windows for children’s safety. Children are also kept in classrooms and would not likely be visible from a reception area. One of the day cares in the video told several news outlets that it did not grant Shirley entrance because he showed up with a handful of masked men, which raised suspicions that the men were agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At least one of the centers was closed at the time Shirley arrived because it opens later in the day to serve the children of second-shift workers.
Is there a history of child care fraud in the state?
Yes, but it’s not as widespread as Shirley claims.
Not a MN resident, but both the daycare my child attended before starting school and every daycare in my area have a combination of tinted/obscured windows and strict access control, even for parents (eg: a parent isn't allowed to make a "surprise inspection" without a court order).
If anything, I'd be suspicious of (and not send my child to) any daycare that _didn't_ have those security features.
Please don't spread propaganda lies here pretending it to be a majority of cases to such an extreme. You saw some clips of people investigating doorway entrances and lobby areas and were shocked the lobbies aren't full of children hovering at the exit's threshold because you were told to expect them there. In fact what you saw was someone unable to find any of the evidence that has existed.
Ah yes, Tim isn't running again because there is no truth to it. My god. Some of you are so obsessed with the "narrative" that you'll look at the sun and say it's night.
I don't what you are talking about but it's nonsense and offensive, a bald faced lie so outrageous that people are supposed to be shocked into silence?
The tactics being used are:
* whistles
* recording with phones
* free speech
* communication with neighbors
* sharing with neighbors, ala potlucks
* training each other on legal means of resistance
* caring for people kicked out of detention centers in the dead of winter without their coats or phones
* bringing meals to families that are afraid to leave the house, since the political persecution is largely a function of skin color, as numerous police chiefs have attested when recounting what ICE/CBP does to their officers when off duty.
Calling this "insurgent tactics" instead of neighbors being neighbors is most definitely a perverse and disgusting values assessment. When the hell have insurgents used the whistle and the phone camera as their "tactics"?!
Saying that this lawful activity, all 100% lawful, somehow "impedes federal enforcement of laws" is actually a statement that the supposed enforcement is being conducted in a completely lawless, unconstitutional, and dangerous manner.
Keep on talking like you are, because people right now are sniffing out who is their neighbor and who will betray them when ICE moves on to the next city. Your neighbors probably already know, but being able to share specific sentences like "insurgent tactics" and how cameras are somehow "impeding" masked men abducting people, when days later we don't even know the identity of officers that shot and killed a man on film, who was in no way impeding law enforcement. And the only people who talk about "impeding law enforcement" also lie profusely when there is direct evidence on film contradicting their lies.
There is terrorism going on, there is lawlessness, there is a great deal of elevated crime in Minnesota, but it all the doing of masked ICE/CBP agents that face zero accountability for breaking our laws and violating our most sacred rights.
Trump is morally obligated to deport felon illegals to protect americans. 70 million plus americans voted for it. Trump can't give up because a few thousand people are playing "im not touching you" with ICE.
No, felon illegals are supposed to go to prison and serve their sentence before deportation. You know, because they committed felonies.
Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor and overstaying your visa is a civil violation and not even a crime. Yet somehow those are the only ones he's targeting. Those, and actual lawful immigrants that say things that he doesn't like.
Yes because the US was famously the good guy in its forays into the middle east.
I love this example because it demonstrates like 5 different levels of ignorance about American politics and foreign relations, plus a good helping of propaganda.
You're projecting a values claim on the American wars in the middle east on me that I didn't make. It's pretty clear that the ME wars were all around bad and evil.
It doesn't change the organization and tactics used to identify targets are the same methods and strategies used by insurgent groups to select targets and attack. AQI was very sophisticated for the technology they had. Their warriors were brave, cunning, and true believers with efficacious systems for what was available to them.
Twenty years of that, plus the rest of the middle east has now made it particularity common knowledge how to run insurgency cells worldwide. This combined with American expertise brought back and with people legally aiding these groups in setting up their C2 structures with what is effective and what works is no surprise.
This investigation should be no surprise to anyone. They use these techniques because they work. They are so effective at target acquisition, monitoring, and selective engagement that if they flipped from their current tactics to more violent ones it would be a large casualty event.
What's needed is MNPD sharing their data around the criminal illegal aliens with ICE so that they can execute the deportation orders that have already been issued by judges.
The structure of your message implies you are not American. DHS posts the people they deport here:
MPD _is_ sharing and coordinating with ICE _when they're supposed to be_. MPD has already transferred ~70 people to ICE for deportation this year alone, after they completed prison sentences (which ICE claimed as their own arrests).
I'm guessing they would be 70 actual undocumented immigrants with actual criminal records then?
Not "brown looking" native americans or "foreign looking" US citizens that have been incorrectly identified and dragged without warrents from their homes and families barely dressed into the snow?
I'm not sure of the immigration status, just an article that called out ~70 transfers from MPD DOC to ICE following incarceration. I'd imagine it's a mix of documented and undocumented immigrants, as being convicted of a crime is a valid reason for the state to revoke a visa.
The people you don't like are always guilty, right? Two people are accidentally killed, somewhat due to their own actions, but do you this can mean nothing else than "oppression".
They were not "accidentally killed". They were shot. Someone decided it was a good idea and pulled the trigger. You don’t end up lodging 10 bullets into someone’s back accidentally.
The current version appears to be that the victims gun went off (in the hands of the police officer), by which the rest of them thought that it was the victim who was shooting, so they shot back.
It's the opposition to the current presidency who is trying to spin it their own way. They want it to get out of hand, that there are masses on the streets, whistling to police doing their work, to create more of such situations, so they could blame the government even more.
Equating civil resistance, even in heated forms like disrupting raids or blocking roads, with decades‑long insurgencies that involved organized armed groups, territorial control, foreign combatants, and protracted guerrilla campaigns is like comparing a neighborhood disagreement over lawn care to Napoleon invading Russia.
Like i've said over and over, the tactics used are the distilled what works from those insurgencies honed over decades. They are incredibly effective. The network that was built (several max signal chats, organized territory, labor specialization) has essentially created an effective targeting mechanism.
This isn't a bunch of people organically protesting, this is an organized system designed to "target" ICE agents. The only difference is the payload delivery between physical disruption vs weapon based attacks.
So what's the supposed goal of this "targeting" of ICE agents? Because that's a key to the insurgency vs protest thing.
We have chats, organized territory and labor specialization in a company I work for, too. It doesn't say anything by itself. It's just describing a means of human cooperation. Goal is to write software. You can have organized protest movement too. Unless the goal is to overthrow governing authority, or whatnot, it's not insurgency.
Not a lawyer, but there's a lot of back and forth around jurisdiction between local and federal enforcement. If the President directs the DoJ to not fight to own the investigation over local, then it is up to the Executive Branch.
They might not have the capacity to do more considering they still need to redact the rest of the epstein files that show their president is a child trafficking pedophile
They are running communications rings geographically distributed across the city via Signal. They organize into specialized roles for identifying suspected agents (spotters), tailing them, and moving to contact with ICE. They use the ARMY SALUTE[0][1] method to handle their reports.
Anyone who ran convoys in the Middle East, patrolled, or did intel around it will know this playbook. The resistance is impressive because it's taken lessons learned from observing the US Military overseas dealing with insurgencies.
So i wonder why he people of the city would act the same way as a group being invaded by a hostile force? Just like the Middle east its the people being invaded, they are the problem, not the invaders.
It's more like Minneapolis has been "chosen" as the battle point by people opposed to Trump in every step. It's the same person leading deportations as under Obama, they deport less than Obama did, yet they have been demonized almost immediately after the Trump administration took over. Why?
During the Obama administration, state and local LEO worked with ICE to deport. Now they are directed not to. Without that protection and cooperation from local officers, it becomes significantly harder and more dangerous to execute these operations. So they put masks on because the local agitators are doxxing them, threatening their families, and making life unsafe for the agents.
So now we have this lack of cooperation from local government that creates unsafe and dangerous operating conditions for ICE. What are they supposed to do? Not enforce the law because the local government says no? We already fought a war about Federal power versus state power. Heck, Obama (whom i voted for 2x) sued Arizona (Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387) over supremacy of the Federal Government with respect to immigration.
There would be no problems if Minneapolis and Minnesota leadership reacted the way other cities like Memphis did. Instead they've explicitly, or tacitly, endorsed this escalating resistance movement. I can't imagine ever putting my hands on a LEO and expecting it to go well, yet they do it freely. Officers are only human, and day-in day-out of this, combined with very real actionable threats against your life, and family life are only going to create more tensions and more mistakes.
This is no invasion hostile force, this is a chosen focal point to challenge the will and ability of this administration to enforce the democratically made laws.
You left out a pretty important detail. Your "insurgents" in America aren't shooting people or planting IEDs. Communicating and protesting, on the other hand, are sacrosanct rights in the US.
You're missing the forest for the trees here. The network and techniques used here are the same, but even more refined and tech enabled, of those insurgency groups. The power is the network of people in their specialized roles that can quickly target the enemy (ICE) and deliver a payload (obstruction).
The FBI has a long history of attempting to infiltrate and destabilize these groups. In the early 2010s there was a push to infiltrate right leaning groups. They especially called out in their published documents disgruntled veterans returning from the wars and unhappy with leadership noting a worry they would use the skills picked up at war at home.
It's absolutely no surprise that the FBI would investigate this behavior.
People go back and forth on this. When they are trying to sound "very smart", they'll insist "well actually, the Russians invaded in 2014!"
But something fundamentally different happened in 2022.
Remember, Zelensky was elected on a platform of negotiating with Russia for the dispossessed territory. That was acceptable 2014 - but certainly not now.
frankly I think much less than people assume. Obviously nuclear weapons need to be taken seriously but we should have taken a much more muscular posture ages ago.
There's this mental cold war image of these people grinding it out to the Armageddon but in reality the entire Russian leadership has their children living in the cities they're threatening. Putin has a daughter that manages an art gallery in Paris. Bullies back down when you punch back and that's the much better framing of modern day rogue actors.
Back in the day Biden could have said we're protecting Ukraine - invading troops will be bombed by the USAF, rather than the actual - well if you only invade a little bit we won't do much.
... European gas+LNG consumption has gone down by 2/3 and has largely been replaced by Americans and our president has openly threatened to steal territory from a NATO ally through force.
It's not exactly like Europe is in a comfortable place energy-wise nor can it say it doesn't need energy from any current supplier.
At the fall of the USSR, Coca-Cola should have bartered soda with Russia for the nukes. After all, the Cola Wars were heating up even as the Cold War looked to be ending, and Pepsi had a superior navy, bartered from the USSR with soda, and Coke could have used a nuclear deterent.
Russia had originally licensed Coca Cola (or Pepsi) like a decade before the fall of the Soviet union!
Stripping nation from nuclear deterrence is suicide: Ukraine did this in 1993. Both missiles, payloads and strategic bombers :/ They had it all... (Reverse engineering some command codes would be trivial as Ukrainians had top tier engineers in the entire Soviet Union).
Have the CIA turn enough insiders that one of them succeeds in assassinating Putin after a propaganda campaign raising up an opposition party ready to take over in an election/coup (mixture of both really). Have a weak and friendly leader installed that exchanges nukes for population support and possibly brakes up Russia into several smaller states.
When the USSR broke up, Ukraine gave up its nukes in exchange for security guarantees (lot of good that has done them)
Tell me you honestly think what is happening in America right now isn't the outcome of long planning by Russian intelligence (and likely other intelligence services). Their plan was to install a leader they had chosen and influenced.
Also Epstein was probably also a spy, but more likely for Mossad. BIG COINCIDENCE he was so close with dear leader?
Then tell me you think that doing things in Russia isn't possible.
Ukraine gave up more than nukes, it forfeited future membership in russian federation and nato. All the ridiculous bush-era bluster about nato membership for ukraine was in itself a (minor) violation of budapest memo.
Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
>Reasonable observers don't think ukraine could have kept russia's nukes, firstly because they were russia's and not ukraine's, and secondly because a country with less than $100B economy (in shambles at the end of the ussr) can't afford to maintain nuclear surety. Additionally, it's very unclear whether any nukes would have been employed by now. Any nuclear attack on russia would result in total annihilation, and if ukraine could only strike a few high-value targets in exchange, it's not a winning weapon or even a deterrent.
I'm not saying that at the time it wasn't the best course of action. Something other than what happened may have been possible and may have been an improvement, but it certainly would give any future nations considering giving up their nukes a significant pause.
>Finally the rest of the thesis above is likely to result in a wave of assassinations and sabotage across europe and a wider war that almost all parties have sought to avoid. It's a fever dream shared by angry dummies who are completely incapable of rational thought.
Again, this is the method that you would use to do it. If it were a good idea it would likely already be done. I'm not saying it's a good consequence-free course of action, that wasn't the question.
How do envision we might disarm an adversary with thousands of nuclear missiles, other than by preemptively nuking them and hoping they don't respond in time. Not really a plausible plan.
If you work for Palantir and if you work on these systems: You have blood on your hands. You know that it's not right what is happening on the ground right now. Do something.
> 3. Are more worried about their next paycheck and having bad things happen to them related to not paying rent.
i feel like a broken record: anyone with a resume good enough for Palantir would have no problem finding work for another company/public sector employer. but they stay.
I don’t think it’s really this simple. Palantir is a major government contractor that enables it to be more tech savvy. It’s embedded through hundreds of teams / agencies. You can’t remain a credible partner if you play morality police on every workflow. Palantir has worked through multiple administrations of both parties and have to support whoever is in power to have a seat at the table.
Ultimately the question is just: would you prefer to have a competent or incompetent government?
Otherwise you can agree or disagree with government policies, but that shouldn’t be directed at tech vendors, it should be directed at politicians and people in government / at the voting booth.
The government is notoriously terrible at tech. Are you debating that? Out of the top tech talent over the last 20 years, how many of them do you suppose work in FAANG vs the US government?
I'm not saying Palantir specifically is necessary, but I do think finding avenues for Silicon valley to help the US government is necessary for them to be tech competent.
Palantir's ICE contract itself is 30 million over 2 years. Thats 15 mil a year, where this past year's total revenue was ~4B. Thats about .00375 of their revenue. I hardly think it's the literal contract money they care so deeply about.
Haha, true, although I meant competent from a tech perspective. The reason Palantir is even in the building is because the government is notoriously bad at technology.
You need to separate government institutions ability to use tech from Trumps obvious buffoonery.
I am thinking that whether I want a technically competent federal government depends entirely on who I think will be running it in the future. Right now the technical incompetence, such that it exists, works to our advantage.
Wouldn't be surprised if proportionately more software devs supported this. Tech is still a fast track to riches so they would fall for the narrative more than the average worker.
You forgot another point--or it could be related to #3: off-shoring and H1B. Many people are just working the job and working on a small piece of software where they don't know or care about the ramification of project. They're getting paid and even if they know what's happening, they're not incentivized to care about what happens in America.
That's not my experience from the time I worked for Google. The popular sentiment was actually "We now work for a company that dropped 'don't be evil' and that sucks". See Manu Cornet comics - they are a pretty good reflection of the sentiment I'm talking about, a random example https://goomics.net/387
And it's not like everyone just complained for moral posturing and then continued to wipe the tears of disgust with wads of cash. Many people who left also mentioned the ethics part as why they left.
Due to background, I know a lot of people who work at google, and while many of them will give lipservice to ethical concerns, none of them have made any changes at all because, and this is an exact quote, "the money is too good."
Yes, Palantir folks have self selected for the first two over and over - anyone working there for many years now is completely blacklisted from anything I touch, when someone advertises ex-Palantir folks in the job description I know I can safely avoid that company forever.
Same. I would never allow anyone who has Palantir on their resume to be hired in any company I have influence over. They are the brownshirts of the tech industry, worse even than the people poisoning children's minds at Meta.
The unfortunate converse is there are plenty of other software companies looking for that .gov money that would pick these less than scrupulous employees right up.
In a thread last year a Palantir employee said most of them were either Indian, East Asians, or laid off and/or unemployable White males. Good luck guilt-tripping any of them.
Note: I'm not American, nor White/WASP, nor Asian.
It’s hard to prove without knowing the app devs, but for points 1 & maybe 2, we can look at whether Americans think the raids are justified.
28% of them think they are [0]. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that the devs would be part of that number
Edit: it looks like the poll it’s for the recent incident of the woman who was shot - my mistake. Then I would assume the number for the raids themselves is higher
> JP Doherty did not want to sign the email. But he knew he didn’t have a choice. His son, Rhys, was scheduled to have strabismus surgery in January, correcting an eye issue that made it difficult for him to walk on his own. The procedure cost $10,000 out of pocket. Doherty discussed the decision with his wife, and while she wanted him to be able to quit, they both knew the kids needed his health insurance. [0]
When we stop tying our health insurance to our employment, we'll see a drastic uptick in people starting their own businesses. Working at company Z because their health insurance is fully paid for by the employer vs working at company Y where it costs you 1,400 a month for HDHP but the salaries are the same shouldn't be a thing
Palantir does not work in a vacuum - it requires other technology, platforms and systems to operate and succeed - many of which are designed and maintained by the users of Hacker News.
Certainly you must be aware that there are not just binary values of morality in life. The obvious answer is yes they are stained, as we all are through our participation in various systems, but with vastly varying amounts.
Is the manufacturer of the bomb responsible for when Israel drops it on a family home in Gaza? Yes. Is it the same responsibility as the general who gave the order? No. Is it the same as the pilot who followed the order? No.
Does that make it useless to hold people accountable? Of course not.
Respectfully, this is cheap cope. The bomb maker didn't know when he made the bomb, maybe. Now he knows, as do all the people turning the gears on this meat grinder, including a bunch of people here.
If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country, but without an ounce of hyperbole, the human race, then keep your head down. If you don't, fuckin DO SOMETHING.
You know all those times you've said or heard others say "well if I was in Germany in the 30's...." well, guess what, games fuckin real now. So act like the person you want to be.
>If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country
For people who think borders are just lines, our country as geography doesn't even exist. It's just lines. For people who think that all people are the same, everywhere, and deserve to go where they please, our country as a people doesn't exist either.
So if that's your conception of a country, why should I care about it at all? It's just a random place I happened to be born, and its disloyalty to me outweighs any I might show it. I inherited a house jointly with the rest of you, and you keep letting squatters live here for free. Once they're here, you screech if anyone tries to evict them. If I complain about them punching holes in the drywall and shitting in the kitchen sink, you tell me I'm racist. Whatever else, you and I are incompatible, and I am out of options.
I believe in borders; my taxes fund my government, and not someone else's. However, there is no US-American "people" aside from the indigenous people who have been massacred. Ever since, it has always been whoever has been here.
I don't believe borders should exist, but they do. If you say otherwise you are simply in denial. Borders are promises of violence made by nation-states, which I also don't believe in, which nevertheless exist and are harming people.
Whatever ideological differences we may have, need to be shelved. We can bicker about that later. For now, the border of the U.S. exists, and it's killing people.
> Whatever ideological differences we may have, need to be shelved. We can bicker about that later. For now, the border of the U.S. exists, and it's killing people.
The ideological differences are, in no small part (directly or implicitly) over whether the border should exist and whether it killing the people it kills is a good or a bad thing. Can’t really just shelve that.
We are all experiencing this, just at a larger scale. To call it a metaphor is to deny the reality, nothing about this is metaphorical.
It hurts all of us, but those on the left are willing to endure the torment if it they think it hurts their opponents more. They're willing to endure it if they think that tihs will swing voting numbers in their favor in the coming decades. The right to live within the United States, as an actual inalienable right and not just some temporary privilege is called citizenship, and those without it have no such right.
When those of you vote me down so you can pretend that everyone disagrees with me, you're setting yourself up for failure in the future. You will believe your own echo chamber and be sure that the Democrats will inevitably win, once and for all, because how can they not when they never hear anyone disagreeing with them? The numbers aren't on your side at all.
Palantir is built explicitly for surveillance, in a way the other companies you listed are not. There is no comparison here. It's like saying the City of Minneapolis is complicit because they maintain the roads ICE is driving on.
Not really. Palantir is data integration and analysis software that in some cases (like ICE) can be used for surveillance. There are also thousands of commercial clients who use Palantir for completely non surveillance workflows, as well as many other government teams who use Palantir for non surveillance things. This is all public information.
> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address, 404 Media has learned. ICE is using it to find locations where lots of people it might detain could be based.
Is ICE using a general purpose app for surveillance or is Palantir making a deportation-centric app for ICE?
Yes, this is how market economy works. For every organization doing horrible things, literally everyone is a small number of payment-handshakes from it.
No, it doesn't mean that "mr gotcha"[1] argument is valid. You don't have to isolate yourself from society Kaczynski-style to either criticize society or to do something smaller (like choosing who you work for).
The rage should be dependent on the contribution. You mention a third party software vendor who produces tools that aren't even "dual-use" with respect to the abuse by ICE, they are specifically tailored. That's not the same as, say, providing electricity to them.
They are dual use. Palantir creates platforms (Foundry, Gotham) which are used by ICE but also thousands of other companies. Are you saying that just because ICE tailors these platforms to their workflows they’re not dual use? That feels akin to saying some super complicated excel workflow used by a company means excel is not dual use.
Palantir does a ton of customization and consulting for specific use cases. This isn't like Microsoft Excel being used to track uranium enrichment in Iran, it is a direct, explicit part of their business.
Even if you do nothing else of impact in your life, you can stop defending the bad guys.
I’m not defending the “bad guys”. The original argument was about moral culpability based on distance from the bad deed. Microsoft could have just as easily refused Azure for the ICE contract, but they didn’t, yet somehow they are just far enough away to not be culpable.
> If you work in technology, you are part of this force, whether you like it or not.
Disappointing to see you downvoted. I agree with this partially, but only because I think it applies more broadly.
I work in tech (although not in Big Tech/Mag 7/FAANG/whatever they're called now), and I feel quite acutely that anyone in the field is culpable in part for the enabling the absolutely massive dump that the capital-adjacent class is taking on the world to have their power play fantasies play out.
To the extent that I've started apologising on behalf of the field/profession to non-technical folks when they complain about yet another dark pattern/"growth hack" designed to steal their attention and money.
A Palantir rep was supporting one of our exercises late last summer, and he said "Knowing what I know about how the military is going all-in on Maven....I recommend buying Palantir stock."
I picked up a few shares, but I haven't checked if Palantir's growth has been unique or part of a general military-industrial complex melt-up.
Man, back when I was doing Big Consulting (including gov't/defense) I had to affirmatively declare every year to Legal that I wasn't directing any investment purchases or doing anything that could be construed as improper use of nonpublic knowledge. And now Palantir reps just out here pushing insider trading tips like it's nothing, smdh.
Nah, free blood money was when my General Dynamics shares went from $60->$120, then did a stock split and went from $60-> ~$100. I think that was in....2005? The Stryker (a GD product) was coming into service in Iraq, which drove my purchasing decision. I was an E-4 in Korea at the time and thought I was a defense stock-picking genius.
I had to pull out of US stocks/market completely last year after I felt dirty just having money in a country sliding into authoritarianism. Interesting where different people draw different lines :)
The US gov (including ICE) uses all of Microsoft Office for coordination and planning: email, spreadsheets, powerpoint, document generation, etc. Would you say Microsoft employees have blood on their hands too? If not, what makes Microsoft different?
> Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a “confidence score” on the person’s current address
So essentially, the relevant app here is custom built in order to help ICE raids.
That's substantially different from generic office tech where ICE happen to be one of millions of users.
You're going to have to explain to me why it's a bad thing or immoral for the government to be aware of where immigrants who legally need to be deported live.
You were arguing that the use of Microsoft office vs the bespoke Palantir app were equivelent, and I'm simply pointing out that they are very different.
I'm a stranger on the internet, if you don't already think that the USA's immigration raids and camps are a bad thing, I'm probably not going to be the one to convince you otherwise.
There's a lot of good journalism and commentary on the topic, so if you want to have your mind changed, do a web search and read from people much smarter and more knowledgable than me.
That’s not an answer. Please explain why it’s a bad thing that Palantir had produced an application that shows ICE agents the probable addresses of people they’re supposed to deport along with information about them.
If the answer is “I don’t believe in immigration law and the government should not enforce it regardless of what people vote for”, that’s a completely acceptable answer.
Because these systems are not only used on illegal immigrants. To give you a very clear example: a US citizen was murdered without any due process a few days ago by ICE.
Because surveilling people -- PEOPLE, not citizens -- without probable cause is a violation of the US constitution?
It is a bad thing because it leads to innocent people being brutalized, it's a violation of the constitution, it's very clearly the primary tool of an increasingly authoritarian government?
“Due process” is not a magic incantation. This is emotional, moralizing rhetoric that doesn’t persuade anyone. People who insert themselves into operations involving the state’s actors who have a monopoly on violence are risking their lives and legal jurisprudence has upheld the state’s actions to stop them by whatever means necessary in similar cases many, many times. And it’s obvious things could not operate in any other way. The state cannot give you a free pass to stop the operation of law enforcement and they definitely can’t give you a free pass to run over the agents of the state. “Due process” does not factor in to live situations that have a risk of death or injury. (It also doesn’t mean a court case. People talk about it in this thread as though the administrative orders issued by immigration judges aren’t due process.)
I don’t have a problem if people want to acknowledge this and risk their lives knowingly in protest of whatever they don’t like, but it’s absurd to pretend that’s not what you’re doing. I don’t think that’s what’s happening though when Good’s girlfriend asked why they were using real bullets.
The state having your address is also not surveillance in any meaningful sense.
edit: I'm ratelimited so I can't reply to the reply: no, he didn't answer. These people did get due process. So it's about something else. ICE is being used for its legally authorized purpose, which yes, includes removing people who illegally hinder them.
The term to consider here is >extrajudical killing<
As in: Someone wotking for the executive kills another citizen, without 1) a need to do so for selfdefense 2) any justification from the judicary for it, and that without being charged for murder/aggrevated manslaugther.
The argument: they are not doing what this law enforcement person wants do do of them (whether that obstruction is legal or not), so they are free to be killed is nothing but the total disregard for the law, any decency and the respect for human life and dignity. In short it is lynchmob mentality.
The argument is that people recklessly driving their vehicles with a total disregard for the lives around them are a danger to the people in front of their car and anyone else on the street, which is recognized by the Supreme Court even when nobody is directly in front of the car. They don’t have to wait until you kill someone and get tried for it. They can legally just shoot you under current law. That’s what the courts say.
Self-defense is, however, an entirely plausible defense in this scenario, even if the agent could have acted differently to not be in the path of someone already behaving erratically, and even if people only with the benefit of slo-mo multi-angle replays don’t think so. That’s why nobody is being charged. This happens all the time, unfortunately. The minute you choose to endanger people around you in the presence of people with guns, you’ve rolled the dice on your life.
So do you have any actual examples of what you’re describing?
>The argument is that people recklessly driving their vehicles with a total disregard for the lives around them are a danger to the people in front of their car and anyone else on the street
And my argument is that no matter what SCOTUS law one cites, or hand-waving about self-defense that is said, that shooting her in the head from the side of the car was not only tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse in a way that a competent person should immediately recognize.
One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.
>The minute you choose to endanger people around you in the presence of people with guns, you’ve rolled the dice on your life.
This is shorthand for "comply or die". Welcome to the free world. I wonder if Europe and Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world know what they're missing by not having LEO as qualified as ICE running their streets.
> I wonder if Europe and Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world know what they're missing by not having LEO as qualified as ICE running their streets.
"Europe" is of course not a place, but maybe you'd be surprised to know this does happen in "Europe" and other countries. In fact France specifically legalized police shooting vehicles fleeing traffic stops even if the police themselves are not in danger, and about a dozen people are killed that way every year.
Heck, here's a video of a shooting in Canada where the police fired at someone just trying to get away:
> One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.
She accelerated her car before turning the wheels knowing people were in the path of her car. (Even if you argue that the wheels spinning before the wheels turn doesn't count, cars do not turn rotate on their central axis, so accelerating while turning still endangers people in front of the car.) Nobody can read her mind but the possible consequences of that action are obvious. Legally that constitutes intent, regardless of what we might want to project on her state of mind.
Further, if you do want to talk about state of mind, you cannot argue that any person behaving rationally would choose to commit a felony and flee from LEO in a vehicle in the first place. This is an extremely high-risk move for zero benefit and the video confirms it didn't even take place out of panic, which was my original thought. On the ground in that situation there can be no analysis of "what is she thinking" because she abandoned the reasonable course that anyone there would have expected her to take.
> that shooting her in the head
No confirmed gunshot wound is in her head. Where did you hear this? It appears the ICE officer fired center of mass, as two confirmed gunshot wounds are in her chest and one in her arm.
I realize that arguing these technical issues will not change your mind, because for you the emotion of "people dying is bad" trumps all the reasons it happened. But I hope it will get you to consider what other people are thinking.
> tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse
That isn't clear at all because you cannot know what the counterfactual is. There were armed people who could have shot James Fields before he accelerated into a crowd. If they had, Heather Heyer would be alive today. If they had shot him, then people would be making the same argument you're making. Hitting the gas while your car is surrounded by people is no different than firing a gun randomly. In the very best case, your are operating a deadly weapon with a total disregard for human life. In some situations (self-defense), that may be justified. But it is not innocent.
The way to stop this from happening is to stop encouraging people to commit crimes by interfering with law enforcement. There are other effective ways to protest. Another good start would be winning elections. Encouraging people to get into violent encounters with law enforcement is risking peoples' lives for nothing. Once you choose violence you don't know where it's going to go.
I highly disagree with your analysis. And yes, some of my perspective is based on the ideology that the ICE agents are largely incompetent, racist, hateful human beings led by people of the same quality.
You are correct, she didn't get shot in the head, she was shot in the chest and lived for 20 minutes while she was denied medical attention.
Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word. A woman blocked the street, got killed then called a f*cking b*tch by the cop after he shot her, and a domestic terrorist before her body was cold by the DHS secretary and president and vice president.
You say she shouldn't have been there. I say ICE shouldn't have been there, shouldn't have issued conflicting orders, shouldn't have gotten in front of her car, and should have kept going around her like they had been. I say her demeanor before she left meant she clearly was not trying to harm anyone. Period.
There were no conflicting orders, unless you mean ICE telling her to get out of the car while Good's partner yells "drive, baby drive!"
> shouldn't have gotten in front of her car,
It certainly would have been smarter for the ICE agent on a personal welfare level, but the idea that the cops have to leave you an escape route is silly. It's policy mostly for police safety; from everyone elses' standpoint, you don't get to say "the cops have stopped me and I don't have a way out so I have no choice but to run them over."
> Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word.
Right, well, I think it's pretty clear that anyone who is out protesting and resisting the incompetent, hateful, and violent thugs of a fascist regime should absolutely, 100% expect to be killed. I mean, that's what fascist thugs do. Instead, Good and her partner appear to have been caught totally off guard, with her partner demanding to know why they had real bullets. There's a disconnect somewhere.
Anyway, I guess one of my overarching points is that this is not actually unusual police behavior, even by international standards. It's getting so much attention because of its political salience. I don't know (and doubt) there is any coordination going on, but in these situations I think people should always ask themselves why: a) this event, like many others, is incorrectly being treated as unprecedented or beyond the norm and b) why it is so emotionally charged when similar past events were not, c) whether the emotionality is productive at all personally and d) whether the outrage is likely to lead to desirable political consequences. For a closely related example in the lattermost question, I am no lover of cops, but it appears the actual political results of the BLM protests were highly mixed, at best, and in some cases made things worse. So, for example, returning to a situation where we have immigration laws and minimal enforcement is clearly not a desirable end for anyone except maybe some classes of businessmen.
It got a lot of attention because it is death, because it was avoidable, because it was the responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable, and because popular tension breaks at unpredictable moments. Hers happened to be on video from a thousand different angles.
Your rhetoric waffles between support of the actions of the authorities, and you seem to drift between satire and reality. "I'm no lover of cops" while you victim blame a woman for getting killed.
>I think it's pretty clear that anyone who is out protesting and resisting the incompetent, hateful, and violent thugs of a fascist regime should absolutely, 100% expect to be killed
Given the amount of energy you are expending to defending the actions of officers in this instance, I assume you are a supporter of this administration and their actions.
Feel free to post a video showing the conflicting orders. As best I can determine, this was just early (and very typical) misinformation. I could be wrong!
> responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable
I disagree. I don't see that LEOs have some sort of moral responsibility to make sure they aren't standing where they can be run over. People have a moral responsibility to not drive recklessly.
> "I'm no lover of cops" while you victim blame a woman for getting killed.
It is certainly an unfortunate situation, but if you can set aside your moral outrage, looking at the chain of cause-and-effect, she definitely took actions that had a very high probability of leading to being shot. Do you disagree? I don't see how looking at this shooting from a moral framing is sensible or likely to be productive in any way regardless of which side "wins" and is able to execute policy based on it.
> It got a lot of attention because it is death, because it was avoidable, because it was the responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable, and because popular tension breaks at unpredictable moments
See, I don't think it's actually unpredictable at all. There are very good reasons there aren't mass riots in Canada over police not in any particular danger shooting up someone driving a stolen truck, and there are for Americans ICE shooting a woman who, at best, disobeyed clear instructions and operated her vehicle with a reckless disregard for human life.
What? You know someone in thisbthread made the argument, that it is not smart to shoot at someone driving at you because it won't stop the car. The truth of that can be seen in the recording of the video where renne nicole is being shot by that ICE person. The car is driving right on till it crashes into a mast or post or whatever these things are called. At this point her brain must be blown all over the interior of the car, since he had that gun on her head before the car started. You know. The guy was standing to the side of the car, and that woman must have been scarred for her life. I mean when you're so close, you must feel what is going on. And I think it is clear where the car will be going by the point that man decided to pull the trigger. Watch the video closely again. Imaging standing there with the gun. You would feel the rotation of her boy propagating through the pistol that is elongating your hand. You feel how the car is movjng away from you, even so you want it to stop and want the dooe to open up. You must see the thoughts and emotions of that woman running over her face as she decides to disobey and flee.
What I see is someone who wants someone else to obey and to control them and is so entitled to the idea that the woman in the car should do, that when she doesn't do as he wants, the inhibition that a person who is representing the state doesn't work anymore and the impulse to take control and to take power is taking over. And he pulls the trigger.
I mean that is what I think I see when I watch the video. You described your perception. (That isn't even to contadicting. You argue that starting the car and (potentially) fleeing, is legitimage reason to kill someone.
To me that is insane but so is everybody carrying weapons, so there is that. Especially non police having these privileges that are normally reserved for highly trained and sworn in police (that have in my understanding absolutely have to weigh the risk to their life against the certainty to end that of someone they are there to protect, even if that person acts against there will. Where I live it is assumed that the impulse to flee is and to preserve yourself is extremely strong in every individual so, that attemptimg to do so does not constitute a crime/felony or whatever)
Anyways: to get from disagreements in perspective and assumptions about what is right and wrong to something that can be the foundation of a civil society (as opposed to the "lawless wild west" as the sayinf goes) there is written law and independent judical processes in which these assumptions and perspectives are weight againsg each other. So that is what should be happening.
People not having to undergo this scrutiny after such an act hat ended someone elses life means and being protected from that is so inlawfull I miss the right terms to qualify it. Something about lynching, mobs, lawlessness and disregard for humaan life and dignity all sanctioned by the highest political authority of your country.
>This is emotional, moralizing rhetoric that doesn’t persuade anyone.
If the constitution is now just "emotional rhetoric", then we are lost. No point showing you the article breaking down every bit of conduct in this situation if you dont care aboht law.
This will be a civil war with the only winner being China. Good luck.
He answered your question perfectly now you're rolling your eyes at the concept of due process, which has little to do with the original conversation (why is Palantir bad?) Do you just like being contrarian?
That person isjustifying using deadly force on someone who was driving away, by the command of said shooter. This is the exact kind of person who is the reason this regime isn't unilaterally overturned.
I wasn't answering you. I was calling out the vicious sleight of hand where you reduce what ICE is doing to the innocently-sounding "immigrants who legally need to be deported".
First: I do not believe immigration laws should be enforced in their entirety vis-a-vis mass deportation. Decades of flawed immigration laws, flawed employment laws and flawed enforcement have led to the current situation where millions of people are in this country undocumented, who are otherwise law-abiding, decent people who contribute to their communities and love the US. The rhetoric about immigrants being a drain on society are flawed at best, and hatefully wrong and bad faith at worst.
Second: If we want to get a handle on immigration volume and change the system so fewer people are undocumented, the correct response logistically and morally is to create a path to legal status (not citizenship) for those currently here, who have been here for a long time, who have families and who have not committed violent crime.
Third: If someone wanted to maximize the effectiveness of immigration enforcement resources for the purpose of safety using deportation, they would still be doing targeting of violent offenders. They clearly are not. Stephen Miller wants all undocumented people out of this country because he is a white supremacist. When "moderating forces" in the administration tried to push back on raids at farms and factories, Miller angrily protested and got Trump to change his mind back to indiscriminate mass deportation.
Third, pt 2: If Republicans were serious about measured but effective reforms to reduce immigration, they would have accepted the 2024 legislative package that capped asylum volume and vastly increased border patrol and border judiciary resources to expedite cases and get people back out of the country in a fraction of the time the current system requires. Instead, they wanted to win the 2024 election with immigration as a wedge issue, and they want to pursue a maximalist position of fear and mass removal.
Fourth: The US federal government is a semi-democracy. We have a single-choice, no-runoff election system in most of the country that forces an extremist-friendly two party system, and the presidential election is further removed from popular choice by the electoral college. The president is the least "democratic" elected position in the nation. I do not think most people support the extent of the violence and maximalism of the administration.
Fifth: The surveillance technology being adopted by the government is not being used solely on undocumented citizens.
Finally: If I were in charge and wanted to take a stance on immigration, I would do largely what was in the 2024 bill, I would set up a work visa program for industries that heavily utilize undocumented labor, and I would target recent arrivals and criminals for deportation - not all undocumented residents.
---
TLDR:
We're arresting and deporting veterans, PhD students critical of US policy, and people who have lived here for decades as part of the "American Dream" who have done no harm to our country. What is being done is not in the name of safety nor does it even indirectly improve the lives of Americans. Surveillance and tracking tools are being deployed against all citizens. In the broader context of the behavior and statements of Miller/Trump/Vance et al, this is part of a multi-pronged attack on democracy and the freedom of citizens from government intrusion.
Edit: and all of this debate is without the context of an administration that has declared itself above the law domestically and internationally, that has invaded a country for oil and is currently preparing to invade a treaty member of our strongest military alliance to steal their natural resources. So if the parent wonders why some people are hostile at debating this, it's because to debate the point at all is to ignore obvious truths.
>The rhetoric about immigrants being a drain on society are flawed at best, and hatefully wrong and bad faith at worst.
Ironically all the big wealthy GOP donors all hire illegal laborers to clean their homes and mow their lawns, and to maintain the golf courses at clubs they belong to. But we can't actually have the conversation about illegal immigration get to the root causes of why immigrants are actually here, now can we?
> Stephen Miller wants all undocumented people out of this country because he is a white supremacist.
Another point of irony - most of the ardent white nationalists from the heartland of America would be aghast to learn that Miller is a rich Jew from Southern California whose grandparents were immigrants. For a lot of them, Jews are explicitly NOT white nor are they American.
> If Republicans were serious about measured but effective reforms to reduce immigration, they would have accepted the 2024 legislative package that capped asylum volume and vastly increased border patrol and border judiciary resources to expedite cases and get people back out of the country in a fraction of the time the current system requires.
Or, even earlier, they could have backed e-Verify as federal minimum standard for all employment as far back as the 1980s. But no, let's not go after the businesses hiring illegal laborers.
> Or, even earlier, they could have backed e-Verify as federal minimum standard for all employment as far back as the 1980s. But no, let's not go after the businesses hiring illegal laborers.
Strong borders are entirely about making easy to exploit cheap labor. That's entirely the reason why neither democrats nor republicans have addressed immigration. It's also entirely the reason why the only lever being pulled is deportation.
Businesses simply love being able to say to workers "Do what we say or we'll have you deported".
This is why undocumented workers pay taxes and can get jobs, even in the reddest of states. It's not some sort of "flaw" or "impossibility" that couldn't be fixed pretty quickly.
Rightly targeted law would penalize businesses hiring undocumented workers and would protect the workers regardless of documentation status. Doing that would immediately fix any perceived problems with immigration.
Considering that Microsoft is also providing services to the Israeli government with the explicit intent of storing and cataloging all of the phone calls made by Palestinian citizens so that they can be analyzed by AI for potential bombing targets...yes I would say Microsoft also has blood on their hands. I wouldn't be surprised to learn they have deep partnerships with Palantir for compute services.
Microsoft is a modern IBM holocaust tabulation machine. Yes, many of the people who work for Microsoft should be prosecuted and put in prison for war crimes, with varying degrees of culpability. There are people in MS who knowing negotiated deals that aided and abetted war crimes, and those who wrote morally repugnant military surveillance software that was used to automate mass murder in the Gaza holocaust.
Yes, absolutely. These are criminal scum, on par with pedos. Just look at how they are helping a people getting wiped out from their own territory in the Middle East.
That's a pretty broad generalization, but OK I'll bite.
- I think Yarvin has a lot of good points. No one should be ashamed to admit the truth of a matter. I can't stand his voice, I think he has annoying mannerisms, but nonetheless the man has a point and I'm not ashamed (especially by unknown and strange online personas) to say so.
- Palantir is objectively a profitable job. I've learned a lot here and the people I work with are brilliant.
- I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.
Let's be honest, simply conjecturing that someone ascribes to a political view isn't discourse. It's a potshot. You're assuming that anyone who reads your comment and leans in your direction is going to agree and vote with you. This is literally the lowest and cheapest form of engagement. It's also the most self serving. It does nothing to advance the conversation or prove your point.
Most importantly, this is the exact type of behavior that is furthering political polarization and discouraging actual discourse.
Honest-to-God truthfully, reading Moldbug is what made me realize the speciousness of pure rightism and ushered my journey from a rightist-axiomatic "Libertarian" / ancap to a centrist-qualitative libertarian-without-labels that sees left and right thinking as both necessary parts of a complete whole. But YMMV, apparently!
In general I think whenever you find a "red pill", you also end up confronted with a whole slew of new easy answers. Whether you end up buying into them or not really comes down to who you are as a person.
I will never ever understand the construct of right / left / red / blue / lib / conservative without having to take a really dumb view of the world and its human inhabitants.
The problem is that left/right are highly appealing because they claim to have the world figured out. The strongest manifestation being the authoritarians (of either ilk) that think they just need to implement their chosen top-down policies and every problem will end up being solved by construction.
Can you describe at what point someone would “have blood on their hands” in your view?
The problem in my mind is that these systems are exclusively in service of dishonesty. ICE is clearly being used to further political ends. If it were actually trying to stem immigration it wouldn’t concentrate its officers in a state with one of the lowest rates of illegal immigrants.
Are you saying you agree with that cause or that you bear no responsibility?
It makes perfect sense to concentrate law enforcement in a state that is in defiance. Even if the absolute numbers are low, the state cannot back down from enforcing the law because some people are resisting. Otherwise you invite anyone to disregard any law they don’t like. The state won’t allow this and the only way to overcome this is either to change the law or toss out the government, and only one options is realistic. And btw I am against deportations of people who have committed no felonies unrelated to immigration.
> It makes perfect sense to concentrate law enforcement in a state that is in defiance
Using the word "defiance" indicates that your perspective is decidedly not American.
Both the States and the Federal government are co-sovereign, mediated by the US Constitution that spells out the rights and responsibilities of each. The Federal government is currently in willful and flagrant default of this founding charter - both overall in terms of how it is supposed to function (offices being executed in good faith forming checks and balances), as well as openly flouting the handful of hard limits outlined in the Bill of Rights. As such, the Federal government has lost the legal authority to dictate anything to the States.
It is of course still prudent to recognize the realpolitik of the "Federal government" having command of a lawless paramilitary force currently unleashing terror and mayhem on civil society. But the point is that we need to work towards re-establishing law and order in terms of the remaining functioning sovereigns.
They are certainly NOT co-sovereign, that is an absurd statement as states cannot leave the Union. Any sovereign party can withdraw from a treaty. The states are represented in their ability to collectively steer the federal government by Congress and the Electoral College. The feds are currently enforcing the ill will of both which sadly is the result of last elections.
I said co-sovereign, not that they're both independently sovereign (required for your treaty example). This is straightforward law, go read up on it. States are considered sovereign themselves, with powers limited by the US Constitution - the same qualification as the Federal government.
It's honestly besides the point. For even if I accept their sovereignty, they have exercised their sovereign will in the Electoral College to elect this administration. And they always have the power to impeach it through their representatives, the administration did not take that away, nor did they suspend the Congress, nor do they appear to be preparing to wrongfully influence the next elections. A state can not go and rebel against the Union because it disagrees with the current administration. Hell, the Union can literally change the Constitution against the will of a particular state if enough other states agree. You can consider states sovereign if you want, and I concede that it's an established tradition, but when the whole agreement on the separation of powers can be changed with a particular state voting against it - that's a mockery of sovereignty of that state.
Sorry, this is a whole ball of post-hoc motivated reasoning.
> For even if I accept their sovereignty, they have exercised their sovereign will in the Electoral College to elect this administration
Simply repeating the word "sovereign" doesn't mean you've applied and fully accounted for the definition.
> A state can not go and rebel against the Union
I'm not talking about rebellion here, but the provision of law and order in spite of the federal government's policies of repeated lawbreaking.
> when the whole agreement on the separation of powers can be changed with a particular state voting against it - that's a mockery of sovereignty of that state.
This subject is not like computer programming where finding some lever you can pull to affect an axiomatic-deductive result invalidates the independent meaning of the original thing. If two-thirds of the states actually wanted to scrap the current Constitution and turn the federal government into an autocracy with two impotent patronage-review councils, then you would have a point. As it stands, you do not - the entire point of these necessary supermajorities is to put the brakes and pull us towards a foundation of individual liberty and limited government when things are close to evenly divided.
As I said, you really need to read up on the founding of this country. It's got all of these dynamics and more - including the "liberal media".
I think most people involved in protests would not characterize the thing they are resisting as merely "law enforcement". What they are experiencing is an occupation by a politically weaponized paramilitary organization which is going door-to-door in their neighborhoods wearing masks, wielding ARs, yelling at people and brutalizing them. How do you think you would react if this was taking place in your community?
Of course the brutality is not desirable, but to stay in perspective, what would you suggest they do to still enforce the law efficiently but without this forcefulness? They can’t do it the normal way when they are constantly watched and their targets are warned beforehand by whistles and apps and they can’t and shouldn’t back down on enforcing the law.
I expect them to enforce the law without breaking the law. I want the job of any law enforcement agency to be hard. Not because I want lawlessness, but because the government has a rightful burden to surpass to prove that it's citizens are in the wrong. The government is supposed to serve the citizenry and not the other way around.
We have a freedom of speech and protest precisely to signal our discontent with our leaders. It is precisely for citizens to harass law enforcement that they view as unjust.
The entire reason we got those freedoms spelt out in the constitution in the first place was because of British occupation and the views that the British governments laws and enforcement were unjust. There is a direct parallel. The spirit of the 3rd amendment is that we should be able to kick out law enforcement that we hate. That we don't have to tolerate their presence.
> what would you suggest they do to still enforce the law efficiently but without this forcefulness
How about not violating the 5th amendment by going door to door through neighborhoods randomly? I don't give a single FUCK if ICE can do their jobs today if they have to violate half the damn bill of rights to do it.
I don't accept the framing that this is about law enforcement in the first place. I believe that this administration is run by xenophobic right wing extremists who care little for the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. They have weaponized ICE against the Somali community in Minneapolis today, the overwhelming majority of whom are legal refugees. As we have seen, they will not hesitate to weaponize ICE against anyone else who crosses them. I believe the organization does not exist to protect or serve the interests of the American public and should be abolished.
The American public has sadly elected this administration. I agree with you in principle, especially when legal immigrants become targets. But again, if the actions of this administration are not just morally wrong but illegal there are courts, and in any case there are elections. The people of one state or one city can not obstruct the will of the Union, it is fundamentally undemocratic way of interfacing with the fairly elected government.
I'm sorry, but if you still have any expectation that this administration will engage in good faith in any democratic process, you either haven't been paying attention or are engaging in willful self-delusion. They do not believe in democracy. They care about free speech only insofar as they can use it to claim they are being victimized, but will gleefully take it away from their opponents. They laugh in your face while they pardon the J6 insurrectionists. The presidential election is not and ought not be a referendum on whether or not we all get to have our rights trampled by gun-toting masked goons. At a certain point you have to stand up for what's right--that is, a reclamation of democracy.
Efficiency has never been a goal of US governance, especially in how it interacts with the People. This is deliberate. Read up on the events around the American Revolution if you want to see why that is. There are actually a lot of arguments being trotted out today that were trotted out back then, by the British.
I mean this idea of defiance is absurd. People here are 99.9% exercising their constitutional rights. The majority of crimes happening at this moment are ICE infringing on people’s constitutional rights. I appreciate you sharing your perspective but that logic exists in isolation from the reality. ICE are so bad at policing they are creating more crimes than they are solving.
Of course with the Trump FBI the message is loud and clear, those crimes will not be investigated
ICE officers are bad at policing because they were a paper pusher/investigative agency which should always be assisted by local law enforcement. Most of the other feds operate like that. The administration dramatically increased ICE workload and in addition to that the local police is not always cooperative, and they are being obstructed by protesters. Of course they are fumbling around and making lots of mistakes, but again, they can not give up on enforcing the federal law.
I don't think I would ever "have blood on my hands" in my current position as a software developer because Gotham and Foundry have valid and real world use cases that are being implemented in ways that actually make people safe across the nation. That's honestly just the truth. Can people, or and organizations use any given product for nefarious ends? Absolutely. Do we try to mitigate it? Very much so.
At the end of the day it sounds like the people making this argument don't really like how ICE is using the product. That's unfortunate, but it seems like the response is making a proximation error though. For those taking this view: Do you yell at farmers for planting, growing and packaging strawberries because you're upset about the obesity crisis and people's craving for strawberry flavored products? Do you run out into the fields and grab them by the shoulders saying "This is your fault!". I'd hazard not.
There is a larger epistemological argument to be had there, but needless to say I'm just not convinced that any sober person believes that qualitatively ascribing moral outrage to a single group of people is really that simple.
>I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.
Yes, yes, the little hands at the gestapo that were just filling up forms for deportation do not have blood in their hands, we know. Tried and failed defense, many times.
it's funny how now days you can spot a tool by how they want to make sure the nuance of the fascist prick argument is being heard. I hear it. It sucks.
>No one should be ashamed to admit the truth of a matter.
Yet supports a regime that is censoring colleges, getting workers fired over their political views, pressuring and shutting down press, and more.
The point clearly only matters for truths they like.
>Palantir is objectively a profitable job
And ICE offering 50k signing bonuses. How much is your soul worth?
>I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.
Dismissing ethics as a salient argument is exactly why pathos is effective. If you were truly without shame you wouldn't be affected by the argument. Deflecting shows shame. I've meet a few sociopaths and this isn't how they respond.
>Most importantly, this is the exact type of behavior that is furthering political polarization and discouraging actual discourse.
Citizens are being killed on the street as we speak by their government. This is not a time to say "but why can't we just get along". There is literal blood on their hands. Maybe yours, I don't know.
And I'm beyond tired of this because this was warned from day one. But it was dismissed by overly reactionary and dramatic (I can pull up many of the flagged threads here). It's tiring because this wasn't some freak accident we correct, but a year of escalation that was designed by the administration.
If you're fine with that to self preserve your lifestyle, then I hope you are a sociopath. Otherwise, that does indeed eat at your soul, deservedly.
1. He's white and lives in a blue state. Doesn't affect him. Oh, and money.
2. The attention on Palantir and their customers makes his stock and options go up. He's happy, because money.
3. His GOP-worshipping parents get to brag to their GOP-worshipping friends that their son is helping God's Gift to Humanity - Donald Trump. And making bank while doing it.
4. He believes that Palantir is doing good work, and that's the end of it. He believes himself to be a genuinely good guy, so if he's doing something, it must be good.
In general, if you're working for Palantir, you're unlikely to find yourself in the right side of history. Whenever you hear of tech being used for questionable purposes, Palantir seems to have their fingers deep in the pie.
Palantir is solely a surveillance business. Like, maybe some day in the future they branch out into something that's not explicitly evil, but that seems unlikely.
I wonder how he feels about what the administration is doing and how his own work is directly helping them. Surely he is aware of all of the supremacist rhetoric coming from the official Twitter accounts of various government agencies or Elon Musk or Stephen Miller. Surely he has seen the kind of racist abuse that Vivek Ramaswami endured on Twitter, which led to him recently quitting social media.
Doesn’t he see how all of this is going to come for people like himself next?
Meh, I blame social media specifically and media generally for the state of our country. Why call out just Palantir. The US, maybe the world, would be better off if companies like Meta (and others) didn't exist....
You don't seem to disagree with parent, and as long as you're aware you have blood on your hands, I guess cool?
Why try to inflame the conversation even more? Just curious what you get out of it, because you're clearly not curious, or trying to understand something here.
This is a thread about morals, not tech. Many people are talking about how immoral ICE (and therefore Palantir) is, and I want to present the side that they are in fact doing exactly what many people in our society thinks needs to be done (i.e. they are not immoral).
> I want to present the side that they are in fact doing exactly what many people in our society thinks needs to be done (i.e. they are not immoral).
The Nazis were doing what many people in their society thought needed to be done.
It is a rather uncommon position (though, ironically, frequently a strawman position falsely attributed to their opponents to mock them by roughly the same political faction that backs the current ICE action) that “morality” is just whatever a sufficiently large number of people currently prefer.
Wouldn’t it be even more fair to say that the people who allowed or even encouraged illegal immigration have blood on their hands because they know what they were doing and how the government would have to respond under the law? If we are going to use the line of reasoning you suggest then this should easily be on the table also.
the government uses force for everything it does, it doesn’t need to resort to violence if you comply, (and yes it feels gross to type that) I hate to appear to defend something I hate but it’s because I understand the nature of it not because I approve of it: the point still remains that the people who facilitated the illegal entry knew without a doubt that this was going to happen afterwards, however far you want to extrapolate that onto their motives I don’t intend to speculate on here
it only assumes that the government is aware of their own laws and has half a brain to realize what that means, what I wrote is being proved true right now
* It assumes that the government's priorities are malleable enough that it will eventually decide to prioritize these laws, but not malleable enough that they could change them. This is self-contradictory.
* It assumes that a person's immigration status is not malleable and cannot be normalized. This is strictly false.
* It assumes that immigration laws are static. Again, strictly false.
* It implies that all force is equal in violence, which is something I usually only hear from high schoolers who have just encountered libertarianism and love it
* It suggests that there is no moral agency in acting on behalf of the government, only in acting against the backdrop reality of this monolithic slab of granite.
* It suggests even that the violence currently taking place is for the purpose of enforcing laws. This isn't true for the U.S. citizens by birth or naturalization who are being unlawfully detained, it isn't true for the thousands of non-citizens with legal status who are being detained and moved across state lines. It isn't true for the non-citizens who are being arrested literally while attending the process of maintaining their legal status. It isn't even true for those without legal status who are having their doors kicked in without warrants, and it isn't true for those without legal status who are being detained and tortured. None of this is actually according to the law, it's just what they can get away with and make a spectacle of violence.
I'm not even exactly clear who the nebulous group of people is that you want to blame for getting people caught up in the government's violence. I guess if you're mad at coyotes, sure, be my guest? If you're mad at anyone involved in the process of asylum you're mad at people following the law. If you're mad at people helping their neighbors you've lost the plot. If you're mad at state or city governments not enforcing federal laws for then either you don't like federalism or you don't understand it, but at best your assumption is historically contentious.
People like... Donald Trump, prominent employer of illegal labor for decades?
If you want to go after prominent employers of illegal labor (and others who profit from it) I shan't shed a tear. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
Please keep us posted. I'm thinking of becoming a small time farmer/zoo keeper.
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