The comment section here is an incredibly disturbing read, as to how many people are trying to justify this on-site extra-judicial execution. Let me start by saying that all this debate itself is meaningless to start with. No police or law and order agency is supposed to execute a civilian under these circumstances in any country. That should instantly be taken as a murder by an official empowered to prevent exactly that. As far as I understand, ICE is not even a law and order agency and has even less authority to do so.
The woman was occupying just one lane, which means there is no merit to the claim that she was obstructing them. And then no matter what she did next, the masked agents just walk up to her vehicle and try to pry open her door and pull her out. That is not what the police do. That's what the mafia does. Anybody facing such a harrowing situation is likely to panic and try to get away. A real officer would know that and won't shoot a panicked and unarmed person who has her hands on the wheel. Nothing about the circumstances suggest a regular confrontation with a law and order agency. It's a terror campaign. The people arguing the self-defense claim based on some flaky technicalities are psychopaths who lack any respect for human lives.
Whenever I mention Nazism in here to make a serious point, I get downvoted based on some unexplained moral outrage. It's either because 'it's so disturbing' or because people don't like the comparison with the worst that humanity has produced, or because I'm 'cheapening' (trivializing) the Holocaust and insulting its victims! Lame in my opinion, because there is no worse insult to its victims than to just let the horrors repeat!
Well, these outraged people can just stay outraged all they want, because I'm going say this in no uncertain terms. The US and HN has a real Nazi problem - at least in ideology, if not outright in spirit. And another Holocaust is not entirely out of the question either, because back in the past too, it wasn't that well known in public even among the German citizens until the allied forces overran the concentration camps. Who knows what is going on in the shadows right now, when so many people are comfortable with justifying murder, racism, invasions and imperialism?
You're too pretentious if you think that the horrors of the past can't repeat, because history sets precedents and shifts the Overton window. I know that HN is primarily a technical forum. But I seriously don't care if I lose my entire HN score for this, because what is the point of having any technology if it is to live like slaves under tyranny? This is one matter that well worth saying out loud, no matter how unpopular it is or how disturbing a suggestion it is.
Now let's look at the atrocities that ICE has committed so far. Intimidation/terrorizing, destruction of property, attacks on local law enforcement, kidnappings, child abuse, racial discrimination, denial of justice/due process, illegal warrantless arrests and detention, inciting riots, armed attacks on unarmed civilian protestors, attack on media personnel, attack on elected representatives (the last three constituting attack on democracy), human trafficking, torture and murder. It pretty much ticks all the agenda that the Gestapo used to have. Does Nazism sound all that improbable now? Governments around the world should be classifying ICE as a state-funded terrorist organization right now and sanctioning its leaders and members. They should be arrested and tried at Hague or Nuremberg if they step outside the US.
I'm deeply disturbed by how fast we forget the fragility and preciousness of human lives. And the worst is that we have historical examples showing us what will happen. And yet, we relentlessly justify their replay unconcerned?
"That interference has overwhelmingly turned out well."
What an absurd thing to say. The US doesn't only overthrow dictatorships - it supports them too, as it suits its self-interest. Why not include the US interference when it SUPPORTED Hussein and later changed its mind - still think "interference turns out well" after backing a genocidal monster, supporting his invasion of a neighbour, invading twice and related deaths of 400 000 people?
Countries stabilise over time, that's what their people make happen. You ignore Indonesia, Iran, El Salvador, Nicaragua and dozens of disaster of US imperialism but give credit to the US when their populations rebuild them.
The US has done some positive things but they're the convenient accidents you've cherry picked to make your point.
> I am not a network engineer, but I believe it would have been far easier to make the two versions interoperable.
And what do you base this belief on?
Fact is you'd run into exactly the same problems as with IPv6. Sure, network-enabled software might be easier to rewrite to support 40-bit IPv4+, but any hardware-accelerated products (routers, switches, network cards, etc.) would still need replacement (just as with IPv6), and you'd still need everyone to be assigned unique IPv4+ addresses in order to communicate with each other (just as with IPv6).
It's understandable that IPv6 would be ambitious rather than incremental given the cost of rolling out a new protocol; the bells-and-whistles IPv6 design is probably just a relatively small constant factor more expensive than the simplest possible address space expansion. Viewed that way, you only get the one chance to update the protocol, you might as well fix whatever you can.
Something often observed in authoritarian states is duplication of effort because of empire building. The ruler cannot trust any of his underlings- they are all sucking up to him and backstabbing each other constantly, so he pits them against each other, assigning overlapping responsibilities on purpose to keep any one subordinate from becoming too strong. This is why all of the "fascism/communism is so efficient" arguments need to actually look at the nature of Soviet or Nazi governments. As an example, there were at least five completely separate armed ground forces in Nazi Germany (1).
This constant competition between parts of the government actually led to tremendous waste. You can see it again in the Soviet space program during the 1960's. While NASA had a single purpose of getting to the moon before 1971 with a unified organization under the control of a single leader, after Khrushchev was deposed (and Korolev died) the Soviet space program splintered into a war between the old OKB-1 (Korolev's group) and Chelomei's OKB-52 that lasted for twenty years over Super-Proton vs Energia etc.
1: The Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS are the two most famous, but the Luftwaffe recruited, trained and equipped the Fallschirm-Panzer Korps and Fallshchirmjaeger- yes, German paratroops worked for Goering not the Wehrmacht. There were also five Marine Infantry Divisions under the Navy- they had half as many Marine Divisions as the US did, despite many fewer amphibious assaults! And the Volksturm, at the end of the war when things looked grim for Nazi Germany, was under NSDAP party control but separate from the Waffen-SS.
I don't get why you have to obfuscate like this. You aren't against limitations for questioning. You wont find any sensible person that is against immigration enforcement completely.
What you want is the ability for your side to carry out its will unobstructed by any legal process, because you fundamentally believe what they are doing is right, and the other side is evil.
Just say that instead of pretending that its about the law.
I remain amazed at how, again and again, no matter how specific and unique an abuse by the Trump administration is, it is always, invariably, Really Joe Biden's Fault. Like, the frame has been adopted by the MAGA base, but also the cranky left. The media does it too. Here on HN bothsidesism is a shibboleth that denotes "I'm a Serious Commenter and not a Partisan Hack".
But it leads to ridiculous whoppers like this, and ends up in practice excusing what amounts to the most corrupt regime in this country in over a century, if not ever.
No, this is just bad, on its own, absent any discussion about what someone else did. There was no equivalent pardon of a perpetrator of an impactful crime in a previous administration I can think of. I'm genuinely curious what you think you're citing?
> - What Kimmel said was wrong (assuming you believe Utah state investigators) and deeply irresponsible and inflammatory.
I agree that we should be disavowing violence.
The problem is that for 10 years democratic lawmakers and media figures are disavowing violence on both sides, while republican lawmakers and media figures are doing the opposite: stoking the flames, promoting the idea of civil war, telling everyone that the country is stolen from them, that immigrants are out to get them, that democrats are out to get them, etc. According to this rhetoric, democrats are to blame for all of this. When something bad happens and it's not democrats who caused it, they come up with a conspiratorial explanation for how it's still democrats.
So when one side keeps constantly disavowing, and the other side keeps constantly attacking, at some point disavowing becomes literally the wrong thing to do. You can't lay down your weapon while the other person just keeps hitting, and expect the hitting to stop.
What we are being shown repeatedly by republicans is that violent, divisive rhetoric actually leads to electoral victories, and grants free license to become "president for one side only" and do whatever that side wants. If democrats continue to disavow and apologize, they will end up simply extinct. This is why some democrats stopped doing that.
It's fascinating seeing the extent to which Republicans have monopolized both violence and victimhood. The entire article seems to be a standard exercise in bad faith commonly seen from right-wing pundits.
Here, labeling certain individuals on the right as fascists is claimed to necessarily also be a call for violence against them. The only example provided for this claim is a reference to a musician in the middle of WW2 sporting a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar, as if wartime propaganda from 80 years ago is still relevant today.
I certainly haven't seen any relevant individual on the left calling for violence - whether that be people with significant followings in media and especially not among elected individuals.
In contrast, not only do I see pretty significant calls to violence from the right (e.g., Trump's rallies calling for violence against media members, his speech on 2021-01-06 whipping his crowd into a frenzy before the attack on the capitol, the "enemies within" speech he just gave to top military brass, etc.), but we're also seeing ICE becoming increasingly violent.
The claims about attacks on freedom of speech are similar.
Those on the left organize protests and boycotts against people they disagree with, thus exercising their own freedom of speech. Occasionally, such actions have resulted in individuals losing their jobs and their reputation. I won't claim that cancel culture doesn't go too far sometimes or get started over some incredibly petty things, but by and large, it's a movement that relies entirely on exercising speech as its mechanism.
Contrast this again with actions on the right. We have a sitting president launching lawsuits against anyone who says something he doesn't like. At the same time, he's directed his FCC secretary to threaten removal of broadcast licenses and interfere with business mergers of anyone using speech critical of Trump. That is textbook government censorship.
And no, Biden's administration requesting things on social media being taken down is not the same thing unless you can demonstrate said requests were also accompanied by threats of government action. It probably shouldn't have happened, and it definitely should have resulted in political consequences of some sort (it did), but it's not the same thing without threats being levied.
The problem isn't the undocumented people or how many we have, the problem is the rampant disinformation and populist messaging around them.
Basically, we can trivially tap into the human mind's natural inclination for tribalism and use undocumented people as a bargaining chip. We can tell people that THEY cause this problem and that problem, because THEY don't share our values, our skin, our culture, our mindset.
It works extremely effectively because:
1. Everyone likes to hear that they're not the ones causing problems, someone else is.
2. Humans naturally segregate based on commonalities. So people are in one group, and undocumented people in another. Sure seems like us versus them then.
3. The solutions are simple, so people have high confidence in them. Build a wall. So simple and easy, a toddler can understand that! Whether it works is not relevant.
4. Americans already have a strong sense of national identity.
5. The economy and perceived economy/QOL is actually in trouble, so we have legitimate justifications for our populist messaging.
But, had it not been undocumented people, it would've just been something else. We know that because we do see it successfully, time and time and time again, for other groups.
Trans people. That's another one that is in use today, right now, for populist messaging and it's highly effective.
> when actual fascists start rising, we'll have taken all the meaning out of the language we rely on to identify them.
Isn't this a delightful Catch-22.
If you forewarn about a developing Fascist movement, you're simply taking away the meaning from the word until it's too late and the Fascists take power.
You cannot call anything Fascist, for there may be something more Fascist that may need the power of the word.
But ah! We couldn't call out their fledgling movement full of dog whistles and double speak so no one was aware enough to stop them as a fledgling movement!
In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction.
At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods.
Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.
You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter.
Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements
The woman was occupying just one lane, which means there is no merit to the claim that she was obstructing them. And then no matter what she did next, the masked agents just walk up to her vehicle and try to pry open her door and pull her out. That is not what the police do. That's what the mafia does. Anybody facing such a harrowing situation is likely to panic and try to get away. A real officer would know that and won't shoot a panicked and unarmed person who has her hands on the wheel. Nothing about the circumstances suggest a regular confrontation with a law and order agency. It's a terror campaign. The people arguing the self-defense claim based on some flaky technicalities are psychopaths who lack any respect for human lives.
Whenever I mention Nazism in here to make a serious point, I get downvoted based on some unexplained moral outrage. It's either because 'it's so disturbing' or because people don't like the comparison with the worst that humanity has produced, or because I'm 'cheapening' (trivializing) the Holocaust and insulting its victims! Lame in my opinion, because there is no worse insult to its victims than to just let the horrors repeat!
Well, these outraged people can just stay outraged all they want, because I'm going say this in no uncertain terms. The US and HN has a real Nazi problem - at least in ideology, if not outright in spirit. And another Holocaust is not entirely out of the question either, because back in the past too, it wasn't that well known in public even among the German citizens until the allied forces overran the concentration camps. Who knows what is going on in the shadows right now, when so many people are comfortable with justifying murder, racism, invasions and imperialism?
You're too pretentious if you think that the horrors of the past can't repeat, because history sets precedents and shifts the Overton window. I know that HN is primarily a technical forum. But I seriously don't care if I lose my entire HN score for this, because what is the point of having any technology if it is to live like slaves under tyranny? This is one matter that well worth saying out loud, no matter how unpopular it is or how disturbing a suggestion it is.
Now let's look at the atrocities that ICE has committed so far. Intimidation/terrorizing, destruction of property, attacks on local law enforcement, kidnappings, child abuse, racial discrimination, denial of justice/due process, illegal warrantless arrests and detention, inciting riots, armed attacks on unarmed civilian protestors, attack on media personnel, attack on elected representatives (the last three constituting attack on democracy), human trafficking, torture and murder. It pretty much ticks all the agenda that the Gestapo used to have. Does Nazism sound all that improbable now? Governments around the world should be classifying ICE as a state-funded terrorist organization right now and sanctioning its leaders and members. They should be arrested and tried at Hague or Nuremberg if they step outside the US.
I'm deeply disturbed by how fast we forget the fragility and preciousness of human lives. And the worst is that we have historical examples showing us what will happen. And yet, we relentlessly justify their replay unconcerned?