The rebellion had to raise the temperature faster, more dramatically, in order to wake people up. To make the frogs realize it was hot and jump out.
Lonni Jung: "You realize what you've set in motion? People will suffer."
Luthen Rael: "That's the plan."
Luthen believes that to succeed, they need to anger the Empire and make them come down hard on the citizens, which in turn will fuel the rebellion.
C.J. Cregg: Leo, we need to be investigated by someone who wants to kill us just to watch us die. We need someone perceived by the American people to be irresponsible, untrustworthy, partisan, ambitious, and thirsty for the limelight. Am I crazy, or is this not a job for the U. S. House of Representatives?
Leo McGarry: Well, they'll get around to it sooner or later.
C.J. Cregg: So let's make it sooner - let's make it now.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not denying it's appropriate; it just seems remarkable to me that it's being used so often lately.
The frogs have it easy. All they have to do is jump out. One individual action and they're safe. (Until the scientist catches them and uses them in more experiments, anyway.)
The situation for people living under governments becoming gradually more oppressive is much more complicated. You don't know for sure that the water will keep heating up. Escape is extremely difficult and costly. Turning off the heat takes massive collective action. A third of the frogs actively want the water to boil, and another third don't really care.
Probably because a country that was famous for trying to spread their idea of "freedom" all across the world, seemingly can't notice themselves that the country is rapidly declining into full on authoritarian dictatorship, with a very skewed perspective of "freedom", and the people who are opposing it, aren't rioting (yet at least).
The judicial arm of the government aren't even enforcing the laws of the country anymore! Not sure how, but it'll get worse before it gets better. Quite literally a fitting analogy in this case.
To us on the outside, getting filtered news that trickles down, it just seems like there are no candidates. One is 79 and one is 83, where are all the young politicians? Why does the media choose to only emphasize a few of them at the time?
Actually, both major parties (not always at the same time) have a long track record of working very hard to promote voting for third-party candidates, doing things like funneling funds covertly (or simply nudging donors) to fund their efforts, assigning party activists to support third-party efforts, etc.
Of course, they exclusively do this for third parties whose appeal is, or is expected to be, mainly to people whos preference, if choices were limited to the major parties, would be for the other major party.
Because it's not just rhetoric, as long as the electoral system isn't reformed to change this, getting people to vote for a minor party instead of your opponent like demoralizing them and getting them to stay home, or disenfranchising them (two other things the major parties have been known to try to do to populations likely to vote for their opponents otherwise) is a lot easier and exactly half as useful, per voter, as getting them to switch to you from the other major party.
It is also helped because many of the people who are insiders in the major party are secretly voting for the third party when the majority of primary voters (who are rarely well informed) force someone they don't like on the party. They can't do anything this time, but they can send a message to each other where they failed.
But when one side represents fascism and the other doesn't the choice is still easy.
Down ballot. There are very few elections where nothing on the ballot is of stake.
Biden was no longer a candidate even by the time the last election happened.
Look to Mamdani. Note that the real election there was in the primary. If you squint a bit, the US electoral system looks like the French one. There's two rounds of voting, and in the first one you get to pick who is the crook that will be put up against the fascist in the final round.
It's going to be boring and time consuming, but people have to use the levers they do have available to do internal Democrat party politics if they want to improve the situation.
The two-party system will always leave you with suboptimal choices when it comes to casting your vote, but the alternative to Trump was two decades younger.
At the risk of sounding sarky, you are going to have to do more than protest at the weekend (!) to stop what is happening to you.
Whenever ICE goes into a new city, they're meeting more and more community resistance. The protestors have mostly been very smart about remaining civil, which continues making ICE look worse and worse as they tear gas and arrest peaceful protestors.
The supreme court has ruled (somewhat surprisingly) that Trump can't deploy the National Guard into cities any longer.
Trump's approval rating has continued steadily declining since he took office, and the midterms are shaping up to be a bloodbath.
I'm mid-40s and this is the best-organized and most successful demonstration movement I've witnessed in my lifetime. Occupy got close, but that felt like something that the more 'extreme' ones were actively participating in, with more passive support from the populace. Now it feels like everyone is getting directly involved in one way or another.
I think we're one or two bad incidents away from wide-scale rioting.
Right underneath the headline. That’s pretty normal for the FBI, assuming they had a search warrant.
The problem is that "classified materials" means whatever the government wants it to mean in this context. Is there a journalist you want to target for a particular reason? Just accuse them of handling classified information, which they don't ever have to produce to the public because it's "classified".
As in, the US's full knowledge of the technical capacity of Israel's nuclear weapons program, including how we obtained that information. That's now in the hands of the Saudis, Iran, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. And it was found in a fucking bathroom.
Yet nobody seems to care that a Trump-appointed lackey magically (whose husband has credibly been linked to organized crime) found themselves on the case "by chance" and issued a whole bunch of bullshit non-appealable verbal rulings on how and why Donald Trump is innocent.
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
Who said they were?
>Raiding a reporter's house is very much an abnormal act to have taken place.
Only by invoking the most numerical slight of hand sort of "a DV is abnormal because we hand out a thousand traffic tickets a day and make only one or two DV arrests" logic is it abnormal.
For the past 5+yr the FBI has raided the home of about one journalist per year. Every time the allegation has been about investigating the source of some leak.
They didn't do one in 2024/2025 I don't think. Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind. I'm not gonna say they get a pass, but this is "the normal amount" for them.
Once again, that doesn't make it right and I shouldn't have to say this but this comment should not be construed as an endorsement of the FBI or any specific activities they engage in.
“ Natanson was told that she is not a target of the investigation, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.
Instead, it appears to be related to an ongoing probe of a government contractor in Maryland.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/media/fbi-hannah-natanson-was...
James Burke, the Veritas guy, the ABC News guy, etc.
That is relatively minor compared to ICE shooting protestors and then stopping people from giving them medical attention.
In all seriousness, it sounds like they're trying to stop another Snowden type leak.
In what way is what she was doing similar to Snowden? Snowden was a huge bombshell, with droves of material, proving what a lot of people suspected was happening, but had no proof.
This journalist seems to have been receiving a ton of "small leaks", of improper firings and a lot of other federal misbehavior, but all within the US, and all with things we already knew was happening.
So rather than "one big sea of bad", she was investigating "a thousand small cuts of bad" across thousands of people who had evidence.
Snowden leaks had global implications that changed relationships between countries, while this seems mostly internal to the US.
I bet it's the recipe for the military-grade copium some people are on
Trump is merely a symptom of the problem that is the Imperial Presidency. If we can’t tackle the problem itself we’ll get another politician doing the exact same shit after Trump.
Unless the system changes, it'll continue to let people misuse it to their own gain. Trump was hardly the first one, and depending on how things will go, he might be the last, but "last" in a good way or in a bad way remains to be seen.
Who is responsible for the system if not the individual - and the collective thereof?
The fundamental problem is the citizen not being educated or caring enough about their own independence and state of being in the framework of a global economy and sovereign nation state
It helped my mental model a lot at the very least.
I think we came away with very different conclusions
To me it is abject proof that individuals do not have the mental emotional or other capacity to actually behave in the modern world such that they retain their mental independence and develop a sense of personal epistemology
Humans are way too dumb and prone to propaganda to actually have a coherent society at the scale needed so that we don’t collectively I’ll kill each other through poorly identified externalities
For example, how is someone who led/incited an insurrection against the government able to become head of said government? Already there, something is gravely wrong. You don't let undemocratic leaders lead a democratic society. So the system is broken, and the current administration is proof of that.
Otherwise what other commentators said will happen, someone who might even be worse than Trump will eventually lead the country.
The only answer to that is the people who form the citizenry.
If the citizens cannot influence the system such that they can actually affect change on the system then they are irrelevant in it and the system needs to be replaced
As long as they continue to fail to organize then they will continue to be dominated by it
That’s just reality
There is no alternative organization that can counter the global capitalist system currently
A five year old can see the problems with a lot of this stuff, which once upon a time you'd defend with vague notions of a self-policing culture or the ghost of ethics in governance. Those kinds of non-safeguards can work fine in a stable system, but they inherently rely on foreknowledge of future conditions not changing in unpredictable ways.
The self-reinforcing recursive loop underlying all this is that the systems of governance can only be changed by the governors. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that democracy will fail so long as it's representative - the incentives to fix the system itself are simply not there because any inefficiency is exploitable for personal gain (so why fix it?) The doomsday proposition that comes out of that though is that the system cannot be changed - only replaced once it decisively breaks. Maybe that's what all this is. I would hate to find another bottom but I fear there's more to go before we get there.
You can be mad at the FBI for raiding a journalist (although we don’t have all the details and maybe there is some context you don’t know)… but be consistent.
Furthermore, Trump is no journalist, nor did he steal the secret files for journalistic purposes.
"They're gonna take my guns away!" Yet that never happens.
But people are being targeted for what they say, for disagreeing publicly. That's real. And a lot of "patriots" don't seem to notice or care.
They notice. They care. They just love it.
The "free speech absolutist" folks never were.
I too wish people also cared as much about the 1st amendment, but sadly I think the tide is turning on that. Too many on both the right and left seem okay with censorship and harassment.
Things like this is just another way of trying to drive a wedge.
With the ridiculous leeway American law enforcement has when it comes to harming people ("qualified immunity"), I don't think that second amendment will be relevant until there's an outright civil war happening. And when it comes to that, one or both sides have access to predator drones and fighter jets.
The people claiming that having guns won't save you against the weight of the army are only partly correct. Having a few guns won't save me personally. I would certainly be killed on my own. But no government can kill everyone, either as a practical matter, or simply because you still need folks to produce the food. When everybody is armed, the government simply cannot oppress them to the same degree.
They don't need to take your gun away, they just need to give you enough reasons to not use them. And even in 1779, it required lots of planning and coordination, and lots of loss to life and property to achieve change that way.
The focus should be more on elected politicians, and voters themselves and how they vote/not vote. If the mid-terms were being held today, how many people would vote? It's scary, who wants to risk their lives for a vote? not many.
I fear the governors of states will have to intervene, and the way that goes might lead to a conflict with the federal gov.
Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
Is there any surprise that there's a dearth of armed citizens ready to stand up for them?
"A rifle behind every blade of grass only works if you've been watering the lawn"
If you genuinely think we're at the point that we need to start shooting, the onus is on YOU to get armed, get trained, and take action. Don't expect anyone else to come and fight for you, especially those you perceive as your political enemies.
Edit: oh, you were responding to the second half of their comment, not the first. I see.
How do people really expect this to work? In detail? You show up with an armed militia at a school and the ICE guys just drive on past (and then raid someone else)? Or are they expecting more of an Amerimaidan situation? Jan 6th situation?
Coordinating with your neighbors and compatriots is essential from the soap box, to the ballot box, to the jury box, and to the cartridge box. And I'd like to emphasize the order of those boxes should be followed.
ICE is thuggishly and sloppily prowling places like Minneapolis because statistically they can get away with it without causing too many bodies. Up the potential body number and their tactics are forced to change for the better.
If the statistical average door they kick in in Minneapolis had the same likelihood of "shit I ain't going back to prison <bang> <bang> <bang> <dives out bathroom window and hops neighbors fence>" behind it as the statistical average door in St. Louis ICE wouldn't be behaving the way they are in MN. They would have specific targets, specific places and times to pick them up, etc, etc. (i.e. operating like the local professional police do) because the risk calculation with even a tiny change you might get shot back at, even if only ineffectively, makes that (much higher) resource expenditure pencil out, with consequences in terms of how much they can get done.
Personal ability to credibly threaten lethal violence if cornered (note: I did not say "firearms") acts much like an AGTM or MANPADS for an infantry squad. You're not gonna take a squad with TOWs on the offensive against a bunch of tanks, but if attacked you've at least got a prayer. The same math holds on the individual level. Making any potential target substantially more prickly to a potentially superior force and doing so for little cost is a huge boon for the little guy. A firearm is a force multiplier same as a bomb carrying drone or a cell phone that records things the government does not like or a media platform that puts those things in front of the eyes of the masses. It forces the superior force to still be much more careful and expend far more resources when engaging. When it comes to domestic policing what this means is that ICE would be under more pressure to "be careful and professional" in every city like the DEA did during the war on drugs we wouldn't even be having this discussion because they wouldn't be employing the tactics that everyone hates.
This math is a large part of why drugs won the war on drugs. There were enough glawk fawtys wit da switch kicking around on the "wrong" side of the law that the cops needed to adopt militarized tactics, the public didn't wanna pay for that shit (monetarily or politically) over weed, and thus drugs won the war on drugs. If they could've rolled up on just about anyone "cheaply" with just a few cheaply (poorly) trained cops, minimal equipment and support, minimal planning and surveillance, etc. it would've gone on way longer (but they couldn't, because that would have yielded too many bodies and cost too much political capital).
One dude in his home with a gun or two versus a 50 billion dollar ICE force that has complete immunity and a massive media and political empire ready to spin any bad incident into an us-versus-them narrative.....
Yeah, it is a fantasy. Oh, and if anything really gets out of hand, that political empire also has nuclear weapons.
And the whiplash is quite small, if not nonexistent. Why? Because there's no depths to which this regime, which is openly hostile to its own population, won't go to assert power, as well as to maintain it.
Sounds like a regime worth fighting if that's what you believe, but it seems you've decided it's futile.
How does legal immunity or a media empire affect a dead man?
>Oh, and if anything really gets out of hand, that political empire also has nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are not very useful in a civil conflict... Or pretty much any conflict
That's doing a lot of heavy lifting. I know Republicans who unironically say shit like "We can't do background checks. What if I'm trying to buy a gun really quick for a hunting trip?" I would imagine your idea of "attacking" the second amendment is just common sense laws.
> Just a few years ago, their own supporters were smugly saying that standing up to the government is a fantasy for paranoid whackjobs.
In your heart of hearts, do you really believe this has anything to do with it? If we were to take your comment seriously, it just illustrates the right never actually cared about standing up to oppressive governments, they just wanted to be the oppressive government. That is actually pretty consistent with how the left clocked them.
But in reality, it has nothing to do with what you wrote. The biggest 2A fanatics, as someone related to quite a few of them, just have a fantasy of shooting people. They are openly celebrating the death of Renee Nicole Good because that's the kind of thing they want to do.
I'll be honest, this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, so I'm gonna take it for what it's worth ... nothing.
That never happens because the parties vested in that right resist every single time. Effectively. With real numbers. Not media campaigns or propaganda social media mechanisms. Largely without protesting, with no need to get into degrees of legality in doing so.
You don’t get to say “that never happens” as if it isn’t the explicit goal of an entire political party. You get to realize “we don’t let that happen”.
As to current events… the mass deportation guy won elections, why is it you expect armed resistance to federal officers carrying out the exact thing the majority of voters wanted?
You can disagree on anything you like, but, I find the “why aren’t people shooting federal officers who are enforcing immigration law!?” posts to be extreme affirmations of echo chamber. If you don’t like it, get your reps to change the laws, not suggest murdering people who you don’t like.
One day, a woman wrote to me on Signal, asking me not to respond. She lived alone, she messaged, and planned to die that weekend. Before she did, she wanted at least one person to understand: Trump had unraveled the government, and with it, her life.
I called William, feeling panic rise like hot liquid in the back of my throat.
He told me to stay calm. He told me to send the woman a list of crisis resources, starting with the 988 national suicide hotline. He told me to remember that reporters are not trained therapists or counselors, just human beings doing the best we can.
“You should try to help, but whatever this woman does or doesn’t do, it may happen regardless of anything you say,” William said. “It’s not up to you.”
I did what he said, then fell asleep refreshing the app, checking for a reply. The next morning, a message appeared below her name: “This person isn’t using Signal.”Chemical and/or clinical depression can be debilitating, and i consider it mental instability.
-Nils Karlson, Economist and poltical scientist, founder of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, former professor of political science at Linköping university, Sweden, visiting fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, etc.
Did you miss the lesson from the actual guillotine? It’s just another escalation in the cycle. The parties switch from raiding to guillotining each other. The guillotine doesn’t solve the problem, it just raises the stakes.
But Robespierre was a believer in capital-R Reason, and he had to face the National Assembly all the time. So his speeches are a fascinating gradual slippery slope from “it would be good if Jews and actors would get to vote too” to “only Terror will purify the world.”
I’ve got a little book of them, aptly titled “Les plus beaux discours de Robespierre” — his most beautiful speeches. It would be an odd adjective to use about almost any other political monster’s output (excepting Antiquity and the distance we have to them).
2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.
Some administrations may see this as a feature not bug…
Reporters are not federal employees and it’s not illegal for them to have or discuss classified materials. Most of what Snowden leaked was classified, and remains classified to this day, but you and I can read about it on Wikipedia. The government pursued Snowden because he was legally obligated to protect that info. They did not pursue Barton Gellman because he wasn’t.
So in this case the government is raiding the home of someone who did not commit any crime, in the hopes of getting at people who might have. I think it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could get ugly fast.
It's all unacceptable and it's exhausting, but apathy is the enemy here.
The problem is nobody is willing to use their constitutional right to fight for justice, because everyone is deathly afraid of losing even a little bit of their comfortable life.
If people were more willing to use the rights given to them by a specific amendment, none of this would happen.
> The search came as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.
I looked at a lot of search warrant affidavits in a previous job and there's really nothing all that unusual about this aspect (doing it to a member of the press or doing it on a pretext are separate issues that I'm not commenting on). Police execute search warrants at other locations all the time because the relevant question is whether there is probable cause to believe that there is evidence of the commission of the crime they are investigating at that location, not whether the person who lives or works there is guilty of that particular crime. Given that fact, of course, it's all the more reason that judicial officers should subject search warrant affidavits to careful scrutiny because when they come to look through your stuff they will just turn your house or business upside down and they don't get paid to help you clean up afterwards.
> The warrant, she said, was executed “at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars.”
> Bondi added: “The Trump administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.”
The issue here is the American tradition of a free press and the legitimate role of leaks in a free country. The PBS article is a bit better on context:
> The Justice Department over the years has developed, and revised, internal guidelines governing how it will respond to news media leaks.
> In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued new guidelines saying prosecutors would again have the authority to use subpoenas, court orders and search warrants to hunt for government officials who make "unauthorized disclosures" to journalists.
> The moves rescinded a Biden administration policy that protected journalists from having their phone records secretly seized during leak investigations — a practice long decried by news organizations and press freedom groups.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fbi-searched-home-of-w...
My understanding is that searches of journalists still must be signed off on by the AG personally.
If that's true, it's a direct violation of the fourth amendment. I'll paste it here for convenience:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Does that include (former) presidents as well?
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65775163
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Donald_...
(Asking for a friend.)
Of course that was before right wing supreme cpurt decides presidents can vreak the law as they wish (wink wink only as long as they are right wing, I am sure they would rule differently on democrat).
To my understanding, a US search warrant authorize law enforcement officers to search a particular location and seize specific items. The requirements are:
1# filled in good faith by a law enforcement officer 2# Have probable cause to search 3# issued by a neutral and detached magistrate 4# the warrant must state specifically the place to be searched and the items to be seized.
There is nothing about the owner of the location. It can be a car, a parking lot, a home, a work place, a container, a safe, a deposit box in a bank, and so on.
The significant question here is about probable cause. Why were those items interesting for the FBI to collect? Are they looking to secure evidence against the leaker, and if so, what was the specifics of the search warrant? The article states: "The statement gave no further details of the raid or investigation".
Probable cause should not be about preventing journalists access to documents they already got, as that would be like going after Barton Gellman.
Based on your own logic then Assange did not have any requirement to protect classified information yet he was Public Enemy number one.
I know people who personally sat on the Edward Snowden board and spent years of their life trying to create a case within the intelligence community against this guy
uh oh sounds like the Guardian is asking for a raid too
edot•1h ago
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
Traubenfuchs•1h ago
HumblyTossed•1h ago
Traubenfuchs•1h ago
Exactly what I was thinking about when I was writing my comment.
I can understand that big corpos are not our friends and are purely money driven, but publicly bribing the president with gold is on a level no one ever expected. Right in line with the Fifa peace price.
derektank•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA?wprov=sfti1#Corruption
fhdkweig•1h ago
DetectDefect•1h ago
Traubenfuchs•1h ago
MAYBE non US governments? They probably have deals with all the big governments allowing them to spy on their own people at least.
luddit3•1h ago
beeflet•34m ago
embedding-shape•1h ago
snowwrestler•1h ago
weberer•1h ago
SpicyLemonZest•1h ago
dkdcio•1h ago
still doesn’t really prove much
parineum•39m ago
fwip•1h ago
iAMkenough•41m ago
kuerbel•39m ago
beeflet•35m ago
iamtheworstdev•1h ago
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
lawn•1h ago
That's how the US is right now.
mikeweiss•1h ago
joering2•1h ago
At least DHS is not interested in finding out. And there has been plenty US citizens deported under DHS.
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118180/documents/...
https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...
andsoitis•1h ago
Are you sure? Do you mind linking to information / reporting about that? I have not seen any.
throwaway38294•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deporta...
Then you can read the congressional report:
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118180/documents/...
At this point this is not an accident it's an intentional policy to spread fear and suppress dissent
joering2•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths,_detentions_and_deporta...
prh8•48m ago
srean•18m ago
cultofmetatron•1h ago
Ice has already summarily executed two US citizens. one literally on camera and broadcasted to the world.
blhack•1h ago
toomanyrichies•52m ago
Relatedly, here's a fuller list of recent shootings by immigration agents. [2]
1. https://www.foxla.com/news/ice-shooting-keith-porter-northri...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shootings_by_U.S._immi...
srean•1h ago
jimt1234•40m ago
lawn•1h ago
There are quite a few examples where they did detain US citizens, even claiming that the papers they had weren't good enough.
The president has also multiple times said that he will strip people of citizenship. Yes, it's not exactly legal but they're doing illegal shit all the time and nobody's stopping them.
lokar•50m ago
rozab•1h ago
toss1•1h ago
This regime has already illegally stopped, assaulted, arested, jailed, and/or deported multiple US citizens. They now stop people and demand they show citizenship papers, and the AsstDirFBI has said people must carry proof of citizenship at all times, and if not, ICE are free to abuse you under the presumption you are an illegal.
We are already under a "May I see your papers, please?" Nazi-like system.
Except without the superficial politeness of the "May..." and "...Please" and seeing the face of your accusers who hide behind masks.
rambojohnson•1h ago
gvedem•54m ago
anon84873628•43m ago
ryandrake•43m ago
sneak•29m ago
cdrnsf•11m ago
an0malous•1h ago
quietbritishjim•50m ago
NewJazz•46m ago
ceejayoz•45m ago
Others do what the parent post described.
HN is certainly not a monolith, and we've got our share of loons on all extremes of the political spectrum.
heromal•44m ago
kgwxd•37m ago
bix6•41m ago
There’s 30 posts on the front page. If someone doesn’t care about politics why can’t they just ignore that 1 post instead of flagging it into oblivion?
addandsubtract•41m ago
sofixa•35m ago
I don't agree. Crypto scams get discussed at length here for days, but when it's a Trump crypto scam, it gets flagged and disappears.
simgoh•28m ago
I sympathize, relate, and I'm not about to lecture you like some corners of the internet about "the privilege" to try and ignore stuff like this, but it is important to keep stuff like this at the forefront. We continue to experience unprecedented life events.
Levitz•5m ago
throwworhtthrow•28m ago
That's why I stopped reading them.
It's never once occurred to me that I should rather open them up, dive into the comments section, and tell the participants that I'm trying to get away from boring discussions about diet and fitness.
MSFT_Edging•21m ago
IE Flock being a ycombinator startup, Ring cameras giving free access to police and others[1], AI systems being used for targeting dissent, ad-services and the data they vacuum up being bought by agencies to build up profiles for dissenting citizens[2]. We've watched this type of technology even be used to target the families of people in warzones to explicitly perform war crimes[3].
This is a forum of people who have effectively built the panopticon but don't enjoy hearing about how the panopticon is being used. Politics is now interwoven into our careers whether we like it or not. There is no pure technology, everything we work on effects the world for better or worse. Pulling the wool over our eyes to pretend there's a pure non-political form of talking about these topics is childish and naive.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/home/security/amazons-ring-cameras-push... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-i... [3] https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/questions-and-answers-is...
GJim•17m ago
Whilst I sympathise, it's a bit hard to avoid politics on here, when the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley are actively supporting a corrupt administration to line their own pockets.
A statement of fact that will no doubt earn the ire of many tech-bro's.
afavour•17m ago
Difficult not to see it as folks plugging their fingers in their ears. And there are folks on here that are flagging things because they paint the administration in a bad light. There are DOGE folks here, there are Palantir folks, etc. etc., I don't think you can dismiss those motivations even if they aren't true for you personally.
mullingitover•10m ago
Der_Einzige•43m ago
billfor•33m ago
jyounker•27m ago
rtp4me•24m ago
<logging off now>
SpicyLemonZest•24m ago
When Trump decides to destroy your life, as he's destroyed so many others, I hope you'll find supporters who aren't so determined to ignore the inconvenience as you.
Sparkle-san•15m ago
kilroy123•32m ago
yoyohello13•18m ago
expedition32•56m ago
lokar•52m ago
parineum•46m ago
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
immibis•46m ago
bregma•44m ago
baggachipz•39m ago
cmiles74•18m ago
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administr...
AnimalMuppet•8m ago
actionfromafar•8m ago
naravara•1h ago
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
gruez•1h ago
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
naravara•42m ago
It was the mid 2010s yes.
And they’re not going to abduct and torture and American citizen out of the blue. The more “intensive” methods are higher cost, the intention is just to increase the friction involved with engaging in the routine and scalable, ordinary forms of snooping.
srean•1h ago
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/13/stan-swamy-h...
everdrive•1h ago
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
kasey_junk•1h ago
everdrive•1h ago
kasey_junk•1h ago
This government brought sham charges against the Fed president, what are they going to do to a run of the mill federal employee?
irishcoffee•38m ago
It is not illegal to talk to a reporter, it is illegal to share classified intel with someone who doesn't have a clearance and a need-to-know.
Do I think they should have raided this persons house? Absolutely not. Is it illegal to share classified information, absolutely.
"For my friends everything, for everyone else, the law" or whatever the saying is, applies here. In this case, the reporter did nothing wrong, but the raid on the home of the reporter can be justified according to the law, so it isn't illegal. Should it be? Probably.
Legislation is good, rules are good, the classified rules seems to make sense if you subscribe to Hanlons Razor at the least. Sometimes though, laws just don't make sense and shouldn't be codified.
For example:
MCL 750.335 - "Any man or woman, not being married to each other, who lewdly and lasciviously associates and cohabits together, and any man or woman, married or unmarried, who is guilty of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year, or a fine of not more than $1,000.00."
This shouldn't be a law.
alphawhisky•1h ago
epistasis•1h ago
mingus88•1h ago
We are on step 3
HNisCIS•55m ago
immibis•43m ago
itsanaccount•34m ago
imo they're usually too late, as guns without training and a group aren't very useful. but i can tell you the number has went up about 4x the baseline in the holiday season. and thats after its doubling after November's elections.
this country is a powderkeg and what's worse is i think these provocations are international. the admin seems to want to start a civil war.
SpicyLemonZest•1h ago
cjs_ac•57m ago
HNisCIS•54m ago
The question is how many people will side with them vs reality.
selectodude•45m ago
pixl97•44m ago
Eh, they killed them by the hundreds of thousands, and were not even trying to genocide them. If the current regime decided to actually just exterminate people our level of technology would make what the Nazis did look like babies playtime.
>The question is how many people will side with them vs reality
At least 40% of the population given what we've seen so far.
johnisgood•44m ago
Where can I read more about this?
ceejayoz•42m ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
johnisgood•21m ago
It was a political struggle for legitimacy, not just territory, and the enemy did not have to win any battles, just avoid losing until the political will collapsed.
The thing is, military power does not automatically translate to political success, and guerrilla fighters do not need to defeat tanks and jets, they just need to survive, persist, undermine legitimacy, and exhaust the opponent's political will.
So, in this sense, the US was not beaten by farmers, it was beaten by a strategy that made military superiority irrelevant.
SpicyLemonZest•16m ago
ceejayoz•42m ago
The American military at the time cared - at least somewhat - about the international reputation of the United States. That may not always be a thing. It may not be a thing now.
SpicyLemonZest•48m ago
HNisCIS•56m ago
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
scarecrowbob•52m ago
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
srean•50m ago
comments that it's only federal employees who are legally bound regarding classified documents, reporters are not.
kuerbel•35m ago