My entire life it’s been about nothing more than domination of the “immoral” and the end justifies any means when the alternative is someone else winning the vote.
They are the people the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” is referring to.
Turned out they just were the selfish assholes everyone always said they were, with everything they say just being poor attempts at rationalization of their deep lack of morals, including their self-serving primitive religion.
They're for small government and anti-censorship in the same way they are for "secure elections". An election is secure when they win. It's fraudulent when they lose.
Republicans today are far-right extremists straight out of an authoritarian regime, operating within the friend-enemy mode of politics ("everything for my friends, the law for my enemies"). And the project is to preserve this hierarchy with themselves at the top.
> The far right is animated by the revolutionary project of reconfiguring society along the exclusionary or hierarchical lines patterned after a “divine” or “natural” order. Far-right figures envision societies organized through hierarchies—whether racial, ethnic, religious, or ideological. They aspire to deploy state power to defend the “true people” (sometimes called the Volk), who often already occupy the top rungs of society, from a constellation of perceived enemies or from relative or outright disempowerment. The far-right ideal is a homogeneous society, and that ideal is diametrically opposed to a liberal, pluralistic order. The far right believes that liberal pluralism represents a dangerous and unprecedented upheaval of the natural order. The far right blames most or all social problems on that upheaval—that is, on liberalism. Instead of seeing social order as emerging from the interactions of many diverse persons and groups cooperating in a polycentric system, the far right believes a homogeneous order must be imposed—and imposed in a holistic fashion, incorporating all forms of social interaction, from the structure of the nation-state to the most intimate relationships in the home.
> The far right’s commitment to freedom extends only to the “true people,” whose values align with far-right goals. This is an exclusionary conception of freedom, entirely contraposed to a neutral rule of law. Generally for the far right, discussion and deliberation are denigrated in favor of authoritarianism and “decisive action,” although the far right will also frequently invoke values like “freedom of speech” to exert pressure on discourse communities to welcome its ideas and rhetoric (see Why do far-right groups often talk about “freedom”?).
I mean obviously they never were. I think what really surprised people is that it turns out that despite it's supposed "libertarian" roots, the tech community has largely broken hard right authoritarian when the rubber hits the road. Kind of reinforcing the old adage that libertarians are just republicans who want to legally smoke weed.
I'm not sure it's the worst attribute you can have, but I definitely agree with the sentiment.
As I've gotten older, I've become less fond of slippery slope style arguments. People love making them for censorship-related rules and laws.
"Oh if <biden> is allowed to ask/tell social media to stop publishing so many lies about covid then that means trump will be able to <whatever>"
First of all, trump and his ilk are probably going to do <whatever> regardless of what people did in the past and the technical legality of the actions seems to be of only minor concern.
Secondly, I hate this idea that laws and rules can't have nuances. We can, with our collective brain power, probably come up with a law that helps reduce covid lies and doesn't also apply to government criticism or whatever.
I get the appeal of a simple "all speech is free! No laws about speech allowed!" But fairly obviously you're going to have laws about fraud/threats/slander/"porn" at which point we're back to nuances and deciding which bits we allow and where.
As for modern republicans, I'm not old enough to have ever believed their states rights/small gov/freedom lies, but I thought I could at least count on them to be anti-russia invading other countries.
Are we not allowed to know where cops are operating? I would support all US cops and ICE and any other state sponsored authority to wear GPS and body cameras at all times.
Do you not feel you'd just be creating a utopia for criminals? You could take that data and create a program to show, amongst other things, minimum response time by area greatly facilitating crime. And then of course you'd also be essentially ending any undercover operations which are very important for breaking up criminal organizations.
I'm fully on board with bad apples in the police being held accountable, but I'm not sure this sort of idea that you're proposing would accomplish much beyond greatly easing crime and criminality.
Any criminals with more than a single brain cell already know what cop response times are in their area. In the 60s-90s everybody had police scanners and cops talked over open radio about their locations and calls but crime still dropped massively in that time.
We already live in the safest time in the last few hundred years atleast, if not of all human history, all these fears about rampant crime are unfounded. And most crimes are committed by people you already know. Hell the biggest source of theft in the US, which dwarfs all other forms of theft combined, is employer wage theft. The cops deserve no trust because they have spent the last 6+ decades doing everything possible to militarize and become more draconian while extorting the poorest of society for fines and funding. Civil forfeiture laws are still abused on the daily and the entire US population knows it. Trust is earned, not given, and US cops and courts have done everything possible to destroy any trust between them and average citizens.
Maybe if I could trust that being executed on the side of a road by a cop in full view of the public and on camera would result in them going to jail people might support them having a bit of leeway, but they have repeatedly destroyed that notion. Cops are a far bigger threat to me than any petty criminals, most criminals were driven to crime through desperation so I can atleast sympathize with some of them. I have yet to meet a cop that wasn't a complete and utter asshole looking for any excuse to arrest or harass me or others around me.
Crime rates were substantially lower in the 50s, and prior, than they are today. The narrative about collapsing crime relies on starting sampling near the 60s at which point crime started exponentially skyrocketing, peaking at the 90s - where we hit the highest rates seen in modern history. The collapse of crime starting around that era correlates with an exponential rise in incarceration. In 1960 something like 400k Americans were imprisoned. Today it's around 2 million with the US having the highest incarceration rate in the entire world.
Similarly, the idea that crime is mostly by people you know is driven by another falsehood. That is only when the relationship between the victim and offender is known. The wide majority of crime has an offender that was either unknown to to the victim, or "relationship unknown." And the total number of cases of people killed by police who were not instigating physical resistance or aggression towards them is very near zero. There have been some really egregious cases, but they are very far and few between.
And yeah the 'cop personality' is pretty common, because it's cultivated in the training. They are going after the sort of people you probably don't even know exist, certainly not in the quantities that they do - especially with this image of reasonably people driven to desperation you've built up in your mind. These people will take any sign of hesitation or weakness as something to exploit. The 'cop personality' is a tool to help them do their job, even moreso than the tools on their belt.
That's, at the minimum, debatable. The primary point of people reporting on the location if ICE agents is to enable other people to evade or interfere with law enforcement. And that walks right into the illegal zone in various ways - accessory, obstruction, interference, aiding and abetting, and so on.
It really isn't debatable. You aren't responsible for what other people do with information you give them. If someone told you "I'm going to commit a crime, tell me if the police are nearby" it would be probably illegal to tell them (as furtherance to a conspiracy), but without an agreement to help commit an illegal act it's totally legal
No agreement is necessary under law, only knowledge of an illegal activity and an intent to help it succeed. Agreements just tack on new charges like criminal conspiracy. This is why the peer comment about Waze is interesting. They likely have a fairly strong argument that it's simply sharing publicly available information - which is of course 100% legal, while I think ICEBlock will likely lose a very open and shut case because it's entire purpose is to facilitate the evasion or disruption of law enforcement.
I expect the government is probably thrilled to get sued by ICEBlock precisely because of this. It's probably about as favorable a case as they could ever find, and ICEBlock losing will set a highly useful (from the government's perspective) legal precedent which will then probably be weaponized to go after stuff like Waze.
It's not hard to find similar dunks for the other side, eg. "I thought Democrats were for bodily autonomy" (with regards to vaccine mandates/passports) or "I thought liberals were for free speech" (with regards to cancel culture).
No side is perfect, but contrary to popular misconception, Democrats/liberals have generally been much better when it comes to restrictions on state power and support for civil liberties.
Until the COVID-conspiracism came around, vaccine mandates had been supported by a massive bi-partisan consensus - for decades - because they make sense. Just take a look at this article on The Federalist of all places, from 2015: https://thefederalist.com/2015/02/03/the-insane-vaccine-deba...
> Fundamentally, the protection against life-threatening plague is one of the original reasons government exists. We’ve had mandatory vaccines for schoolchildren in America since before the Emancipation Proclamation. The Supreme Court has upheld that practice as constitutional for over a century, and only the political fringes believe there ought to be a debate about such matters. This is one of the few areas where government necessarily exercises power.
> You shouldn’t be compelled to vaccinate your child, but neither should the rest of us be compelled to pretend like you did.
> It’s the failure to deal with those consequences that frustrates me about this debate. If you choose to not vaccinate your children, that is your choice. In the absence of an immediate threat, such as a life-threatening plague or outbreak, the state doesn’t have a compelling reason to administer that vaccination by force or to infringe on your rights. But that doesn’t mean there are no tradeoffs for such a decision. If you choose not to vaccinate, private and public institutions should be able to discriminate on that basis.
>"I thought Democrats were for bodily autonomy" (with regards to vaccine mandates/passports)
The liberal position on bodily autonomy (and indeed most things) has never been absolute. If an action is likely to cause harm to others (and forgoing a vaccine in the midst of a deadly pandemic is indeed likely to cause harm to others), then reasonable action to curtail the harm is justified. As recently as the 2010s, both parties supported vaccine mandates. I remember conservatives making fun of the antivax movement as liberal lunacy as recently as 2019.
>"I thought liberals were for free speech" (with regards to cancel culture).
Cancel culture is itself a form of free expression and association.
Damn I am nostalgic for a time when it was just a few delusional new-age nutjobs who were trying to kill their children and expose everyone around them to preventable deadly illnesses.
Sometimes I like to look up the stuff people are throwing a little fit about.
> On November 4, 2021, OSHA released an emergency temporary standard (ETS) that generally requires private employers with 100 or more employees to establish and enforce a policy that either (1) requires all employees to receive a COVID-19 vaccination, subject to legally required exceptions; or (2) requires employees to receive either a COVID-19 vaccination or provide proof of regular COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering when indoors or occupying a vehicle with another person.
Looks like it was private companies' choice whether or not to allow face covering and regular testing in lieu of a vaccine. Requiring masks indoors during a global pandemic. The comparison to women being denied medical care was and is still offensive.
I don't think you realize it, but your retort could be easily applied to the story in the OP just as easily as it could be applied to cancel culture. The point isn't whether either side is "right" or not, but that both side's positions shouldn't be distilled down to 1 liner dunks like the original commenter was engaging in.
No. The First Amendment does not protect from consequences between non-government entities. A government agency attempting to track down people when it disagrees with their speech is explicitly what the First Amendment was intended to protect. Hope that helps.
