Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies - it's no longer a hypothetical future where the tools you are building might be abused, it's today.
If you’re not awake already, you support what’s happening.
Blind, which I realize is a bit of the wild west, is full of racist anti-immigration/pro ICE hatred. Obviously, you can see where users work/worked, and it’s every company you could imagine.
The sad reality is that a lot of people will do what they can to support racist agendas, possibly even motivate them to work at certain companies as it feels moralizing to their hateful beliefs.
> you support what’s happening.
I don’t know that things are that black and white.
Do you feel the same about the billions of consumers who buy and use the products these companies make?
No because employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause. That's why ad-tech is so effective in the first place.
Consumer pays $1.10 for a can of coke, $0.10 of that goes to ad-tech, the consumer watches some coke ads, ad-tech pays $0.05 to the publisher and the consumer receives $0.05 in benefits in the form of "free ad-supported content" (which they already paid $0.10 for).
The only way for consumers to avoid this is to just stop spending money with any brand that advertises online, which is completely unrealistic and a much taller ask than asking employees to give up their deal with the devil (and work for just about anyone else except big tech).
Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”.
Does your argument still hold up?
>”employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions are completely diffused and many steps removed from the harm they cause.”
“employees are making the actual thing that inflicts harm while consumers' actions directly cause deadly harm.”
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t be voting with our wallets and supporting these people but your initial argument is flawed. They produce goods precisely because consumers buy them…
> Replace “tech” in this scenario with “ammunition”. Does your argument still hold up?
Can you explain why you think it wouldn't?
Tons of principled engineers choose not to pursue opportunities at military contractors, for instance, and this is not widely seen as unreasonable.
I didn't say "tech", I said "ad-tech" and "big tech" (meaning ad-tech like Google, not TSMC) which aren't morally neutral like ammunition is. Invasion of privacy and exploitation of private information is an inherent part of their business model.
"The only way for consumers to avoid this "
Or they could stop drinking coke? But I guess that is too much to ask.
That's what gp said, except Coke isn't the only thing that funds the advertising industry - it's pretty much every product you can buy.
It's not perfect, but you can go a pretty long way by prioritizing store brands when possible.
Stores still fund the advertising industry but to nowhere near the extent that name brand goods do.
You can avoid coke but approximately every brand in the supermarket is funding ad-tech. And even if you can find brands that don't, your supermarket is likely funding ad-tech to advertise itself so you can't go to there at all. Maybe you still have a farmer's market but chances are that they're advertising online.
You can't buy a car or any smartphones you've ever heard of, you won't find an ISP that doesn't advertise online, and good luck finding a decent job without supporting ad-tech.
There's a large difference in the magnitude of spending.
A big chain like kroger, for example, is spending around 10 to 100M. Coke is spending around $5B.
Avoiding national branded products goes a long way in avoiding contributing to the problem.
Things don't need to be all or nothing.
Coke is always a discretionary purchase. Basic food staples are not. Kroger relies on national brand advertising to lure people from the perimiter of the store into junk food land.
Most (maybe not all) basic food staples have store brand alternatives. Even junk food does. Sometimes (maybe even often) those products are just repackaged version of the name brand.
If the goal is to decrease money going into advertisement budgets, then the best thing you can do is buy store brand when possible. Even if both products are ultimately made from Nestle corp, the cheaper store brand will send less money into Nestle's pockets which means less money for advertising.
That's what I mean by "avoiding nationally branded products". A package of "signature frozen peas" will taste just as good as the "birds eye green peas" without sending money to a major company (Looks like all the major companies have spun off their frozen food departments, but at one time this was a Nestle brand. I spent too much time looking into major frozen food brands :D).
The advertisement budgets for the grocers are simply a lot smaller than that of the national brands across the board. It also doesn't seem (to me at least) to have been really spent on invasive advertisements.
[dead]
[dead]
There are degrees of culpability in any discussion. Generally, this is approximated by how much damage you individually are doing to your society compared to the alternative. You have to consume a lot of a company's products before your impact is comparable to working for them.
Exactly. If you have regular meetings on how to best progress development of the torment nexus, then you can't claim innocence just because you aren't the one deploying the torment nexus for torment-purposes.
Consumers less so.
They are the victims, not the source.
Fully agree.
If you want to put the blame on consumers, at least show them on your adverts, product packaging, etc. all the morally abject methods used in the production of the product.
If you hide it from them, all the blame is on you.
Black and white thinking is a large part of what got us here.
With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food. Working for those companies does not make people “do what they can to support racist agendas”.
I can pay rent and feed myself without hurting people
Everything else is an excuse
Is this your way of sharing that you work at X or are open to hurting people in exchange for cash?
Also, you can retain your morals and choose a career, it is optional to select where you work as it’s hopefully voluntary.
There's nothing voluntary when your options are homelessness and starvation. The bank won't accept your morals in lieu of money when accepting mortgage repayments.
Thankfully I don't live in the US and I don't work for anything even remotely related to this. I don't know if I would have the fortitude in the current US job market (based on what I read here) to threat the well being of the wife and daughter by taking principled stances.
Dilapidating the world for an easy buck is gonna bite you and/or your kids eventually. We have reached technological sophistication where certain kinds of mistakes are not allowed if civilization as we know it is to survive.
When the bank reposseses the house because you are not paying the mortgage, this will bite you and your kids too.
You can call it an "easy buck", and it is just coping. An easy way to make some poor schlemiel creating a miserable report with user location data during his sprint into a greedy bastard that is just enriching his bank account out of the suffering of plenty.
Atomization enables this. Any number of individuals are individually weak against their employer/some org, but a big group of them can be quite powerful.
If many were to sacrifice their morals out of financial pressure easily (the control over which is in increasingly few hands) the path the US is treading becomes pretty deterministic... We've seen it in the movies and read it in the books.
You guys seem to need collective action and civil disobedience.
Then again.. maybe the will for collective action comes only after the repossessions...
> You guys
One of the reasons I chose to move to Europe is because I value the mininal safety nets and labor protections on this side of the pond. Yes, I make less money and pay more taxes but I believe this is how society should work, I reject the hyper individualism that ignores any sort of collective.
But I am also not naive. Expecting individuals to take the burden for decisions way beyond their control is silly. It takes immense fortitude to threaten the well being of those dear to you based on principle, when the only outcome is your own suffering (the company will likely find another employee right away anyway).
The best way to evaluate any society is to look at what happens to people without power in the system. Inmates, illegals, the poor and children.
Actually the social safety net has allowed Europeans a level of individualism that is completely unimaginable for the rest of the world.
No charity from church or family needed. Just the State- and it does not care about your religion or sexual preferences.
You chose the most absolute and extreme predicament possible to cast your “money is money” belief.
You do realize this is what most criminals of the world just so happen to say as well, right?
Where is the line?
There's nothing extreme in what I said, it is actually how the world we live in works.
It's an extremely unfair system based on coercion - you are beaten down into submission by the implicit threat that without work you won't be able to make ends meet.
Maybe you have a family that can support you financially. Maybe you already own the place where you live and could save up money over an extended period that you can weather a storm. If you are in these situations, that's great, but it is also an extremely privileged position to be in.
Absolutely no one with the skills to work in the software industry is in a position where working for unethical mega-corporations or literally starving are their only options.
Okay, I'll accept your point for those software engineers that have a choice between working at an immoral company or "homelessness and starvation".
Thankfully, that isn't most of them. Despite the job market not being as good as it used to be, the vast majority of software engineers in the US could still find another job to pay the bills before becoming homeless and starving.
If that's the case, great then. I did work for a company I find morally objectionable in the past (i.e.: evil), and I eventually found my way out.
At the time I was still paying rent and needed employment to keep my visa. I also had little savings, and an ill parent that depended on me. I certainly couldn't take the principled stance of "fuck this, I'm out".
My point is that if you are in the position to take a principled stance, good for you. Maybe you already own your home, maybe you had time to accumulate savings, maybe you can do a few interviews and land a less evil job even in the current market (and perhaps a pay cut won't be a massive blow in you life). All that is awesome, but also a position of relative privilege.
Prescribing principled stance as universal without recognizing this is just cruelty though.
I sympathize with your situation, and I'm not calling you a monster. But "I had no choice, I had people depending on me" is the exact reasoning that has enabled every atrocity carried out by ordinary people; it's the banality of evil.
None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.
Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.
So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.
I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.
(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )
> That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.
But it may well become true soon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897620
From the angle of your 2015 post, I can at least see where you're coming from. Modern adtech is much more granular and up to date than a census ever was.
And hopefully the worst case can be prevented.
I understand quite well. The banality of evil is a thing because most people have actual very little power to enact meaningful change. Risking yourself for the well being of complete strangers is commendable, but often has an obscene cost for the individual.
I reject that societal and systemic issues can be fixed by individual action, unless as an individual you are extremely powerful (and the ones that are typically are the ones causing the societal and systemic harm).
As an common man you can do small things. Do a lousy job when processing the paperwork of evil. Malicious cooperation to the powers that be. Small acts of charity. That sort of thing.
Systemic change can only be achieved through collective action. Easier said than done.
The world is cursed. Life is tough even at the best of times. The system as it is ensures compliance through coercion and threats.
I honestly believe we would agree more than disagree on the current state of things. I just reject the approach that individual action is a way out of this sort of mess.
My father keeps asking me why I don't I ever apply to $BIGCO and earn more money. I certainly have the ability, he says.
But I ask him, "But would you work for Lex Luthor?"
He doesn't have a good comeback to that.
Anyway, I (mostly, hopefully) try to make my small corner of the world a happy place. And I hope everyone else does for theirs.
[dead]
[dead]
Perhaps to show the level of privilege I enjoy as a software engineer with some level of seniority, I have had zero problem resigning from a position (more than once in fact) because I objected to something my employer was doing. It's been enough for me to filter potential opportunities exclusively to tech-for-good concerns.
Sure, I don't earn half a million a year total comp to kiss some billionaire's ass, but I still have a very comfortable lifestyle that is well above the median.
Yeah, software is perhaps one of the industries where the "I got bills to pay" argument is the least justifiable. If your lifestyle can only be sustained by working for unethical companies then your lifestyle is unethical. You certainly don't need to sell your soul to FAANG to live a comfortable and happy life.
> With the sorry state the software industry is currently in, I’m not surprised that developers would sell their soul in exchange for the peace of mind of being able to pay rent and food
You really think adtech is the way to avoid starving on the street? There are a hell of a lot of jobs between entry level and adtech dev that could give you the same basic peace of mind.
There was never shortage of developers who "would sell their soul" for higher salary in conditions where job with slightly lower salary was easily available. I really do not think we have to pretend to our selves that if one of us does it, it is because he/she is poor and the kids would starve.
Also, layers are resining from positions in doj they find unethical. It is not like the jobs for them were easier to find.
Blind is like 4chan, not representative of the vast majority of software engineers but rather their own self contained bubble. I wouldn't use Blind as exemplary of anything in this case.
I spent enough time in FAANG and adjacent to realize that some of the senior engineers and directors around me held 4chan/Blind-like beliefs.
Some of those folks were cultural leaders in the orgs I belonged to. Some even passed for nice people.
But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
Quite the high horse you got there
Considering there are hundreds or thousands of users on this site who have taken cash—either directly or indirectly—in exchange for building the world's most egregious examples of privacy-abusing software that were formerly only memes in 80s sci-fi movies. Yet they choose to focus their energy on getting upset over things they don't understand and can't control—like immigration enforcement.
No, my conscience is clean.
Hey there, I quit a job over similar concerns, knowing it would lead to a >70% decrease in comp. Without a significant nest egg or wealth, whether personal or through family.
Now let me say the same: But those tools buy Teslas and $8 donuts and cardboard apartments in trendy neighborhoods for people too young to understand how money works.
There, now there's no longer a high horse concern.
>...I quit a job over similar concerns, knowing it would lead to a >70% decrease in comp. Without a significant nest egg or wealth, whether personal or through family.
Hey, thanks for doing the right thing.
Thank you!
It takes real courage and it costs to have principles. And just like I detest those that fall for the money I have insane respect for those that stand up.
It’s worth pointing out that a non-insignificant subset of tech workers know the impacts and still don’t give a fuck though.
@anoym - There isn’t something inherently bad about working for law enforcement or national security agencies as long as what you’re doing cannot be used now or in the future unethically. But too be honest I think this is a ‘don’t hate the player’ type things, if palantir didn’t exist, another company would take its place - privacy legislation is the only thing that prevents it, not relying on ethics of the masses.
> legislation is the only thing that prevents it
I strongly agree. There's even the argument to be made that if no legislation exists, even if you're anti X, you might get incentivized to build a company for X just so it's not a fan of X at the helm of the top company for X.
Blaming it on the employees is pointless. It's the law that should dictate what's allowed and what isn't and if the lawmaking or enforcement isn't working you probably want some "good" people in those companies.
Laws are a reflection of the collective ethics of the masses, or at least they should be in a democracy.
All Law enforcement and Nat Sec of the United States is inherently unethical, or at minimum tied to ethically questionabke tactics. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world, death penalties ect. Our Military isnt exactly ethical in its missions, pretty much since WW2
You're basically saying "There isnt anything inherently wrong about working for the 4th Reich"
This is a childishly simplistic view of the world
What complexity is it you'd like to add?
For instance, the local cops checking in on grandma, or those checking in on a troubled child are really not the bad guys. You WANT them when you need them.
Not all LEOs are brown shirts, In my experience, few are, but they give the lot a bad rap.
Treating LEOs uniformly as evil is just counterproductive
Yes but I don't have a definitive map of who are the good ones, so we must treat it as a life or death situation and suitably defend ourselves in an interaction with any of them.
Why would I want cops doing that instead of social workers or teachers doing it?
No one becomes a cop because they want to be nice and help vulnerable people. Some might say they did but that is some coping technique. Being a cop involves exerting violence towards people who are vulnerable and desperate, and to become one you have to be fine with this. Some would say that this alone is enough to deem a person ethically dubious.
Even if one would accept the premise that society requires some degree of organised violence towards its members, one would also have to handle the question of accountability. Reasonably this violence should be accountable in relation to the victims of it, and police institutions inherently are not.
I think that we should also note that the other person above used "childishly" to denote something negative, apparently they don't think of kids as the light of the world and childish as something fun and inspiring. This is something that makes me quite suspicious of their morals.
Maybe you and I have vastly different experience with police. Disclaimer: From a rather small US state.
Your other note is also well taken, it does however not imply that anything a kid or teen does is OK or automatically positive.
Finally, it's OK to be suspicious. I am too. What I am saying is that one cannot just make the decision "all cops are evil or must be treated as such" and then hope for a good outcome in all cases. I argue it's a better policy to keep an open mind and decide on a case by case basis.
No, I’m not ‘basically’ saying that. Stop putting words in my mouth.
Is it worth pointing out? It seems counterproductive to respond to a call to action by sarcastically complaining about the people being called to action.
The call is coming from inside the house.
As effective calls to action often do! It's almost tautological when I say it this way, but if you want people working in ad tech to oppose ICE you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.
Perhaps the conflict is that you just want to make people who work in ad tech feel bad, and don't care whether or not they enable ICE? That's fine, I suppose, there's industries I feel the same way about. But then we don't have much to talk about and I'm not sure what you hope to gain from being here. To me opposing ICE is very important - I think tobacco companies are pretty bad too, but if ICE sent out a request for cartons of cigarettes I'd shovel praise on them for declining.
That’s the voice part of exit, loyalty, voice is it not?
> you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.
Yes—and one of the tools we have for that is shunning.
If enough of us who are appalled and disgusted by the state of things, and the people who willingly lend themselves to creating said state, make our disgust with those people known, it can lead to some of them choosing to act differently, because they care about being thought well of by their fellow techies.
I agree with what you're saying, but shunning has to be selective to be effective. People have to believe that you won't shun them if they avoid the terrible things you're trying to stop. It's too much to simultaneously beef with ICE, adtech in general, Tesla, $8 donuts, and anyone who lives in a trendy neighborhood.
A lot of them are even proud of being the loyal partners of the US intelligence community, which includes DHS and ICE.
NARRATOR: It wasn’t.
If you need to wait until the tools you build are being used for things you disagree with before seeing the problem with building those tools then you have already failed.
It's a wakeup call: there's a lot of money in the mass surveillance industry
Not really. Surveillance might create an arbitrage opportunity, but insurers hate data they can't trust. The more data the more noise.
Powerful people are paying a lot of money to locate their dispersed enemies. Think of the system in Palestine that tracks wanted terrorists back to their homes at night, so their whole families can be exploded.
>Hopefully this is a wakeup call to the software engineers and other employees at those companies
No, it won't be. Except perhaps to too few to make a difference. The money is too good.
It wasn't a hypothetical future back in the time of DoubleClick.
In the words of the XO from the Alfa class submarine to his CO in The Hunt for Red October: "You've killed us, you ass."
What makes you believe that software engineers are against the stuff happening? This new movement is defined by male loneliness and other sad traits that are quite common among people whom life passes in front of a computer. Curtis Yarvin, one of the masterminds of this new age is a software developer himself.
I would argue that whatever is happening now is part of the revenge of the nerds once the nerds remain unsatisfied despite the material possessions they acquired as software ate the world.
People deeply disconnected from the real world, seeing numbers and thinking with numbers without understanding the underlying realities of those numbers is a trait of any low touch system that developers and other IT professionals operate within.
Just yesterday apparently when asked Trump said "it's just two people" that were executed by ICE and steered the conversation when he was pushed to elaborate.
Probably from tech perspective ICE is incredibly well working, in tech world you can take away the livelihood of thousands of people by a single line of a code that changes an algorithm that bans someone or re-sorts the search results. Someone loses their Youtube account they built for years due to algorithm misfiring, someone loses their developer account on an App Store and can't even get a reason for it.
The tech world is very used to operate in a fascist high efficiency environment that enshittifies everything that touches but keeps improving on some selected KPI. Maybe they wish it doesn't happen but they are not going to sacrifice higher numbers for the lives of a few people. Welcome to the highly efficient(according to selected KPI) new world order.
I know you don't like to hear that as this is a place for IT people but the governance of online platforms is quite fascist across the board. People are banned, shadow banned or rate limited when don't behave or don't say the right stuff. Preserving order and increasing engagement is above everything, even those who claim that they came to make "speech free again" quickly turned into just changing what speech to be allowed.
Anything controversial that is attracting negativity is hidden away unless it is feeding the narrative of the platform, then it is actively promoted.
Therefore, I don't think that IT workers have any remorse or any problem with this new reality. Its the reality they built and most are loving it.
The medium is the message but the medium was built bit by bit by IT professionals in a span of 20 years.
A focus on preserving order is a far liberal/far centrist thing, not fascist. Fascists would ban to achieve political goals and not to maintain order.
Major political groups:
Liberals/centrists - maintain order/decorum at all costs
Fascists - gain power at all costs, in groups of decreasing size
Libertarians - reduce taxes at all costs
Leftists - argue for an equal society but never get there
Conservatives - return to monke
yeah, no. In centrist governments you don’t have a a secret police type law enforcement that go around and “enforce laws” without trials etc by intimidation and executions. That is a fascist thing.
Gain power is at all cost as a fascist trait is a good point, Tech companies do that all the time too so techies are often accustomed with that.
[flagged]
Not OP, but I think the way ICE enforces immigration in the USA has a lot of issues. The bar is too low for people granted the right to utilize lethal force to join, they aren't revoked of the same civilian rights to privacy we give to public enforcers of the law, aren't required to wear bodycams because of their reliance in hiring more people before they can abide by what the law requires, and so on.
What an incredibly shitty comment which is wrong on so many levels. You are the type of person who believes that Oskar Schindler should have been shot to death for breaking the "law" rather than being celebrated.
I'll be happy to bet he has no idea who that is and why supporting the Nazi's as long as they're doing your bidding is a bad idea.
ICE doesn't follow the law. It breaks it.
Its main mode of operation is fish-net-style catching brown people on the streets and making them sign voluntary deportation. That allows to bypass any court orders and any requirements of the law (like hearing, lawyer, etc).
Edit: to the commenter below:
>I care because my children are approaching the workforce and I want their opportunities to open up to them
do you really want your children to work in strawberry fields in CA in 100+ degrees weather? That is the opportunities which mostly get open when you remove the migrants, legal or illegal, that ICE is targeting.
I'm a brown immigrant, the process to get into the US legally was long. I trust US institutions to have good intent, but like all institutions they fail at times. The mandate is to remove 25 million illegal migrants. I reject the hostile posture that people are taking based on negatively biased information, which in my view, further reassures me they are acting in Americans' best interest. I care because my children are approaching the workforce and I want their opportunities to open up to them, unlike I've witnessed in the tech industry where unscrupulous businesses have happily replaced American workers with labor that is desperate. You can't convince me that the negative bias toward ICE isn't in large part, funded and astroturfed by elements in the business lobby that don't care about unemployed citizens and residents, and further drafted by those who have jobs so can afford to not care.
Do you honestly believe that when they're done with the illegal immigrants they're not going to come for the 'brown people in general'?
They will come after “domestic terrorists”.
Deporting 25 million people using a terrorist militia is mass ethnic cleansing. Period. Has nothing to do with the job market, it is a basic historical reality.
If you want job opportunities to open up to your children, perhaps you should invest in parenting that teaches them good values (like hard work and good attitude), education and sense of agency in place of hoping some government agency will kidnap and deport enough immigrants (many of which are legal, like you btw) for market to offer enough demand for them. The above point about „quality” of jobs „taken” by the immigrants is also very valid…
You believe jobs are being taken and handed to deserving illegal immigrants because they have a better work ethic. I believe they are because investors are seeking ever greater returns no matter the cost to other others or even the long term sustainability of those very returns. This is the basis of our different positions.
If you believe investors are ruining the country, why do you want to deport millions of immigrants instead of investors?
Because the rules of this land are the end result of waves of developments, over millennia, hard won through the observation of the cause and effect of policy on societies. I trust the effectiveness of American law on the basis of the success of the American Experiment. This very success is the draw that led me to leave my homeland and family and come here. So I'll go with American Law and legal system, rather than follow some reactionary duct-taped law some guy commenting on the internet says we should do.
American law is becoming third world like your home country now.
Enforcing racial purity laws is abuse? Why are you impeding the Gestapo, a federal law enforcement agency? Why do you hate law and order, dirty anarchist?
These are sad and dangerous times, you really should append the /s these because there are way too many people on HN who would take your comment and say 'he's one of us!'.
"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of [hackernews readers]: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
Resorting to goodwin is an admission that you have no better argument.
[flagged]
Get a warrant. The federal government should not be "soliciting vendors" for my location.
I love how the accounts defending ICE are always brand new.
[flagged]
German here, with little stakes in your shitshow. At no point during the obama years did I think:
"Wow this looks just like the rise of the nazis!"
Which was covered extensively during my history classes.
Why did you even have all the school schootings if you don't use that stupid second ammendmend thing you have? This is the tyranical government you've all been waiting for.
[flagged]
Perhaps "what you thought then and now" is the difference between those times more than "what happened then and now". With the former being largely influenced by "what your bubble told you then and now".
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
We don’t have good data because it’s illegal to, for example, ask citizenship status on our census, but if you believe the numbers many democrats cite, Obama deported more immigrants than Trump. You can use Google to verify that though I’ll warn you the rabbit hole runs deep when it comes to official statistics. Importantly, under Trump we have far more violent felons to deport. The media thrives on salacious and emotionally charged stories rather unbiased reporting based on nuanced facts. It’s the entertainment industry.
The recent tragedies are indeed thoroughly depressing for all of us, but we shouldn’t let our emotional reactions destroy our ability to reason and think objectively about history and statistics. We can feel and think. Some of us believe enforcement of laws is the villain in this. Some feel the laws themselves or the idea of borders and sovereignty are to blame. Others that a surge of violent criminals such as those who killed Jocylan Nungary or Laken Riley is the cause of the recent tragedies. None of these views are inherently evil. All of these views have some merit. Truth is manifold. Don’t be narrow minded, we need broad thinking not simplistic pathos driven dogmas and references to nazis. Grow up.
The number of deportations under obama was definitely higher, but he had only one concentration camp (guantanamo bay), and didn't use that for his own people.
Learn about the tolerance paradoxon, there is no negotiating, nuance and reasoning with fashists.
Your enlightened centrism is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Get educated.
If you are German, then you are probably blind to the similarities between current German politics and the Nazis, so this is not a good point of comparison.
Yeeeaaaah, I dunno if you wanna go there while the US is investing $100B in state sponsored ethnic cleansing, terrorism, and concentration camps. Glass houses, stones, etc.
Germany invests less than that, but Germany is a smaller country. I'm not sure how much it is per capita.
Which politics are you referring to? The AfD ("Alternative for Germany") who has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution? And which has heavy ties to trump, musk, and the current U.S. government?
Just because we currently have our own right wing populist faschists rearing their heads again, doesn't mean that the parallels of the current events in the US and the rise of the Nazis aren't real and glaring to someone who has had this as part of their basic education curriculum.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250503162240/https://www.verfa...
All parties of the government support and pay for ethnic cleansing in the middle east.
What does that have to do with the situation in the US? The situation in the middle east is completely orthogonal to that, and observing the rise of faschism there says nothing about my stance on the current german foreign policy in regards to the middle east.
If you want to know: In my personal opinion that conflict is fucked beyond repair because a small group of powerful people on both sides benefit from it, while a huge number of deep interpersonal conflicts and histories fuel it, with any moderates getting squashed by their own side. So I wouldn't send weapons, but I'd send humanitarian aid or the blue helmets. That whole region is thoroughly fucked beyond my pay grade.
But it's only Nazis if you disagree with them. After all, the whole point of drawing the comparison is to shut down any possibility for discussion and nuance - "people I don't like are just like the nazis so I don't need to treat those who who doesn't fully oppose them with any respect".
Again, I have little stakes in your shitshow besides the international meddling they do with our own faschist party.
This dualist thinking seems to be a particular US thing, based on your two party system.
I see the erosion of the rule of law and decency in the US, the persecution of minorities, the populism, the defamation of journalism as "lügenpresse" and alignment of media to the party line, the personal police force (what the fuck is ICE doing in Italy), the person cult around a single madman, the violence without consequence, the fancy SS/SA style cosplay uniform by the head of ICE, and I think "that looks a lot like the stuff we learned about in school".
> After all, the whole point of drawing the comparison [to Nazis] is to shut down any possibility for discussion and nuance
Another way of phrasing this is that it's a call to stop assuming good faith discussion on the part of the boosters, stop being derailed by pondering nuance, and focus on putting the brakes on the new Nazi movement. History doesn't repeat but we're teetering on the edge of a large-scale horrific rhyme. Regardless of one's preferred policies regarding immigration, there is zero justification for where we're at.
The ones who are exterminating a race are the nazis
Which race?
Palestinian
The jews are the Nazis now? Do you hear yourself?
Use your words, direwolf. Even if your moral outrage is valid, calling everyone you dislike a "Nazi" is unhinged.
Any race or group can be genocidal. What's so special about Israelis?
You can really tell which states actually fund their education programs by who understands this and who does not.
It's a disease and it is spreading, fast.
Reasonable comments engaging in discussions on HN are frequently downvoted and flagged by the hivemind, causing the account to be shadow banned (ie. any comment is immediately 'dead', invisible to others).
I make a new account at least every week to get around this. This is my only account. Don't like it? Encourage your comrades to engage in good faith and tolerate perspectives that they personally disagree with.
What? Where's the bad faith? You made a really dumb argument and got a simple factual response. And you still failed to engage with that response instead making up imaginary persecution.
>What? Where's the bad faith?
Downvoting my comment, flagging my comment, getting my account shadow banned (it might be already and you'll never see this comment...), while dismissing my comment because it's from a new account.
People can't have it both ways. Stop censoring civil comments that you disagree with, or stop complaining that people make new accounts to circumvent the censorship. Or, I guess, be honest enough to explicitly ban anyone from disagreeing with the hivemind and enjoy your echo chamber in peace.
No higher authority came in to block your speech. Your peers expressed disagreement with you. Where is the censorship?
Downvoting is not censorship. Nobody involved here is a mod or admin. I see you still haven't responded to the simple fact asserted in the original post though.
You had a chance to respond to the simple factual claims in this message and you still instead used your reply to hilariously claim down voting is censorship where there literally was no moderator involvement therefore literally nothing preventing you from responding. If you think downvoting is censorship why are you not on a website that doesn't have downvoting? You probably also think marriage between peoples of different countires is violent genocide given your hysterics in magnifying simple events into the dramatic and extreme.
I'm not the poster you replied to, but absolutely. Now personally I don't believe that this data should exist in the first place, but using it for law enforcement purposes is just very shilling and even worse than its "normal" use. I would think that someone with a fresh burner account would agree.
That implies a crime was committed. I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance. Getting a warrant from a judge is far better than ICE doing what they’re currently doing.
Unless of course that population wide surveillance pays $150k+/yr, with unlimited free snacks and gym membership, then all bets are off.
> I think you’ll find people on HN fairly unsupportive of population wide surveillance
Lately I'm not sure that's the case.
Exactly, more than enough bootlickers on here. Or actual boot wearers, as I just found out.
see:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46897536
You seem to be a bit scared of doing this all under your own name, comrade. But don't worry, we know exactly who you are.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> Not only that, but your profile clearly says you aren't even American. Maybe you should focus on your own politics, or things you understand, and not try to threaten people.
I'm not threatening anybody, I'm just pointing out that in the aggregate anonymity does not exist as told by TFA whereas the GP seems to believe it holds some weight. The only reason you are able to write your comment is simply because I'm not hiding.
You on the other hand are.
> I personally, am glad we have this, so I don't experience what I do when I go to Europe, and get a bunch of illegal Africans terrorizing people in front of police. Or let alone the no go zones.
Funny, that hasn't happened to me yet. What also hasn't happened to me yet is that I got shot in the face at a protest.
But: you are part of the problem, you believe you are part of the solution. The fact that you believe that you are part of the solution but you're not proud enough of it to do so under your own name tells the whole story. It's the equivalent of the mask of those ICE goons.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/
https://jacquesmattheij.com/trackers/
> I'm glad, to have spend most of my career in the government to stop these people coming in and terrorists. Which is why I can report, the US has a very low terror rate, especially when you look at foreign extremists, unlike other parts of the world.
That has something to do with two oceans and nothing at all with your efforts.
[flagged]
> I proudly stop terrorists, I proudly help law enforcement, and I proudly serve my country to make it the best in the world.
And you're proudly delusional.
But that's fine, stick your head in the sand and continue, you are so invested in this that the thought that you might be on the wrong side seems to scare you into flinging abuse and digging in deeper.
The USA is not 'the best in the world', not by a long shot. Witness the turd sitting in the half demolished White House that you serve.
> Anyways, I will be submitting a tip personally
Haha, so you are now threatening to take revenge on someone you've never met because they're calling you out for exactly that sort of thing. I don't think I could have asked for harder proof.
WTF dude, have you entirely lost it?
> Also, unless you're violating your visa and breaking American laws. You wouldn't have gotten shot in the face at a protest in America.
The women shot in the face by an ICE agent was not "violating her visa", nor was she violating American laws by being halted for a short time across a single lane with traffic passing her by.
She was given conflicting instructions by two agents, and was within her rights to leave as she did, slowly, carefully, when she was shot through the front and then through a side window by the same agent.
> I proudly stop terrorists, I proudly help law enforcement
These particular agents were a clown show textbook example of how not to behave .. you should be not be proud to associate with them.
As for American law - it's falling apart from the top: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/the-trump-doj-has...
The people shooting US citizens in the face and in the back are repeatedly in violation of judges orders.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> So, the government did an investigation
Not the state government, and the federal government is in the midst of not a investigation under the pretence of having one.
> But if you try to run over the police.
She did not. It's very clear that she did not.
Also .. ICE agents .. not "the police" - these were immigration agents overstepping their bounds.
See stories about breaking multiple judges orders.
[flagged]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgNnbTrsgw
Watch it.
Since i cant reply to your flagged comment above, ill do it here.
> And I gotta ask, you think it's just two oceans, and what your experience is in the intelligence community field? Are you just assuming without knowing the inner workings?
This depicts the distribution of refugees caused by iraq and afghan wars. Which, to remind you, were proudly based on lies.
> https://www.unhcr.org/news/press-releases/iraqis-afghans-and...
> As a region, Europe received 75 percent of all asylum applications although the United States remained the single largest recipient country with an estimated 13 percent of all applications
Are you still proud making the world a better place? Maybe you are too busy fighting terrorists to reply.
Are you implying that refugees are terrorists? Also, according to any refugee agreement, you go to the first country of safe harbor. Not across the world. Why can’t they go back now, make Iraq great?
Also, they arnt killing Americans anymore are they? We gave them everything we could. But the afghan army chose to just do drugs and do nothing and now their women can’t go to school and don’t have rights again.
No, im not implying that all refugees are terrorists. Just pointing out the obvious outcome of terror: people flee to savety.
There are still terror orgs seeking to destabilize the region, like israel or ISIS. Besides the destruction, thats at least one reason why you wouldnt want to go back.
But why can they stay? Maybe a familiy -- a life -- is a reason to stay too. Why is "why dont they go back" your initial reaction? Why do i have to remind you about that human element of migration? Are you implying all refugees are terrorists? Or are you a racist?
Id really would like to see your mind rn. How it tries to spin the convo to "but they are illegal aliens". Such a pitty that even you cant see it.
[flagged]
How many face military conflict?
Not sure what you mean. Joining the IDF is optional for Israeli Arabs.