Some context:

• https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36e41dx425o
• https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/03/02/how-border-apprehensions-ice-arrests-and-deportations-have-changed-under-trump/
• https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/immigration/3266633/biden-did-not-abolish-ice-not-problem-democratic-party/

The basic idea is, while Trump aims for very visible rhetoric to inflame his racist base, ICE’s presence has still gone up regardless of which president is taking the chair. In fact, Biden beat Trump’s deportation numbers (and I’m sure given his ego, he aims to inflate that further, and finds due process one of his obstacles).

One thing that can be said is that when ICE has been in the news, it was never visibly aiming for cruelty under Democratic presidents. But that’s also only accounting for the cases that we know about. And, the last article points out how even through a full term, Biden not only failed to address the growing worries of cruel behavior within ICE, but built them a new quarter-billion-dollar headquarters.

I mean, you have to go where the evidence takes you, even if you don’t like the results. The best thing you could perhaps say about Biden or Obama, was simply that any of their direct participation in border patrol activities followed rule of law.

Generally, CBP/ICE has stayed above much direct scrutiny or supervision, and if an individual doesn’t have reporters, lawyers, or family asking after them (sometimes even then) a lot can be hidden even from administration.

It’s very likely Trump did not do much to “push” ICE’s behavior, he just enabled them, and they reward him by threatening his direct opponents.

What might be scary is if America’s Auschwitz moment is revealed to be completely independent of administration. We’ve already heard many stories about ICE during each presidency, just that many details were hidden or unconfirmed.

It was the same way at the end of WW2. Even many Germans were aghast at what they’d been doing at the camps.

I remember the game Bully extended this take. The main character has no beef with the nerds, and helps them, but they still extend their victim complex to him and antagonize him.

Basically, it’s a problem with using the generalized word “people” in statements like that.

I’m going to warn you: There’s a lot that ICE and the administration have gotten away with because of people claiming “No way. Their actions would be too ridiculous if that’s what it was. There must be more to it.”

What we knew already even before scarce details emerged:

• Judges are extremely slow to take deliberate actions, to affirm their position as a fair arbiter that gives all sides chances to respond
• ICE has scarcely ever provided sufficient evidence for many of their arrests, including most of the high-profile ones
• The immigrants involved in this crime showed no indications of being violent or dangerous (even though ICE claimed they were)

So no, I don’t think ICE can be given benefit of doubt in this case. Every officer involved with this one can be arrested - and they can provide their argument when they go on trial.

I’m imagining something like being able to go to a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation. They wouldn’t be granted rights to record that information permanently, but would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.

This would rely on professional trust - that the people you show your info to will not record it; and, that if they for some reason have to, they won’t turn it over to warrants. By the same token, they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.

You’re right that someone engaging online long enough could be exposed. That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.

This is the one thing I hoped for out of crypto/blockchain.

You, commenter, don’t need to know that I’m “Brian Brianson, a citizen living at 123 Abenue Avenue”. But, it’s good to know that the person commenting is a real person who has been seen and verified by someone, as a simple true/false flag. If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details, then it could curb botnet opinionation as well as be useful for a lot of things.

Politics is a form of negotiation with other elements of leadership to make a nation’s major policy decisions.

Musk, you never DID get involved in politics. You hired a private army and got involved in criminal intimidation.

It’d be very curious if there was literally no country on the planet that permitted him entry. I was about to say Russia, but he’s only been useful as a pawn in the US to them.

I have heard that Obama supports breathing.

One of my frustrations is, if I want to try some dozen games on Itch.io, they all come down as EXEs and it’s not clear how I could quickly set them up for Proton. I understand the 20-clicks method of setting up one game off of Steam, and Lutris helps with well-known launchers like Ubi Connect. But for independent authors, needing to do setup for every EXE is a heavy dealbreaker.

I really want a better formalized framework for argument/discussion of a topic that either participant can feel safe in. Currently, we have courtrooms, our old schools have Debate Clubs, but I’d want something far easier to pick up on that allows for time to research/validate discussion points.

This reminds me of the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht. In short: No, not so many of them are victims and puppets.

There are some cases where people are pulled out of cults by exposure to outside opinions. Anyone among the Republicans that has frequently had that exposure, on some level (for instance, hearing arguments from Democratic senators prior to votes) agrees with and wants the destruction.

Hawaii was recently successful in enacting state laws to limit campaign contributions. I’d hope that other states willing to tackle the fight could do the same. The biggest chance would be if it could be done in battleground states.

I’ve wanted this for ages. And it’s represented so well in Republicans having only one platform: “Oppose Democrats. If it makes a Democrat angry, do it.”

Cleanse - and I mean CLEANSE - the opposition party. No one here can claim the Democrats never have good ideas. And yet, we can definitely do better than them. A better party means having better ideas - not just “Stop them libruls”. Bernie just toured the States with a message of exactly what that would look like.

“In power”? In a perfect world he’d never again be on this side of a prison cell!!

The horrific absurdity is that even Trump was beginning sentences with “Somebody should …” AFTER he became president.

They are too used to the conspiracy-theorist, “humble-truth-finder” mindset EVEN when they are at the top.

One place that there’s still a lot of defiance is from lawyers and judges. There’s still scary stories there about attorney intimidation and even surrender, but courts are often winning against him. Brian Cohen recently interviewed Marc Elias who resolved not to cater to threats, and even Chief Justice Roberts gave a warning to Trump over his attempts to use bullying instead of normal appellate process.

Aha! Just like my local food bank didn’t lose funding - it just didn’t receive its next funding installment! Good job on the useless pedantry, Batman!

It’s distressing how often the track of inventors has been overtaken by the plans of hyper-capitalists.

• Tesla cars were invented by Elon Musk Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who were then cut out by their investor to enshittify the interface.
• Keurig coffee pods were invented by a pair of roommates that wanted them to become recyclable so they wouldn’t cause so much waste.
• Blizzard used to make fun games, and is now bought out by people that don’t.

I still need to put out my big, long-form video promoting the Accountable Capitalism Act - something that could lead a large body of software devs at a big company to be present for the big-shift plans to, say, “Remove error messages from Windows!” and tell their bosses: Hell no. The same style of issue exists in many industries.