This is about posting license plates (presumably not of personal vehicles), facial images, and names of federal officers.
I mean I thought we already make federal employees and vehicles public knowledge. The national guard currently deployed in Minneapolis are unmasked as far as I know to compare. I'm not understanding why DHS federal employees are exempt from this standard.
> I'm not understanding why DHS federal employees are exempt from this standard.
Because the aim of ICE is to terrorize local communities that either have a lot of immigrants/non-white people in general or that vote heavily Democrat like Minneapolis.
And terror doesn't work when you can reliably identify the terrorists and hold them accountable, or do the same to the terrorists as they dish out on their victims.
They don't magically gain more privacy protection in public over what your average person has just because they clock out after a hard day of work by virtue of being a government employee.
They are constantly and consistently reminded that people have the right to record in public and they chose to ignore that as there are no consequences if they violate the law. Or that people have a right to peacefully assemble. Or freedom of the press...
I agree they don't gain more privacy protection in public than the average person. I also agree they shouldn't gain more privacy protection in public than the average public employee, either!
I'm merely assuming that the license plates being listed are ones they use for their official work, since the rest of their info is being tied to what's available for any other public work.
If a law enforcement agency is so incredibly unpopular that they feel the need to hide their faces, they should not exist. Nobody likes LAPD, and they almost exclusively piss people off close to where they and their families live. Yet, no covering their faces.
ICE exclusively deals with targets who are not dangerous in of themselves (because when an illegal immigrant breaks other laws, the real cops respond), so they're not hiding their faces from them. They're hiding their faces from the general public, who, you might note, are the root of authority in a democracy. That is an unambiguous message that they are not acting in the best interest of the people, and should fuck off.
When I was growing up, cities weren't under siege from militarized Federal agencies hiding their faces and acting with no accountability because the state supports the opposition party, which is Democratic, certainly not communist.
What you suggest needs to happen is in violation of the Constitution and deeply un-American.
It is not possible to "dox" a public employee because that information is legally public information. Don't become a public employee if you want your job to be private.
All federal officers are at risk of being doxxed and their families being targeted. The national guard deployed currently has their faces uncovered to the public and no doubt have the same risk to them. Again, I don't understand how DHS is special in this regard. All credible threats to individual officers and their families should be pursued through the court of law exactly the same as threats to every other federal officer.
If I'm being dumb then please explain with stupid-speak to me.
> What would be different about these people if their faces were visible?
I mean, if you agree there's no difference, then we should prefer transparency? You're going to have to make the case for why they should cover their face, since the default for law enforcement for the last 200+ years has been to show their face.
I know y'all are holding your breath all day to wait for me to reply. If you wanted an actual discussion you would just reply and not downvote and flag.
> Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.
I 100% agree with this sentiment and that is why I strongly support speeding the asylum application process through redirecting immigration enforcement funding to bolstering the courts. Our backlog should be 0 before we start knocking door to door and stopping people for the suspicious behavior of being brown at Home Depot.
Yeah, I agree. The emphasis on expanded field enforcement is backwards. If millions of people are "illegal" primarily because they are stuck in multi-year backlogs, then the failure is in the court and asylum system, not in a lack of raids.
From a systems perspective, we're heavily funding the most expensive and disruptive part of the pipeline (identification and removal) while starving the part that actually resolves legal status (adjudication, asylum review, work authorization). Though maybe that's a feature of this administration, not a bug.
If the goal is public safety, prioritizing people who commit violent crimes makes sense. If the goal is restoring legal order, then yeah, the obvious first step is to drive the backlog toward zero. I don't think that's the administration's goal though.
I agree the administration's goal is not to restore legal order or even public safety. Hate makes you stupid. Hating a people makes you really stupid. I don't think it really has a goal, not even Project 2025 or whatever. It's too stupid. It's like a teenager breaking its own xbox because its gf didn't text it fast enough. Nonsensical anger directed towards random innocents.
I disagree others don't matter that much. Attention means influence. If your tears garner attention, you prove your influence. Those seeking to influence to their benefit will see your proof and react accordingly.
I am a non-h1b engineer and I declare it is in my best interest to advocate for h1-b engineers. Otherwise management would simply calculate why would they hire me and treat me well when they can hire a more desperate h1b holder and treat them like trash.
This sort of tracks for me. The smartest people I know as adults mostly fucked around a lot and had wide interests that all culminated in them doing a great thing greatly. The smartest people I know as kids spent hours grinding on something and crashed out in college and are mostly average well-to-dos now.
I'm reminded of a meme on Facebook my wife showed me that was a two-dimensional graph of SAT score vs. GPA. The corner with the highest SAT scores but the lowest GPAs was shaded in and labelled "These are the people I want to hang out with."
I'm not sure we should romanticize ADHD, which is what you call that region. If those people could be high SAT and high GPA they would prefer it. Signed, someone in that region.
Nah. There are plenty of intelligent students who don't have ADHD but are either lazy or rebellious enough to not care about conventional measures of academic success.
I annihilated the SATs. My grades were only good in high school because I was just "gifted" enough to get As without studying. I do not have and never had ADHD. I also never learned how to study.
I almost failed out of college. I didn't know how to study. I didn't have the habits. I sure had a lot of fun in high school and college though.
> In 1933, while overseeing the writing of Truppenführung, the manual for leading combined arms formations, Hammerstein-Equord made one of the most historically prescient observations on leadership. During the writing effort, he offered his personal view of officers, classifying them in a way only he could:
> “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”
I'm not actually sure that's true. Theres plenty of controversy now that books that are popular and beloved now are actually not very well written. I mean I've been hearing this complaint since Twilight was popular.
I haven't read Twilight, but I've read a few beloved and popular books that are atrociously written from a literary standpoint. That does not mean they are not popular for a reason.
One I did read, out of morbid curiosity, is 50 Shades. It's utter dreck in terms of writing quality. It's trite, it's full of clichees, and formulaic to the extreme (and incidentally a repurposed Twilight fanfic; if you wonder about the weird references to hunger, there's the reason), but if you look at why it became popular, you might notice that it is extremely well crafted for its niche.
If you don't want a "billionaire romance" (yes, this is a well defined niche; there's a reason Grey is described as one) melded with the "danger" of vampire-transformed-into-traumatised-man-with-a-dark-side, it's easy to tear it apart (I couldn't get all the way through it - it was awful along the axes I care about), but as a study in flawlessly merging two niches popular with one of the biggest book-buying demographics that have extremely predictable and rigid expectations, it's really well executed.
I'd struggle to accept it as art, but as a particular kind of craft, it is a masterpiece even if I dislike the craft in question.
You will undoubtedly find poorly executed dreck that is popular just because it happened to strike a chord out of sheer luck as well, but a lot of the time I tend to realise that if I look at something I dislike and ask what made it resonate with its audience, it turns out that a lot of it resonated with its audience because it was crafted to hit all the notes that specific audience likes.
At the same time, it's never been the case that great pieces of literature was assured doing well on release. Moby Dick, for example, only sold 3,000 copies during Melville's lifetime (makes me feel a lot better about the sales of my own novels, though I don't hold out any hope of posthumous popularity) and was one of his least successful novels when it was first published. A lot of the most popular media of the time is long since forgotten for good reason. And so we end up with a survivorship bias towards the past, where we see centuries of great classics that have stood the test of time and none of the dreck, and measure them up against dreck and art alike of contemporary media.
I think part of the problem is that social media is normalized and it is easy. It is way easier to engage socially (or at least you feel like you're engaging socially) with likes and lurking and stuff. It is way harder to put on pants and go out and it is normalized to do so (phrasing like bedrotting is super casual, whereas it is actually really hard to maintain an eating disorder because you have to be constantly hiding it from people).
Also I think there's more groups whose social norms online teach you to be repulsive offline and again there's not enough social pushback against it. We do need to be harder on casual edginess online because it is teaching habitual behaviors that make it hard to engage socially. Your 50 year old hiking buddy is not going to understand your soycuck joke you are trying to show him on your phone. Your average wine mom at women-only book club is not going to love if you insist on talking about banning trans people from the club because they're "men invading the women's spaces" especially when there's very likely 0 trans people to exclude in the first place on account of trans people being rare.
Lastly there is usually a ton of stuff happening but the instructions on how to engage with it is nebulous. People who know the algorithm find it easy, the people who don't know the algorithm find it super hard. And IDK how to solve that because there's so much going on in people's heads that they don't realize the people around them seriously aren't scrutinizing them that much. There's like a socialization death spiral where every small awkward interaction hurts way more when you don't have enough experience to know that the small awkward interactions are normal. So you can't tell someone "just go to book club" because they'll go, have 1 normal situation like mishearing someone and then decide they are so embarrassed they can never go to book club again-- but since it is so normal it happens at every social event and they end up lonely.
You actually bring up the biggest obstacle to my tentative idea for this Sunday, of holding up a sign that points to a time/place for a casual conversation with strangers. I thought this would be a good way to get very lonely passers-by out of their comfort zone and into a situation where they have a chance to make friends and bond, but the absolute diversity of interests is the main show stopper. My first thought was to essentially avoid sensitive topics on the poster, such as religion and politics, but it still leaves the huge diversity of potential common interests open. So I started doing some research on the most common hobbies that people have in cities and that can be talked about casually, in hopes of finding like 5 ot 6 to write on the sign to get people into the coffee shop.
I think people who seek out activities assume you actually have to be interested in the activity. No. You're there to socialize. The activity is just an excuse to have a positive experience with people. I play board games. Do I like board games? Meh. Do I like hanging out with people and talking about a board game, sure. The difference is important. This is why its a common joke to attend book club without having read the book. The book is literally just an excuse to gather.
Inquiry, since I know anti immigrant sentiment is on the rise in other countries. How are other countries increasing their enforcement of their immigration laws? Are there also chaotic situations where their immigration enforcers are shooting people in cars? Are there better ways for rising anti-immigrant sentiment to result in stricter enforcement with less violence?
India has been deporting immigrants to Bangladesh/Myanmar and this includes Indian Citizens, because there is no due process being followed and court orders are being regularly ignored.
> authorities forced another 40 Rohingya refugees into the sea near Myanmar, giving them life jackets and making them swim to shore
> the police raided his home, seized his mobile phone, and tore up his identity documents, which were proof of his (Indian) citizenship. They then flew him in a BSF plane (…) Sheikh said he was forced to cross into Bangladesh with eight others.
I remember threads about this on HN back when the CAA Bill first dropped - you saw much of the same concern trolling back then, as if nobody could see what the real intent behind it was.
Now that you're mentioning, I'm surprised that, even though in some corners anti-immigrant parties rose to governing, they are only doing legislation and stricter enforcing immigration and border protection rules - not appreciated by everybody of course but somehow understandable where they're coming from. Might be somebody else knows more, or has seen more, but my one data point is: no nothing like that was ever hinted from what I can tell. And I'm appalled.
I’m in the UK. There is strong anti-ILLEGAL-immigrant sentiment, because hundreds of thousands of undocumented men originating in Africa and the Middle East have illegally crossed the English Channel from France and then made asylum claims, meaning the UK taxpayer is forced (by treaty) to house them and feed them. These are quite evidently opportunists. A large proportion are young fighting-age men, and most are fleeing countries where there is no current conflict.
As a taxpayer in a cost of living crisis I resent seeing hotels full of these chancers.
And I don’t think women and girls are safe with them around, given the staggering sexual crime statistics
I'm from Russia. There's no such special department there, nor police shoots at anyone in a car. They do chase, then after some minutes, if nothing works, shoot at tires. There's no rule, nor drilling to shoot then think, nor to take a gun ASAP. There's no qualified immunity for police either. (Right-wing Russians, even die-hard Putin's supporters, in fact admire this side of the American police -- like "you don't stare at a policeman in America", they say.) The whole issue of detainees being shot -- that's not a problem there at all.
There is one department that's similar to ICE, the riot police called Rosgvardia (Russian Guard), which is anti-mass-protest force. When it was created, they hired all the normal police drop-outs, the worst. But they only carry batons.
The real issue with human rights in Russia is in courts and law application, and inside prisons, out of public eye.
Can confirm. Police will generally be quite gentle (even when they use weapons, they have to shoot a warning shot). Rosgvardia very likely will beat you up. Russian SWAT will for sure beat you up or shoot you.
Beating up and actual torturing may commence after you were apprehended.
But being shot during the ordinary police stoppage is not a wide-spread problem.
I want to agree with you, however, how do we guarantee that the people of Texas have recourse via their government? Didn't the Texas state government have national headlines recently to enact anti-democratic gerrymandering?
Correct, there is no recourse, they've used their 30 years of hard-core ideological Republican uni-party control to remove any possibility of opposition. Besides gerrymandering they're constantly attacking Houston's ability to self govern, kicking democrat voters off the rolls, making it harder for city residents to vote.
I mean I thought we already make federal employees and vehicles public knowledge. The national guard currently deployed in Minneapolis are unmasked as far as I know to compare. I'm not understanding why DHS federal employees are exempt from this standard.
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