So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs.
It is genuinely unsettling. Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you. A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be. If the precedent is allowed to be set, there’s a good chance the power will be used against your cause in the future.
> Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you.
Words won't protect you. Precedent won't protect you. Guns won't protect you. If you are in a society where others want you surveiled or dead or removed or heavily restricted, and you're outnumbered, it's already too late. As you say, for many people already "Constitutional" is just a weapon to be wielded when it suits them and ignored when it doesn't. But the reason why that's bad needs to be much more than "because this piece of paper says so," it needs to be "because these are things we all agree are important."
Yes, absolutely. And what's changed is that we now have a massive number of people (on both sides) who no longer agree that these things are important, or at least who think that other things are more important - so much more important that "these things" (constitutional protections) can be circumvented when they get in the way of the "more important things".
Constitutional protections are largely running on institutional inertia at the moment. That's good - the institutions were supposed to do that - but it won't last forever.
just scare people enough and they will turn in their family members. Especially if you dress it up in being the right moral thing to do. we were so close during the lockdowns, one step away
Additionally, I find it a bit concerning that people are ok with violating one principle or right on the basis that it’s fighting against another violation.
If we identify A, B, C, and D as potential rights, and you and I agree on rights A and B, but we disagree on the principles of C and D, then it’s ok that my side violates your rights A and B because if we can’t agree on all of them, then you deserve none.
It’s the kind of thing that ensures that compromise, understanding, and legislation won’t happen by way of conversation or respectful debate, but instead by name calling and force.
Its always staggering to think people forget we only have a two party system. You'd think that would keep both parties in check from abusing their powers considering at some point the party you went after and did suspect things in order to win a few elections? Well, they're going to be back in power and what do you think they're going to do? The same thing you did.
I feel like we're currently in this death spiral where its just a never ending war to get the other parties people out of power by any means necessary. While the entire time, its the people who have to suffer through it and pick sides.
It appears the centrist moderate has evaporated from American politics - which to me was the last group of voters who kept both sides honest. There is no compromise either, its just a scorched earth approach now where nobody wins.
>I feel like we're currently in this death spiral where its just a never ending war to get the other parties people out of power by any means necessary. While the entire time, its the people who have to suffer through it and pick sides.
I feel ostracized by both sides. It's maddening. Earlier today someone asked if PBS was left leaning. How low have we come that we watch something like PBS looking for "Left" or "Right" leaning views to confirm our bias and not just watching it to be informed.
PBS news hour is pretty moderate IMHO. But still won't stop people from seeing a story that makes them feel bad and labeling it left or right.
I think it only means "only two parties to buy." They agree whenever the money says to and disagree about real issues that are distractions from what the money wants.
The problem is not a lack of meeting in the middle on culture war issues. The problem is that no one is even allowed to oppose the money. Not really. And when they try to, they're not considered "centrist moderates," but "far right" or "far left."
In my experience on social media, this sort of thinking is typically classified as "both sidesing" (or an assertion of "false equivalence", etc etc etc), and is considered to be highly inappropriate.
And the people that say these things are often otherwise clearly intelligent, it is less common on HN perhaps, but certainly not uncommon.
Is the real split in this country between liberals and conservatives?
Or is about whether the political contest we observe is mostly genuine or mostly constructed?
Are we watching UFC or WWF?
UFC gives the impression of an authentic contest with real outcomes while WWF is generally understood and portrayed as a form of theater. People who identify in the liberal cluster tend to take the media narratives quite seriously, and despise people who show suspicion of popular media. They call them "conspiracy theorists" pejoratively.
The conservative cluster types are more widely ranging. Many have no objection to individual freedom and expression around things like abortion, drugs, or sexuality because they believe in individual freedom and responsibility: you can do what you like until it harms others AND it isn't my job to help you execute or recover from whatever silly thing you choose to undertake, I can do it if I choose.
This is likely the dominant conservative ideology, and yet it is virtually never portrayed in the media. What we see instead of a paternalistic Christianity presented as conservativism.
Perhaps that is why conservatives tend to distrust the media?
It seems to me that there may have been some sort of a strange, unrealized cultural change in Americans over the last few decades. I seem to recall that the abstract notion of freedom of speech/assembly/etc was considered a VERY big deal by all or at least most Americans. However, this seems to have morphed into people now holding most of their ideological beliefs at specific concrete, object level issue level.
Assuming there is some truth to this, the rise of the internet and a daily deluge of culture war content seems like it could easily explain the transformation.
IMO it's because everyone is in a panic about the other side. One side believes that the other side is "grooming and sterilizing children" while the other side believes that they are working to "replace democracy with fascism". In turn both sides get more extreme and work each other more into a frenzy as extremists on each side will in fact say outrageous shit. Abstract values like "free speech" get lost in the war.
Edit: even on here we have a comment openly calling for fascism (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35950813) and I'm sure others attacking the Christian roots of US society in comments here makes people on the other side who see that as the core of their value system feel equally threatened.
You have highlighted the core basis of Foucault's Boomarang: it doesn't matter the target of oppresive technologies and practices. Sooner or later, their scope will be turned on you.
Unfortunately, we are about 10 lines into that, and the election of 1 president and 1 key turn from the rest.
To emphasize this, if Facebook knows who practically everyone is in the US (indirectly or directly), then sure as fucking hell the government does. All it takes is one guy that wants to do the McCarthy "unAmerican" bullshit and has enough to do it and the US Government will know EXACTLY who to target.
> If the precedent is allowed to be set, there’s a good chance the power will be used against your cause in the future.
I've become deeply cynical about this argument. The Constitution is a weapon, used by the powerful against the powerless. I think it's pretty clear that in many cases the Supreme Court decides cases on purely ideological grounds, then goes back and creates post hoc justifications from precedent and the text.
Public opinion is useless here - it doesn't matter whether people are "OK" with something. What will you do, elect a new Supreme Court?
It is because my side is made up only of good virtuous people who really want to do what's best and only want the power to do good things, and the other side is full of evil horrible people that want to bring about oppression and sadness my favorite media outlet proved it.
Even with a constitutional convention, you still need 3/4 of the states (38 of them) to ratify anything, which I don't think is feasible today. Hell, I'm not even sure the delegates to a hypothetical constitutional convention could even agree enough on what to propose for ratification.
I don't think my political enemies need any kind of precedent to piss on my rights. If one doesn't exist before they take power, they'll happily establish it.
> abortion protesters have a habit of assassinating doctors that perform abortions
What’s the prevalence of this occurring? Wikipedia calls out 7 in the US [0] with the most recent in 2015. This this seems like profiling protesters as assassins is about as rational as profiling members of a certain religion as terrorists.
What's interesting about this branch in the discussion is that assassinating anyone and firebombing anything are illegal criminal acts. The underlying reason should not matter to anyone. We already have laws to deal with this.
The problem surfaces when one ideological faction is in power and chooses not to apply the laws --or be lenient-- to people who happen to be on their side of ideological spectrum.
That's what drives a society into what is sometimes referred to as "banana republic" territory. Tolerating this behavior does not result in regulating society towards good outcomes. It's a feedback loop that gets more and more extreme with time. This is not how you build a society where people with different ideas can coexist in peace.
The abortion debate is tough, and agreement --or a middle ground-- may never be reached. However, criminal behavior from any faction in the spectrum of ideas on this topic should not be tolerated at all. It should be punished to the full extent of current law, regardless of who is in power and who might be committing the criminal acts. And, more importantly, those in power --and the media-- must publicly and clearly characterize all criminal acts for what they are.
In this case, the relevant fact is pro-abortion protestors have a habit of firebombing things.
> Twitter, alerted a federal law enforcement agency to pro-abortion protests and rallies in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.
> A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be.
When I was young, due to my family's business, I lived in multiple cultures outside of the US. I have personally experienced precisely the kind of political shift you mention in your post as a teenager, living in Argentina. I am referring to the military take-over.
Imagine a world where the police or military thugs can kick down your front door in the middle of the night and take some or all of your family, never to be seen again. Imagine a world where, rock and roll was declared illegal and you could be arrested, tortured or worse if found "guilty" --not by a jury, by a single thug-- of anything remotely associated with it. Or how about being in a bus going somewhere, the bus gets pulled over and they beat the shit out of a bunch of people, just because they can (and justify it in some form).
If you were known to not be in alignment with the prevailing ideology your life was worth nothing. Thousands died. Thousands disappeared.
I had the personal experience one evening of getting pulled over by a couple of police cars while just walking home with friends after going to the movies. They threw us (and I do mean threw us, violently) up against the wall, harassed the shit out of us, slapped a couple of us around, took whatever money we had and sent us on our way. We were LUCKY that it didn't go beyond that.
Americans are alarmingly ignorant of history outside their own borders. Our system of education is so one-sided, in an ideological sense, that kids leaving high school, and, in particular, college, become adults with truly distorted and troubling ideological programming.
You talk to ANY immigrant who came from anywhere where the ideologies promoted by our universities and mass media are the "law of the land" and you are far more likely to get a treatise on how horrific this is rather than enthusiastic support for it. This ideology has proven to be a generational disaster across the world and across time. And yet, we, collectively, have allowed this to happen.
> So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs.
This is a major point that, once again, isn't taught in schools. The consequences will not be favorable over the long term. The idea that you should protect the rights of those you do not agree with is so fundamentally unique that it is rare, very rare, around the world. The US, in that sense, was unique. I say "was" because, today, I believe this is history. The fact that university students will riot when someone their puppeteers do not agree with comes to give a presentation at their school is evidence enough of the intolerant society we have manage to "educate" ourselves into.
In this twisted world, the reality is that those espousing such things as tolerance, equity, freedoms, etc. actually, through their actions, actually do the opposite and represent the opposite: intolerance, non-equity, a desire and willingness to curtail freedoms, etc.
We have managed to create an entire generation of adults full of hatred and intolerance.
This is not a good outcome. This is the kind of thing that, in the chess game of a globally competitive world, your enemies absolutely rejoice about. While the US is busy polarizing its own population --alarmingly, through education-- actors around the world spend ever day placing one foot in front of the other. The result of this massive lack of foresight will not be pretty.
> It is genuinely unsettling.
Yes. I'll add, scary, disappointing, unproductive and dangerous. I do realize that a good percentage of the HN college-educated audience is in the grips of ideology that was pounded into their heads. It's Plato's Allegory of the Cave. All you can do is try to lead them out of the shadows. Yet, they have to be the ones open to viewing the world with their own eyes, rather than the shadows they were presented with.
I would highly recommend watching a series on Netflix:
"BREAK IT ALL: The History of Rock in Latin America"
One of the very interesting things about this series is that they actually explore the political shifts you hinted at in your comment. They, of course, cover this in the context of Rock, but also provide a generalized view. This kind of thing has happened in nearly every Latin American country. It is disturbing that Americans don't know this history well. If they did, many of the political actors and most of the militant academics in this country would be laughed off the stage. There is HISTORY to prove that these people are not only demented, they are actually dangerous to society.
> I do realize that a good percentage of the HN college-educated audience is in the grips of ideology that was pounded into their heads.
That stereotypes / strawpersons and dismisses everyone with a different perspective before they even speak (and yet complain about polarization). That's a good sign that you have no idea what they're talking about, not being exposed to other points of view.
The oppression you discuss has long existed in the US: There are groups of people in the US that have long suffered the same treatment you did with police, such as Black people; that's the source of the term 'black lives matter' - it's saying 'our lives actually matter like everyone else's; you can't just take them with impunity'. Now New York officials can summarily declare someone to have mental illness and involuntarily detain them - one person was murdered and much of the country praises the murderer. LGBTQ people are widely denied rights and are subject to lawless attacks and abuse, including by government. Dissenting and critical views are outlawed in many public arenas, such as schools, across large parts of the country.
It's that oppression that many people in colleges and elsewhere are working hard to change. You are actually on the same side, if you wouldn't let the reactionaries (who are simply anti-liberal) divide you - that's how they hold on to their oppressive power.
> While the US is busy polarizing its own population --alarmingly, through education-- actors around the world spend ever day placing one foot in front of the other. The result of this massive lack of foresight will not be pretty.
This is how it's always been, it's not new. Just look at the 1960's in America. I'm also not even sure how much of it's the systems in question and how much is the people in question using extreme confirmation bias to polarize themselves, in some cases.
Much of this is the age of the people in question, IMO. Whether they're at college or diver deeper into some social media, youth (late teens and early twenties) is when radicalization happens, whether they're been taught be an institution or not. That leads me to believe that while institutions may be part of the problem, there's something larger that goes on at that age which many different competing interests capitalize on to their own benefit.
Edit: That said, while it's not new, it does appear to be cyclical, and I'm not going to argue against it seeming to have a resurgence.
I don't find scraping publicly accessible data nearly as bad as when they circle planes over protests and track people. Not just the marshals service, but FBI[1] and even the US Air Force[2], etc. A prime example of this was during the riots in Kenosha, WI in 2020, and the subsequent trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. A good deal of the footage they used in the trial was from the FBI surveillance plane[3], and they supplied low resolution footage, but had all persons involved clearly marked and tracked. What they actually have is much clearer than what they provided to the lawyers under subpoena. Combine that with cell phone data, and trackers they manually place on "suspects" and their cars[4].
While I agree with some others here that the idea of the government watching public tweets is generally fine, I think the concern here is that there's various legal restrictions on how the government can conduct surveillance, and by using a willing private company to do the surveillance instead, they can avoid oversight and bypass some (most? all?) of those restrictions.
Another concern is the perverse incentives setup by private surveillance tech like this, where you very easily get into ShotSpotter situations where the ability to deliver perceived value to the government is more important that not fabricating evidence to ruin people's lives: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...
I know Palantir will work with your data, but do they also offer any sources of data themselves? If so, this sounds more or less the same as that (or at least that part of their offerings).
I'm very ignorant of the legal context for this sort of thing, so I really don't know if it'd be trivial (legally) for the government to try to get this information themselves.
As an analogy, I think this is (ethically) similar to parallel construction. But rather than hide the illegal activity outright, you tunnel it through a private company. That way you get the same derived value as you would if you had broken the law to do it for yourself, but without the law breaking. I guess something like Room 641A is the best of both worlds.
Bulk, high-resolution activity tracing by the government should be illegal. There is no justification for employing warfare-grade surveillance as standard operational protocol for non-combatant citizens. There is no basis for collecting and examining such data in search of criminality.
Results are highly subject to political whimsy. The government is inadvertently creating a platform for turn-key intimidation and extortion. The individuals broadly identified and targeted are those who are least likely to be engaged in crime.
This is the wrong approach. It is time to force our leadership back to the drawing board to identify and develop more sound approaches.
They keep going back to the drawing board and coming up with 2 cases:
1. Bulk surveillance for pattern recognition
2. Breaking cryptography so they can go directly to the source/plaintext
Perhaps we need to figure out some other ways to make the population resistant to crime. For example reducing poverty and increasing opportunity often leads to reduced crime, why not spend billions on pursuing lasting changes on that front?
It's not exactly unusual that people consider too-detailed and/or large scale attention paid to technically public things "spying" or similar to it. E.g. if the government were to have agents follow members of a group anywhere and watching their homes, without breaking into private spaces, that'd probably be labeled as such too. Even though they are just collecting publicly visible information and report "Mr Smith is getting close to the court house. Mrs Smith spoke to the lawyer again." Social media just makes automating that a lot easier.
Can someone explain the legal theory that diffentiates using something like Dataminr to monitor tweets vs simply having an army of agents manually searching for them? I agree that it feels like the scale of the former makes it different, but is there a principled reason why that is the case?
The legal choices and mechanisms we have are based on built in assumptions about how easy and expensive something is, and this is especially true for monitoring of public spaces. The decision to say that stuff you say/do in public can be monitored without oversight was made when that would be fairly rare accidentally or require a lot of resources to deliberately use. If we suddenly find ourselves in a world where every single public moment can be recorded and surveilled, the risk to rights is much large for the same state interest. So with the balance shifted, the legal decision could shift.
The law (thankfully) is not some hard coded machine that follows cold logic ignoring all context. (Good) judges are able to look at changes in context and recognize that the underlying factors have shifted and so change rulings.
You are entitled to privacy even for certain public situations. Even if you can see through a window, the government can't go training telescopes inside your home without a warrant. It's an active battle for things like location data.
I don't know, but Congress passed legislation to prevent the digitization of gun records. So they have massive paper files and a small set of agents to match guns to crimes.
You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually.
My reasoning is the latter requires significant resources thus agencies would exercise discretion in what they monitor. With automated systems they can monitor larger swaths of people without much effort at all.
I think the contrast is supposed to be the difference between always monitoring people who post about protesting FOR X and/or protesting AGAINST X versus searching for posts of people who were near some incident related to some protesting or some crime. It is similar to the geo-fence search warrants that were recently discussed here.
tl;dr: I see it as the difference between using search tools to monitor for potential suspects vs search tools to implicate already identified suspects.
I'm struggling to understand the outrage here. It's quite possible I'm missing the point and am open to being educated, but what's being described here is essentially running data analysis tools on the public postings people are making on Twitter right?
Everything described in the anecdotes, unless I missed it, was basically someone going on Twitter, a global media platform designed to convey your postings to a mass audience, and then reading the things people wrote. Right?
I can think of a variety of things that could have been done after that which would be bad, oppressive things. But are they alleging that?
The headline here is "U.S. Marshals spied..."
Did they? Like if I post something WITH THE VISIBILITY SET TO PUBLIC VISIBLE BY EVERYONE WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION EVEN NON-LOGGED IN PEOPLE and then someone reads it, then I can claim someone is spying on me?
That's true. It would be more appropriate if the headline was "U.S. Marshals stalked Abortion Protesters" or "U.S. Marshals are creeping Abortion Protesters out".
People don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate.
How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?
I mean, it's all public information, right?
How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?
I get the concept. But there's a pretty obvious difference between just sitting in my home and going to work and posting on a global media platform that is literally intended to reach every other living human as its core reason for existing.
The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them.
Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something.
1) I would at least have a chance of knowing about it, and could lodge a complaint with the relevant agency, or take them to court, if necessary. This may not work, but there's at least some level of recourse and accountability.
2) The chilling issue is that of mass surveillance. The kind of surveillance you describe is time- and resource-intensive, and doesn't scale. If agencies can collect and analyze data on a vast number of people with a few clicks of a mouse, that's a danger to everyone's freedom.
From the article, "the agency had cast such a broad surveillance net that large volumes of innocuous First Amendment-protected activity regularly got swept up as potential security threats."
This is funded by unlimited federal deficit spending. Let's reduce their budgets.
I was going through the white house proposed budget this weekend and there are more than a few call outs (10-20%) that seem superfluous or like they should be handled by private industries as they seem constrained to benefit those private businesses.
Government money also tends to raise all ships^H^H^H^H^Hprices, so many of the social welfare programs - tuition and home buying loans and assistance, for example - have had the effect of raising prices to the point that most people couldn’t afford them without that assistance. That seems like a good indicator that the program has lost its purpose and should be scrapped for a new idea. Getting rid of those would be immediately deflationary for several sectors (good, imho).
As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments and reducing inflation than a great deal of what public money is being spent on.
> As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments
Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers.
Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing.
“Ontario opportunities fund
You can help reduce Ontario's debt by completing this area to donate some or all of your 2022 tax refund to the Ontario opportunities fund. Please see the provincial pages for details. ”
Saying that the government is spending too much money is such a triviality. The facts are that there is no serious appetite in U.S. politics today to reduce law enforcement budgets[0], and that reducing the budget of the U.S. Marshals would be unlikely to stop them from using these tools (which they see as a less expensive way to accomplish their objectives).
If you want to stop this kind of surveillance, your best bet is to advocate that it be illegal, with accountability. You can also advocate for a reduced budget, but it's not going to get you very far. If anything, it would tend to lead to more use of this kind of tool.
[0]- There are some agitators on the fringes of both parties for specific reductions to parts of law enforcement that those agitators have a problem with. Whether correct or not, the fact is that these are two disjoint proposals from elements that have no interest in compromising with each other. Neither proposal covers the U.S. Marshals, and neither is going to amount to anything at the federal level.
> advocate that it be illegal, with accountability
I am interested in how that would work on an individual basis, as feds have to agree to be sued and lawsuits typically need to show specific harm. USSC doctrine of qualified immunity knee-caps accountability.
The police are allowed to "surveil" protected speech, unless you want to ban them from reading the newspaper.
I really don't see the issue. This is information people knowingly release to the public, so the cops are not spying on anyone. A protest is a potential security threat, which is why the cops always show up. I see no evidence this information was abused to try to prevent people from expressing their opinions. What am I supposed to be upset about?
Also, as you very well know, the large majority of the Federal budget goes to social services like healthcare and social security. The entire DoJ budget is a drop in the ocean. Slashing federal budgets will do nothing to eliminate this sort of program but will result in Granny living on the street.
I think we need a term for 'taking public information and deriving nondisclosed information from it'. It isn't really spying, but it's more than just access.
It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, but I think a lot of the debate here is just people arguing the semantics of what's going on.
The cost of adding irrelevant data to relevant data is minuscule. Trying to use a "Rod from God" that is the deficit spending limit to set a finishing nail will only destroy the entire city.
A lot of other more important things would get cut before the marshals felt the squeeze (c.f. other current events like what NYC does with the police and what they cut in order to have more cops)
That's correct. It's a longer term, monster cultural problem in the US.
We're spending plenty of money to have the nice things our society should have (eg universal guaranteed healthcare; better public transportation), and we're spending it wrong (eg paying way too much for healthcare) and or in many of the wrong places (eg the decades-long war on drugs and its consequences).
Nobody does inefficient government spending (and general spending, our consumers are fiscal idiots too) like the US. We spend more and get less for it than any affluent peer nation.
Then follow the law and penalize already illegal misuse or already illegal collection of data. Any administration that says it’s for civil rights cannot also be for mass surveillance.
Readit News
It is genuinely unsettling. Personally, I don’t care about the underlying thing the protests are about, the important aspect is that if you allow unconstitutional government action like this, eventually it will be used against you. A decade from now we have no idea what the political climate will be. If the precedent is allowed to be set, there’s a good chance the power will be used against your cause in the future.
Words won't protect you. Precedent won't protect you. Guns won't protect you. If you are in a society where others want you surveiled or dead or removed or heavily restricted, and you're outnumbered, it's already too late. As you say, for many people already "Constitutional" is just a weapon to be wielded when it suits them and ignored when it doesn't. But the reason why that's bad needs to be much more than "because this piece of paper says so," it needs to be "because these are things we all agree are important."
Constitutional protections are largely running on institutional inertia at the moment. That's good - the institutions were supposed to do that - but it won't last forever.
Deleted Comment
If we identify A, B, C, and D as potential rights, and you and I agree on rights A and B, but we disagree on the principles of C and D, then it’s ok that my side violates your rights A and B because if we can’t agree on all of them, then you deserve none.
It’s the kind of thing that ensures that compromise, understanding, and legislation won’t happen by way of conversation or respectful debate, but instead by name calling and force.
It's as if they never heard of or disagree with the sentiment of the ninth amendment . . .
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-9/
Dead Comment
I feel like we're currently in this death spiral where its just a never ending war to get the other parties people out of power by any means necessary. While the entire time, its the people who have to suffer through it and pick sides.
It appears the centrist moderate has evaporated from American politics - which to me was the last group of voters who kept both sides honest. There is no compromise either, its just a scorched earth approach now where nobody wins.
I feel ostracized by both sides. It's maddening. Earlier today someone asked if PBS was left leaning. How low have we come that we watch something like PBS looking for "Left" or "Right" leaning views to confirm our bias and not just watching it to be informed.
PBS news hour is pretty moderate IMHO. But still won't stop people from seeing a story that makes them feel bad and labeling it left or right.
I think it only means "only two parties to buy." They agree whenever the money says to and disagree about real issues that are distractions from what the money wants.
The problem is not a lack of meeting in the middle on culture war issues. The problem is that no one is even allowed to oppose the money. Not really. And when they try to, they're not considered "centrist moderates," but "far right" or "far left."
And the people that say these things are often otherwise clearly intelligent, it is less common on HN perhaps, but certainly not uncommon.
Or is about whether the political contest we observe is mostly genuine or mostly constructed?
Are we watching UFC or WWF?
UFC gives the impression of an authentic contest with real outcomes while WWF is generally understood and portrayed as a form of theater. People who identify in the liberal cluster tend to take the media narratives quite seriously, and despise people who show suspicion of popular media. They call them "conspiracy theorists" pejoratively.
The conservative cluster types are more widely ranging. Many have no objection to individual freedom and expression around things like abortion, drugs, or sexuality because they believe in individual freedom and responsibility: you can do what you like until it harms others AND it isn't my job to help you execute or recover from whatever silly thing you choose to undertake, I can do it if I choose.
This is likely the dominant conservative ideology, and yet it is virtually never portrayed in the media. What we see instead of a paternalistic Christianity presented as conservativism.
Perhaps that is why conservatives tend to distrust the media?
Assuming there is some truth to this, the rise of the internet and a daily deluge of culture war content seems like it could easily explain the transformation.
Edit: even on here we have a comment openly calling for fascism (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35950813) and I'm sure others attacking the Christian roots of US society in comments here makes people on the other side who see that as the core of their value system feel equally threatened.
It is waaaay too easy to idealized past while ignoring what was actually happening.
Is this unconstitutional? I was wondering what case law there is about the government buying data like this.
Probably not.
Unfortunately, we are about 10 lines into that, and the election of 1 president and 1 key turn from the rest.
To emphasize this, if Facebook knows who practically everyone is in the US (indirectly or directly), then sure as fucking hell the government does. All it takes is one guy that wants to do the McCarthy "unAmerican" bullshit and has enough to do it and the US Government will know EXACTLY who to target.
I've become deeply cynical about this argument. The Constitution is a weapon, used by the powerful against the powerless. I think it's pretty clear that in many cases the Supreme Court decides cases on purely ideological grounds, then goes back and creates post hoc justifications from precedent and the text.
Public opinion is useless here - it doesn't matter whether people are "OK" with something. What will you do, elect a new Supreme Court?
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As with so many american issues, just amend the fucking constitution!
I swear this country needs to stop everything and do a constitutional convention (can be done, never be done before).
Even with a constitutional convention, you still need 3/4 of the states (38 of them) to ratify anything, which I don't think is feasible today. Hell, I'm not even sure the delegates to a hypothetical constitutional convention could even agree enough on what to propose for ratification.
What’s the prevalence of this occurring? Wikipedia calls out 7 in the US [0] with the most recent in 2015. This this seems like profiling protesters as assassins is about as rational as profiling members of a certain religion as terrorists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence
The problem surfaces when one ideological faction is in power and chooses not to apply the laws --or be lenient-- to people who happen to be on their side of ideological spectrum.
That's what drives a society into what is sometimes referred to as "banana republic" territory. Tolerating this behavior does not result in regulating society towards good outcomes. It's a feedback loop that gets more and more extreme with time. This is not how you build a society where people with different ideas can coexist in peace.
The abortion debate is tough, and agreement --or a middle ground-- may never be reached. However, criminal behavior from any faction in the spectrum of ideas on this topic should not be tolerated at all. It should be punished to the full extent of current law, regardless of who is in power and who might be committing the criminal acts. And, more importantly, those in power --and the media-- must publicly and clearly characterize all criminal acts for what they are.
> Twitter, alerted a federal law enforcement agency to pro-abortion protests and rallies in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, according to documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.
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When I was young, due to my family's business, I lived in multiple cultures outside of the US. I have personally experienced precisely the kind of political shift you mention in your post as a teenager, living in Argentina. I am referring to the military take-over.
Imagine a world where the police or military thugs can kick down your front door in the middle of the night and take some or all of your family, never to be seen again. Imagine a world where, rock and roll was declared illegal and you could be arrested, tortured or worse if found "guilty" --not by a jury, by a single thug-- of anything remotely associated with it. Or how about being in a bus going somewhere, the bus gets pulled over and they beat the shit out of a bunch of people, just because they can (and justify it in some form).
If you were known to not be in alignment with the prevailing ideology your life was worth nothing. Thousands died. Thousands disappeared.
I had the personal experience one evening of getting pulled over by a couple of police cars while just walking home with friends after going to the movies. They threw us (and I do mean threw us, violently) up against the wall, harassed the shit out of us, slapped a couple of us around, took whatever money we had and sent us on our way. We were LUCKY that it didn't go beyond that.
Americans are alarmingly ignorant of history outside their own borders. Our system of education is so one-sided, in an ideological sense, that kids leaving high school, and, in particular, college, become adults with truly distorted and troubling ideological programming.
You talk to ANY immigrant who came from anywhere where the ideologies promoted by our universities and mass media are the "law of the land" and you are far more likely to get a treatise on how horrific this is rather than enthusiastic support for it. This ideology has proven to be a generational disaster across the world and across time. And yet, we, collectively, have allowed this to happen.
> So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs.
This is a major point that, once again, isn't taught in schools. The consequences will not be favorable over the long term. The idea that you should protect the rights of those you do not agree with is so fundamentally unique that it is rare, very rare, around the world. The US, in that sense, was unique. I say "was" because, today, I believe this is history. The fact that university students will riot when someone their puppeteers do not agree with comes to give a presentation at their school is evidence enough of the intolerant society we have manage to "educate" ourselves into.
In this twisted world, the reality is that those espousing such things as tolerance, equity, freedoms, etc. actually, through their actions, actually do the opposite and represent the opposite: intolerance, non-equity, a desire and willingness to curtail freedoms, etc.
We have managed to create an entire generation of adults full of hatred and intolerance.
This is not a good outcome. This is the kind of thing that, in the chess game of a globally competitive world, your enemies absolutely rejoice about. While the US is busy polarizing its own population --alarmingly, through education-- actors around the world spend ever day placing one foot in front of the other. The result of this massive lack of foresight will not be pretty.
> It is genuinely unsettling.
Yes. I'll add, scary, disappointing, unproductive and dangerous. I do realize that a good percentage of the HN college-educated audience is in the grips of ideology that was pounded into their heads. It's Plato's Allegory of the Cave. All you can do is try to lead them out of the shadows. Yet, they have to be the ones open to viewing the world with their own eyes, rather than the shadows they were presented with.
I would highly recommend watching a series on Netflix:
"BREAK IT ALL: The History of Rock in Latin America"
https://www.netflix.com/title/81006953
One of the very interesting things about this series is that they actually explore the political shifts you hinted at in your comment. They, of course, cover this in the context of Rock, but also provide a generalized view. This kind of thing has happened in nearly every Latin American country. It is disturbing that Americans don't know this history well. If they did, many of the political actors and most of the militant academics in this country would be laughed off the stage. There is HISTORY to prove that these people are not only demented, they are actually dangerous to society.
That stereotypes / strawpersons and dismisses everyone with a different perspective before they even speak (and yet complain about polarization). That's a good sign that you have no idea what they're talking about, not being exposed to other points of view.
The oppression you discuss has long existed in the US: There are groups of people in the US that have long suffered the same treatment you did with police, such as Black people; that's the source of the term 'black lives matter' - it's saying 'our lives actually matter like everyone else's; you can't just take them with impunity'. Now New York officials can summarily declare someone to have mental illness and involuntarily detain them - one person was murdered and much of the country praises the murderer. LGBTQ people are widely denied rights and are subject to lawless attacks and abuse, including by government. Dissenting and critical views are outlawed in many public arenas, such as schools, across large parts of the country.
It's that oppression that many people in colleges and elsewhere are working hard to change. You are actually on the same side, if you wouldn't let the reactionaries (who are simply anti-liberal) divide you - that's how they hold on to their oppressive power.
Edit: Some revision
This is how it's always been, it's not new. Just look at the 1960's in America. I'm also not even sure how much of it's the systems in question and how much is the people in question using extreme confirmation bias to polarize themselves, in some cases.
Much of this is the age of the people in question, IMO. Whether they're at college or diver deeper into some social media, youth (late teens and early twenties) is when radicalization happens, whether they're been taught be an institution or not. That leads me to believe that while institutions may be part of the problem, there's something larger that goes on at that age which many different competing interests capitalize on to their own benefit.
Edit: That said, while it's not new, it does appear to be cyclical, and I'm not going to argue against it seeming to have a resurgence.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zvwj/military-fbi-flying-s...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/air-force-surveillance-p...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/03/us/kyle-rittenhouse-trial/ind...
[4] https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/mysterious-p...
It doesn’t seem that there was any intimidation of peaceful protesters, which obviously would be concerning.
What - if any - is the difference between a riot and a protest?
Another concern is the perverse incentives setup by private surveillance tech like this, where you very easily get into ShotSpotter situations where the ability to deliver perceived value to the government is more important that not fabricating evidence to ruin people's lives: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...
I know Palantir will work with your data, but do they also offer any sources of data themselves? If so, this sounds more or less the same as that (or at least that part of their offerings).
I'm very ignorant of the legal context for this sort of thing, so I really don't know if it'd be trivial (legally) for the government to try to get this information themselves.
As an analogy, I think this is (ethically) similar to parallel construction. But rather than hide the illegal activity outright, you tunnel it through a private company. That way you get the same derived value as you would if you had broken the law to do it for yourself, but without the law breaking. I guess something like Room 641A is the best of both worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Results are highly subject to political whimsy. The government is inadvertently creating a platform for turn-key intimidation and extortion. The individuals broadly identified and targeted are those who are least likely to be engaged in crime.
This is the wrong approach. It is time to force our leadership back to the drawing board to identify and develop more sound approaches.
1. Bulk surveillance for pattern recognition
2. Breaking cryptography so they can go directly to the source/plaintext
Perhaps we need to figure out some other ways to make the population resistant to crime. For example reducing poverty and increasing opportunity often leads to reduced crime, why not spend billions on pursuing lasting changes on that front?
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The law (thankfully) is not some hard coded machine that follows cold logic ignoring all context. (Good) judges are able to look at changes in context and recognize that the underlying factors have shifted and so change rulings.
You are entitled to privacy even for certain public situations. Even if you can see through a window, the government can't go training telescopes inside your home without a warrant. It's an active battle for things like location data.
You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually.
Not sure how that would be achieved since you can make your own guns and bullets in the majority of states.
Funny thing about that which could also apply to data/AI/etc, is that I understand the ATF is ignoring that law anyways.
tl;dr: I see it as the difference between using search tools to monitor for potential suspects vs search tools to implicate already identified suspects.
Everything described in the anecdotes, unless I missed it, was basically someone going on Twitter, a global media platform designed to convey your postings to a mass audience, and then reading the things people wrote. Right?
I can think of a variety of things that could have been done after that which would be bad, oppressive things. But are they alleging that?
The headline here is "U.S. Marshals spied..."
Did they? Like if I post something WITH THE VISIBILITY SET TO PUBLIC VISIBLE BY EVERYONE WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION EVEN NON-LOGGED IN PEOPLE and then someone reads it, then I can claim someone is spying on me?
How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?
I mean, it's all public information, right?
How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?
The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them.
Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something.
But it wouldn't be spying right?
1) I would at least have a chance of knowing about it, and could lodge a complaint with the relevant agency, or take them to court, if necessary. This may not work, but there's at least some level of recourse and accountability.
2) The chilling issue is that of mass surveillance. The kind of surveillance you describe is time- and resource-intensive, and doesn't scale. If agencies can collect and analyze data on a vast number of people with a few clicks of a mouse, that's a danger to everyone's freedom.
This is funded by unlimited federal deficit spending. Let's reduce their budgets.
Government money also tends to raise all ships^H^H^H^H^Hprices, so many of the social welfare programs - tuition and home buying loans and assistance, for example - have had the effect of raising prices to the point that most people couldn’t afford them without that assistance. That seems like a good indicator that the program has lost its purpose and should be scrapped for a new idea. Getting rid of those would be immediately deflationary for several sectors (good, imho).
As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments and reducing inflation than a great deal of what public money is being spent on.
Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers.
Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing.
“Ontario opportunities fund
You can help reduce Ontario's debt by completing this area to donate some or all of your 2022 tax refund to the Ontario opportunities fund. Please see the provincial pages for details. ”
If you want to stop this kind of surveillance, your best bet is to advocate that it be illegal, with accountability. You can also advocate for a reduced budget, but it's not going to get you very far. If anything, it would tend to lead to more use of this kind of tool.
[0]- There are some agitators on the fringes of both parties for specific reductions to parts of law enforcement that those agitators have a problem with. Whether correct or not, the fact is that these are two disjoint proposals from elements that have no interest in compromising with each other. Neither proposal covers the U.S. Marshals, and neither is going to amount to anything at the federal level.
I am interested in how that would work on an individual basis, as feds have to agree to be sued and lawsuits typically need to show specific harm. USSC doctrine of qualified immunity knee-caps accountability.
How does one make reading publicly posted tweets illegal?
I really don't see the issue. This is information people knowingly release to the public, so the cops are not spying on anyone. A protest is a potential security threat, which is why the cops always show up. I see no evidence this information was abused to try to prevent people from expressing their opinions. What am I supposed to be upset about?
Also, as you very well know, the large majority of the Federal budget goes to social services like healthcare and social security. The entire DoJ budget is a drop in the ocean. Slashing federal budgets will do nothing to eliminate this sort of program but will result in Granny living on the street.
It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, but I think a lot of the debate here is just people arguing the semantics of what's going on.
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We're spending plenty of money to have the nice things our society should have (eg universal guaranteed healthcare; better public transportation), and we're spending it wrong (eg paying way too much for healthcare) and or in many of the wrong places (eg the decades-long war on drugs and its consequences).
Nobody does inefficient government spending (and general spending, our consumers are fiscal idiots too) like the US. We spend more and get less for it than any affluent peer nation.