That's a pretty broad generalization, but OK I'll bite.
- I think Yarvin has a lot of good points. No one should be ashamed to admit the truth of a matter. I can't stand his voice, I think he has annoying mannerisms, but nonetheless the man has a point and I'm not ashamed (especially by unknown and strange online personas) to say so.
- Palantir is objectively a profitable job. I've learned a lot here and the people I work with are brilliant.
- I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.
Let's be honest, simply conjecturing that someone ascribes to a political view isn't discourse. It's a potshot. You're assuming that anyone who reads your comment and leans in your direction is going to agree and vote with you. This is literally the lowest and cheapest form of engagement. It's also the most self serving. It does nothing to advance the conversation or prove your point.
Most importantly, this is the exact type of behavior that is furthering political polarization and discouraging actual discourse.
Honest-to-God truthfully, reading Moldbug is what made me realize the speciousness of pure rightism and ushered my journey from a rightist-axiomatic "Libertarian" / ancap to a centrist-qualitative libertarian-without-labels that sees left and right thinking as both necessary parts of a complete whole. But YMMV, apparently!
In general I think whenever you find a "red pill", you also end up confronted with a whole slew of new easy answers. Whether you end up buying into them or not really comes down to who you are as a person.
I will never ever understand the construct of right / left / red / blue / lib / conservative without having to take a really dumb view of the world and its human inhabitants.
The problem is that left/right are highly appealing because they claim to have the world figured out. The strongest manifestation being the authoritarians (of either ilk) that think they just need to implement their chosen top-down policies and every problem will end up being solved by construction.
Can you describe at what point someone would “have blood on their hands” in your view?
The problem in my mind is that these systems are exclusively in service of dishonesty. ICE is clearly being used to further political ends. If it were actually trying to stem immigration it wouldn’t concentrate its officers in a state with one of the lowest rates of illegal immigrants.
Are you saying you agree with that cause or that you bear no responsibility?
It makes perfect sense to concentrate law enforcement in a state that is in defiance. Even if the absolute numbers are low, the state cannot back down from enforcing the law because some people are resisting. Otherwise you invite anyone to disregard any law they don’t like. The state won’t allow this and the only way to overcome this is either to change the law or toss out the government, and only one options is realistic. And btw I am against deportations of people who have committed no felonies unrelated to immigration.
> It makes perfect sense to concentrate law enforcement in a state that is in defiance
Using the word "defiance" indicates that your perspective is decidedly not American.
Both the States and the Federal government are co-sovereign, mediated by the US Constitution that spells out the rights and responsibilities of each. The Federal government is currently in willful and flagrant default of this founding charter - both overall in terms of how it is supposed to function (offices being executed in good faith forming checks and balances), as well as openly flouting the handful of hard limits outlined in the Bill of Rights. As such, the Federal government has lost the legal authority to dictate anything to the States.
It is of course still prudent to recognize the realpolitik of the "Federal government" having command of a lawless paramilitary force currently unleashing terror and mayhem on civil society. But the point is that we need to work towards re-establishing law and order in terms of the remaining functioning sovereigns.
They are certainly NOT co-sovereign, that is an absurd statement as states cannot leave the Union. Any sovereign party can withdraw from a treaty. The states are represented in their ability to collectively steer the federal government by Congress and the Electoral College. The feds are currently enforcing the ill will of both which sadly is the result of last elections.
I said co-sovereign, not that they're both independently sovereign (required for your treaty example). This is straightforward law, go read up on it. States are considered sovereign themselves, with powers limited by the US Constitution - the same qualification as the Federal government.
It's honestly besides the point. For even if I accept their sovereignty, they have exercised their sovereign will in the Electoral College to elect this administration. And they always have the power to impeach it through their representatives, the administration did not take that away, nor did they suspend the Congress, nor do they appear to be preparing to wrongfully influence the next elections. A state can not go and rebel against the Union because it disagrees with the current administration. Hell, the Union can literally change the Constitution against the will of a particular state if enough other states agree. You can consider states sovereign if you want, and I concede that it's an established tradition, but when the whole agreement on the separation of powers can be changed with a particular state voting against it - that's a mockery of sovereignty of that state.
Sorry, this is a whole ball of post-hoc motivated reasoning.
> For even if I accept their sovereignty, they have exercised their sovereign will in the Electoral College to elect this administration
Simply repeating the word "sovereign" doesn't mean you've applied and fully accounted for the definition.
> A state can not go and rebel against the Union
I'm not talking about rebellion here, but the provision of law and order in spite of the federal government's policies of repeated lawbreaking.
> when the whole agreement on the separation of powers can be changed with a particular state voting against it - that's a mockery of sovereignty of that state.
This subject is not like computer programming where finding some lever you can pull to affect an axiomatic-deductive result invalidates the independent meaning of the original thing. If two-thirds of the states actually wanted to scrap the current Constitution and turn the federal government into an autocracy with two impotent patronage-review councils, then you would have a point. As it stands, you do not - the entire point of these necessary supermajorities is to put the brakes and pull us towards a foundation of individual liberty and limited government when things are close to evenly divided.
As I said, you really need to read up on the founding of this country. It's got all of these dynamics and more - including the "liberal media".
I think most people involved in protests would not characterize the thing they are resisting as merely "law enforcement". What they are experiencing is an occupation by a politically weaponized paramilitary organization which is going door-to-door in their neighborhoods wearing masks, wielding ARs, yelling at people and brutalizing them. How do you think you would react if this was taking place in your community?
Of course the brutality is not desirable, but to stay in perspective, what would you suggest they do to still enforce the law efficiently but without this forcefulness? They can’t do it the normal way when they are constantly watched and their targets are warned beforehand by whistles and apps and they can’t and shouldn’t back down on enforcing the law.
I expect them to enforce the law without breaking the law. I want the job of any law enforcement agency to be hard. Not because I want lawlessness, but because the government has a rightful burden to surpass to prove that it's citizens are in the wrong. The government is supposed to serve the citizenry and not the other way around.
We have a freedom of speech and protest precisely to signal our discontent with our leaders. It is precisely for citizens to harass law enforcement that they view as unjust.
The entire reason we got those freedoms spelt out in the constitution in the first place was because of British occupation and the views that the British governments laws and enforcement were unjust. There is a direct parallel. The spirit of the 3rd amendment is that we should be able to kick out law enforcement that we hate. That we don't have to tolerate their presence.
> what would you suggest they do to still enforce the law efficiently but without this forcefulness
How about not violating the 5th amendment by going door to door through neighborhoods randomly? I don't give a single FUCK if ICE can do their jobs today if they have to violate half the damn bill of rights to do it.
I don't accept the framing that this is about law enforcement in the first place. I believe that this administration is run by xenophobic right wing extremists who care little for the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. They have weaponized ICE against the Somali community in Minneapolis today, the overwhelming majority of whom are legal refugees. As we have seen, they will not hesitate to weaponize ICE against anyone else who crosses them. I believe the organization does not exist to protect or serve the interests of the American public and should be abolished.
The American public has sadly elected this administration. I agree with you in principle, especially when legal immigrants become targets. But again, if the actions of this administration are not just morally wrong but illegal there are courts, and in any case there are elections. The people of one state or one city can not obstruct the will of the Union, it is fundamentally undemocratic way of interfacing with the fairly elected government.
I'm sorry, but if you still have any expectation that this administration will engage in good faith in any democratic process, you either haven't been paying attention or are engaging in willful self-delusion. They do not believe in democracy. They care about free speech only insofar as they can use it to claim they are being victimized, but will gleefully take it away from their opponents. They laugh in your face while they pardon the J6 insurrectionists. The presidential election is not and ought not be a referendum on whether or not we all get to have our rights trampled by gun-toting masked goons. At a certain point you have to stand up for what's right--that is, a reclamation of democracy.
Efficiency has never been a goal of US governance, especially in how it interacts with the People. This is deliberate. Read up on the events around the American Revolution if you want to see why that is. There are actually a lot of arguments being trotted out today that were trotted out back then, by the British.
I mean this idea of defiance is absurd. People here are 99.9% exercising their constitutional rights. The majority of crimes happening at this moment are ICE infringing on people’s constitutional rights. I appreciate you sharing your perspective but that logic exists in isolation from the reality. ICE are so bad at policing they are creating more crimes than they are solving.
Of course with the Trump FBI the message is loud and clear, those crimes will not be investigated
ICE officers are bad at policing because they were a paper pusher/investigative agency which should always be assisted by local law enforcement. Most of the other feds operate like that. The administration dramatically increased ICE workload and in addition to that the local police is not always cooperative, and they are being obstructed by protesters. Of course they are fumbling around and making lots of mistakes, but again, they can not give up on enforcing the federal law.
I don't think I would ever "have blood on my hands" in my current position as a software developer because Gotham and Foundry have valid and real world use cases that are being implemented in ways that actually make people safe across the nation. That's honestly just the truth. Can people, or and organizations use any given product for nefarious ends? Absolutely. Do we try to mitigate it? Very much so.
At the end of the day it sounds like the people making this argument don't really like how ICE is using the product. That's unfortunate, but it seems like the response is making a proximation error though. For those taking this view: Do you yell at farmers for planting, growing and packaging strawberries because you're upset about the obesity crisis and people's craving for strawberry flavored products? Do you run out into the fields and grab them by the shoulders saying "This is your fault!". I'd hazard not.
There is a larger epistemological argument to be had there, but needless to say I'm just not convinced that any sober person believes that qualitatively ascribing moral outrage to a single group of people is really that simple.
>I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.
Yes, yes, the little hands at the gestapo that were just filling up forms for deportation do not have blood in their hands, we know. Tried and failed defense, many times.
>No one should be ashamed to admit the truth of a matter.
Yet supports a regime that is censoring colleges, getting workers fired over their political views, pressuring and shutting down press, and more.
The point clearly only matters for truths they like.
>Palantir is objectively a profitable job
And ICE offering 50k signing bonuses. How much is your soul worth?
>I don't think I have "blood on my hands" and rather instead think that people who use that tactic are resorting to strange emotional manipulation in place of a salient argument.
Dismissing ethics as a salient argument is exactly why pathos is effective. If you were truly without shame you wouldn't be affected by the argument. Deflecting shows shame. I've meet a few sociopaths and this isn't how they respond.
>Most importantly, this is the exact type of behavior that is furthering political polarization and discouraging actual discourse.
Citizens are being killed on the street as we speak by their government. This is not a time to say "but why can't we just get along". There is literal blood on their hands. Maybe yours, I don't know.
And I'm beyond tired of this because this was warned from day one. But it was dismissed by overly reactionary and dramatic (I can pull up many of the flagged threads here). It's tiring because this wasn't some freak accident we correct, but a year of escalation that was designed by the administration.
If you're fine with that to self preserve your lifestyle, then I hope you are a sociopath. Otherwise, that does indeed eat at your soul, deservedly.
