> I wish I could go back in time to when I didn't need to tense up before opening up the news each day.
This really hits home. These four years have been such a depressing time for just reading the news. Every day it seems the US is edging closer and closer to.... I don't even know what. With half the country happily marching to the drumbeats. It's amazing just how fragile our systems were.
I've been wondering if it's just mentally more healthy to go the ignorance is bliss route. I know so many people who don't even register these kinds of events, and they seem happier.
Don't trust the news. Watch documentaries about mainstream news (Manufacturing Consent is my personal fav) and you will see that reality is not what they are peddling--it is influence.
No, but I'm old enough to remember when all the major media told approximately the same lies so that they were part of the shared, accepted “truth”, which is probably what you are thinking of.
Note that that sanctuary city cases was the exception. 3 other federal circuit courts ruled the other way, and so far the Supreme Court has refused to vote, so as it stands, the government can withhold funds from NY but not California or Oregon or Washington.
Go figure why the GOP wishes to add another SCoutUS judge with 1.5 months to the election, unlike precedent set in 2016 by McConnell's senate along with vocal support from Senator Graham.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political battle. That's against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do this. Commenting occasionally on political threads while generally using the site as intended is fine, but using it primarily for politics is not fine, because those things will take over the site by default if we allow it, and that's not HN's mandate. If you would please review the rules and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.
(On the other hand, I didn't see your account attacking fellow users, calling names, and so on—that's definitely good.)
I wouldn't argue that it's not "fascistic", except in the sense of semantic gamesmanship, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that it's not illegal. The law is like a billion lines of Javascript, written by high school students, over decades, without even a single unit test, with the server running continuously.
"Legal" consists entirely of the opinions of lawyers, who are literally trained in law school to see both sides of every problem and construct a defense either way. I suspect the DoJ would have no problem constructing a brief that it's legal.
Ultimately the decision rests entirely with more lawyers on the court, and if they happen to be predisposed, there is no higher power to tell them otherwise. Even a flagrant, direct contradiction of the text is completely irrelevant.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how that applies in this case. I just have little doubt that it already has been.
Best explanation--it's a huge collection of patches. There are key moments that revisit the spirit or unintended consequences but it's a largest legacy codebase that grows faster than the tech debt can be cleaned up.
If you label a rival political other as an enemy of the state, especially when groups that support the state are known be more violent and deadly to Americans (police/white nationalists), that is inherently fascistic.
A fascist government will not announce it is but rather that antifascists are enemies of the state. This has already happened and is simply ramping up. It will lead to stochastic terror and more bloodshed.
Interesting; So when Democrats label Trump a Russian agent, effectively treason, they are being inherently fascistic.
And when the Democrats and their militia, Antifa, call their critics/disagree-ers/dissidents "Nazis" (who are also the enemies of our state) they are also being inherently fascistic.
I have wondered why they support doxxing and harassing their enemies, strict ideological compliance, and looting/rioting/arson as a means of political influence. But now that you've explained it's due to their inherent fascism, it makes a lot more sense.
I would suggest instead of arguing on the internet, going and reading letters, diaries, etc. from people who were living through WWII which would give some perspective on what fascists were like, what the propaganda was like, etc. "I know you are but what am I" was a very fundamental and common propaganda line of the fascists then, and there were good reasons at the time to not dismiss it entirely. I've been reading George Orwell's letters recently along those lines, where he grappled with British imperialism and why it was necessary to fight the Nazis.
It has never been any more easy and obvious at the time to determine the bad guys than now.
Oh, by the way, Orwell himself spent some time being a propagandist for the British.
His law degree from George Washington University, being a member of the bar, and his having worked for the Washington, D.C., law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge probably refutes your assertion. [1]
I live in Manhattan. I don't know what anarchy they are talking about. It is calm, peaceful, and beautiful here right now. I have not seen, nor heard, a protest since June or July? I've biked all around Manhattan and the only distressing thing I've seen is the closed storefronts and "for lease" signs plaguing city blocks. Mayor de Blasio seems intent on ruining the local economy with petty rules and restrictions.
My grandmother called me in a panic the other day because she thought rioters burned down my neighborhood in Chicago. An hour long conversation and I still couldn’t grasp why she thought that.
That’s the type of question I get most often. “What is the rioting like?” Well I don’t know because there hasn’t been any. Everything is peaceful and calm. People are walking around with masks and socially distancing themselves while they lounge in the park. It’s total anarchy.
I live in Brooklyn in a neighborhood with a demographics this administration would call rapist and criminals because they originated south of the border. But there is no anarchy here either.
I do acknowledge crime is up in New York but it's not like everyone is running around the streets shooting, looting and burning things down.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I did. Murders are up 50% but overall crime is flat, including overall violent crime. The percentage is misleading, too, because the raw numbers are still quite low. NYC doesn’t even crack the top 70 deadliest cities in the US.
If you govern a people and willfully allow them to become endangered through, eg. defunding the police, permitting lawless zones throughout your jurisdiction, and so on, and the end result is innocent lives under your power are harmed or destroyed, then you should be held accountable.
The police have not been defunded in either Minneapolis or NYC. They have decided—while fully funded—to stop doing their jobs to punish the cities that tried to hold them accountable for their abuses.
The cities they are targeting probably send a disproportionate amount of tax money to the federal government. I really wish the mayors of these cities, and the governors of these states would start to talk about this imbalance.
It would be interesting to see the democrats embrace the idea that progressive taxation is unjust and that a person's tax bill should influence the services they're entitled to.
No. Some state take in billions more in federal tax dollars then they send in with states like Alabama and Kentucky often at the top of the list. Without California and New York floating most red states they'd be sunk.
This is why when a red state chooses to lower taxes or otherwise increase their reliance on federal help I laugh at the hypocrisy of the bootstraps party and wonder why my federal taxes, in a blue state without federal support, should go to such irresponsible people.
The suggestion is that these cities are potentially paying more money to the federal government than they get back in federal aid. The population is irrelevant.
Congress controls the purse, not the President and his increasingly political departments. If they want to change the law, they should vote on a bill first.
Congress authorizes spending but the executive actually does it and, in practice, can fail to do it selectively. If not statutorily authorized, this can be illegal, but the fact that it's illegal doesn't mean a whole lot until someone uses that fact to force it to be undone, which can take quite a long time.
> If they want to change the law, they should vote on a bill first.
What if they just want to arbitrarily exercise power and don’t give a flip about the content of the law, what should they do then?
Remember, a fascist leader won't say it out loud but they will name antifascists enemies of the state. This is that.
If this happens, the House needs to strip funding from DHS for inciting said violence as well as set up systems to cope with ongoing problems instead of fomenting unrest to further the current administrations political goals and lie about protests. Depending on what sources you've read, it may be there is way less 'anarchy' at protests than you think, at least wherever the federal government did not get involved.
At first protesters kneeled during the anthem at NFL games and were belittled and straw manned as protesting the flag or America when really protesting police violence against black people. Kneeling was suggested by a US veteran in communication with Kaepernick as a way to respect the flag while making the issue known. As an amateur athlete I kneeled for the anthem at baseball and football games but never even had such a nationalistic show of pride for soccer or other sports. The protesting voices were drowned out by misinformation and character attacks to obscure their true cause. Then as people began paying more attention, more police violence was exposed and protested including the ongoing deaths of black Americans. Just or unjust the police are no executioners and the constitution provides the right to a fair trial. As events piled up in the short term memory of society, more began protesting and marching to make their voices heard in accordance with their first amendment rights.
And again they were shut out or shut down, violently, by the same police they were protesting. The movement was counter protested by white nationalist groups appearing to have support or comradely with the police, often while fully armed (second amendment represent) whereas antifascists and BLM groups were usually not. Bad actors from either ideology incited property damage with many exposed and turned over to police in the moment. And then the US government overreached by sending unmarked storm troopers into several US cities, against governor and mayor outcry, to only increase the chaos and foment more violence. And yet Trump has used the violence as a political stick to push his election chances, how shameful and pathetic.
This is Trump's all doing in Trump's America. The imagery his attack ads on Biden show is Trump's America (or sometimes events from the Ukraine and Russian jets, seriously look it up it's silly). This is what happens when a movement's voice is shuttered under misinformation by media and the current administration. When the first amendment is shut down and the rival groups (police and white nationalists) are leveraging the second to counter protest, what other options does a civil society have? Vote in the next election when elections security bills have been held up in the GOP senate for months now, reducing our capacity to counter foreign interference like what was documented in 2016 and has, according to all US intel groups, continued unabated by Russia and others? That system last elected someone with a 2.8 million vote minority and gave a minority party (48% of the vote) more than a 10% majority in the House and control of the Senate? Do we trust the DHS and DOJ to do the right thing when they are led by someone likely legally unqualified for the role or someone who has drafted pardons for traitors, continues to interfere in investigations to benefit Trump, and is the same person who is calling protests anarchy?
These avenues have been shuttered to the public. From the womens march to the last 6 months of protests, what has changed? Trump was impeached and the GOP senate didn't call a witness at his trial, moving to acquit. Several investigations continue to show gross abuse of power by the Trump administration like firing inspector generals, pushing for unprecedented actions in ongoing criminal cases, and we know most of the Trump family has used private email while in office (as the Trump supporters say "Lock them Up")...
I love how anarchists, who are a tiny sliver of the population which has never had any significant political power, are now scapegoats for all the problems created by the very same powerful right wing plutocrats trying to pin it all on anarchists. And it’s crystal clear that they don’t even know what anarchism is. Lovely.
50 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadHow does this policy help the country? It's just so blatantly designed to hurt people.
The whole point seems to be to rile up Trump's base at the cost of people who are just trying to go about their lives during a pandemic.
This really hits home. These four years have been such a depressing time for just reading the news. Every day it seems the US is edging closer and closer to.... I don't even know what. With half the country happily marching to the drumbeats. It's amazing just how fragile our systems were.
I've been wondering if it's just mentally more healthy to go the ignorance is bliss route. I know so many people who don't even register these kinds of events, and they seem happier.
I know right. The Democrats have so little regard for our nation that they've nominated two Manchurian candidates in a row.
If you frighten people enough they will vote for anything that resembles safety. The first part is accomplished, wouldn't you say?
No, but I'm old enough to remember when all the major media told approximately the same lies so that they were part of the shared, accepted “truth”, which is probably what you are thinking of.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/nyregion/sanctuary-cities...
Another case that may apply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Dole
It may be illegal, but it's not really clear, it seems like it would need to be decided in court.
(On the other hand, I didn't see your account attacking fellow users, calling names, and so on—that's definitely good.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More explanation about how we moderate this:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
"Legal" consists entirely of the opinions of lawyers, who are literally trained in law school to see both sides of every problem and construct a defense either way. I suspect the DoJ would have no problem constructing a brief that it's legal.
Ultimately the decision rests entirely with more lawyers on the court, and if they happen to be predisposed, there is no higher power to tell them otherwise. Even a flagrant, direct contradiction of the text is completely irrelevant.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know how that applies in this case. I just have little doubt that it already has been.
Best explanation--it's a huge collection of patches. There are key moments that revisit the spirit or unintended consequences but it's a largest legacy codebase that grows faster than the tech debt can be cleaned up.
A fascist government will not announce it is but rather that antifascists are enemies of the state. This has already happened and is simply ramping up. It will lead to stochastic terror and more bloodshed.
And when the Democrats and their militia, Antifa, call their critics/disagree-ers/dissidents "Nazis" (who are also the enemies of our state) they are also being inherently fascistic.
I have wondered why they support doxxing and harassing their enemies, strict ideological compliance, and looting/rioting/arson as a means of political influence. But now that you've explained it's due to their inherent fascism, it makes a lot more sense.
It has never been any more easy and obvious at the time to determine the bad guys than now.
Oh, by the way, Orwell himself spent some time being a propagandist for the British.
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-P-Barr
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2020/06/26/scathing-...
I do acknowledge crime is up in New York but it's not like everyone is running around the streets shooting, looting and burning things down.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-ci...
https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/public_safety/crime-sele...
Based on the numbers, NYC probably isn’t even in the top 200 of deadliest cities. At some point you have to switch to “safest cities” instead.
Maybe the US DoJ should defund St Louis? Or maybe not because that would be idiotic and counter intuitive.
The second is from 2017 data.
Try again.
If you govern a people and willfully allow them to become endangered through, eg. defunding the police, permitting lawless zones throughout your jurisdiction, and so on, and the end result is innocent lives under your power are harmed or destroyed, then you should be held accountable.
And they ask "where are the police?" after defunding the police.
And they ask "where are the police?" after unanimously deciding to defund (rather, abolish) the police.
So an entire police force must be abolished because of the alleged abuses of a few?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...
This is why when a red state chooses to lower taxes or otherwise increase their reliance on federal help I laugh at the hypocrisy of the bootstraps party and wonder why my federal taxes, in a blue state without federal support, should go to such irresponsible people.
Congress authorizes spending but the executive actually does it and, in practice, can fail to do it selectively. If not statutorily authorized, this can be illegal, but the fact that it's illegal doesn't mean a whole lot until someone uses that fact to force it to be undone, which can take quite a long time.
> If they want to change the law, they should vote on a bill first.
What if they just want to arbitrarily exercise power and don’t give a flip about the content of the law, what should they do then?
If this happens, the House needs to strip funding from DHS for inciting said violence as well as set up systems to cope with ongoing problems instead of fomenting unrest to further the current administrations political goals and lie about protests. Depending on what sources you've read, it may be there is way less 'anarchy' at protests than you think, at least wherever the federal government did not get involved.
At first protesters kneeled during the anthem at NFL games and were belittled and straw manned as protesting the flag or America when really protesting police violence against black people. Kneeling was suggested by a US veteran in communication with Kaepernick as a way to respect the flag while making the issue known. As an amateur athlete I kneeled for the anthem at baseball and football games but never even had such a nationalistic show of pride for soccer or other sports. The protesting voices were drowned out by misinformation and character attacks to obscure their true cause. Then as people began paying more attention, more police violence was exposed and protested including the ongoing deaths of black Americans. Just or unjust the police are no executioners and the constitution provides the right to a fair trial. As events piled up in the short term memory of society, more began protesting and marching to make their voices heard in accordance with their first amendment rights.
And again they were shut out or shut down, violently, by the same police they were protesting. The movement was counter protested by white nationalist groups appearing to have support or comradely with the police, often while fully armed (second amendment represent) whereas antifascists and BLM groups were usually not. Bad actors from either ideology incited property damage with many exposed and turned over to police in the moment. And then the US government overreached by sending unmarked storm troopers into several US cities, against governor and mayor outcry, to only increase the chaos and foment more violence. And yet Trump has used the violence as a political stick to push his election chances, how shameful and pathetic.
This is Trump's all doing in Trump's America. The imagery his attack ads on Biden show is Trump's America (or sometimes events from the Ukraine and Russian jets, seriously look it up it's silly). This is what happens when a movement's voice is shuttered under misinformation by media and the current administration. When the first amendment is shut down and the rival groups (police and white nationalists) are leveraging the second to counter protest, what other options does a civil society have? Vote in the next election when elections security bills have been held up in the GOP senate for months now, reducing our capacity to counter foreign interference like what was documented in 2016 and has, according to all US intel groups, continued unabated by Russia and others? That system last elected someone with a 2.8 million vote minority and gave a minority party (48% of the vote) more than a 10% majority in the House and control of the Senate? Do we trust the DHS and DOJ to do the right thing when they are led by someone likely legally unqualified for the role or someone who has drafted pardons for traitors, continues to interfere in investigations to benefit Trump, and is the same person who is calling protests anarchy?
These avenues have been shuttered to the public. From the womens march to the last 6 months of protests, what has changed? Trump was impeached and the GOP senate didn't call a witness at his trial, moving to acquit. Several investigations continue to show gross abuse of power by the Trump administration like firing inspector generals, pushing for unprecedented actions in ongoing criminal cases, and we know most of the Trump family has used private email while in office (as the Trump supporters say "Lock them Up")...