The people coming will be coming for a variety of reasons but it won't be to take the jobs of the uneducated Americans

It's fascism 101.

Don't focus on words. Focus on actions. For example, the action of deploying the military on Americans does not make conditions better for us. Quite the contrary. The action of having a military parade for the president's birthday is expensive and doesn't benefit us. That money could be going to education, school lunches, Medicaid, building bridges, etc. But it isn't. it is only going to stroke the president's ego. Most of his actions, EO's, deals, bills, etc., fall into this category.

  > deploying the military on Americans

People are pushing back when rubber bullets and tear gas are being used, illegally.

U.S. citizens have a right to protest. This is baked into our constitution.

You guys have a stark division between the government employees and the not-government-employees. Isn't the US government "for the people, by the people"? Serious question. I'm not disputing what you said, rather I'm trying to understand it.

They are also effectively impossible to sue, so you'll probably never see any justice in the courts if they act unlawfully. Even if manage to get the lawsuit going they will play fuck-fuck games with jurisdiction until you lose (as I found out when trying to sue feds for stripping me naked, cavity searching me, and executing a fraudulent warrant on a fabricated dog alert -- no one would take my case because they had lost similar cases every time).

Clearly if these people torching the cars are waving foreign flags, they are a foreign enemy and thus the military is appropriate, no? Serious question. I have no horse in this race, I don't live there.

Among other reasons, we got here because the government only seems to respond to big business and the oligarch class, but not the rest of us.

And "reestablishing order" is an obvious farce, because the Trump administration was deliberately provoking this conflict by sending in masked agents to abduct people and at least in one instance, running over a protestor. The administration has been consistently escalating the conflict, which is not something you do to "reestablish order", but it is absolutely a tactic of 20th century authoritarians to acquire emergency powers which they then use to prevent elections, jail political opponents, etc.

That was the president lying on a nationally televised debate, the purpose of which was to lay the groundwork for exporting poor people who were here legally.

It's usually about how the poor get Foo for free, which everyone else has to pay for, and also about how they misuse Foo for nefarious reasons. The commons then get riled up, either because "Hey, why do they get free housing when I have to spend tons of money?" or because of all the nefarious things they supposedly do.

Explain how work requirements to qualify for Medicaid makes conditions better to ensure there are fewer poor people. Doesn't this just harm people who can't work due to disability, and practically ensure they will never get better enough to work and contribute to society?

Sure saves a lot of money for wealthy people though.

"But muh roads and hospitals and police." Lol, that is covered by the ~0.5% of my salary I pay in property taxes and a little extra in use taxes and county and state sales tax. The federal portion, what do I get? Massive subsidies for people who stick their boot down my throat, military provocations that make us all far less safer, the worlds largest prison population (and near the top per capita). None of it makes sense -- the stuff that matters was achieved with the feds spending 2% of the gdp (and I might add, pretty much open immigration).

"Helping the poor" is one of the worst mistakes the USA ever undertook.

here's the correct indoctrination message

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/trump-fox-int...

> Former President Donald J. Trump, in an interview broadcast Sunday, doubled down on his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, language that echoes Hitler.

> “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” Howard Kurtz, the media critic and interviewer, asked on Fox News. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’”

> “Because our country is being poisoned,” Mr. Trump responded.

12million immigrants came into the country during the Biden administration. This type of load on the system does not go unnoticed. NYC for example was drastically transformed.

Why do you think it’s just a “perceived” problem?

They cannot handle it with the resources being given. This is true for the red states like Texas and what not, the social services we do have struggle to handle the load. But we're choosing to let these systems struggle. We could solve it if we chose to do so.

In 2020 our population was ~330 million people. Even if 12 million people immigrated to the United States, that's an influx of 3.6%. In reality its probably closer to 4 or so million, so really more like 1.2%. We're supposedly the wealthiest country on the planet with so much opportunity and freedom and yet we can't handle adding far less than 5% of the population as migrants in five years? If that's the case, we're probably the poorest country on the planet, not the wealthiest.

If it's a true story. Your comment history reads like conservative talking points fabricated by someone pretending to be black or pretending to care about black people. Specifically not like a black conservative.

Why do you assume that that doesn’t happen?

- Chicago (2014) https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/chicago-area-company-fined...

- Texas (2012) https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/2-companies-admit-hiring-i...

- Colorado (2025) https://www.cpr.org/2025/04/30/ice-fines-colorado-janitorial...

etc.

ACSI fined $2M for the same amount paid as wages to illegal labor. How much profit did they make from that? Sounds more like the cost of doing business than any real crushing fine.

Put the management of these companies in prison for ~~knowingly~~ recklessly hiring illegal labor. Make it likely they will be audited and caught. Make it easier to get a work permit That will solve a lot of illegal migration.

You just provide proof of why it doesn't happen in the very first link. 300k fine for 604 illegal for a repeat offender. That's essentially saying: The cost to hire illegals is too small not to do it.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/largest-joint-immigration-...

If I was a betting man, I'd handicap the number of paper-less workers he employs at his 3 golf clubs in Florida at 100. If we were to take into account the amount of work-permit-less laborers working on his golf courses nationwide, I'd say the number is over 200.

And even then, I'd bet my life on the over. Having played golf once at his club in Doral (shitty course, would never play again, even if my round was covered), I can safely assume ain't nobody mowing that course that can speak English passably, let alone are in this country working legally.

Remember folks, with this administration, hypocrisy is the point.

I don’t know that that is true:

Florida: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/100-undocumented-immigrant...

Texas: https://www.tpr.org/border-immigration/2025-06-05/ice-raids-...

California farm country: https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigrati...

“This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency.”

It strains credulity somewhat to act as though ICE, whose purpose has always been immigration enforcement, only started enforcing immigration under Trump. I remember hearing about ICE/immigration raids for many decades now in California.

In any event I think the prior’s point was that the current admins’ zealous focus on immigration is mostly optics. The idea is to get California activists to juxtapose themselves on the evening news throwing bricks and Molotovs against clean cut patriotic young servicemen. The American electorate prefer marines to brick throwers, so it’s just easy politics. It’s been the go to gambit of the Trump team for most of his two terms. Immigration is a very popular issue with voters, but not with educated journalists who know most GOP donors like the Koch brothers are free market libertarians who want totally open boarders and therefore despite the voter concern, nothing meaningful will ever happen because immigration enforcement and reform will remain in essence a tool to whip up hysteria in the non-sophisticated. Immigration and deportation numbers don’t lie, and tell most of the story.

> President Trump spent much of his campaign vowing "mass deportations" of undocumented immigrants, and the first weeks of his term have been marked by public displays of immigration enforcement. It could pose a blow to multiple parts of the country's food supply chain, including the dairy industry, where more than half of the national workforce is undocumented.

* https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-undocumented-workers-suppo...

Gun control, abortion, immigration (legal and illegal), taxation/gov’t spending, affirmative action (aka DEI), etc.

Trump is really good at pushing buttons and generating outrage though. Not unexpected for a reality TV show star.

No wonder Canada's productivity is stagnant and on track for the lowest growth in the G7. Why invest in technology or productivity when you can just cry to the government for cheap, indentured labor?

It's definitely not the case now. Unemployment is way up. Which I suspect is a combination of factors (slowing economy & tariffs) not just immigration.

But yes, Canadian governments work for employers, not workers. Just like any other advanced capitalist country. There is an expectation that there's a "natural" unemployment rate in this country around 6%, and they freak out if it goes much lower than that.

In general, when regular people are complaining about inflation they're complaining about their groceries. When you hear businesses and governments concerned about inflation .. they mean they're stressed out because minimum wage employees are demanding some basic respect that employers feel they shouldn't have to provide...

Why jump to these conspiracy notions about division and blatantly ignore the simplest and most obvious explanation.

They act accordingly to those incentives.

It isn't remotely the problem or even in the same galaxy as needing this type of response.

The cause for the actions is racism. The protests are due to calling out racism and removing due process.

Anything else is denial or sophistry, that's the simple truth.

I never said that, but that's quite the strawman.

It would have been possible to reform the system, without deporting anyone the wrong color to a damn megaprison in a foreign country, or arresting people right at their court hearings, most who are here legally.

The way things are going, the protests are more than warranted, more than justified. As far as I'm concerned, anyone still defending a clear authoritarian is a traitor.

Your response is a straw man. Be better.

FWIW I don’t agree with OP in that there isn’t a single cause, but racism definitely plays a role.

And then "Anything else is denial" shows a myopic, closed minded viewpoint, suggesting any further discussion would be pointless. As is most internet chatter on this type of matter.

They charges 4 low level managers with aiding illegal immigrants.

But I don't think the companies had to pay any fines or any owners face charges.

Once they get into the US they don't just live off of social services. What the US provides isn't nearly enough for that. So they end up working, their kids go to school, and those kids eventually have children who are US citizens. That's literally the concept that the United States of America was founded upon (after the genocide of the natives). That's the entire intent behind the US Constitution.

By letting people come to the US and stay in the US we're following the founding fathers playbook. It's the founding principal of the nation. That's how things are supposed to work.

It was a multi-million dollar if-statement that copied the expertise of the relevant law into a permanently legacy expert system.

Doing anything besides that would be illegal. But that also means there is no cross-referencing or vendor enforcement of fraud.

It did things like check if some tax-related status code was valid for the indicated home country of emigration. It didn’t do things like check against a national database for an SSN.

It basically punished people for filling out forms incorrectly or not being able to scan a document.

We didn’t get new regulations every quarter or ever. I dunno what the point was.

Edit: the everify step technically used personally identifiable information to contact a national database.

I guess my gripe is that I didn’t see how it could prevent fraud in any way a normal HR person wouldn’t have caught if it were to be caught. It’s a duplication of a process everyone was already doing.

can you elaborate on that?

centralized systems for identity are used all over the f world, and de-facto you have them in the US too (hello credit cards, hello driver licenses, hello... SIM card?)... they can be used as _tools_ by regimes with fascist tendencies, but their existence alone is quite neutral

ALL countries with functional governments NEED centralized identity systems to function (hello... IRS?), and they all get them even if you like to pretend they don't exist.

...why not just accept they are there, and focus on properly securing them from attacks, making them unalterable by corrupt officials (from simple checksumming and write-only permanent archives to full-on blockchain solutions), and preventing unrestricted access to them, all technically doable.

If you PRETEND you don't have a centralized identity system, don't you just leave all these problems unfixed and just go on with a broken system forever?

Even if we had a perfect e-verify system that magically guaranteed the result was accurate, it probably wouldn't make a difference. Not while it's use is "optional" in states like Texas.

If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."

As soon as you institute such a program businesses could get sued for illegal labor conditions, abuses of employees, sexual abuse of employees, violations of contract law, and more. Their expenses for imported labor would probably triple.

Would such businesses close as a result? Maybe a handful would but the real impact would be a huge drop in profits—also known as a greater share of profits going to workers.

The whole working class/middle class divide was made up by the rich to get you to vote against your interests, and propped up by pick-mes who want to feel like they're better than someone.

The only way this would stabilize is if the government came in and subsidized and socialized farm work heavily and that would also never happen.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...

Something along the lines of:

Now nobody is picking fruits, all the fruits die on the tree/vine, so there's none of that in the supermarket and those farms go bankrupt. Also, most of those who were paid to butcher the cattle are gone, but the cows are still there, costing the farmers money, so those farms go bankrupt. And then so do the feed suppliers for cattle farmers that don't ranch (or do but need extra feed besides the grass). But everyone still needs to eat, which means there's correspondingly more demand for the stuff which is heavily mechanised, so prices for that go way up, but because this is an instant supply shock the average person is still hungry no matter what the prices are, unless the humans start eating alfalfa en-masse.

Nothing GP wrote suggests that. Listing some realities and effects doesn't mean you approve of them.

Your analysis is simply off. The side pushing for worker and immigrant rights are not saying "please keep immigrants here so we can exploit them more".

The side that's trying to maintain a population of illegal immigrants and explains that this is necessarily because it is necessary to have a pool of workers willing to work for illegal wages.

Trump needed immigration to go unsolved in 2024 to have something to run on.

Liberals may make the point that removing millions of workers from the country would be bad for the economy, but you're being downright disingenuous if you suggest that is the primary reason people are upset about the raids and deportation.

The Nazis leveraged hatred towards minorities as a wedge to force their totalitarian control over Germany's state and society. They built up a ficticious enemy within, they inflamed society against that enemy, and proceeded to promise they would eliminate that enemy if the were granted total control over everyone and everything.

It's no coincidence that Trump is targeting California to fabricate a crisis and rapidly escalate the issue he created himself, specially how he forced the unjustified and illegal deployment of national guard and the armed forces. The goal is clearly not illegal aliens standing next to Home Depots. The goal is to force a scenario where loyalists in the armed forces target any opposition. It's no coincidence Trump has been threatening the governor of California with prison for the crime of "running for elections" at the time he's announcing deploying armed forces in California without authorization or legal standing and against the will of the governor of California.

They blamed them for pre-existing social problems. I feel the important context was that the government had to be significantly dysfunctional for the Nazi party to even exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator

I mean, this is a guy who put out a press release about his own health where everyone could tell he was lying because it included his own height and they just found pictures of him standing next to other people who were supposed to be the same height or shorter.

No, it’s much better to go harass people who aren’t in republican circles. Us vs them. Round up some illegals, make some examples, stick it to the democrats (who loosened the borders and are complicit). Trump is strong, and finally cracking down on all of this illegal nonsense, hoo rah!!

It’s all theater, that’s what Trump is - a darn good showman. Some illegals will get deported, eventually some of his core will see him as the thug he is. We just need to ensure democrats have a viable candidate lined up…ideally a white southern man. Clearly the push to elect a woman isn’t working at this time - we’ve tried it twice and Americans vote Trump instead.

If you're implying that employers of illegal immigration are hard to find, it's really not. Any farmer who receives subsidies (which is most of them) has to submit all sorts of paper trails, and if they have both no employees and no fancy farm-automation equipment, then it's pretty easy to check if they have illegal immigrants.

Hell, a single surveillance drone during harvest season could do 90% of your work. Work you're already doing if you're looking for illegal immigrants. "Gee I have no idea why a bunch of illegal immigrants harvested all my fruit for free", yeah pull the other one.

That's not how it works in practice. They use someone else's SSN and proper withholdings so nobody's the wiser unless the owner of the SSN being used both gets audited and has some portion of their income bumped into another bracket, which is rare.

This does not eliminate illegal labor completely but significantly reduces it.

Second, I disagree. It's important to disincentivize both the supply and demand. Right now, employers of illegal immigrants suffer no negative consequences when caught... so they keep in doing it. Which means that these mass deportations are purely performative, and the next wave of immigrants will get the same jobs.

it's so widely know im unsure if you're really oblivious or being sarcastic. sorry.

The other was about the deportations, which the court said they need to serve deportees a notice of deportation before they are actually deported.

There is no ruling that says ICE can't go after them wherever they are and arrest them.

Doing the arrests? Sure. Intimidating protesters for partisan messaging while desecrating the honour of our armed forces? No.

The only "they" doing arrests are ICE and the LAPD. The California National Guard isn't arresting anyone to my knowledge.

> local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals

Source? For literally any of this sentence.

LAPD/Sheriffs are doing vandalism related arrests including unlawful assembly.

CA guard is standing around federal properties. They normally don’t do arrests but they can and will do “detainments” until another agency can take over.

But the FBI is on site doing federal arrests (vandalism etc against a federal building is both a state and federal offense).

Yesterday I saw a pic claiming to be of local law enforcement keeping the protestors separated from ICE. It was shared by protestors very upset that ICE was being kept safe while ICE shot at the protestors with tear gas — but(!) I have no way to tell if that was even taken this week in LA or 10 years ago in a different continent, because even before GenAI, there's loads of cases where people share videos of something awful, but label it about something completely different and use it as evidence about that other thing.

The person you replied to is looking for evidence that "local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals" — it's really hard to show "did nothing" from any single clip.

Even absent GenAI being pretty good now, what kind of video do you think will actually demonstrate that (1) local law enforcement, (2) did nothing, not just in the area being filmed but even when the camera was off, (3) specifically that the mobs were trying to set free "illegals" rather than being very unhappy that unidentified armed people wearing masks were hauling away their local pizza maker who they'd known for a decade?

And if illegals are such a problem, why do the Republicans toady up to the corporations that perpetuate and profit from it?

Count how many gray posts are here and think what will happen when they will all leave. Not to mention that this site is Reddit v2.0 and have the same result and that is not coincidence.

How can one argue that the police serve the people? They don't necessarily even serve local government. They get a lot of federal funding and equipment, and in riot-control mode their purpose is to brutalize protestors until people stop showing up.

I also find it rather grotesque to watch Newsom argue that state and local police are perfectly capable of handling (i.e. crippling) protestors by themselves and don't need any federal assistance to do so.

Longer vid: https://streamable.com/bc1sog

Still doesn't make it right.

Goes all the way back to Rodney King.

"At stake is a fundamental component of the framework of US constitutional democracy. It begins with the principle, enshrined in law, that military forces exist to protect the country from existential threats — such as an invasion or rebellion — not to enforce the law.

Most fundamentally, the founders of the American republic understood very clearly that concentrated military power, loyal to a single man, could be used to achieve total control by that person. And they had a historical example in mind: Rome — a republic governed by the people and the Senate — was transformed into an empire ruled by an emperor as a result of the Roman army being turned against its citizens."

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-06-09/trump-...

Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc).

You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.

On multiple occasions, I've met Americans who simply care about might-makes-right. It's skin-deep, as soon as you ask them why they support this or that policy, it's because they are powerful and the rest of the world is not. I've literally met Americans who thought their tax money allowed them to summon troops, more than once. (This ended up backfiring as it turns out, they did not know how to get US Marines to arrive, big shocker.)

The same kind of thinking seems to be prevalent internally. You can trample the law, because you can. You see it even in ordinary US-made popular media. What happens what a character gets in trouble with the law? Well, then of course it depends on who has the most money to hire the best lawyers.

In the current case, I suspect the government will just do whatever it wants and there will be no legal reckoning.

My read is that this is even further along in many places in Europe.

The nice thing about the HN Small World is that it can be efficiently searched.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_w...

Quite often, and the answer is not many. It's why I've returned to a frankly elitist worldview, because this seems to be a historical pattern when power is diffused too widely. The lesson of our age may be that the Chinese political system, which seeks to restrit political competition within a small, carefully-selected group, is fitter than the American experiment.

I'll additionally note that China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military.

Agreed. I'm saying if we're accepting this as precedent, a Presidential republic is not a stable system. We either reject the military being called in to quell protests. Or we accept it as precedent and revise our system of government to remove that power from the madness of crowds.

Seems like it's just cultural norms all the way down. If people want to take advantage of the system, they can break these norms while pretending to be what they used to be.

serious question: are Countries such as Italy, France etc not a democracy?

All of them are, verbatim from wikipedia, "a military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population.". Ditto for spain Guardia Civil, and many of the countries listed in that same wiki page: Algeria, Netherlands, Poland, Argentina, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, Chile, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie

The spanish Guardia Civil is a very good example of a police force tied too deeply with the military. In 1981 some parts of the force attempted an actual coup, with one guy entering the parliament and shooting in the air (or ceiling).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt

The continuity of the Guardia Civil after Franco's dictatorship is one of many vestiges that has not been removed due to fears of creating an instability leading to some coup and a reversal to fascism. IMHO this may have been justified the years immediately after Franco's death, but should have been addressed at some point. See the 1981 coup as for why "appeasing" the oppressors usually doesn't work out, or even works out for the oppressors.

Their logo even today still contains a fasces[1] shield, which as been added during the Franco regime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasces

In my experience they don't act at all like normal cops, and sometimes can be in conflict with them. The only interactions I ever hear of with citizens is if they beat the shit out of someone. You're not going to be going to them for a lost phone or a cat in a tree.

But they absolutely will do traffic police on highways, intervene to reason with a loud neighbor, etc. They'll also routinely show up during large protests in big cities.

The "big-gun carrying" Gendarmerie is a special unit, the GIGN, probably akin to US' SWAT teams. They'll intervene when "very dangerous" people are involved, think hostage situations or the like. "Regular police" also has a similar outfit.

In the Netherlands, the Royal Marechaussee are literal soldiers who perform military police duties and also many civilian policing duties, but all of them are soldiers first.

* when used domestically, it's under the Minister of Justice and Security

* there's also no Dutch equivalent of the U.S. presidency with unilateral executive control over the military

I'd argue this kind of danger is something you get more in presidential systems. Not that we all shouldn't be wary of military forces within our civilian populations.

The second part is a huge differentiator from "normal" military. A police force even if administratively under the military has one crucial differentiator: their daily duties and training revolve almost exclusively around policing civilians from the same country. Military training and tactics are overwhelmingly aimed at dealing with foreign enemy combatants, mainly other military forces.

The methods give away the intentions and expected outcome. The US already has a very "militarized" police force. You send actual military only if you want to inflict the maximum amount of damage, and with that threat overwhelmingly scare the country into compliance.

That is the part that is not universally true. There are plenty of Gendarmeries who are soldiers first, with combat training and ethos, who also perform policing duties, the Marechaussee included.

Fair enough, but Wikipedia confirms that they all have civilian law enforcement and police duties so clearly their training, tactics, and experience revolve heavily around dealing with civilians.

I'll still take that over "soldiers only", even more with US's very active military where the soldiers routinely see active combat. Both the theory and practice shapes their "soldier vs. enemy combatant" world view. That's a hammer if I've ever seen one.

So I don't think your comment makes any sense, at least in Portugal.

They are, but not in the the "framework of US constitutional democracy." A system for which we have more evidence of stability than either of Italy or France's modern republics. (Note, too, les gendarmes' heritage: imperial France. Also, gendarmes aren't usually deployed overseas. They are, in a sense, more similar to the FBI than the U.S. Marines.)

1- the territorial split between gendarmerie/police within the French territory

2- the fact the gendarmes for police work report to the Ministry of Defense.

If one had to design the police system from crash, they would likely merge police and gendarmes for police work.

The split is nonsense today.

IMO as Chilean, it's a pretty bad thing democratically, for both historical (dictatorship) and more recent reasons. Still, there is a clear difference between when the police with deep ties to the army enforce the law and when actual troops do it.

While copper Gutiérrez and grunt Herrera both technically have the rank of corporal, one mostly writes tickets, deals with noise complaints, and has riot training, while the other only knows how to march and shoot an assault rifle.

The actually important thing is that this is testing the waters. Trump will use the troops for flimsier and flimsier reasons.

NOTE: Chilean police are semi-routinely brutal; this is not an endorsement.

Other countries can do that if they want. It may or may not be a threat to them. But in the US, it's absolutely a threat to democracy, because it's already the executive deploying the military against the law.

It’s not just that the military has become both, the police have too. Arming your police to the level of US police is just crazy.

Its always been this way.

Its no surprise that some government systems more strongly appeal.

The problem here is you've taken the last part as the whole.

There were plenty of thugs as you say that have no social inhibition and get imprisoned. But there are numerous others that got along well enough and covered for each other they kept themselves away from punishment. There were cruel bullies in my school while committing vicious acts had enough of a following they could depend on them to blame the victims as the entity that started the fight. This type of person is well suited for the thin blue line.

Crowd control is pretty much the opposite of modern warfare, with large number of troops marching shoulder to shoulder forming shield walls, even having supporting cavalry.

Probably very specific, but I was in two non-US militaries and all combat corps were trained in Aid to the Civil Power, including public order, and were regularly refreshed.

Wait, don't you mean that "the people become the enemies of the state"? Or did I miss some jab at immigrants?

> /4 So “cover me” to the LAPD means “if someone pops up with a gun and shoots at me, shoot at them.” Apparently to the Marines it means “lay down a curtain of suppressive fire using your rifles.” Hilarity ensued.

https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3lr2w7wo3...

It's called that because it's how you cover people.

If you ask someone to darn your sock, and they do, will you complain "hey, I didn't say 'darning needle'"?

A cop saying “cover me” is asking for something the marine might call overwatch.

I think you’d already kinda lost this? Cops seem to mostly serve themselves?

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sz2QN8_VvoM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

Quite the opposite. It was passed in 1878 because of the backlash against Reconstruction, shortly after federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, and was intended to prevent something like Reconstruction from happening again.

You're right. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest it was a product of Reconstruction. It was absolutely part of the process of post-civil war renormalisation.

I was a member of an infantry battalion once tasked with doing policing in a foreign country. Let me just say that the outcome was exactly what you’d expect. We were very effective at responding with overwhelming force to attacks by an insurgency but pretty ineffective at keeping the peace.

I don't think you were, since all US COIN operations in living memory have been abject failures.

I never said we were effective at counterinsurgency ops

That said, what the current administration is doing is almost like they're following a manual other countries followed on their road to nationalistic decline and all the right people in places of power seem to know this. I wonder if they're ready for it? My observation is that the previous administration had four years to pass laws and measures based on trump's first four years and they didn't, which tells me there is really no stopping what is to come.

The planned decline of America won't be like other countries because of post-WW2 "super power" repositioning of country and it's critical role in global trade, communications and finance. All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear.

On the other hand, I like to think that if things turn sour and gruesome very fast, the American public might react to that well enough to make a u-turn.

I'm in LA right now. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't know anything is up.

It wouldn't, you'd need to change the food industry for that to happen.

However I don't really like walking everywhere or taking public transportation so LA is the perfect city for me because it has many municipal places I can park my car and then walk around.

Let me explain LA to you since you clearly don't understand it.

LA is a combination of many smaller cities. Each one, on it's own is a small micro city with everything you would expect. You can live in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank, Sherman oaks, West Hollywood, Ktown, Beverly Hills, Sawtelle, etc. each one of those places has a very vibrant and walkable area with cute shops and restaurants and easy public transportation. If you live in those places you don't necessarily need a car.

The problem with LA is that you might want to go from one of these places to another and the walk would take a very long time because LA county is bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island. But you can walk it if you want.

LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines. And is doing so rapidly.

You and I have different definitions of walkable.

Suffer compared to what? That's the alternative? Number 1 stays number 1?

The world works in peaks and troughs, swings and roundabouts. What goes up must come down. Time marches on, change happens. This comes with suffering, but is also the definition of progress.

Nothing is the best forever, and the one's at the top who don't acknowledge that are the ones with the hardest fall ahead. That applies to complacent SV leadership as much as it applies to the average American citizen.

I can't fault this way of thinking about the world: change is inevitable, you have to roll with it. If I accept it though, the idea of "planned decline of America" is interesting to think about. If you're at the top, decline is inevitable, it's the only direction. What's the only thing you can do to mitigate the pain of the inevitable? Try plan to work with it. Not sure how I feel about this way of thinking, it feels pragmatic if nothing else.

Decline is not inevitable. others like China can rise, there could be multiple successful and wealthy countries. heck, even in a decline, america can become like germany instead of like venezuela. the decline you're thinking of is a lot nicer than what I'm thinking of I think.

Preventing a decline requires established institutions to function as designed. America is not declining because it's like the roman empire, it is declining because the corporate ruling class are strangling the nation for short term profits. It isn't "we the corporations of america" it is "we the people". They've assaulted the foundation of the wealthiest most powerful empire in history and it is collapsing as a result.

Graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...

Republicans get primaried for supporting Dems.

This creates the reality which is sold in their information and news networks. Dems always have bad bills, and see - no Republican is supporting it.

Yup. We let the pointers take precedence to the point that that they don't actually point at anything, we just like how they look.

If you cannot accept an idea because it was brought forward by a political competitor, you lack the necessary detachment to make good decisions.

Sometimes party discipline is sensible for political pragmatism, but in all other cases democracy is the better solution. It should be handled with care.

Better than party discipline would be more effective intra-party debate, discussion, consensus processes etc. It's probably slower than line enforcement tho'.

Simplifying: Congress was never meant to be deadlocked on simple party lines. It was always meant to have people figuring out ways to work together, even at the expense of the party, but in favor of their constituents.

Why? If we had a couple more Manchins and Sinemas right now, you know what we'd have? A majority.

Democrats could not do it. If they had done it, they would be as bad as Trump is now.

You make it sound like "our democracy was never perfect, so obviously we always just had a mad emperor all along"...

A lot of people have decided that what Trump is doing is good. A lot have decided that it is evil. It is not so clear cut.

Yeah, the decline of the British Empire is starting to look sedate and well-managed compared to this.

I'm sure because the USA was there to pick up any slack that Britain dropped, in a way that China is not doing with the USA.

Things could have been much different.

And Elon Musk, former presidential vizir. There's clearly power in Twitter, but it leans right as well.

Afterwards, and from the outside, it looks and sounds like ... well read some history about attempts to 'restore proper order'. The outcome and progression is entirely and sadly predictable.

It's been about 80 years since WWII. Are we doomed to repeat this on an 80 year cycle, when the last generation who went through this passes from the scene?

So - maybe not doomed to an 80 year cycle, as life expectancy changes, and/or as cultural memory changes due to more/better records.

But in broad strokes... yes.

If they just protested, nobody would care at all.

Said no with a clear head ever.

Bringing national guard and marines is the correct response to the democrats' violence. Last time they were allowed to riot, they caused a ridiculous amount of damage.

As a non-US, was that Jan 6th, you're talking about, or is there something else you're referring to that i could look up?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/group-50-people-shoplif...

Somewhere in the 19 million people in the Southland, a car is burnt in anger or celebration every weekend. Lakers parades are famously family unfriendly.

Businesses are robbed daily and violently.

I mean, there was a huge deal about the trains for a while [0] and nothing happened with the LAPD+ for a long time let alone the USMC.

LAPD+ cops are assaulted every week with God knows what.

That's what 19 million people are like. That mass of people sees a lot of low-probability events, by pure math.

Honestly, what's going on is that Donny watches Fox a lot. Fox is a media business, if it bleeds, it leads. Fox also is reeling from the Dominion lawsuits and two competitors barking up their tree. They have to push for ratings. Donny doesn't know this, he just sees what everyone else is seeing on Fox.

Hence this whole autopen thing that no one else outside of the Fox bubble has a clue about.

Donny sees the story, rants about it in front of confused cameras, then Fox has to double down on it and Donny rants again. It's a oroboros of bad research and news junkies.

So with these LA riots (blink and there's another), you get Fox seeing if it bleeds, it leads. Then Donny fritzes on it, then he's sending in the USMC without food or water, because, duh. Then they report on that, and he'll be sending in a whole regiment (5000 marines) by the end of the week, then a battalion (1200 marines, because these words have no meaning to him).

Look, there is no plan with Donny, he's just reacting to whatever he last experienced. It is super clear from all the evidence about the very leaky administration that they are just reacting to things as they come at them. Again, there is no plan. And yes, that is somehow worse than some conspiracy to make the US an autocracy.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/14/economy/la-freight-railroad-t...

EDIT: I want to extend this idea about Donny having mashed potato brains a bit further. SInce the whole admin is just reacting to things by overexertion, that means that anyone trying to counter them (and that's like nearly everyone else on Earth) has it made in the shade. You let them swing, then just keep up the pressure after every blow. They crack, we've already seen this in the trade stuff (TACO), in the Greenland/Panama/Canada thing, in the signalgate thing, in the Kilmar thing, etc. All you have to do is just not let go of it. They get bored of it, because Fox's viewers get bored of it, so Fox switches the programming, and so the admin does too. They declare victory, and walk away.

And, it’s also naive to think that all the protesters are on the same side. Instigators are from either no side and the other side.

During the George Floyd protests I was walking home and witnessed agitators turn a peaceful protest violent within minutes. There were at most 10 of them out of a crowd of 500. When I got home, the news described the protest as being a violent one.

You and a lot of people here need to look more critically at what you are seeing online and in the news.

Stop with the gaslighting.

Ironically, the two places they don't want to move to.

I'm feeling incredibly depressed and angry about all this.

Or is America as it was, finished?

If they have orders to fire, then there will be no court, they just have to fill out an after-action report detailing what happened.

If the civilian court wants to make an example out of the military member they can opt to keep the case in their court. This can happen if the crime was egregious or there are some other circumstances. Plus, any additional civil suit brought by a victim or their family will always be a civilian lawsuit.

There are times where things are different- in particular, there are times in which something is only a crime in one system but not the other. You can be court-martialled for failing to follow orders, but this is not a civilian crime.

In terms of shooting a civilian, it probably depends on the circumstances. If the Marine was given an order to shoot and had some legitimate feeling reason to do so in the moment, the military would probably do their best to protect the marine, but it would probably be a civilian court trying them (the military won’t take a case if they don’t intend to follow through). Note that for this to be the case, there is probably now an officer who gave an illegal order and the officer would probably be tried for a crime. But there are conceivable ways in which a marine can shoot someone under lawful orders and not really have done anything wrong- self defense is the likely scenario. If a protestor starts shooting a gun toward a marine then they will get return fire.

If the marine were to disregard his orders and shoot someone because he’s trigger happy, then the military is probably going to ask to take the case, throw him in prison for life while demoting him down to E1 (the lowest rank), and generally ruin his life as much as they can. They really crack down on this kind of thing because they rely on discipline to make things work. Marines are generally trained to do as they are told, no matter how much it sucks. And marines that don’t do as they’re told get examples made out of them so that everyone else knows to follow orders.

At least that’s what would have happened in the past, but with the current president who knows how it would turn out. Because the state may choose not to let the case go- the president can pardon a federal/military crime, but not state crimes. So California might keep the case because then the president couldn’t let him off easy.

The galaxy is watching.

His posts were always insightful and it is indeed sad that he is no longer with us.

For reference, Euromaidan involved the death of over a hundred protesters before the government finally collapsed.

The people of the US may be inured to violence. They aren't inured to violence from their own military, though.

The Ghorman massacre in the recently aired season 2 of Star Wars Andor is the playbook version of this.

I don't think the US is there yet, but the direction seems about right. As you say, step by step.

Andor was great. I really enjoyed it. It's the AI robots you should really worry about.

It’s usually too much for people to contemplate that things are going to end.

Or worse, it’s bad faith, and it’s shared to lull people into accepting the change.

One of the clear things is that the right side of the political sphere is no longer constrained to narratives that have accurate correspondence to reality.

Even if this blows over, there will be something else, and then something else - and some superficially plausible rationale that contradicts previous positions.

And people who’ve seen this before will point it out - but people in the hall of mirrors will be stuck dealing with whatever is being reflected around them.

It’s genuinely cognitively hard to reason past such things, especially if reasoning past them is done alone - because then you are now stuck feeling like you are outside of your group - worse, you might have to join the people you were angry with.

This is one reason it takes a long time (months, years) to travel this distance - you can’t mentally switch allegiances and world views in a moment. There’s too many interconnected beliefs, actions - neurons.

But for people who’ve seen this before, it’s pretty clear cut.

The Governor requested federal help. Legally different.

I edited this post because riots implies they weren't burning down their own neighborhoods because they didn't actually own anything there and had not been prevented from owning anything. Certain groups love to post the actually affected Korean store owners, but it's a gross one minority group was pitted against another to prove racism was ok in retrospect to cause the conflict.

You need electoral reform post haste - but I do not seed even a start to that discussion, so I think you are hosed. Might not be Dictator Trump, but maybe Vance or some other guy who succeeds in this game.

And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't. The democrats are too slow to recognize the problem and even if they eventually do, there are no majorities to change the system. And finally: Democracy needs at least two parties - democrats cannot be expected to keep branches of the government forever. You need a sane and democratic second party. Republicans ain't it - but the current system gives them success, so why change?!

We tossed that all aside in the 1930s via threatening to pack the Supreme court. Federal powers are now everything because interstate commerce is now everything and without a functional 10A and with delegation to executive agencies POTUS approaches God level.

Democracies are vulnerable to "authoritarian takeover" has been known and understood for 2500 years.

> The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position.

In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

> And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't.

A better argument would be that this isn't a partisan issue. The last President declared a Constitutional Amendment by fiat and attempted to do (good) things like student loan relief with blatantly illegal authoritarian methods due to the perpetual Congressional gridlock.

EDIT: It was US President George H. W. Bush ...

I agree that Trump is unlikely to turn into a dictator. But Caesar wasn't Rome's last dictator. And he wasn't the first to march on Rome.

Precedents are being set. Regardless of your views on illegal immigration, what's going on should be concerning because eventually someone with strong views you don't agree with will be in power, and if they can just arrest members of Congress, openly defy courts, ship ideological opponents to Guantanamo and send Marines into states they don't like, we're all going to be poorer for it. (If this shit stands, I'd argue the next Democrat in the White House should go FDR on the system.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System

Safe? When manned by actors known to shoot journalists in the head with “less lethal” weapons?

ADS operators would be exposed to more than the standard maximum permissible exposure (MPE) limits for RF energy, and military use requires an exception to these exposure limits

According to Wired, the ADS has been rejected for fielding in Iraq due to Pentagon fears that it would be regarded as an instrument of torture

Seems to have problems on both ends.

From an outsider's view, everything looks so performative and fabricated to be consumed by a tv target audience. I mean, if there is so much illegal immigration in the US, is it the most effective use of resources to target a TV cliche that would gather a residual number of people?

They is doing lots and lots of heavy lifting here. At the same time things are very confusing, because it seems like your fellow American is out for blood in a manner that shows no humanity.

Your fellow American on the right is plugged into a Matrix that traffics in its own narratives and can now freely manufacture or amplify its own fringe facts and narratives.

They are actually fighting very hard for the soul of america - as they see it. Virtuous efforts to stop the villainy and stupidity of the venomous yet weak liberals, leftists and democrats.

There’s a system in place to manufacture narratives, the closest analogy would be wrestling - except the President doesn’t treat it as fiction, he acts as if it’s real.

And since you can make and sell narratives incredibly quickly, while facts and analysis are days of effort - well, you have a structural change to the market place of ideas.

It happens everywhere in democracies now. See Brexit - entirely predictable. Yet completely unable to “sell” the known and clear problems to a majority of the citizenry.

Same with tariffs.

There’s a floor to people’s capability in navigating our current information environments - and partisan groups of experts are happy to use it to their advantage.

The problem began empirically with conservative positions, but the efficacy of the technique has now created its own political force.

The image the Trump administration conveys goes way beyond targeted hate. They appear to be replaying the Nazi playbook of persecuting minorities as a strategy to wedge in totalitarian control over a nation and society. Illegal immigrants just so happen to be the path of least resistance in the US.

So in late May, Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of the president’s immigration agenda, addressed a meeting at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The message was clear: The president, who promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, wasn’t pleased. The agency had better step it up.

Gang members and violent criminals, what Trump called the “worst of the worst,” weren’t the sole target of deportations. Federal agents needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told top ICE officials, who had come from across the U.S., according to people familiar with the meeting.

Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-...

I think this makes it even scarier. This means the goal is clearly not establishing sound policy, but to output propaganda that is designed to be easily consumed by TV audiences. It is beyond reality because it is not designed to make sense, it is designed to make sense to TV consumers by feeding on the context they get from their TV tropes. The Mexicans hanging around in Home Depots is a TV cliche that's recognized by people living wel beyond any Home Depot.

The best is Trump crowing about historically low unemployment numbers, and then peddling hysteria about illegals "taking American jobs." None of his degenerate followers care that this argument is stupid, and calls them stupid.

Now it's been papered over with other excuses, like the mythical "fentanyl" that's pouring in from Canada.

For example, you are deporting labor. Ostensibly Because of fairness and justice - they are in the country illegally. Ergo they should go.

No one should be above the law.

This has zip to do with gangs and criminality though.

But why this process ? Why not punish people who are employing them ?

This is more efficient and even more just. People are employing workers they know are here illegally and undercutting minimum wage.

Or why not raise minimum wage so more people will be willing to work those jobs ?

People act on incentives - and america is a country with a concentration of some of the hardest working and smartest people in the world.

It has a tradition of valuing this and converting those strengths into its own.

Now I have enough of a background in econ, business and politics to see through the narratives.

I also know you can’t sell all those interventions, not the least because none of these address the issue of gangs and criminality and eating pets.

Which brings us to the issue that your rationale, the ones which are debated online - are downstream from whatever controversy and theory that’s going to show up as soon as a new distraction is needed.

I mean, just Take a look at your original question,

“Leave the hardest working and deport the lazy ones ?”

America is built on immigration of the hardest working, most driven people from across the globe.

America is a machine for hardworking people to move ahead. That’s its promise.

And this is the question its citizens are unironically asking.

As I said, many ways to skin a cat.

People follow incentives, so why not punish people who are paying for the labor? Arrests for employing them?

Its an economic system, theres 2 way incentives.

The process used, depends on what problem you are solving.

So, you know, maybe they could try to do what they said they'd do for once?

One man was taken into custody for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at an officer and a motorcyclist was arrested for ramming a police skirmish line.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/kill-l-police-attacked-fireworks-...

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said "you had people who were...attacking police officers, deputy sheriffs and causing a lot of destruction."

The 101 Freeway shut down Sunday evening two times due to protesters on an overpass throwing rocks, debris, and firecrackers at California Highway Patrol officers and vehicles.

Footage on Sunday from the CBS News Los Angeles helicopter showed that multiple windows of the police headquarters had been shattered as well.

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/downtown-la-protests...

Once the state sets its eyes on enemies, it doesn't stop adding to that list.

Use of the tools and techniques in place right now will continue to be used, and against "legal" citizens.

I worry how we turn the corner. I don't like what history says.

This is why the 4th amendment exists. It is my favorite amendment. I wish people would take it more seriously.

https://theconversation.com/ice-has-broad-power-to-detain-an...

I agree that in practice there is some kind of loophole: ICE gets a "warrant" for someone that by definition has no ID, so there is no point in identifying a detainee - the immigration court will do that, later. Effectively, they seem to get away with snatching people off the street that vaguely may resemble any "warrant" they have.

So many homeless here have zero identification.

They are basically just going after people who are too brown and even ending up grabbing people who are just here on vacation, legally.

Rocks / debris came after tear gas.

The news has been startling in its mis-coverage.

Firey but mostly peaceful protests are happening all over again. No, burning down cities is not peaceful. After just a few days, at least five officers, several journalists, and we don't know how many rioters have been injured so far. We don't yet have estimates of property damage, but tens of millions would be conservative. Similar riots have resulted in hundreds of millions in damages.

When the right does this, we call it what it is: violent riots. We acknowledge it's wrong to attempt to prevent the government carrying out its the duties it was democratically elected to carry out. We should hold that standard to the left as well. These rioters are anti-democratic.

Your effort to overstate might have derailed your own reality.

Don't know about you, but I could never throw a brick at anyone. I couldn't and wouldn't put a mask on and head out with the intent to burn cars, throw rocks, loot, and cause criminal damage. That is the opposite of "largely peaceful."

The LAPD chief stated it's "out of control." Your attempt to imply tear gas was used on peaceful protesters doesn't fit the evidence. Many of the rioters are highly organised with supply runs of masks, fireworks and projectiles. I'm not sure what your agenda is but "accuracy" doesn't seem to be it.

There's a lot of videos of the contrary - LAPD pelted with rocks by aggressive mobs who are there to fight against "nazi scum" or fight for "stolen land" as they wave every other flag than American.

I suspect the usual media chicanery - everyone reporting the story that their viewers want to hear.

Anyway. My point was that I could not do this. If I was asked to fire teargas at a crowd who were protesting kidnapping people off the streets and taking them to concentration camps, I could not do that. I would refuse that order.

There's a lot of people in LA with the skills and equipment to rapidly organize like this; got to see it in person during the Occupy protests, when a tiny village popped up around City Hall - complete with power and internet infrastructure; medical, porta-potties, meals, workshops and seminars... it was pretty impressive!

It's also worth noting the insanity that is July 4th in Los Angeles, so there being a lot of fireworks is uhhh... really, really not weird for LA? We usually get increasing amounts (in size and frequency) of illegal firework "shows" all throughout June.

Lastly - there's also a big difference between "out of our [LADP's] control" and "out of control" - that's (AFAIK) actually the norm for effective protests. A large protest that's under the LAPD's control is generally a "demonstration" instead (see the women's marches).

they shot a bunch of people, and the feds took it pretty hands off. if anything, the protestors arent being nearly violent enough to get soft hands from the government. if they were out there with automatic weapons and actively shooting at the cops and guard, theyd be left right alone, and the road would be shut down for a couple months

So less violence towards law enforcement and insurrection than January 6th. Action the President endorsed in January by issuing pardons.

Honestly, if a Democrat were to match Trump's energy, they'd be promising pardons to protesters who damaged ICE property or torched a Trump property. They're not. In part because they're rudderless. But also because they're still gripped by the notion that we're not in the midst of a coup.

My understanding is that the National Guard are being deployed because ICE is being impeded from carrying out their operations. If California were allowed to constructively block the Federal government from carrying out policy of democratically elected administrations, that would be effectively a declaration of secession. Hundreds of years of precedent has made it clear that states are subordinate to the Federal government.

The California government are not blocking the Federal government from carrying out ICE raids. If you believe otherwise, please show the evidence that Trump has presented.

  A combined 42 arrests were made by the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the LAPD said early Monday. Alleged crimes included attempted murder, looting, arson, failure to disperse, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and other offenses.

is one source, others may have more or less detail. It supports arrests being made wrt looting, not the assertion that most of the looters were arrested.

Governor Wilson called up the National Guard, actually; subsequently, at Governor Wilson's request, and coordinating planning with both the Governor and Mayor Bradley of LA, President Bush invoked the Insurrection Act, federalized the Guard, and called up the Marines, and deployed the federal and federalized forces (including, also, federal law enforcement) in close cooperation and coordination with state and local law enforcement to restore order.

That is very different from the situation presently.

The national guard and the marines are not trained in crowd control. They are trained in combat situations. They have no role to play here, at best they just make people angry, at worse could perpetuate a massacre.

It stems from leadership - and current leadership wants them to be like that. So, they will become like that.

Even the British Army, generally regarded for professionalism, make a lot of jokes about how unintelligent and trigger happy the average squaddie is.

I suspect many commenters on HN would also have bridges to sell you, seeing as they’re from around the world, and countries where similar statements were made.

The statement is one thing. Reality is different, even with the best intentions, things get messy, and then the media and information firestorm that follows leaves scars that fester for decades.

You’d be lucky if it doesn’t lead to new infections and new wounds.

Which is why self inflicted wounds are so absurd, especially from nations that have the expertise to know better.

But - expertise is expensive, and entertainment and narrative vitality is the currency we traffic in.

A currency that pushes the costs of clean up and figuring out what happened to the future, if you are lucky to have any committees to look at it all.

We all need a news system that isn’t competing with engagement.

You think any individual marine will follow their conscience and step in if they see an abuse of power by authority?

It is not just Trump. he represents what conservatives, republicans and their voters are. And this is enabled by consistent pretension that Trump is an secretly opposed aberration. No, he is admired both publicly and secretly.

Nothing about deporting illegal immigrants requires deploying the Marines.

The governor of Louisiana requested federal help. Legally very different.

Most people don't understand why we have the system of laws that we do. Most Americans couldn't design a stable republic the way our founders did. (Most of their contemporaries couldn't either.)

Nothing about deporting illegal immigrants requires calling in the Marines. Nothing about this situation makes their deployment in Los Angeles legal. Performative hackery is practiced by both sides. Desecrating the honour of our armed forces used to be bipartisan, but I guess that's no longer the case.

They are being deployed on American soil for their force projection.

Will a useful idiot throwing a rock at a federal building be sufficient casus belli for the latter?

I have zero problem with deporting people that are here illegally. I have plenty of problems with how it's currently being done.

Can you expand on this? If you are referring to the AEA, as far as I know that’s not what is being used in LA.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/09/los-angeles-...

Well in a Freudian way this statement could be interpreted to exactly mean that what ICE is doing is illegal.

The issue however that prompted the protests was the way they are pursuing deportations with militarized tactics, brutality, and snatching people off the streets as abductions. They do not declare themselves, do not present their civil warrant, do not produce identification, and subsequently frequently do not follow laws, regulation, or the constitutional requirements of due process.

There is no reason that their neighbors, family, and friends need to be happy with what’s happening. They are afforded protection in our society to be angry and disclaim the government without fear of persecution or prosecution. When they’re then persecuted and prosecuted for doing that, people are pissed by the injustice. Then when their governments responsible is to fly in the military, you should expect an explosive situation.

Indeed it seems pretty clear the explosive situation was premeditated and planned - using armored vehicles and riot armored police to invade immigrant neighborhoods and abduct service workers and day laborers in broad daylight when a simple standard ICE operation was clearly designed to provoke strong response in those neighborhoods. Everything after that has been pretty deductively arrived at to create this precise situation. Even the language of insurrection and rebellion - laughably absurd claims for even a riot - which hadn’t happened until the national guard were deployed - are carefully chosen words to provide pretext for what comes next.

I desperate miss the states rights individual freedoms libertarian leaning republicans. They would never have done these things.

Also that they’re going after many people who are actually attempting to comply with the law, because those are the easiest to find. Meanwhile tens of millions of undocumented immigrants are still here, and the lesson they’re being taught is don’t trust the legal process, stay under the radar. In the end the Trump administration is unlikely to make a large dent in the undocumented population - they certainly haven’t so far. It’s mostly theater. They’ll just end up discovering how unintended consequences work.

That doesn't include the hundreds of students legally here on student visas.

And of course, if ICE is going to deport people in the country illegally: it's well establish by now that Musk and Melania violated the terms of their nonresident visas when they first came to the U.S., rendering their U.S. citizenship null and void (Musk worked in violation of his student visa; Melania both worked in violation of her tourist visa and overstayed her visa by several years; if she hadn't married Trump she would have been deported and banned from the U.S. for 10 years).

"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state."

"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Note that this affords the freedom to relocate within, leave, and return to one’s country, not the freedom to enter into other countries in violation of their immigration laws.

As it turns out when you send a force trained only to kill and subjugate, that's what they do. A few guardsman stood down but most did not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Seppo

tl;dr: it’s rhyming slang, Yank (USA person who may/may not also be one of the two Australian stereotypes of Americans, the other one being Texans) rhymes with (septic) tank, shortened to the euphemism used by OP

Well, I'm not so sure about that last part anymore.

Or to quote Serbian president's freudian slip (from just two days ago): "Every living soul in Kosjerić [small town that held municipal elections] came out to vote against us, but we still managed to win."

It is fucking bullshit how a country can spend decades building up its democratic institutions and all it takes is one opportunist to get elected once to undo it all and solidify himself into power for the next 15ish years. And then after they finally leave, you have to start all over again from scratch.

Turns out it's all BS. Unless it already deteriorated, and no it has not deteriorated in most of the world, votes do count and you live with the outcome which may include the eventual reality of vites stop counting. It's very weird, I can't form an opinion if its a psyop or just how the societies work.

> In his first speech as PM, he promised drastic measures to stop the negative spiral of the Hungarian economy, and to ease the burden of the international crisis. He also stated that he would remain in power until he had the solid majority of Parliament behind his austerity package, but will stay no longer than a year.

> The new cabinet formed on 29 May 2010. Bajnai was succeeded by Viktor Orbán. After that he retired from politics and returned to business life.

Funnily, Gyurcsany was removed after a leaked recording on which he said "we have fucked it up. Not just a bit, but much." [1] It's amazing that after 17 years, when Orban's huge lies and corruption is proven, people are fine with that, but when a former clown PM was complaining to his party members that "we should've done better", half the country was in riot.

[1]: In English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%90sz%C3%B6d_speech

The "real" problem was that they had too many (Russia-influenced / supported?) ex-communists and some of them were doing corrupt business in the 100k USD range; Of course this is already forgotten, Orban's friends' 100M+ USD ranging businesses seem to be fine with the voters. Not to mention Orban's and the foreign minister's regular visit to Putin.

Relevant search keywords: "Hungary Orban" + any of the following: "stadium", "castle", "rich meszaros", "corruption"

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Hungarian_parliamentary_e...

The same steps, in the same direction, the competitive authoritarian[0] playbook was clearly in full play, during the first term Trump started to openly attack the free press, subjugate some democratic institutions, etc. but guardrails were still holding, some GOP Congress people could pushback, the VP wasn't entirely in the cult, the cabinet had some level-headed people.

Now in the second term there is nothing holding back, not the Congress nor Senate, not the Judiciary, not the cabinet, not the elites, not the press, and seemingly the people aren't able at all to comprehend and pushback on how authoritarian it all is.

The plan trudges along, crisis will keep being fabricated so Trump's grip on power increases, this one in LA is definitely going to be used to salami slice more and more power into the Executive, under the veil of "homeland security".

You're entering a new phase of Trump's authoritarianism, Americans, and there doesn't seem to have any power actually powerful enough to fight back.

[0] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745953

And then 2010-2025 happened, we saw what the revenge was.

Trump coming back feels very similar to this.

Project 2025 is just a collection of methods they used in E-Europe before. On one hand one could read and learn from history. On the other hand... It's a manual on how to do things, in case you wanna build a system like those in E-Europe.

Hyped antagonism between both sides on purpose. Check.

Remember Ghorman

Burning the city? Check Incopetent mayor not doing its job? check Incopetent governor watching the caos unfold? Check.

"We made the story. We shaped it. We blew it up. We decided when it was over. With the right ideas planted in the right markets, in the right sequence, we can now weaponize this galactic opinion." ―Dee Shambo[1]

Now that the people that believe in QAnon are in power, they have 100x resources to spread disinformation. When conspiracy theorist are the ones in power, is it really a conspiracy anymore? It is policy.

Do you think just stating what is happening is a conspiracy?

Is the situation not being inflamed? Are troops not moving in? Do you think these aren't happening? I'm curious because I'm always a little unclear if conspiracy people think things aren't actually happening, like this is fake video or something?

Kind of like shooting reporters with rubber bullets.

This is a dire situation and I'm not sure how this country crawls back out of this authoritarian slide, but we've got to somehow.

(But to your point, anything >0% is pretty horrible.)

What's stopping them to do enough fuckery between now and 2028 to "win" the GOP the election in 2028 (or even 2026), and to stop Trump from joining the ranks of despots that keep getting reelected like Putin and Erdogan? Or JD Vance can be his Medvedev.

To use a horrible analogy, a lot of times women don't even admit to themselves that they've been raped, because accepting that means accepting a horrific label. The USA is in the middle of getting raped, and so far the response has been to mostly freeze up and take it, not wanting to fight, because that is scary and can get you hurt even more. (Well, at least for the majority of the country there isn't a real fightback yet...).

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...

>In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Moreover, due to the electoral college and Senate and gerrymandering of House districts, the majority is hardly needed for attain power. I bet that even in other societies, throughout time, roughly a third of the population will not react to what one of the other thirds is doing (even if they claim they don't approve in polls).

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-d... ("Former Pentagon chief Esper says Trump asked about shooting protesters")

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tiananmen-... ("Resurfaced Trump interview about Tiananmen Square massacre shows what he thinks of protests")

* We value human life over property

* We only empower police to use lethal force to prevent that person from taking a life.

Seems you’d like to change this? Enough’s enough, steal a TV and you die on the spot?

What if police attack a peaceful protest--say trampling a lone person with horses (https://www.newsweek.com/la-protestor-stomped-police-horseba...) or shooting a reporter standing by herself (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reporter-los-angeles-protests-r...)? Is there an assault-rifle shaped solution to this kind of anarchy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Split

“National guard operates under military rules of engagement, not civilian use-of-force guidelines.”

    The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy 
    military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion
    or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations.

    The statute implements Congress’s authority under the Constitution
    to "provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of
    the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions." 

    It is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act,
    under which federal military forces are generally barred
    from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.

This is the heaviest hammer in the toolbox. Deploying it against citizens he doesn't like because he resents their message is a historical display of bad character and is profoundly unethical in a way that the harshest adjectives struggle to reflect.

I’d cite my source, but can’t find it. I also can’t find anything saying he is invoking it.

Do you have any specific source?

Edit: I’ve found several sources that make It clear the Insurrection Act had not been invoked.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/politics/insurrection-act-tru... - “Trump officials quietly discuss moves in LA that avoid invoking Insurrection Act, but it’s not off the table”

Republicans would have to lose a lot of seats for it to happen. Or, Trump would do something beyond the pale for the GOP. Hard to imagine what would make them change their minds on it. Probably not thousands of dead protesters.

> Approximately 700 Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division will seamlessly integrate with the Title 10 forces under Task Force 51 who are protecting federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.

It seems like Trump has not invoked the insurrection act but instead it’s all under a different federal law. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, has a write up [2] on Title 10 vs the Insurrection Act and some possible concerns. He posted this about the National guard but given the military release states they are being deployed to assist the nation guard under title 10 it still seems relevant. To quote the TL;DR of his post:

> The TL;DR here is that Trump has not (yet) invoked the Insurrection Act, which means that the 2000 additional troops that will soon be brought to bear will not be allowed to engage in ordinary law enforcement activities without violating a different law—the Posse Comitatus Act. All that these troops will be able to do is provide a form of force protection and other logistical support for ICE personnel. Whether that, in turn, leads to further escalation is the bigger issue (and, indeed, may be the very purpose of their deployment). But at least as I’m writing this, we’re not there yet.

[1] https://www.northcom.mil/Newsroom/Press-Releases/Article/421...

[2] https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/156-federalizing-the-californ...

This, along with bullish economic policies to get them to capitulate to demands of US-homed multinationals (along with plenty of their own internal problems like everywhere else), has caused a problem that has now come home to roost.

It wasn't their fault, they were just born in the wrong country. If they can make it here to work and build a better life for themselves, great. Pay taxes. Get ID'd. Done.

Besides, there are also fully legal immigrants being deported.

Papiere bitte

This is how a free country turns slowly into a place where you need to carry a passport to take out the garbage bin in the morning.

There's nothing in the text that suggests it is appropriate to preemptively deploy US military in response to protests, not even because the administration deems protestors to be enemies.

Narratives in support of preemptively deploying the military against protesters are all crafted justifications, each built after the act has been decided on.

What's left to for apologists to do is to choose whether to own the methods and intentions or mirror the administration's disingeniousness.

Would blockading federal offices not qualify under the third condition?

> (3) the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States;

Everyone’s okay with peaceful protests, but they should call in the national guard and prosecute people for violence. You might hate Trump, but in my previous experience, it’s the residents of the most liberal districts that suffer all the consequences of this nonsense.

The fact that you won't say which city is telling. Do you still live there? How does one live in a city where everything was destroyed?

Go look at photos of Ukraine, Syria, Gaza... There, cities have been entirely destroyed. Portland had some building fires and boarded up storefronts.

They didn't make any such claim. They were explaining the consequences they experienced as a result of the BLM riots.

They burn the small business of honest working people.

Of the 2000 national guard deployed, only 300 have actually been operationalized.

There was hardly any looting or rioting. Certainly not more than could be handled locally. Trump is doing this to deliberately escalate the situation.

It's hilarious to me that we even have the cultural understanding of a sports riot, and it's assumed that it's just not that bad. Just people having a good time, burning up a car and smashing businesses to celebrate (mourn) their team's victory (defeat).

Is that supposed to be funny? Because in a super dry sort of way it's hilarious as a concept.

Edit:

Fwiw, the governor probably shouldn’t have waited for permission. A white man encroaching on the city run by a black woman at the height of Freddie Gray, tough spot to be in.

> where the mayor of the city said that she was going to allow, give protesters room to destroy and wasn't going to stop them.

https://www.fox5dc.com/news/hogan-says-defunding-police-wors...

No it's not. They just like slavery. If it was about states rights they wouldn't support sending in the military.

What I find shocking about comments like yours is the reminder that propaganda works. Someone in the republican party decided "guys, advocating for slavery openly doesn't go over well, let's tell them it's actually about states rights", and loads of people actually believed it.

I'm not in support of administration or MAGA.

But, to be pedantic, you can be for states' rights, but against states overstepping Federal powers.

Immigration is, currently, a Federal power.

Who is and is not a citizen is not a state's decision.

Just because you're in favor of state's rights (I am), does not mean you think every single issue should be a state's issue.

Maybe you'd like each state to fund their own SS and Medicare. But that's not how it is. And it's unlikely to ever happen.

And as one might not realize given the rhetoric, border crossings in 2024 plummeted (although not reaching pre-pandemic levels) thanks to increased arrests on the US side of the border and more efforts from Mexico to control the flow of refugees.

Have you thought about why trump's voterbase includes so many legal immigrants? immigrants who put in the immense effort to come here properly are tired of people sneaking into the country and the democratic party conflating legal and illegal immigrants and acting like the two groups are the same.

I have thought about what Trump got a lot of legal immigrant votes. I believe it's because a) he lied, playing on fear in order to get people to think he could save them from a non-existent threat and b) people didn't think he was going to do what he promised to do.

Ileana Garcia, Florida State Senator and co-founder of Latinos for Trump, just said "This is not what we voted for." She's wrong -- it was very clear to me during the campaign that Stephen Miller's goal was exactly what we're seeing now. However, I am fundamentally sympathetic to people who were fooled.

There's no need to give legitimacy to the lie.

Here's hoping this is purely an optics play and they are only there to waste money and incite nationalism. Because if this escalates in any way and the US military turns on Americans, its hard to understate how bad things could get.

I live in a very red state (North Idaho). They don't need to send ICE here. The sheriffs are all cooperating and lending county facilities to hold immigrants. It is safe to say the entire sheriffs department is basically a branch of ICE at this point. They have been targeting I-90 and US-95 heavily and running plates on every car along with a helicopter that basically just goes back and forth all day.

There is very little immigrant presence here (illegal or otherwise) but they have been catching work crews at random (usually under the premise of suspicious vehicle/behavior).

Spokane has been having CBP and ICE raids as well. Quite a few make the local news. Just doesn't get the attention like the larger cities do. Quite a bit of roundups going on out by Yakima and Tri-Cities, WA too. Which is part of why they are using county jails to hold people.

If it was ever true, it hasn't been true for a long time.

There used to be (and probably still is) a saying in the US military that goes something like "Folks who can't hack it in the military wash out and become cops.".

The military is not at all configured to be an effective long-term occupying force, but its personnel are trained to be soldiers [0] and peacekeepers. (While I'm absolutely certain that one can find examples of psychos that should have been detected and discharged earlier, that's true of any sufficiently-large organization. Finding every malicious person is a task that's next to impossible.)

Anyway, in a high-pressure, chaotic situation, I'd rather come up on a random member of the US military [1] than a random cop any day of the week.

[0] Yes, this does mean that they damage, destroy, injure, and kill when required.

[1] Whether active duty, reservist, or honorably discharged.

YMMV.

Now ask yourself why Trump is sending a group (who are explicitly prohibited from making arrests) whose entire mission is war to the 2nd biggest city in the country? It's for the same reason those Marines carry guns.

As I've seen others remark, LA gets far worse whenever the Dodgers or Lakers win a championship. It is not a war zone, warriors are not needed. But clearly they are desired.

They don't deserve any benefit of the doubt at this point. Ask yourself what the MAGA reaction would've been to troops being deployed to their riot at the Capitol.

You realize that this is all happening in a very small part of LA, which is an absolutely enormous metropolitan area with more than 10 million residents. The cars being torched are Waymos (which have been happily recording video that is turned over to authorities at request, instead of by warrant -- this action will keep them out of the protest zones) and no businesses are being harmed. The ones being violent are in uniform (even LAPD is saying that protesters are peaceful and those who are violent are people who are frequently violent and showed up for the fight, which is telling on themselves more than a bit).

For 99% of Angelenos, this weekend could have been business as usual if they chose to ignore the federal threats to their neighbors. Millions went to farmers markets, kids birthday parties, church, and all of the other regular weekend activities. The city has not been invaded by anyone other than feds, it is not a war zone, it's not even close to a riot. You are being lied to and manipulated if you believe any of that.

And this week, many residents who have the privilege of doing so are standing in line to barricade the entrance to schools that are hosting graduation ceremonies, so abuelas can celebrate the end of elementary school without being terrified of being kidnapped by men in masks. This is how the community protects its own, and a lot of other places could learn from that if they gave a shit.

In LA, the guys standing outside of Home Depot are the kind of guys that a woman would feel safe telling that they're carrying cash, invite them into their car, and bring them to their house... alone. These are not dangers to anyone.

LAPD and especially LASD, on the other hand, aren't the kind of guys who are safe alone with their own wives.

It’s dangerous to have the military do it. The Founding Fathers knew this.

And the protestors aren't the problem; the problem are the looters using the protestors as cover. The looters mostly belong to the retail theft gangs that have been plaguing stores across the country (even in red states) since COVID.

No, it’s not crazy but for an unusually large portion of the populace it makes you a racist.

Ditto for any suggestion that immigration law be enforced.

I thought only German Nazi soldiers were incapable of having morality and ability to decide, and were only capable of following orders.

What can they do to guard then?

You either support somewhat violent protests, regardless of topic, expecting that law enforcement and civilians will handle it amongst themselves, or you are authoritarian and demand that the federal government intervene with the US Armed Forces the moment someone throws a rock at a cop car.

This is an abomination, and anyone who supports the deployment of troops in my opinion lacks the values I thought were universal in this country.

(To support this action by Trump is to say you don't support the second amendment, on the grounds that the people should never have the power to subvert the state).

I really hated when Fox news would say things like this and I hate it when individuals do. It makes it impossible for us to communicate.

Just because the other side doesn't share your values doesn't mean they have none. You might say their values are evil. That's a different discussion, but they're rarely just reacting blindly.

I'm saying they lack the values I grew up believing were universal in this country.

No, they do not even get to claim order any more. This situation is being escalated by Trump in order to have a raging crisis for him to attack and drive even more division. Just like he did to the 2A/BLM protests, just like he did with the election lies culminating in the J6 protests, just like he did with his appalling anti-leadership throughout Covid. Trump doesn't possess the skills to actually tackle problems. His only real skill is slithering away from blame after he creates chaos and destruction. The fascists' only real value is now naked autocratic "strong" man authoritarianism. And the only reason they're still clinging to caring about the law is to assuage their own egos that the suffering they're reveling in is somehow justified.

They are bad people.

It makes me feel sick as a programmer knowing how many people on this board that values "hacker" anti authoritarianism and curiosity would have the government send the military to shoot their own citizens

But yeah, some cars getting destroyed is terrible.

In the end, it will come down to SNCOs and NCOs to make the decision because the Marines try to push down "battlefield" decisions to as close to the action as possible. Of any service, I expect your average Marine to be able to make independent decisions in the moment. That may or may not be a good thing.

The President can of course dispatch the military for domestic law enforcement, but to do so he needs to establish a legal exception, like the Insurrection Act. That hasn't happened yet.

[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poss...

The USA is a dictatorship now, the trump cult has won. Let's hope it crumbles fast.

> Orders for these purposes shall be issued through the governors of the States or, in the case of the District of Columbia, through the commanding general of the National Guard of the District of Columbia.

To surpass that, the president must declare an insurrection. But he’s done no such thing, since such a claim is nakedly indefensible.

(This justification of course only applies to the national guard. The federal armed forces have even stronger guardrails.)

I mean, Gavin Newsom just did a long interview from a "crisis center" where he did exactly that, today. And plenty of Democratic politicians also speak against violent protests whenever they occur.

But unless you actually pay pretty close attention to what Democratic politicians actually say, you won't hear these statements. Fox doesn't cover Democratic politicians speaking against violence. And frankly, if there's a 99.9% peaceful protest with one burning car, the media will devote 80% of their coverage to the burning car, and maybe a few sentences to politicians saying the burning car is bad. The media is unfortunately interested in spectacle and entertainment.

I pay more attention than average to what politicians of both parties say, and it's kind of hilarious how often I hear "Why didn't so-and-so say X?" (uh, they do every week or two), or "I never believed so-and-so would do Y" (uh, they literally promised Y on the campaign trail). I don't know how to fix this.

Trump: We must have law and order. Immigration laws must be enforced. We will not tolerate riots or destruction.

Protesters: The government shouldn't detain people who are in the country illegally. We should ignore federal laws we don't agree with. If we disagree with federal agents who are enforcing existing laws, we should impede them, attack them, and destroy property to lash out.

This is not an endorsement of Trump, as he's clearly milking this situation to squeeze Newsom. This is a deliberate strategy to put Newsom in an untenable position and paint him as an irredeemable liberal to everyone outside California. Until the left takes a logically defensible position on illegal immigration, they will continue to be vulnerable to Trump's theater on this and he will continue to bludgeon them with it in elections.

Well, unless it's done in furtherance of our agenda and against Congress...

So we're in a situation where the democratic party is utterly failing to actually implement any of the good or popular left policies that would help the masses, even the pretty moderate ones, but is pushing incredibly unpopular extreme left policies that don't actually help the citizenry. In that context it's honestly a very reasonable thing for someone on the right to point to the dems call the party far left. And yet for those of us that want these policies for the people, the dems appear right-leaning. Very odd how this has worked out, but both are true in a way.

I think the reason behind this is mainly due to them being controlled by their corporate donors who dictate focusing on the unpopular policies which are cheaper for the corporations to contend with. Universal healthcare would be a huge blow to corporate control in this country, as right now healthcare is tied to employment and that gives large corporate employers incredibly excessive power.

In either case, thank you for the insight. It didn't give me any additional insight and while you call it one dimensional, I only see an expansion of the same idea I shared: both sides use culture war to smear each other (and as a lazy cop-out to game the media attention for coverage and votes). Most people have heard of AOC, Bernie, and Elizabeth Warren's. Even Ted Cruz & RFK JR (pre election). Surely when congress is 400+ and senate is 100+ people, those names don't represent ALL of the intricate factions of the two parties?

Yet we all act like they somehow are the representative of the opposite. To me you're just saying the same thing, but relieving any responsibility of the parrots, and putting it solely on corporate and self interested politician.

If those culture wars win votes, I think putting the sole responsibility that way is just an convenient excuse for everyone to play along the system and shout at each other.

I guess to the people shouting at each other, my comment might have come off as "touting my horn". I'm from the outside, I don't have any high horse or stakes in this but I understand the confusion

You've swallowed a lot of right-wing propaganda about the Democratic Party. Do you really thing Democrats are "pro-illegal immigration"? The rest of these tendentious mischaracterizations take some tedious and likely fruitless effort to debunk, but just think about that phrase. Do you think any party is in favor of illegal immigration? How would that work anyway? Parties try to pass laws. The best you could find is that some party favors immigration policies you would prefer be illegal.

Democrats are against violating laws to deport people here legally or following the legal, prescribed process for adjudicating their status. Republicans are okay with breaking the law to chuck people out of the country. That produces a different result, but "illegal" is on the wrong side of the balance there for your argument.

You're not in a great position to tell Democrats what to say and do if you're clearly ignoring what they say and do and believing the lies other people feed you about them.

I do. Demonstrably so. The Biden administration admitted between 8-20 million illegal immigrants into the country, depending on the estimate used. Even at the low end, this is the highest ever in the history of the country. More than any other administration. They made all kinds of excuses. They claimed they needed new laws. Trump solved it almost overnight. [https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...] The Democrats lied. They didn't need more laws. They wanted things the way they were. They chose to permit the situation and allow it to devolve like that.

Now almost every Democrat representative is resolutely opposed to deporting illegal immigrants. There is simply no other way to interpret this than they are in fact pro illegal immigration.

We should be clear, protesting is not illegal. It's protected first amendment speech. There is activity at protests that is illegal, and should be punished, but that's not protesting and lumping them together puts a chilling effect on.

I've seen lots of pictures of protestors waving Mexican flags, and of the burning Waymos, etc. My guess is these are a very small percentage of protestors, but it makes for great TV, and Trump gets to say that he's "protecting America against violent foreign invaders". And I can imagine many people watching this and agreeing with him - I mean, I consider myself quite liberal, but waving a Mexican flag at these events just makes me think you can fuck right off with that bullshit.

It's a great example IMO of how Trump deliberately sows division and escalates whenever possible in order to use people's fear to consolidate power. It's basically Autocracy 101.

If you think that's what's going on, you are indeed quite confused

"Too many people are saying, "It's terrible that innocent black men died, but this property destruction has to stop!"

when they should be saying, "It's terrible that there is property destruction, but the death of innocent black men has to stop!"."

What happened immediately before Trump started sending in armed groups to the streets of Los Angeles was Trump getting credibly accused by Elon Musk of associating with Jeffrey Epstein.

So the correct title here is "Marines deployed to LA in response to Trump's association with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein being widely discussed on Twitter".

This allows people to correctly infer cause and effect, and most importantly, intent.

> Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

To fill in the negative side of authorities, Trump cannot use the mobilized Marines to enforce US laws (aka act in a law enforcement capacity).

As you said, they are restricted to protecting federal buildings and federal agents.

After the first Gulf War they sent us to Greensboro, NC to march in some parade and no one argued against that either because we weren't being used in any law enforcement capacity. Honestly, if we were there for 'riot control' I doubt they would have given us such a warm welcome.

They are arguing there's an insurrenction in California.

The argument seems to be more of a no-confidence move because the Californians can't keep order. They'll presumably treat the wording seriously but I think the "form of rebellion" is more a jab at the people who keep harping on about insurrections. Looks like a bad argument from any angle I can think of (they aren't invited and there isn't an actual rebellion to put down).

Whenever...the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States; the President may call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to ... execute those laws.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/12406

A very interesting article about this situation from a Georgetown law professor was posted somewhere deep in this discussion and is well worth reading.

The professor is strongly opposed to the deployment, and calls it "dangerous" and "pernicious" among other things. Nonetheless, he "thinks the federal government has both the constitutional and statutory authority to override local and state governments when it comes to law and order" and that "this [clause] is better understood as a purely administrative provision than it is as giving a substantive veto to the governor."

https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/156-federalizing-the-californ...

> The authority for the President to use the military in cases of insurrection comes primarily from the Insurrection Act, codified in 10 U.S. Code §§ 251-255. This act provides the statutory exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act.

> When unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce federal laws in any state by ordinary judicial proceedings. (10 U.S.C. § 252)

> When an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy in a state hinders the execution of state and federal laws, depriving people of their constitutional rights, and the state authorities are unable, fail, or refuse to protect those rights. (10 U.S.C. § 253)

> When an insurrection opposes or obstructs the execution of U.S. laws or impedes the course of justice under those laws. (10 U.S.C. § 253)

The last time this Act was used was in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots and it withstood all legal contests. This time around it is a stated intent of these rioters to specifically obstruct federal law enforcement efforts. That's their stated goal which they are very consistent and very loud about in interviews. This clearly satisfies the criteria for the Insurrection Act.

I understand that this is a concerning action, but the law is black and white. If the U.S. and Congress and the House didn't want Presidents to have this power, the country has had more than 200 years to amend it.

Kind of like using the Insurrection Act to suspend habeas corpus and then threatening judges if they dare to question its legality?

> This time around it is a stated intent of these rioters to specifically obstruct federal law enforcement efforts.

Or, one might argue, "petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

The President does not have a legal right to suspend habeas corpus. Only Congress.

> Or, one might argue, "petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

No, a petition is a piece of paper or in verb form, lobbying politicians. Burning down cities and attacking officers does not fall under the definition.

  > Is there an official definition?
  > the law is black and white.

>> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

People can say whatever they want. Only violent actions qualify as insurrection.

We have seen what happens to the traitors flying the Confederate flag.

They are listened to, cuddled, and pardoned.

But is not. Invasions are military offensives involving combatants of a geopolitical entity [1].

If this is an invasion, every rally in which a Confederate flag is waived is a rebellion. Also, § 4 concludes with "and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence." The Constitution is very clear about the scope of executive military power within the United States because they weren't illiterate and knew how Rome's republics fell [2].

Hell, even when Hamilton argued for federal control of militias, he underscored that its risk "to the liberties of the people" was mitigated by the fact that the states "have the SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE APPOINTMENT OF THE OFFICERS," emphasis his [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp

[3] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed29.asp

and God forbid if the English team crashes out early...or worse, ends up winning.

For sake of argument, let's grant this.

"A first-time illegal entry is a federal misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $250 and a maximum jail sentence of six months" [1]. Assaulting a federal police officer carries a maximum jail sentence of 5 [2] to ten years [3].

The first category, petty misdemeanors, includes things like DUIs, cyberbullying and vandalism [4]. It also, conveniently, doesn't require a jury trial [5]. Based on your standard, if a tourist is caught driving under the influence, or is suspected of cyberbullying or vandalism, it triggers the threshold upon which, if any violence of any kind is suspected in their vicinity, troops can be deployed against American citizens. (And then they get no jury trial.) Because I will love to see that precedent explored the next time the far right whips up an election-denial conspiracy.

[1] https://legalclarity.org/18-u-s-c-1325-illegal-entry-and-its...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/111

[3] https://medvinlaw.com/federal-assault-on-law-enforcement-pen...

[4] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/classes-of-mi...

[5] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-6/p...

There are no invaders attacking my family.

My people is all of humanity and I don't believe any race or nationality should be favored over or considered better than another. There are no (space) alien invaders attacking my people.

My territory is this Spaceship Earth, a speck of dust in a giant uncaring universe, and I share it with all known life in the universe. There is no other life known, and therefore no invaders.

I do have children. I do love my family. I did have a stable, happy childhood. My ethnicity is extremely irrelevant and I'm offended you'd ask.

I'm not particularly incensed about illegal immigration either way. I think ICE could be more humane. But they're ultimately executing the nation's laws.

What Trump is doing with California's National Guard and the Marines is orthogonal to what he's using to justify it. (The Marines aren't arresting illegal immigrants. They've been deployed against protesters. Mostly Americans.)

To the extent I believe there is a risk from illegal immigrants, it's principally in the risk from cartel violence leaking into America. These sort of theatrics undermine that law-enforcement prerogative by focussing on quantity [1] over quality.

> My instinct is to annihilate them in defence of myself, my family, my people, and our territory

I'm much more concerned about someone with those instincts than I am about nonviolent people. (As would have been our founders.)

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/immigration-ice-deportation...

but people who are in country illegally are not domestic.

"The Clause uses the term 'domestic violence' in the now-archaic sense of '[i]nsurrection or unlawful force fomented from within a country,” and not the modern usage meaning violence between romantic partners or within a household" [1][2].

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/sec...

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed21.asp

Is the fact that someone is present in the country illegally more likely to be presented as evidence that that person doesn't count as a source of insurrection "from within the country", or as evidence that the person isn't beating his wife?

The point is domestic isn't qualifying violence, it's referring to a particular category of threat.

> the fact that someone is present in the country illegally

Illegal immigrants aren't "from within [the] country."

The people who are from within the United States are protesting. Mostly peacefully. They're the ones the Marines are being deployed against.

But that is the way TiredOfLife presented it. He says that people who are illegally present don't fall into that category. You respond that he shouldn't be talking about wife beaters. Where did that come from?

(Also, of course, "domestic" is qualifying "violence". It's just doing it in Merriam-Webster's sense 2 rather than sense 3.)

The term domestic violence cannot be decomposed into domestic and violence. It's a term of art referring to "[i]nsurrection or unlawful force fomented from within a country."

> of course, "domestic" is qualifying "violence"

No, it's not. It would be like arguing that a law that talks about the United States of America doesn't apply if the states aren't united at the time of its application. (It's even stupider, since this is not only a term of art, but an archaic one as well. Decomposing it is akin to using the modern definition for domestic violence to interpret that text.)

This is such a tabloid and uneducated take. These are riots or unrest, not an invasion. An invasion is a military offensive by a nation-state or global entity. If this was in fact an invasion, the US should invoke NATO article 5.

If that's the bar, then I'm wondering how you'd classify the J6 mob? Remember, the president explicitly pardoned each and every J6 protester who was duly convicted in a court of law by a jury so at best there are some extreme double standards being applied.

No, it doesn't.

What country is using what army to invade USA?

But it just makes me so sad. I think I ought to delete my account. Every time anything US politics-y comes up, especially the supreme court, the comments are filled with such horrible takes. It makes me feel like, if this is the sort of world the people here want and its so different from what I hope for, what common ground do we have.

Why should I care about, idk retrocomputers or WASM OSes etc. if its just to be part of a group that's like this.

Idk, same sort of angst about doing anything on a computer these days. I get embarrassed telling people what I do. People in general seem to hate programmers and the more I go on the more I think they're right.

Idk blehjj, just in a bad mood sorry for ranting. Thanks for the comment, honestly

Take it as an opportunity to engage in calm debate. I've learned a lot from reading the comments around these stories.

If it starts incensing you, hide the story. (They tend to get flagged off the front page fairly regularly. Something I used to condone until Silicon Valley started showing its authoritarian tendencies.)

At some point people need to understand that this is just completely ahistorical and incredibly naive. It feels more like a cop-out to never take a stand for anything. I respect the exasperated outburst of the GP, at least it shows that there is some kind of backbone that will hurt when reading all this bullshit gaslighting.

There's not even a hint in the last 20 years - on both this site and the internet in general - that "calm debate" has done anything to stop fascists from gaslighting every step of the way. Despite their claims to the contrary, they aren't even looking for a debate.

Instead they just get the platform they so actively always wanted and are defended by the tone police to spread their bs, and the more influence they get the looser some people's already frail backbone get. They won't stop. Don't expect it. Don't wait for it.

I'm pretty sure you were aware of this but cite the Posse Comitatus Act to make it sound like what Trump is doing is illegal.

You can absolutely argue that what he's doing is unnecessary, disproportional, evil, provocative, etc, but it's not illegal.

Super unclear.

Governor Wallace of Alabama was overtly rejecting a court order to desegregate. There was a law passed by the Congress. A U.S. court making an order. And the U.S. President enforcing it, including with the military. Wallace was defying the U.S., not just President Eisenhower.

The facts and circumstances here are different. The immigration laws being enforced are clear. But the Marines aren't being deployed against illegal immigrants, they're being deployed against mostly-American protesters. There have been zero court actions specific to these protests. This is being entirely done by the President. Moreover, neither Newsom nor Bass are interfering with ICE. So it's a bit ridiculous to compare a former Confederate state's governor personally blocking a U.S. court decision to mostly-peaceful protesters (and where not, being processed by local and state law enforcement) exercising their Constutional rights to speech and assembly while ICE continues to do what it does relatively unimpeded.

Without invoking it, it just is not relevant here.

None of this is legally established.

The only way to go after them (given the current SCOTUS, who made the ruling above), is impeachment. And for that, the president has to do something so bad that 67 senators are willing to find the president guilty.

The only check on presidential power that seems to exist is the impeachment process

Yes. Abrego Garcia is back in America, isn’t he?

By our courts. That is the difference between the President defying the courts to disappear a suspect and due process.

Then you're empowering the President to detain someone solely on suspicion of being a noncitizen. Which will be mighty convenient for a future President when someone says or does something they don't like. (Irrespective of whether they are or are not a citizen.)

Also, these Marines are being deployed against American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble and speak. Whenever the bill comes in, it will easily have costed many orders of magnitude more than the cost of even a death-row inmate.

Broad immunity for official acts, and absolute immunity for core Constitutional powers. Nothing about "all charges" or self or preëmptive pardons.

> the current court seems very sympathetic to the unitary executive theory

UET concerns itself with how much power the President has to exercise executive power [1]. Not the boundaries of executive power per se.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Termi...

True. But the kicker is that the president has an effective Carte Blanche to determine what is an official act.

I think this is where the interpretation of the ruling is wrong: common reading is that it gave the president more power.

Textually, whether it does or doesn't entirely turns on the definition of an "official act" which the Supreme Court very notably left for lower courts to determine on a case by case basis.

>> The immunity [for official acts] the Court has recognized therefore extends to the “outer perimeter” of the President’s official responsibilities, covering actions so long as they are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” Blassingame v. Trump, 87 F. 4th 1, 13 (CADC).

Including in Trump v United States, which was still ongoing at the time Trump won reelection.

>> On Trump’s view, the alleged conduct [of contacting state and other election officials] qualifies as official because it was undertaken to ensure the integrity and proper administration of the federal election. As the Government sees it, however, Trump can point to no plausible source of authority enabling the President to take such actions. Determining whose characterization may be correct, and with respect to which conduct, requires a fact-specific analysis of the indictment’s extensive and interrelated allegations. The Court accordingly remands to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether Trump’s conduct in this area qualifies as official or unofficial.

>> Whether the communications alleged in the indictment involve official conduct may depend on the content and context of each. This necessarily factbound analysis is best performed initially by the District Court. The Court therefore remands to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether this alleged conduct is official or unofficial. [...] Unlike Trump’s alleged interactions with the Justice Department, this alleged conduct cannot be neatly categorized as falling within a particular Presidential function. The necessary analysis is instead fact specific, requiring assessment of numerous alleged interactions with a wide variety of state officials and private persons.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf p5+, p24

Since it was dismissed without prejudice, it's entirely possible a subsequent Department of Justice reopens it and proceeds with the District Court fact finding the Supreme Court directed.

Trump v. United States was decided with respect to "a federal case that was ultimately dismissed by federal district court judge" [1]. It was about the limits of U.S. executive power. Not "every DA in the country."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

- In the summer of 2020, as Trump privately fumed over nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, White House aides drafted a proclamation to send thousands of active-duty U.S. troops into the streets.

- Trump ultimately was talked down by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, but he has publicly expressed regret over not acting more forcefully.

- Top Trump allies, including architects of the far-right roadmap "Project 2025," have at various points called for using the Insurrection Act to secure the border, preempt Inauguration Day protests, and even subvert the 2020 election.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/10/los-angeles-protests-trump-...

Finally, the American people fights for democracy, after centuries of oppresion. /s

What happens in these coming months defines a major historical event for the USA, which sets it's course for the coming century.

It may become a country which is directly hostile to you. If you are American and are ignoring this, then it is no different to getting mad your family is wanting to talk about the raging kitchen fire that is unaddressed and escalating because "so what, the stove top has fire sometimes, it's a gas heater, that's normal" which, sure, would be right, but right now the entire wall is ablaze.

You cannot ignore this one, even those of us in other countries cannot ignore this one, as we have to reconsider our alliance with a country that reasonably one can assume is in the middle of falling to a fascist regime.

This is NOT run of the mill politics. This is genuinely about the collective future of the Anglosphere.

I don't love the phrasing of inferiors, but at least evil certainly applies. (Well thought out, well informed) Politics is a duty not a luxury.

And it's even topical here - this surveillance industry that grew out of many tech startups is itself at ground zero of this fascist takeover, both boosting extremist disinformation to drive "engagement" and also creating a crop of newly-minted elites with the audacity to kick over the whole apple cart of our American way of life.

The only effect of any protest vote is to tell your friends. Hasan had a lot of friends. Arab communities in Michigan had a lot of friends. Never-never Trumpers had a lot of friends.

I personally believe that a personal political strategy should have a conscientious goal, cognizant of the effects of its action.

There’s no separate moral universe where you preserve your ideals by helping elect an autocrat from the other side.

A voter should weigh the value of their statement vs the value of voting for the lesser evil. In a state like mine, where the results of the next three presidential elections could be predicted with accuracy today, a statement seems to have more value to me; if I lived in a battleground state, it would be different. I have often voted in presidential primaries where the candidate was already selected; again, I value my vote for the lesser evil much less than a statement.

Its been comical watching broken systems fall over themselves to accommodate trump while people pretend that they just need to vote for people who will maintain the broken systems instead of abusing them.

If you didnt spend the last 12 years tearing down your broken system and replacing it, you support all this bs. Eventually someone was going to get past the election, into the cockpit of the machine and press all these fucking buttons.

Not only did americans vote for the chimpanzee twice, they never got rid of all the buttons.

"Elections have consequences" you guys are meant to be the demonstration of how an armed populace responds to tyranny. But until I see you guys actually do anything about it, its just proof that more american values are completely worthless.

Enjoy the fall.

The destruction happens in the blink of an eye.

Rebuilding takes a lifetime.

Take his budget proposal for example. It explicitly called for the complete de-funding of TRIO programs. I have worked with multiple TRIO programs at multiple institutions over the years. While I am hopeful that the congress will institute funding for them, but the damage is done. People who have worked for these programs for decades are leaving, because of the uncertainty. These are career professionals who have helped THOUSANDS of kids make a better future. Further, TRIO programs are historically an entry into higher education for first-generation and low-income students not just in terms of being served by the programs, but also being employed by them. Every TRIO program I've worked with has been staffed by low-income first-generation folks. Without this entry into higher education, we will lose these voices in postsecondary education. People start with TRIO then move into hard dollars and off of grants, spreading their experiences across a campus.

The damage is done and we'll be feeling it for longer than my children will be alive.

Subsequently, the thing that really caused my immediate family (hardcore republican) to turn off of Trump was actually his most recent budget proposal and the hearings associated with it. They saw that he was cutting programs that help rural areas more than urban areas and feel betrayed. It takes everything I have in my to not just say "I told you so".

Finally - and completely disconnected, if you want to know how full of shit this administration is - The Secretary of Education said out loud that the (1)TRIO programs were out-of-date, that (2)schools needed to find other ways to recruit students, and that (3)there was no way to measure their success.

(1) TRIO has decades of research supporting their most effective models, and is a thought leader in student support and success for at-risk youth. The current trend of "pathways in higher education" that is sweeping the US is literally just a TRIO model.

(2) TRIO programs are explicitly banned from being used as recruiting tools for their host institutions if they are hosted by a college/university. It is illegal.

(3) TRIO programs submit an annual performance report with multiple measures of success. Any inability by ED to find proof of TRIO effectiveness is because they are incompetent in analyzing the data, not because the data doesn't exist.

However, enforcement of immigration laws has been one of the biggest parts of his election platform, if not the central part(build the wall, etc).

I imagine his voters are happy to see some action being taken.

The protestors could really do with some better optics, destroying property and waving foreign flags is just going to increase approval for military action.

If the protestors had instead marched peacefully with American flags, it would have been a much better PR win.

If you pay attention, you will notice that immigration policies have nothing to do with what's happening in the US, and at most they are a pretext.

The Trump administration is rounding up and transfering people, including US citizens, to prisons in third world countries they have no connection with. They are doing this without due process or legal basis. They have attacked and threatened judges who can and did opposed these actions. Lately the Trump administration is even threatening elected officials, including governors, with imprisonment.

Now you are witnessing the Trump administration illegally mobilizing both a state's national guard and the armed forces against its own citizens.

At one point anyone has to ask themselves if this is really about immigration at all.

News flash. The opposition is always going to say something like this to set an impossible bar for the protestors. This type of thinking undermines all protests, protects the status quo, and basically boils down to victim blaming.

Not to mention you can always have false flag operatives undermining a movement.

It's true that the opposition will say that even the best most peaceful protest is bad. But sometimes people broadly will agree with them, and other times they won't, and that depends on what's actually going on.

Then this would be a great time for him to start following them.

Many of his actions this year have been in violation of immigration laws. Incredibly brazen violation of them, in fact.

There are issues worth rioting over. Maybe you don't feel that illegal immigration is one of them, but you should at least understand the logic of a protest, and why sometimes becoming violent is necessary to accomplish anything.

Trump is purposely manufacturing a crisis because he knows his opposition is taking a losing position. Polls have been very clear that voters want the government to enforce immigration laws. Maybe not in Los Angeles, but nationally, the left is taking the losing side of this issue.

It’s clear since the election - Trump administration will use violence without any due process. Sort of Catch-22.

If you resist the indiscriminate purge of what Trump considers “illegal immigrants”[0] - military will be called to suppress the protests with some sort of never ending “emergency situation” established giving him full dictatorial powers.

Or he will just do the purges without resistance and achieve same goals.

“Protest voters” and democratic leadership have a lot to think about right now.

[0] lets not forget that you can be a US citizen and you can still be purged

In a democracy people can vote for the Devil him self, and the Devil him self would become the president, but there are institutions which prevent him from instituting his demonic policies.

Elections have consequences, but if those consequences are the loss of rights, then you never lived in a democracy to begin with.

So I guess these folks who live in a "real democracy" according to you just have the good government fairy swoop in when the people vote in a dictator.

At the end of the day, a democracy is just people, all the way down. It doesn't matter what laws you've written down, what courts you have, what procedures you've developed. If enough people stop believing in the enforcement of those laws, or court orders, or governmental norms, there is no deus ex machina.

Self-coups are a thing, and the best person to subvert a democracy is one who already wields considerable power within one. History is replit, unless you're doing the no-true-scottsman shuffle on the topic of democracy - if so, carry on.

Let’s say someone is genociding, and the election opponent says “I want to also genocide, but harder and smarter.” Your moral obligation is stronger against the incumbent?

Is it because the incumbent is already complicit and the other guy might not be as bad? I don’t understand the moral logic of the possible absolutism here.

Shouldn’t the imperative be to reduce suffering? How does getting the lesser evil out of office help the situation?

Any jackass can say anything. What matters is what they actually have done.

Never reward incorrect action.

Will the Marines merely deploy harsh language?

Nice try.

I asked a question and you answered, it was not a "gotcha". However I have asked other people (in person) over the past few days who do support the pardons and Jan 6 and also support deploying the military against civilians in CA now. Glad to know you're consistent in your views, sad to know you can't tell a question from a "gotcha".

Democracy does not mean the majority gets whatever it wants. Part of being a democracy is protecting the rights of the minority.

Yes, it does. By definition democracy is doing whatever the majority wants to do.

>protecting the rights of the minority

Under democracy the minority opinion can be ignored. Rights only need to be protected if the majority wants. And the majority can decide what is and isn't considered a right.

Then you no longer have a democracy.

Originally from the Dept. of State: https://www.principlesofdemocracy.org/majority

So you are trying to say that a democracy that is unable to find a global maxima is not a functional democracy? I would disagree and say that a democracy moving towards a local maxima is still functional.

Doesn't LA have a police department?

What did the LA governor had to say about it?

Is that so? What did he had to say about it? As I understand it, the LA governor is adamant in how illegally mobilizing both the national guard and the armed forces is being used to fabricate a crisis.

Tame is good.

The administration wants the protests to turn into a flashpoint so they can send in more military control.

Lighting things on fire and launching fireworks is enough to create the tipping point. Don't encourage this stuff.

https://theonion.com/protesters-urged-not-to-give-trump-admi...

The reason why non-violent protest works is not because it prevents escalation, but because when escalation does inevitably happen, the masses will think the escalation was unwarranted and be sympathetic to the protestors. The worst possible thing for a protest movement to do is scaring the masses, since then they will flock to the state for "protection" and give the state carte blanche to get the situation under control.

For all the work that MLK and his coalition did to practice nonviolence and to appear respectable, they were always disliked by the majority of the public. Being liked by the public is not a prerequisite to getting results. If you focus too much on respectibility, the impact of what you can do decreases until it hits YouGov petition levels.

This doesn't just work by getting the public on your side. It works by showing that you are not repressed by fear. Fear is how facists rule, so showing others they don't need to fear, that they can decide not to fear, that is the real threat to authority.

That means they will abuse you to make others fear. When that happens, you need it to trigger outrage as widely as possible.

Being annoying can be quite beneficial to a protest. It brings attention and forces people to think about you. There is a point after which it turns people off, and becomes a net negative, but you usually have to be very annoying for that to happen.

Being scary is entirely different thing though. When people are afraid they tend to become closed off to new ideas, and look to strong leaders. You absolutely don't want that in a protest.

> The protest has to be disruptive enough to affect the powerful, and approachable enough for sufficient people to join.

I think the ultimate point of a protest is to reach the ordinary people who aren't part of a movement. Movements succede and fail not by how much they convince the die hard supporters, but by how much they convinced average uninvolved people.

The problem with your opinion is that it leaves out the fact that one side is deeply involved in ensuring this escalation takes place, either in fact or in appearance only.

So regardless of what protestors are doing, or even who infiltrated protests to inflame and escalate events, the Trump administration is hell bent on having these protests escalate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Split

I've seen a number of people on social media thanking others for neutralising tear gas, so it's definitely happening. Maybe just not evenly distributed.

I tell my friends that we need to look to Hong Kong and France in case the protests move to Texas.

Such "protests" would be much rarer and shorter in Texas.

edit: I got throttled, as is the case on HN when things get "active". Here is my response to koolba:

---

At a head? Sure.

Do I think police can get rough and "in it" with civilians without live fire and without the use of the US Military? Yes.

Do I think, when a sufficient bloc of a city rebels against its law enforcement, then maybe the law enforcement should reconsider what they're enforcing? Also yes.

I disagree with the premise that the State is always right and that their monopoly on violence is absolute.

We celebrate the US revolution and revolutions across the world when governments act illegally and against the will of the people, violating civil rights.

I would not support firing into a crowd of people because of minor property damage.

So you are saying, guy throws rock. Now he has no rock. He should be shot despite having no rock?

So you are saying, police riot gear is useless against rocks?

I'm not suggesting they police should just blindly open fire on the crowd. But if you are in a crowd that turns violent and starts attacking the police, I think it's reasonable to expect some collateral damage in whatever their response is going to be.

> So you are saying, guy throws rock. Now he has no rock. He should be shot despite having no rock?

Yes. Or are you suggesting that if a guy shoots a gun and misses, then we should we wait for him to reload too? If the guy does not drop down on all fours and assume the position, I think it's reasonable for police to shoot someone throwing rocks at them.

> So you are saying, police riot gear is useless against rocks?

I doubt it's some invincible force field. They could still get hurt. And the police are there not just for their own safety. They are there to protect everybody. If someone is throwing rocks it could hit non police as well.

I do find it incredible the lengths people will go to argue in favor of violence to defend law breakers.

Trailer: https://youtu.be/QDz1WVUHim4

Def worth watching with people and sharing. Very inspiring <3

The state will always use loaded language to change public opinion.

As a result, we have people like Trump and Musk, both narcissists and sociopaths, at the White House.

Growing up, I dreamed about going to US, but was born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. As I got older and visited the country, it somewhat cooled my dreamed (Europe progressed dramatically in the meantime).

And now I feel a bit nostalgic and disoriented to be honest - what I once regarded as the country with the highest standards of ethics, integrity and rule of law, is unfortunately proving once again that no empire lasts forever. Of course it's a bit too soon as the US is still a superpower, but it definitely feels like the tide turned and really quickly.

Ironically, those people were right about that aspect.

If that kind of talk worries you, consider how much uglier it will be when the good people of LA form unregulated militias instead. Do you really want to see Ruby Ridge 2: Rooftop Korean boogaloo?

We are to depend on our trusted local law enforcement to protect us, as well as our valiant governors who will assuredly call up local guards to do the same. Examples of brave, novel Democratic resistance to Trump abound these days. There's no need to worry!

Why it's low effort: You claim things are out of control for the police. You don't explain why, or how this is different from previous situations when marines were not needed. It just reads as a +1 post.

They think this is a problem only for blue collar workers, that they cannot empathize with.

That said, California should have been on top of this situation. It looks like Newsom is willing to sacrifice the safety of his citizens in an attempt to score political points.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1669/General-Mood-Country.aspx

The last time we got a "C" (70%) was December 2001. That probably means something regarding what this poll is measuring.