It is already, but like a famous cartoon coyote they will keep it running until they can't.
I hate this. I just want to play music with my friends and be retired. Doing tech support for what hopefully does not become a nascent national insurgent effort is way, way less fun.
Maybe if someone can live somewhere peacefully then they should be allowed to just live there. Maybe making laws that lead to horrors is the crime.
Maybe the real nihilists are the people who'd rather see unjust laws followed than to look at something evil and re-evaluate the legitimacy of giving power to the people doing the evil thing.
I am glad you feel that _I_ have a high level of compassion for my fellow humans.
If someone posts "but Obama" in response to a bunch of -hand written letters from children in what I consider to be a literal concentration camp- then I'm going to think that person has transcended a lack of "integrity" or "critical thinking skills" into becoming a literal monster.
This is the account's M.O. You can see my response above, but basically as far as I can tell they're deeply conservative, and they try and position themselves as a like "rational centrist" by doing this "both sides" Dance.
The giveaway that you've noticed, is they never actually condemn the existing administration without also comparing them to Obama (and for reasons beyond me, specifically Obama and not say, Biden, Bush 1/2, Clinton).
big hint: how many computer-literate people do you know that would put their whole-ass name as their HN handle, in 2026? none i'd professionally associate with, thats for sure
Having an excuse for why you still haven't filled out the fourth-quadrent "unknown unknowns", doesn't make you "better".
It's entirely possible to dislike BHO for racist reasons, just like it's possible to think both he and the Bushes are literal war criminals for consistent reasons.
I think GWB is a war criminal who had a better understanding of North/South migration than BHO. I still think both of them, and about anyone who supports DJT for any reasons, are pretty vicious.
And, like I said, literal all folks who like DJT and dislike BHO are birthers of various stripes. That's my lived experience. Maybe you're some kind of unicorn, who knows.
I am indeed somewhat conservative. Not deeply so. I occasionally vote for against the grain, and several times Libertarian.
My stance is this: impartial sources like the ACLU have treated Trump and Obama in similar ways. ( They have been deeply critical of both for their immigration stance. ) It seems logical to me. Both presidents used the same organizations, led by the same people, using largely similar tactics, to do the same thing.
Yet people today are protesting, resisting, agitated, when there seemed to be little of that behavior when Obama was doing largely the same thing. ( Refer to the ACLU articles. ). They condemn Trump, but still cheer Obama.
Edit: You raise a valid point about Bush and Clinton. Indeed, both of these behaved a lot like Trump and Obama. Why didn’t people lose their minds then? Why only now?
My opinion is that Trump ( and Obama ) were both enforcing the laws passed by bipartisan congress. ( As others have pointed out, Bush and Clinton could easily be included. )
They have all enforced the laws, as is their duty. Obama eloquently said he is a president, not an empower. He did not get to pick and choose which laws to enforce.
So I condemn neither Obama nor Trump. They were charged with a duty, and they fulfilled it.
My argument is against people who condemn one and praise another.
I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites.
At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it.
Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context.
It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business.
At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way.
At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events.
I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work.
That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point.
However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns.
Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site.
All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.
Rights don’t entirely disappear because a group of individuals decides to form a collective entity. That’s the heart of the Citizen’s United decision. If an individual can aggregate data about his customers and make a decision to not serve a known offender, then surely a group of individuals can do the same. That’s their right.
Again, this is not discrimination if it’s done for specific individuals, even if it’s done using data collected in aggregate. Banning a protected group wouldn’t be illegal. But banning a specific person would not.
Whether it’s legal to sell that same data as a list of undesirables is the open untested question.
"Readers, whatever you're doing right now is what you would be doing during the rise of Nazi Germany..."
That is true.
If you're in the US and you're not in the signal chats or whatever that would alert you when ICE is working then you're not doing all the things that you could do to prevent this pronounced move towards fascism that will impact you personally and deeply.
This is not activism as charity- people need to understand that we are still in a spot where we may be able to push back, and that should be understood as simple self-interest.
Even if you're not in a place "under siege" they are working where you are living.
Consider that if you're in some rural place or even a place where they feel "at home" your work is going to be more impactful by definition:
- find your local immigrant's rights group that is watching out for ICE
- get trained by them how to be a "responder"
- slot in and help where you can.
“The fact that I was not prepared to resist, in 1935, meant that all the thousands, hundreds of thousands, like me in Germany were also unprepared, and each one of these hundreds of thousands was, like me, a man of great influence or of great potential influence. Thus the world was lost.”
― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
She was mad that one of the protestors had a "Fuck Ice" flag.
She said that it made her uncomfortable that her granddaughter might see the flag and be offended.
What a world.