You know you've really hit the time travel jackpot when future you appears to try to stop you, and another future you tries to stop them from stopping you.
Sherman, set the Wayback machine to February 1, 2016, I was writing about how Jason Leopold was labeled a FOIA Terrorist. Leopold was insisting that his FOIA requests be actually honored and fulfilled, and some conservative officials didn't like that, nor the notion of there being investigative checks on government. Leopold wore the epithet with pride.
I also noted the recent incident of Ahmed Mohamed in September, 2015, who, fourteen years old at the time, brought a science project, a digital countdown clock, to school and turned it on. Because it was a brown Muslim boy with a countdown timer, the alleged adults in the room decided he was a terrorist with a bomb. Mohamed found himself separated from parents, guardians and legal representation, booked by law enforcement and ended up in juvie before the hullabaloo was sorted out, because he was brown and possessed a digital timer he built, himself.
And so by the time Leopold was being branded as a Tango, I submitted that the term terrorist had long escaped its meaning as a criminal seeking to use violence to further a sociopolitical agenda and had turned into a blanket derisive: Terrorist was anything that a conservative reactionary doesn't like.
Kinda like gay in the eighties.
Kinda like woke in the mid 2020s.
The problem is, now there are captured judicial and paramilitary agencies that serve the ideological whims of Donald Trump, his regime and the MAGA movement. Now there are state agents, essentially hired goons, to take the term terrorist (and Antifa) seriously, specifically to turn noncooperation, civil disobedience and even legal protest into a dissident-gang-related conspiracy, to criminalize what should be legal, and to turn minor crimes into major ones deserving of harsher punishment. Or maybe even as justification to gun down a civilian on sight. (Law enforcement officers do that a lot here in the States.)
Terrorist went from a kind of violent criminal, to a generic derisive designation to essentially a joke. And now it is an ambiguous label by which to persecute political enemies of the regime.
The Roberts court is not consistent to precedent (even in regards to its own prior rulings) nor to any legal theory but only what serves a specific (far-right, pro-Republican, white Christian nationalist, corporation-serving) ideology.
We've already seen the way SCOTUS has dismantled the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. And we've seen how the Roberts court has nullified the VRA.
It can apply the same methods to dismantle the rest of the Constitution, particularly the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and nineteenth amendments.
And left alone unhindered to continue its work without consequences, I have no doubt it will.
The White Christian Nationalism movement in the US isn't restricted to evangelical protestants, and certainly doesn't include all of a given denomination.
Case in point, the six far right justices on the US Supreme Court, all of whom are Catholic, are White Christian Nationalist, and who rule aligned with MAGA and Trump a large majority of the time. Also, all of whom are Federalist Society members.
Note that Justice Sotomayor is Catholic and is not White Christian Nationalist, and not a member of the Federalist Society.
So I wonder where the SCOTUS MAGA six brand of Catholicism charts compared to J. D. Vance's brand of Catholicism (or for that matter, Peter Theil's brand of Catholicism (Given Vance is really just a Thiel Minime.)
Nobody voted for this specific result, aside from 6 people in black robes.
An awful lot of people voted for the larger package of which this is a component. It's like saying nobody buys the car for its doorlock mechanisms. And yet, they bought the car.
This is a good place to link the Behind The Bastards two-parter on Clarence Thomas. (on YouTube: Part One, Part Two)
Justice Thomas is a creepy, creepy man, and does so love his billionaire masters.
I remember in the first Trump term, Trump spoke at a UN conference and was laughed at for just declaring how great the US is doing under him.
It wasn't the first time, and I hypothesized Trump might think he can change reality through force of will as if he was dreaming, or a child bullying his peers in let's pretend.
Nowadays, it looks like a means of public manipulation, and a large enough segment of the population is susceptible to lies spoken with authority and often enough. Doubly so when much of the public gets its information from the massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that is compelled to stay on message.
Even before the rise of NSLs (FBI National Security Letters), I've observed that the term national security is vague and not narrowly defined, and appears to be an excuse to violate civil rights very much the way that appeals to children's welfare are used to justify odious legislature.
Can anyone provide a consistent narrow definition of national security as the term has been used in government institutions during the George W. Bush era, the Obama era and the Trump eras?
How Money Works did a video discussing the China dilemma.
The AI companies say that if they aren't funded or are over-regulated, China will develop superpowerful AI before the US does and that would be bad.
Then they say that they have to be able to sell their bleeding-edge chips to China or that would weaken their market share and that would be bad.
So the AI lobby (which is huge) shouldn't really be trusted as a source.
I bet it's not going to matter whether there actually are anti-technology-extremists, just as it doesn't matter to the DoJ whether a given dissident is part of a hypothetical Antifa cell. The point is exactly the same as when Joe McCarthy would accuse someone one being a communist, to smear them and increase the chances that a jury will pin them with a conviction and a sentence disproportionate to whatever crimes were committed.
Expect this to be applied to protestors engaging in noncooperation or civil disobedience, especially if police private security contractors or agents of state accuse them of assault.
Child Sexual Assault Material or CSAM provides a weird gray zone. CSAM is universally illegal when it is produced by actually endangering or harming children. But art that depicted CSAM yet doesn’t actually involve children may not be, especially, if it has artistic value or is thought-provoking. During the 20th and 21st centuries, content featuring child sexuality slips in and out of legality depending on the era, on local ordinance and sometimes even whether a police officer, DA or judge decides possession is criminal in a given case. 70’s coming of age porn fiction became illegal in the 80s. Japanese lolicon (and its knockoffs) from the 1990s became illegal in the aughts (at least in red states. Blue states still sometimes interpreted it as art). CGI content has always been a gray zone, and currently AI slop of CSAM (featuring fictitious children) is legal, not because culture has changed but because the controllers of the AI technology have incredible influence on the federal government.
This smacks of the entire history of capitalism from Walmart underselling all the competition until they all closed, to big farms forcing workers to move to the urban factories where they couldn't bargain for better pay and better treatment.
Capitalism ruins everything.
Sadly, the circumstances now for potential peaceful exchange of power is worse than it was before the raid on the Capitol Building, January 6th, 2021. I anticipate we will see violent challenges to election results of the 2026 midterms when legal challenges and protocol challenges fail.
(We may also see violence during the election itself, as ICE agents raid polls in blue-leaning regions. I'm also curious if Mike Johnson will just plum refuse to swear in newly elected Democrats into the house, as he did with Adelita Grijalva)
Trump is in power. MAGA Republicans are in power, and Trump has already demonstrated he does not believe in peaceful transfer of power.
I think in this environment, we have the problem that big tech is investing a whole lot into AI on the premise that it's going to replace a lot of human jobs. That and they're doing it sloppily, for instance, lobbying officials to displace homes and farms for their data centers, rather than developing data centers that are more efficient or utilize untapped energy / cooling resources.
In an environment that wasn't so top-heavy and run by oligarchs and corrupt officials, I could see AI as yet another tool (for art, for science, for law, for medicine, whatever), and eventually we may actually see AI used humanely.
But not in the current United States. Maybe a future China.
This is a common problem with some psychiatric patients, especially observable with the patent's symptoms can get dangerous. (Bi-Polar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder are notable cases.)
Some patients take their meds for a while, feel better and then stop taking them because they're asymptomatic. Which leads to the symptoms coming back, sometimes leading to the patient going on a drama rampage sometimes involving lethal weapons or heavy machinery.
For this administration (and to be fair, prior administrations, especially the Republican ones) law enforcement doesn't exist to reduce crime, but to preserve hierarchy and to keep workers and minorities in their place.
Normally, the legislature is supposed to be in charge of the purse strings, but this whole scheme demonstrates the capacity of the executive to just pay itself for whatever reason, and -- when talking about the special immunity provisions for Trump and family -- turn laws off.
If no-one does a thing to stop it, if it is allowed to become legally effective, then it sets a precedent for the Trump regime and future administrations to follow to allow the executive to bypass both Congress and the courts.
I'm pretty sure Abrego is going to be a thirteen-part Netflix mini-series that doesn't have to pad its episodes with fiction at all, considering the number of turns and twists his legal team has been forced to navigate.
The Trump regime has painted itself an absolute villain in the process.
This was one of the reasons US state department attaches tried really hard to deal fairly with defectors from the Soviet Union. They often committed no crimes or if they did, did so against operatives who were criminal, themselves. Regardless, their take was too useful not to protect them.
We didn't just debrief migrants from behind the Iron Curtain, but had intelligence operations throughout the world, especially in the Americas, so when someone came with juicy intel against a rival state, it was important we made sure they were safe and comfortable long after the usefulness of their reports was exhausted.
In most cases, them talking smack about their home state to the US was a grave betrayal, beyond a mere criminal sentence. The kind of thing blast furnace executions and immurement were reserved for.
By selling out on our South American criminal informants the US hasn't merely sent a message to potential sources from criminal sectors but also to those from international sectors.
We've just lost all our future spies.
Researching time travel
You know you've really hit the time travel jackpot when future you appears to try to stop you, and another future you tries to stop them from stopping you.
"Terrorist" as a perjorative
Sherman, set the Wayback machine to February 1, 2016, I was writing about how Jason Leopold was labeled a FOIA Terrorist. Leopold was insisting that his FOIA requests be actually honored and fulfilled, and some conservative officials didn't like that, nor the notion of there being investigative checks on government. Leopold wore the epithet with pride. I also noted the recent incident of Ahmed Mohamed in September, 2015, who, fourteen years old at the time, brought a science project, a digital countdown clock, to school and turned it on. Because it was a brown Muslim boy with a countdown timer, the alleged adults in the room decided he was a terrorist with a bomb. Mohamed found himself separated from parents, guardians and legal representation, booked by law enforcement and ended up in juvie before the hullabaloo was sorted out, because he was brown and possessed a digital timer he built, himself. And so by the time Leopold was being branded as a Tango, I submitted that the term terrorist had long escaped its meaning as a criminal seeking to use violence to further a sociopolitical agenda and had turned into a blanket derisive: Terrorist was anything that a conservative reactionary doesn't like. Kinda like gay in the eighties. Kinda like woke in the mid 2020s. The problem is, now there are captured judicial and paramilitary agencies that serve the ideological whims of Donald Trump, his regime and the MAGA movement. Now there are state agents, essentially hired goons, to take the term terrorist (and Antifa) seriously, specifically to turn noncooperation, civil disobedience and even legal protest into a dissident-gang-related conspiracy, to criminalize what should be legal, and to turn minor crimes into major ones deserving of harsher punishment. Or maybe even as justification to gun down a civilian on sight. (Law enforcement officers do that a lot here in the States.) Terrorist went from a kind of violent criminal, to a generic derisive designation to essentially a joke. And now it is an ambiguous label by which to persecute political enemies of the regime.
We can't trust this court. It shows no consistency.
The Roberts court is not consistent to precedent (even in regards to its own prior rulings) nor to any legal theory but only what serves a specific (far-right, pro-Republican, white Christian nationalist, corporation-serving) ideology. We've already seen the way SCOTUS has dismantled the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. And we've seen how the Roberts court has nullified the VRA. It can apply the same methods to dismantle the rest of the Constitution, particularly the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and nineteenth amendments. And left alone unhindered to continue its work without consequences, I have no doubt it will.
I wonder if there's an intersection...
The White Christian Nationalism movement in the US isn't restricted to evangelical protestants, and certainly doesn't include all of a given denomination. Case in point, the six far right justices on the US Supreme Court, all of whom are Catholic, are White Christian Nationalist, and who rule aligned with MAGA and Trump a large majority of the time. Also, all of whom are Federalist Society members. Note that Justice Sotomayor is Catholic and is not White Christian Nationalist, and not a member of the Federalist Society. So I wonder where the SCOTUS MAGA six brand of Catholicism charts compared to J. D. Vance's brand of Catholicism (or for that matter, Peter Theil's brand of Catholicism (Given Vance is really just a Thiel Minime.)
"Voted for this specific result"
Nobody voted for this specific result, aside from 6 people in black robes. An awful lot of people voted for the larger package of which this is a component. It's like saying nobody buys the car for its doorlock mechanisms. And yet, they bought the car.
For everyones information and edification
This is a good place to link the Behind The Bastards two-parter on Clarence Thomas. (on YouTube: Part One, Part Two) Justice Thomas is a creepy, creepy man, and does so love his billionaire masters.
"Even killing leaders ended up making Iran stronger"
If only Iran could return the favor.It seems to be a running theme
I remember in the first Trump term, Trump spoke at a UN conference and was laughed at for just declaring how great the US is doing under him. It wasn't the first time, and I hypothesized Trump might think he can change reality through force of will as if he was dreaming, or a child bullying his peers in let's pretend. Nowadays, it looks like a means of public manipulation, and a large enough segment of the population is susceptible to lies spoken with authority and often enough. Doubly so when much of the public gets its information from the massive oligarch-owned far-right propaganda machine that is compelled to stay on message.
What the heck is national security anyway
Even before the rise of NSLs (FBI National Security Letters), I've observed that the term national security is vague and not narrowly defined, and appears to be an excuse to violate civil rights very much the way that appeals to children's welfare are used to justify odious legislature. Can anyone provide a consistent narrow definition of national security as the term has been used in government institutions during the George W. Bush era, the Obama era and the Trump eras?
Mixed feelings for all of us
How Money Works did a video discussing the China dilemma. The AI companies say that if they aren't funded or are over-regulated, China will develop superpowerful AI before the US does and that would be bad. Then they say that they have to be able to sell their bleeding-edge chips to China or that would weaken their market share and that would be bad. So the AI lobby (which is huge) shouldn't really be trusted as a source.
This smacks a lot of the Antifa scare
I bet it's not going to matter whether there actually are anti-technology-extremists, just as it doesn't matter to the DoJ whether a given dissident is part of a hypothetical Antifa cell. The point is exactly the same as when Joe McCarthy would accuse someone one being a communist, to smear them and increase the chances that a jury will pin them with a conviction and a sentence disproportionate to whatever crimes were committed. Expect this to be applied to protestors engaging in noncooperation or civil disobedience, especially if police private security contractors or agents of state accuse them of assault.
From a rant on Lemmy
Child Sexual Assault Material or CSAM provides a weird gray zone. CSAM is universally illegal when it is produced by actually endangering or harming children. But art that depicted CSAM yet doesn’t actually involve children may not be, especially, if it has artistic value or is thought-provoking. During the 20th and 21st centuries, content featuring child sexuality slips in and out of legality depending on the era, on local ordinance and sometimes even whether a police officer, DA or judge decides possession is criminal in a given case. 70’s coming of age porn fiction became illegal in the 80s. Japanese lolicon (and its knockoffs) from the 1990s became illegal in the aughts (at least in red states. Blue states still sometimes interpreted it as art). CGI content has always been a gray zone, and currently AI slop of CSAM (featuring fictitious children) is legal, not because culture has changed but because the controllers of the AI technology have incredible influence on the federal government.
"The ones that kept using them had no choice"
This smacks of the entire history of capitalism from Walmart underselling all the competition until they all closed, to big farms forcing workers to move to the urban factories where they couldn't bargain for better pay and better treatment. Capitalism ruins everything.
That's not as reassuring as it should be.
Sadly, the circumstances now for potential peaceful exchange of power is worse than it was before the raid on the Capitol Building, January 6th, 2021. I anticipate we will see violent challenges to election results of the 2026 midterms when legal challenges and protocol challenges fail. (We may also see violence during the election itself, as ICE agents raid polls in blue-leaning regions. I'm also curious if Mike Johnson will just plum refuse to swear in newly elected Democrats into the house, as he did with Adelita Grijalva) Trump is in power. MAGA Republicans are in power, and Trump has already demonstrated he does not believe in peaceful transfer of power.
AI may be the next CAD
I think in this environment, we have the problem that big tech is investing a whole lot into AI on the premise that it's going to replace a lot of human jobs. That and they're doing it sloppily, for instance, lobbying officials to displace homes and farms for their data centers, rather than developing data centers that are more efficient or utilize untapped energy / cooling resources. In an environment that wasn't so top-heavy and run by oligarchs and corrupt officials, I could see AI as yet another tool (for art, for science, for law, for medicine, whatever), and eventually we may actually see AI used humanely. But not in the current United States. Maybe a future China.
But I feel fine!
This is a common problem with some psychiatric patients, especially observable with the patent's symptoms can get dangerous. (Bi-Polar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder are notable cases.) Some patients take their meds for a while, feel better and then stop taking them because they're asymptomatic. Which leads to the symptoms coming back, sometimes leading to the patient going on a drama rampage sometimes involving lethal weapons or heavy machinery.
Law Enforcement is not about reducing crime
For this administration (and to be fair, prior administrations, especially the Republican ones) law enforcement doesn't exist to reduce crime, but to preserve hierarchy and to keep workers and minorities in their place.
Is anyone talking about the precedent this sets?
Normally, the legislature is supposed to be in charge of the purse strings, but this whole scheme demonstrates the capacity of the executive to just pay itself for whatever reason, and -- when talking about the special immunity provisions for Trump and family -- turn laws off. If no-one does a thing to stop it, if it is allowed to become legally effective, then it sets a precedent for the Trump regime and future administrations to follow to allow the executive to bypass both Congress and the courts.
Coming soon to a TV near you
I'm pretty sure Abrego is going to be a thirteen-part Netflix mini-series that doesn't have to pad its episodes with fiction at all, considering the number of turns and twists his legal team has been forced to navigate. The Trump regime has painted itself an absolute villain in the process.
Criminality doesn't matter
This was one of the reasons US state department attaches tried really hard to deal fairly with defectors from the Soviet Union. They often committed no crimes or if they did, did so against operatives who were criminal, themselves. Regardless, their take was too useful not to protect them. We didn't just debrief migrants from behind the Iron Curtain, but had intelligence operations throughout the world, especially in the Americas, so when someone came with juicy intel against a rival state, it was important we made sure they were safe and comfortable long after the usefulness of their reports was exhausted. In most cases, them talking smack about their home state to the US was a grave betrayal, beyond a mere criminal sentence. The kind of thing blast furnace executions and immurement were reserved for. By selling out on our South American criminal informants the US hasn't merely sent a message to potential sources from criminal sectors but also to those from international sectors. We've just lost all our future spies.