Uriel-238 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Extraordinarily Renditioned Migrants Report Back From El Salvador’s Maximum Security Hellhole

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2025 @ 12:27pm

  Cant tell if /s but...

  There are two ways that basic human rights are enforced. One is generally, by the implacable encroachment of nature. Hot climes, cold climes, predators, plagues, parasites, the need for food, the unstoppable march of time and age, all stab at the human tribe, killing us one by one to extinction as it has done to over 90% of all species that exist. Cooperation is our superpower, and morality (id est basic human rights ) are the mutual agreement (often unsaid), the terms by which we cooperate with each other. This teamwork serves as a powerful force multiplier against the elements. Work together, and we may effectively compete for the world's resources. Don't, and we all will die off. The societies that unify more people are the ones that define culture for the rest of us. The other is the civil unrest that accumulates against tyrants who don't allow for basic human rights and human want. The rise of governments other than monarchy (or feudal lord and vassals) has come from the matter of hereditary selection yields a lot of tyrants. It is difficult to build a legacy of good governance or far-reaching conquest before a Joffrey Baratheon inherits the throne and loses it all. Nations and kings still strive for the thousand-year rule, and few societies -- if any -- have survived so long without their history fragmented by a period of unrest, civil war and regime change by force). Our scholars still guess at the models that preserve a long-lasting stable society, but all of them tend towards establishing permanent civil rights that protect everyone, with the list of such rights becoming longer by the iteration. Defining rights seems to figure largely into the formulas that work better. I suppose, a dictator can simply massacre all the dissidents, but that's an action that makes new dissidents of the onlookers, lather, rinse repeat until you don't have enough people to make a modern society. The iron hand, tempting as it is, just doesn't work as well. A lot is still speculation, much like the the Fourth International Posadists, who assert that a communal state (one that escapes capitalism) is necessary before space travel and colonization can proceed in earnest. Historians only hypothesize how to create a long lasting stable state. We can see plainly, however, the mass accumulation of political wealth and power, allows a small demographic to capture government and subvert it to serve them rather than the public. And this keeps at bay some basic advancements of universal quality of life, such as shorter work-weeks enough that the common population can parent and pay attention to civic duties. We may be not far from a global post scarcity society, if weren't for the sickness of billionaires who are determined to accumulate even more wealth for themselves, if not all the wealth in the world, to no rational end. But these plutocrats will bring all their wealth and power to anyone who dares try to unseat them, or even defy their efforts to reshape the world as they like it, so we've yet to find a cure for what is essentially parasitic capture of national bodies.

• On the post: Extraordinarily Renditioned Migrants Report Back From El Salvador’s Maximum Security Hellhole

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 29 Jul, 2025 @ 02:15pm

  "A maximum security prison meant to hold convicted terrorists"

  Once again, a) Even terrorists (or serial killers, or child predators) deserve better treatment than this. This is the kind of prison an evil lord from an Edgar Allen Poe novel might build. It's right up there with immurement. b) No state should be torturing and rendering people (or for that matter, killing them). The whole notion of retributive justice fails at all levels (it doesn't reduce crime as a deterrence and it only increases recidivism for those who survive their sentence), but also our systems of due process are just not certain enough or fair enough to justify cruel treatment or execution. If we must have prisons at all, they should contain and be centers where actual rehabilitation is possible. Instead, at least in the US, they are the product of an industrial complex that profits from warm-bodies in dungeon cells. CECOT itself is being used as an oubliette (a place of forgetting) to dispose of political prisoners, and while the US has recovered some folk from the compound, those who remain incarcerated there still are a humanitarian matter, regardless of any allegations of what they might have done, or who they might be. CECOT should not exist, and every day it is operational is heinous.

• On the post: ICE Lawyers Are Trying To Remain Anonymous In Court Like The Cowards They Are

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2025 @ 06:16pm

  Wow.

  I highly suspect Smeagol has more moral integrity than you do. You're way down in Peter Pettigrew territory, there.

• On the post: Judge Reinstates Fired FTC Commissioner While Everyone (Including The Judge) Knows The Supreme Court Will Overturn

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 24 Jul, 2025 @ 02:25pm

  "according to the Constitution"

  Except we now have legal scholars laying out receipts to the contrary, that this isn't according to the constitution at all. I recommend Lawless: How the Current Supreme Court Runs On Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories and Bad Vibes by Leah Litman. This is a reckoning that's been gathering a long time I noticed something was amiss having read the Dobbs ruling by Alito. From the United States Supreme Court, I expect ironclad arguments. I expect spurious logic to be sublime, elegant. We should have nine Cardinal Richelieus in there able to use the wording of the constitution and a bit of clever interpretation to get us layfolk to agree with their interpretation (or at least wonder why the outcome is not as expected). The Dobbs opinion is dogshit. It's got the hallmarks of an internet screed. It's obvious for the Federalist Society six, they're letting their lack of oversight and lofty chairs do the heavy lifting, so they can submit screeds that are barely fit for internet forums, rather than One, First Street. They are Federalist Society shills for their lord and master Leonard Leo, who assured all Republican SCOTUS nominations 1990 forward would be monarchists seeking to consolidate power in the executive eventually so that the office could be handed down from parent to blood descendant. And they stand by all the hallmarks of Post-trump US far-right conservatism, including climate crisis denialism. Alito himself is a MAGA desciple who believes the 2020 stolen election rhetoric against all evidence. Thomas has admitted multiple times he just hates liberals, and has contempt for other blacks, and is glad to just bring ruin to the nation. He also likes inappropriately sharing porn with people who don't want to see it. And Roberts wants to be emperor, himself, but is happy to settle for kingmaker, and the grand vizier who tells Sultan what he's allowed or not allowed to do. SCOTUS today is a chamber of usurpers engaging in a slow coup d'etat, as the outsider justices get pushed out with dissents just in case a new society forms from the ashes and wants to know where this one went wrong, and the entire federal legal community knows it. Should this turn into a hot civil war (possibly when MAGAs realize they're losing to a peaceful moving they'll crack out their guns and start shooting) then yes, Leo and the Federalist Society should be the first of the aristocracy stacked before the window of death in the central city square. They likely won't be, but they really worked to deserve express access. PS: Leftists are the ones that believe government should serve the public and power should be distributed as far and wide as possible. We tried the right wing way through the middle ages. Conservatism in the US led to the coup d'etat and federal deconstruction we're watching today, so I fail to see what you see standing on the right. Or are you one of those proud white-power fascists because you have absolutely nothing else to have pride in? Parenting and schooling in the US cranks out a lot of those, and has since even the 1980s.

• On the post: DHS: Filming Cops, ICE Officers is A ‘Violent Tactic’

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Jul, 2025 @ 10:46pm

  Freedom for me, chains for thee

  This is the whole point of fascism, that no-one outside the in group counts as human or as a person, hence their equal accommodation, civil rights, sustenance or survival do not matter. The enemy within rhetoric justifies singling out fringe groups on the edges of the new mainstream for culling (sending to concentration camps and eventually mass executing). Eventually the ouroboros cuts into its own, deciding specific traits are out, then those who don't agree with the heinous parts of the doctrine, then those whose salutes are not snappy enough. And in the end, as the Allies are pounding Berlin with artillery, as Soviet tanks push into the city limits, Hitler decides the German people never were strong enough to handle the truth, and it's all their fault that he has to kill himself and have his body burned before he's captured. (The whole thing is madness. It's as reasonable as a billionaire deciding he needs more money enough to capture governments so that people die of malnutrition or lack of healthcare by the hundreds of thousands. It's too bad that no-one near these guys can arrange an intervention.)

• On the post: Judge Reinstates Fired FTC Commissioner While Everyone (Including The Judge) Knows The Supreme Court Will Overturn

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Jul, 2025 @ 10:34pm

  "era of propaganda"

  There is a far right trillion-dollar propaganda machine that dominates viewership in the US, and it shows that at least in the conditions within the US (in which people are burning out and even dying under neoliberalism) propaganda machines work. So either we (as a society) going to suffer a system where democracy is suppressed or subverted by literal mind-control, or... We're going to find an effective counter to that same mind-control (which may result in a technology race), or... We're going to discover some really terrible consequences of using a humongous propaganda machine to mind-control the people. Maybe they all wake up one day and turn into flesh-eating monsters. (A classic problem with advertising is that the new method used to appeal to this generation indoctrinates the next, so the ad spot at the half hour break in the 1950s is about as effective as the superbowl ad blitzes, subway cars splashed with ads, and ads in every app in the 2020s) However the reversal comes, I hope it's soon, because I'm sore about my brilliant dad turning into a MAGA zombie.

• On the post: ICE Lawyers Are Trying To Remain Anonymous In Court Like The Cowards They Are

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Jul, 2025 @ 10:22pm

  "Woke filth"

  You're losing me at woke filth everything after that reads fascist brainwashed drivel, blah blah blah... You know, throughout my own life, the only people I know that call other people filth are racist fanatics on a violent mission who believe that others can somehow have their rights (including life and liberty) to be stripped away. When it appears in cinema, that's usually when John Wayne or Sylvester Stallone or Justin Timberlake shoots them in the face. Filth is to show this Wehrmacht Hauptmann really truly believes the rhetoric, and is irredeemable. In Star Wars they used scum similarly. You must feel lonely and tiny.

• On the post: On The Supreme Court’s Constitutional Vandalism In Service Of Inherited Wealth

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 23 Jul, 2025 @ 01:01pm

  Hoovervilles and Flour Paste

  Lenninist Communism, despite its rough starts was starting to look pretty good as an alternative to shantytowns of cardboard and paint cans, and dying of malnutrition, and yet our industrialist overlords whispering in the ear of Hoover (actually talking to him over cigars on Poker Night, though I think Hoover didn't partake in the cigars and bourbon) felt this was America at its best. This is the Great Again ideal of MAGA And when FDR's New Deal came about, said industrialists (and Hoover) were jolly sore about it and set about creating a propaganda campaign about free market (unregulated) capitalism and how it's the only way to go. Early iterations were worse than PragerU, but would get better over time. Then James Fifield refined pro-wealth Christianity, (possibly motivated to draw the material support of millionaires) which would be the ur-Evangelist Christianity and White Christian Nationalism that we see today. A great deep dive is Behind the Bastards two parter, How the Rich Ate Christianity Also our industrialists were really interested in the Italian fellow and his trains and the Austrian fellow and his Charlie Chaplain like moustache who shared a political philosophy. Unfortunately, WWII happened and they were the baddies, and the disclosures in the aftermath were really bad. But the threat of nuclear war would keep Communism on the adversarial side of America. Now that much of the federal government is dismantled, sabotaged or still captured, scholars of resistance note we can't get those back, rather we'd have to build them anew, and probably should, the way a coder has to redo what was lost in yesterday's power outage (and a tendency to forget regular saving of work) So since our options are something like DPRK or to try something new, we might want to start thinking of the somethings new to try.

• On the post: Judge Reinstates Fired FTC Commissioner While Everyone (Including The Judge) Knows The Supreme Court Will Overturn

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 22 Jul, 2025 @ 05:44pm

  At this point SCOTUS is the big question

  Even if the Trump regime fails, either through rejection of its base via it's own scandals (and dropping the mission of saving children from Epstein and Comet Ping Pong pizza-eaters), the Federalist-Society SCOTUS Six still have the means to lock down the federal government until MAGA lost find a new Mussolini-wanabe messiah to worship. It raises a question of how do we rescue the United States from a captured SCOTUS, and acknowledge Leonard Leo and the rest of the culprits who plotted its capture. I do hope there is a solution to the SCOTUS question, one that finally protects the US from captured high courts.

• On the post: ICE Lawyers Are Trying To Remain Anonymous In Court Like The Cowards They Are

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 21 Jul, 2025 @ 03:25pm

  Same old song (Just a drop of water in an endless sea)

  Every accusation continues to be a confession.

• On the post: DHS Abandons Fighting Actual Crime To Focus All Of Its Attention On Undocumented Migrants

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Jul, 2025 @ 01:01pm

  "U.S. immigration law being enforced"

  What we're seeing is not U.S. immigration law being enforced which is plain when it's noted that ICE is also detaining and rendering aliens who are legally here and the occasional US citizens, conspicuously when they engage in protected speech that is disliked by the Miller regime. And that's before we get to the alleged retributive justice model that is disproportionate to the crime. Deportation is supposed to be specifically reserved for those undocumented who are violent felons. Curiously, this was Heydrich's strategy during the early stages of the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS (or SD) who was rounding up all the Jews rather than just felons. Initially this was justified by Heydrich to show to the Führer that his department was busy doing something important (see BULLSHIT JOBS) but later it was recognized it fueled the enemy within paranoia that promoted tolerance of the Reich, and so Heydrich expanded greatly the list of people who qualify for collection and rendition to concentration camps. Speaking of which CBS is ending the Late Show and firing Stephen Colbert for his wokeness. Deck by deck, Titanic sinks into the North Atlantic.

• On the post: DHS: Filming Cops, ICE Officers is A ‘Violent Tactic’

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 19 Jul, 2025 @ 12:55am

  Disclosing the heinous wrongdoing is worse than the wrongdoing itself.

  This has been a working doctrine of the Republican party since the Reagan years and the Iran–Contra affair. It's not entirely specific to the GOP either. Embarrassment of US officials and the current administration is also the motivation US' interest Julian Assange, and why Chelsea Manning was treated inhumanely during her imprisonment. It's also why Edward Snowden is stuck in Moscow (I think with Russian citizenship, now) and can't go anywhere, including airspace, where he might be extradited to the United States. For all the disclosures we need from whistleblowers, the US federal government hates them, and hates having its wrongdoing disclosed, even though this attitude belies that the federal government isn't trying to actually govern in good faith, and needs to be dismantled and restored. And we've seen enough scandals from the Republican party to know they are less concerned about the scandalizing behavior itself than they are the publication of it. I'm guessing the Democratic party has a similar attitude, though they pretend to want clean politicians for candidates. The 2000 presidential election was evidence enough that the US state has failed. Even before 9/11 it was bleeding out. And this means in the case of ICE (which is a paramilitary sub-department that shouldn't exist, especially after the abuses of it during the 2020 George Floyd protests and unrest), we need cameras on them all the time streaming to civil rights defense organizations like ACLU, whether or not filming them is regarded by the state as violent or unlawful. (I mean, it's not like ICE or the current DoJ and DHS actually care about law or crime. We're all sus by default. We're all POI, and we're all headed to New Dachau -- bypassing due process -- if they ever get their hands on us. Why not commit crimes?) And we need to get to where public video capture of ICE action is just a routine hue-and-cry sort of thing we do.

• On the post: DHS Abandons Fighting Actual Crime To Focus All Of Its Attention On Undocumented Migrants

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 17 Jul, 2025 @ 02:58pm

  "DHS Abandons Fighting Actual Crime..."

  Wait, we've seen this plot before in prior seasons. The Holy Inquisition in Sicily was hunting, heretics and witches (really, anyone too spooky or who had interesting land to seize) rather than their usual beat of predatory priests, corrupt clergy, and usurer Jews. The laity had to turn to vigilante gangs to hide away the fugitives and deal with the misbehaving cloth, via frontier justice. Eventually from this blend of activity the Sicilian Mafia formed, and would eventually turn to protection rackets to stay in power. Booze running, prostitution, gambling, and drugs would come later as they were criminalized. (Modern police like to go after non-violent suspects due to them being less armed and easier to rob and book, so it makes perfect sense ICE might go after non-criminal immigrants first, regardless of Steven Miller's outrageous quotas.) What I'm trying to say is, we're entering a fine age for street gangs, neighborhood watches and mutual aid orgs to develop into proper organized crime syndicates. They can even hide migrant fugitives, deal in fabricated identities before expanding to porn and other should-probably-be-legal contraband.

• On the post: The Shell Game Of Fascist Gaslighting

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2025 @ 02:25pm

  About a century ago

  The US was under the thumb of the railroad tycoons (even then called robber barons), and culminated in the Great Depression during which a lot of Americans lived in shantytowns and dined on flour paste (slowly dying of malnutrition). And the industrialists that Hoover surrounded himself with thought this is how the United States should live. And they resented Roosevelt's New Deal and still do. There are hypotheses that the people of the US were taking a long sober look at Leninist communism. Certainly academics and the entertainment elite had read some Marx and realized this was a more sound direction for society to go (which would come back to bite them during the McCarthy scare) But for the rest of us, anything was better than the dust bowl shithole that America had become. The great experiment was then on the verge of collapse when FDR intervened. According to Behind the Bastards the industrialists immediately went to work on the propaganda machine. It sucked and had to go through many iterations before it turned into the mind-control menace that we see today, but I remember learning a history and economics that was deeply lensed through American exceptionalism and rugged individualism that resembled 60's era Hollywood westerns, rather than the history we've pieced together via modern archeology. Also the industrialists picked up James W. Fifield's wealth-friendly, fuck-the-poor Christianity (which he might have invented specifically to woo millionaires to pay for his megachurch in Nevada). It's why white Evangelist Christian nationalism simultaneously imagines a compassionate, merciful Jesus as their symbol yet simultaneously refuses compassion and mercy as virtues, themselves. The whole anti-empathy movement (and the cognitive dissonance necessary to agree with it) is downright spooky. Those mind control lasers really work! There were even efforts to adapt Mussolini's fascism, if the Austrian fellow hadn't spoiled that avenue for the ownership class everywhere, invading Poland and starting the European theater of WWII (and the visceral horror of the concentration camps) gave the whole world pause, rightly so, since the middle ages teems with long wars, witch burnings and the communal experience of famine and plague. But as we can see today, the ownership class has gone all in to get the last laugh and return us back to monarchy forever (or at least until we careen into some great filters). They may well turn the US into another DPRK (still even calling ourselves a democratic republic) but we can see the ownership class -- old money and new -- also chipping away at the semi-socialist, tightly regulated society in the EU, as too many frogs are dying under King Log (neoliberalism) to keep voting for him, even when King Heron (far-right autocracy) is the only alternative. But for now, Europe and industrialized nations look at the US under Trump and be grateful they are not us, just as NATO did as they watched the (by then, deeply corrupt and autocratic) Soviet Union collapse in on itself, and the US took some victory laps as the cold war ended.

• On the post: The Problem Isn’t Whether The JD Vance Meme Story Is True—It’s That It’s So Believable After Everything The Trump Regime Has Done

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 29 Jun, 2025 @ 01:29pm

  "the safety of American citizens"

  Um, the safety of American citizens from what exactly? The rate of violent crime by refugees, by undocumented persons, by tourists and people on visas or permits is significantly lower than the violent crime rate by the general public. Our citizens are more violent and commit more wrongdoing than all our immigrants, undocumented or otherwise, and the statistics showing this have been consistent for decades. Maybe you feel American citizens are threatened by them taking our custodial and agricultural jobs (or at least slowing the rate we automate them) or you are worried that citizens will be threatened by tourist dollars from entering the economy? Please do elaborate, as I am failing to fathom whatever you mean, at least in how it relates to the facts.

• On the post: The Problem Isn’t Whether The JD Vance Meme Story Is True—It’s That It’s So Believable After Everything The Trump Regime Has Done

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2025 @ 10:59pm

  Again with my references to cold war Hollywood cinema

  Firefox was a (silly) 1982 Clint Eastwood movie about an American spy stealing a Soviet super-fast fighter plane, which he finally does for act III The primary antagonist for act II is the local constabulary and KGB in the tourist centers and common urbs of Moscow, who appear to suspect everyone in the city is a NATO spy looking to make off with secret military hardware. And wouldn't you know it...

• On the post: The Problem Isn’t Whether The JD Vance Meme Story Is True—It’s That It’s So Believable After Everything The Trump Regime Has Done

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2025 @ 10:49pm

  Depicting Trump as lesser

  You're not far off. Trump is really sensitive about the effectiveness of his bombing attacks on Iran's enrichment sites and stockpiles. Obliterated is the new Stop the Steal

• On the post: The Problem Isn’t Whether The JD Vance Meme Story Is True—It’s That It’s So Believable After Everything The Trump Regime Has Done

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2025 @ 01:57pm

  In late 20th century cold war Hollywood...

  ...the strip search scene appeared in multiple movies, in which our hero is taken out of the customs line for extensive search. Body-cavity searches are threatened if they're not actually done. Often some paraphernalia like Playboy magazines, or a flask of liquor or something would be confiscated as contraband. The message was pretty consistent: cross the Iron Curtain, and this is how free peoples can expect to be treated.

• On the post: ICE’s Military-Style Raid Of A Los Angeles Flea Market Netted Only Two Arrests

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2025 @ 07:43pm

  Someone has to die before it's a folk song

  The scary part is that we don't get popular support until the harm is visceral. And considering detaining Latins to gulags is not enough, it may have to be a young white woman... or a massacre. I have non-zero hope that we'll have learned our lessons from prior instances like George Floyd. We will see.

• On the post: ICE’s Military-Style Raid Of A Los Angeles Flea Market Netted Only Two Arrests

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2025 @ 01:15pm

  Not the i̶m̶m̶i̶g̶r̶a̶n̶t̶s̶ droids you're looking for.

  Wow. Swap dudes in camo with white armor and helmets, and you have some scenes right out of Mos Eisley.

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