Many people have been pointing at Waco for years. Even Janet Reno later admitted regretting that episode, and yet you do not hear the left in the US saying at all that this was a problem - in fact it is stereotypical far right recruitment material.
This is why it is clear the problem with ICE is not their mode of enforcement, which is far less egregious than the Waco situation, but the fact they are remotely effective.
From "a problem" to "rallying cry" is a pretty neat goalpost move.
Leftists have long warned that expansions of government power (in general) and police militarization (specifically) are most likely to be eventually used against leftists.
Modern leftists are definitionally promoting expansion of government power - it is a core consequence of their beliefs.
The late Murray Bookchin was the exception that proves the rule, and he was hardly popular or widely known, and made some astonishingly prescient interviews before he died about the direction it was all headed in.
Obvious examples: health care, education, social benefits provision, public transit, arms control. All involve expansions of the state bureaucracy and decision making power.
This is tangential to whether those things are good/bad in and of themselves.
The reason Bookchin was interesting, and why he was isolated even from Sanders, was he accurately saw any hierarchy as oppressive, whether class, capitalistic, cooperative, or even a temporarily well meaning state bureaucracy. It also says something that such a person didn’t manage to create a sustainable movement.
The classic right wing policy which confused everyone was “the negative income tax” that Milton Friedman was so keen on, yet it is UBI by another name. Aside from advantages compared to a minimum wage the important point is by being universal you remove the scope for bureaucratic decision making, so they went to enormous lengths to ensure it never happened.
> Obvious examples: health care, education, social benefits provision, public transit, arms control. All involve expansions of the state bureaucracy and decision making power.
So what you have established is that the left and right both want to expand government power, but the left wants to use it to improve the general welfare while the right wants to use it to crush their fellow citizens. Thank you for the clarification.
I generally lean left, and favor a large welfare state, reasonable regulation, etc. and I find your statement unfair.
People can reasonably disagree on these things.
In particular, the role of the federal government (vs the states) is important. Many of the benefit programs have no real need to be national, other than the ability of the federal government to borrow an unlimited amount of money. And many regulations are only federal because that was seen as easier and faster than gaining support in each state for them. Forcing a nation wide policy on an issue that could easily be dealt with by each state because you know you can't get the support is not very democratic.
That does not seem to be a differentiator, either. The right is definitely trying to use federal power to enforce their positions on the entire country when possible, e.g. abortion. It sure seems like "states rights" is more a slogan used when convenient, not a core ideological position.
Certainly not; I myself held a green card at one point.
But that's a bit like responding to "Auschwitz was bad!" with "so you oppose giving free food and housing to Jews?!" I object to how enforcement is being performed, and the collateral damage ICE is willing to inflict on citizens not in their legal purview.
Now let's do you. Do you think the President should have a relatively blank check to get away with being convicted of felonies? Do you have concerns about the Vice President's claim that ICE agents enjoy "absolute immunity"?
Your problem is you want things more than think about them.
The rot of the bureaucracy coming to convenient decisions extends from illegally allowing millions of people to take up residence in the country to convicting people of trumped up nonsense in an obvious attempt to keep them from office to subvert the democratic intent of the people.
This is why Trump and co are the clean up crew before returning to a happier place. It is not a nice job, and nice people wouldn’t be able to do it, but it is a necessary one to prevent things getting so much worse.
You: "Selectively enforcing only the laws you want to is the key enabler of corruption."
Also you: "convicting people of trumped up nonsense..."
Whoops. Someone sure seems… selective. (And we've gone full circle, to my original point.)
> Your problem is you want things more than think about them.
This is precisely the implementation problem inherent in "immediately deport tens of millions of people upon which American society has relied on for decades for cheap labor".
What came first, Trump or failing to enforce laws regarding mass illegal immigration? With a multi decade head start too.
You cannot expect institutions that selectively ignored laws for decades to think it is legal for anyone to stop them from doing so, despite not being able to pin anything concrete to anyone at all. In fact you expect the kind of “ha!” you are trying to pull here.
Trump would not be close to the presidency without the historic selective enforcement by people you happen to have aligned interests with who opened pandora’s box. It is only now you feel on the wrong side of it that you have a problem.
As it stands they are in power, for almost another three years. It seems odd that they could manage this were their position as illegal as you claim. Somewhat reminiscent of the British declaring the American Revolution illegal.
> What came first, Trump or failing to enforce laws regarding mass illegal immigration?
If you wanna play that game, the country started with selective enforcement on day one. The Fourth Amendment didn’t apply to a rather large portion of the population.
> Somewhat reminiscent of the British declaring the American Revolution illegal.
It was absolutely illegal. What is legal is not always moral (the Holocaust, after all, was legal in Hitler’s Germany); what is moral is not always legal.
Current ICE/Homeland Security actions are unambiguously illegal.
The problem is that without an independent congress the US system is able to descend into authoritarianism. The court has (reasonably) decided that on many broad issues regarding presidential actions and abuse of authority only congress (via impeachment and removal) is able to constrain the president.
The current congressional majority has, for now, decided to allow the president to do almost anything he wants, regardless of the law and constitution.
Because that's plainly not what they are always doing. And the aggressive, racist unprofessional, downright dangerous way ICE are going about things is simply shocking.
That they neutered themselves doesn't make them any less neutered.
I'm skeptical about their ability to reclaim it, too. Lots of them remember being terrified and running away Jan 6, even if many now pretend not to... and SCOTUS has been on a tear wiping out long-standing legislation Congress was quite clear about like the Voting Rights Act.
To extend the analogy, Congress hasn't had their balls removed, they simply aren't humping other dogs right now.
I'm not an expert, but while many of SCOTUS' rulings have been against the plain letter of the law, few of the decisions ruled out Congressional power in those areas categorically. Congress could pass a new Voting Rights Act, or redefine the EPA's powers over wetlands, or any number of things, they just choose not to. And of course, even with a Democratic Congress, getting past the veto may be impossible.
No. One old man and a bunch of malicious zealots at his side are introducing a tremendous amount of instability into the country and the world at large; just like they did with his first term, only now less inhibited.
The problem is the old man and his enablers have zero respect for the law, whereas the other team does (they are not above reproach but in this regard they are distinctly different).
This makes the fight unfair, as without law all we have is unbridled violence as a tool and that is a path to ruin for all.
They are simply enforcing a law that people have had every opportunity to democratically change in the decades since it just stopped being enforced properly, and yet they failed to secure a democratic mandate to do so.
Complaining from that position is far from being on a moral high ground.
While a pan-US national awareness is widely seen as emerging during the civil war the rest of what you are saying is disingenuous. Prior to that it was a selection of colonies etc. which very much had borders because skirmishes over taxation rights was a thing.
There was significantly more inter ethnic strife in the US pre WW2 than most people seem to appreciate, much of it relating to if encountered (by whatever means) people should be settled/assimilated/rejected. There were riots/protests of this type in major cities at least between the civil war and the 1930s, and state policy reflected this, such as with the Chinese exclusion act which would hardly have been possible without a border.
Seems you have memory holed how pro Russia the US was too. You guys had joint military exercises. Why single out the EU as being bad?
What you seem to also have memory holed was that up until Crimea, the prevailing idea for Russia was that the more we trade with them, the more wealthy and informed the populace becomes and the more entwined the economy becomes globally and thus losing that access would become too painful to them. The exact same playbook was used for China up till 2016.
Olimex are a better middle ground than sparkfun or adafruit for the things they cover.
In truth people will spend a lot of money paying other people to shop on Aliexpress for them so they can maintain the illusion they are above all that.
Personally, I've had absolutely miserable experiences trying to get products on Aliexpress.
I have at least 3 paid for orders that literally just never showed up (18650 charger, and two LFP 24v chargers). It's not a huge sum of money (~$45) but it's just... gone. Poof - into the ether. It's been more than 24 months.
I also have had orders take 3+ months to actually arrive. Consistently. And some products that do show up but are absolutely unfit for purpose (ex - copper wire that IS NOT COPPER).
Given the complete lack of reliability... I now avoid aliexpress for pretty much everything.
So sure - something like sparkfun/adafruit/etc is going to charge me an overhead, but that overhead ensures
1. The product will roughly work
2. The product will show up
3. The product will show up on a reasonable timeline
----
The extra money isn't so I can have an illusion that I'm "above all that"... it's literally just setting a baseline service level that I don't mind paying extra for, because aliexpress isn't a reliable shop (and is borderline scammy as fuck).
The inevitable speculation will occur, in which I have no useful insight.
I will say adafruit have clearly been heading in a bit of the wrong direction lately. See the misleading noise about arduino, for example. Have to wonder if the whole tariff situation is hurting them and it is causing these ripples.
I did check on archive.org, and the code of conduct is there on March 2025. So they didn't just add it in the last month or so, and then send this notice.
> Unacceptable behaviors include but are not limited to: offensive comments, insults, jokes or ridicule; gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they are nor other unappropriately aggressive behaviors; threats of violence or deliberate intimidation; creating additional online accounts in order to harass another person or circumvent a ban; harassment of any form.
I can't help but wonder who decided that, in an electronics forum of all places, *any* form of joke should be unacceptable, but sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic!
You're absolutely correct and it's me who has mis-read that part. The point of the oddly relaxed wording on sexual images and behaviour still stands though!
The image would have to be topical, and the sexual nature would have to be necessary (not-gratuitous) for it to be compliant with that CoC.
I'd be surprised if such an image can exist in an electronics forum because those parameters are pretty narrow.
I also don't interpret policy as disallowing any form of joke.
I'm not about to go hunting, but I think I would find a good number of good non-offensive jokes, and probably no instances of sexual imagery.
> sexual images are only a problem if they are gratuitous or off-topic
Well if someone was working on something like a medical device there might be some documentation that could be interpreted as sexual but that documenting it was not gratuitous.
Every time someone uses the term “renewable” they are providing coverage to this notion.
It is deeply bizarre you can think otherwise.
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