I think he thinks women are icky and scary. Vaginas, he likes.

I am torn between “This kind of amateur-hour bullshit is why they will not succeed. If you’re going to be a properly tyrannical government you have to have your paperwork in order and your threats have to be credible threats, not just random bullshit with every email you can find put into ‘BCC’” on one hand, and on the other hand “No one says she won’t get her door kicked down and whisked away even though she didn’t do anything wrong at all, just because she’s one of the class of people who’s historically been exempt from it. They definitely will start doing that to citizens at some point, it’s just up in the air how soon it will start and how much resistance there will be.”

This will definitely get their attention.

So did the Reichstag fire.

After all, what are we going to do? Elect someone else like them?

This is a really good question.

Starting from about 1992, all the way culminating in the 2020 BLM protests, there was absolute fury about police brutality in this country. It got written down in the media as just senseless rage, a spasm of violence that periodically overtook certain cities. Buildings burned, people died. But there was actually a lot of intent behind it. The LA riots that restarted this grand mid-century American tradition didn’t happen until after the acquittal. They beat the fuck out of this guy for a long, long time, just pounded him on the asphalt with nightsticks like the gang members that some of them are. People were mad when that happened but it was peaceful mad. But then, because of the bizarro-world media landscape and public consciousness level at the time, a jury of peers took a look at all that and said “Well, but they’re the police, that’s allowed.”

And, that day, the fuckin’ city went up. Sublime wrote a song, Koreans became a meme, and so on. We all got to watch on TV while people stopped a truck driver and dragged him out and chucked bricks at his head while he was bleeding on the ground.

It happened again and again, after that, once video recording devices became common enough that people could see what was going on and communicate the raw reality to other people. It wasn’t just some isolated rumors from “the black community.” But the lock on media and public consciousness is powerful. The nightly news couldn’t understand it. Why are “they” burning their own city? Why this violence? Police brutality was a “debate.”

Anyway, the cities kept burning. LA, Baltimore, Kenosha, St. Louis, Ferguson, St. Paul. People threw bricks and bottles and fireworks at the police, burned police cars when they could. Police had mace and tear-gas and “rubber” bullets and liked to initiate violence from their side anyway, whether the crowd was peaceful or not, and the existence of some separate rioters separated by miles or years is really all it took to “justify” it against peaceful protests. Also, it only took one Baltimore before every department in the country laid into a bunch of surplus military equipment and started looking into water-cannons, sonic weapons, developed techniques and procedures for arresting hundreds of people at a time or just randomly hurting them as an alternative.

And, through all of that time, nothing really changed all that much with the police brutality.

Anyway, starting in about 2012, The Daily Show started reporting passionately on police brutality. For the first time, someone with an audience in the tens of millions was using their platform to yell about what a problem it was. To look into the camera and simply, passionately explain in detail what the fuck was happening, why and how people were being lied to about it, what some of the answers could be.

That didn’t fix it, of course. Up until 2020, you could still have a Breonna Taylor or a Jacob Blake and the officers would be fine. Now at this point, I will probably diverge from the Lemmy consensus. I think that after the BLM protests, policing changed radically in this country. I actually don’t think top-down reform had too much to do with it. I think the absolutely historic scale of the BLM protests, and the groundwork of consciousness that had been laid over years and years of just accurately communicating what was happening, was strong enough to make people decide to do things differently.

Actually that cop that talked at the 2024 DNC talked about this. He very explicitly said, my whole mindset for policing used to be very backwards, I used to think some of these things were okay. It’s “use of force.” Of course we can apply techniques to get compliance if someone is “resisting.” But, now that he sees things differently, he is reforming his department, trying to get rid of cash bail, doing some of these things that the activist community has been talking about for decades. I think most of police reform happens because of things like that. Which is why it hasn’t been happening in departments that don’t want that (looking at you NYPD).

I think the justice system in this country has a long way to go before it is “justice,” not least of which because the economic opportunity and social contract that a person is presented with is inextricably linked to any “criminal” choices they’re going to make in their life. But I actually think day-to-day policing is one of the areas that’s had the most reform. You can notice that most of those walls of names of unarmed people shot because they made the police nervous or for no reason at all pretty much ends in 2020.

Why did that happen?

Millions of people in the streets.

A change in consciousness, an awareness by people who aren’t affected by the problem, directly communicated to them about what is even happening and why it is a problem.

The threat of direct action. I do think burning down the police station in the precinct where George Floyd died had quite a lot to do with initiating that police reform. It’s a powerful symbol that the people, directly and literally, won’t take no for an answer.

Why didn’t that happen? Why am I even talking about this, as an answer to this apparently unrelated question?

Well, the riots definitely didn’t do much. They were happening for decades without any result that was perceptible to me. I’m not saying people weren’t justified in doing them but I’m just looking at what works and what doesn’t.

I think if people’s consciousness isn’t there, then getting violent to try to punish the people who you feel need to be punished, to change the system by naked force, is usually counterproductive. Definitely if your opponents are completely comfortable with naked violence, it is.

Think if, instead of the 2020 BLM protests, we’d had people sneaking around and randomly setting fire to police chiefs’ houses. Or police precincts.

Would that have helped?

…

If you have millions and millions of people on your side, aware of the problem and willing to get into the streets to take action on it, then you’re a long way along towards solving the problem. If you don’t have that, but you want to initiate some random violence to even the scales, then that violence can come back on you many, many, many times over. And usually does, historically.

It’s very bad.

Honestly, even if he were one of the bad guys it would be bad. The rarity of naked stochastic violence as a thing to be employed against “enemy” politicians is one of the few teetering guard-rails that is still in place. I don’t really know much about the guy except for his vocal support for Israel (which is a significant sin) but burning down politician’s houses cannot lead to good things.

Aisling Bea would have been prepared.

Yeah. And, they’ve all had a steady diet of “plucky outlaw nobody breaking from their orders to stand up against a tyrannical system” all through their media growing up, and then a steady diet of “your job is to protect the constitution, this is how to deal with illegal orders” all through their training. And on top of that, Trump has been doing his best to piss off the military and disrespect them at every turn.

I have no idea how it’s going to play out. But even as far back as 2020, there was a radical difference in how the National Guard was behaving at BLM protests versus the local cops. Some of the Guard people said they basically felt like their main role was to protect the protestors from the police. Their whole culture and behavior is just different even from local civilian police, let alone from the type of neo-Gestapo that Trump likes to treat with.

They’re not moving into Mexico. They’re moving onto US land, displacing the civilian authorities.

He’s really digging around in the American system for elements that are explicitly loyal to him, not to the law, and trying to put them in charge. He found one in ICE. He’s trying to remake the overall federal government to be that, instead, and to some extent he’ll succeed but I think mostly he will just break it and make it a laughable dysfunctional band of idiots, instead of molding it to be the way he wants it.

I think he thinks that the military is going to be easy to mold into another instance of that, and I think there will be some small success, but I think the more likely result for most of the military is just that they’ll think it’s bullshit and it’ll motivate them to resent and resist him as his orders start to get more and more illegal. I could be wrong, but that’s what I think.

a bench warrant was issued for Sullivan.

There you go. Go after the little people. Put them in prison. They’re committing crimes, kidnapping and battery among others. Tackle them and put cuffs on them. Let their defense team explain how they were acting under legal authority, what statutes were involved, where their warrant was.

I understand that things have gone insane on the federal level, but they’re still committing crimes in municipal places.

In a perfect world, we could impeach Trump for causing these things to happen, but it’s still absolutely possible to interfere with the actual people who are committing crimes in order to implement the stuff.

Why would Adam Back work against the goal of creating a digital currency? Presumably, he had some sort of reason why he thought it would be better to do it the one way instead of the other way. Maybe in hindsight his logic was just wrong.

I have no idea of the technical details involved, maybe what you’re saying does make sense. But your argument makes equal sense, to me, when applied to say that Adam Back couldn’t possibly have taken that stance, as it does applied to say that Satoshi couldn’t have taken that stance. I’m not convinced. I have no idea if the thing is true or not, but it seems pretty plausible to me, and the “debunking” does not at all.

That’s the weakest sauce “debunking” I’ve ever seen.

It’s been a while, but as I remember the arguments they give are:

• Back basically disappeared activity-wise from the relevant mailing list at the same time that Satoshi appeared, and everyone immediately trusted Satoshi and treated him as someone of value
• Similarities in writing style
• Back has given some odd answers in interviews when asked about Satoshi, that basically only make sense if he at least knows who it is

Is that ironclad? Certainly not. It is however a lot more convincing than “why would someone with a lot of money care whether the value of their money went UP or DOWN if they already had a lot? Checkmate”.

How did they debunk the claim that it might be Adam Back? Have a link?

I wasn’t expecting “pretending the guy that the feds disappeared had never existed” to appear on the bingo card quite this soon.

Some people were lecturing me just a few days ago about how we shouldn’t freak out and exaggerate and say that someone had been “disappeared” just because they were in ICE custody without any charges being filed and no one knew where they were for a few days. They might have had a point or they might not. But… maybe there are some details I’m not aware of, but on first hearing, this really does sound like they just disappeared this person in the full literal historical sense. And the university is going along with it.

The dude is gone. No one knows where he is.

Plus, there should be public records related to some of this stuff. I don’t actually know how it works if someone’s presenting a FISA warrant or something for a search of a physical location, but even in that case, I think the woman or her lawyer would at least be able to give a brief statement to the press explaining what they can and can’t talk about.

But definitely for the arrest of the dude itself, there should be a public record and a warrant signed by a judge. If he was arrested by the normal federal-court-inclusive-of procedure.

Plus, why is his employer pretending he never existed? That seems like a whole new chapter in this whole unfolding nightmare that we are progressively entering into.

Okay lol so you literally have no idea who Adam Back is or what’s in the video or why it might or might not be credible. That’s what I am taking away from this.

I thought you might have some sort of real reason why the arguments might not be solid or something. Never mind, have a good day.

What? Yes they do.

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/news

Why not?

The modern FBI is not interested in counterespionage.

I mean technically it is possible that this is some leftover of their operation before they joined up with America’s adversaries, but usually for counterespionage they would explain what’s going on instead of just disappearing the suspect. This seems potentially much more dark than that.

It’s probably Adam Back.

https://youtu.be/fMWnaR5uJxQ

This has been happening for years to Hispanic people, and much worse.

I’m glad y’all in the news are upset that it’s happening to white people from rich countries (“tourists”! The horror) now. But you missed the point, if that is why you are upset.

Oh yeah, that side of it made perfect sense to me, like I said.

What the commenter was saying was a little bit different though. They said they, as a Canadian, were upset with the heinous nature of the Democratic party, and then they were sick of obnoxious Americans coming to their town and trying to defend the Democrats. And, also, there’s a housing crisis, and immigrants are making it worse.

If they’d said what you said, I would have been far less suspicious about what they were saying. They did switch after the fact to saying that they were sick of Americans who were using being Democrats as a shield against criticism of their country, which again makes good sense to me.