US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://x.com/TheFIREorg/status/1898841858983239814
More details: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-authorities-arrest-pales... and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/9/mahmoud-khalil-stude... (This last article mentions his green card apparently being revoked.)
Which would mean he's just being detained without cause in some unspecified location on no basis
Congress and SCOTUS are playing calvinball with the Constitution (and civil rights) too.
oh yes. and he broke a law passed by congress. that makes it even MORE appalling, as all three branches were complicit in an egregious breach of the constitution, not a single one stopped to hold the line
From this article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/9/mahmoud-khalil-stude... it says "A US immigration enforcement agent said Khalil’s permanent residency was also being revoked, according to the protest leader’s lawyer."
The administration is pretending to goof up following court orders or simply ignoring them, and is lying in court, repeatedly - claiming they "don't know" who is in charge at DOGE.
ICE was arresting people who turned out to be citizens, shuttling them across the country so make it harder for their lawyers to contact them.
Why are you expecting the administration to follow procedures for deporting someone here with a green card?
But, once they do, the guy is still entitled to a lawyer. Vanishing the guy and telling the lawyer that they aren't allowed to know where their client is or whether he's still alive is not legitimate.
So far all we've heard about this process and the justification is "Contact the White House."
No, it can't. It must go through a process which affords the green card holder due process. There are specific grounds which are required to be met to remove someone's green card.
And it absolutely cannot be revoked because the government disfavors ones political speech. That's an absolutely fundamental violation of the first amendment and our right to free speech.
A trivial example: is criticism of Israel fair or antisemitism?
I would imagine the current US "crackdown on antisemitism" being the cause of being added to the watchlist, which is fair in my opinion
I don't see how terminating employees or ending foreign aid being a decline in Civic freedoms
What about the demolishing of government agencies that DOGE is trying (and sometimes succeding) in? You call it "termination of employees", but don't seem to consider that they tried to fire jugdes who restrained their power. This looks to me like a plain powergrab. I hope I don't need to tell you where something like this leads, but I am certain it's not going to be democratic or respectful of civic freedoms.
As a non-straight non-binary (neither cis-male or -female) person, the US is currently just about the last place I want to be. If the current trend continues, then I genuinely fear for the lives of some of my friends.
Imagine someone that has transitioned and passes as the sex they identify as, now only having the option of getting a passport as the sex they were assigned as birth.
Practically, for many, that simply isn't an option.
There is a issue with fear and using the passport.
Border agents have pretty much complete discretion and control at all borders in all countries against non-citizens. Any border agent can deny entry for any reason, or subject someone to extra searches, maybe strip searches, without any consequence or any recourse from the traveler.
Given the amount of transphobic people, this is an issue. Imagine if gay people had to get passports in the 90s or 80s that marked their orientation?
The second issue is a huge issue as well, that could easily lead to an increase in suicides.
And could you define the word accurate in this context?
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/transgender-and-nonbinar...
> And could you define the word accurate in this context?
First, could you clarify if you're a conservative or not? I won't be willing to engage with you further if you are.
Yeah, out of the two of us that ain't me lol.
Cheers.
Ask the question differently. What kind of administration guts 70-150k jobs in a few weeks and cuts foreign aid? So many want to say "don't draw a bridge between that question and to a decline in civic freedoms". Fine, I won't draw the bridge, it seems to appease many people's idea of themselves. We'll just keep waiting and reading about more and more evil.
> The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.
> The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.
Okay, so there's nothing to do with actual civil freedoms. I dislike orange man as much as the next person, but this article is garbage.
On the other hand the EU has serious issues with civic freedoms - censorship, suppression of political parties, cancelling elections with results they don’t like, and more. But I’m sure this group doesn’t mind those actual civic freedom issues.
TL;DR: It's nonsense. They're manufacturing dissent.
Citation needed?(and maybe a refresher on Chomsky's propaganda model)
No more questions.
If you are letting “empathy” drive your civilization to ruin, it is no longer empathy. That is the point.
In contrast, we know that lack of empathy directly leads to atrocities:
> In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy. —Captain G. M. Gilbert
"One of world’s richest man Elon Musk’s kids does not want to be related to their biological father anymore. Born a boy, Xavier Alexander Musk, has filed a plea seeking a change in her name in accordance with her new gender identity. Xavier had filed the petition seeking both a name change and a new birth certificate that reflects her new gender identity with the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica in April 2022.
The reason for the name change in the documents is mentioned as “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”"
"Elon’s father Errol Musk fathered two children with his former stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, who is 41 years his junior."
"n a recent podcast interview, Errol Musk said his son Elon had not “been a good dad” to his children."
“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon, 46, told the magazine. “You have no idea.”
Elon added: “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil… He will plan evil.”
“You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done,” Elon said, though he never went into specifics about what his father allegedly did. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done… It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”
“It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood… It may sound good. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery.”
"One does see a mother turning the children against the father successfully. "
"It's thought Grimes is keen to move in with the mothers of Musk's other children and raise them all together in one big house, however, most recently she's hit out at her billionaire ex publicly about his parenting.
"Plz respond about our child's medical crisis. I am sorry to do this publicly but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation. This requires immediate attention", she wrote on X.
"If you don't want to talk to me can you please designate or hire someone who can so that we can move forward on solving this. This is urgent, Elon.""
He's not saying "Don't empathize". He's not saying "We shouldn't have empathy". He's saying "Empathy can be exploited, and used against you".
Which is entirely valid. Balance is everything.
Now I know many have issues with Musk right now. I'm scratching my head on a few things he's doing. But, this quote seems entirely reasonable.
"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
-Samuel Johnson
Which is a shame, because if you questioned the quote a tiny bit and listened to the whole segment[1], it's far less damning that you make it out to be. Before that quote he even says "I believe in empathy, I think you should care about other people". He's not against empathy as a whole, he's against "too much" empathy, to the point that "you suicide yourself". That in my view, is entirely reasonable. If you had infinite empathy and were running a store, and you let yourself be shoplifted to bankruptcy, I think most people agree that would be a character flaw.
He mentions right after that "empathy is good but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot".
That quote is clearly taken out of context and is specifically chosen as click/rage bait.
Like all things, nuance and context is always key.
I, of free and sound mind, do not.
I find an argument that it could be nullifying to be quite challenging to make. (really, I can't figure out how I'd make it)
Additionally, if I could, I'd still have to wrestle with that life isn't full of cartoon villains, and people usually hedge.
> he's against "too much" empathy, to the point that "you suicide yourself"
His recent comments against all DEI programs(while implementing his own DEI programs and being a DEI hire himself) seem to show that this is an exaggeration
In other words, he's not an absolutist, which seems fine.
>His recent comments against all DEI programs(while implementing his own DEI programs and being a DEI hire himself) seem to show that this is an exaggeration
Sounds like you're already convinced that he's a Bad Person, so anything he says is going to be further proof of that. Even if he said something utterly anodyne like "government should be smaller", you'd probably respond with "well given what he's doing at DOGE, that's obviously him saying that he wants to dismantle the federal government as we know it".
I'm also not sure what your comment about DOGE is trying to say. He has commented many times on wanting smaller government, and is working actively to achieve that with DOGE. What am I missing there?
We are experiencing a global assault on truth because truth provides a foundation on which to judge those in power.
Social media is the powerful's most potent weapon against truth. When social media combines with privatized intelligence companies, it creates a tool that can be used to divide and conquer societies, turning one half of the people against the other, deputizing the ignorant or vulnerable to fight for despots.
When birth rates start to drop the over-65s start getting more of a vote share than they've ever had before.
Are we though? Can you convince me of that, as a non-American?
Trumpism is a cause in itself, but it's also a symptom of a deeper cause that is afflicting more than only the United States.
The unintended consequence of social media, especially profit-driven social media infested with troll farms and bots from various governments (including China, Russia, US, Iran, Israel, to name but a few countries that have been caught), is the destruction of trust and community[0].
Commercial interests have been assaulting truth since before I was born, nearly half a century ago. The methods for doing so have steadily improved. Social media briefly hindered it, before being co-opted thoroughly to advance it.
Even where the truth hasn't been completely buried, finding what's true and what's spewed from the firehose of bullshit is a time consuming and difficult task, one that definitely doesn't scale to very many of life's decisions at all.
Culminating this trend is the rise of the extreme right across the globe. This is tightly linked to politically motivated disinformation coupled with whatever the techniques are that are forming closed mind cult-like behaviours.
Maybe it's not an assault on truth - maybe truth is just collateral damage - but I don't think I could even pose it as a question to ask if you could convince me these things are not happening.
Perhaps, but from where I'm sitting the effects seem to be much more pronounced in the US than (say) here in Australia or in the UK. Americans seem to have gone for it in a big way.
Of course that may well be because the assault is concentrated more on the US. Or perhaps US society was just primed for it in some way. Distrust in the government has been building there for a very long time, and while trust in government is stretched in other places, it's not completely broken.
There is truth, half truths and narratives. I wish people try to identify what they are looking at when they are consuming news.
1. A called B's girlfriend something bad, and got punched in the face by B. Truth
2. B hit A, half truth.
3. B is a bully, narrative.
At least that is how I see it.
I doubt it. But not for the reasons you're probably thinking.
I spend most of my time in Slovenia and Croatia, but I travel to Serbia frequently as it's "in the neighborhood" and medical/dental treatment there is top-notch and much cheaper than anywhere else.
I can state with absolute confidence that Serbia is one of the most freedom-loving countries in the world, and Serbs are ultra-zealous guardians of their personal freedoms. In Serbia, there are very few restrictions that impinge on one's day-to-day life, and even the laws are along the lines of recommendations. You can buy any prescription drug OTC; you can smoke in just about any restaurant; you can send your 10-year-old son to the cornerstore to buy you a bottle of whisky. You can also speak out against the government -- and quite loudly, at that -- just as people have been doing over recent weeks/months:
> https://apnews.com/article/serbia-students-protest-vucic-can...
I can think of nothing that's permissible in the USA or UK that's not possible in Serbia. (But I can think of many things that are possible in Serbia yet illegal or impossible in the UK or US!) All things considered, it feels much more free than any part of the USA. Serbian cops are friendly, there's no ubiquitous middleman grifting or gatekeeping, and one is basically free to do and say what one likes.
how about declaring yourself Kosovan?
If you just walk around and tell people that you're a Kosovan, or post about it online, they'll think you're either a militant/reactionary agitator or a lunatic. You might get some dirty looks, but you're not going to get thrown into prison.
If you're talking about taking real political action, sure, that would be a bad idea. But I can think of a lot of similar things (effectively things that aim to destabilize the government or foment civil unrest) that are similarly illegal in places like Germany/UK/etc.
And how about this point? "Violence against women and girls: During the year, at least 27 women were victims of femicide."
27 out of how many millions? What's the per capita rate compared to the US and UK?
Until you are the victim.
> The summary at that link mostly attempts to relitigate an old war and shame Serbia for perceived associations with Russia.
Right so. Atrocities should never be forgotten, no matter who they are associated with.
> What's the per capita rate compared to the US and UK?
The femicide rate in the USA is 3½ times higher. Each single case is one too many.
Basically in a lot of countries you either are a FT equivalent and get bennies or you are not an FTE and get nada.
But the serbs had some social outrage over foreign companies contracting to their citizens but not paying tax in that country. From what I gather its due to healthcare costs.
So they did something, (difficult for me to ingest as a foreigner) but it seems that either:
1. You have to register and pay corporate tax in Serbia, then you can hire locals without issue
2. The staff member has to register as a business and pay corporate + payroll tax
or they do it dodgy and hope the tax man doesnt ruin their life.
This had the effect of creating a cottage industry of middlemen who take a slice between employer and employee which is probably the least freedom oriented outcome possible.
HMRC, who pushed for the law, is however exempt and hires contractors the old way, outrageously enough.