Boycott IETF 127
boycott-ietf127.org
boycott-ietf127.org
If the conference was originally going to be held on the west coast of the US then Vancouver would be an excellent alternative and if it was going to be held on the east coast then Montreal is another excellent alternative.
Can anyone suggest some viable alternatives in Mexico?
Those guys were pretty smart
I got my first taste of this with this was a summer school at Les Houches in the French Alps [0], and after graduating I did postdoc positions on three different continents -- all the time appreciating that unlike corporate expats, I got to choose the exact place to go next. Would highly recommend this way of traveling over backpacking.
[0] https://www.houches-school-physics.com/ecole-de-physique-des...
It's much better value for money than anywhere in the US.
As an example, this article from 2025 about a family of foreigners being shot dead also lists numerous other recent examples of tourists being killed, and links to those stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/01/world/americas/americans-...
Those aren’t even the only ones, and physical harm isn’t the only type of crime foreigners can experience in Mexico either. Moving a conference there for safety makes no sense whatsoever.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
So it's very expensive to overfly the US without landing, and once you land you can't avoid immigration even if you are just transiting on your way to another country.
The overland fee is $61.75 per 100 nautical miles (and it's a lower $26.51 per 100 nautical miles)[1]. Is this really that high? Let's say a flight from Canada to Mexico has to cross 1600 nautical miles overland the US. That would cost 16 x 61.75 = $988. Isn't that pretty low? On a flight with 200 passengers, that's an extra $5 per passenger.
[1] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/international_aviation/overf...
> Beyond problems at the border, the current Secretary for Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - has said that he will send those with ADHD to camps. Source: Futurism.
What he actually said:
> "I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms — drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country," he said during the podcast. "I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free."
That what happens when you rely on Futurism as a source.
I had a friend deported from Denmark when he overstayed his visa and it was basically the same thing.
Some of these look really bad and could be sensible justification for the proposed boycott/cancellation (see French scientist eg) but a lot of it looks completely hysterical.
Some bad history with executive orders / The Alien Enemies Act and interning people in the US:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_Americans
Also, the current administration stated an intent to relocate (intern / reeducate?) the homeless, many of whom are citizens.
Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
And I wouldn’t want to gamble if I‘m one of the unlucky ones that you described as looking bad.
That kind of uncertainty is exactly what makes those travels unnecessarily dangerous.
That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
> Because two weeks in jail what could be a simple flight home sounds fishy.
The inefficiency of American institutions is nearly limitless. Don’t put too much stock in the glacial pace of our bureaucracy as being malicious when it happens everywhere else out of broad incompetence.
> That’s not hysterical it‘s cautious.
Again, I agree that there are a few stories of deportations that are legitimate causes for concern about hosting a conference with internationals in the US. But if you use people getting deported for overstaying their visas as a part of justifying that concern, then that is hysterical. It conflates issues that are effectively totally unrelated to one another.
It would be like claiming it’s not safe to travel to Italy because the local justice systems will charge you with trumped up charges and quote both the Amanda Knox case as well as cases where Americans actually broke the law and got charged justly. Only the Amanda Knox case is actual justification for the claim!
Correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sounds like you're saying that inefficiencies due to incompetence are exempt from criticism.
It should go without saying that detaining innocent people is BAD, regardless of whether it's malice or incompetence.
And to be clear, they aren’t innocent in the referenced example. They were breaking the terms of their visa.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
Remember this the next time you ship a bug! You built a system whose purpose was to have that bug in it.
The purpose of Linux is to ship bugs: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/47/Linux-Linux-Kernel.htm...
Genius stuff here. Crazy how many people use an operating system whose literal purpose according to you is to ship bugs.
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
and honestly, it's obvious.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/lying-about-ausc...
I've visited two concentration camp memorials, with their cynical writing at the gate.
I've read the Auschwitz documents edited by 2001 Verlag. I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s (way to early)
nonetheless, I was not aware of concentration camps being labeled as recreational leisure camps of some sort by the nazis.
my point being: it was no lack of education to not know that additional aspect of systematic brain sick evil.
The closest thing I can find is here: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-...
And this film was never even shown broadly as it was made near the end of the war. Also, it's technically for a ghetto and not a concentration camp.
No AI I've asked and no links I've found suggest that concentration camps were broadly propagandized as anything similar to "wellness farms".
> Some 18,000 Germans from all walks of life are being held in the political concentration camps in various parts of the country.
> Wilhelm Frick, Prussian minister of the interior, explains that they will be kept there until they become "fit citizens," reconciled if not converted, to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
> Sanitary conditions generally are described as excellent. There are doctors at each camp to care for the health of the inmates, and some of them report that the political prisoners are adepts [sic] at getting on morning "sick call."
> The physical culture includes morning setting-up exercises, football matches and similar group games. The manual labor is mostly tidying up the camp premises and barracks, but there are odd Jobs too, such as sewing or painting swastika emblems on confiscated Communist flags.
> Taeglische Rundschau sees political ideas of tomorrow coming from the concentration camps of today. Quoting a prisoner as saying "Sure we'd like to get out; but this is a good enough place to think things over," the paper comments:
[0] https://newspapers.ushmm.org/historical-article/1933-camps-u...
> At most of the camps privileges are few. Major Kauffman, head of the big Heuberg camp in Wuerttemberg, said his prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month. There are no visiting days there.
It literally even calls them political concentration camps in the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
this legislation is a consequence of the paradox of tolerance.
Which if you had clicked and read you would see comes from the US Holocaust museum and is heavily focused on Theresienstadt. I was making a point that you're not really interested in engaging with anything I'm writing and are instead focused on just getting your own point across as evidenced by your use of "Theresienstadt" as a point in reply.
the 2010 "source" further above is abysmal Holocaust denial.
your source (ushmm) of course is not.
I got confused on the small smart phone display about who I was responding to.
apologies again.
Do you recall Karl is sent to Theresienstadt where the art studio secretly paints the holocaust?
That is the "paradise ghetto", the potemkin village concentration camp the Nazis created to give tours to international observers to fool them about conditions. Sometimes called a retirement village or the gift of the Fuhrer to the Jewish people but of course, just a temporary pause for transports going further east to the death camps.
I also found the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi Party Rally Grounds) permanent exhibition the most useful content I was exposed to: they really show how fake news on all available channels and mega-church style mass entertainment were key to overturn a democracy and enable the atrocities. that and first bullying and then eradication of opposition.
I'd really hope US up their resistance and democracy protection game at this point in time. I'm afraid. As in existential fear.
edit: ...also I didn't know it was even used this way, back then, see my TIL reply in some "cousin" comment.
But if you still mean that the specific term "wellness farm" COULD have been used as a euphemism for concentration camps (regardless of whether or not it ever was), then what's the point? Like people also COULD have used the term "suburb" as euphemism for a concentration camp. Should we also be skeptical of anyone who says they want to build suburbs? What's even the point of of saying that a term COULD have been used as euphemism historically?
If it was a well accepted term it’d be one thing, but when made up on the spot it very much sounds like “place we sen out undesirables” to me.
What if I took them somewhere remote where there are no drugs and didn't let them leave?
My heart hurts for them, but I have no idea if it's a good idea or not.
Regardless, I think his heart is in the right place. Time will tell whether or not it's actually useful.
The problem isn’t the camps but the people who have the authority in them and how the treat people especially if the cure isn’t working.
Not everything can be cured by organic food, fresh air and labor.
BTW is the food the grow for the farms only or is selling it part of the plan?
If the latter then it’s about cheap labor
That is to say, to any sane modern human, curing gayness is nothing like curing drug addiction.
We have to do something. Because whatever we've been doing for the past two decades has amounted to nothing.
And maybe that ends up being the answer, that there is nothing you can do. But I'll never insult someone for trying, no matter the method.
>But I'll never insult someone for trying, no matter the method.
No matter the method is a bad take, that’s how we got gruesome people doing gruesome experiments on people who need treatment.
And the camp thing is pretty old and they always end the same: abuse of power.
Perhaps, but I have family going through this and it just makes you so mad. I'd pay to send him to a camp where he's beat with a bullwhip every day if I knew it could cure him.
Perhaps it clouds my judgment a bit, but the alternative is just watching him die, which I'm not stoked about.
Would you do the same if the chance of curing or killing him is 50:50?
Or if it’s uncertain that it works at all?
This is not only immoral and vile, but borders on the psychopathic. The man should have never been allowed to make any decision affecting public health.
But they don't, they outsource the job to a group of (mostly) sadistic, uneducated-in-rehab, "boot camps" that somehow think that violently invading an individual's rights and actions is how to "cure" drug addiction, without attempting to treat the underlying causes of addictive behavior.
If we assume a drug abuser is doomed for death in the next 6 months. But by using them as slave labor in terrible conditions for 3 years guarantees they will live to old age, regardless of any psychological trauma from said experience, is it worth it?
I'm not taking a position, I'm just making a thought experiment. It's more of a moral philosophical thing than an answer, I guess.
I think a lot of people not in the midwest may not understand the gravity of the fentanyl problem in the US. Literally every family is affected, whether directly or indirectly.
It's basically a religious war. One side seems to think they need to "break people's spirit" by "work camps", the other side seems to believe in "healing from violence" by compassion. You're free to pick your side, but it's going to get harder to switch, and the other side will treat you as their enemy.
The answer is a very obvious "no" in any society that claims to be free.
> I'm not taking a position
Frankly it's terrifying that these sorts of questions are being posed as real dilemmas in western societies in 2025.
2) its entirely voluntary and non-coerced
The current administration is setting up a modern day Spiegelgrund.
I've been in max security prisons. There are generally far more drugs inside these than I've ever seen in the outside world.
I don't want to piss on rehab too much, it can work. But for every decent rehab facility there are probably 100 bogus ones.
Also remember, that to an addict who has been to prison, rehab feels like prison. It has the same locked-down, heavy-on-the-rules design that can cause serious PTSD issues for (practically everyone) who suffers some sort of trauma from being incarcerated.
RFK might be an idiot, but even idiots might be right once in a while
Or the fact that you're not longer in the environment with its stressors that cause you to seek out drugs in the first place? Lots of people sleeping rough go for drugs of any kind just to be able to put their mind to rest.
Finland shows this with its "housing first" policy, giving people a home is a relatively easy way to get them off of drugs.
"Work will set you free from your addiction."
But he was definitely talking about ADHD. This tweet has the short video of him actually including adderal.
Given the things he said about vaccines and bird flu, I wouldn’t trust him an inch.
> I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,
I am not going to skim through 1.5h of deranged ramblings in a raspy voice to find him saying this though.
Are you trying to claim that because he didn't specifically mention ADHD, despite mentioning the drug used to treat ADHD, that he's not talking about ADHD despite him holding views about neurodiversity that are at odds with the published literature on their treatment?
In fact, people without ADHD are much more in need of an intervention if they are abusing adderall than someone who has ADHD, wouldn't you say? So the much more reasonable interpretation is that he is talking about those people, not people with ADHD.
No, you're being intentionally disingenuous here. Obviously, he dislikes the fact that these drugs are being prescribed to patients, and he would prefer it if they were not. I'm sure he imagines that these "farms" would be a better treatment for depression than SSRIs are, and likewise for the other drugs and conditions.
No it's not the only way, because he's also talking about SSRIs, which have only medical uses (no abuse potential really). Therefore it is reasonable to argue he is also talking about Adderall's intended medical use against ADHD rather than its abuse.
Yes he said SSRIs, but SSRIs are not for ADHD, so that has no bearing on whether or not he said "people with ADHD should be sent to camps", which he just... did not say.
This shouldn't need to be stated, but I personally think RFK Jr. is a nutter. That doesn't mean you can stick words in his mouth or imply things he didn't actually say.
Be better than the other side.
Maybe, had he not said that bit as well, I'd agree with you. He could be talking about Adderall purely in a sense of misuse.
But he included psychiatric drugs, and that (and the SSRIs) makes his statement ambiguous enough that I'm comfortable interpreting it as including ADHD patients.
(And, just purely for vilifying psychiatric drugs, the threshold for intolerance [which must not be tolerated in order to achieve a tolerant society] is crossed. Lots of people have mental health issues and need treatment, including with drugs.)
It's to provide people a path for getting off of all manner of drugs that are difficult to get off of. That could be heroin, or it could be Ritalin or some SSRI. It's basically socialized rehab based on some model that RFK seems to favor.
From what I've read (and seen in friends and family), the system is really good at getting people on pharmaceuticals. It doesn't seem to give much of a shit about helping them get off when they choose to do so.
I'm not sure why, but there seems to be a focus on misuse or abuse. Someone could have used the drugs exactly as directed and now doesn't want to use them anymore, and is running into an inability to do so on their own.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/generation-adder...
However, you put it in context with the fact that this administration has shipped off people to an El Salvadoran prison without any due process… this becomes a lot more ominous.
In other words, his opinion isn't worth the electronic bits needed to spread them.
I would evade Germany, Austria and also Italy in general, due to common racism against slavic people.
Trans people might not enjoy Slovakia or Hungary right now, but I’m not sure they are unsafe to visit for them (yet)? Someone local might fill me in here…
https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/03/20/hungary-bans-lgbt-pride-...
The US doesn't have a monopoly on immigration horror stories: Australian immigration illegally detained an Australian citizen for 10 months. [0] They illegally deported another Australian citizen to the Philippines, and when they discovered their mistake, their initial response was to cover it up rather than try to rectify it. [1]
https://www.cntraveller.in/story/these-3-countries-rejected-...
Obtaining a work visa in a particular country is not a human right, and their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies.
I would guess that 90% of the applications were for travel, not work.
> their issuance are up to the hosting country’s policies
These countries don't even bother to apply their policies. Some cases I heard about indicate that they randomly reject applications, without reviewing them.
As to whether they are conforming tot heir own policies or not, I can’t find any evidence either way in the linked article. They’re just stating the numbers.
More importantly, and according to your link, only Estonia rejected 50+% Indian applications, everyone else rejected less than 50%, with only 2 others anywhere near 50% (Malta and Slovenia).
So out of 29 countries in the Schengen area only 3 were anywhere near the 50% mark and all 3 are tiny countries as far as both area and populations are concerned (those 3 combined account for only 4 million people in total).
Also, just to take one of those 3, Estonia has an overall high rejection rate in comparison to all the others, and that started happening after the pandemic.
Details are important
Schengen isn't "different from EU". It originally was separate from EU, but since 1999 has been an aspect of the EU. Per Wikipedia:
> Originally, the Schengen treaties and the rules adopted under them operated independently from the European Union. However, in 1999 they were incorporated into European Union law by the Amsterdam Treaty, while providing opt-outs for the only two EU member states that had remained outside the Area: Ireland and the United Kingdom (which subsequently withdrew from the EU in 2020). Schengen is now a core part of EU law, and all EU member states without an opt-out which have not already joined the Schengen Area are legally obliged to do so when technical requirements have been met. Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements.
"Several non-EU countries are included in the area through special association agreements."
In fact there are also EU countries NOT in Schengen. And there are countries in Europe but not in the EU which are not in Schengen either.
Sounds like Estonia, Malta, and Slovenia didn't want their countries to become transits for illegal immigration from India to the UK.
Countries like Germany get legitimate Indian immigration for work and higher education so their rejection rate is lower.
I could have said Switzerland, but I believe that my point expands to the entirety of the EU, why I expanded a bit.
As some of you sibling commenters also write: Not all parts of the Schengen / EU is equally - just like you probably wouldn't move these things to rural Alaska.
Sure, Singapore has draconian laws when it comes to narcotics. But surely everyone attending will be aware of this? It’s been widely reported over the decades how foreign nationals have gotten life sentences or even the death penalty for drug running. What I’m saying is that Singapore are up front about it and it’s not enforced arbitrarily. Leaving your personal stash at home and abstaining for a few days should hopefully not be too difficult for the attendant engineers.
Wait, holy shit, it was legalized in 2022. Didn't know. Nice!
So, enforcement was certainly attempted and people were certainly detained for periods of time and forced to defend against charges that were laid.
It's not readily clear how often charges under Section 377 (1860-) or Section 377A (1938-) were laid in Singapore prior to 2007 (or of the charges laid how many cases came to trial and how many convictions occurred).
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_377A_(Singapore)#Const...
I frequently get the impression that the policymakers in Singapore are more progressive than they reveal, but are extremely cautious about loosening up because they don't want to antagonise certain voter groups (e.g. people of certain religious persuasions). It is quite telling that the law was repealed in its entirety only in 2023, one year before the former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stepped down from his position.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/05/us-scientist...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643467
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24369233
Clarification: the “not new” part is foreign attendees not being able to attend conferences in the U.S. So, if you valued inclusion, holding international conferences in the U.S. has been a bad idea for a long time.
The second and third are the same incident, from the prior Trump administration. But the visa was denied; nobody was arrested or detained.
The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time. That’s not new. In fact [2][3] is only noteworthy because it was an influential individual (in this circle) with a strong passport; people with weaker passports are routinely denied. Hell sometimes UN diplomats are denied.
Right, but you did not give examples of that happening previously.
> The fact is if you care about people from all around the world being able to attend your conference, the U.S. hasn’t been a good location for a long time.
TFA says
> As an Internet community we strive to include everyone. Holding a meeting in the US is incompatible with our values.
It’s been incompatible with their values for very long.
I don't think this has been a basis for denying entry to people in past?
However, these cases were rejections of visa. And even Stenberg's case was about being denied entry, not arbitrary detainment and torture like we see now. IMHO this wave of cases is a change in quantity that results in a change of quality already. But the quality of the rejection/detainment has changed as well.
> I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.
> The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
How is this not "new at all"? I just don't understand why some people are so blind to the ongoing abuse of power. What a shame!
And I was very clear about which part is “not new”. What a shame people can’t read. What a shame partisan commenters read “U.S. has been blah blah for a long time” and immediately jump to “Trump defender!!!”
Edit: I should also mention I literally emailed dang to get https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410548 (discussion thread for your link) restored when it was flagged.
What has always been going on: people overstay their visa, depending on the scale and country, people get treated badly almost always in these cases.
What is happening now: people being critical of Trump are being rejected, legal visa holders are being detained because of the scale of the abuse.
These are clearly very different things and very much a fault of specifically Trump administration. Searching phones and messages to look for Trump critical messages .. unbelievable and totally new stuff is going on here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-f...
I disagree. These legal visa holders are caught for small (or slightly larger) infractions, like a previous visa revocation due to running a cannabis business, sort of working (helping?) on a non-work visa, obviously planning to work on a non-work visa, etc. These could always (at least after 911?) land you in big trouble in the U.S. if you have the wrong nationality and/or skin color. I believe these were almost completely ignored by (mainstream) press because most Americans won't sympathize with them, they are obviously illegals, criminals, terrorists, etc. Now that Canadians/Western Europeans are caught in the system, suddenly people with the same infractions or suspected infractions are obviously legal visa holders.
I personally know someone with the wrong nationality and wrong color who was detained at the border (maybe not technically "detained"? let's say held) for no apparent reason for hours and got their devices searched, then released and allowed to enter. That was either 2013 or 2014. Thankfully not weeks or months.
The only fundamental change now is the bar is lowered and sympathizable (to most Westerners) people are being caught in it.
And I maintain that people who actually valued inclusion shouldn't have held conferences in the U.S. since a long time ago, if ever.
I agree with your "this didn't start yesterday" view and with the "holding US conferences was always less than maximally inclusive" (for example because it was fucking expensive to go to Las Vegas, and because the phone searches, and ... in general the whole border patrol can do anything for miles around ports of entry)
But many things can be true at the same time. Trump found his paramilitary troops, the scale of the operation(s) and the source of the cruelty being the White House seems new. (At least since Nixon/Contra.)
The agencies don’t reveal reasons why someone was denied or detained, so there is no evidence whatsoever that someone was detained for being critical of Trump. The claim that this happened is from Philippe Baptiste, a French minister for higher education who has been attacking America continuously in a bid to attract researchers from the US.
They're not blind to it. They either like it and want it (sometimes because they benefit from it), or they're indifferent to it because it doesn't affect them personally. I know — it's really hard to appreciate the mindset of people with no empathy.
What are they waiting for? To see if they will come out ahead. It's classic rebel's dilemma.
Eventually the truth will catch up to us all. We'll undeniably realize this is a tyrannical movement that intends to replace the Constitutional order without the consent of the governed.
In no universe is the election of a dictator equivalent to 3/4 of the state legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution.
People do take you more seriously if you've been around for a while and they know you aren't full of shit, but that's just social dynamics.
Personally I think the hyperbole only serves to cheapen the real problems.
Im a bit disappointed in HN for ranking it so high. Time to take a look at the bot detection algo?
Historians are actively comparing us to Nazi Germany. https://snyder.substack.com/p/what-to-expect-when-youre-expe...
The holocaust started as a deportation effort. Trump reportedly said "I wish I had Hitler's generals." https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-said-hitler-did-...
3-4 prominent republicans have Sieg Heiled in public, including Bannon who did not put his hand on his heart first.
You are confusing hyperbole for actually shocking news, and it's so shocking it's easily mistaken for hyperbole because if you don't bury your head in the ground it's too much to bear. Accepting the truth of whats happening means you must act, and so people are opting not to accept it to protect their mental health.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/29/nx-s1-5276898/rfk-drugs-addic...
"I'm going to bring a new industry to [rural] America, where addicts can help each other recover from their addictions," Kennedy promised, during a film on addiction released by his presidential campaign. "We're going to build hundreds of healing farms where American kids can reconnect with America's soil."
That's the kernel of truth, but when you bring in the historical context of authoritarian regimes, and the absolute lack of rule of law, you start to get very very afraid.
In 2025 Americans are so anesthetized even the "opposition party" can't say the obvious out loud in public. Let alone the president's cabinet.
People voting for a dictator isn't equivalent to 3/4 of the legislatures ratifying an amendment to the Constitution. The People have not given consent to set aside the Constitutional order.
If the People want to set aside the Constitution, they must do the hard work of convincing enough people in enough states to do it lawfully. Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
For all the flaws of the founding fathers they definitely understood power. How it gets consolidated. And how to fragment it. Their advice is polyarchy.
What we're witnessing is autogolpe to establish a CEO-dictator, the consolidation of power. In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history. And they will fail.
No, they don't.
They just need to obey a government that ignores its Constitutional bounda.
> Otherwise it's settled with might makes right.
It's always settled that way. Legality isn't a substitute for might makes right, it is, a social mechanism for guiding where the “might” ends up. But if the people—who ultimately, are the muscles of the might—decide not to care about legality, than it doesn't matter any more. Words written on paper are not self enforcing.
Inaction is largely indistinguishable from consent.
> autogolpe
No. We are experience Russian backed regime change in the same way we have instituted regime change in other countries, amplified by tried and true propaganda techniques used to propel other authoritarian regimes to power.
> CEO-dictator
This is a deliberate new age propaganda technique using conceptual metaphors (see George Lakoff).
"The CEO metaphor re-frames political rule as a business operation, which makes executive overreach appear logical rather than dangerous."
By getting someone to accept the metaphor of CEO, it manifests consent for executive overreach without having directly assessed how accurate "president as CEO" is as a metaphor.
> In no universe are Trump, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin on the right side of history.
Complete darwinism/social darwinism is a cogent and consistent moral system. It doesn't produce a world anyone should want to live in, but it is a consistent ideology. Social darwinism was the philosophical core of nazi ideology. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/
No, the constitution has a maintenance cost. The constitution is already set aside if people are not willing to pay that maintenance cost. Solidarity is the price of freedom.
Despotism is the default state you will get when you don't pay upkeep to your institutions.
I use https://hckrnews.com it shows flagged posts too.
I'm sure there's a left-leaning tech group you can join where everyone agrees with you. But this post doesn't belong here, and neither do flame wars.
I can’t get used to the fact that the US seems dead set on destroying its reputation in the world.
But with the direction the comment section of HN has taken over the last few years I’m sure there will be lots of commenters who will dismiss this as virtue signaling.
The targets usually have darker skin or are from countries far more east, but now it affects people like themselves.
Fence-sitting these days is a political decision all by itself. Well, it always was, but now that we've established a new normal (that's not very normal) rooting for the status quo is even more partisan.
It's not too much of a problem now, as t Big Tech is not in the "software business" so much as in the "laying off people to make the stock look good" ; but at some point they'll have to bring people in to actually write code.
Or, are they expexting LLMs to really make the bulk of the jobs?
Or maybe everything settles down in two years, and this is just a bout of neo-McCarthyism.
Time will tell. In the meantime, I guess Europe must not be that bad, if people are organizing conferences here instead of China or Dubai ?
I told the last recruiter flat out that it's no longer ethical for me to work for a US company but I don't think many people will do the same.
Maybe teaching about the holocaust should be accompanied with copies of daily newspapers from the late 1930s to demonstrate their mundanity.
Any reputable news sources for this?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...
- psychological manipulation through prolonged uncertainty and withholding information
- dehumanizing conditions like freezing cells with inadequate blankets
- sleep deprivation
- physical suffering during a 24-hour transfer between facilities while shackled and confined in a prison bus
- humiliation and degradation particularly during pregnancy testing procedures where she was forced to squat over a communal toilet with others present
- arbitrary detention without any timeframe without clear legal justification despite having an approved visa and no criminal record
https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2025-03-14/green-card-holder-fr...
Mind you this is an individual with a legal visa, German citizen, and in theory the type of immigrant "good" for the US.
This raised all red flags to anyone even with legal status to go to the US.
(Apart from the GDS Transport font, which is exclusive to GOV.UK websites)
That said, I do find the US border incidents to be super scary. I don't blame people for not wanting to come.
[1] https://www.ietf.org/administration/policies-procedures/code...
And let's be honest, a lot of people do indeed feel that this will only happen to people who make mistakes in their visa application (knowingly or not), have tattoos (or travel with tattooing gear), participate in any form of activism, are transgender or otherwise queer, or any other reason not applicable to conservative/right-leaning, white, middle class or higher, educated white collar workers. Some people are quite comfortable with all this (I won't bother pointing out the historical parallels), and it does come down to privilege and having an approved political mindset.
And here's the really nasty thing: if you point this out, you run the risk of sounding exactly like the 'woke' bogeymen this administration is 'fighting'. Language and the imagery invoked have been hijacked to a fascinating but troubling degree.
This is called denial or shock, which is a natural result of grief.
Is there any evidence of this?
Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out.
I tried suing over those, but even though there is a statute saying they must be bath towels, laws in the USA don't necessarily have to be followed. There are two types of laws, mandatory and directory. Directory laws are laws that are just "if you wanna" and don't carry any weight. A large majority of laws governing prisoner rights are these type of laws and there is no enforcement mechanism when they are broken. [ironically these laws specifically use the word "shall" in their wording, but in most jurisdictions "shall" is legally read as "may" in the USA]
"The towel shall be made of cloth and be bath size."
> She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.
> “He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.
> He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.
0. https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-03-14/green-card-holder...
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/03/cops-burst-into-womens-r...
the State Department has also announced that it considers sex markers that don't correspond to sex at birth to be fraudulent. ostensibly for the sports ban, but it actually applies to all visa applications and documentation.
combine those two facts with the administration's stated antipathy towards us, and the recent trend of Germans and Canadians being detained for weeks with no apparent cause, and I think you should see why trans women ought to avoid US travel right now.
I hate this culture war micromanagment where politicians write moral laws for things where there should not be any law.