Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.

People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.

Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?

I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.

> every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.

To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.

It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)

ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

Remember Willem van Spronsen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Tacoma_immigration_detent...

His daughter

I can only imagine how full of grief she was to learn that her dad suicided in such a wasteful way.

Love, and hope will defeat facism

What was the last time love and hope defeated fascism anywhere?

It took the development of the most ghastly weapons to have ever graced this Earth and multiple meat grinder war fronts to defeat fascism last time.

[flagged]

Things don't have to move towards a civil war. Congress needs to get it's druthers and start being Congress instead of enablers?

If people of the past would have followed that argument, we would not have seen the declaration of human rights of the French Revolution, not have had the civil war, slaves might still be slaves. Hitler’s successors would reign Europe.

Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.

No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.

> Hitler’s successors would reign Europe.

> Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.

> No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.

The other problem is that literal Hitler thought the exact same thing, which is why Mein Kampf got written in a prison.

I wonder if the people four years ago chanting to hang Trump's VP (for accepting having lost the election) also thought they were in the right…

(Not that it matters either way if those people are "mistake theory" (power) rather than "conflict theory" (truth), because I expect all clothes to eventually be worn by various conflict theorists).

When it come to Hitler people will generally approve of political assassinations and infanticide if it would have meant that Hitler were killed before world war 2. Any benefit that society would have gain if those methods would had been established as the norm would however be dwarfed from the negatives. Sometimes bad methods make things initially better, but long term has terrible consequences.

As a minor historical perspective. The French Revolution is know in Europe as one of the bloodiest period in France under the name of Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon who then initiated the Napoleonic Wars, which is also know as one of the biggest war in Europe.

> That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well.

No. It. Does. Not.

Violence begets violence, and it is all our interests to fight against violence wherever, whenever.

Fight fire, with water

Violence begets violence

Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?

> Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?

Because it is not

Is there any collective action going on besides lip-service protests?

> a judge arrested in her court room

But she did something illegal? Like while I agree with her ideals, if she did something illegal than she can get arrested.

This is mental. Game you seen the amount of illegal stuff the current administration have done that results in zero arrests? There is bad faith and then there is this argument. As if the role of law is even being remotely adhered to by the current regime.

Was it so obviously illegal? It didn't look like it to me.

Did she pose an imminent danger to society if she remained free? Was she a flight risk?

Every individual involved in this is doing it because there is something to be gained. The system is basically saying “the more you deport, the more numbers you generate, the more funding you get and the less I will check what you do with it”. We can blame the individuals sure, but if they keep getting showered with money for doing the wrong thing, of course the system has a big responsibility. Why should the people involved not do this if they are being explicitly encouraged by their employer to do it?

Based on some interactions I have had with CBP and ICE in the past as a legal immigrant, I'm confident that many of those people aren't doing it because of any sort of monetary gain or career advancement, but simply because it gives them an outlet to realize their sadistic tendencies.

And because is tolerated and even encouraged, these jobs attract exactly those kinds of people. Which is how you end up with an organization with an internal culture that revels in human suffering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com