I am sorry to tell you that it’s been sold to Unilever.

They are still semi-independent, but to a decent extent, they’ve gone to the dark side. The founders are still good 'uns though.

I think he could have done the same thing while still modeling the right way to deal with law enforcement.

If he wanted to provoke a confrontation in order to make a point / attract attention (usually a terrible idea but I guess maybe you could make the argument that in this case it would be worthwhile), he could have been extremely firm about his rights but still wanted to have a conversation about some of the other notable people they have detained, and ask their opinion on those people. Make arguments about abstract topics, but not deal in any respect with any questions about him and explain that he doesn’t want to talk about that without a lawyer.

Even that is dangerous. The thing is that having long conversation with the cops and answering all the questions they have for you, even about just random topics, your own viewpoint, what you talk about on stream, all that stuff, ought to be a risk. It’s not that you shouldn’t engage in it because CBP is breaking the rules. It is that you simply should never do it with any law enforcement, good or bad, for any reason once you’re in the crosshairs of being investigated for potential action against you.

I agree with the article author that it sounds like he was just operating from a position of an argument with someone who he wanted to make a point to, generating good content for his stream, that kind of thing. He wasn’t violating the normal guidelines of how is safe to interact with cops on purpose for specific reasons, he was just clueless about what is a good way to do it. Maybe I’m wrong in that. But I agree with the article author that things like counting it as a win that he got them to start to agree with him on some things, things of that nature, is a sign that he’s absolutely out of his depth and should stick with the simple safe guidelines and model the same for his followers.

Yeah. In retrospect, it’s easy to pick out what stuff is just Elon Musk making up bullshit because it would be awesome. And, with the cybertruck, he finally got to inject that into the engineering process as a dominant factor as he’d been trying to do for so long with the cars. And look at the result…

Back before people knew all that much about it, back when Elon Musk was the guy who made Tesla and SpaceX and this super smart guy (as opposed to being the guy who bought them and then fucked up the engineering), I knew some people who were excited about it. It was supposed to be a working truck but electric, bring all the better-than-other-cars stuff that the Roadster and Model S had, it was supposed to have solar panels and electrical outlets and super-strong construction so you could use it to survive the zombie apocalypse.

I think that was before the inflection point, back when the genuine success Tesla had had made Musk’s personal brand of bullshit believable. I remember when people started getting a good look at all the concept and actual prototypes, that made it look like a dumpster without the storage space, was when the shine came off the rose. But I definitely do remember people who were excited about it back in the beginning.

Haha all good

Haha I completely missed it. I should have seen it though, yes.

They’ve actually been doing this for a while. There is a whole ecosystem of engagement and publicity, what type of content draws reward financial and social, and it has collided several times with the legal system and it usually is not pretty.

The only real recent examples that come to mind are Johnny Somali and Ruby Franke, but I know there are more. Caution, if you decide to look into Ruby Franke be aware that it’s real fucked up (child abuse motivated by religion and the can-do-no-wrong star power of the influencer.) Johnny’s fucked up, too, but for the most part he was mostly hurting himself.

Bro… 😢

Just to get back to some of the other points from earlier:

From what I heard the military has only gotten more authoritarian as time went on

The military has gotten a lot more diverse since around the year 2008. Authoritarian-ness, in my limited knowledge about it, seems like it’s kind of waxed and waned as decades have come and gone. Maximum during the Spanish-American war, World War 2, War on Terror, and then at a a minimum during Vietnam, the Bonus Army time, the Ed Snowden / forever war days. It did reach a peak around the time of the War on Terror, which is why I thought it was weird that you singled out Obama in particular. I don’t think seeking congressional authorization or not really has the slightest bit to do with how individual ground troops or mid-level commanders are going to react to stuff when Posse Comitatus issues start to come to the fore as they seem moderately likely to in the near future. There are some other issues which I think will impact people’s thinking much more.

I’d wager modern Hugh Thompsons would either find the military insufferable and leave or would be eventually broken by the system like everyone else, which would explain why you used an example from Vietnam rather than a more recent one from the war on terror.

Eddie Gallagher was reported repeatedly by his fellow SEALs. The other frontline troops seemed to think it was a much bigger problem that he was committing war crimes than the brass did, although he was eventually court-martialled. It’s not really clear to me whether they fucked up the prosecution accidentally or on purpose, but regardless, he wasn’t really punished, but the other soldiers definitely seemed to think that he should be.

The massacre at Haditha seemed like it was generally approved of by everyone involved. As was Abu Ghraib. Like I say, I think early-2000s war on terror era was pretty much the recent peak for authoritarianism.

As a broader point, about getting broken by the system, I just don’t think it works that way. I think the main thing is, how awful of situations do you get put into (the right kind of trauma will trigger almost anyone to become a violent maniac), and how much ethics and trust seem like they’re on display from the people around you and above you. How hard does the darkness go, and how much light can you see to counterbalance. That’s my personal take on it. I feel like it’s a very individual thing. I do think that people can have individual reactions to wide societal issues: Are you sucked into the Trumpworld view where killing Democrats is okay because they support pedophilia and they tried to attack Trump who did nothing wrong? Are you horrified by watching ICE commit atrocities? Have you seen people you respect get pushed out of the brass by politics? That kind of thing. But I don’t think that any military with any type of training can really stamp out that individual level reaction. As far as I know, they actually try to lean into it when they do propaganda during training, motivating people to see the world as “enemies are threatening your family, that’s what you’re fighting for” “we’re your brothers you can trust us,” that kind of thing. Because they know that at the end of the day, people are doing to do what they decide to do. I think that’s why the authoritarian bent waxes and wanes, too, because events and perceptions shift over time, and the reaction of the soldiers goes with it.

if I’m not wrong the trend of “Military Operations Other Than War” started with Obama

https://listverse.com/2017/05/28/top-10-unauthorized-us-wars/

In My Lai, Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between US troops and Vietnamese civilians, and told his men to shoot the Americans if they tried to advance. No one questioned it. The US army tried to give him a medal for heroism in conflict with the enemy, part of their general cover-up, and he told them to get fucked. Eventually, they relented, halfway admitted that what he did was right, and gave him a medal for what he actually did. A lot of people at the time thought he was a traitor but he’s a free man now with his medal, and his name is in all the books. They court-martialled the commander most responsible for the massacre, although he didn’t really get punished.

The Vietnam Veterans Against the War did some of the most hard-hitting resistance to the war.

Everyone’s an individual. The US army is comprised of every color of the rainbow all the way from total MAGAs who want to kill Arabs and Democrats and are just waiting for someone to tell them to, all the way to whole platoons of Hugh Thompsons. It is fairly likely that a lot of how this all shakes out will come down to which faction becomes the consensus faction.

Edit: Oh, also, you’re showing your hand a little bit, saying that Obama was when the ship sailed. Not that he did much of anything to stop anything, he killed plenty of people, but there was one clear specific moment at which the ship sailed, and it wasn’t Obama.

I’m actually a little bit glad that they are dropping the pretense. ICE is sure as shit not law enforcement anymore.

The US army obeys the president (mostly), they’re not supposed to be involved in this. They are actually supposed to tell the president to get fucked if he tells them to.

The National Guard, on the other hand, obeys the applicable governor, and they are absolutely supposed to intervene for stuff like this. The system is actually designed with a good bit of sense in some respects. We might sort of be at the point where they should be involved, but definitely in the pretty near future, one of the better timelines involves the state cops and the National Guard putting up organized armed resistance to the escalations that ICE tries to do. I actually would really like to see the little squads of “I can’t show my face I snatch PhD students with asthma” tough guys in a conflict with either of those agencies. That carries that added benefit, also, that if we make it to the other side intact the people who gave ICE their orders can absolutely pay a price for having taken part in a rebellion against the United States.

There are of course other timelines…

I don’t think this is really true as long as they’re complying with the DMCA. OP can upload stuff, it’ll stay up until someone notices and cares enough to send a takedown notice, and then the server host will take it down. In theory OP might be liable if they really wanted to push it, which maybe makes it not the best idea, but I think the server operator is in the clear as long as they take stuff down if it does get requested to.

You’re not wrong. Somehow, though, even that deeply corrupt process has managed to out-democracy the unfathomably more corrupt process that leads to which elected leaders get into office and what they do with it.

Somehow, when it comes down to it, “Do you want abortion to be legal” can still receive a resounding “yes” from the people of the state. Putting extra layers in the way of that happening is still a bad thing I think even though the underlying process is subject to the same swampy awfulness that the whole rest of the thing is subject to.

See my other comment. I wasn’t saying at all that Lemmy was a US-only thing, I was just trying to say that that the whole network is probably enough of a niche platform that it’s not worth the substantial effort that would be involved in trying to interfere too much with US users on non-US instances. Big instances in the US, they can fuck with, and so why not (and especially since the Take it Down act is structured to empower individuals to go after them without the government needing to spend resources on it.) Instances outside the US, never mind, we have bigger fish to fry.

Oh, I am sure most of Lemmy is outside the US. I was saying that, in general, Lemmy (and even Mastodon) is probably too small and difficult a problem for them to want to attack through any systematic method. I think, if anything, they’ll just surveil and punish individual US-based users as opposed to trying to shut down or block instances outside the US.

It’s one of the advantages of ActivityPub services. Bluesky will be easy for them to attack at the root and I fully expect them to do so, whereas for truly federated services I think the reaction will be “ah what the hell too much trouble, how much harm can they really do.”

No, they will just make server operators liable for obeying any conservative who has an issue with any content there and can make the right format of complaint.

I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with. Small, scattered opposition that is subject to deliberate trolling and disruption at any scale anyone feels like deploying will simply not be worth bothering with.

This is all assuming if a big internet-censorship operation starts (which it seems likely that it will). I think it will mainly focus on large based-in-the-US companies which host large services. Notably among them will be Bluesky. The only impact it will have on anything ActivityPub-based is that they will shut down or muzzle some big instances inside the US, and then, the point being made, they will probably move on, leaving instances outside the US to do whatever they want. That’s my prediction.

Oh, also, Palantir’s surveillance will incorporate people’s comments into their overall dossier on the person, regardless of where their instance is, which means that anyone who maintains a big presence on an ActivityPub network will be putting themselves at person risk of neo-deportation to somewhere they can never get free from. It will still be legal to do, though. Sure.

I don’t think it is for the right reasons. Whatever she says, I think she is opposing it because she hates Jews, not because she cares about Palestine or free speech. For example I suspect that making it illegal to boycott Russia, she’d be all for.

should fail

I’m going to to stop you right there. I do actually agree with you 100%, I’m just saying that “no one can prove I didn’t do this action for X innocent reason” falls apart in how the actual law is actually applied (and regardless of whether the law is being applied for a reasonable reason in the first place, which of course this one is not).

A lot of things in legal-world can actually work this way. Intent matters. So if you’re distributing a document that calls for boycotting Israel, that can be illegal (I mean… arguably, I guess, under this awful law). If you’re in charge of a purchasing agency, and you suddenly drop all your Israel-aligned contracts, that can be illegal. If you’re denying mortgages to people of a certain color, that can be illegal.

No one can stop you from the individual actions, but if someone can prove that it was part of a coordinated effort to achieve one particular goal (which it kind of has to be coordinated in order to achieve any impact) then it can be illegal.