That “though” tho

If they really believed money is speech then forcing us to give it to a business to exercise our legal rights really should be a clear cut 5th Amendment violation, but of course they don’t believe in anything besides power

Basically every single song from the Moby album Play was in basically every single commercial on TV

On a related note, Jon Bois mini series on the history of mound charging is hilarious and brilliant

So I guess Fortune magazine just discovered inflation today? Fuck your dumb oligarch divisive bullshit, the only problem with Social Security is that the wealthiest haven’t been paying enough into it.

Thinking the stupidity meme won’t jump from one species to the next is just a lazy cop out, regardless of the species we just have to stop being stupid and there’s no one single switch that can be flipped for that

Link?

So in other words more than a 60% supermajority of Americans don’t support ICE

For MAGA Republicans

Cult members gonna cult. What percentage of likely voters are identifying as MAGA now and what was that same number in January 2025? Because I’d bet that’s gone down

Thank you for the link!

Six in 10 Americans disapprove of the job ICE is doing, while about 3 in 10 approve.

So in reality about twice as many people oppose ICE as support them. I think Americans have a lot of opinions they need to reconsider, but the ICE problem isn’t being driven by that, it’s being driven by a government that can pursue extreme and violent policies regardless of public opinion, which is a whole different problem to deal with, and I think that problem is only made worse by overstating the degree of popular support ICE has.

The question people need to be asking themselves about this issue is not “Why do so many people support this?”, it’s “Why doesn’t our government listen to us?”

I cant believe it

Good, you really shouldn’t believe random bullshit people say without any evidence

half of Americans still support ICE

Citation needed

Well, at least the war on terror and the war on drugs both went well, right?

The influential group

Citation needed

Also, denying someone in your custody medical care really ought to be considered torture, which really ought to be some sort of crime

No, ICE and CBP are separate agencies, they just both happen to be appallingly racist (even by the standards of US law enforcement). The county board successfully forced the sheriff to ban ICE agents, but in response to that she went out of her way to hold a press conference to tell the board they better not try to ban CBP agents too or else, which is probably more just deeply annoying to me than it is actually consequential at this point, but could turn into a lawsuit if the county does try to ban CBP I’d suppose.

But of course pigs are still pigs

Kelly Martinez, San Diego County’s elected sheriff, said after the vote… CBP could continue using a county facility, setting up a showdown with the supervisors, who are also elected. The sheriff made a lengthy defense of CBP’s work…

Related articles, “The Legacy of Racism within the U.S. Border Patrol” (arc) and “Border Patrol has a history of excessive force. Critics say they’re out of their depth” (arc)

Related story from 2023, “Government’s own experts found ‘barbaric’ and ‘negligent’ conditions in ICE detention” (arc)

In Michigan, a man in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was sent into a jail’s general population unit with an open wound from surgery, no bandages and no follow-up medical appointment scheduled, even though he still had surgical drains in place.

A federal inspector found: “The detainee never received even the most basic care for his wound.”

In Georgia, a nurse ignored an ICE detainee who urgently asked for an inhaler to treat his asthma. Even though he was never examined by the medical staff, the nurse put a note in the medical record that “he was seen in sick call.”

“The documentation by the nurse bordered on falsification and the failure to see a patient urgently requesting medical attention regarding treatment with an inhaler was negligent.”

And in Pennsylvania, a group of correctional officers strapped a mentally ill male ICE detainee into a restraint chair and gave the lone female officer a pair of scissors to cut off his clothes for a strip search.

“There is no justifiable correctional reason that required the detainee who had a mental health condition to have his clothes cut off by a female officer while he was compliant in a restraint chair. This is a barbaric practice and clearly violates … basic principles of humanity.”

These findings are all part of a trove of more than 1,600 pages of previously secret inspection reports written by experts hired by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In examining more than two dozen facilities across 16 states from 2017 to 2019, these expert inspectors found “negligent” medical care (including mental health care), “unsafe and filthy” conditions, racist abuse of detainees, inappropriate pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees and other problems that, in some cases, contributed to detainee deaths.

These reports almost never become public.

For more than three years, the federal government — under both the Trump and Biden administrations — fought NPR’s efforts to obtain those records. That opposition continued despite a Biden campaign promise to "demand transparency in and independent oversight over ICE.

The records were obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by NPR. After two years, a federal judge found that the government had violated the nation’s public records law and ordered the release of the documents.

(Italics in original, bolding added)

Exactly

This pollster may have swayed the outcome of an election with knowingly false statements

I don’t think that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Also, you could make an argument that, like, some diner near a polling place doing a special swayed the outcome of an election because it made the area look busy and potential voters decided they didn’t have time.

I see the point about needing time for real journalists to blow it open

Actually my point was more about needing more journalists and editors and newsroom support staff so that someone could have looked into this sooner and more aggressively

What happens when the poll with fake data is released only hours before the election?

Probably only a few people see it and it doesn’t have much impact

But what we are talking about was intentionally false.

I appreciate the idea of limiting ourselves to people who make intentionally false statements, but when I intentionally say something like “race is a social construct” or “the president is a criminal” the average Republican thinks it’s a false statement.

What these people did was super shitty, but I don’t see a way to criminalize it without handing fascists a giant weapon to beat loud mouth leftists like me over the head with. I think the best remedy here is we get the names of everyone involved in this and then for the rest of their lives whenever they say anything of consequence we’ll be able to say “Oh you’re one of those liars who lied to all of us one time, I don’t think I believe what you’re claiming now.”

I’m pretty sure fraud laws all require demonstrable financial harm or unjust enrichment (which this might end up being when more info comes out but that hasn’t been proven yet).

If cops and prosecutors cpuld just call every statement they don’t like fraud everybody who ever wrote an article on, like, flock cameras or gender affirming care would end up in prison. Misinformation/disinformation is a problem that deeply pisses me off, but if we try to imprison our way out of it those laws are 100% going to be used on people saying true things conservatives don’t like hearing.