a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts

that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen. The underlying core social contract does appear to be one of "if you do 'good' things, generally the law will agree with you and if it doesnt then we wont hold it against you the first time"

*the important caveat here is that this leaves a rather disgustingly large and exploitable gap in what is considered good vs bad behavior, with some people having biases that can spin any observable facts into good or bad based on their political agenda. Additionally, personal biases like racism for example, influence this judgement to value judge your actions in superficial ways

I would be remiss if I didn’t suggest everyone go watch the Watchmen series on HBO

They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen their entire lives and they are probably right.

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People rarely recognize that force can be turned on them until it happens. If one side uses force and the other refuses to, you cannot expect the first to grasp that force is always a two way street, because for them it is not real until they feel it.

Did you just link to grokipedia?

My favorite was the one where Florida Republicans made it legal to deny medical treatment based on religious or moral belief, and a surgeon stopped administering anesthetic to Republicans.

Conservative and progressive groups.

People who care about their community?

There's going to be a lot of pressure on Democrats from their base to hold people accountable for what happens during Trump's 2nd term. And there is going to be some new blood that runs on that. You have state governors like Newsom, Pritizker and Waltz documenting abuses with future accountability in mind.

What baffles me is how conservatives supporting the current government overreach aren't worried about the coming backlash. Do they think they'll just win all the future elections? Even when there is no more Trump?

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"Why would anyone be opposed to deporting criminals" is verbatim what I've read from conservative commenters.

That isn't the issue being discussed. This is illustrating that armed, masked goons as a political weapon is a pandora's box that will get turned against everyone, regardless of status. Some people just don't care about the violence in Minnesota because it isn't happening to them.

> Why would anyone be opposed to the IRS catching tax cheats? This seems like such a bone-headed take.

And ICE says they only go after illegals.

Speaking of historically illiterate...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

> Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.

There's nothing wrong with catching tax cheats as long as due process is followed and the person's rights are not infringed. However, selective enforcement can be used as a weapon - never investigate people "on your side" and always investigate "enemies" even if there's no evidence of fraud. Another way to weaponise enforcement is to have a law that is almost never prosecuted and rarely followed (e.g. only using bare hands to eat chicken in Gainesville, Georgia), so then a law enforcement officer can threaten to prosecute for it unless the victim complies.

I feel like you can both want illegal aliens to get deported, but not approve of how ICE is executing protesters in the street, entering homes without warrants, and kidnapping people in unmarked vans.

Similarly, you can think it would be good to catch tax fraud, but think that it should be handled without executing folks.

> infamously against “Tea Party” activists

that claim was disproved by the way

but, it is famously how the feds managed to get Al Capone

No, they went after tax cheats and it wound up that there were a lot more people cheating taxes hiding behind conservative-sounding fronts than there were hiding behind liberal-sounding fronts.

This was spun as "targeting conservatives".

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I think this take is on the cynical side. A more charitable interpretation would be what they say (but maybe I'm being naive): that they don't want to break the rules to fix what someone else broke by breaking the rules.

I'm not sure what you mean by "they consistently come up with the exact small number of Democrats needed to push legislation and bills that the party proposes to be against" -- if you mean the Republicans manage to get some Democrats to "switch sides" -- it's important to remember that this is how everything used to get done. Check the old votes: party-line was less common back in the day. And even now, Democrats tolerate members with differing opinions far more than the GOP does, and it shows in their voting patterns.

I don't think its any sort of "grand struggle" in any sense other than the human condition is a grand struggle for peace in a world which perhaps fundamentally encourages conflict, but it doesn't have to be a grand struggle to appreciate the fact that people are dying and being treated inhumanely.

I really do think you're fundamental warning is spot on: people really should consider how power is going to be used against them when calculating how much of it to give up in the pursuit of a goal. I also happen to think its sort of ridiculous (and impossible) for us all to wail and gnash our teeth each time a person dies unjustly. But I also think its probably wrong to be amused by it, even if it is commonplace in human affairs.

Yeah.

I don't subscribe to the hypocritical vies that people are expected to have "free will" and "freedom", while also being "influenced by the algorithm".

Its either one or the other. Personally I think its the former, and Tik Tok is just confirming to people what they want to hear.

The mechanism to do it properly is the feds working with local and state officials where there's a full breadth of accountability and judicial coverage. Some states and cities have explicitly rejected doing this, some opting to purposefully make it harder. Trump instead of being diplomatic and trying to work with them has aggressively sent goons in to do flashy operations and pushed federal enforcement to the limits of the law.

ICE and border patrol wasn't really designed either legally or in training for these sorts of large operations, so it's created lots of dangerous situations like how to do crowd control broadly under laws like "interfering with a federal investigation", while commanders are pushing them hard for results.