Coke is always a discretionary purchase. Basic food staples are not. Kroger relies on national brand advertising to lure people from the perimiter of the store into junk food land.

Atomization enables this. Any number of individuals are individually weak against their employer/some org, but a big group of them can be quite powerful.

If many were to sacrifice their morals out of financial pressure easily (the control over which is in increasingly few hands) the path the US is treading becomes pretty deterministic... We've seen it in the movies and read it in the books.

You guys seem to need collective action and civil disobedience.

Then again.. maybe the will for collective action comes only after the repossessions...

Absolutely no one with the skills to work in the software industry is in a position where working for unethical mega-corporations or literally starving are their only options.

I sympathize with your situation, and I'm not calling you a monster. But "I had no choice, I had people depending on me" is the exact reasoning that has enabled every atrocity carried out by ordinary people; it's the banality of evil.

None of the individual acts seem evil. Conducting a census isn't evil. Collating the data isn't evil. Arresting people with the wrong papers isn't necessarily evil. Driving a train isn't evil. Operating a switch isn't evil. Processing paperwork isn't evil.

Look what's proposed now: Adtech has the data, this would feed into ICE systems leading to arrests, flights are conducted, and people get put into prison camps like CECOT where they have no recourse and where people are already talking about forced labor.

So no, I'm not saying to these folks "you're literally causing Auschwitz". That's a famous Vernichtungslager, and that's not true yet.

But people getting locked up in Concentrationslager or Arbeitslager (like historically : Mittelbau-Dora, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Monowitz). I think we're getting there.

I guess the question is: at which point do you decide maybe to wear extra layers or skip a meal instead? We're not there yet. The chain has many links. Eternal vigilance is needed to make sure they don't actually link up.

(ps. Imagine if I was posting this in 2024! Can I exchange this timeline for another please? )

What complexity is it you'd like to add?

That’s the voice part of exit, loyalty, voice is it not?

> you have to convince them it's good for people working in ad tech to oppose ICE.

Yes—and one of the tools we have for that is shunning.

If enough of us who are appalled and disgusted by the state of things, and the people who willingly lend themselves to creating said state, make our disgust with those people known, it can lead to some of them choosing to act differently, because they care about being thought well of by their fellow techies.

Because the rules of this land are the end result of waves of developments, over millennia, hard won through the observation of the cause and effect of policy on societies. I trust the effectiveness of American law on the basis of the success of the American Experiment. This very success is the draw that led me to leave my homeland and family and come here. So I'll go with American Law and legal system, rather than follow some reactionary duct-taped law some guy commenting on the internet says we should do.

We don’t have good data because it’s illegal to, for example, ask citizenship status on our census, but if you believe the numbers many democrats cite, Obama deported more immigrants than Trump. You can use Google to verify that though I’ll warn you the rabbit hole runs deep when it comes to official statistics. Importantly, under Trump we have far more violent felons to deport. The media thrives on salacious and emotionally charged stories rather unbiased reporting based on nuanced facts. It’s the entertainment industry.

The recent tragedies are indeed thoroughly depressing for all of us, but we shouldn’t let our emotional reactions destroy our ability to reason and think objectively about history and statistics. We can feel and think. Some of us believe enforcement of laws is the villain in this. Some feel the laws themselves or the idea of borders and sovereignty are to blame. Others that a surge of violent criminals such as those who killed Jocylan Nungary or Laken Riley is the cause of the recent tragedies. None of these views are inherently evil. All of these views have some merit. Truth is manifold. Don’t be narrow minded, we need broad thinking not simplistic pathos driven dogmas and references to nazis. Grow up.

Germany invests less than that, but Germany is a smaller country. I'm not sure how much it is per capita.

All parties of the government support and pay for ethnic cleansing in the middle east.

Again, I have little stakes in your shitshow besides the international meddling they do with our own faschist party.

This dualist thinking seems to be a particular US thing, based on your two party system.

I see the erosion of the rule of law and decency in the US, the persecution of minorities, the populism, the defamation of journalism as "lügenpresse" and alignment of media to the party line, the personal police force (what the fuck is ICE doing in Italy), the person cult around a single madman, the violence without consequence, the fancy SS/SA style cosplay uniform by the head of ICE, and I think "that looks a lot like the stuff we learned about in school".

The ones who are exterminating a race are the nazis

> After all, the whole point of drawing the comparison [to Nazis] is to shut down any possibility for discussion and nuance

Another way of phrasing this is that it's a call to stop assuming good faith discussion on the part of the boosters, stop being derailed by pondering nuance, and focus on putting the brakes on the new Nazi movement. History doesn't repeat but we're teetering on the edge of a large-scale horrific rhyme. Regardless of one's preferred policies regarding immigration, there is zero justification for where we're at.

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