There would likely be millions of Americans celebrating the murder of their current president, should that happen. It doesn't mean it's reasonable, right, just, or civilized, nor would it indicate that it was a unanimously supported action.
"Just because they're a brutal dictator who murdered thousands of people."
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of other reasons to be skeptical of American military adventurism, but killing this one guy in particular really isn't one of them.
>Yes our president has only needlessly murdered two innocent US citizens so far
Over a million people in the US died of COVID. It's impossible to know exactly how many of them would've lived if the pandemic started under a president with a saner response than recommending injecting disinfectant, but I'm willing to bet it's more than two.
Maybe the President should have taken that into account when lying publicly about the impacts that he admitted in private conversation, or mocking and undermining expert advice?
Excess death from Covid is a non-trivial topic. Sweden had a very different approach to covid response, and yet had a very average number of excess death. The post-covid investigation provider some clear insight of what was primary causes to excess deaths, and yet very little of those conclusions has became common knowledge.
The primary group that had excess death caused from covid was to people living in homes for elderly care, and the primary cause was a lack of initial process and gear by people who worked at those locations. They were not given enough time to keep up a higher standard of sanitation (often given less than 15 minutes between patients), and protective gear was lacking. They also heavily depended on mass transportation which was a primary location for the virus to spread. A better early response in that sector, including shutdown/restriction of mass transportation would had saved many elderly people from early death.
To note, this had nothing to do with masks, vaccines, or shutdown of schools, which is the main points usually brought up in popular discourse. Sweden would have had one of the lowest number of deaths, with the exact same use of masks/vaccines/shutdowns as it did, as long as the response in elderly care had been done better.
Parent is referring to the same president as the grandparent...
Trump has murdered 2 innocent U.S. citizens so far, and was president when COVID started. Trump's response to COVID was part of why he lost the 2020 election.
By your logic, Khamenei probably hasn't murdered anyone either, right? What a pitiful "argument".
While other Presidents would go as far as putting signs saying "the buck stops here" on the Resolute Desk, the current President's sign would say "the buck stops anywhere but here".
Let's also see what happens with New Mexico's investigation of the Zorro Ranch...
Self defense, my ass. Neither situation posed ANY credible threat to those agents, despite what ICE Barbie got up and said in front of a podium twenty minutes after the event.
The amount of ahistorical histrionics on here is deeply worrying for such an educated population. Your political news needs to change. Shouldn't have to say this but to people like you it's a necessity: not a Trump voter or supporter, just correcting misinformation.
solid and well written response except no one who is even slightly to the right would ever admit that we actually lived under Trump's rule during the COVID. entire right is now anti-vaccines, anti-all but it was the right that locked up our children and kept them out of schools and forced the vaccines on the population (could not go to the fucking gym without the proof of vaccination). so politically we have short-term memory in this country, especially the right politically. this is why the right is celebrating now America bombing the shit out of everyone while in October of 2023 were pitching that we need to vote right "to stop the endless wars."
and murdered a bunch of Venezuelans, a bunch of non-citizens in the USA, collected from American companies and residents billions in tariffs...
How about those Epstein files?
The death toll for the Venezuela raid is between 80 and 100, out of them only 10 were civilians. I feel bad for those 10 civilians but, for the rest, I feel no sympathy, as they were oppressors.
They killed nearly 100 Venezuelans at sea, accusing them of transporting drugs. To date, this regime has provided no evidence to corroborate those claims, in addition to the fact those were extra-judicial executions. We already knew that parts of their justificantions were false, especially the accusations against Venezuela of producing fentanyl. We also know that the US military committed war crimes at least once, when they blew up survivors of an initial bombing. Despite all these, Trump and his goon squad were seemingly quite pleased and joking about it. It's splendidly evident that they assign zero value to lives outside of their goon circle. That extends to every non-whites, political opponents and even women/girls who suffered sexual crimes.
There are zero reasons to assume this regime's victims, except for known tyrants like Maduro and Khameini, to be guilty at all. The regime has zero credibility when it comes to human rights. So those fishermen were most likely innocent victims and not drug smugglers.
In addition to all this, don't assume that this US attacks on Iran were because of his love and benevolence for the Iranian civilians. If it were so, he wouldn't have provoked the Iranian regime to crackdown on the protestors and kill around 30K of them. That farce was unnecessary for the liberation of Iran. Instead, he used them to create an excuse to carry out an attack that they had already planned.
So, as much as I understand the Iranians' joy in seeing the end of Khameini, I strongly suspect that this is just the beginning of another authoritarian regime over there, controlled remotely by the US regime this time, just as we see in Venezuela. Expect everything from human rights violations to mass scale plunder of their natural resources. All that we see now are just ploys to establish a worldwide neocolonial order under a very racist and xenophobic regime operating from the US. Let me remind you of the meme that this orange dictator posted that shows Canada, Venezuela and Greenland as part of the US territory. I don't see this end well for any civilians on this planet, including US citizens.
He sure does act like a dictator, ruling by executive order. He sent the US military to operate on US soil, by executive order... so yes, he is very much a dictator right now.
As an outside observer, I'd say it's by far not as bad as in Russia yet but they're heading towards a similar model. Due process has already been eroded, prosecution is more selective than ever, there are attempts to criminalize harmless minorities, a large government-controlled police force arrests anyone they want to (including journalists), government-critical press is bought, sued, and intimidated, Congress is held in contempt, court orders are ignored, and the FBI works directly on behalf of the president. That being said, they've still got a long way to go.
>> there are attempts to criminalize harmless minorities
> like what?
Among other minorities, they're going very strongly against transgender people and support groups and try to criminalize them. They're obsessed with transgender people for some reason. For example, Executive Order 14168, Executive Order 14183, Executive Order 14187, Executive Order 14190, Executive Order 14201, and by offering cash bounties to the FBI for "...information leading to the identification and arrest of transgender activists promoting 'radical gender ideology'."[Wikipedia] Pam Bondi described such activists as "domestic terrorist groups."[ibid] There is also a large initiative by the Heritage Foundation to make the FBI classify transgender people in general as domestic terrorists and introduce a new classification they call "Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violence and Extremism" (TIVE).
Why they are so particularly violent against transgender people and so obsessed with that topic is a complex matter. I suppose their hatred for this tiny group is based on a mix of religious fanaticism, Elon Musk's direct influence on the US government, extremely insecure masculinity, the need of Fascism for inventing inner enemies (because it doesn't have any stringent ideology), and the fact that this group is so small and insignificant that they cannot possibly defend themselves - unlike the US gay community, who have a large lobby by now and include people like Peter Thiel.
> identification and arrest of transgender _activists_
This isn't chasing trans, it's looking for people who promote 'radical gender ideology'. It's not activists who support trans either. Emphasis on _radical_ and _ideology_.
"Turn over your state's voter information to the Federal Government for ... reasons, or we'll keep up the ICE raids in your cities that have already led to death and injuries" would be one simple example. Oppression... or extortion... or both.
"We want to suppress voters under some false boogeyman of 'illegal voters'. You are refusing to give us data which we need to do this, so instead, we'll keep ICE in your cities who have been shown to have no issues with escalating violence, until you do."
I struggle to believe you cannot connect those dots.
In addition, why would ICE enforcement in a city go away because voter rolls are turned over? Is illegal immigration in Minnesota a problem worthy of active enforcement or not?
In other words, oppression of citizenry to advance the efforts of a government to suppress voting that it dislikes.
The current administration's "we need your voter rolls" has fuck-all to do with "requiring ID to vote".
> Like in literally every country
As a citizen of Great Britain, Australia and now the US, I'm well aware of this.
And it doesn't change the "you can vote without ID in blue states!" from being the absolute bullshit that it is, and again, has nothing to do with why DHS is demanding voter rolls from blue states.
Ask any minority. Lest you think it will be limited to minorities though, ask Alex Pretti, or even ask the NRA what they think about Trump saying that if he didn’t want to get shot, he shouldn’t have been carrying a gun.
In cases where it's feasible to do life in prison, I'm fine with that too. But for dictators, that's typically not realistic (Maduro notwithstanding). Better to kill them rather than let them continue killing others.
I actually oppose the death penalty as a punishment for crimes, but for practical rather than principled reasons: I don't want innocent people (and there's always a chance of innocence) to be killed, and it's more expensive than life in prison anyway.
Part of the reason I, like you, make an exception for world leaders is that it can be cathartic for the people who suffered under them. Of course, it depends on the circumstances. I'm not talking about giving Jimmy Carter the chair for failing to bring down inflation.
My personal view is that most dictators deserve to be stuffed into a suitcase, loaded into a canon, and fired into the side of a climbing wall. I guess that makes me immoral.
That said, for anything aside from a despotic world leader, I'm also against the death penalty.
I'm opposed to the death penalty as well, but this has nothing to do with why I'd prefer despots be left to live in obscurity rather than die a relatively quick, painless, and public death.
Sentence them to live alone and anonymously in an uncomfortable cell in an unremarkable prison without visitation, communication, or news of the outside world.
Most dictators are elected democratically, once. What makes them a dictator is them not relinquishing power. It's too late to protest after a dictator is officially a dictator. They know what will come and are usually prepared with an armed force loyal only to them.
When the sitting president of the United states repeatedly states he would like to have an illegal third term, that elections are fraudulent and must be under his control, continually takes actions testing the limits of what he can get away with in terms of authoritarian behaviour, and only backs down temporarily when he faces massive backlash, you can forgive people for being alarmed.
Add to this list the two children and an adult unnecessary killed by measles in Texas and New Mexico in 2025 after the disinformation campaign aiming to save the government a few dollars.
When is that? When he declares himself the supreme dictator of the US? Or when he nukes another nation because of his racism?
Look around and compare with the Nazis. There is already the demonization and dehumanization of a large demographic group. There are concentration camps and extralegal police forces around already. Just like in Nazi extermination camps, the people who disappear into these ICE facilities are near impossible to trace again. There are already fatalities in there from inhumane living conditions, very bad food, lack of medical care and occasional premeditated murders. Even among the civilians, they see differently abled people as a burden, just as the Nazis did. Just as in Nazi Germany, there is an expansion of military power at the expense of the civilians and flouting of international laws. And just as in Nazi Germany, smart people who can see the writing on the wall are already on a mass exodus.
If you still believe that you're in a democracy, you forgot what happened on Jan 6, 2021. Their ego is too fragile to accept anything except their victory. There is zero chance that the despots will risk getting impeached, trialed and punished by the Congress and face the severe consequences of absolutely horrendous stuff they've committed so far. Even if the public opinion is overwhelmingly hostile towards them, they'll just claim election fraud. They have started efforts for that on multiple fronts with truly bizzare incidents being reported.
And let's talk about the BIG massive elephant in the oval office (besides the obvious one). Trump is NOT the main character, even though I'm sure that he doesn't know that. Look at what their mouthpieces are saying, their dubious billionaire friends are doing and their unelected psycho-minions are pulling off. This isn't just a dictatorship. This is a multi-generational authoritarian regime with clear succession plans. You're all distracted by just the beginning of a long chain of misery. And the beginning isn't even the worst. This is one thing where this regime is unlike the Nazis or the Fascists. Those regimes were controlled by the figure head who formed it - making them vulnerable to decapitation. This one is acting more like a secret society that puts someone in the front to act as their symbolic figure head. Removing the figure head isn't going to end the regime.
You're waiting for an imaginary signal when every alarm around you is screaming at you. The time for 'if' is long gone. That ship sailed a while ago.
Well, there are other things you can look at. For one, Khamenei was dictator of a regime that abducts women and recently murdered 10s of thousands of protesters in the streets. I'd reckon most, including Iranians, would not judge the killing of such an individual immoral, unjust or uncivilized.
I don't know whether I'm "kidding" or not, but I might as well post what immediately came to mind as I read this:
Sandra Bland et al.
ICE detainments
The excess 20k (as far as absolute numbers go) road fatalities in the US versus Iran.
And the excess I-have-no-idea-how-many-k who died under Trump's bungled COVID response (and who are going to die from Biden's bungled rail strike response)(and who died under Obama's failed healthcare half-measure)(and who died under Bush's bungled Katrina response and because of his pre-9/11 mismanagement).
Yes, yes, per-capita and all that. I'm not really making a rational argument here, just appealing to the truthiness of noticing that America has its own way of killing its citizens.
I'm not here to defend GW Bush. He did many stupid things. But I don't recall a lot of criticism around his "pre-9/11 mismanagement". Can you offer some specifics? The hunt for Osama Bin Laden started (at least) with Clinton and continued with GW Bush. Unfortunately, neither was able to stop him before the 9/11 attacks.
There was a cottage industry in elaborating the theory that Bush and his administration were unnecessarily caught flat-footed or even knew the attacks were imminent.
He seemed more interested in publicity and exaggerating his own bureaucratic importance than being objective—tendencies the political opposition and media were in no mood to criticize.
Everything that has and will happen due to poor working conditions after he broke the rail strike in 2022. The cause celebre was the East Palestine derailment, but conditions are still unconscionable, and it's hard to conceive of a situation where rail laborers are overworked and under-supported doesn't result in more, and worse, incidents like that one. And then, of course, there are the knock-on environmental and economic effects.
It's not the only objectionable thing Biden's administration is solely responsible for, just the one that came to mind.
They threw the justice and civility when they murdered people on the street. That ship has sailed and the party who's responsible for this escalation is the government.
It’s sad that I can’t be sure which government you are talking about right now, Iran or the USA.
I’m aware the scale of “murdered people on the street” is stark and so you are almost certainly talking about Iran but what ICE is doing (and the clear extrapolation) fits your comment IMHO.
You do know muslims arrived in Spain when they occupied it in the 8th century, right? It's not like they just arrived here recently. Most people in Spain today have muslim ancestry.
Perhaps, but there would be tens/hundreds of millions of people like me who didn't vote for Trump and don't like him, but would be absolutely enraged beyond perhaps anything in this country's history if another country blew up the White House and he was killed.
There are. There are also a lot who are celebrating in iran. In the us people who voted against trump accept he won and still believe his term will end as scheduled.
Exactly. This is just western media trying to project some morality to what was an internationally illegal act ... (and perhaps some in the media hoping against hope this publicity would please the dear, glorious leaders of Israel and the US to end the war).
Honestly, I am disappointed that your comment was downvoted. You raise a good, if uncomfortable, point. I too tire of the well-worn phrase: "XYZ is illegal under international law". To me, interntional law is only useful for medium-sized (population-wise) states and smaller. Once you are a nation with a large population, then you can afford a large military and do whatever you want. Sure, people won't always like what you do, but there is very little they can do to stop it. Look at all the crazy shit that US, China, and Russia has been up to in the last 10 years -- plenty of violations, but few teeth to stop it. Even Israel, which is a very small state, but backed by a global superpower, has done many terrible things in Gaza.
Preventive war (attacking to neutralize a future, non-imminent threat) is considered illegal under modern international law. The UN Charter restricts the use of force to UN Security Council authorization or self-defense against an actual, imminent armed attack, making preventive actions, which target potential future dangers, unlawful.
It also allows any one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the US, to unilateraly veto any binding resolution that imposes sanctions for violating said law, with no established rules or even informal expectations that they recuse themselves when conflicts of interest arise.
Israel and Iran are involved in active hostilities for a long time now, direct or by proxies. Furthermore, US and Israel are making the case for a preemptive war with the advent of the Iranian nuclear program (whether you believe it or not, that’s beside the point), and those are legal.
Ok, call it a "special military operation" if you want. A war by any other name would smell just as bad.
And what is Congress - or any other part of the US government - going to do about the pedophile not following rules? Stop him? How? Every potential check and balance has either been defanged or is controlled by his supporters.
Probably nothing. Also it’s not like the Democrats have much moral high ground to stand on here either (considering that Obama did more or less the same thing several times).
But congress can of course stop Trump from doing this and a whole bunch of other stuff. The problem is that it just chose not to and to give up much of its powers to the executive over the years (in practice if not legally) due to partisan reasons..
Why can't you be at war without officially declaring it? We have had lots of wars not declared by congress. Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq. This seems like a weird way to think.
Being required legally doesn't change the actual fact of war. Sure it is breaking the law. I don't see how Libya is the one in the long list to set this precedent of illegally non-declared war.
I read the whole thing and thought I had very little interest in this kind of thing. I'm not sure if the writing is exceptional, or if I was captured by the idea that the style would change as I read on. Maybe a bit of both, but either way, this was very interesting. I wonder, if a similar thing were done with hand writing, whether many of us would be lost a lot sooner.
Yeah, but the stock might take a massive hit if this were seriously pursued, and it might even have further consequences in the markets. Let's keep our priorities straight.
Generally from a financial planning standpoint 35-50 is typically the "grinding years" where mortgage, family, and other life commitments means that typically your career investment needs to pay off to make it through. In some ways it is the "danger zone" financially. Hard to change careers (not young enough), but not yet worked enough to retire with large expenses coming in. This isn't unique to software engineers either -> this is most people in most jobs.
There are also mixed people on these forums in different regions, countries, work experiences, etc. For example software in most places in the world had an above average salary but not extremely high (i.e. many other white collar professions would pay similar/more). For those people where it is a standard skilled role it probably hits even harder now than say the ones with lots of stock who can retire early and enjoy the new toy that is AI.
It was said in the context of having bills to pay. Meaning that he is in deep and needs a high-priced developer salary to make ends meet.
Virtually all other careers that offer similar compensation have an old boys club gatekeeping the profession, requiring you submit many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars before they will consider letting you in. That might pencil out as a reasonable investment when you are 14, but once you are mid-career you'll never get back what you put into it.
Learning XYZ skill is something you can do at any age, and doing so will even get you an average paying job with ease. Learning the XYZ skill in the way that keeps the old boys happy is not a realistic option for someone who considers themselves old.
I think we'd need a lot more suffering before we have enough people to start that kind of action. If we see 35% unemployment over the next 5 years with insufficient time to adjust, then maybe the pitchforks come out.
Well, time is one aspect but we'd also need motivation and proper execution for a reasonable chance at successful adaptation. My guess is we'll coast along the boundary. I don't imagine things will move so fast as to cause the sort of general upheaval that I think you're talking about. But I do think things will move fast enough to cause significant harm on a larger scale than we've seen recently in the West.
> you might temper your expectations of a rational market
TSLA is like a snowball down a hill. It morphs from EV to autonomous driving to AI to robots to space to tera fab to space datacenters. Rolling in the next big narrative or gov handout as it speeds down the hill.
I don’t understand why you’re bringing up Obama. Nobody is defending him, and I think you might be inferring some sort of tribalistic defensiveness without any evidence. I see that sort of thing a lot, and I’ve never understood it.
Please correct me if I misunderstood the point you were trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make is that highly respected and even lauded individuals kill American citizens and people aren't generally afraid of them, so the fact that "they've shot and killed american citizens" on its own doesn't explain any fear. But I had misread the original question so my point was not quite relevant because the question was stated with justified fear already implied.
> My genuine trouble with this kind of post is that I don’t know if it is true.
Same thought I had. I mean, it sounds pretty bad but it's also making no attempt at all to report an unbiased view. I'd like to hear from officials. What are their goals, and why are they doing it this way? I don't think the majority of Trump voters wanted this kind of harm and chaos.
What is the unbiased view of a federal agency geared up for war kidnapping and terrorizing people in the streets of American city? You have no idea what it's like here right now.
I don't have any idea and I'm not trying to defend or justify.
> What is the unbiased view of a federal agency geared up for war kidnapping and terrorizing people in the streets of American city?
That's exactly what I'd like to know. The report didn't provide one. That's my point. Which is fine, they didn't intent to, they were just telling their truth. But those ICE agents have a perspective, they have motivations, they're people, and while reading the report I was curious about what they might have to say about their actions.
> those ICE agents have a perspective, they have motivations, they're people
They are racist, fascist thugs, it's that simple. They want to terrorize immigrants and brown people. There is no need to overthink this. They are racially profiling people every day, and arresting citizens because they are minorities. They shot a mother in the head and now they are telling the rest of us "didn't you learn your lesson?", alluding to that murder. They tear-gassed a family of 6 trying to get home the other day, including a 6 month old baby that lost consciousness. The family had nothing to do with anything, they were simply trying to get home in an area ICE was attacking.
What "perspective" could possibly change anything about this shameful behavior?
They knowingly voted for a racist, a rapist, a felon ...
A man who as president sent a mob to assassinate the vice-president of the United States and members of Congress, because that VPOTUS, Mike Pence, refused Trump's illegal order to overturn an election both of them had lost.
I'm just talking about one report. I'm not waiting to hear from anyone. I just passively consume what happens to come my way, and this is the first report about this situation that I saw on HN and took time to read.
Please educate yourself. The message is not hidden like some cryptic puzzle. Read, read, read. And from more than just one news source. Many. Recognize the bias.
> I don't think the majority of Trump voters wanted this kind of harm and chaos.
Sorry to be vulgar, but it’s about fucking time they find the fucking courage to speak up.
I am angry at the conservative people in my life, first and second connections and beyond, not because they fell for 8 years of increasingly fascist propaganda, but because now they’re too weak and scared and cowardly to stand up and recognize that they were wrong and they’ve ushered in some of the darkest days in American history.
The American right continues to be complicit. I am losing respect daily while I watch my conservative friends not speak out. It’s heartbreaking.
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