7 ms·

A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" —

by pohl 1y ago

A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?

cookiengineer 1y ago
[flagged]
- nosioptar 1y ago
  Yes, Big Balls allegedly got his ass beat by a couple of 15 year olds. https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story?id=124406722 https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
  - chrisco255 1y ago
    Big Balls is only 19 and was intervening, unarmed, in a carjacking attempt of a woman by up to 10 people as reported. DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country. Would you have the balls to protect a woman in that situation?
    - estearum 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - gottorf 1y ago
        [flagged]
        estearum 1y ago
        [flagged]
        650REDHAIR 1y ago
        Gutting USAID has killed people. There isn’t any other way to look at it.
        estearum 1y ago
        [flagged]
        gottorf 1y ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 1y ago
        > What a ridiculous argument. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        gottorf 1y ago
        You're right, I should cool off for a bit. Names are flying all across the thread, and it's hard!
        tomhow 1y ago
        Understood. Thanks for trying your best.
        estearum 1y ago
        Huge portions of the United States do in fact have a very similar relationship with their water companies, because their water companies are given water rights by the relevant state governments. I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
        tastyface 1y ago
        You are absolutely wrong. People have died as a direct result of USAID cuts and will continue to die. Here's some reporting on the subject: https://archive.is/YknTv https://archive.is/YknTv There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
        gottorf 1y ago
        Sorry, I did not make myself clear enough. I'm not disputing that there exist people whose lives depend on USAID. I'm disputing the claim that there is a direct moral culpability on the part of the people who work for the administration that cut USAID funding, or the American electorate that empowered said administration, for those deaths; and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals. > There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it. The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away. Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is. To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
        tastyface 1y ago
        Sorry, but no: the person pulling the trigger does not get to shirk ethical culpability, especially if they're sadistically relishing their hatchet job.
        gottorf 1y ago
        There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE! It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
    - KennyBlanken 1y ago
      > DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess? https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-city/ https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-... St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k. St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
      - marpstar 1y ago
        Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor. DC is the only place the president has jurisdiction in this scenario.
        abeppu 1y ago
        ... except this president federalized and deployed the national guard in California only earlier this summer, over the objections of the state's governor, so is that rule still a rule?
        fc417fc802 1y ago
        He was able to provide a justification, however thin, which he presumably can't in the case of St Louis. Not that I disagree with the general sentiment. He's only doing this as a political stunt and St Louis wouldn't serve that purpose as well even if he could somehow swing it legally.
        abeppu 1y ago
        I'm sure there are also federal buildings in St Louis; the justification from California works almost anywhere. But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues. https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-lawsuit-924491849641549828c4f52a41d54e6b https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-l...
    - delfinom 1y ago
      Red states overwhelmingly have the highest murder rates lmao Widespread poverty and guns.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        You mean red states with large blue cities in them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:Homicide_rates_per_100,000_by_state._FBI._US_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti.... The states with the lowest homicide rates include a mix of very blue (Massachusetts) and very red (Iowa, Utah). The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
  - 55555 1y ago
    Teenagers can be strong. Almost every adult would be dumb to pick a fight with a high school football player. And the reality of fighting is that generally once you’re up against two or three other people, you’re going to get beat up. It’s not a Jason Bourne movie. World-class MMA fighters have been jumped. One person generally cannot fight several people.
  - atonse 1y ago
    If you’re enjoying the fact that two individuals attempted a person’s car and then beat them up, just because the victim doesn’t agree with your politics, you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you. That’s a bridge too far for me.
    - King-Aaron 1y ago
      This feels like a dog whistle to me.
      - atonse 1y ago
        Not really, maybe I'm just too naive, but I don't want our society to devolve where we're enjoying violence inflicted on the "other" even if I absolutely hate what they're doing and how they're doing it (like in the case of a lot of DOGE stuff).
        assword 1y ago
        [dead]
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1]. Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-doge-teen-was-fired-by-cybersecurity-firm-for-leaking-company-secrets?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-do...
    - NoGravitas 1y ago
      If said violence actually happened. It's a little too convenient that the "victim" was "Big Balls".
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
I'd like to see your evidence that it was staged. So far I have not seen anything that indicated that it was.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mring33621 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    I deny you the right to put words in my mouth.
    - mring33621 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - bloomingeek 1y ago
        If crime was going crazy in D.C. the GOP would be all over it in a flash and the local and national press would be monetizing the info. All this is a stunt to deflect from whatever is bothering the big orange dummy at the moment.
        dragonwriter 1y ago
        It is, in part, a distraction, from (particularly) discussion of the Epstein files, but the one thing the Trump regime is efficient with is using elements of their real authoritarian agenda as their distractions when they need one. So, sure, DC is a distraction, but its also a part of a fairly overt broad campaign against the homeless (not against homelessness as a social condition, against homeless people as subhuman enemies), that is itself tied into the national campaign of ethnic cleansing and the national campaign against the mentally ill (again, not against mental illness), and the DC operation is also part of the progressive militarization of civilian law enforcement. If this sounds like things that occur together in fascist regimes, well, there's a reason for that.
skinnymuch 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
khazhoux 1y ago
The “staged” part is speculation and not necessary. Even without that, we have federalization of a regional PD because one Republican was assaulted.
- chrisco255 1y ago
  Washington DC is already federalized under the Constitution. DC does not belong to a state and exists as a special region with very specific Federal definitions for its existence.
nullc 1y ago
So what you're saying is that the attack was just "crisis actors"?
- seanp2k2 1y ago
  Every accusation is an admission. Always has been.
  - Y_Y 1y ago
    Then I accuse you of being a handsome genius
scarface_74 1y ago
This has happened before - a staged arrest in DC as propaganda https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-up-a-bag-of-crack-on-live-tv-whered-he-get-it/ https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...
billy99k 1y ago
[flagged]
kotaKat 1y ago
Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.
tacticalturtle 1y ago
Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month. In fact that’s actually what they’re doing: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-washington-dc-crime-eric-tarpinian-jachym/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...

by pohl 1y ago

cookiengineer 1y ago

[flagged]

nosioptar 1y ago
Yes, Big Balls allegedly got his ass beat by a couple of 15 year olds. https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story?id=124406722 https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assault...
- chrisco255 1y ago
  Big Balls is only 19 and was intervening, unarmed, in a carjacking attempt of a woman by up to 10 people as reported. DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country. Would you have the balls to protect a woman in that situation?
  - estearum 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - gottorf 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - estearum 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - 650REDHAIR 1y ago
        Gutting USAID has killed people. There isn’t any other way to look at it.
        estearum 1y ago
        [flagged]
        gottorf 1y ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 1y ago
        > What a ridiculous argument. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        gottorf 1y ago
        You're right, I should cool off for a bit. Names are flying all across the thread, and it's hard!
        tomhow 1y ago
        Understood. Thanks for trying your best.
        estearum 1y ago
        Huge portions of the United States do in fact have a very similar relationship with their water companies, because their water companies are given water rights by the relevant state governments. I think if someone decided to save money by shutting off water to Phoenix or Los Angeles, they will have some portion of the relevant blood on their hands. That's especially true if they did so with zero effort toward a smooth transition.
      - tastyface 1y ago
        You are absolutely wrong. People have died as a direct result of USAID cuts and will continue to die. Here's some reporting on the subject: https://archive.is/YknTv https://archive.is/YknTv There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it.
        gottorf 1y ago
        Sorry, I did not make myself clear enough. I'm not disputing that there exist people whose lives depend on USAID. I'm disputing the claim that there is a direct moral culpability on the part of the people who work for the administration that cut USAID funding, or the American electorate that empowered said administration, for those deaths; and that said moral culpability means it's fine when those people are victimized by criminals. > There are ethical ways to reduce humanitarian aid. Eliminating it all at once ain't it. The nature of government-funded programs is that the actual source of the funding, the taxpayer, has very little direct say in it, and the people who are involved have very little incentive to remove it. Politicians love attaching their names to bigger and bigger budget numbers in headlines, and of course the people whose salaries depend on that budget aren't inclined to make it go away. Every now and then the taxpayer gets fed up and elects some boor to make a hatchet job out of it, and intellectuals remark on how heartless it all is. To me, the true ethical blame is on whoever it is that allowed these millions of people to be permanently dependent on aid.
        tastyface 1y ago
        Sorry, but no: the person pulling the trigger does not get to shirk ethical culpability, especially if they're sadistically relishing their hatchet job.
        gottorf 1y ago
        There is no trigger being pulled, metaphorically or not. USAID isn't a force of nature that would have continued to flow, as though water going downhill, if only it weren't for those sadistic meddlers at DOGE! It's humanitarian aid funded by the American taxpayer and brought to life by every dedicated worker involved. To choose to stop being a part of this chain of actions is to go from acting on something good to becoming neutral, not becoming evil. What's next, calling someone ethically culpable for quitting their USAID job?
  - KennyBlanken 1y ago
    > DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess? https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-city/ https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-... St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k. St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
    - marpstar 1y ago
      Deployment of the National Guard within a state is at the discretion of that state's governor. DC is the only place the president has jurisdiction in this scenario.
      - abeppu 1y ago
        ... except this president federalized and deployed the national guard in California only earlier this summer, over the objections of the state's governor, so is that rule still a rule?
        fc417fc802 1y ago
        He was able to provide a justification, however thin, which he presumably can't in the case of St Louis. Not that I disagree with the general sentiment. He's only doing this as a political stunt and St Louis wouldn't serve that purpose as well even if he could somehow swing it legally.
        abeppu 1y ago
        I'm sure there are also federal buildings in St Louis; the justification from California works almost anywhere. But critically, the trial in which the legality of that action is considered is happening the week. Whether or not the action is judged to have been a constitutional violation ultimately doesn't matter; the administration did it, and even if the court rules against the administration, it will have been two months too slate. Effectively, the president has demonstrated he can federalize the national guard whether or not the governor consents for long enough to score whatever political/media points he's currently fixated on, and if the legal system stops him, he will have moved on to other issues. https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-lawsuit-924491849641549828c4f52a41d54e6b https://apnews.com/article/california-trump-national-guard-l...
  - delfinom 1y ago
    Red states overwhelmingly have the highest murder rates lmao Widespread poverty and guns.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      You mean red states with large blue cities in them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:Homicide_rates_per_100,000_by_state._FBI._US_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti.... The states with the lowest homicide rates include a mix of very blue (Massachusetts) and very red (Iowa, Utah). The cause is not "poverty and guns," because Idaho, which has a lot of poverty and a ton of guns, has one-third the homicide rate of Maryland, which is one of the richest and most educated states.
- 55555 1y ago
  Teenagers can be strong. Almost every adult would be dumb to pick a fight with a high school football player. And the reality of fighting is that generally once you’re up against two or three other people, you’re going to get beat up. It’s not a Jason Bourne movie. World-class MMA fighters have been jumped. One person generally cannot fight several people.
- atonse 1y ago
  If you’re enjoying the fact that two individuals attempted a person’s car and then beat them up, just because the victim doesn’t agree with your politics, you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you. That’s a bridge too far for me.
  - King-Aaron 1y ago
    This feels like a dog whistle to me.
    - atonse 1y ago
      Not really, maybe I'm just too naive, but I don't want our society to devolve where we're enjoying violence inflicted on the "other" even if I absolutely hate what they're doing and how they're doing it (like in the case of a lot of DOGE stuff).
      - assword 1y ago
        [dead]
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > you have to examine how far your partisanship has gone that you’re cheering for violence against someone who disagrees with you Partisan violence was de facto sanctioned by Trump’s January 6th pardons. Coristine, moreover, was directly involved with decisions—almost certainly ones he made outside the cover of law—that cost lives in America and around the world [1]. Finding schadenfreude in a violent person receiving the violence they gleefully meted out to others isn’t toxic. It’s quintessentially human. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-doge-teen-was-fired-by-cybersecurity-firm-for-leaking-company-secrets?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-07/musk-s-do...
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    If said violence actually happened. It's a little too convenient that the "victim" was "Big Balls".

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

I'd like to see your evidence that it was staged. So far I have not seen anything that indicated that it was.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mring33621 1y ago
[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  I deny you the right to put words in my mouth.
  - mring33621 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - bloomingeek 1y ago
      If crime was going crazy in D.C. the GOP would be all over it in a flash and the local and national press would be monetizing the info. All this is a stunt to deflect from whatever is bothering the big orange dummy at the moment.
      - dragonwriter 1y ago
        It is, in part, a distraction, from (particularly) discussion of the Epstein files, but the one thing the Trump regime is efficient with is using elements of their real authoritarian agenda as their distractions when they need one. So, sure, DC is a distraction, but its also a part of a fairly overt broad campaign against the homeless (not against homelessness as a social condition, against homeless people as subhuman enemies), that is itself tied into the national campaign of ethnic cleansing and the national campaign against the mentally ill (again, not against mental illness), and the DC operation is also part of the progressive militarization of civilian law enforcement. If this sounds like things that occur together in fascist regimes, well, there's a reason for that.

skinnymuch 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

khazhoux 1y ago

The “staged” part is speculation and not necessary. Even without that, we have federalization of a regional PD because one Republican was assaulted.

chrisco255 1y ago
Washington DC is already federalized under the Constitution. DC does not belong to a state and exists as a special region with very specific Federal definitions for its existence.

nullc 1y ago

So what you're saying is that the attack was just "crisis actors"?

seanp2k2 1y ago
Every accusation is an admission. Always has been.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  Then I accuse you of being a handsome genius

scarface_74 1y ago

This has happened before - a staged arrest in DC as propaganda https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-up-a-bag-of-crack-on-live-tv-whered-he-get-it/ https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...

billy99k 1y ago

[flagged]

kotaKat 1y ago

Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.

tacticalturtle 1y ago

Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month. In fact that’s actually what they’re doing: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-washington-dc-crime-eric-tarpinian-jachym/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...