11 ms·

It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was comprom

It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?

torstenvl 8mo ago
[flagged]
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random. That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
  - torstenvl 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Sparkle-san 8mo ago
      Arresting people solely on the basis of their skin color or having an accent is akin to kidnapping. How many legal residents and citizens are you comfortable with being arrested without a sound legal basis? My number is zero.
    - autoexec 8mo ago
      What happened to George Retes was not law enforcement
    - Arainach 8mo ago
      >Law enforcement is not an armed gang It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - zaptheimpaler 8mo ago
      The people doing the arresting have no ID and wear masks, arrest people without any evidence, throw them in detention centers and then deny them their legal right to a bond hearing and instead detain them indefinitely. Even someone like you should understand, police are not the judges, they can arrest someone but detaining them for a long period of time requires ascertaining their legal status and offering a chance for bond. The judges also overwhelmingly ruled the same thing, while ICE is directly disobeying their legal orders. If they were law enforcement, they would be following the law not breaking it. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-successfully-swarm-courts-seeking-due-process https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-succe...
    - wat10000 8mo ago
      How are they not? They’re definitely armed, so only the “gang” part is questionable. Wikipedia says: “A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.” I’d say that fits some law enforcement pretty well.
- Terr_ 8mo ago
  > seem evil for enforcing immigration law When people living otherwise-blameless lives begin getting accosted, beaten, or killed on suspicion of the legal equivalent of unpaid parking tickets, then yes, the new enforcement occurring is indeed "evil." When they start willfully breaking all sorts of other major laws and violating court-orders to enforce the minor law, yes, that's usually evil. When rationales last-used to jail innocent Japanese-Americans into US "internment" camps during World War II are being resurrected to declare entire nationalities as foreign invaders, yes, that sure looks a lot like the evil it was before. When people are being snatched off the streets and then shuffled constantly between prisons purely so that their own lawyers cannot find them to challenge their detention, that is evil. When you're not just normally deporting people under US law, but start sending them--without trial or even charges--to rot for the rest of their lives in an El Salvador torture-prison run by a paid dictator accomplice, YES, that's f***ing evil! ____ I could continue, but I won't, because those should be ample examples for normal Americans who've had over a year to watch all these well-documented things happen... and there is no amount will be enough for someone that secretly likes the evil when it happens to others.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - disqard 8mo ago
    I think you might be finding a certain category of apologist over-represented here. Still, I appreciate you making the effort to engage in Good Faith!
  - torstenvl 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - platinumrad 8mo ago
      You first, buddy.
    - Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago
      I would argue that wherever you're getting your news from is lying by omission and you have no idea what's actually happening out there. Alternatively, you're engaging in willful ignorance. Yes, it's reasonable to want to enforce immigration laws, but ICE has been engaging in outright criminal behavior. Arresting and imprisoning US citizens, denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them. Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are lying constantly on their social media pages.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- hluska 8mo ago
  In no stretch of the imagination does this even answer the question. I get that you wanted to make a political point, but this is remarkably weak.
- Sparkle-san 8mo ago
  Other comparable countries also having roving gangs of secret immigration police that are unbound by the law and the only departments responsible for overseeing them are managed by the same boss that controls them?
- autoexec 8mo ago
  The majority of Americans support immigration enforcement, the majority does not support how it's being done. Enforcement of the law is not the evil you see people being upset about.
- Arainach 8mo ago
  Who said anything about immigration? Let's start with abandoning science funding, abandoning investments in and tax credits for renewable energy sources that are the future. Then there's applying political pressure to academic institutions to drive even more researchers away, abandoning the civil service and science/reason-based governance. Move over to the medical sector and put a dangerous anti-science nut in charge, kill off funding and research. You pull out of international organizations, trade deals, and treaties. You throw temper tantrums and tariffs around, flip flopping day to day and making it impossible to predict the costs of doing business. You antagonize the rest of the world and give them a constant stream of reasons to stop doing business with you, leaving you isolated, weaker, and poorer. Then, sure, let's go briefly to immigration. America has been great because it has been where all the smartest people want to be. Our political and academic environment caused the smartest people around the world to want to be here, and the US benefited massively from their contributions and inventions. So you build a culture demonizing anyone not a specific shade of white. You destroy visa programs. You send thugs to universities to harass people and make them unwelcome. You tell students and researchers who went home to see family that they can't come back to the US. Then you send thugs into cities to terrorize and murder people. So you give all those brilliant scientists even more reason to leave the US, take their contributions with them, and never return. That's how you kill America.
helterskelter 8mo ago
I just said it in another post today, but I had a family member recently die from colorectal cancer when they were on a list for a new treatment at Yale, which was canceled because of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The doctor who was to perform it literally said "I want you to think of this procedure in terms of a cure" when they were stage 4 for like 7 years at that point. BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline. Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.
- Cabal 8mo ago
  > The doctor who was to perform it literally said "I want you to think of this procedure in terms of a cure" I have difficulty believing a medical professional would say that.
  - helterskelter 8mo ago
    This is what my family told me. They may not have been his exact words but he believed it had a very strong possibility to go into complete remission. This was after they had gone through other therapies like HIPEC, where they told me it'd buy them a few years (they got 8). The problem is CRC will often metastasize into areas current treatments can't really get at and that tends to be where the cancer comes back. Apparently this procedure got right in there.
  - ikrenji 8mo ago
    why? state of the art therapies eg genetically reprogramming patients own immune cells to hunt cancer are curative in cases that were previously a death sentence
csomar 8mo ago
You are massively under-estimating the destructiveness of idiocy. It's more destructive than whatever your enemy or a compromise could achieve.
- specialist 8mo ago
  I learned from playing Diplomacy that a competent enemy is preferrable to an incompetent ally.
andrewflnr 8mo ago
... I can think of a lot actually. They could try to unilaterally reduce the nuclear arsenal and other military power, for instance. They could close down foreign military bases. A lot of those would even be more left-coded actions. A popular left-ish politician who had a platform of reducing foreign involvement wouldn't even need to hide their agenda. I get the angle, and I'm not even ruling out that some of the BS is sabotage, but in the big picture it's too easy for me to believe the current admin really is that stupid.
foxglacier 8mo ago
You clearly haven't thought about that question at all yourself and are just repeating mindless political rhetoric. Why even say it? Other people have proposed obvious answers. I hope you learn those answers and stop asking.
jimbokun 8mo ago
This suggests that our executive branch has fallen under the influence of foreign agents through blackmail or coercion of some sort. Whereas the simpler and more obvious explanation is that the US President shares the general outlook and values of America’s enemies and thus naturally acts in their interests without persuasion needed.
- viking123 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - disgruntledphd2 8mo ago
    All monocausal explanations are wrong. (Except for this one, obviously ;) )
  - mancerayder 8mo ago
    The U.S. is under control of the Israel? We all know what you really mean. How do messages like this end up on HN? Is it the Reddit sub we have that's attracting these types of people?
    - NietzscheanNull 8mo ago
      Highlighting Israel's inexplicably strong influence over US foreign policy is not the dog-whistle you seem to be implying it is.
      - throw478722704 8mo ago
        It’s not inexplicable and it’s not strong if you’re not an antisemite. The US has spent orders of magnitude more defending Europe.
        8mo ago
eunos 8mo ago
> US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies Or maybe the rots are within? It's tempting to trivially assume it's outside. I'd say they are mostly come from within and beyond Trump admin.
e40 8mo ago
I do agree this is a possible explanation, but there is another: The avarice and narcissism of our leader, along with all the yes-people, grifters and people devoid of ethics and morals he has assembled around him have led to the current situation. Also, it appears a lot of people in the administration are not very smart, but think they are. We can never underestimate the damage that can be done by a stupid person that thinks they are smart. In this case, these people have incredible amounts of power.

torstenvl 8mo ago

[flagged]

direwolf20 8mo ago
Idk, I think a much more effective way to destroy the US would be to send armed gangs through the streets and have them kidnap people from their houses at random. That would cause far more destruction than merely telling people you were doing that without actually doing it.
- torstenvl 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Sparkle-san 8mo ago
    Arresting people solely on the basis of their skin color or having an accent is akin to kidnapping. How many legal residents and citizens are you comfortable with being arrested without a sound legal basis? My number is zero.
  - autoexec 8mo ago
    What happened to George Retes was not law enforcement
  - Arainach 8mo ago
    >Law enforcement is not an armed gang It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - zaptheimpaler 8mo ago
    The people doing the arresting have no ID and wear masks, arrest people without any evidence, throw them in detention centers and then deny them their legal right to a bond hearing and instead detain them indefinitely. Even someone like you should understand, police are not the judges, they can arrest someone but detaining them for a long period of time requires ascertaining their legal status and offering a chance for bond. The judges also overwhelmingly ruled the same thing, while ICE is directly disobeying their legal orders. If they were law enforcement, they would be following the law not breaking it. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-successfully-swarm-courts-seeking-due-process https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/ice-detainees-succe...
  - wat10000 8mo ago
    How are they not? They’re definitely armed, so only the “gang” part is questionable. Wikipedia says: “A gang is a group or society of associates, friends, or members of a family with a defined leadership and internal organization that identifies with or claims control over territory in a community and engages, either individually or collectively, in illegal, and possibly violent, behavior, with such behavior often constituting a form of organized crime.” I’d say that fits some law enforcement pretty well.
Terr_ 8mo ago
> seem evil for enforcing immigration law When people living otherwise-blameless lives begin getting accosted, beaten, or killed on suspicion of the legal equivalent of unpaid parking tickets, then yes, the new enforcement occurring is indeed "evil." When they start willfully breaking all sorts of other major laws and violating court-orders to enforce the minor law, yes, that's usually evil. When rationales last-used to jail innocent Japanese-Americans into US "internment" camps during World War II are being resurrected to declare entire nationalities as foreign invaders, yes, that sure looks a lot like the evil it was before. When people are being snatched off the streets and then shuffled constantly between prisons purely so that their own lawyers cannot find them to challenge their detention, that is evil. When you're not just normally deporting people under US law, but start sending them--without trial or even charges--to rot for the rest of their lives in an El Salvador torture-prison run by a paid dictator accomplice, YES, that's f***ing evil! ____ I could continue, but I won't, because those should be ample examples for normal Americans who've had over a year to watch all these well-documented things happen... and there is no amount will be enough for someone that secretly likes the evil when it happens to others.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- disqard 8mo ago
  I think you might be finding a certain category of apologist over-represented here. Still, I appreciate you making the effort to engage in Good Faith!
- torstenvl 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - platinumrad 8mo ago
    You first, buddy.
  - Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago
    I would argue that wherever you're getting your news from is lying by omission and you have no idea what's actually happening out there. Alternatively, you're engaging in willful ignorance. Yes, it's reasonable to want to enforce immigration laws, but ICE has been engaging in outright criminal behavior. Arresting and imprisoning US citizens, denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them. Meanwhile, ICE and DHS are lying constantly on their social media pages.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
hluska 8mo ago
In no stretch of the imagination does this even answer the question. I get that you wanted to make a political point, but this is remarkably weak.
Sparkle-san 8mo ago
Other comparable countries also having roving gangs of secret immigration police that are unbound by the law and the only departments responsible for overseeing them are managed by the same boss that controls them?
autoexec 8mo ago
The majority of Americans support immigration enforcement, the majority does not support how it's being done. Enforcement of the law is not the evil you see people being upset about.
Arainach 8mo ago
Who said anything about immigration? Let's start with abandoning science funding, abandoning investments in and tax credits for renewable energy sources that are the future. Then there's applying political pressure to academic institutions to drive even more researchers away, abandoning the civil service and science/reason-based governance. Move over to the medical sector and put a dangerous anti-science nut in charge, kill off funding and research. You pull out of international organizations, trade deals, and treaties. You throw temper tantrums and tariffs around, flip flopping day to day and making it impossible to predict the costs of doing business. You antagonize the rest of the world and give them a constant stream of reasons to stop doing business with you, leaving you isolated, weaker, and poorer. Then, sure, let's go briefly to immigration. America has been great because it has been where all the smartest people want to be. Our political and academic environment caused the smartest people around the world to want to be here, and the US benefited massively from their contributions and inventions. So you build a culture demonizing anyone not a specific shade of white. You destroy visa programs. You send thugs to universities to harass people and make them unwelcome. You tell students and researchers who went home to see family that they can't come back to the US. Then you send thugs into cities to terrorize and murder people. So you give all those brilliant scientists even more reason to leave the US, take their contributions with them, and never return. That's how you kill America.

helterskelter 8mo ago

I just said it in another post today, but I had a family member recently die from colorectal cancer when they were on a list for a new treatment at Yale, which was canceled because of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. The doctor who was to perform it literally said "I want you to think of this procedure in terms of a cure" when they were stage 4 for like 7 years at that point. BBB slashed funding for cutting edge medical research which would not only save, or at least prolong lives, but also generate revenue for this country -- when we export our IP, or when people come here for some of the most advanced medical procedures. To say nothing of immigration policies which actively repel some of the best and brightest and may be leading us to an actual population decline. Sure we weren't perfect by an stretch before, but it feels like we're getting drowned in a toilet at the moment.

Cabal 8mo ago
> The doctor who was to perform it literally said "I want you to think of this procedure in terms of a cure" I have difficulty believing a medical professional would say that.
- helterskelter 8mo ago
  This is what my family told me. They may not have been his exact words but he believed it had a very strong possibility to go into complete remission. This was after they had gone through other therapies like HIPEC, where they told me it'd buy them a few years (they got 8). The problem is CRC will often metastasize into areas current treatments can't really get at and that tends to be where the cancer comes back. Apparently this procedure got right in there.
- ikrenji 8mo ago
  why? state of the art therapies eg genetically reprogramming patients own immune cells to hunt cancer are curative in cases that were previously a death sentence

csomar 8mo ago

You are massively under-estimating the destructiveness of idiocy. It's more destructive than whatever your enemy or a compromise could achieve.

specialist 8mo ago
I learned from playing Diplomacy that a competent enemy is preferrable to an incompetent ally.

andrewflnr 8mo ago

... I can think of a lot actually. They could try to unilaterally reduce the nuclear arsenal and other military power, for instance. They could close down foreign military bases. A lot of those would even be more left-coded actions. A popular left-ish politician who had a platform of reducing foreign involvement wouldn't even need to hide their agenda. I get the angle, and I'm not even ruling out that some of the BS is sabotage, but in the big picture it's too easy for me to believe the current admin really is that stupid.

foxglacier 8mo ago

You clearly haven't thought about that question at all yourself and are just repeating mindless political rhetoric. Why even say it? Other people have proposed obvious answers. I hope you learn those answers and stop asking.

jimbokun 8mo ago

This suggests that our executive branch has fallen under the influence of foreign agents through blackmail or coercion of some sort. Whereas the simpler and more obvious explanation is that the US President shares the general outlook and values of America’s enemies and thus naturally acts in their interests without persuasion needed.

viking123 8mo ago
[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- disgruntledphd2 8mo ago
  All monocausal explanations are wrong. (Except for this one, obviously ;) )
- mancerayder 8mo ago
  The U.S. is under control of the Israel? We all know what you really mean. How do messages like this end up on HN? Is it the Reddit sub we have that's attracting these types of people?
  - NietzscheanNull 8mo ago
    Highlighting Israel's inexplicably strong influence over US foreign policy is not the dog-whistle you seem to be implying it is.
    - throw478722704 8mo ago
      It’s not inexplicable and it’s not strong if you’re not an antisemite. The US has spent orders of magnitude more defending Europe.
      - 8mo ago

eunos 8mo ago

> US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies Or maybe the rots are within? It's tempting to trivially assume it's outside. I'd say they are mostly come from within and beyond Trump admin.

e40 8mo ago

I do agree this is a possible explanation, but there is another: The avarice and narcissism of our leader, along with all the yes-people, grifters and people devoid of ethics and morals he has assembled around him have led to the current situation. Also, it appears a lot of people in the administration are not very smart, but think they are. We can never underestimate the damage that can be done by a stupid person that thinks they are smart. In this case, these people have incredible amounts of power.