Man it’s crazy to listen to competent people speak after dealing with American leadership for the past two years. Why did the adults ever let the geriatric children run the circus…smh
many were raised to have blind faith in authority
Two years? I still remember Bush II
Not the Bush 1 administration???
That too.
Anyone who thinks politics has become stupid in the last couple years is just wrong.
Hell, Ford fell off stages so much it was a bit on SNL
It’s been stupid for a long time but it has been unimaginably ultra-mega-stupid since Trump got elected the first time.
I miss the old, only-secretly evil, stupid.
There was nothing secretly evil about the past leaders
It’s funny how progressive his pre-9/11 immigration policy goals were. He wanted to fast track citizenship so they could pay taxes like everyone else.
I think his being dumb was an act to be disarming. His “fool me once,” bit actually highlighted this because mid sentence he realized he would be giving the media a great sound bite of him saying “shame on me.”
You won’t get fooled again!
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” - George Bush
This man’s as deep as a puddle.
I think he realized mid sentence, or somebody told him over ear peace that he is stepping himself to create a clip “shame on me”
Truly life-changing.
Why did the adults ever let the geriatric children run the circus…smh
Because most of them weren’t geriatric when they got in decades ago. They just never left.
The Boomers have been in the way of absolutely everyone ever since, refusing to get out of the way and always with the “fuck you, I got mine” attitude.
the DNC allows her, because it takes the pressure and bad PR off of the old guard Dems like schumer, booker, and jefferies(and the rest of the Dinos)
She turns it on and off like a spigot, all depending on which Deporter in Chief is in the Oval Office.
I know ignorance would read its head in the comments.
edit: Oh, it’s you. I blocked you before. I guess shit bubbles to the top. Let’s try that again.
Deporting itself isn’t bad. Deporting immigrants that contribute to community is bad for everyone.
An important piece to handle this right is to have enough immigration judges that can determine who should be deported and who is allowed to stay. US historically has shortages in that area. During Biden a bill was about to pass to address this and many other issues. It had bipartisan support, everyone thought it most likely will pass, until candidate trump stepped in and basically made Republicans not vote for it, because he needed the immigration crisis.
One, it could be used for campaign (see, we now already see immigration caravan, it is like a clockwork, always right before elections), two, expanding ICE and converting it to personal army wouldn’t have buy in.
Now we have masked larpers going after old, women and children, like in Nazi Germany, they even built concentration camps (note, I did not say death camps, lookup concentration camps in dictionary, it is exactly that, people are confined without access to courts).
And as in Nazi Germany the group of people that ICE will go after will gradually expand.
Good on you for blocking them. You wouldn’t want to have to deal with any facts or data that would make you question the people who professionally lie to you. That’d be just terrible.
What do you see when you look at this?
🫰NOT the thirst trap congresswoman. 👋 The chart, what do you see?
Trump is looking like he’ll top one million. He did it. He beat Obama’s record. 🎉🙄
All Presidents are scum.
America was NEVER “great”.
Ok so what does your pretty picture have to do with the matter at hand
AOC makes a big deal about ICE and deportations when Trump is in office. But when Democrats do it, suddenly she doesn’t seem to care.
So is the implied “argument” here that ICE is just as evil under Democrat presidents as it is under Trump?
I think people who rape, torture, kidnap, steal, and deport others are evil, no matter who their boss is.
Am I supposed to be swayed in some way by these photos?
Can’t someone make a Tesseract ban list except for MAGA trash that accidentally gets lost and wanders into Lemmy? And then host it on github with a script to somehow add it via a terminal? I’m tired of having to manually block these horrible evil people.
Opposing deportations is hardly “MAGA”.
You lost the plot.
You might be right. Was this a reading comprehension issue? I thought someone said something bad about AOC and was upset. I don’t even remember what is going on anymore.
Boy has Republican propaganda been working overtime on AOC over the years. Just mention her name around a Republican and watch the Pavlovian response. It’s almost like you physically hit them. They don’t know why they hate her but they have just been told over and over that they do and should. Those running the propaganda are very afraid of her.
I knew she was a serious person when Nancy Pelosi threw a tantrum after her election. Pelosi is like Trump, if you make her nervous, you’re doing something right.
[Don’t worry, I was just comparing Nancy Pelosi to the “It’s a banana, Michael, how much could it cost?” lady (in both appearance and behavior). I decided to delete my comment because it fringed on personal insult rather than critique, and that’s kinda not really my style.]
Man that’s the perfect still to compare nancy to a loose seal.
I can’t tell which is which…
Way back I worked with a guy who said, “AOC is just Democrat Trump”
He stuck with the I-don’t-like-either political opinion, voted republican.
I worked with him for a few years and sometimes I’d just remember that he said this. Never could understand what the hell he meant or where he heard this. It literally blew my mind. AOC is a politician, there’s criticism you can throw on her and things she’s done poorly but like what the fuck metric was he looking at that made him say this? Baffles me
Buddy probably only watched Fox News
I guess people like that don’t really listen to what a person is saying or what they stand for, so both are just politicians that are in the news a lot and therefore comparable. Trump probably just makes him laugh more or strokes his ego the right way. It’s sad, really.
Nope a shocking number of Americans just listen to people tell them what a politician said instead of just listening for themselves
they also fetishize her too.
In all fairness, she is a big booty Latina.
Same with Bernie Sanders (a few years ago mostly). I once mentioned Bernie as part of a funny story I was telling… and man, the whole fucking thing derailed as soon as I said his name. I wasn’t even being political, I was just making fun of myself and someone else. It became the definition of “practically foaming at the mouth”… they were triggered just like a Pavlov experiment. It was kinda nuts, ngl
It was confusing, jarring, annoying, and highly ironic all at the same time. They had no individual thought or opinion; crazy
It’s why she will probably never be able to be President. They see her as a threat just like they did Clinton. They spent 20 years demonizing Hilary Clinton prior to her running for President, and because the Dems ran her anyway we got Trump. They’ve been doing the same thing with AOC.
Obama was able to become President because he was an amazing orator who the country had never paid attention to, and the GOP wasn’t prepared. John McCain was the best Candidate the GOP ever ran, and he didn’t have a chance against Obama because the GOP didn’t have a playbook for dealing with a strong, unknown candidate who could speak coherently.
Except that AOC has principles and speaks the truth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
that does’t win the presidency though, look at who is the current president.
I just don’t think it’s the comparison between Hillary Clinton and AOC is very meaningful. Other than them both being Democratic and being women, they have nothing in common.
That’s the same machine that had been running against the Clintons for decades by the time Hillary ran for 2016. I doubt they had to spend a dime on convincing their base not to vote for her because they were already primed to see her as the devil incarnate. They just had to sway a few independents and they were good to go.
It’s why I’m genuinely concerned that AOC might never get a fair shot at the presidency. Maybe if the GOP falls apart post-Trump like some are speculating she could win out against a fractured opposition, but I still worry about that visceral reaction from years of conservative media demonizing her.
it is funny people who get all like defunding ice is crazy but we got by without it for most of this countries history.
Defund DHS as well.
Every aspect of DHS stated purpose is a redundant copy of agencies that already exist. This is because their stated purpose is a lie. It was clearly invented to suppress the plebs. DHS is the SS/Stasi, and ICE is their paramilitary arm. They WILL 100% be deployed against the general public in the very near future, and this has been the plan for 30 years. It is a bipartisan continuation of policy.
Those same people love that we cut USAID
We knew this was the case since The Patriot Act (at least).
Twelve years of Democratic presidency, did they get rid of this obviously redundant agency? No. What about Republicans, they are for smaller government, right? did they get rid of this redundant agency?
No.
Instead, they all borrowed money to keep this and so much more funded.
I miss Russ Feingold who ran on a platform of being against the PATRIOT ACT.
FRJ
Always and forever.
Yeah, exactly. It’s hard for me to listen to any Democrat bluster as if they are in partnership with their colleagues and what is considered a separate party, but we all know better.
The correlation of datacenters being built and ice funding being increased.
The correlation of social disruption and stoking fears… Testing police against people in 2020. Knowing they now they shouldn’t use the police for the objective at hand here, which is creating modern surveillance and profiling and policing infrastructure. So they boosted immigration drama… Now they have a force that won’t tarnish regular police or national guard or military.
Trump is the fall guy president, while feds work the background growth of surveillance infrastructure. Once it’s finished we will have shiney too good to believe democrate marketed to save us.
Ice is the fall guy to use for force if trouble arrives and gets in the way of the feds objectives.
People act like it’s purely a left vs right thing but I think the reality is much darker and that this is all on purpose for an objective that the feds believe we need to maintain as a nation. The past 20 years feels like an orchestrated objective. Ai and surveillance is the modern nuclear arms race. Feds have sacrificed regular citizens for less.
The division and consolidation of the left and right is all on purpose. Every person that chooses the left and right and their marketed extremism, both being an arm of the same monster, is one less person living for honest genuine humanity and it’s natural path.
There’s a game above the nations they don’t want people to understand they are free to play. The nations are tools for the people that understand the real game. Arguably you aren’t really in touch with reality if you not taking the full spectrum into account. Instead most are basically like a caged toddler escaping reality with an iPad while the adults play the real game, manipulating lifestyles and politics to lead ours lives down a path that’s not naturally our true genuine lifepath.
There’s been whistle blowers for decades… From the streets to the CIA.
Truth is not measured in mass appeal. American and 1st world success is not a measure of one’s human worth.
She’s right. Republicans would have never allowed the infrastructure to constantly surveil citizens to be built in the USA if it weren’t brought in using some racist Trojan horse. But now what?
Oh cmon, that’s not true.
They would’ve allowed it anyway because cops can use it to track their ex-wives and they could also start tracking when pregnant women go to blue states if they don’t already (they probably do tbh).
Johnson County deputy used Flock Safety’s 83,000-camera network across 45 states to locate a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion
The Democrat Party are also guilty for allowing it. Don’t kid yourself. They’re not our friends.
Yeah, the one who called this out is just as guilty as the ones who put it there! /s
When did Biden warn ICE was going to be a paramilitary terror force? Look at the last acts he did before leaving office, one of them was opening up several large detention centers for ICE. The Republicans push the racist agenda and Democrats quietly supply the infrastructure and do nothing to pushback when they have the opportunity.
the ones who put it there
I think you should take some time to research and understand that vast difference in budget and in mandate between the ICE Obama inherited from Bush and the one he turned over to Trump before you go saying silly things like that.
AOC took office after Obama was out of office.
And she and Obama are part of the same party, beholden to the same donor class, and following the same leadership.
And still votes the way the party whip tels her to when the matter is important to the donors. Did the video of her openly weeping while voting to fund Israel anyway not show you how it works?
Not to mention that Obama built cages for immigrant kids in which they’re forced to live in hostile environments & will most likely never see their parents again.
Actions always speaks louder than words on camera, Sunflier.
Right, cause AOC’s assuming representative office in 2019 can be held responsible for the actions of the Executive administration that ended in 2017.
Eat more chicken
It’s never too late.
Too late for stopping the action. Never too late for revenge.
A very long time ago, I messed up in my life, badly. I ultimately had to serve three years in federal prison.
I won’t go into the details of the crime itself. It was pretty bad. Needless to say, I deserved those three years. I was guilty as hell, and I knew it. My lawyers knew it, the prosecutor knew it, and the judge knew it.
But here’s the thing, I went through the system, and the system was fair to me. At no point, from going through the courts to being released from the BOP, can I honestly say that I was mistreated or abused.
I had my day in court. I said my piece. I made my case. The judge considered everything and ultimately sentenced me to three years instead of the eight years that had been on the table at the beginning.
The point I’m trying to make is that we really do have a functional judicial system. It is capable of prosecuting people who commit crimes while still providing them with due process and a fair opportunity to defend themselves.
If someone breaks the law in the United States, they should be prosecuted according to the law, fairly and consistently.
What we’re doing now, using the power of the state in ways that disregard those principles, is Draconian, totalitarian-state nonsense, and it needs to stop immediately.
The point I’m trying to make is that we really do have a functional judicial system.
Tell me you’re white without telling me you’re white
Tell me you’ve never been in the bop without telling me you’ve never been in the bop.
It only really functions if the judge got enough sleep that day, your defender was paid well and is a good person, and you’re not a minority. More negatives if the jury is feeling particularly bored or youre in a rural area. A lot of urban areas have some pretty shit judges too.
Its about 100 coin flips weighted towards whether youre actually guilty or not.
I think this gives far too much weight to the imperfections of individual people while ignoring the entire purpose of having a judicial system in the first place.
Of course judges get tired, jurors get bored, attorneys vary in competence, and individual people bring their own biases and prejudices into the courtroom. There is no mechanism capable of removing human judgment from a system that necessarily requires human judgment. But that does not make the process a series of random coin flips.
The entire point of procedural rules, evidentiary standards, constitutional protections, appellate review, sentencing guidelines, jury instructions, disclosure requirements, standards of proof, and the adversarial process is to constrain individual discretion and make the outcome less dependent on any one person’s mood or personality. They don’t eliminate human error; nothing could. They create a framework within which human beings are required to operate.
And there’s an important distinction between saying “the system can produce unjust outcomes” and saying “the system is fundamentally arbitrary.” The first is obviously true. The second doesn’t follow from it.
If the judge has a bad day, that doesn’t mean the law disappears. If a defense attorney is incompetent, there are remedies for ineffective assistance. If a judge makes an error, there is appellate review. If a prosecutor violates the rules, there are consequences. If jurors disregard the law, the verdict can be challenged. None of these mechanisms are perfect, but they exist precisely because we understand that the people operating the system are imperfect.
My own experience actually illustrates this. I went through the system, I was guilty, and I deserved the sentence I received. I don’t remember the courts being perfect or every person involved being perfect. What I remember is that there was a process, there were rules, there were competing sides, and there were people whose job was to make sure those rules were followed.
That’s a much more accurate description of the justice system than “100 coin flips.” It’s a human institution deliberately constructed to put as many constraints as possible on human fallibility. Sometimes those constraints fail. Sometimes they work remarkably well. The fact that they cannot produce perfection doesn’t make them pointless.
I’m going to hazard a guess here. You’re white?
Yes, I am white. In fact, my family hails from the Caucasus mountains in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Which, incidentally, is completely irrelevant to the point I was making.
You’re the second idiot under my original comment to make this same argument, and it’s every bit as ignorant and stupid as it sounds. It’s nothing more than empty pandering to the head-bobbers in the comment section who are apparently willing to agree with anything as long as it confirms what they already believe.
Yes, there are significant elements of systemic racism in the federal judicial system and in the judicial systems of many individual states. That is an entirely legitimate subject for discussion. But the existence of systemic racism does not mean that the United States justice system, as a whole, simply favors white people over people of color in every circumstance or that every individual interaction with the justice system can be reduced to race.
The American judicial system is a massive, chaotic machine made up of millions of people, millions of individual decisions, thousands of courts, and an enormous body of laws and procedures. It is physically incapable of producing perfectly consistent outcomes. Judges make mistakes. Prosecutors make mistakes. Defense attorneys make mistakes. Police officers make mistakes. Jurors make mistakes. Sometimes people receive excessive sentences, sometimes innocent people are convicted, and sometimes prejudice absolutely influences the outcome. None of that is particularly controversial.
But neither is the fact that, in general, the system does exactly what it is designed to do: determine guilt and impose punishment on people who have been found guilty under the law. My personal experience of receiving fair treatment through that system does not somehow become invalid because I happen to be white.
And this bizarre assumption that “the judicial system was kind to you, therefore you must be white” is not an argument. It’s an intellectually lazy attempt to dismiss someone’s actual experience without knowing anything about it.
If you want to discuss racial disparities in the American justice system, I’m perfectly happy to have that conversation. Bring statistics, case law, sentencing data, or credible research. But responding to an individual account with “you’re white, so of course the system treated you well” isn’t analysis. It’s just racial stereotyping dressed up as social commentary.
It’s relevant because what you experienced with the “justice” system is a very small minority of cases. As many as 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain, with an average of ten minutes or less for the defendant to speak with their public defender. This is before even getting into the suffering within prison. You are significantly more likely to experience abuse from this system if you are non-white.
I see though where you could say for your point that race is irrelevant if you were just showing that the system can be fair, but you say your experience shows we have a “functional judicial system”, that doesn’t necessarily follow. If it doesn’t function fairly in the majority of cases it isn’t functional as far as providing equitable justice for society.
Once again, our judicial system is a gargantuan, messy machine with thousands of moving parts and millions of people trying to interpret and apply millions of laws across millions of cases, each with its own circumstances.
I am not equating my personal experience with the BOP and federal court system to evidence that our justice system is perfect or inherently fair. I have explicitly acknowledged that wrongful prosecutions happen, innocent people go to prison, and judges, prosecutors, police officers, and other officials make serious mistakes. My point has always been narrower: the justice system is, for the most part, functional at determining guilt and administering punishment for crimes.
The reason I brought up my own experience is simple: it is the experience I actually have. The prison system is an entirely different world and culture a society within society. And once you’re inside, being white isn’t necessarily some automatic advantage.
I was sentenced under the law and served my time because I committed a crime. The idea that I somehow received a special benefit simply because I am white doesn’t comport with my actual experience. I went to prison because I broke the law, and I was punished for it.
The cognitive dissonance here is remarkable. It is one thing to look at the system from the outside and form conclusions about it; it is another to actually live through it. I can tell you that, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of the people I did time with had committed serious crimes and deserved to be incarcerated. That doesn’t mean the system is incapable of injustice, nor does it excuse the horrific things I witnessed while I was in the BOP. I saw things nobody should have to see and met people nobody should have to meet.
And yet, after experiencing all of that firsthand, I still came out believing that our judicial system is, for the most part, functional.
That’s the point I don’t think people are understanding. I served time in prison for a crime I committed, experienced the system from the inside, and I’m still capable of assessing it objectively rather than simply condemning it because I had a terrible experience.
The idea that I somehow received a special benefit simply because I am white doesn’t comport with my actual experience. I went to prison because I broke the law, and I was punished for it.
That isn’t what people are saying, that can be true, and you can still experience what is called “white privilege” in that people that aren’t white are much more likely to experience racist treatment from authority figures in the US than white people. It wouldn’t be noticed because the system worked fine for you but not necessarily for most people.
There are many instances where you can see the system treats people unfairly especially those without money and people of color. Anecdotally and statistically I could go on for a while. Your experience alone is just one of millions. Just the sheer number of people imprisoned in the US is itself proof of the abusive nature of the US police state.
My experience with the federal court system and the Bureau of Prisons has given me a perspective that is very different from someone who has only observed the system from the outside.
I can tell you from personal experience that the BOP, the federal courts, and the various law-enforcement agencies operating within the federal justice system do not operate according to some simple racial hierarchy. In my experience, your skin color is not what determines how the federal system treats you. I would go even further and argue that “white privilege,” as it is commonly used today, is an oversimplified framework for understanding what actually happens inside the federal justice system.
What we absolutely do have and what I believe is considerably more consequential is wealth privilege.
The more money you have, the more resources you can put behind your defense. You can hire better attorneys, retain experts, investigate your case more thoroughly, challenge evidence, negotiate more effectively, and generally make the government work harder to obtain a conviction. In some circumstances, having sufficient money and resources can mean avoiding prison entirely. Someone without those resources simply does not have the same ability to fight the government.
That disparity is very real, and I saw it firsthand.
Where I disagree strongly is with the idea that the federal justice system is primarily organized around race. The system is enormous, bureaucratic, imperfect, and frequently driven by institutional incentives. America has also built an enormous incarceration infrastructure around the idea that imprisonment is the default response to a wide range of offenses. Once you have that much infrastructure, that many institutions, that many employees, and that much money tied to incarceration, there are inevitably powerful incentives to keep the machinery operating.
I am not claiming that every person in the system is corrupt or that every case is unjust. Quite the opposite. My experience showed me that the system is generally functional, but it is also an enormous machine with thousands of moving parts and institutional incentives that have little to do with the simplistic racial narratives people often use to explain it.
If you want to understand where privilege actually matters in the federal justice system, I would start with money.
The person who can afford an exceptional defense has a fundamentally different set of options from the person who cannot. That difference can affect everything from pretrial litigation to sentencing to the amount of time someone ultimately spends incarcerated.
In my experience, the most consequential privilege in the federal justice system isn’t the color of your skin. It’s the depth of your wallet.
It’s not a literal racial hierarchy, since segregation and slavery were abolished the systemic racism in the US operates mostly in a de facto manner through things like biased sentencing and a higher likelihood of being arrested. And you do agree that money is a big factor, look at the wealth distribution in US. White people on average hold more wealth than people of color. Therefore white people are more likely to afford a good lawyer. This is one way in which racism turns into material effects for people even if the system states “all men are created equal”. A wealthy black person in the US may be able to have a fair trial with a good defense, but all other things equal, the data shows that the system favors white people over others.
This is why sociological research is important, for each individual there may be no clear way to see the level of disparity. A black person may feel that they were given a fair trial but won’t be aware that a white person charged with the same crime is likely to be sentenced more leniently.
Yes. I can agree with what you said here apart from the insults, but just to be clear here… You’re white, right?
Systemic racism (in some individual states, apparently) is real, but isn’t a foundational, structural issue ig. There are “elements of systemic racism”… what? Like, without the “systemic” part? Ain’t the fact that there IS systemic racism definitionally that we do NOT have a fair judicial system?? He got pretty butthurt u called him out lol
Quite literally the first 4 word sentence.
I knew you were going to do this, and I’m upset with myself for not calling you out on it in my original comment before you had the opportunity to go down this route. But then again, I thought to myself, perhaps I should just let you, and you’ve done exactly what I expected.
So yes, as I originally stated, I am quite white.
And thank you for bringing this up once again, since apparently you have absolutely nothing to rebut my argument with aside from pointing out the fact that I’m white. You’ve effectively admitted as much yourself.
So I would encourage you to carefully reread the comments, reconsider your approach, and perhaps reassess the conclusions you’re drawing from them. Because, believe it or not, you’re the one engaging in racial prejudice here.
Gonna be a tough argument for u, if your case is that your anecdote of good treatment as a white man is unrelated to non-white people infamously and consistently receiving piss poor treatment at every level of the judicial system. Sorry, better watch out against my “racial prejudice” against the “race” of people whose criteria of whiteness seems to fluctuate a lot through history.
Right. So still nothing.
I don’t care if you are correct in this point or not. Just wanted to say this is an amazing rebuttal to a comment.
O well thank you… I think.
What does race have to do with it? Can we leave that out of this?
Not when it comes to incarceration, no.
I know a rat snitch federal informant when I read one. You’re either related to a cop or a mason or a snitch. The system is not nice and kind and understanding even to palest of the alabasters, who always fare better. Someone did a lot more time because of you. Eat shit and rest in an iron maiden where you belong.
Youre probably right…
deleted by creator
And everyone clapped…
Well ICE did say “stop, collaborat, and listen”
Guess they all collaborated.
I’d vote for this.
But she does not want to abolish it.
She literally just said that she wants to abolish it like actually said that word.
She’s a United States Representative. What the hell do you want her to do, issue a public edict or something?
Yeah she literally says the words “we must abolish ICE” during that same talk lol.
Did she finally say it again? Good for her. She walked that back a year ago.
I declare ICE abolished
Well son of a biscuit slap me around and call me Susan!
No u dont understand. Liberal bad
Industry
standardplantCan you just cease all participation in society for the rest of our sake?
I’m going to have to remember that line, most excellent 👌
