This should raise serious questions about DHS. Who are they employing? How are they trained? How are they preventing abuse of power? What is the culture there?
Under the prior administration, DHS acted brutally, in many cases. What happened to correct that culture?
What in the cinnamon toast fuck. It's literally the meme about bombing middle eastern kids with pride flag drones.
Somebody please explain to the CIA we don't want performative wokie bullshit just for them to stop torturing black bagging and murdering and selling crack and abusing ppls rights.
If you squint hard enough, you can imagine a scenario where CIA actually wants to hire people with anxiety and other mood/psychological disorders to that they can be more easily controlled. It's Machiavellian but, well, this is CIA we're talking about.
The CIA is trying to hire young, college-educated people. They tend to skew fairly permissive on social issues.
Just to give you an idea of where the culture is: There's a defense industry "shitposting" subreddit that is full of younger, pro-America, pro defense industry types and its members would likely fit your definition of "woke". There's a whole group of them on twitter too tied in with the osint community.
The major defense contractors all have excellent diversity and equity ratings with e.g. the HRC. Transgender individuals are also much more common in the US military compared to the general population.
They gave a for-profit prison company high Diversity, Inclusion and Equity rating and ESG score because they put murals of Martin Luther King in the prison. Monty Python would have been proud:
"The report, conducted by Moore & Van Allen, a North Carolina-based law firm, offered some room for improvement but largely applauded the private prison giant for its “genuine” commitment to diversity principles, including by raising cultural awareness with a mural of Martin Luther King Jr. at one of its Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in Arizona."
It's really just a side-effect of culture war victories. The US is an imperialist power and like all other imperialist powers it will project its zeitgeist out into the world.
If conservatives won the culture wars the CIA would be trying to hire Proud Boys and Jordan Peterson fans or whatever.
Go back 20 years when Evangelical Christianity was at its zenith of cultural power and what did we get? Two invasions of Muslim countries and paranoia that agnostics and atheists were national security liabilities because a hypothetical invading Muslim hoard would convert them to Islam (yes, this was actually a scenario bandied about in those circles) and recruit them to become terrorists.
Not the OP, but the OP was talking about culture wars, not legal wars.
I think this is a meaningful difference. There is a growing disconnect between the culture of both coasts and the law of the land, which tends to approximate the real balance of leftish/rightish viewpoints across the entire country.
Big business surely plays a lot of kabuki, but some of their statements and policies are sincere. Would major corporations allow you to carry your gun on your person during working hours, argue against abortion rights in a chitchat by the water cooler or even not use the correct pronouns when talking to your nonbinary coworker? Or would you be slapped down by the HR and possibly fired outright?
At a former company (very large and well known in Scala community), I had a friend reprimanded and warned for answering a question about guns in a way that showed he was knowledgeable. He was a competitive shooter for his hobby.
I disagree. I believe culture drives law long term. For example: The abolishment of slavery began as a movement where people(in the north and overseas) were disgusted with it way before before it led to legal reforms. The south played the same tricks that they are doing today. THe difference was that the control of the narrative led to meaningful action(ie. Lincoln ignoring the supreme court/threatening to impeach, Civil war etc.)
In recent times, the law has either gone fully right wing or is left wing but on shaky ground(depending on the issue).
>There is a growing disconnect between the culture of both coasts and the law of the land, which tends to approximate the real balance of leftish/rightish viewpoints across the entire country.
This is a result of people in the coasts saying they believe in something but not fully meaning it. Therefore they will not fight for it with all their might. The coasts are more populous, generate all the major economic growth, and as you said, control the narrative. Yet the rural areas are known as "Real America™". How is it that the coasts are continuously losing? It cannot be a grand conspiracy. They just don't really want it. With that you can make the argument: Does the left 'really' control the narrative if the action behind that narrative does not really exist?
If you truly don't believe that progessives won the culture war, try being slightly to the right of Bill Maher anywhere on campus, in entertainment, in media, in your workplace or on twitter...
Ok so right wingers get occasionally harassed in some left wing areas. That is a response to the fact that right wingers have continually made progress while the left has gotten nothing really concrete(again: row vs wade: lost, lgbtq rights: in danger, gun reform: nonexistent).
Culture drives law long term and so its difficult to admit that the culture war has been won by the left if they keep losing everything except the conversation which clearly does not matter in the long term if it results in no meaningful change.
The woke empire under Obama bombed more than 7 new muslim and non-white countries.
The neocons are called neocons because they were Democrats who joined George W Bush and then went back to being Democrats again. Best example is Victoria Nuland from the Kagan "bomb every muslim country" family. See also the Ledeen doctrine:
"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business," which Goldberg remembered Ledeen saying in an early 1990s speech.
> If conservatives won the culture wars the CIA would be trying to hire Proud Boys and Jordan Peterson fans or whatever.
People's personal gender choices, which affect nobody, are not comparable to groups that promote violence, disruption, and the overthrow of the democratically elected government.
If you want them to stop doing that you do in fact want them to hire more people who would be against it, otherwise it's going to be all Mormons. (they're the best at getting clearances)
where does '(metaphorical) bombing middle eastern kids' come into it? Where are middle eastern kids mentioned? What drones? WTF did you just watch or did you make stuff up?
It's just about a trans person saying "it's ok to be me" (irritating shit and no-one cares, good luck to her, but that's all it is). Nothing else.
> It's just about a trans person saying "it's ok to be me" (irritating shit and no-one cares, good luck to her, but that's all it is).
What is irritating about it? There's clearly a large problem with abuse of trans people, a serious issue of physical, social, and career safety. Why shouldn't someone address that issue? Why the F should that irritate you?
There is a problem with {trans, homo, etc}-phobia. But this made a point of this person being trans for some cheesy inclusivity. None of the trans people I know talk about being trans, or wish to talk about it. No-one I've ever worked for would judge against someone for being trans.
In a sense, it's a solved problem - once crappy publicity videos like this can be produced, the battle has largely already been won, or the video would never have been produced.
I suppose the over-produced slickness of this, with it's almost zero contenet annoys me.
Maybe the video was trying to reach out to people who might not otherwise think of working for the CIA.
There were some very cringe recruitment videos for the Russian army that went around online that made the thing look like some macho combination of push-ups and a video game yet look how they performed in war.
I think it would be pretty moronic to conclude much from some recruitment videos.
It also opens up a much large talent pool. For that age group. ~~50% of the US population isn't white. They double their talent pool.
> diversity makes organisations more effective.
Especially an intelligence agency, which has a national security interest in understanding and working with, in very difficult and effective ways, just about any culture in the world.
It is concerning how many throwaway comments are made like this by ignorant people unable or unwilling to back up what they say. If they're just going to repeat standard, right-wing (or left) talking points they should at least be willing to defend them.
This is pure cringe. There is plenty of hiring going on with priorities above being the best person for the job. Look at the current Vice-President of the US for example.
They essentially are. The presidential candidate hires them to make their candidacy more appealing to voters. The whole ticket is voted in, but the vice president is effectively hired onto the ticket by the presidential candidate.
> After watching it I assume China will be invading Taiwan in the next year.
I'm not watching it to find out whether you mean that, or whether that's sarcasm. But Russia talked very similarly to how China is talking, and it turned out that Russia meant it.
The run up to that was conservatives constantly claiming Russia was going to instantly defeat Ukraine's "gay they/them army", which of course they haven't done, because being macho and heterosexual doesn't actually help you survive drone bombings.
These snipes don’t matter when it comes to war. Conservatives and mainstream dems are in full support of wasting billions of dollars to blow stuff up in other countries. What they say may be slightly different, but the end goal is full support of the imperialist stance and the gleeful military complex.
"Anti-imperialism" is like half leftover Soviet Union propaganda, which is why "anti-imperialists" are opposed to defending against Russian invasions, because they think Russia is actually the USSR in disguise.
Most of us anti-imperialists condemn both Russia for invading and NATO for the constant threats, proxy warfare and helping Ukrainian fascists coup the government in 2014.
When two imperialist forces fight, the working classes of either should refuse to fight each other.
The working class of Russia has been busy genociding entire Ukrainian villages and looting their washing machines to take home to their wives. Remember, they don't have class consciousness, because they're not secretly communists.
And yet plenty of Russians do refuse to fight, just like plenty of Ukrainians. There are trade unionists and communists in both countries, but without state power in either. The latter can change.
The 2014 uprising was a popular movement. Come on. Don’t feed me the Kremlin propaganda that all those thousands of Ukrainians getting beaten and arrested by government goons were paid US stooges. It’s possible for the US to support a movement and for it to also be a genuine popular indigenous movement.
She didn’t dictate anything, we was advising and negotiating. That’s what diplomats do. It’s literally their job. Did they have a lot of influence? Sure. Did the Russians have a lot of influence with the previous lot? Absolutely. At the end of the day though the Americans think the Ukrainian people should have a say, and the Russians don’t.
The reason the Russians took over Crimea wasn’t because of anything the US did, it’s because of what the Ukrainian people chose to do.
At the risk of being edgy... The sort of people that apply to work at the DHS and the sort of people that would be quite happy enforcing CCP policy seem to me to be about an 80% overlap. You see the same thing with the police. In both cases you need quite a long period of different processes, different things being rewarded and protected etc before people "lose interest", if ever.
I guess you might get it at the EPA in a more left wing, environmental way, but then polluting mega corps are probably more able to defend their interests than dissidents.
I am not sure how you deal with that sort of perverse motivation issue?
> This should raise serious questions about DHS. Who are they employing?
Most US civil servants are hired through a competitive process. Given positions, these people all had security clearances.
There are exceptions that are hired as political appointees though. Normally these are the politically shrewd players, but regularly phd brainiacs, albiet politically inclined.
Most US civil servants are good people, and well credentialed and are hard working folks.
> How are they trained?
Federal Law enforcement are trained at the FLETC locations [1]. Federal law enforcement training is generally considered vastly superior to local law enforcement.
> How are they preventing abuse of power?
Pretty much every federal system has strong auditing and logging capabilities, and internal affairs/Inspector General. It doesn't always mean you can catch a perpetrator misusing a system, but you do have the data to get them after the fact.
> What is the culture there?
This is really an organization by organization thing.
US Secret Service historically had the best mission culture.
DHS, allegedly, is more of a dog-eat-dog organization. Many former DHS folks told me it was not a good place to work. Personally, all the DHS people I met were qualified. They have some immense challenges in DHS and that stress is probably part of the problem.
> Under the prior administration, DHS acted brutally, in many cases. What happened to correct that culture?
Civil servants, like the military, take their marching orders from civilian management. When an administration takes over the federal government in a transition, they assign political appointees to the highest positions that may receive senate confirmation, if they pass it. Given President Biden, the Biden administration installed the current leadership.
When you swap the leadership, you do significantly impact the culture. However, if civil servants are not following orders of the SES management, they can get in big trouble, to include, losing their positions.
Racist abuse of migrant kids and breaking the bones of unarmed protesters really eats at the soul over time, I'd imagine. Those poor DHS agents - won't someone think of their stress levels?
Because naturally securing the border, airports, etc is a simple affair that everyone in this forum could accomplish with very little difficulty and much less corruption.
DHS was created in ~2002 and has been a joke ever since. The airports and other borders were secured before that by other agencies. (No, 9/11 does not mean we needed a new agency - credible briefings were ignored by higher-ups and the attackers had powerful backing)
Lots of stuff in our modern post-DHS security era is a total joke. Removing shoes and throwing out liquids over a certain size doesn't protect anyone.
Thanks for the informative comment - I know a lot of that, but it's good to see it here from someone who knows.
But it doesn't address the question, and even sweeps it under the rug by implying that because of these systems there can't be serious problems: There may be serious problems at DHS
> US Secret Service historically had the best mission culture.
The US Secret Service has had numerous, serious scandals, including some that led experts to say they were a failing organization. Several times people getting drunk and also abusing locals during overseas missions. One used their power and organization resources to intimidate their (ex-spouse's new lover? I don't remember it exactly.) Under Obama, IIRC, the attacker who made it into the White House and was discovered by accident. Etc. Etc.
> Miller granted consent and ultimately admitted that he had run the queries for Taylor and sent the results to Taylor via text message, and that Taylor had provided a gift card in return.
Wow it just blows.my.mind. that that is all it takes!
That only makes sense. There are McDonald's in China, so they already need the capability. Why bother shutting it off outside China? There are Chinese tourists in most places.
The system is often more reliable than the staff. I bought a gift card from IKEA in China and wanted to see what would happen if I tried to use it in the US. It worked fine, in theory. But when I asked the American cashier how much was on my card, she happily reported to me that it was $100. (It wasn't; it was ¥100.) The receipt she gave me, though, correctly listed ¥100.
Was there some kind of mix up? Are they laundering their money using foreign currency? Or does US Ikea not understand the difference between Yen and Yuan?
Interestingly, many Chinese believe that the two currencies use different symbols, with one of them using one crossbar on the Y and the other using two.
I am not aware of any such distinction being drawn in reality, though.
Look at Ukraine, and how Russia flooded it with possibly 10,000+ of its spies.
You read stories of ones who were caught, and you cannot make it it up. Their main recruitment target are idiots in places of high power.
KGB recruited more agents than real spies. They had many more people doing lobbying, covert propaganda, and subversion, than peeking into Western secrets.
They really valued their high profile spies, but their influence agents — "pomogaikas" were near disposable. Finding idiots in places of power was always easier than finding smart, ideologically motivated betrayers fit for espionage assignents.
Then these recruits aren't real assets, are they. Sounds like the FSB just engineered some money laundering from the Russian tax payer to the Ukrainian civil service.
A bit related, few weeks into invasion a propagandist on Russian state TV was lamenting about Ukrainians being supposedly much more "nazistically" brainwashed than Russia expected them to, and as an example he told "I have a friend in Harkiv, he had been pretty pro-Russian, he sat just 6 days in the basement hiding from the bombings, and after that he completely turned around, voluntarily joined Ukrainian territorial defense force and is now running around with machine gun against us".
By default, China considers all ethnic Chinese to be Chinese nationals.
>In regards to the de facto practices of the Chinese government, Kris Cheng wrote in Foreign Affairs that "Beijing presents nationality as an elaborate legal question, but in practice the answer is simple. Only one rule applies: If you have ever held or could have held Chinese citizenship, you are a Chinese national unless Beijing decides you are not. And even if you were born abroad but you're of Chinese descent, Beijing still feels as if it owns you.
China also requires all Chinese nationals to spy when asked.
>As long as national intelligence institutions are operating within their proper authorities, they may, according to Article 14, “request relevant organs, organisations, and citizens provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation”.
> By default, China considers all ethnic Chinese to be Chinese nationals.
That is not true at all since:
> If you have ever held or could have held Chinese citizenship, you are a Chinese national unless Beijing decides you are not.
So a an ethnic Han or Kejia who was born and grew up in Malaysia is ethnically considered Chinese, but the PRC has no claim that they might be a Chinese citizen.
> And even if you were born abroad but you're of Chinese descent, Beijing still feels as if it owns you.
The only case where that can happen is if one of your parents has Chinese citizenship when you are born abroad, and even then it supposedly doesn't count if they have permanent residency in another country (e.g. my kid is supposedly not a PRC citizen because I'm American and mom has a US greencard). But this isn't clear and all you can do is try to get a Chinese visa; if decided to be a citizen of China and another country, kids have to renounce one or the other when they are 18 (but they can't do that before, there make easy exceptions for people like Eileen Gu for dual citizenship because China doesn't really have rule of law, so they can make it up as they go along).
I think one problem is that there aren't really treaties with rules on multiple citizenship or really the criteria for citizenship in general that would prevent a country from refusing to allow you to renounce your citizenship, so if a country has some basis and incentive to consider you a citizen under its rules, there isn't really anything stopping it from doing so.
this stuff is freaky. at college when the hk protests were at their height, some taiwanese students put up a public art display to raise awareness about the protests and the chinese government. the very next day, it was gone, apparently torn down overnight by a group of chinese students. We shouldn’t have tolerance for people silencing speech, especially here in our own country.
China is special in its way of handling foreign spies I heard: no ideology, just money and overall agreeable contact. Like a business relationship.
That s how they got both much deeper but a lot less loyal cohort of useful idiots to help a bit their image. You ll notice all this spying, as awful as it is for the victims, is about something they can never change: that they're a terrible dictatorship and Xi is illegitimate.
It's not like they got a federal employee to, say, steal missiles blueprint. What a waste of time for them to do all that PR work. Especially when it can backfire and show them as even more insecure and desperate than the day before ...
He has no more mandate to lead China than me, a random dude in China. He's not elected, he didnt perform incredible national deed (like some victorious war general sometimes), he's not pushed by the people etc.
It feels he's there because he fits a role set by a small minority and will perpetuate the party he likes rather than help the country or represent the people. He's possibly legitimate to lead the communist party however. Just not China.
For instance, a legitimate leader encourages competition, transfers power to successors, accepts counter power, is benevolent to critics, works on compromises rather than absolutes etc. And if he doesn't, the people get rid of him ASAP. You get legitimity once there's someone judging it. I can't perceive who's above Xi, and it's certainly not us, the taxpayers.
Most spies and subversives of this sort do it for the thrill, and because they think they can get away with it. The "leverage" you describe is sometimes employed, but it's not usually the critical factor in their decision to do this kind of thing.
That's also why the money or other benefits involved often seems low for the acts committed.
I didn't. Anyone who gets any level of clearance (or it used to be this way) has to go through training and they go over all this stuff in it. They try to push the "leverage" narrative hard in them, but it's pretty clear what really motivates these people. They're generally either depressed (not enough thrill in their lives, spouse cheated on them, etc.), pissed (e.g. because the gov't did something they didn't like) or narcissists ("I'm better and smarter than everyone else, and I can get away with this"). Almost everything else about the motivations behind their actions is a distant second issue. They'd have done what they did whether the leverage existed or not (and it often doesn't).
You're assuming the knew who they were working for. The USG claims they destroyed evidence and obstructed justice.
> The charges against Miller and Taylor pertain to their alleged obstruction of justice, including by destroying evidence, after they were approached by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and asked about their procurement and dissemination of sensitive and confidential information from a restricted federal law enforcement database regarding U.S.-based dissidents from the PRC. This information was used by Liu and Sun in the transnational repression scheme. Both Miller and Taylor were arrested pursuant to a criminal complaint in June 2022.
It sounds like they provided information to the DHS agents from a protected database. Then when they figured out who they had provided this information to, tried to destroy the evidence of their involvement.
I would note that TFA has slightly ameliorated; it wasn't intended to sound mean as "the fucking article" suggests. It's commonly used to just mean "the article", with the swear word sort of disappearing. I hope I didn't cause offense; I just didn't want consider it.
Because the article is usually full of bloaty ads that take all day to load, tracking beacons, and multiple paragraphs of bloviating before getting to the point. This is a DOJ page which is a little bit different but it will still be 90% hot air and 1 sentence of substance. So people just go to the comment thread expecting to get the gist of the article through context, without clicking on it. HN's policy of having to use the original (often clickbait) title also reinforces click resistance. Being able to append a short summary (see r/savedyouaclick) would help.
My bet is that for many (most?), they already have their minds made up (or set in a particularly strong direction) on almost any topic you could present.
Since the curiosity and openness to expand or change one's mind is low, you might as well dive into the dialog and show off / set people straight.
At the same time, I also witness people who really add value to the conversation by providing an insightful framing that I hadn't thought of, provide a synthesis between two people who are speaking past each other, etc.
Whether the trend is one way or the other, I do not know.
Some day the author of a long article that makes it to the front page of HN is going to leave a single, short sentence in the middle of the sixth paragraph from the end, that says "If you've read this far, leave a comment with the word 'elephant' in it."
When that happens, watch the thread and wait to see how many comments are posted before somebody notices the elephant in the room.
HN is a not intended to be a place for rehashed discussion where everyone is already familiar with the relevant information. Reading the article should be considered essential criteria for commenting here.
I don't recommend that dang and others attempt to enforce this. Just that there be appropriate room for the chiding of those who comment without reading.
Edit: Apologies, I meant to to reply to the comment below. I agree wholeheartedly with what you've said.
It's a prerequisite for relevant discussion. That it happens everywhere is just a sign of how discussion is degrading everywhere.
Sure, you can just come into a thread and start a blog about the awesome breakfast you had, or guess what the article is about based on the title alone and pontificate on whatever triggers you, or just shoot whatever shit is on your mind, but that isn't something to be encouraged in a community whose purpose is supposed to be intellectual curiosity, in a thread with an actual topic at hand. You can't satisfy your own intellectual curiosity by never engaging your intellect with new material, much less anyone else's.
Otherwise, what's the point of having articles to begin with? Let's just have dang turn this place into a generic text forum and be done with it. Let's just make it /b/ without the pictures and any semblance of humor.
HN is not intended to be a place for rehashed discussion where everyone is already familiar with the relevant information. Reading the article should be considered essential criteria for commenting here.
I don't recommend that dang and others attempt to enforce this. Just that there be appropriate room for the chiding of those who comment without reading.
Edit: Sorry, the winky face was meant as sarcasm. I'm pretty sure most people mean "the fucking article", but there isn't any definition anywhere I can find. For now this is an acronym with, let's say, "reasonable doubt", about what it means.
I agree and I commented something similar above. I'd be curious though to see the original derivation. It wasn't immediately clear to me despite a long history with being told to "rtfm".
Every move the Chinese government makes should be scrutinized to the finest detail. They have but one goal: complete control of key parts of world infrastructure. See what’s happening in the Indo-Pacific. Most media is asleep at the wheel.
Sure; I saw more empty shopping malls in Malaysia than anywhere else. Chinese built and just waiting.
But there are massive road projects in Costa Rica complete with Chinese heavy machines and marked lumber. Same in South Africa and I watched Chinese contractors doing surveying in Eswatini.
Apparently in Costa Rica at least; these workers are there for year or two contracts, then are given citizenship and their families brought over, they live in gov housing camps that look like prisons and should have saved enough money in their time to open a store or start a business.
It’s not JUST owning infrastructure. It’s a long term agreement these countries are making with China.
maybe not always dictatorships, but the US definitely does has a history of promoting regime change in its interests. backing unpopular dictators is a good chunk of that
A DHS officer and a DHS agent leak restricted information on US persons and all they get charged on is lying about it?
> Miller and Taylor procured and disseminated sensitive and confidential information from a restricted federal law enforcement database regarding U.S.-based dissidents from the PRC.
> The charges against Miller and Taylor pertain to their alleged obstruction of justice...
Not a lawyer, but is the alleged silencing action in the title illegal? The surveillance equipment installation, the bribery, and the lying perhaps are
It's the method of silencing that often becomes problematic. Shushing someone is legal. Harassing, intimidating, destroying property, etc are usually not.
It looks like the charges were:
> Conspiracy To Act as Agents of a Foreign Government
Wow. The extent to which China goes to silence it’s critics is scary. I cannot believe the kind of effort and coordination it takes to bribe people in the dhs and then buy the victims car and workplace. This cannot be the first time, I am sure they have it figured out like a well oiled machine. On the other hand, I am glad the US government was able to catch this and prevent it. To be honest I was beginning to question our ability to bring people to justice particularly at the federal level.
Is it just me or have there been a spat of such kinds of China f'king with American kinds of revelations? What is the reason that Governments put up with this kind of thing?
Why does this read like yet another case of the People's Republic using bad faith actors to infiltrate the West for their own gain?
If only several groups had been warning about undue influence within society starting at an educational level and planning out. No, those groups were evil doomsayers, it can't be that they were right...
There can't be a history of this in recent years. There can't other stories and people arrested or deported for military espionage and spying... Must be the evil courts not respecting their culture....
> "Sun is a PRC-based employee of an international technology company"
So is he indicted because this company is also located in the US? Or is it typically normal for foreign agents to be indicted if they are not in the US and working on behalf of another government?
EDIT: Asking because it seems weird for someone working for their own government in their own country to be indicted for doing their job by a different country. Isn't that normally a diplomatic problem between countries?
Well that's where there is a definite tension with the US for sure. I'm French and in Hong Kong: in both France and Hong Kong we've seen instances of maybe exagerated outreach by the US into things maybe we should be left trying then failing on our own so we learn. Instead we're left thinking, and it's prevalent opinion in HK among people who stayed, that the US maybe was behind our troubles when really they're just unable to resist giving their holy opinion on everything, something I can admit France is accused of often in other places.
Ofc here, the guy was not just doing his job in China, he extended his reach into the US and it feels fair game. But, you point out to something that annoys me a little bit abt the US !
TBH, pretty lame PRC spooks need to to rely on US databases to target dissidents. Assuming these are actual dissidents and not PRC/CCDI most wanted list, i.e. extrememly corrupt ex-nationals who fled abroad with their riches.
Something I've oddly noticed more than once in forums is some negative mention of China, some random person (bot? slave?) will show up and tell people to stop being racist.
Maybe with unrivaled manpower that kind of stealth campaign is possible but it would like fighting the incoming tide.
But really, who thinks anyone has any say over China, they are going to do whatever they want, when they come for Taiwan nothing will be done in the end.
Today I learned that the Department of Homeland Security runs Emergency Relief Operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota where they have assigned a Deportation Officer.
Why does an Emergency Relief Operation need a Deportation Officer?
It seems like we need, more than ever, to disband and disarm Border Control. Maybe make a new agency, and forbid it to hire anyone at all from the old snakepit.
I would guess this is due to the large Somali population in Minneapolis.
I don’t know how recent, but in the past there have been issues where Somalis in MN were discovered assisting, directly funding, attempting to join ISIS.
Yes, ~63 people from a single terrorist group, according to a single report, back in 2015.
DHS obviously has more than one job.
I mean, we're also talking about a place with the 30th busiest airport on the planet, with an international border, and a large international port. Of course the federal law enforcement agency tasked with enforcing laws regarding those activities has an office there.
I have learned to take judgments from DHS about people's intentions with great and well-deserved skepticism. It is common and normal for Muslims to join together in study groups, and we have numerous published examples of FBI coercing people to join and then try to radicalize these groups so that they can be labeled terrorists. Sometimes the FBI even supplied weapons. Most members of any of these groups have no interest in violence, but all get tarred for membership if any do.
It is routine for law enforcement to lie, and to coerce people under their control to lie, to serve whatever narrative their boss somewhere up the line has constructed. It is not exceptional: they consider this their job.
If it only takes a few bad actors, everyone in the US would be condemned by guilt by association. We are responsible for our own acts, not people who look like us (imagine what that would mean for US-born people with white skin!).
I think a claim against anyone and especially any group of people needs to be supported by clear evidence. It's too dangerous and easy to demonize some outsider group, and we've seen a long history of horrible outcomes for innocent people.
There is much more reason to suspect problems at DHS, given the OP.
When providing aid involving police that want to attack the very people you are providing aid to (most of whom are legal, black African with weird sounding accents, they smell funny because they eat different food from you and they speak a language you do not understand, but they are in your country legally, mostly) is evil.
They smell funny because they don't share Western and some Asian norms of cleanliness. Not because they eat "different food".
I ate some form of curry every single day for lunch for 6 months while my ship was in the Dubai Drydocks, as the Drydocks offered lunch for around $2 a meal and their choices were "Continental" - a.k.a., bland as fuck "European" food, "Asian" - a.k.a., whatever Filipinos normally eat, and "Indian" - a.k.a., food from the nation of India.
Every single day I was on duty and in the drydocks, which was literally every other day, I made my order for the Indian meal, because it was always delicious... chicken vindaloo, dal tadka, dal makhani, naan bread, Basmati rice, etc. That's 90+ days of eating Indian food. I often ate at Indian restaurants in Dubai when I wasn't on duty.
I never "smelled funny"... because I took a fucking shower every day and used soap. If you're living in America, you can afford soap. A 16 ounce bottle of Suave body wash is $0.99 at Walmart. And every single state has a Walmart... hell, almost every city has a Walmart.
It the cooking that imbues clothing with a smell, not just the eating. Some foods are just more aromatic than others. I don’t suppose you expect people to wash their clothes after every time they cook, even if there is a Walmart.
Americans are known throughout southeast Asia for smelling bad, in large degree because they do not bathe as much as locals do. But also because of their diet.
Well, I've never claimed to be a "normal" American in nearly any sense of the word... Hell, when I was in the Navy, I would specifically time my meals such that when lunch rolled around, I could go take care of number two and get a quick shower so I could feel "clean" again.
I showered once in the morning, put on my uniform, and would always shower again in the evening while stateside. Sometimes, depending on the location and the heat / amount of sweat I was producing, I would shower in the morning before work, after I got off watch, and before I went to bed. There were times in Dubai where the heat was so oppressive I would take four showers a day... always the quick boot camp ones... turn on the water, get damp, turn off the water, soap up the important bits, turn on the water, rinse off, turn off the water, dry off... but I really don't see how people could go even a single day without a shower in that region of the world. And I'm from north Texas.
> Do you have anything to backup this claim about anyone in particular?
Yes. Half a lifetime spent in the United States Navy. Traveling to, and living in, over 39 different countries on 6 different continents, from Canada, England, Italy, Germany, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, Malaysia, Laos, Haiti, Costa Rica, Japan, China, India, Sri Lanka, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and on, and on, and on some more.
> This is just unfounded prejudice and stock racism.
This is fucking word. for. word. the stock "woke" response from someone who's never traveled the world.
Go ahead. Travel to the countries I listed. See which ones smell not-so-great and which ones don't. If you think it's a matter of "racism" and not a matter of "insufficient public funds to provide for widespread public sanitation", you're not only wrong, you're hilariously wrong, and hilariously ignorant.
India literally had a campaign called, "Poo in the Loo!" due to the fact that there was a significant problem with public defecation.
> this specific group in this specific location has an outsized number of people that are aiding terrorist organizations
Can you back that up with anything at all? That is a very dangerous accusation, and obviously plays to prejudice and racism regardless of intentions. It seems it should be stated very specifically and with clear evidence.
Edit: Someone else posted an article. I still think that nobody should make claims like that without being specific and having evidence. 64 people do not indict an entire community. What does the OP imply about DHS, for example?
> most immigrants are law-abiding and good citizens
Most people are law-abiding and good citizens, but some are not. It has nothing to do with immigration status. I happen to think that all people were created equal, regardless of where they were born.
The 63 number is deeply suspect as well. Were the 63 convicted? Were they even arrested? Or just deported without arrest, charge, or trial? DHS is well known for selectively hiring aggressive bigots, so their judgment on anyone carries negative credibility.
It’s probably just an editing mistake. In a different part of the document, it says the same person works for Enforcement and Removal Operations in Minneapolis, which could also be abbreviated to ERO.
Under the prior administration, DHS acted brutally, in many cases. What happened to correct that culture?