I heard about this today, things are weird in the US as this guy has a green card but it was being revoked for speech the government didn't like and apparently not anything criminal:
It's questionable whether his green card has actually been revoked either. Supposedly that requires proceedings to go through an immigration court and be approved by a judge, and as far as anyone knows that hasn't happened yet.
Which would mean he's just being detained without cause in some unspecified location on no basis
> It's questionable whether his green card has actually been revoked either. Supposedly that requires proceedings to go through an immigration court and be approved by a judge, and as far as anyone knows that hasn't happened yet.
News coverage seems to suggest immigrants can be detained while moved to revoke their green cards are made, but it’s incredibly troubling that no one seems to know what’s up, the government agents arresting him seemed to think he had a student visa and in general there is so little visibility
You're suggesting there was a previous administration that rounded up lawful permanent residents without court orders on US soil, on the charge that they committed forbidden speech?
oh yes. and he broke a law passed by congress. that makes it even MORE appalling, as all three branches were complicit in an egregious breach of the constitution, not a single one stopped to hold the line
Yes, but FDR's executive order allowed the military to order the exclusion of anyone from any place. The actual thing a person could be arrested for was passed unanimously by Congress to support the EO and enforced by courts. Even during a real national emergency, nobody was disappearing Japanese people without due process. Korematsu was arrested and tried and convicted and their conviction was upheld by courts of appeal and the Supreme Court. At the time FDR, Congress, the Court, and everybody else thought they were doing due process. There's a lot of daylight between that and what Trump is doing.
> Supposedly that requires proceedings to go through an immigration court and be approved by a judge, and as far as anyone knows that hasn't happened yet.
The administration is pretending to goof up following court orders or simply ignoring them, and is lying in court, repeatedly - claiming they "don't know" who is in charge at DOGE.
ICE was arresting people who turned out to be citizens, shuttling them across the country so make it harder for their lawyers to contact them.
Why are you expecting the administration to follow procedures for deporting someone here with a green card?
Hey, the government can decide whether something qualifies as grounds to revoke a green card or not, that's totally legitimate and I support it.
But, once they do, the guy is still entitled to a lawyer. Vanishing the guy and telling the lawyer that they aren't allowed to know where their client is or whether he's still alive is not legitimate.
> Hey, the government can decide whether something qualifies as grounds to revoke a green card or not, that's totally legitimate and I support it.
No, it can't. It must go through a process which affords the green card holder due process. There are specific grounds which are required to be met to remove someone's green card.
And it absolutely cannot be revoked because the government disfavors ones political speech. That's an absolutely fundamental violation of the first amendment and our right to free speech.
It's really not as simple as "hey, the government can decide." To have a green card revoked, the person must be an active member of a group at war with the US or have committed some kind of fraud. DHS must initiate it (not the State Department, despite Rubio's statements), and it must be approved by an immigration judge.
So far all we've heard about this process and the justification is "Contact the White House."
Additionally, here's the AP article that Marco Rubio linked to:
> Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, *the agent said they were revoking that too*, according to the lawyer.
> The student, Mahmoud Khalil at the university's School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents at his university residence on Saturday, the Student Workers of Columbia union said in a statement. His wife is an American citizen, eight months pregnant, according to news reports, and he holds a U.S. permanent residency green card, the union said.
> Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
I don't consider twitter posts as anything more than the ramblings of the deranged, and don't really see a twitter post as evidence that someone already got deported considering how much politicians lie on there.
There is evidence that the group that Khalil headed did endorse Hamas and distributed pro-Hamas propaganda. Whether this news article is true or if it's propaganda remains to be seen.
"He has remained active in recent disruptive protests, including last week’s takeover of the Milstein Library at Barnard College. Videos and photographs posted on X depict him holding a bullhorn near the library entrance and engaged in discussion with school administrators.
That protest featured violent propaganda flyers that purportedly came directly from the “Hamas Media Office,” including one pamphlet titled “Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” which justified the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people — and in which women were repeatedly raped, whole families were executed and 251 hostages were taken to the Gaza Strip.
Others at the Barnard library takeover passed around trading card-like photos of notorious Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon last September."
"Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aided a Columbia -owned apartment inhabited by Mahmoud Khalil, who fronts a radical group, Columbia United Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which sympathizes with terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and calls for the “end of Western Civilization.”"
Whether or not this is true, I can't say at this point or if this is just propaganda. But at the very least it does say that his group sympathizes with terror groups and if that's true, then it makes him eligible for deportation.
Huh? This just reinforces what I said. He isn’t accused of distributing pro-Hams propaganda or saying he supports them. At best you have unsubstantiated claims on X that someone distributed some images at an event he was also at. That isn’t very conclusive and likely won’t hold up in a normal court of law.
He is the leader of a group that is being accused of endorsing Hamas and distributing pro-Hamas literature. If true, then him being the leader absolutely means he is responsible and should be held responsible. Unless you don't think that Trump should be held responsible for the actions of Musk.
Obviously a newspaper article isn't enough evidence and even the veracity of the article remains in question, the assumption is that there will be actual evidence. If true, he should be deported. If false, then he deserves to go free. It's pretty cut and dry.
I don’t think the article even was so bold as to say his organization distributed pro Hamas flyer. They say someone at the protest did and leave it to your inference that it was the org he leads
> He’s been a regular fixture on news programs discussing the group’s disruptive efforts, including an interview on Quds News Network done completely in Arabic
Why is it relevant that he did an interview in Arabic? Like seriously?
As others have said the rest reads as just guilt by association.
To be maximally fair to the other position it has made me reluctant to protest against Israel despite being broadly against them. There are too many people in that movement who are clearly racist, but it’s also unfortunate that pro Israeli forces campaign hard to conflate opposition to Israel with opposition to Jewish people
Ah, neat, so if the government decides it disfavors your speech it just has to say "that speech supports a terrorist organization", and it can deport anyone it wants first amendment be damned?
The government has no obligation to allow any and all non-citizens who seek to immigrate to the US. If the immigrant is engaging in unfavorable or distasteful activities, the government certainly has the right to not allow them to enter the country or become citizens. It's not just for endorsing terrorism, if any immigrant commits a heinous crime, then can and will also be deported, so it makes sense to me.
A permanent resident is not someone who is seeking to immigrate to the US. They have already immigrated. That's what permanent residency status is, and that's why there's a much higher bar for the removal of permanent residency than there is for a visa, or the *application* for a permanent residency.
The government can have wide latitude in who it chooses to grant permanent residency to. It cannot, however, flippantly revoke that status (and especially not over disfavored speech)
To think it should be allowed to do so is to either fundamentally misunderstand what a "permanent resident" is, or to callous disregard all of our first amendment rights.
You are wrong. I'm someone who immigrated to the US so I'm deeply aware of the situation.
Permanent resident isn't the same as a citizen. Until you become a citizen there are still limitations to the things you can do, for example vote, go on a jury, etc. And you can lose your PR if you stay out of the US too long or if you commit certain crimes. And endorsing terrorism absolutely can get you stripped of your PR.
Once you are a naturalized citizen, then the bar for losing your citizenship is much higher, usually you need to have lied during the immigration application. But even commiting an especially heinous crime won't get your stripped of your citizenship.
I'd heard from sources I consider reputable that all allegations of physically blocking doorways were made up and the protestors remained outdoors and that furthermore, the Israeli students perceived the existence of the Palestinian flag in their line of sight, anywhere, ever, to constitute intimidation and discrimination regardless of the context.
What are some good sources to reconcile your claims with these other claims and find out the truth?
> Pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University early Tuesday charged the same campus building that students advocating for racial justice occupied in the 1960s, a significant escalation at the elite institution that launched dozens of campus demonstrations across the world.
> “We will not leave until Columbia meets every one of our demands,” one of the students yelled from a balcony window. The demands include university divestment from Israel, disclosure of Columbia investments and protections for protesters.
I'm curious what you think your sources say? You originally claimed that this protest leader participated in the act of selectively denying access to campus facilities for Jewish people. That Politico article does not support your claim.
I did not claim that he directly participated in that. If you simply google his name, in every article the word 'leader' is used to describe him in relation to the Columbia protests, protests which did include such acts.
He was a leader of protests at Columbia which involved physically blocking Jewish students from entering classes and other forms of overt discrimination and intimidation directed at Jewish and Israeli students.
That he was a leader of protests at Columbia? That the protests involved physically blocking Jewish students? That the protests involved intimidation directed at Jewish and Israeli students?
It was a full sentence. Try backing it up with facts. This shouldn't take a 7 comment deep thread to handle, unless maybe you are full of shit and want to bury that fact with some of your bullshit.
You are trolling or I suppose you are just upset that your guy is being deported. If there's something specific you want me to find a source for, let me know.
I'm trolling? For asking you to source one claim? This is the sixth time you've been asked to provide sources. Two people have asked. Your unsourced comment is flagged. The one source you provided does not match your claims afaict.
You can find many other mainstream sources calling him a "leader" by simply doing a Google News search for the term "Mahmoud Khalil leader".
This is something you could have taken 2 seconds to Google. This is why you're trolling and acting in bad faith. Regardless of our discussions here, Mahmoud is being deported and many more are to come according to statement put out by the White House.
I appreciate the source and I'll get back to you with a detailed reply of my own once I've finished reading it and searching for corroborating details on the people who were there. Watch this space.
I would encourage you to think more critically. If you organized a peaceful protest should you be held liable for other peoples actions? He was apparently deported for speech, not violence according to the parent comment.
I have no idea if there's footage of him personally doing such things, but he's a leader of the protests, and one of the people negotiating on behalf of the other protesters with the university. He is most definitely taking part in occupying part of campus illegally, so his ass should be deported.
> There's no issue with deporting someone like that and it is within the government's power to do so.
I feel like I know the answer to this but do you also believe we should just deport everyone that commits any crime irrespective of whether it's a misdemeanor or felony?
Non-citizens should not be participating in or fomenting political protests, especially ones that involve harassment, intimidation, destruction of private property, occupations of buildings, (all of which occurred throughout the Columbia protests).
If you are talking about deporting someone for getting a speeding ticket, that would be pretty draconian unless it was something very dangerous like doing 25 over in a school zone during school hours, etc.
> If you are talking about deporting someone for getting a speeding ticket, that would be pretty draconian unless it was something very dangerous like doing 25 over in a school zone during school hours, etc.
Lol sure ya let's deport people for speeding in a school zone. Forget due process or the justice system at all for these heathens nah just ship them off immediately. Like are these real words that reflect you're serious adult position on this? Do you really not have any sense that what you're saying is insane?
For felonies, absolutely. For felonies and misdemeanors in the furtherance of political goals (as is the case here), absolutely. Otherwise you leave yourself wide open to political interference by foreign nations on your own soil.
The mistake that every single person makes that advocates for extreme measures is they assume the arbiter of those measures will always be on their side. Historically it's literally never been the case but who knows maybe you'll be part of the first group to always be in the good graces of dear leader. I wish you good luck!
Deporting foreign political agents isn't extreme though, it's been standard practice worldwide for thousands of years. It's actually less extreme than what has been practiced in many locales for dealing with foreign agents: torture, summary execution, etc.
There's been a concerted effort to frame any support for the people of Palestine as support for Hamas, and any criticism of Israeli policy as anti-semitism. It's not even uncommon to see it on Hacker News.
The content of this article is in stark contrast to the information I'm seeing from other posters as well as relatively non-partisan sources such as the BBC and Wikipedia. I've done some preliminary fact-checking to try and gauge how much I trust it. Other HN users may find this helpful.
Media Bias Fact Check report on True North:
> These media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.
The linked article hinges entirely on the content of a few tweets by twitter user @l3v1at4an (https://x.com/l3v1at4an). The twitter user almost exclusively posts about Palestine, Hamas and Hezbullah, with a distinct anti-Islamic and pro-Jewish slant. The subtitles in the videos are translated from arabic and supplied by this twitter user.
Googling for 'Mahmoud Khalil "repeat the strike"' or 'Mahmoud Khalil "kidnap the soldiers"' produces only the True North article as a result.
The above is enough to raise suspicions about the translation quality in the video. Would be great if someone with better knowledge of Arabic was able to verify or refute the translated subtitles.
What do you call what's being done to him if not imprisonment? What are "migrant privileges"?
If expressing sympathy for a group disliked by the politicians currently in power makes people a "national security threat" there are tens of millions of national security threats in this country, many of them citizens, and they all apparently deserve to disappear like this guy has?
Citizens cannot be deported. In general, if you are a migrant to a country, you are a guest until you become a citizen. This is not rocket science. My own family went through this process.
If an American citizen is being jailed for speaking in favor of Hamas, we can have a conversation.
The brain gymnastics of Trump supporters arr absolutely amazing, one hand they could stop shouting freedom of speech everytime someone (a private entity) didn't allow them to spew racism on their platform, on the other hand deporting (the government) someone for their political views is fine because they are a security threat and deportation isn't really punishment (being banned on a social media platform on the other hand...).
At least be honest and say "I don't care because it's speech I disagree with"
I saw this comment on Bluesky yesterday, and it really resonated with me after watching a "totally moderate" conservative friend incrementally tolerate more and more obviously evil things:
> A conservative will pretend to believe whatever they think is necessary to get to their only goal: hurting you. That is the sum total of how they function. Pretending they have morals, ethics, or beliefs actively plays into their hands.
"Owning the libs" is pretty much the only thing needed to unite them.
And what about the active hostilities towards trans people, who often can't get passports anymore (I personally know one person who has this problem) and can't update their names and gender entries anymore.
What about the demolishing of government agencies that DOGE is trying (and sometimes succeding) in?
You call it "termination of employees", but don't seem to consider that they tried to fire jugdes who restrained their power. This looks to me like a plain powergrab. I hope I don't need to tell you where something like this leads, but I am certain it's not going to be democratic or respectful of civic freedoms.
As a non-straight non-binary (neither cis-male or -female) person, the US is currently just about the last place I want to be. If the current trend continues, then I genuinely fear for the lives of some of my friends.
This would make more sense. It's a very different problem if trans people "can't get passports anymore" vs being able to get their preferred gender on a passport.
Of course, the use of the term 'preferred gender' is the issue here (I don't mean with your reply), since to trans people such as myself, it's literally who we are.
Imagine someone that has transitioned and passes as the sex they identify as, now only having the option of getting a passport as the sex they were assigned as birth.
Practically, for many, that simply isn't an option.
Someone asked more why it was not an option but deleted their comment before they could answer, so here is my reply:
There is a issue with fear and using the passport.
Border agents have pretty much complete discretion and control at all borders in all countries against non-citizens. Any border agent can deny entry for any reason, or subject someone to extra searches, maybe strip searches, without any consequence or any recourse from the traveler.
Given the amount of transphobic people, this is an issue. Imagine if gay people had to get passports in the 90s or 80s that marked their orientation?
The second issue is a huge issue as well, that could easily lead to an increase in suicides.
As I see it, it is an option but there is a cost. You're making an absolute statement when it seems like it's that you view the practical cost of choosing the option as too high. Which is fair but you're refusing to explain the costs. Is it physical harm? Is it emotional harm? Is it future inconvenience? Is it fear of future physical harm? Etc. Etc.
The risk of physical harm and harassment goes up significantly, imagine a transwoman trying to travel anywhere with a passport that indicates male, they can be detained, searched for any reason. That's just one obvious example. There are plenty of other instances where physical harm might increase, and yes emotional harm is a big issue as well, not least because it's a clear attack on dignity.
I don't see how terminating employees or ending foreign aid being a decline in Civic freedoms
Ask the question differently. What kind of administration guts 70-150k jobs in a few weeks and cuts foreign aid? So many want to say "don't draw a bridge between that question and to a decline in civic freedoms". Fine, I won't draw the bridge, it seems to appease many people's idea of themselves. We'll just keep waiting and reading about more and more evil.
> The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.
> The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.
> The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.
Okay, so there's nothing to do with actual civil freedoms. I dislike orange man as much as the next person, but this article is garbage.
Nothing has changed about civic freedoms in the US with the new administration. If you read the article, their reasons are a bunch of things that have NOTHING to do with civic freedoms. It cites reducing the size of the federal workforce for example. This is just a political activist group that is falsely pitched as some kind of civic freedoms watchlist.
On the other hand the EU has serious issues with civic freedoms - censorship, suppression of political parties, cancelling elections with results they don’t like, and more. But I’m sure this group doesn’t mind those actual civic freedom issues.
Mass government purges - including unlawfully firing people who oversee the legality of government actions - is an indicator of deteriorating civic freedoms as institutions meant for oversight and public services are dismantled.
Journalism is the art of massaging a press release (from a politically motivated organization that nobody has ever heard of and which doesn't actually do anything) into a statement of fact. The average person (who has a seventh-grade reading level, mind you) has absolutely no defense against this sort of low-effort appeal to "authority".
What does the editorial decision of a newspaper's owner, which runs counter to the unconcealed biases of many who remain gainfully employed at the paper, have to do with legal freedoms of association and expression?
If it's true that "criminal agitators on the left" are causing chaos and intimidating voters with no consequence, doesn't that support rather than refute the point that the US is experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms? The watchlist the source article reports is describing a derivative; if you go to their site, they agree with your intuition that Pakistan is in a substantially worse civil rights tier than the US.
The existence of violence doesn't mean that civic rights aren't deteriorating. In fact, it's an indicator.
Washington Post is owned by a billionaire who has gutted the newsroom and said that only pro-capitalist stances will be allowed. Reddit has recently come out with a ban on literally the word "Luigi", and has stated that you can be banned simply for upvoting comments which they deem promote violence (the criteria for this are vague). The Hacker News comments sections are usually filled with apologists for Musk and Trump, and only recently have there been more comments pushing back on the "they're saving democracy" narrative.
We're entering a new era of McCarthyism as pro-Palestine activists are being targeted for expulsion and deportation. Trump has floated the idea of moving US citizens to prisons outside of the country. Musk called unmasking DOGE employees "illegal."
> criminal agitators on the left are intimidating voters on the right
Washington Post's editorializing is a free speech matter and has nothing to do with the first amendment, since it's a private actor, which is the story we were all told during covid and the Floyd riots.
Quite a lot. There was a big news story in 2023, which I followed pretty closely, where a popular ex-PM was ambushed in a courthouse by military forces before being arrested, tried, and imprisoned. He and his supporters believe, I think reasonably, that Pakistan should be understood as being in a state of undeclared martial law.
My family is intimately familiar with them but I guess the larger point I was making is that the trends in the US have been following the Pakistani arc for quite a while. There’s not really a one-to-one comparison with the blasphemy laws. Probably a better comparison would be like child pornography, or something
I’m an American of Pak origin. My point was that blasphemers there (PK) are treated judicially and socially like child pornographers here when plenty of actual child porn over there goes unpunished.
Asking people to amend those laws over there gets the exact same reaction you just had.
I have no problem with the comparison. DRC, Pakistan and Serbia are moderately good on net, with most having a good life and a minority being absolutely screwed. The idea that their average level of quality isn't similar to America's after adjusting for purchasing power is an insult to the many people living in them who are striving for good with a remarkable degree of success.
There are a great many academic data sources justifying this in all cases but if you still disfavour them and would be swayed by an informal documentary instead, I can recommend the Miracle of Pakistani Tekken as the best short-form documentary on how their people are as well-meaning as you or I:
[edit] I mixed up the DRC with it's northern neighbour, the RoC. The RoC is an adequate place but the DRC is a hellhole that doesn't belong on this list.
You’ve got to be kidding. The DRC is an unfree authoritarian state and one of the poorest countries in the world to boot. It’s in a completely different tier from Serbia.
Almost as if book burning isn’t that big of a right in the grand scheme of things.
> America is in a league of its own when it comes to speech
Try boycotting Israel, you might go to jail or lose your green card for speaking out about it. American free speech (in the way that matters, not in the way of theater) is under threat and has been with every successive government for quite a long time.
> Not one of these things has the least to do with civic freedoms.
These things have to do with whether democracies follow the rule of law.
Civic freedoms tend to go away when democracies become authoritarian regimes.
> USAid didn't even exist before 1961
It was created by Congress in 1961, but destroyed by the ire of one man in 2025, without any Congressional approval. Does it feel like democracy to you?
> It was created by Congress in 1961, but destroyed by the ire of one man in 2025, without any Congressional approval. Does it feel like democracy to you?
Are you suggesting what he did was unconstitutional? If so, Congress can (and should) absolutely impeach him for it and make him defend his actions in court. The President is not above the law.
Or did Congress give the President the authority he needed to do exactly what he did? In which case, what is more democratic than a body of democratically elected represetitives voting democratically to pass a law which establishes something under the control (and disgression) of a democratically elected executive?
Have you not been paying attention? The president is above the law according to the current Supreme Court, and Congress is stuffed full of sycophants that will never impeach him.
Apparently I'm not paying attention because I seem to have missed that Supreme Court ruling. Can you link it for me?
If our democratically elected representatives in Congress will not impeach the President, then they are evidently content with how he has performed his duties. Of course, the next Congress is free to have a different opinion and proceed with an impeachment. They can even impeach Supreme Court justices who have failed in their duties. If that is what you want, I suggest you vote in accordance with that in the 2026 election.
Also, impeachment is not the only mechanism which members of Congress can use to hold the President accountable. They are free to try and convict the President of criminal misconduct in court.
>These things have to do with whether democracies follow the rule of law. Civic freedoms tend to go away when democracies become authoritarian regimes.
Nobody complained when Woodrow Wilson and FDR destroyed the rule of law to remake the federal government. Do you understand that what the progress movement stands for is fundamentally at odds with the constitution, which has for some time only been the de-jure rule of law?
>It was created by Congress in 1961, but destroyed by the ire of one man in 2025, without any Congressional approval. Does it feel like democracy to you?
Just like the vast majority of Americans. Of course, none of the things this group is complaining about have anything to do with the rights of black people either.
It's also easy to guess someone isn't a black person because black people would be aware of the litany of human rights abuses that were common and systemically applied in the US prior to the 1960s (and some still today).
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit—they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response” -- Elon Musk
Which is a shame, because if you questioned the quote a tiny bit and listened to the whole segment[1], it's far less damning that you make it out to be. Before that quote he even says "I believe in empathy, I think you should care about other people". He's not against empathy as a whole, he's against "too much" empathy, to the point that "you suicide yourself". That in my view, is entirely reasonable. If you had infinite empathy and were running a store, and you let yourself be shoplifted to bankruptcy, I think most people agree that would be a character flaw.
So he positioned himself such that you can't say "he has no empathy", but he can still use "too much empathy" as a reason for anything?
> he's against "too much" empathy, to the point that "you suicide yourself"
His recent comments against all DEI programs(while implementing his own DEI programs and being a DEI hire himself) seem to show that this is an exaggeration
>So he positioned himself such that you can't say "he has no empathy", but he can still use "too much empathy" as a reason for anything?
In other words, he's not an absolutist, which seems fine.
>His recent comments against all DEI programs(while implementing his own DEI programs and being a DEI hire himself) seem to show that this is an exaggeration
Sounds like you're already convinced that he's a Bad Person, so anything he says is going to be further proof of that. Even if he said something utterly anodyne like "government should be smaller", you'd probably respond with "well given what he's doing at DOGE, that's obviously him saying that he wants to dismantle the federal government as we know it".
I don't know what "Bad Person" means, I was just pointing out the ridiculousness of saying "he only wants to get rid of empathy in the extreme when it leads to (essentially) suicide" when he's actively working to dismantle programs that benefit the economy just because he perceives them as having some modicum of "empathy" related to them.
I'm also not sure what your comment about DOGE is trying to say. He has commented many times on wanting smaller government, and is working actively to achieve that with DOGE. What am I missing there?
The contention is usually that empathetic policies that favour outgroups can be exploited by that outgroup to benefit themselves. For example, a universal policy of hiring from all groups can be subverted by allowing in a group that hires only their own members.
There isn't enough evidence to speculate on his mental state IMO, but he is a prescribed ketamine user which means there are a plethora of possible causes.
"Musk has fathered fourteen children, one of whom died as an infant. He had six children with his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, who he met while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child Nevada Musk died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks."
"One of world’s richest man Elon Musk’s kids does not want to be related to their biological father anymore. Born a boy, Xavier Alexander Musk, has filed a plea seeking a change in her name in accordance with her new gender identity. Xavier had filed the petition seeking both a name change and a new birth certificate that reflects her new gender identity with the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica in April 2022.
The reason for the name change in the documents is mentioned as “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”"
"Elon’s father Errol Musk fathered two children with his former stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, who is 41 years his junior."
"n a recent podcast interview, Errol Musk said his son Elon had not “been a good dad” to his children."
“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon, 46, told the magazine. “You have no idea.”
Elon added: “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil… He will plan evil.”
“You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done,” Elon said, though he never went into specifics about what his father allegedly did. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done… It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”
“It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood… It may sound good. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery.”
"One does see a mother turning the children against the father successfully. "
"It's thought Grimes is keen to move in with the mothers of Musk's other children and raise them all together in one big house, however, most recently she's hit out at her billionaire ex publicly about his parenting.
"Plz respond about our child's medical crisis. I am sorry to do this publicly but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation. This requires immediate attention", she wrote on X.
"If you don't want to talk to me can you please designate or hire someone who can so that we can move forward on solving this. This is urgent, Elon.""
Nothing wrong with quoting it in a supportive fashion. It is an entirely reasonable take. Especially if you listen to the entire point he made, and not cherry pick the part that makes it sound bad (intentionally, of course)
If you are letting “empathy” drive your civilization to ruin, it is no longer empathy. That is the point.
The claim that "empathy" is driving Western civilization to ruin is highly dubious and presented without evidence.
In contrast, we know that lack of empathy directly leads to atrocities:
> In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy. —Captain G. M. Gilbert
Amusing, a quote on "empathy" from a Zionist who was against desegregation.
"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
It's pretty easy to judge the US for what is happening right now, we certainly deserve it, but the decline of civic freedoms and liberalism is a global phenomenon.
We are experiencing a global assault on truth because truth provides a foundation on which to judge those in power.
Social media is the powerful's most potent weapon against truth. When social media combines with privatized intelligence companies, it creates a tool that can be used to divide and conquer societies, turning one half of the people against the other, deputizing the ignorant or vulnerable to fight for despots.
Perhaps, but from where I'm sitting the effects seem to be much more pronounced in the US than (say) here in Australia or in the UK. Americans seem to have gone for it in a big way.
Of course that may well be because the assault is concentrated more on the US. Or perhaps US society was just primed for it in some way. Distrust in the government has been building there for a very long time, and while trust in government is stretched in other places, it's not completely broken.
But that belies the real contention of what exactly is the truth? What is even more fundamental that has been lost is trust in nation and institutions due to a growing values divide. We must first trust before we can accept in good faith. Perhaps in some sense we should be thankful that we now have societies robust enough that even if major institutions lose legitimacy with half the population we don't get a civil war.
Commercial interests have been assaulting truth since before I was born, nearly half a century ago. The methods for doing so have steadily improved. Social media briefly hindered it, before being co-opted thoroughly to advance it.
Even where the truth hasn't been completely buried, finding what's true and what's spewed from the firehose of bullshit is a time consuming and difficult task, one that definitely doesn't scale to very many of life's decisions at all.
Culminating this trend is the rise of the extreme right across the globe. This is tightly linked to politically motivated disinformation coupled with whatever the techniques are that are forming closed mind cult-like behaviours.
Maybe it's not an assault on truth - maybe truth is just collateral damage - but I don't think I could even pose it as a question to ask if you could convince me these things are not happening.
This is not sounding like something modern then, if anything it's sounding like it's always been bad and we're only now recognizing(or having the channels to openly discuss) how bad it is.
The anti-intellectual fascist Georgescu arising from obscurity to a near winning position in Romania due to social media should be evidence enough.
Trumpism is a cause in itself, but it's also a symptom of a deeper cause that is afflicting more than only the United States.
The unintended consequence of social media, especially profit-driven social media infested with troll farms and bots from various governments (including China, Russia, US, Iran, Israel, to name but a few countries that have been caught), is the destruction of trust and community[0].
Do a search of USAID and Civicus and you'll see a bunch of partnerships throughout the years. Most funding from USAID goes through NGOs, so you're not going to see a direct funding, but it's pretty clear they are in the same space as overt USAID funding targets like Internews.
Everything is out there. Just because you don't want to believe it doesn't mean it's not real. USAID sends money through its NGOs and it makes its way through partnerships and funding to orgs like Civicus who is clearly involved in propaganda just like Internews.
> Civicus, an international non-profit, puts country alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia
I doubt it. But not for the reasons you're probably thinking.
I spend most of my time in Slovenia and Croatia, but I travel to Serbia frequently as it's "in the neighborhood" and medical/dental treatment there is top-notch and much cheaper than anywhere else.
I can state with absolute confidence that Serbia is one of the most freedom-loving countries in the world, and Serbs are ultra-zealous guardians of their personal freedoms. In Serbia, there are very few restrictions that impinge on one's day-to-day life, and even the laws are along the lines of recommendations. You can buy any prescription drug OTC; you can smoke in just about any restaurant; you can send your 10-year-old son to the cornerstore to buy you a bottle of whisky. You can also speak out against the government -- and quite loudly, at that -- just as people have been doing over recent weeks/months:
I can think of nothing that's permissible in the USA or UK that's not possible in Serbia. (But I can think of many things that are possible in Serbia yet illegal or impossible in the UK or US!) All things considered, it feels much more free than any part of the USA. Serbian cops are friendly, there's no ubiquitous middleman grifting or gatekeeping, and one is basically free to do and say what one likes.
If you just walk around and tell people that you're a Kosovan, or post about it online, they'll think you're either a militant/reactionary agitator or a lunatic. You might get some dirty looks, but you're not going to get thrown into prison.
If you're talking about taking real political action, sure, that would be a bad idea. But I can think of a lot of similar things (effectively things that aim to destabilize the government or foment civil unrest) that are similarly illegal in places like Germany/UK/etc.
There is much more to the state of civil rights than the behaviour of the police towards foreign tourists. For some "real" issues see for example the Amnesty International short report of the state of human rights in Serbia 2023: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...
Those are hardly real issues -- the summary at that link mostly attempts to relitigate an old war and shame Serbia for perceived associations with Russia.
And how about this point? "Violence against women and girls: During the year, at least 27 women were victims of femicide."
27 out of how many millions? What's the per capita rate compared to the US and UK?
I used to have some serbian staff, and this seems mostly true, but they had one hell of a time contracting globally.
Basically in a lot of countries you either are a FT equivalent and get bennies or you are not an FTE and get nada.
But the serbs had some social outrage over foreign companies contracting to their citizens but not paying tax in that country. From what I gather its due to healthcare costs.
So they did something, (difficult for me to ingest as a foreigner) but it seems that either:
1. You have to register and pay corporate tax in Serbia, then you can hire locals without issue
2. The staff member has to register as a business and pay corporate + payroll tax
or they do it dodgy and hope the tax man doesnt ruin their life.
This had the effect of creating a cottage industry of middlemen who take a slice between employer and employee which is probably the least freedom oriented outcome possible.
That's not unlike IR35 rules in the UK, where the government got sick of contractors acting as employees behind a limited company veil, paying a lot less tax overall. Companies wishing to hire contractors must absolutely not treat them like employees, those that are must be employed by an umbrella company and pay regular payroll taxes.
HMRC, who pushed for the law, is however exempt and hires contractors the old way, outrageously enough.
I heard about this today, things are weird in the US as this guy has a green card but it was being revoked for speech the government didn't like and apparently not anything criminal:
https://x.com/TheFIREorg/status/1898841858983239814
More details: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-authorities-arrest-pales... and https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/9/mahmoud-khalil-stude... (This last article mentions his green card apparently being revoked.)
It's questionable whether his green card has actually been revoked either. Supposedly that requires proceedings to go through an immigration court and be approved by a judge, and as far as anyone knows that hasn't happened yet.
Which would mean he's just being detained without cause in some unspecified location on no basis
> It's questionable whether his green card has actually been revoked either. Supposedly that requires proceedings to go through an immigration court and be approved by a judge, and as far as anyone knows that hasn't happened yet.
From this article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/9/mahmoud-khalil-stude... it says "A US immigration enforcement agent said Khalil’s permanent residency was also being revoked, according to the protest leader’s lawyer."
News coverage seems to suggest immigrants can be detained while moved to revoke their green cards are made, but it’s incredibly troubling that no one seems to know what’s up, the government agents arresting him seemed to think he had a student visa and in general there is so little visibility
Trump has stated that citizenship is now Calvinball, only he knows the rules. If they can disappear a permanent resident they can disappear you, too.
it kinda always was calvinball, we just had administrations less keen on pulling out the cruelest interpretation of the laws.
You're suggesting there was a previous administration that rounded up lawful permanent residents without court orders on US soil, on the charge that they committed forbidden speech?
previous administrations have done way worse clear all the way to fdr imprisoning citizens and wilson imprisoning debs.
I don't recall anything FDR did that called the citizenship of anyone into question. Debs was tried and convicted by a court.
> Debs was tried and convicted by a court.
oh yes. and he broke a law passed by congress. that makes it even MORE appalling, as all three branches were complicit in an egregious breach of the constitution, not a single one stopped to hold the line
Wasn't the internment of Japanese a thing back then?
Yes, but FDR's executive order allowed the military to order the exclusion of anyone from any place. The actual thing a person could be arrested for was passed unanimously by Congress to support the EO and enforced by courts. Even during a real national emergency, nobody was disappearing Japanese people without due process. Korematsu was arrested and tried and convicted and their conviction was upheld by courts of appeal and the Supreme Court. At the time FDR, Congress, the Court, and everybody else thought they were doing due process. There's a lot of daylight between that and what Trump is doing.
> that makes it even MORE appalling, as all three branches were complicit in an egregious breach of the constitution
Congress and SCOTUS are playing calvinball with the Constitution (and civil rights) too.
> Supposedly that requires proceedings to go through an immigration court and be approved by a judge, and as far as anyone knows that hasn't happened yet.
The administration is pretending to goof up following court orders or simply ignoring them, and is lying in court, repeatedly - claiming they "don't know" who is in charge at DOGE.
ICE was arresting people who turned out to be citizens, shuttling them across the country so make it harder for their lawyers to contact them.
Why are you expecting the administration to follow procedures for deporting someone here with a green card?
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Hey, the government can decide whether something qualifies as grounds to revoke a green card or not, that's totally legitimate and I support it.
But, once they do, the guy is still entitled to a lawyer. Vanishing the guy and telling the lawyer that they aren't allowed to know where their client is or whether he's still alive is not legitimate.
> Hey, the government can decide whether something qualifies as grounds to revoke a green card or not, that's totally legitimate and I support it.
No, it can't. It must go through a process which affords the green card holder due process. There are specific grounds which are required to be met to remove someone's green card.
And it absolutely cannot be revoked because the government disfavors ones political speech. That's an absolutely fundamental violation of the first amendment and our right to free speech.
And who defines that process? Oh right, the government.
It's really not as simple as "hey, the government can decide." To have a green card revoked, the person must be an active member of a group at war with the US or have committed some kind of fraud. DHS must initiate it (not the State Department, despite Rubio's statements), and it must be approved by an immigration judge.
So far all we've heard about this process and the justification is "Contact the White House."
There are more causes for revocation in the law than just those two.
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"We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported"
Twitter post by the current secretary of state Marco Rubio, specifically relating to this exact topic.
https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1898858967532441945
Additionally, here's the AP article that Marco Rubio linked to:
> Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, *the agent said they were revoking that too*, according to the lawyer.
https://apnews.com/article/columbia-university-mahmoud-khali...
> The student, Mahmoud Khalil at the university's School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents at his university residence on Saturday, the Student Workers of Columbia union said in a statement. His wife is an American citizen, eight months pregnant, according to news reports, and he holds a U.S. permanent residency green card, the union said.
Yeah. It says nothing about revoking his greencard or deporting him, just that he holds one.
> Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a link on X to a news article about Mr. Khalil’s arrest and issued a broad promise: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/nyregion/ice-arrests-pale...
I don't consider twitter posts as anything more than the ramblings of the deranged, and don't really see a twitter post as evidence that someone already got deported considering how much politicians lie on there.
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thanks pookie
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The does not seem to be, or it has not been offered so far
There is evidence that the group that Khalil headed did endorse Hamas and distributed pro-Hamas propaganda. Whether this news article is true or if it's propaganda remains to be seen.
https://nypost.com/2025/03/09/us-news/ice-arrests-palestinia...
https://nypost.com/2025/03/09/us-news/who-is-mahmoud-khalil-...
> There is evidence that the group that Khalil headed did endorse Hamas and distributed pro-Hamas propaganda
There is nothing in those articles that says he supported Hamas or that he distributed pro-Hamas propaganda.
"He has remained active in recent disruptive protests, including last week’s takeover of the Milstein Library at Barnard College. Videos and photographs posted on X depict him holding a bullhorn near the library entrance and engaged in discussion with school administrators.
That protest featured violent propaganda flyers that purportedly came directly from the “Hamas Media Office,” including one pamphlet titled “Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” which justified the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people — and in which women were repeatedly raped, whole families were executed and 251 hostages were taken to the Gaza Strip.
Others at the Barnard library takeover passed around trading card-like photos of notorious Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon last September."
"Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents aided a Columbia -owned apartment inhabited by Mahmoud Khalil, who fronts a radical group, Columbia United Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which sympathizes with terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and calls for the “end of Western Civilization.”"
Whether or not this is true, I can't say at this point or if this is just propaganda. But at the very least it does say that his group sympathizes with terror groups and if that's true, then it makes him eligible for deportation.
Huh? This just reinforces what I said. He isn’t accused of distributing pro-Hams propaganda or saying he supports them. At best you have unsubstantiated claims on X that someone distributed some images at an event he was also at. That isn’t very conclusive and likely won’t hold up in a normal court of law.
He is the leader of a group that is being accused of endorsing Hamas and distributing pro-Hamas literature. If true, then him being the leader absolutely means he is responsible and should be held responsible. Unless you don't think that Trump should be held responsible for the actions of Musk.
Obviously a newspaper article isn't enough evidence and even the veracity of the article remains in question, the assumption is that there will be actual evidence. If true, he should be deported. If false, then he deserves to go free. It's pretty cut and dry.
Let's be clear here because you're trying to muddy the waters.
There is no evidence that Khalil endorsed Hamas or distributed pro-Hamas propaganda.
Those articles are simply using the "guilt by association" tactic and it's disgraceful.
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I don’t think the article even was so bold as to say his organization distributed pro Hamas flyer. They say someone at the protest did and leave it to your inference that it was the org he leads
If he didn't endorse Hamas or terrorist activities, he should not be deported.
He has still committed crimes by illegally occupying parts of the university.
I have a pretty weak opinion of the nypost
Lines like this certainly don’t help:
> He’s been a regular fixture on news programs discussing the group’s disruptive efforts, including an interview on Quds News Network done completely in Arabic
Why is it relevant that he did an interview in Arabic? Like seriously?
As others have said the rest reads as just guilt by association.
To be maximally fair to the other position it has made me reluctant to protest against Israel despite being broadly against them. There are too many people in that movement who are clearly racist, but it’s also unfortunate that pro Israeli forces campaign hard to conflate opposition to Israel with opposition to Jewish people
Ah, neat, so if the government decides it disfavors your speech it just has to say "that speech supports a terrorist organization", and it can deport anyone it wants first amendment be damned?
Neat trick!
The government has no obligation to allow any and all non-citizens who seek to immigrate to the US. If the immigrant is engaging in unfavorable or distasteful activities, the government certainly has the right to not allow them to enter the country or become citizens. It's not just for endorsing terrorism, if any immigrant commits a heinous crime, then can and will also be deported, so it makes sense to me.
A permanent resident is not someone who is seeking to immigrate to the US. They have already immigrated. That's what permanent residency status is, and that's why there's a much higher bar for the removal of permanent residency than there is for a visa, or the *application* for a permanent residency.
The government can have wide latitude in who it chooses to grant permanent residency to. It cannot, however, flippantly revoke that status (and especially not over disfavored speech)
To think it should be allowed to do so is to either fundamentally misunderstand what a "permanent resident" is, or to callous disregard all of our first amendment rights.
You are wrong. I'm someone who immigrated to the US so I'm deeply aware of the situation.
Permanent resident isn't the same as a citizen. Until you become a citizen there are still limitations to the things you can do, for example vote, go on a jury, etc. And you can lose your PR if you stay out of the US too long or if you commit certain crimes. And endorsing terrorism absolutely can get you stripped of your PR.
Once you are a naturalized citizen, then the bar for losing your citizenship is much higher, usually you need to have lied during the immigration application. But even commiting an especially heinous crime won't get your stripped of your citizenship.
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I'd heard from sources I consider reputable that all allegations of physically blocking doorways were made up and the protestors remained outdoors and that furthermore, the Israeli students perceived the existence of the Palestinian flag in their line of sight, anywhere, ever, to constitute intimidation and discrimination regardless of the context.
What are some good sources to reconcile your claims with these other claims and find out the truth?
> Pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University early Tuesday charged the same campus building that students advocating for racial justice occupied in the 1960s, a significant escalation at the elite institution that launched dozens of campus demonstrations across the world.
> “We will not leave until Columbia meets every one of our demands,” one of the students yelled from a balcony window. The demands include university divestment from Israel, disclosure of Columbia investments and protections for protesters.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/30/pro-palestinian-col...
Why post a comment like yours that can be disproven within 2 seconds of Googling?
There was literally a song written about this by Macklemore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hind%27s_Hall
I'm curious what you think your sources say? You originally claimed that this protest leader participated in the act of selectively denying access to campus facilities for Jewish people. That Politico article does not support your claim.
I did not claim that he directly participated in that. If you simply google his name, in every article the word 'leader' is used to describe him in relation to the Columbia protests, protests which did include such acts.
You still haven't cited any sources that support your claim.
What claim?
He was a leader of protests at Columbia which involved physically blocking Jewish students from entering classes and other forms of overt discrimination and intimidation directed at Jewish and Israeli students.
This potential bullshit.
Which specific thing are you questioning?
That he was a leader of protests at Columbia? That the protests involved physically blocking Jewish students? That the protests involved intimidation directed at Jewish and Israeli students?
It was a full sentence. Try backing it up with facts. This shouldn't take a 7 comment deep thread to handle, unless maybe you are full of shit and want to bury that fact with some of your bullshit.
You are trolling or I suppose you are just upset that your guy is being deported. If there's something specific you want me to find a source for, let me know.
I'm trolling? For asking you to source one claim? This is the sixth time you've been asked to provide sources. Two people have asked. Your unsourced comment is flagged. The one source you provided does not match your claims afaict.
Ok you want the source for one of the claims?
Here's Al Jazeera calling Mahmoud Khalil a "student leader of Columbia protests":
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/9/mahmoud-khalil-stude...
You can find many other mainstream sources calling him a "leader" by simply doing a Google News search for the term "Mahmoud Khalil leader".
This is something you could have taken 2 seconds to Google. This is why you're trolling and acting in bad faith. Regardless of our discussions here, Mahmoud is being deported and many more are to come according to statement put out by the White House.
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1899151926777749618
That is, again, not backing up your full claim, that the protests selectively denied access to campus facilities to Jewish students.
> For asking you to source one claim?
> not backing up your full claim
Does this help you understand your issue now?
You can't just source half a sentence. You sourced maybe 1/3 of one claim. The least important third, too.
> 1/3 of one claim
This should be your clue that there are multiple claims which is why I asked you which ones you wanted evidence for.
Still no sources, just excuses.
I appreciate the source and I'll get back to you with a detailed reply of my own once I've finished reading it and searching for corroborating details on the people who were there. Watch this space.
I will check back but there are literally pictures and videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y16rEIXWcGs
I would encourage you to think more critically. If you organized a peaceful protest should you be held liable for other peoples actions? He was apparently deported for speech, not violence according to the parent comment.
Well, it depends. What was the protest against?
Restraining others from entering or leaving is no longer "peaceful".
By all means, show us the video of him doing this then. Or is he being detained for the actions of somebody else?
I have no idea if there's footage of him personally doing such things, but he's a leader of the protests, and one of the people negotiating on behalf of the other protesters with the university. He is most definitely taking part in occupying part of campus illegally, so his ass should be deported.
A permanent resident should have a regular trial if warranted. Getting arrested first by immigration agency is the issue here.
> There's no issue with deporting someone like that and it is within the government's power to do so.
I feel like I know the answer to this but do you also believe we should just deport everyone that commits any crime irrespective of whether it's a misdemeanor or felony?
Non-citizens should not be participating in or fomenting political protests, especially ones that involve harassment, intimidation, destruction of private property, occupations of buildings, (all of which occurred throughout the Columbia protests).
If you are talking about deporting someone for getting a speeding ticket, that would be pretty draconian unless it was something very dangerous like doing 25 over in a school zone during school hours, etc.
> If you are talking about deporting someone for getting a speeding ticket, that would be pretty draconian unless it was something very dangerous like doing 25 over in a school zone during school hours, etc.
Lol sure ya let's deport people for speeding in a school zone. Forget due process or the justice system at all for these heathens nah just ship them off immediately. Like are these real words that reflect you're serious adult position on this? Do you really not have any sense that what you're saying is insane?
Deportation and having a formal judicial process are not mutually exclusive. It seems that you're not thinking very clearly about this topic.
Yup totally I'm the one not thinking clearly lololol.
For felonies, absolutely. For felonies and misdemeanors in the furtherance of political goals (as is the case here), absolutely. Otherwise you leave yourself wide open to political interference by foreign nations on your own soil.
The mistake that every single person makes that advocates for extreme measures is they assume the arbiter of those measures will always be on their side. Historically it's literally never been the case but who knows maybe you'll be part of the first group to always be in the good graces of dear leader. I wish you good luck!
Deporting foreign political agents isn't extreme though, it's been standard practice worldwide for thousands of years. It's actually less extreme than what has been practiced in many locales for dealing with foreign agents: torture, summary execution, etc.
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> Publicly expressing sympathy for a declared terrorist group...
Did he express sympathy for Hamas or killings of Israelis? From what I can tell he didn't and I don't see any accusations of that in the media.
There's been a concerted effort to frame any support for the people of Palestine as support for Hamas, and any criticism of Israeli policy as anti-semitism. It's not even uncommon to see it on Hacker News.
This man publicly stood in Montreal and celebrated October 7 in a grand party.
https://tnc.news/2025/01/18/montreal-anti-israel-repeat-oct-...
The content of this article is in stark contrast to the information I'm seeing from other posters as well as relatively non-partisan sources such as the BBC and Wikipedia. I've done some preliminary fact-checking to try and gauge how much I trust it. Other HN users may find this helpful.
Media Bias Fact Check report on True North:
> These media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/true-north-centre-for-public-...
The linked article hinges entirely on the content of a few tweets by twitter user @l3v1at4an (https://x.com/l3v1at4an). The twitter user almost exclusively posts about Palestine, Hamas and Hezbullah, with a distinct anti-Islamic and pro-Jewish slant. The subtitles in the videos are translated from arabic and supplied by this twitter user.
Googling for 'Mahmoud Khalil "repeat the strike"' or 'Mahmoud Khalil "kidnap the soldiers"' produces only the True North article as a result.
The above is enough to raise suspicions about the translation quality in the video. Would be great if someone with better knowledge of Arabic was able to verify or refute the translated subtitles.
What do you call what's being done to him if not imprisonment? What are "migrant privileges"?
If expressing sympathy for a group disliked by the politicians currently in power makes people a "national security threat" there are tens of millions of national security threats in this country, many of them citizens, and they all apparently deserve to disappear like this guy has?
Citizens cannot be deported. In general, if you are a migrant to a country, you are a guest until you become a citizen. This is not rocket science. My own family went through this process.
If an American citizen is being jailed for speaking in favor of Hamas, we can have a conversation.
As i said, deportation is not a punishment.
The brain gymnastics of Trump supporters arr absolutely amazing, one hand they could stop shouting freedom of speech everytime someone (a private entity) didn't allow them to spew racism on their platform, on the other hand deporting (the government) someone for their political views is fine because they are a security threat and deportation isn't really punishment (being banned on a social media platform on the other hand...).
At least be honest and say "I don't care because it's speech I disagree with"
I saw this comment on Bluesky yesterday, and it really resonated with me after watching a "totally moderate" conservative friend incrementally tolerate more and more obviously evil things:
> A conservative will pretend to believe whatever they think is necessary to get to their only goal: hurting you. That is the sum total of how they function. Pretending they have morals, ethics, or beliefs actively plays into their hands.
"Owning the libs" is pretty much the only thing needed to unite them.
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I'm always sceptical about both sides of these sorts of "watchlists" and "violations" because it is always dependant on who's who.
A trivial example: is criticism of Israel fair or antisemitism?
I would imagine the current US "crackdown on antisemitism" being the cause of being added to the watchlist, which is fair in my opinion
I don't see how terminating employees or ending foreign aid being a decline in Civic freedoms
And what about the active hostilities towards trans people, who often can't get passports anymore (I personally know one person who has this problem) and can't update their names and gender entries anymore.
What about the demolishing of government agencies that DOGE is trying (and sometimes succeding) in? You call it "termination of employees", but don't seem to consider that they tried to fire jugdes who restrained their power. This looks to me like a plain powergrab. I hope I don't need to tell you where something like this leads, but I am certain it's not going to be democratic or respectful of civic freedoms.
As a non-straight non-binary (neither cis-male or -female) person, the US is currently just about the last place I want to be. If the current trend continues, then I genuinely fear for the lives of some of my friends.
I'm not aware of any new rules this year that has made anyone suddenly ineligible for a passport.
There are new rules making it hard for trans people to get an accurate passport.
This would make more sense. It's a very different problem if trans people "can't get passports anymore" vs being able to get their preferred gender on a passport.
Of course, the use of the term 'preferred gender' is the issue here (I don't mean with your reply), since to trans people such as myself, it's literally who we are.
Imagine someone that has transitioned and passes as the sex they identify as, now only having the option of getting a passport as the sex they were assigned as birth.
Practically, for many, that simply isn't an option.
Someone asked more why it was not an option but deleted their comment before they could answer, so here is my reply:
There is a issue with fear and using the passport.
Border agents have pretty much complete discretion and control at all borders in all countries against non-citizens. Any border agent can deny entry for any reason, or subject someone to extra searches, maybe strip searches, without any consequence or any recourse from the traveler.
Given the amount of transphobic people, this is an issue. Imagine if gay people had to get passports in the 90s or 80s that marked their orientation?
The second issue is a huge issue as well, that could easily lead to an increase in suicides.
As I see it, it is an option but there is a cost. You're making an absolute statement when it seems like it's that you view the practical cost of choosing the option as too high. Which is fair but you're refusing to explain the costs. Is it physical harm? Is it emotional harm? Is it future inconvenience? Is it fear of future physical harm? Etc. Etc.
The risk of physical harm and harassment goes up significantly, imagine a transwoman trying to travel anywhere with a passport that indicates male, they can be detained, searched for any reason. That's just one obvious example. There are plenty of other instances where physical harm might increase, and yes emotional harm is a big issue as well, not least because it's a clear attack on dignity.
I'm not aware of any such rules, could you please point to one exactly?
And could you define the word accurate in this context?
> I'm not aware of any such rules, could you please point to one exactly?
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/transgender-and-nonbinar...
> And could you define the word accurate in this context?
First, could you clarify if you're a conservative or not? I won't be willing to engage with you further if you are.
I am not, but I'm also not willing to engage with someone with what I consider to be a bigoted view.
> I'm also not willing to engage with someone with what I consider to be a bigoted view.
Yeah, out of the two of us that ain't me lol.
Cheers.
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> and transgenders are to blame for pushing things too far
What did I just read? Do you honestly believe that <0.1% of the population is "taking things too far" and need rights taken away from them.
Is that something you actually believe, and if so how do you justify it to yourself?
> To give you an example, that "We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children" chant in NYC was intolerable.
Sure, but is a measured response to "one small group saying something edgy at one rally" -> "take away their rights"?
I don't think so, but I'd be interested to hear why you think so.
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I don't see how terminating employees or ending foreign aid being a decline in Civic freedoms
Ask the question differently. What kind of administration guts 70-150k jobs in a few weeks and cuts foreign aid? So many want to say "don't draw a bridge between that question and to a decline in civic freedoms". Fine, I won't draw the bridge, it seems to appease many people's idea of themselves. We'll just keep waiting and reading about more and more evil.
> The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.
> The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.
> The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.
Okay, so there's nothing to do with actual civil freedoms. I dislike orange man as much as the next person, but this article is garbage.
You think a change from membership to non-membership in international civic bodies has nothing to do with civic freedoms?
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Bradford is the UK's City of Culture
Rapid decline? Relative to whom? Virtually all other countries have far less respect for free speech.
> Virtually all other countries have far less respect for free speech.
Citation needed?(and maybe a refresher on Chomsky's propaganda model)
Relative to itself. And there is far more to civic freedom than freedom of speech.
Nothing has changed about civic freedoms in the US with the new administration. If you read the article, their reasons are a bunch of things that have NOTHING to do with civic freedoms. It cites reducing the size of the federal workforce for example. This is just a political activist group that is falsely pitched as some kind of civic freedoms watchlist.
On the other hand the EU has serious issues with civic freedoms - censorship, suppression of political parties, cancelling elections with results they don’t like, and more. But I’m sure this group doesn’t mind those actual civic freedom issues.
Mass government purges - including unlawfully firing people who oversee the legality of government actions - is an indicator of deteriorating civic freedoms as institutions meant for oversight and public services are dismantled.
Journalism is the art of massaging a press release (from a politically motivated organization that nobody has ever heard of and which doesn't actually do anything) into a statement of fact. The average person (who has a seventh-grade reading level, mind you) has absolutely no defense against this sort of low-effort appeal to "authority".
TL;DR: It's nonsense. They're manufacturing dissent.
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Regarding the Washington Post:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/business/media/the-washin...
What does the editorial decision of a newspaper's owner, which runs counter to the unconcealed biases of many who remain gainfully employed at the paper, have to do with legal freedoms of association and expression?
If you don't pay attention now it will end up there though if the course continues, hence the watchlist.
If it's true that "criminal agitators on the left" are causing chaos and intimidating voters with no consequence, doesn't that support rather than refute the point that the US is experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms? The watchlist the source article reports is describing a derivative; if you go to their site, they agree with your intuition that Pakistan is in a substantially worse civil rights tier than the US.
Yes exactly I agree with you about the rate of change.
The existence of violence doesn't mean that civic rights aren't deteriorating. In fact, it's an indicator.
Washington Post is owned by a billionaire who has gutted the newsroom and said that only pro-capitalist stances will be allowed. Reddit has recently come out with a ban on literally the word "Luigi", and has stated that you can be banned simply for upvoting comments which they deem promote violence (the criteria for this are vague). The Hacker News comments sections are usually filled with apologists for Musk and Trump, and only recently have there been more comments pushing back on the "they're saving democracy" narrative.
We're entering a new era of McCarthyism as pro-Palestine activists are being targeted for expulsion and deportation. Trump has floated the idea of moving US citizens to prisons outside of the country. Musk called unmasking DOGE employees "illegal."
> criminal agitators on the left are intimidating voters on the right
Sure. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-t...
Washington Post's editorializing is a free speech matter and has nothing to do with the first amendment, since it's a private actor, which is the story we were all told during covid and the Floyd riots.
Which wouldn't be as concerning if he hadn't gutted the newsroom first.
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Of course you can't actually engage with the substance of my argument, so you settle for pedantry. Tells me all I need to know.
Just out of curiosity how much do you happen to know about what civil rights tier Pakistan is on?
Quite a lot. There was a big news story in 2023, which I followed pretty closely, where a popular ex-PM was ambushed in a courthouse by military forces before being arrested, tried, and imprisoned. He and his supporters believe, I think reasonably, that Pakistan should be understood as being in a state of undeclared martial law.
I'm familiar with their blasphemy laws for a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_in_Pakistan
My family is intimately familiar with them but I guess the larger point I was making is that the trends in the US have been following the Pakistani arc for quite a while. There’s not really a one-to-one comparison with the blasphemy laws. Probably a better comparison would be like child pornography, or something
Can describe in detail how you, a Pakistani, think America should relax its child pornography laws?
I’m an American of Pak origin. My point was that blasphemers there (PK) are treated judicially and socially like child pornographers here when plenty of actual child porn over there goes unpunished.
Asking people to amend those laws over there gets the exact same reaction you just had.
I have no problem with the comparison. DRC, Pakistan and Serbia are moderately good on net, with most having a good life and a minority being absolutely screwed. The idea that their average level of quality isn't similar to America's after adjusting for purchasing power is an insult to the many people living in them who are striving for good with a remarkable degree of success.
There are a great many academic data sources justifying this in all cases but if you still disfavour them and would be swayed by an informal documentary instead, I can recommend the Miracle of Pakistani Tekken as the best short-form documentary on how their people are as well-meaning as you or I:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2SQgjYmVYY
.
[edit] I mixed up the DRC with it's northern neighbour, the RoC. The RoC is an adequate place but the DRC is a hellhole that doesn't belong on this list.
You’ve got to be kidding. The DRC is an unfree authoritarian state and one of the poorest countries in the world to boot. It’s in a completely different tier from Serbia.
You mean the other Congo (RoC). DRC refers to the smaller, moderately good one that isn't currently being invaded by the Rwandan army.
No, that's backwards. DRC is the big one, RoC is the small one.
I feel so incredibly embarrassed at my mistake here and understand the outrage.
The DRC is two, maybe three orders of magnitude below Serbia in living standards and civil liberties and is no basis for comparison.
Don't worry, the professional civil rights NGO got it wrong too.
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Almost as if book burning isn’t that big of a right in the grand scheme of things.
> America is in a league of its own when it comes to speech
Try boycotting Israel, you might go to jail or lose your green card for speaking out about it. American free speech (in the way that matters, not in the way of theater) is under threat and has been with every successive government for quite a long time.
Who has gone to jail for boycotting Israel in the US?
Every single person at my college and online won't shut up for 10 seconds about boycotting Israel, I think they are fine.
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When I look through the Civicus Annual Report: https://www.civicus.org/documents/reports-and-publications/a...
USAID is not listed amongst the top 13 donors. In fact not seen any evidence it was funded by USAID at all.
USAID does most of its funding through NGOs. IF you search you'll see plenty of partnerships between USAID and Civicus.
It all comes back to money
Or the fact that Trump defunded the organization that monitors for human rights violations is predictable...
Almost like it was written down in a plan for a project somewhere...
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> Not one of these things has the least to do with civic freedoms.
These things have to do with whether democracies follow the rule of law. Civic freedoms tend to go away when democracies become authoritarian regimes.
> USAid didn't even exist before 1961
It was created by Congress in 1961, but destroyed by the ire of one man in 2025, without any Congressional approval. Does it feel like democracy to you?
> It was created by Congress in 1961, but destroyed by the ire of one man in 2025, without any Congressional approval. Does it feel like democracy to you?
Are you suggesting what he did was unconstitutional? If so, Congress can (and should) absolutely impeach him for it and make him defend his actions in court. The President is not above the law.
Or did Congress give the President the authority he needed to do exactly what he did? In which case, what is more democratic than a body of democratically elected represetitives voting democratically to pass a law which establishes something under the control (and disgression) of a democratically elected executive?
Have you not been paying attention? The president is above the law according to the current Supreme Court, and Congress is stuffed full of sycophants that will never impeach him.
Apparently I'm not paying attention because I seem to have missed that Supreme Court ruling. Can you link it for me?
If our democratically elected representatives in Congress will not impeach the President, then they are evidently content with how he has performed his duties. Of course, the next Congress is free to have a different opinion and proceed with an impeachment. They can even impeach Supreme Court justices who have failed in their duties. If that is what you want, I suggest you vote in accordance with that in the 2026 election.
Also, impeachment is not the only mechanism which members of Congress can use to hold the President accountable. They are free to try and convict the President of criminal misconduct in court.
You should pay more attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40847963
Congress won't do any of those other actions either, because as mentioned, they're chock-full of sycophants.
>These things have to do with whether democracies follow the rule of law. Civic freedoms tend to go away when democracies become authoritarian regimes.
Nobody complained when Woodrow Wilson and FDR destroyed the rule of law to remake the federal government. Do you understand that what the progress movement stands for is fundamentally at odds with the constitution, which has for some time only been the de-jure rule of law?
>It was created by Congress in 1961, but destroyed by the ire of one man in 2025, without any Congressional approval. Does it feel like democracy to you?
Who won the election?
USAid didn't even exist before 1961 - I dread to imagine what it must have been like to live in America in those dark days before nineteen sixty-one.
I'm guessing you are not black?
Just like the vast majority of Americans. Of course, none of the things this group is complaining about have anything to do with the rights of black people either.
I'm sorry, but did you just dismiss discrimination against racial minorities... Because they are minorities?
No, I just pointed out that it's easy to guess someone isn't a minority because minorities aren't common by definition.
It's also easy to guess someone isn't a black person because black people would be aware of the litany of human rights abuses that were common and systemically applied in the US prior to the 1960s (and some still today).
Do you think people who are not black are unaware of the history of black people in America?
Not all of them, but your comment showed a startling lack of awareness of us history.
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Civicus annual report is here: https://www.civicus.org/documents/reports-and-publications/a...
Open Society Foundation contributed 4% of their funding last year.
What is it you're wanting people to take from that? Personally I agree with the report.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit—they’re exploiting a bug in western civilization, which is the empathy response” -- Elon Musk
No more questions.
>No more questions.
Which is a shame, because if you questioned the quote a tiny bit and listened to the whole segment[1], it's far less damning that you make it out to be. Before that quote he even says "I believe in empathy, I think you should care about other people". He's not against empathy as a whole, he's against "too much" empathy, to the point that "you suicide yourself". That in my view, is entirely reasonable. If you had infinite empathy and were running a store, and you let yourself be shoplifted to bankruptcy, I think most people agree that would be a character flaw.
[1] https://youtu.be/sSOxPJD-VNo?t=4565
So he positioned himself such that you can't say "he has no empathy", but he can still use "too much empathy" as a reason for anything?
> he's against "too much" empathy, to the point that "you suicide yourself"
His recent comments against all DEI programs(while implementing his own DEI programs and being a DEI hire himself) seem to show that this is an exaggeration
>So he positioned himself such that you can't say "he has no empathy", but he can still use "too much empathy" as a reason for anything?
In other words, he's not an absolutist, which seems fine.
>His recent comments against all DEI programs(while implementing his own DEI programs and being a DEI hire himself) seem to show that this is an exaggeration
Sounds like you're already convinced that he's a Bad Person, so anything he says is going to be further proof of that. Even if he said something utterly anodyne like "government should be smaller", you'd probably respond with "well given what he's doing at DOGE, that's obviously him saying that he wants to dismantle the federal government as we know it".
I don't know what "Bad Person" means, I was just pointing out the ridiculousness of saying "he only wants to get rid of empathy in the extreme when it leads to (essentially) suicide" when he's actively working to dismantle programs that benefit the economy just because he perceives them as having some modicum of "empathy" related to them.
I'm also not sure what your comment about DOGE is trying to say. He has commented many times on wanting smaller government, and is working actively to achieve that with DOGE. What am I missing there?
Thank you for providing this.
He mentions right after that "empathy is good but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot".
That quote is clearly taken out of context and is specifically chosen as click/rage bait.
Like all things, nuance and context is always key.
You may find it utterly nullifying, not just mitigating.
I, of free and sound mind, do not.
I find an argument that it could be nullifying to be quite challenging to make. (really, I can't figure out how I'd make it)
Additionally, if I could, I'd still have to wrestle with that life isn't full of cartoon villains, and people usually hedge.
The paradox of tolerance, exploited.
Huh? What you do mean by this? Are you advocating for less empathy? Towards whom?
The contention is usually that empathetic policies that favour outgroups can be exploited by that outgroup to benefit themselves. For example, a universal policy of hiring from all groups can be subverted by allowing in a group that hires only their own members.
I am quoting an obviously broken and severely traumatized person in power, in the context of ongoing and upcoming civic freedoms decline.
There isn't enough evidence to speculate on his mental state IMO, but he is a prescribed ketamine user which means there are a plethora of possible causes.
I would argue there is quite an abundance of evidence that is very telling of his mental state.
"Musk has fathered fourteen children, one of whom died as an infant. He had six children with his first wife, Canadian author Justine Wilson, who he met while attending Queen's University in Ontario, Canada; they married in 2000. In 2002, their first child Nevada Musk died of sudden infant death syndrome at the age of 10 weeks."
"One of world’s richest man Elon Musk’s kids does not want to be related to their biological father anymore. Born a boy, Xavier Alexander Musk, has filed a plea seeking a change in her name in accordance with her new gender identity. Xavier had filed the petition seeking both a name change and a new birth certificate that reflects her new gender identity with the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica in April 2022.
The reason for the name change in the documents is mentioned as “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”"
"Elon’s father Errol Musk fathered two children with his former stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, who is 41 years his junior."
"n a recent podcast interview, Errol Musk said his son Elon had not “been a good dad” to his children."
“He was such a terrible human being,” Elon, 46, told the magazine. “You have no idea.”
Elon added: “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil… He will plan evil.”
“You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done,” Elon said, though he never went into specifics about what his father allegedly did. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done… It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”
“It would certainly be accurate to say that I did not have a good childhood… It may sound good. It was not absent of good, but it was not a happy childhood. It was like misery.”
"One does see a mother turning the children against the father successfully. "
"It's thought Grimes is keen to move in with the mothers of Musk's other children and raise them all together in one big house, however, most recently she's hit out at her billionaire ex publicly about his parenting.
"Plz respond about our child's medical crisis. I am sorry to do this publicly but it is no longer acceptable to ignore this situation. This requires immediate attention", she wrote on X.
"If you don't want to talk to me can you please designate or hire someone who can so that we can move forward on solving this. This is urgent, Elon.""
Okay, but on X/Twitter I regularly see people quoting this in a supportive fashion. So it isn't clear it is a joke.
Nothing wrong with quoting it in a supportive fashion. It is an entirely reasonable take. Especially if you listen to the entire point he made, and not cherry pick the part that makes it sound bad (intentionally, of course)
If you are letting “empathy” drive your civilization to ruin, it is no longer empathy. That is the point.
The claim that "empathy" is driving Western civilization to ruin is highly dubious and presented without evidence.
In contrast, we know that lack of empathy directly leads to atrocities:
> In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy. —Captain G. M. Gilbert
Huh? What about that quote seems anti-civil rights?
He's not saying "Don't empathize". He's not saying "We shouldn't have empathy". He's saying "Empathy can be exploited, and used against you".
Which is entirely valid. Balance is everything.
Now I know many have issues with Musk right now. I'm scratching my head on a few things he's doing. But, this quote seems entirely reasonable.
It's a quote from a crook who seemingly advocates for cruelty and sympathizes with fascist style of government.
They hated him because he told them the truth.
"The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism." - Hannah Arendt
Amusing, a quote on "empathy" from a Zionist who was against desegregation.
"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages."
-Samuel Johnson
It's pretty easy to judge the US for what is happening right now, we certainly deserve it, but the decline of civic freedoms and liberalism is a global phenomenon.
We are experiencing a global assault on truth because truth provides a foundation on which to judge those in power.
Social media is the powerful's most potent weapon against truth. When social media combines with privatized intelligence companies, it creates a tool that can be used to divide and conquer societies, turning one half of the people against the other, deputizing the ignorant or vulnerable to fight for despots.
One thing I wonder, is how much of it is simply attributable to the demographic transition that happens when a society urbanizes.
When birth rates start to drop the over-65s start getting more of a vote share than they've ever had before.
>We are experiencing a global assault on truth
There is truth, half truths and narratives. I wish people try to identify what they are looking at when they are consuming news.
1. A called B's girlfriend something bad, and got punched in the face by B. Truth
2. B hit A, half truth.
3. B is a bully, narrative.
At least that is how I see it.
> We are experiencing a global assault on truth
Perhaps, but from where I'm sitting the effects seem to be much more pronounced in the US than (say) here in Australia or in the UK. Americans seem to have gone for it in a big way.
Of course that may well be because the assault is concentrated more on the US. Or perhaps US society was just primed for it in some way. Distrust in the government has been building there for a very long time, and while trust in government is stretched in other places, it's not completely broken.
But that belies the real contention of what exactly is the truth? What is even more fundamental that has been lost is trust in nation and institutions due to a growing values divide. We must first trust before we can accept in good faith. Perhaps in some sense we should be thankful that we now have societies robust enough that even if major institutions lose legitimacy with half the population we don't get a civil war.
How far we've come from the Arab Spring.
> We are experiencing a global assault on truth
Are we though? Can you convince me of that, as a non-American?
I am convinced of it, as an Australian.
Commercial interests have been assaulting truth since before I was born, nearly half a century ago. The methods for doing so have steadily improved. Social media briefly hindered it, before being co-opted thoroughly to advance it.
Even where the truth hasn't been completely buried, finding what's true and what's spewed from the firehose of bullshit is a time consuming and difficult task, one that definitely doesn't scale to very many of life's decisions at all.
Culminating this trend is the rise of the extreme right across the globe. This is tightly linked to politically motivated disinformation coupled with whatever the techniques are that are forming closed mind cult-like behaviours.
Maybe it's not an assault on truth - maybe truth is just collateral damage - but I don't think I could even pose it as a question to ask if you could convince me these things are not happening.
This is not sounding like something modern then, if anything it's sounding like it's always been bad and we're only now recognizing(or having the channels to openly discuss) how bad it is.
The anti-intellectual fascist Georgescu arising from obscurity to a near winning position in Romania due to social media should be evidence enough.
Trumpism is a cause in itself, but it's also a symptom of a deeper cause that is afflicting more than only the United States.
The unintended consequence of social media, especially profit-driven social media infested with troll farms and bots from various governments (including China, Russia, US, Iran, Israel, to name but a few countries that have been caught), is the destruction of trust and community[0].
[0] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/this-thing-will-fail
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You've posted this before in this thread without any evidence.
Can you provide a source that USAID is a major donor to Civicus.
Do a search of USAID and Civicus and you'll see a bunch of partnerships throughout the years. Most funding from USAID goes through NGOs, so you're not going to see a direct funding, but it's pretty clear they are in the same space as overt USAID funding targets like Internews.
// A direct partnership between Civicus and USAID regarding data collection across the world https://www.comminit.com/health/content/citizen-generated-da...
https://x.com/CIVICUSalliance/status/1550121107092492289
https://www.ictworks.org/usaid-advancing-digital-democracy-r...
I mean there's so many partnerships, it's laughable to think that Civicus doesn't have partnerships and loyalty to USAID.
Joint partnerships are not the same as funding.
It's getting ridiculous how many lies you keep perpetuating in this thread.
Everything is out there. Just because you don't want to believe it doesn't mean it's not real. USAID sends money through its NGOs and it makes its way through partnerships and funding to orgs like Civicus who is clearly involved in propaganda just like Internews.
> Civicus, an international non-profit, puts country alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia
I doubt it. But not for the reasons you're probably thinking.
I spend most of my time in Slovenia and Croatia, but I travel to Serbia frequently as it's "in the neighborhood" and medical/dental treatment there is top-notch and much cheaper than anywhere else.
I can state with absolute confidence that Serbia is one of the most freedom-loving countries in the world, and Serbs are ultra-zealous guardians of their personal freedoms. In Serbia, there are very few restrictions that impinge on one's day-to-day life, and even the laws are along the lines of recommendations. You can buy any prescription drug OTC; you can smoke in just about any restaurant; you can send your 10-year-old son to the cornerstore to buy you a bottle of whisky. You can also speak out against the government -- and quite loudly, at that -- just as people have been doing over recent weeks/months:
> https://apnews.com/article/serbia-students-protest-vucic-can...
I can think of nothing that's permissible in the USA or UK that's not possible in Serbia. (But I can think of many things that are possible in Serbia yet illegal or impossible in the UK or US!) All things considered, it feels much more free than any part of the USA. Serbian cops are friendly, there's no ubiquitous middleman grifting or gatekeeping, and one is basically free to do and say what one likes.
> I can think of nothing that's permissible in the USA or UK that's not possible in Serbia.
how about declaring yourself Kosovan?
How exactly, practically speaking?
If you just walk around and tell people that you're a Kosovan, or post about it online, they'll think you're either a militant/reactionary agitator or a lunatic. You might get some dirty looks, but you're not going to get thrown into prison.
If you're talking about taking real political action, sure, that would be a bad idea. But I can think of a lot of similar things (effectively things that aim to destabilize the government or foment civil unrest) that are similarly illegal in places like Germany/UK/etc.
There is much more to the state of civil rights than the behaviour of the police towards foreign tourists. For some "real" issues see for example the Amnesty International short report of the state of human rights in Serbia 2023: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...
Those are hardly real issues -- the summary at that link mostly attempts to relitigate an old war and shame Serbia for perceived associations with Russia.
And how about this point? "Violence against women and girls: During the year, at least 27 women were victims of femicide."
27 out of how many millions? What's the per capita rate compared to the US and UK?
> Those are hardly real issues
Until you are the victim.
> The summary at that link mostly attempts to relitigate an old war and shame Serbia for perceived associations with Russia.
Right so. Atrocities should never be forgotten, no matter who they are associated with.
> What's the per capita rate compared to the US and UK?
The femicide rate in the USA is 3½ times higher. Each single case is one too many.
I used to have some serbian staff, and this seems mostly true, but they had one hell of a time contracting globally.
Basically in a lot of countries you either are a FT equivalent and get bennies or you are not an FTE and get nada.
But the serbs had some social outrage over foreign companies contracting to their citizens but not paying tax in that country. From what I gather its due to healthcare costs.
So they did something, (difficult for me to ingest as a foreigner) but it seems that either:
1. You have to register and pay corporate tax in Serbia, then you can hire locals without issue
2. The staff member has to register as a business and pay corporate + payroll tax
or they do it dodgy and hope the tax man doesnt ruin their life.
This had the effect of creating a cottage industry of middlemen who take a slice between employer and employee which is probably the least freedom oriented outcome possible.
That's not unlike IR35 rules in the UK, where the government got sick of contractors acting as employees behind a limited company veil, paying a lot less tax overall. Companies wishing to hire contractors must absolutely not treat them like employees, those that are must be employed by an umbrella company and pay regular payroll taxes.
HMRC, who pushed for the law, is however exempt and hires contractors the old way, outrageously enough.