You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say

Just like IBM said, a computer can't be held responsible for its decisions. Management's been doing this for a long time to justify layoffs and such. This is just the next step.

IBM wasn't held responsible either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

A lot of people and companies ultimately got away with that, because of either necessity or the manufactured perception of necessity. It's an important lesson about selective enforcement, and just how extreme the cases it can be applied to. From traffic laws to genocide, it's all negotiable for the powerful if there are benefits at stake.

I went to the Siemens museum in Erlangen. Their history of work on medical imaging is on display and it’s good.

The awkward ‘Siemens and the holocaust’ section was so pathetic.

If this kind of thing interests you, you could do a lot worse than picking up Edwin Black's 'IBM and the Holocaust'.

Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.

In a bleak sense I suppose I can understand, it's not as though they can have a big, "By the way, we greedily assisted the Nazis with the worst act of industrialized murder in modern history, profited from it, were never held to meaningful account, and we're still successful," room.

And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral outrage that feels earned around all of this.

Increasingly a human can't be held responsible for their decisions either.

Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.

This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.

They could have an exhibit like that, perhaps describing how they were trying to make amends, donating money to projects promoting pluralism and diversity, opposing authoritarianism around the world, helping the descendants of those they harmed, etc.

But they're not going to, because the people in charge don't sincerely care about the topic.

As for Iraq: I don't see much evidence that US actions there were "best-intentioned", or even well-intentioned.

Exactly. And it's not just ICE. It's every administrative bureaucracy playing favorites. It's flagrant when it's ICE, they're snatching people off the street, that creates a lot of argument. But this workflow was honed, the messaging to the public was figured out, etc, etc, when it was "just" evil bureaucrats catering to mustache twirling evil lobbyists when making rules. Pretty easy to bury something that amounts to driving business in dense technical discussion the public is uninterested in.

Similarly, I like to remind people that "responsibility" isn't necessarily the same as blame or fault, it literally means a duty to respond.

What even were the intentions? September 11 wasn’t related, the WMDs lie was known to be false. Was it just Bush trying to impress daddy?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-64980565

I would contend that there's a middle ground between "de-baathification" and "putting former Nazi officials in places of immense political, economic, and military positions"

I'm always surprised more people don't know how many Nazis were in NATO offices and the West German federal police

Imperial hubris. Surely the US can simply decide to own the oil and poppy fields with no consequences, right?

It's not like people aren't still frothing at the mouth to repeat the same mistake in Venezuela or Palestine or Yemen. Maintaining empire requires shows of force. There's always profit to be made along the way. It motivates itself

” Bremer issued Order Number 2, in effect dissolving the entire former Iraqi army[45] and putting 400,000 former Iraqi soldiers out of work.[46] The move was widely criticized for creating a large pool of armed and disgruntled youths for the insurgency.”

Paul Bremer made something very, very stupid.

> This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right.

Perhaps because your peers are recent immigrants who are culturally and linguistically foreign to you, and are physically here primarily because the place they are originally from is terrible, rather than because they are actually interested in joining your community and sharing its values.

So you think that people who have repatriated themselves would not have any interest in adopting some or all of the values of the place they have gone to? That seems really wrong at a lot of levels, though people rarely adopt all of the values of the place they move to (whatever the circumstances).

I'd never considered this before, thank you!