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

As I have gotten older I have liked 'vigilante justice' movies less and less. Superheros that always prove might makes right, cops that 'buck the system and do what is needed to get the job done', etc etc. It is because those actions always lead to exactly what we seen now, unchecked attacks on people. Corruption using 'we gotta do something and it means a few people will get hurt but it is worth it' as a tool to achieve their agenda. American media has been pushing this message out for so many decades now that we think these are the good guys fighting the hard fight when in reality the opposite is true. Law enforcement and the military should be held at a far higher level of accountability, not a lower one, because of the powers they wield. The country needs to grow up and stop believing, and allowing, this behavior to continue. Be an adult, show up to local city counsel meetings, get actually informed and not headline informed and vote.

24 is a great example of it. Watching the flanderization of that show is incredible bc what they flanderize is exactly what you're talking about. In the first seasons it was clear that what Jack did was wrong in the sense that it broke well intentioned rules; we were just in such an extreme scenario that the rules themselves broke down.

But later it flanderized into, we want to break the rules. The rules are an impediment to goodness, not the guarantor.

24, dr. Phil, and a whole lot of other trash from that era sowed the seeds of the current faacism-lite brewing in America right now. Neoconservatism is as much of a cancer as civic nationalism is.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Rorschach was the bad guy.

Because the piecemeal sellout of the nation's industrial base to the far east on environmental grounds and then the piecemeal closure of any remaining paths up into the middle class on comparable grounds was such a resounding success?

The peddlers of the things that caused the legitimate gripes that drove them into the harms of these movements need to do some looking in the mirror.

Most people don't care about most issues most of the time. If they're holding their nose and voting for blatant extremism, the people they're not voting for ought to do some reflecting.

Not coincidentally, 24 was produced by the neocon Murdoch's Fox, and dramatized the same "ticking time-bomb" scenarios that Cheney was talking about on national TV in order to justify torture. Where you might think torturing one person is justified if it's going to help save thousands from the bomb, that kind of scenario never actually happens. Instead one of the main uses of torture was to extract "confessions" from people swiped from streets all over the world that they belonged to al-Qaeda, in order to justify the war aims of that criminal cabal of still-powerful and protected individuals.

People are racist because of offshoring?

People are racist because people do simple pattern matching and the people and groups have a bunch of overlap with the people and groups that did the border opening (which was also bad for the people hurt by the off shoring) who have a bunch of overlap with the people who were making the most noise about racism.

It's literally "owning the libs" but on a cultural level.

I'm not saying it's smart or right, but it doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here.

Who opened the border and what color were they? From my perspective these are more retroactive constructions of a history which justifies and explains many people’s declining economic statuses along with a whole host of elites who are supposedly responsible, with the most extreme blaming entire racial groups. In reality if there were anyone to blame it would be a roster of republican and democrat deregulators (especially reagan) who allowed corporations to grow more consolidated and politically powerful, alongside an unavoidable and natural specialization in the types of labor our country performs as it gets more advanced.