ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team

> The fact 2nd amendment crowd had a chance to prove their principles a few weeks ago and they did it with flying colors when the NRA came out against any restrictions for trans people.

This is effectively a strawman argument.

We are not discussing their principles that pertain to whom should be allowed to own guns, nor is that question even relevant to the heart of this topic. We are discussing the core, underlying principle that has been used as the primary justification for WHY people should have a constitutionally-protected right to own mechanized, efficient killing machines. You of course already know: the rhetoric (for literal centuries) has been that the preservation of our system of democracy from hostile internal actors requires a citizenry that has the means to effectively fight back.

Without a noble-sounding pretense of existential importance for 2A defenders to shield themselves with, things start to look a lot more like weighing "guns are fun, plus think about hunters" vs "we should reduce our yearly slaughter rate for schoolchildren to match those of other 1st world countries" and choosing the former. So, when people see what they believe to be the increasingly-obvious beginnings of authoritarian overreach in this country, and at the same time seeing most of the 2A crowd saying absolutely nothing about it, it looks like a genuinely remarkable, thoroughly nauseating display of hypocrisy and selfishness.

> But as a 2A supporter I don't feel any obligation to rage against ICE assembling a social media team. These seem to be completely disconnected concepts.

Dishonest framing aside ("assembling a social media team", like how drug cartels simply assemble a team of chemists, semantics be damned!) and with full context considered, I assume you are stating here that you see no problem with the current actions of this administration, both ICE-related and not, and have caught no whiffs of authoritarian overreach. Otherwise, social media monitoring and tracking teams within an organization that does not have the rules, oversight, requirements, or legal vulnerability of existing (previously) non-partisan agencies with similar teams, would be extremely concerning.

Though after writing this out, I'm not even clear on how much of this is a matter of opinion versus a matter of awareness and understanding of current events. One needs to only look at the events of the last 7 days to find egregious evidence of authoritarian movement, things that would've sent recent Democratic presidents into political exile and impeachment. I just learned that my neighbors and I are enemies of the US last Tuesday - literally, verbatim, "enemies from within" with no additional qualification beyond living in a blue city - for example.

Fantastic, heartbreaking film.

Instead of this "lay[ing] blame" nonsense, we focus on owning our own personal responsibility and build from there. Without that solid foundation everything else eventually crumbles and we are no good for ourselves -- let alone others

And of course it's flagged. Because the use of technology built from companies funded by VC has nothing to do with Hacker News and Ycombinator.

Dang and company are such a joke (yes, that's a direct violation of the rules, maybe it'll get their attention) for allowing these sorts of stories to be flagged.

The idea that this is only about "politics" or it's "controversial" and thus should be hidden from view is such a copout. These are the important stories that should absolutely be discussed in a place like this.

Save your breath in replying: "well, it might make people upset and we want to have nice conversations here." And whatever other platitudes arguing for censorship of obviously important topics that deal directly with the technology, companies and employess that frequent this site.

The leap you are making is that citizens perceive immigration enforcement as tyrannical.