ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37457418/eric-schmidt-mistress...

Just invoking Richard Stallman will prove it because the smear campaign on him was so thorough.

Linus seems to be the only one that made it out.

The thing about "Don't Be Evil" at the time, is that (my impression was) everyone thought they knew what that meant, because it was a popular sentiment.

The OG Internet people I'm talking about aren't only the Levy-style hackers, with strong individualist bents, but there was also a lot of collectivism.

And the individualists and collectivists mostly cooperated, or at least coexisted.

And all were pretty universally united in their skepticism of MBAs (halfwits who only care about near-term money and personal incentives), Wall Street bros (evil, coming off of '80s greed-is-good pillaging), and politicians (in the old "their lips are moving" way, not like the modern threats).

Of course it wasn't just the OG people choosing. That period of choice coincided with an influx of people who previously would've gone to Wall Street, as well as a ton of non-ruthless people who would just adapt to what culture they were shown. The money then determined the culture.

erm hes a creep, claimed to be rapist... not many redeemable qualities.

Nah fuck him. If you're closeted and funding anti-queer causes and politicians you deserve to be outed.

Or perhaps don't do business with people who would happily execute you? All that says to me is Thiel values money over anything else.

The insinuation that Gawker in any way shape or form "outed" him is just laughable.

Gawker is absolutely trash media, to be quite clear.

> and that goes for rich or poor

I do agree about this, for certain things - but in others, no - and indeed, courts have ruled that billionaires are inherently "public figures"... "due to their outsized influence on public affairs and opinion".

I also have significant issues with his bankrolling of Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker as an abomination of the legal system, including the right to face one's "accuser":

- Hogan had already agreed in principle to a part ownership stake and profits of Gawker.

- Lawyers paid for by Thiel pushed for him to drop that and push instead for bankrupting Gawker through damages (which were laughable, see below). (Hypothetical question, if you're an attorney, ostensibly representing Hogan, but you know the person paying your bills, Thiel, wants a different outcome for the case, when push comes to shove, whose interests are you going to represent? See the following point too).

- When the case and awarded damages -did- actually threaten to bankrupt Gawker, Thiel/Hogan's lawyers did the most illogical thing possible, if they were looking to recoup any money for their ostensible client... they dropped the one claim against Gawker that would have allowed their liability insurance to at least partially pay out.

(Re damages: The amount that Hogan had originally asked for seemed reasonable. Then after Thiel's lawyers got involved, the amount asked for was multiplied five thousand times.

This included economic damages of fifty million dollars. For a man who had made something in the order of $10-15M his entire career? Who had a net worth at its peak of $30M, and at the time of the lawsuit of $8M? I highly doubt that TV stations pulling reruns of old WWF events, lost hair commercial and other endorsements was worth that. (They separately asked for emotional damages, too, to be clear. But there was near zero justification for this economic damages claim.)

I wonder how much Thiel paid Hogan under the table for this proxy lawsuit?

Bots are not necessary for indoctrination, Fox does that already. But bots help creating dissent and make people busy defending against all the crap.

Also note of sale (underground, also trivially made on one's own) in france is also FGC-9 pistols (modern gun + ammo easily made in short time in france, all with unregulated components), and attackers in france have also used re-activated decommissioned rifles.

Your country is awash in guns for anyone who wants it.

The visible disruptive protests against ICE activity are also the sort of thing that you'd expect the sorts of voters that make a blue state blue to do, so when ICE does arrest illegal immigrants in red states, there's much fewer people who are inclined to protest it and therefore less publicity in general.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-houston-arrests-more-3...

From a systems perspective, we're heavily funding the most expensive and disruptive part of the pipeline (identification and removal) while starving the part that actually resolves legal status (adjudication, asylum review, work authorization). Though maybe that's a feature of this administration, not a bug.

If the goal is public safety, prioritizing people who commit violent crimes makes sense. If the goal is restoring legal order, then yeah, the obvious first step is to drive the backlog toward zero. I don't think that's the administration's goal though.

It only works for people the state expects significant amounts of money from (taxes don’t count)

Don’t expect a government to help you unless you’re one of its larger donors

I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.

That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose.

The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.

The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.

The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.

>despots don't care about the law

This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.

But on the internet we often do this thing where we take the weakest version or a distorted version of an opposing side's argument and ridicule that. It's not quite strawmanning because we never specified who we're arguing against, and surely we can imagine someone, somewhere on the internet has the ridiculous viewpoint. But it's not a common viewpoint (that, for example, we shouldn't have privacy in the bathroom). Doing this only gets us pats on the back from those who already agree with us and deludes us about our opponent's position.

We get things like philandering individuals running on family values platforms, anti-gay individuals being caught performing gay sex acts in restaurant bathrooms, crowing about deficits and the national debt during Democrat administrations while cutting taxes and increasing spending during Republican administrations, blocking Supreme Court nominations because it's "too close to an election" while pushing through another Supreme Court nomination mere weeks before a subsequent election, etc.

The fuel running the Republican political machine is bad faith.

I spent too much of the 90s listening to Rush Limbaugh and consuming other conservative media and the exact same contradictions were prominently on display then. They absolutely excoriated law enforcement for things like the Waco siege. The phrase “jack-booted thugs” got used. But when LAPD beat the shit out of Rodney King on video, suddenly police could do no wrong.

"Trump’s net approval rating on immigration has declined by about 4 points since the day before Good’s death until today. Meanwhile, his overall approval rating has declined by 2 points and is near its second-term lows" [1].

I'd encourage anyone watching to actually pay attention to "how many people care more about party than principle." I suspect it's fewer than MAGA high command thinks.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-is-losing-normies-on-immi...

They publicly called out a Trump appointee for saying you're not allowed to bring a gun to a protest, and have urged that there be an investigation in to what occurred.

They also then blamed it on the MN government, because for some reason CBP (250 miles from a border, and thus 150 miles away from their remit...) pretending to be police officers when they also lack a remit to do that and them then fucking things up and murdering people because of the lack of remit, lack of training, lack of screening on the hiring... is because of Walz and co.

So... better than I expected, but still pretty dogshit.

This statement isn't necessarily wrong because about half of elected government officials are Republican, but I want to point out that less than 60% of eligible Americans voted in 2024, so we're talking about <30% of Americans who vote Republican.

Calvinists or Evangelicals?

I don't think that holds water either way.

Palantir clients: Europol, Danish POL-INTEL, NHS UK, UK Ministry of Defence, German Police (states), NATO, Ukraine, ASML, Siemens, Airbus, Credit Suisse, UBS, BP, Merck, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Customer...

https://www.palantir.com/partners/international/

Collecting information about people doesn't really fit the same mold. It's not sensible to remove that function entirely. It's not a right. And it's not sensible to structure things with the expectation the future government will be evil

And yet.

>If someone is not a citizen and are here illegally they should be removed, no matter their intentions. If you are willing to break the law to stay here, I personally don't want them back in the country.

Without even getting into the subject of kids who are brought here.. I just have to say, why? Immigrants are net contributors in the US. Many of these people who are here "illegally" are in a bureaucratic maze and are attempting to follow the rules. Some aren't, sure, but we live in a society where we don't draconianly punish people for a certain level of breaking the rules in cases where there is no real harm done. And I say deportation, particularly to 3rd country like the USA is doing now sometimes, qualifies as very draconian.

> This is systematically not true as citizens can not be legally deported.

And yet

> The true scope of U.S. citizens wrongfully deported is not known as the federal government does not release data on how often members of this group are mistakenly detained or even removed from the country. However, The Washington Post estimated that there are at least 12 well-known cases, drawing conclusions from court records, interviews and news reports.

-- A Look At The U.S. Citizens Who Have Been Deported By The Trump Administration So Far

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-look-at-the-u-s-citizens...

And as the GP pointed out, it makes no sense to put the president's paramilitary agency¹ in charge of such an audit, rather than qualified auditors, perhaps from the HHS² OIG³.

1. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/us...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_He...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(U...

It's weird, then, that most of them (and it's, like, 60 Somalis out of 80k) were already on trial[0] a good month before ...

> a random YouTuber started knocking on quality learing center doors

"As of December 2025, subsequent investigations by state officials have not found evidence of fraud at the sites Shirley visited."

Oh no, that doesn't sound like a "massive Somali fraud", does it?

(Also he's not "a random YouTuber" - he's a former prankster turned full MAGA right-wing agitator[1] and that should tell you all you need to know about his credentials and honesty.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Shirley ("he repeated a false claim", "has falsely implied", "also amplified Trump's false claim", etc.)

Look it up. And take the red pill.

First of all, the investigation for the fraud had already wrapped up years ago, with many charged. You’re falling for the propaganda that this was ongoing and swept under the rug, as pretense that apparently an occupying force is necessary because Somalians are fraudulent criminals (racist AF), despite the incredible amount of fraud (including Medicare fraud!) within the ruling party at the moment.

Second of all, the ringleader was a white woman who was convicted for this fraud, presumably preying on desperate immigrants, maybe even convincing them that “fraud was the American way”, I mean look at the president - how could fraud not be the American way?

Third of all, that YouTuber has a less than room temperature IQ, and was going around to closed daycares to prove that… they weren’t open? The rightwing grift is so powerful and so lucrative that this absolute imbecile can make it big by giving other imbeciles a justification for their deep-seated racism. Honestly, go listen to interviews with this guy. It’s astounding that anyone trusts any content he puts out, because that’s just what it is - content, not investigative journalism.

Anyway, I guess since some Somalians were involved in fraud we get to occupy cities, tearing anyone brown with an accent away from their family, maybe allowing them to prove citizenship (maybe not), and begin shooting anyone who adds friction to that process (civil disobedience)? That’s the implication of your comment.

Tell me when we can start prosecuting fraud when it’s attached to an (R), by the way.

This is from "Way of the Warrior", when the dominion had managed to con the Klingons into invading Cardassia.

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We have orders to search all vessels attempting to leave Bajoran space.

KIRA: Search them for what?

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: For shape-shifters. Each ship will be scanned, its cargo searched, and its crewmembers and passengers subjected to genetic testing.

SISKO: On whose authority?

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: On the authority of Gowron and the Klingon High Council.

KIRA: The Klingon High Council has no jurisdiction over ships in Bajoran space.

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.

SISKO: Do you have any evidence that there are changelings aboard this particular ship?

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?

KIRA: Commander, Bajoran law strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels in our territory.

KAYBOK [on viewscreen]: I have my orders.

Compared to

ICE: We have orders to search all people attempting to live in America

Search them for what?

ICE: For illegal immigrants. Each center will be scanned, it's users searched, and their finances and medical history subjected to AI pattern recognition

On whose authority?

ICE: On the authority of Trump and the Federal Government

Trump has no jurisdiction over people in Minnesota

ICE: We assumed you would welcome our assistance.

Do you have any evidence that there are illegal immigrants in this particular learning center?

ICE: How can we have evidence until we conduct our tests?

The Constitution strictly prohibits any unwarranted search and seizure of vessels

ICE: I have my orders.

*Technically this point in the episode it was after the Dominion/Russia interference with the high placed Dominion/Russian asset, but before the Klingons/America invaded Cardassia/Greenland.

I am not for unrestrained immigration either. But I would not look for whose child is sick so I can kick them out and leave the sick child alone.

An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.

eventually they got their shit together.

China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.

I am just an outside onlooker, and things seem pretty bleak.

I don't know how they could possibly crank up ID requirements that would get in my way: I have a passport and a REAL ID driver's license.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/ices-forced-face...

Yes, I have multiple documents proving my citizenship. Never been asked though, ID always sufficed.

> so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!

I have voted in more than one state (legally, I moved) never seen any voting place asking for any documents except for state ID and voter roll check. I don't think there is any voting place where local state ID is not "legit enough".

Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers.

And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.

We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.

Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.

Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.

I would like to ask you instead of the Word of Jesus - which is surely fascinating, but bears little relevance for the topic at hand - provide some authoritative data as to how many people actually died in the street in those 43 terrible states, for lack of Medicaid coverage, say in the last 5 years? Was it millions? Thousands? Hundreds? How does it compare with the record of California and those living-on-the-street people I am seeing there every time I visit? I think discussing actual data would be better than discussing Jesus.

But when people say this for ten years at the drop of a hat, you have to forgive everyone else for not just automatically believing it any more.

You are. Why do you think licenses have expiration dates? It legally authorises you to perform specific activity within specific timeframe. Any activity without license is illegal.

By same logic you can't stay in the house you legally rented previously.

Surprised those simple concepts need elaboration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIG_Sauer_P320