Gonna talk about the U.S. like Wikipedia talks about China:

"The situation of human rights in the United States has attracted significant criticism from foreign governments, foreign press agencies, and non-governmental organizations, alleging widespread civil rights violations such as detention without trial, forced confessions, torture, restrictions of fundamental rights, and excessive use of the death penalty."

"The American constitution states that the "fundamental rights" of citizens include freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, universal suffrage, and property rights. However, in practice, these provisions do not afford significant protection against criminal prosecution by the state. The U.S. has limited protections regarding LGBT rights."

"Although some criticisms of government policies and the ruling party are tolerated, censorship of political speech and information are amongst the harshest in the world and routinely used to prevent collective action. The U.S. also has the most comprehensive and sophisticated Internet censorship regime in the world, with numerous popular social media apps and websites being controlled and censored by state policy. The government suppresses popular protests and demonstrations that it considers a potential threat to "social stability". The U.S. additionally uses a massive espionage network of cameras, facial recognition software, sensors, and surveillance of personal technology as a means of social control of persons living in the country"

"Under US economic policy, thousands of private corporations use sensitive personal information to assign individuals a 'credit score,' a legal form of discrimination which incentivizes citizens to make housing, banking and other consumer decisions optimized for maximal profit extraction by financial middlemen"

every single discussion about the fucking signal groupchat makes me feel so insane. "what a display of incompetence! what a failure! let's all make accidental groupchat mistake jokes now" what the fuck are you talking about. it worked. the fact that THIS is the conversation now is literally the point. jeffrey goldberg literally did it again. selling the bombing of the middle east to the public is the entire purpose of his career as a "journalist"

former iof prison guard who spent the past year fully deepthroating the genocidal boot and famously sold the invasion of iraq as something that "will be remembered as an act of profound morality"? "journalist" who literally built his career on manufacturing consent for bombing arabs "accidentally" invited to a top secret group chat about bombing arabs oh no how could this happen? what are you TALKING about. fork found in kitchen! likely place for him to be! my god

"we were asked to make a statement about an oscar winner being beaten and abducted in the exact conditions illuminated by his oscar winning documentary but we have to keep in mind that we can't actually Take A Side because our 11000 global members have many diverse viewpoints! for example many of them would actually want him lynched <3" ok. die.

every single article, post or mention of a Muslim or Latino person on a Visa or Green Card getting dragged off the street by masked men in broad daylight has the same exact comments: "wow, they're gonna start doing this to citizens soon." some of these people have lived here since they were 8 months old and have lived here for over 30 years. it's very telling that Americans are still are managing to separate them in their head from a "citizen" and that their outrage will be far greater when it's someone who "actually lives here" as if 3 decades in the same country shouldn't qualify you for the same rights as everyone else.

It's not really about citizens vs noncitizens. Replace "citizens" with "white people" and the real worry becomes obvious.

every single article, post or mention of a Muslim or Latino person on a Visa or Green Card getting dragged off the street by masked men in broad daylight has the same exact comments: "wow, they're gonna start doing this to citizens soon." some of these people have lived here since they were 8 months old and have lived here for over 30 years. it's very telling that Americans are still are managing to separate them in their head from a "citizen" and that their outrage will be far greater when it's someone who "actually lives here" as if 3 decades in the same country shouldn't qualify you for the same rights as everyone else.

this is very much the point, though? like, the point of saying "being a citizen won't protect you from this" is the same point you're making. these are people deeply rooted in their communities being disappeared for their opinions and their race based on a legal technicality, and the point of "they're going to disappear citizens soon" posts is to try and break the default kneejerk response in a lot of people, which is that "oh this could happen to them but not to me, this piece of paper says i'm safe". i'm sorry but pointing that out isn't saying "oh but that's the line that shouldn't be crossed." most people pointing it out, in fact, think literally nobody should be abducted from their streets and communities by the fucking secret police. they're just trying to emphasize that that's what's actually going on, because the media won't. the media will be all "the secretary of state lawfully revoked the visas of another few hundred Bad Terrorist Supporters today, and they were peacefully detained by the Authorities 😇". and this is bad. we live in fascism. it's okay to point that out.

imagine living your entire life and being this naive and optimistic about the country you live in. yeah. everyone in the United States is equally enraged about Green Card and Visa holders being kidnapped off the street. that's why there's hundreds of thousands of people marching to stop it.

no one is actually waiting until this effects them to act. that's crazy talk. there's definitely no historical precedent for that behavior either. people are saying "oh no citizens could be next" out loud over and over and not actually doing anything or forming any sort of meaningful resistance is because of the media, who has been playing videos of Mahmoud Khalil and a whole assortment of other students being charged with terrorism without due process for the last month now, on EVERY major news outlet in the United States.

corporate media simply groomed grown adults into thinking none of this is happening. it isn't antipathy or self preservation or selfishness or xenophobia. and it's just a coincidence that they qualify every statement with "well, if they TRULY weren't supporting Hamas....." as if that matters whatsoever when it comes to the 1st Amendment.

that's why Trump's approval rating has cratered to a devastating *checks notes* 47%.

let's check and see how Americans actually feel about abducting people who aren't "US citizens" right now!

wow! i wonder if this number will wind up shifting whatsoever when the first "American Citizen" gets tossed in the back of a van for saying mean things about Elon Musk online. i wonder how people would react to that. i wonder if 49% of the American public would still approve of Trump's "immigration" policies if it was a white, blonde, Christian college student rather than a Muslim from some "weird nation" in the Middle East.

i'm sorry that i insinuated that the American public doesn't see immigrants as citizens or even human beings. it's just a coincidence that 40% of the country approves of putting immigrants in concentration camps while they await deportation. i've simply miscalculated the average American's passion for immigration reform.

— Liat Berdugo, A Situation: A Tree in Palestine (via probablyasocialecologist)

“Only you can helo lower property values!

Crime keep housing affordable”

Here’s dril’s candles on a graph for reference.

Black Panthers (Agnès Varda, 1968)

This is just very funny to me.

remember: these are machines that are ultimately trained on text data. you feed it court documents, web pages, tweets, social media comments, books, PDFs and increasingly deeper gulfs of endless digital content. it creates a lexicon.

if you want your burgeoning glorified chatbot on steroids to actually be accurate based on the (often stolen) real life data you've spent an infinite amount of hours feeding it and fine-tuning it to perfection to gain institutional legitimacy and to be seen as reliable among CEOs trying to lay off 75% of their staff over the next 5 years, then you can't ask it to just completely ignore millions upon millions of words typed on the internet in the last decade calling you a stupid piece of shit. it would undermine the very real, existing reality shared among hundreds of millions of people. history has already been written, big guy.