by zahlman | 2025-05-02 14:08:23+00:00
>This isn’t a perception thing

Yes, it is. It very much is, and until you understand the simple ideas I explain below, I don't consider you qualified to discuss political matters in a space like HN.

Since my previous comments weren't enough of a hint (I didn't really expect them to be, because I've dealt with people using rhetoric like yours before), I'll go ahead and give a detailed explanation.

Again, here's the part I quoted from your original comment:

> semantic arguments about why it’s ok for ICE to bust down random doors looking for brown people to deport to the death camps

You said they bust down "random" doors. That is not the same thing as saying that they don't have a warrant. It's saying that they target essentially whoever they feel like, or that they go through neighbourhoods and randomly choose places to enter without any a priori reason to expect a legitimate deportation candidate to be there.

You said that they are "looking for brown people". That is to say, you use common rhetorical flair to imply that this is not only racially motivated, but motivated specifically by the racism of ICE themselves. Not only that, you suppose the sort of folk racism that puts Mexicans and Central Americans in the same category as Middle Easterners and South and South-East Asians. You do this without evidence, and against simple real-world observations that would tend to refute it.

You said that they do this "to deport [them] to the death camps". To support this claim, it's not sufficient to show that they go "to a concentration camp in a foreign country that no one has ever left alive"[0]. To support "who are deported to death camps", you would have to show that ICE directly and knowingly causes them to go to such camps. But to support "to deport them to the death camps", you would additionally have to show that this is their specific intent - i.e. that the ICE agents expressly believe that their targets should die, and that they have the goal of ensuring their deaths abroad - rather than the actually stated goal of, you know, just having them off American soil.

> Just because people choose to not educate themselves doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

1. Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) and make sure you understand how it applies to your political engagement here.

2. Please contemplate how many things might exist in the world about which you know absolutely nothing, and then re-consider whether the phrase "choose not to educate themselves" is at all coherent.

> And as a matter of fact, I’ve heard plenty of people arguing that all of these things are good and that ICE should do them.

I absolutely believe that you've seen people argue that, for example, ICE can be excused for not having had a warrant, identifying themselves etc. if they successfully located and extradited someone not lawfully entitled to be within the USA. I also absolutely believe you've seen people argue that whatever happens after that point is not ICE's concern.

But I don't believe you've seen people make the claims you think they have.[1] I think you've simply failed to understand the massive differences between what they're actually saying and what you think they're saying. I furthermore think this is a result of your personal attitude towards political topics, and that you need to fix this before you can have a productive discussion on HN.

[0]: Although you do have to evidence that and not just assert it. And I really do think this would be an extraordinary claim, because even some disproven, sensationalized claims I saw people make during Trump's first term involved "concentration camps" being within the US and not at all fatal, merely inhumane. Further, ICE has existed continuously since 2003, through Obama and Biden's presidencies - three-letter agencies simply don't change their operations that radically simply because of who is president.

[1]: On the flip side, though: during Trump's first term, I saw video evidence of ICE protesters shouting N-bombs at ICE agents, or at least people they believed to be ICE agents - in what appeared to be a rural environment, as I recall. As far as I could discern and remember, all parties involved were white. This is not to say anything in support of ICE or against their detractors in general. It's simply to illustrate that there's a wide world out there, and there certainly could be people saying the things you claim to have seen, too. I just don't believe it occurs in good faith on HN, and I have ample reason to believe you're mistaken in that.