As others have pointed out, a lot of the people doing the grunt work in Nazi Germany were regular folks thinking they were just doing a regular job. Even many guards in the concentration camps.
We ask how they could just turn a blind eye and think things were normal. But the thing is that’s the actual norm for most human beings. Mix in a few assholes who actively want to be bigots, and we’re in our current situation.
The sad thing is fascism had a foothold even in the US back in the day. We hoped/believed WWII fixed that problem. All it really did was delay it a couple generations. Worse, the failures of the past have given the current scumbags an idea of how to do it better this time.
What if some overzealous border staff not only want to inspect your phone when you get back, but decide to confiscate it for who-knows-why.
I think you should consider leaving your phone at home and buying another “cheapie” phone for the trip. Not necessarily a so-called burner phone, but just a minimal smartphone. Only load the most important contacts and be prudent about the apps you install, especially financial apps. Don’t save passwords on the phone.
When my primary phone was in the shop for a repair a couple of years ago, I went to Best Buy and bought a Tracfone. It cost $25 and I decided to keep it as a backup. The monthly service is $15 and the account is completely separate from my T-Mobile account. It’s a smartphone and looks like a smartphone, but needless to say, it’s waaaaay below the functionality of my fancy-schmancy Motorola Edge.
I don’t know what they offer these days, as that was over three years ago. But I still have the phone and it’s still activated. Better to be safe. YMMV.
The very MAGA conservative NY Post took on the Trump Tariffs today, with this headline story and several editorials
The story profiles a bunch of business owners who are being hurt or driven out of business by the Trump tariffs. One of the companies makes a fortune-telling toy called Mr. Predictor.
I bet Mr. Predictor didn’t see this coming:rofl:.
And once again we get this parasocial bullshit, instead of a headline like New US Tariff Policy Destroys Small Businesses the headline is a direct appeal to Trump, and an acknowledgment that the power is his and his alone.
They should be asking Congress to restrain Trump’s power instead of begging, but AFAICT none of them took that route.
I’m guessing that sometimes they don’t know exactly what they are doing - it is not at all difficult for me to imagine someone who has no problem transporting people who are being deported to a foreign country having a problem doing so when there is a court order not to deport a particular person and the person is being moved in violation of a court order to a prison in a country that he will probably never leave. Thing is, the grunt workers probably don’t know they are being asked to do the latter - they might find out after the fact.
The people who have been quitting have two differences from the average ICE agent - first, they have mostly been in positions where they know exactly what they are being asked to do (those lawyers knew what they were being asked to sign, people knew they were being asked for access to records) and second, they have generally been people who are a little more prepared to suddenly quit than I would expect an ICE agent to be.
What are they looking for, anyway? I delete my emails after I’ve seen them (I don’t read most of them on my phone), so right now I have one email with a link to my auto insurance. I have a dozen text messages. One is a hospital bill from 2022 when I crushed my hand. I’m going to delete it because when I click the link it says I have no unpaid bills. There are a couple of inconsequential texts from friends and family that I haven’t deleted for whatever reason, a dental appointment reminder for next month, and The Wife Thread that I don’t delete. I have a bunch of pictures, but they’re mostly cats, outings, and vacations. I do still have the two photos of my crushed hand that I took in the ER. I keep my phone unlocked in case my wife needs to/wants to use it, so I don’t have any financial things in my Wallet. (There may or may not be an old COVID vaccination document in it.)
I’m not going to worry about it. I have hundreds of emails and texts on my phone. A fair number criticize the current administration and the assholes who are doing terrible things. I assume many millions of Americans have similar information on their phones. They might come after all of us, but it will take a considerable effort. I’m going to act as if we’re still a free country, even though I know that’s debatable.
Not to belabor, but maybe you can forward calls to the cheapie phone. Or when you get ready to leave, mail your principal phone home. And just use the cheapie phone on the last day. I don’t want to be reading about you in the New York Times. Or Supreme Court proceedings. Although I’m sure we could get Dopers to send you a cake with a file in it.
Well, I have texts and WhatsApp messages with friends from all over the world making fun of Trump and complaining about him. One WhatsApp thread in particular refers to him only as Orange Fucktard.
I don’t really think I’ll be singled out, FWIW. I’m a white, native-born hetero male with a European name, traveling alone.
But you never know when your number will come up.
Come to think of it, one of those threads is with my Israeli colleagues. So I should be able to avoid the antisemitism thing they seem so keen on.
Am I the only one who’s noticed that they have torn down any sort of protection or defense of minority groups with one notable exception?
I have a slight paranoia about doxxing myself, but interestingly most people assume my name is Jewish when they hear it, but when you see it spelled it’s clearly northern European.
Sounds questionable. But maybe you’ll get a border agent with above average intelligence and a good awareness of the wider outside world.
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BWA-HA-HA-HA!
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Sorry, maybe I’m just jealous because I never go anywhere.
You’re out in public. You overhear someone expressing a MAGAt-like assertion, and accompanying it with a minor grammatical “error” (such as ending a sentence with a preposition). You instantly call them out; tell them to go back where they came from, because “we speak ENGLISH here in America.”
There’s a pervasive myth that most Germans didn’t know what was happening. While we might quibble about how much some Germans knew, there’s no doubt the guards at concentration camps understood exactly what was happening. The Nazis were more than happy to provide their guards with the copious amounts of alcohol they drank to cope with what they were doing. It wasn’t even that difficult to be transferred to a different unit if you couldn’t handle the work.
Like those Nazi guards, ICE agents know exactly what they’re doing.
Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest they didn’t know what they were doing.
Just making the point that human beings can normalize just about anything. The last decade of political insanity provides ample proof of that in our case, much less what else is to come.
Is the name from a friendly (i.e., trump-ass-kissing) country?
