lotharsson.bsky.social
653 posts
161 followers
187 following
Active Commenter
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If merely saying it made it so, you'd have an actual argument.
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This portion of the dissent much indicts the Supreme Court majority as enemies of the Constitution - of the Republic.
And she's not wrong about that.
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There's another distinct inherent centralising factor when stablecoins are meant to be a proxy for real USD. Exchanges licensed for USD-coin conversion become centralised entities in the system...for obvious reasons.
And IIRC there tend to be centralising forces in market-making as well.
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But it's worse than that.
They not only get richer, they get COMPARATIVELY richer, compared to the rest. Once you have an edge over the rest, your edge gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger...
...until it's not economically viable for any other actors to even try to compete.
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Because they comprise reward structures that disproportionately provide stochastic rewards to those actors/entities with the most coins or the most $$$.
It's a classic "positive feedback loop" in engineering terms. In financial terms it's "the rich get richer".
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Every accusation is a confession...
...and I suspect every unhinged defense of another power-drunk madman is a confession too.
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They all reward increasing monopolisation, which means they centralise into the monopolies that inherently develop.
You can nitpick that it's not the SAME centralised monopoly as for fiat currencies, but arguably it's even worse than that.
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LOL!
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And all of the technological mechanisms cryptocurrencies rely on inherently centralise over time.
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^^^^^^^^^^ THIS!
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And it sounds more Trump-ish ... actually, given his family history, more Drumpf-ish - in the original German.
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Over the last couple of days I've seen several reports (with photos) of masked kidnappers using vehicles with no plates :-(
If so get the VIN if you can (Google where to find it). You have to get much closer to photograph it, but it's also a much stronger identifier than plates are.
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There may be parallels with the bounty hunters snatching anyone with detectable levels of melanin in the North.
I've seen claims the government is offering bounties for snatching potential deportees - but note I haven't seen any decent evidence to back that up.
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And I don't see how people who are stopped and their story is subsequently covered in the media are using it for "clout".
For one thing, the coverage can only HINDER any future attempts to enter the US.
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Your hypothesis presumes that you're observing an unskewed random sample of those who've been stopped. That's exceedingly unlikely. People who ALREADY have more public exposure or "clout" are far more likely to be covered in the press and social media.
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Yes, agreed on all counts.
I haven't seen good evidence bounties have been offered, especially to freelance bounty hunters - but if that's happening it would explain a lot (including the appallingly unprofessional conduct, quite apart from what seems to be unlawful actions).
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And the fact that it is all strongly consistent with the regime's repression of anyone - within the country, and at the border, and even attempting to suppress dissent OUTSIDE the US - that they can possibly repress or suppress who does anything other than cheerlead Israel's genocide in Gaza.
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For instance, you have to also dismiss two stories about it by the eminent national broadcaster in Australia, e.g. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06....
And stories in other outlets.
And the guy's substack: substack.com/@alistair which contains a bunch of historical posts that line up.
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Yes, that's exactly how you can defend your cognitive dissonance.
But such efforts have to grow, and grow, and grow, over time.
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AFAIK there's no effective way to do this, quite apart from the fact that ICE often goes out of its way to make their detainees harder to track.
And I suspect the kidnappers are relying on that fact.
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I've seen claims that there's a bounty per detainee, offered to various ... people ... who aren't necessarily directly employed or otherwise contracted by DHS, ICE or any other law enforcement force.
That might help explain some of their behaviour.
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The same person's story has been written up in The Guardian, amongst other outlets if I'm not mistaken.
Please don't be so gullible that this story is way beyond what CBP and DHS will do in these times, especially given all the other stories from major news outlets over the last few months.
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I've seen that too.
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Thanks for the clarification!
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You might be right, but he person who said that cited a statute that (presumably was the relevant one) and I don't recall it being restricted to immigration arrests.
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I believe they can only do that if the alleged perpetrator is likely to get away if they don't and there's a good chance they will permanently evade arrest.
That certainly wasn't true here.
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They've also been proactively scanning social media for people intending to travel. I wouldn't be surprised if they have backdoor access to private and maybe even deleted posts courtesy of the social media barons who have conspicuously bent the knee.
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^^^ SECONDED!
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I have already seen reports of people being detained for hours because their phone was too burner-ish.
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Once they have had unfettered physical access, it's prudent to treat it as permanently compromised, even after a factory reset.
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And in contrast to the implications of your snark, the severity of such compromises can ***vastly*** exceed that of Facebook/Google/Microsoft cooperating with the Trump regime.
One example: compromised phones can be remotedy triggered to secretly livestream without your knowledge at any time.
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Even so, I would replace the phone. The advice to do so was right on the money.
Once potentially malicious actors have physical access, it can be compromised in ways that are _extremely_ hard to detect, let alone mitigate.
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Deleting it after you book your ticket is too late now.
It may be pointless to delete at all. The regime's been scanning social media for quite a while AND social media barons have all the knee to the regime so backdoor access may have been granted (including "private" & maybe even deleted posts).
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Either way, if it was a joke, I don't think transgender people were not the punchline. The bigots and their disturbing obsession were. In other words, it was punching up, not punching down.
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Can't be sure I read it right, but I didn't read it as a joke at transgender expense. I read it as employing the non-word Trump and some MAGA anti-trans bigots use, presumably to reject their bigotry in language they understand.
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Even better if it's on his own cell network so you can be sure you ONLY get Trump-approved Truth(TM) when you online with it, right?
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So, if I understand what I'm seeing correctly, they're claiming large crowds at Trump's parade...which are refuted by numerous independent reports including photos & video.
So are the screenshots claiming AI doesn't think their photo is AI generated ALSO gaslighting?
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This seems to be the classic abusers' DARVO tactic applied to international relations.
Deny the abuse.
Attack those calling it out.
Reverse Victim and Offender == claim what's ACTUALLY occurring is the victim is abusing the abuser, not the other way around.
* We need to teach this in schools. *
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I saw a couple of other songs mentioned, and I suspect those artists will be pretty pissed off as well.
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So he was asked (somewhat rudely to be sure) to honor his oath, and he IMMEDIATELY dishonored it ... on camera, along with a dozen of his colleagues?
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Unfortunately, he has a Ph.D. which makes his title Doctor.
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... and Marines were, in her mind, being deployed in order to stage a coup against the government of California and of Los Angeles.
It's hard to see any sober way to judge that risk as anything other that entirely off the charts ... unless one WANTS such a coup to succeed, of course.
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It's also worth pointing out that all of ^^^^ THAT ^^^^ is only a quarter of the risk of undermining the Constitution and the Union in ways that will be hard to mitigate if they are allowed to occur.
Secretary Noem yesterday CLEARLY indicated the National Guard ...
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The risks - to law and order, and the Constitution, not to mention numerous ordinary people - of allowing them even a fraction of a chance to succeed at this are WAAAAAAY worse than refusing to stay.
It's not quite a Kristalnacht ... yet ... but it's a test run for manufacturing one.
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... which they are quite clearly using as a test case to see what they can get away with before they scale the strategy up to every other blue state and perhaps even some Democratic-skewed cities in red states, all in the service of entrenching an lawless autocratic regime.
2/
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Sure, it avoids that ... at the cost of the chaos of undermining decades of precedent and States Rights and all that, not to mention the very chaos the gaslighting administration is deliberately stoking in order to "justify" illegally taking control of the National Guard ...
1/
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Yes, it does. I certainly wouldn't bet against that notion.
Elsewhere someone claims the FBI has lost so many people they've hired a bunch more who've only receive a fraction of the regular agent training, perhaps to deploy them as (arguably incompetent) FBI-lite personnel for this kind of thing.
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I don't have any knowledge of it myself, but another poster said the three bars on one "FBI Police" uniform normally indicate Sargeant, and there's no such thing in the FBI either.
Gotta wonder if Ms Nazi Cosplay Barbie hired some Cosplay Feds to rough up dissenters...
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Not exactly stupid.
A key aspect of authoritarian regimes is telling supporters to repudiate their lying ears and lying eyes & forcing officials to publicly humiliate themselves by earnestly repeating the self-evident lies as unvarnished truth.
The more unbelievable the better it works - on them.