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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The modern fascist terraforming plan is:

    Step 1: Flood the zone.

    Step 2: Population gives up and tunes out.

    Step 3: Remove all remaining checks to power.

    Step 4: Purge all political and social undesirables.

    The funny thing is, Stephen Miller and the rest realized they can do the steps in parallel, each one reinforcing and normalizing the others.

    The most valuable and hardest thing we can do is not give up resisting. But pace yourself, find some good in the world and give it some of your attention every day. They’re relying on wearing us down.









  • Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

    This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

    The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

    That last paragraph… Ooof.

    I knew Miller was a nihilistic misanthrope who would take as much power as he could, but I expected Bondi, Noem and Wiles to be nearly as craven to demonstrate their value to Trump and carve out their own fiefdoms. I didn’t expect them to cede it without so much as a shrug.


  • Yeah, this post started as a reassurance that Tailscale wouldn’t enshittify. But it turned out to just be an argument about how to avoid enshittification that boiled down to two principles:

    1. You shouldn’t make your product worse because it’ll eventually harm the company; and
    2. Founders are magic and need to never turn over control of the company to others (be it new CEOs or VC) to resist enshittification.

    Both are partially right and partially wrong.

    For #1: Yes, making your product worse eventually harms the company. No, you can’t expect CEOs to accept that as a reason to not make their product worse because even if it harms the company, short-term incentives that lead to enshittification are eventually going to become irresistible. His comment about reaching “zen” with leveled growth and profit will never stop VCs from calling in demands and favors.

    For #2: Yes, founders typically “get it” more than their VC- or failure-initiated replacements. No, that doesn’t mean founders are uniquely resistant to enshittification. This is your point too, and it’s why I don’t believe this person - they lose credibility here because they don’t acknowledge they aren’t special. Every tech bro out there thinks they’ve cracked the code to permanent tech hegemony. That exceptionalist thinking turns into enshittification, since the product-worsening or overcharging is easier to justify as temporary/necessary/not-a-big-deal (until it isn’t).

    And all of this doesn’t explain why Tailscale specifically gets immunity if the principles are true.

    So interesting post, and a lot more self-awareness than most founders which is still a little reassuring, but a lot of warning signs too.

    Edit: clarity







  • The DHS views the situation differently. In a statement to NBC, a department spokesperson said that “Garcia assaulted and verbally harassed a federal agent and that he was subdued and arrested for the alleged assault”.

    They say this every time, whether or not there is footage obviously proving otherwise.

    Apart from being so insulting and pathetic that this is the government’s generic response to unconstitutional arrests (though he is suing under a tort law due presumptively due to qualified immunity), it’s also outright defamatory to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime and assaulted ICE.

    The story doesn’t provide evidence either way, but if this just is their typical Baghdad Bob propaganda, I hope the victims of ICE start to sue for defamation as well - drain the new bill’s obscene funding with a wave of court-ordered compensation to ICE’s victims.