Apple Takes Down Ice Tracking Apps After Pressure From Doj

The domestic use of ICE and the military is plainly the actions of an organization of violent thugs by anyone with eyes to see. I do not advocate for violence - to the extent I am advocating for anything, I am explaining to you the foreseeable results of ideology-based institutional rot.

You are aware of this, don't appreciate the implications of what I am saying, and have seemingly resorted to yelling "violence" at the top of your lungs in the hopes that I am intimidated by such an accusation and become defensive.

Why do you assume that disobeying unjust laws automatically implies violence?

The only example I've given that involves violence is the American War of Independence, and only then because it's particularly pertinent to the idea that Americans have a duty to disobey unjust laws. All my other examples have been non-violent civil disobedience.

When someone tells me that they believe they have a duty to disobey unjust laws, my first thought isn't that they intend to be violent; it's that they intend to engage in non-violent civil disobedience. You can believe that you have a duty to disobey unjust laws and also believe that violence is a last resort.

> Is the US occupied by a foreign military, or are you just ignoring the political options at your disposal because you'd prefer to focus on how fast we can jump to arms and shoot each other?

The US was founded by foreign invaders. This is why I ask how recent a conquest needs to be.

By the time Gandhi was protesting in the 1930s, India had been under British rule for over 170 years. If Gandhi is morally justified to defy laws set by the invading British, then Native Americans are surely morally justified to defy laws set by the invading US government.

And again, you jump to the idea that defying unjust laws automatically means shooting people.

> It's sometimes more effective in the absence of alternatives. And non-violent civil obedience is most often effective and in most cases far more persuasive with the majority. Prioritize your efforts. No need to get violent when we can be disobedient.

Then we effectively agree. How long do you think we should give a government to fix an unjust law before engaging in civil disobedience and disobeying that law? Presumably it depends on the severity of the injustice, but I'm interested to get a feel for your intuition on this.

> It was already unconstitutional. She didn't break the law. The judicial branch doesn't make new laws, it interprets existing ones. Her disobedience was lawful, and only required because she lacked a platform to reach the courts.

So is someone justified in breaking the law if they believe that law will be overturned by a higher one? What if they're wrong?

Also, how would we test laws for constitutionality if no-one ever breaks those laws? Surely there needs to be something that brings the case in the first place.

> Even if it were unlawful behavior, it is not a duty. I have no imperative to go looking for laws to break, and anyone who tells me I have to is sick.

So if someone tells you that you have a duty to behave morally, that person is sick? Doesn't that include the vast majority of Americans, who at least in theory follow religions that advocate people act morally above all else?

You seem to acknowledge that civil disobedience, even violence, can be justified as a last resort. Yet you also seem to hold legal obligations higher than moral ones, and are dismissive of people who'd choose morality over legality.

Detaining people who are actively interfering with ICE activity as part of a deliberate protest is something I think it's reasonable for any kind of police to be able to do - there's no reason why fellow citizens in a democracy should inherently privilege the violence protesters do in order to prevent the enforcement of a law over the violence that the police do to in order to carry out that enforcement, it all comes down to your political opinion of the law.

Detaining US citizens while in the process of detaining illegal immigrants also seems reasonable, since there's no way to tell if a suspected illegal immigrant claiming to be a US citizen is lying or not until law enforcement actually checks. This is no different than cops being able to arrest a person on suspicion of a crime and then let them go with no charges when they realize they were mistake, which is a power cops already have in our society.

The question of whether it is good to give a path to citizenship for people who immigrated illegally and have lived illegally in the US for many years is a major point of partisan political disagreement in the US. There are huge numbers of people who think that it is very bad that these illegal immigrants weren't arrested and deported many years ago, and want immigration enforcement to make up for the lax polcies of previous administrations, not give a path to citizenship to people who were by law not allowed to be present in the US to begin with.

> Also, unilaterally revoking Temporary Protected Status for folks is also a bridge too far. Those were originally issued by Obama for very valid reasons - the catastrophic 2010 earthquake and later humanitarian crises.

If you think that the presence of people given Temporary Protected Status many years ago by a previous president is bad for the united states, then not only do you want your elected officials to remove this temporary protected status, you probably want your legislators to repeal the law giving presidents the authority to grant this status at all. In any case, there are many voting citizens in the US who clearly do not believe it is a bridge too far, and want the president to revoke this status and not offer it in the future.

I don't have access to the DOW directly, I would still have to choose individual stocks.

In fact, it is because of just how obviously "self evident" it is that the point can even be made in the first place: if you construct a giant centralized bottleneck on the distribution of software and information, you will end up being asked to use that bottleneck to filter content by governments... not just in the United States, but around the world. If that is truly "self evident" to you, you do not build the centralized bottleneck unless you like the idea of the eventual possible results of such.

And, in that analysis, if you like the result, then you can argue with the tone of the wording, but I don't think the point is "untrue". Apple doesn't really have any choice in the matter, so they are a patsy here. And if you argued to help Apple obtain their centralized position, you are complicit in said result. You might be proud to be complicit, or you might be happy that Apple is a patsy, but that doesn't change the truth of the situation.

So like, great: you say that is self-evident... did you like what happened today? If not, do you like it when Apple does the same thing for counties all over the world--when I said "authoritarian control" it was me talking about other countries, such as China, where I think you would be hard-pressed to argue otherwise--and pulls apps like VPNs and protest coordination tools? If so, again, very not my jam... but it certainly makes sense for you to be happy Apple has no choice and proud of any prior involvement you have with such...

...but, if you ever think Apple is doing stuff that makes your stomach lurch because they have no choice but to follow the edict of a government, the question is: what does that imply for moral product development in this world? Do you build--and then advocate for, or defend on forums--a centralized App Store and deny the ability for third-party software? Or do you, as a principled stance... not do that?

To refrain one more time: we are in intense and powerful agreement that "it is pretty self evident that a large or small company would remove an app at the request of the US Government that actively tracks federal agents that are attempting to enforce the law". That isn't only "your" opinion: that is "our" opinion! ;P

As the moment of agency then happens well before this moment today, we then can't shy away from the real question: do you like Trump and how he's running ICE, and the result it has on families? If you do, again: not my jam ;P, but I totally get why you'd be happy about the result today or confused as to why you should feel differently about it.

However, it isn't obvious to me you do, as you want to hide behind the action today being "self evident", as if that obviates the need to even verify someone's (I want to say "yours" but you might technically be arguing on behalf of an anonymous third party, and I don't want to leave opening to pivot the discussion into whether or not you personally ever advocated for Apple) opinion on ICE: in fact, that is why that political opinion matters so very very much!

In a world where we decide one company has a bottleneck on information and freedom strong enough to quickly remove access to content and tools from a large percentage of the population, suddenly we must care deeply about how that tool will get used. If you don't like how that tool gets used, you really have to be advocating for that tool to not exist.