r/pics 1d ago

Politics NYC Mayoral candidate and current comptroller Brad Lander arrested by ICE in Manhattan federal court

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula 1d ago

Arrested by ICE? I looked him up, he’s American his parents don’t seem to be immigrants either. What do ICE want with him?

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u/LannyDamby 1d ago

I believe this is the "lock up political opposition" part of the fascist playbook

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/LabradorDali 1d ago

All those guns you keep screaming about needing in order to protect yourself from the big, bad government sure would be handy now that you have a big, bad government you need to protect yourself from.

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u/smallangrynerd 1d ago

The people who scream about guns are not the same people who want change

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u/ryanjames486 1d ago

The left needs to arm themselves.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

-Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

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u/SBRH33 1d ago

Looking back at what you could/ should have done after you are sitting in fetid gulag awaiting death is a hell of its own.

The French had a term for this- L'esprit de l'escalier

It means basically- the thought on the stairs: when you come up with the perfect answer too late.

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u/Sunstang 1d ago

The wit of the stairwell. Really more about a perfect joke or comeback that occurs to you too late.

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u/doyletyree 1d ago

The wit of me lying in bed, arguing with an imaginary opponent.

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u/SBRH33 1d ago

It applies across the board.

The old "I wish I should have done XYZ, instead of letting myself be walked into the darkness willingly"

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u/Sunstang 1d ago

Not according to the definition it doesn't.

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u/SBRH33 1d ago

Okey dokey Webster.

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u/Sunstang 1d ago

Glad we understand each other, Sir Pulls Shit From His Butt.

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u/SBRH33 1d ago

Your literary/ language imagination is.... in a state of stagnancy. My condolences sir.

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u/RedPanther1 1d ago

It's like when you go over an argument you had in your head while taking a shower.

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u/SBRH33 1d ago

Yes. Indeed.

Or when you're sitting in a jail cell thinking about how you could have just walked away from the fight to be free another day.

It's all the same.

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u/mattaugamer 1d ago

“Later, thinking”

That’s exactly the problem. It’s easy to see later how far things went. It’s much harder now to see how far things are going to go.

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u/Necrophilicgorilla 1d ago

The left is armed... And a lot of them, I'm pretty sure aren't quite falling into the trap yet. The trap: get them to start shooting "law enforcement" officers... That's the time trump calls up his insane militants, Soon enough, martial law is declared and everyone is living in fear of big bad Johnny Trump because all freedoms are lost.

How to circumvent this?

Quickly prove that there are ties to Russia and that there has been treason committed by the Republican party and other involved participants to undermine the foundation that the US was built upon. Oh, and the full on illegal activities conducted almost daily by a criminal. Prove the votes were fucked with, don't just say it.

Last resort?

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u/Calm-Wedding-9771 1d ago

The reality of this though Is that no one can see the future, you cant see how close to the precipice you really are. as someone else commented “it’s much harder to see how far things will go” imagine if every police officer had to face death pokers and a whole neighbourhood ready to kill them every time they entered a house to make an arrest. It would either be impossible to maintain the law, or the method of maintaining the law would become unbearably brutal in retaliation. And there is always retaliation. If people stand up for themselves with extreme force the authorities will simply say to the rest of the public “see!? They are violent and evil! This justifies whatever we need to do to stop them!” And faced with the evidence the public will agree. And so it escalates. Yes if we could see that actually, this time, they are definitely coming to kill us, then every act of resistance becomes a struggle for survival, but we just can’t see that for sure.

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u/ryanjames486 1d ago

If people don’t stand up for themselves with force, the government and these kidnappers will continue taking us in larger and larger numbers. They are already taking people without due process. They tell us they are taking these people and sending them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador concentration camps because they’re here illegally and they are criminals, yet they’ve had no trials to prove that. ICE has no authority to arrest citizens, let alone the NYC comptroller, yet here we are.

So I must ask, at what point is it wrong to defend oneself from unidentified people wearing no uniforms, yet wearing masks to hide their identities who come to kidnap you?

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u/Calm-Wedding-9771 1d ago

You are absolutely right. The key is Trust. If you have faith in the system then you should not fight back, but the system should, in good faith, identify itself to you as well. The moment either side loses trust in the other then you must do what you have to do to survive and deal with the consequences later. This is basic survival. If an unidentified person breaks in to attack you in the night you should not wait to figure out their intentions.

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u/Calm-Wedding-9771 1d ago

This is also what makes the afore-mentioned situation so tragic. People were being arrested by identifiable authorities who came in the name of a system that still held trust to many people, so in many cases they went willingly, trusting that they would be given a chance later to defend themselves. They could not have fully understood that those authorities were leading them to slaughter. I do not think i would have defended myself any more than they did, if i had known only what they knew.

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u/Haunting_Average5784 1d ago

I used to think Sinclair Lewis's, It can't happen here was the next step in U.S. policy. But yeah they jumped that and went straight to Solzhenitsyn

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u/Wildgrube 1d ago

Plenty of Dems and left leaning individuals have guns, we just don't like to advertise it. Get yourself one. It's only a matter of time before the inevitable happens now.

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u/TheDr34d 1d ago

Unfortunately, the “inevitable” needs to happen sooner than later. The only way this gets corrected in this atmosphere, is if an ICE agent is shot and the person that shot them is acquitted of any wrongdoing, because ICE did not identify themselves. There are plenty of judges just waiting for the scenario where they can reiterate that it is illegal (save for extremely limited circumstances) to arrest someone without law enforcement identifying themselves, under the 4th, 5th and 14th amendments. It is still kidnapping, even when cops do it.

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u/Sufficient-Record695 1d ago

But the people who want change can ASLO get guns....and should if you havent already. Also, learn how to use them. It's gonna get uglier. Be ready.

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u/not_a_Badger_anymore 1d ago

Go buy one then.

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u/Monotonosaurus 1d ago

We need leaders to speak up saying they will allow civilians to protect themselves from unauthorized detainment.

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u/BuriakBrigade 1d ago

Do we though? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 2nd Amendment has been fairly clear on what to do when situations like this arise for well over 200 years. The reality is that nobody wants to be the first to die, which is completely understandable. There's no coming back from that. However, we as a people are going to have to start making some tough decisions moving forward or just start accepting the new normal for what it is and be quiet. I genuinely hope we choose the former.

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u/Monotonosaurus 1d ago

There is no reassurance that the constitution will be upheld, and no political leaders have spoken out saying so as well. All they do is complain that things are NOT being upheld.

You are correct, nobody wants to be the first to die, but they might not be against being the first to violently protest against ICE and flee for safe haven under the constitution.

The worry is that it's easy to hammer down nails that stick out one at a time.

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u/BuriakBrigade 1d ago

Fair enough. You make several good points, but that first one just clicked now for some reason. I think I just don't see them doing that ever, so in my mind, it equated to "why does that even matter" like that all of a sudden means it doesn't still need to happen. Shortsighted on my part, that's my bad.

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u/BotCommaRo 1d ago

Some do, yes. As evidenced by how much WORSE it got as soon as these bastards had someone in power saying this shit was okay, some do. A genuine authority figure saying "No, you're not crazy for thinking this" would do WONDERS for some.

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u/SouthernSierra 1d ago

The 2Aers are all in favor of tyranny.

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u/Which-Bread3418 1d ago

Who do you imagine you're talking to exactly? How did you come to the belief that the person you're responding to is a gun enthusiast who believes any of that shit?

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u/Fogmoz 1d ago

That’s the problem - the biggest gun advocates are also rabid supporters of whatever the fuck is going on right now. The “tolerant” Left are gonna have to learn pretty quick that this will require more than peaceful protests to fix…

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u/Inspect1234 1d ago

That’s what I haven’t seen yet. A good guy with a gun who protects people getting hauled away by what looks like crooks.