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Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment. Some govts in fact do it today. It is also cheaper than ai rocket and more precise too
Goons don't scale well. Wide-scale intimidation does.
In a sense, surveillance is a multiplier on your goons, creating virtual goons. If you have 5 goons but you can send them directly to the house of people who disagree with the government with 99% accuracy, it's like you had 500 goons waiting outside 500 houses then only entering the ones where people disagree with the government.
Goons work MUCH better than rockets for intimidation, and actually scale much better.

Rocket is obvious and spectacular. Those are for amateurs.

A journalist got beaten up to the brink of death and will never walk again by 'unknown perpetrators'? Well, it's a dangerous country, and he had it coming, maybe some concerned citizens went a bit too far, but our dear leader cannot watch over everybody.

Scaling: do you think other journalists will not take notice?

And he will still be alive to reminder them how they may end up.

If you want to see how far imagination can go here, look up Artyom Kamardin and think how would you behave after hearing his story .

Goons are bad publicity. Doing your dirty stuff as hidden from view as possible is best option
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Its called police. And they scale extraordinarily well.

And turns out power-tripping men offered raw power over other humans on threat of violence is something they like.

And ICE? Remember J6 and Three Percenter's and all those right wing militias? They ended up in ICE. Same reasons.

A very bold claim I have heard repeatedly, backed up with zero evidence. Care to share any proof you have found?
It's very important to pretend that ICE goons are significantly different from regular cops, because Democrats are going to wave a magic wand and declare ICE to be regular cops again when they are in control of them again.

Meanwhile, regular cops have been doing the same awful things that they've always been doing, literally at the command of Democratic mayors who are pompously declaring that they won't enforce immigration law in speeches. They'll send cops to throw your shit into the street when your rent suddenly doubles, and won't report an illegal immigrant felon (whose history we know nothing about) to ICE.

Organized white supremacists are nobodies with no power, they're all over the military, the cops, prison guards, and ICE. Meanwhile, Parchman Farm in Mississippi doesn't even report the people who are dying there, and has plastic all over the floors because the roofs are open to the elements. That's just legal American black people who this country actually owes something to, though. That was trendy like five years ago, it's so over now.

If you set aside social justice issues, the Democrats and Republicans basically agree. Republicans want a theocratic authoritarian state that can micromanage the workers and keep the economy going. Democrats want the same thing but with freedom of religion and more female CEOs of color.

Now you obviously shouldn't set social justice aside, and given the choice, I absolutely prefer the capitalist hellscape where my friends and I are not being rounded up and killed, but that's a REMARKABLY low standard I've had to settle on as a voter.

GOPs and Democrats are the same on environmental, science, and public health policy completely, huh? You sure you wanna both sides it that hard?
Indeed.

The Democrats and Republicans both are different approaches for the same billionaire class.

They're not "opposite sides of the same coin". Instead, they're more akin to 2 sock puppets. One wears red, and the other blue.

Like the Trump tariffs? They were initially Biden's tariffs that Trump increased and extended. Different clothes, same game.

But I'd be willing to try a good run with democratic socialism, or hell, communism. What we have is the cushy gold-parachute socialism for the elite, and unabashed hardcore capitalism for the poorest. And that fucking sucks. Burn it down.

https://archive.is/nwxkh

That was from a quick search, no doubt there's more. Now it gets down to trust issues on reporting.

It is called swatting.
The OP's point can be understood as an automization and mechanization of such targeting. Which will be necessary if the scope of thoughtcrime prosecution is to expand
Cost kind of stops the government from sending goons right now, sure some governments do it but, it's costly at scale.
Missiles are a lot more expensive and much less reusable than goons though. If the nation state can’t afford the goons, it can’t afford to missile you either
With the digital panopticon neither goons nor missles are really necessary. Opressive forces can just disable your spending and travel credits. If they need you dead or in custody they can just grab you the next time you pop up on camera near one of their agents.
> Opressive forces can just disable your spending and travel credits

"Disabled spending" already happened to the people in the ICC that acted contrary to Trump's diktats[0], without the need for a digital panopticon, both the banks and the government know who you are.

[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/world/us/2025/12/12/its-surreal-u...

Drones aren't though. Plenty of ways to use the data above for evil deeds.
Reaper drones will be the more cost effective way to eradicate amalek.
There are cheap drones with guns now thought
The UK gov has shown to be incredibly efficient at arresting and imprisoning citizens for social media comments.
This is widely promoted but not true.
The cost effectiveness is the intimidation and chilling effects on a wider population, when that can be achieved with a small number of actual goons.
> It is also cheaper than ai rocket and more precise too

Never stopped people overengineering :P

Wasn’t ICE pretty much doing exactly that with no oversight or accountability?
Who needs rockets when you have autonomous mini drones
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Stop justifying more horrible stuff with "there is already some horrible stuff"
The government already does that. The only challenge is scale.
You're being silly, the missile thing was hyperbole. Your computer will direct the thugs to your door.

> Nobody stops the government from sending goons to your door right now for a snarky comment.

This is just dumb. They literally don't know who wrote it, and have to assign somebody to track you down. The fact that they're putting infrastructure on your computer and on the network to make this one click away for them matters.

The goons are. Almost no government can create goons that are submissive enough to comply with any kind of crazy order.
Are you living under a rock?
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