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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.