Let’s Talk Websites

I wish I’d written a post-mortem of my last disastrous hike. Not because it’s an opportunity to humble-brag about a time I hiked 43 kilometres, nor because these stories lead to compelling narratives, but because it’s invaluable for figuring out both what went wrong and how to fix it. As a bonus, it’s an opportunity to educate someone about the finer details of hiking.

Hence when it was suggested I do a post about FreethoughtBlog’s latest outage, I jumped on it relatively quickly. Unlike my hiking disasters, though, a lot of this coming second-hand via PZ and some detective work on my side, so keep a bit of skepticism handy.

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FTO Update, May-June 2023

Important stuff first: FTO will be de-federating from universeodon no sooner than a week from now, and once Facebook/Meta announce more details about Threads/P92 we’ll be blocking them as well. As usual, here’s our financial situation:

Month Cost
November 2022 $26.06
December 2022 $8.73
January 2023 $4.75
February 2023 $0.19
March 2023 $0.00
April 2023 $0.00
May 2023 $0.00
June 2023 $0.00*

And here’s the requisite plug of FtB’s instance and instructions on how to join. I should also mention I added the phanpy UI to our instance. It comes with a lot of useful features, like a “boost carousel” and grouped notifications which make browsing a more pleasant experience. It also supports multiple accounts, none of which have to be on FTO. I’m a big fan. Phanpy has its downsides, but I want to save them for a future review of Mastodon clients.

In the meantime, let’s talk about some recent controversies on the Fediverse.

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Get off Twitter NOW

[2022-12-9 HJH: If you caught this early, scroll to the bottom for an update.]

You remember Bari Weiss, right? She’s behind the “University” of Austin, an anti-woke school I haven’t discussed much but PZ has extensively covered. She’s also whined about COVID, complained about censorship of conservative voices at universities, but most of you likely learned of her from her fawning coverage of the “intellectual dark web.” Her resignation letter from the New York Times editorial board is exactly what you’d expect, given that background.

… a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

This received a bit of pushback from her peers at the time, which was rather remarkable given these were employees publicly critiquing their own boss. But I’m getting a bit distracted here, the key point is that back in 2020 Bari Weiss had a beef with Twitter. It was not only part of the woke left that was stifling conservative voices, in her opinion, it was the vector her employees used to slander her good name. I seriously doubt any of us paid much attention to that back in the day, as Twitter has long been a target of conservatives for allegations of “shadowbanning,” or reducing the visibility of certain tweets or Twitter users. Who cares about yet another conservative with a conspiracy-fueled grudge?

On Friday, a more unexpected sighting came in the form of Weiss, the conservative newsletter writer who was previously a New York Times opinion columnist. Weiss was in the San Francisco office that evening, speaking and “laughing with” Musk, two employees said.

By Saturday, Musk said Weiss would take part in releasing what he’s dubbed “the Twitter files,” so far consisting mainly of correspondence between Twitter employees and executives discussing their decision in 2020 to block access to a New York Post article detailing material on Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop. Now, Weiss has been given access to Twitter’s employee systems, added to its Slack, and given a company laptop, two people familiar with her presence said.

The level of access to Twitter systems given to Weiss is typically given only to employees, one of the people familiar said, though it doesn’t seem she is actually working at the company.

Oh. Oh dear. It gets worse, too! Remember the firing of James Baker? He was one of Twitter’s lead lawyers, until Matt Taibbi and Weiss realized who he was and accused him of preventing their full access of Twitter’s internal records. Which, of course he did! If you were going to give a third party extensive access to sensitive internal documents, you’d be daft not to have a lawyer present to ensure there’s no legal consequence. Which leaves us with the question: when Musk fired Baker, did he substitute in another lawyer to vet the access given to Weiss and Tabbi? Given his love of flouting the law, it’s a fair bet he did not. So it was basically inevitable a terrible situation would get worse.

A screenshot of Twitter's internal dashboard, showing details of the Libs Of TikTok's account.

This screenshot, shared by Weiss, set my hair on fire. Just by looking at it I can tell it’s an internal Twitter dashboard pointed at the Libs of TikTok account. Most of the identifying information has been cropped out, though that still leaves a lot behind. I now know Chaya Raichik uses a custom domain as her private Twitter email, which likely changed some time between April and December and is probably [something]@libsoftiktok.com. The image itself is a crop of a photo taken on an Apple phone on the evening of December 8th, so Raichik hadn’t been back on Twitter since she’d posted a tweet a day or two prior. Raichik has two strikes on her account, including a recent one for abusing people online; she has at least one alt account; and she’s blacklisted from trending on that platform, which is a good thing. Parker Malloy points out that, despite was Weiss says, this screenshot is evidence conservative accounts are given special treatment. The banner up top says that even if a Twitter mod thinks Libs Of TikTok has violated Twitter’s policies, that mod is not to take any action unless Twitter’s “Site Integrity Policy and Policy Escalation Support” team signs off on it. In other words Twitter has given Rachik a few Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free cards for policy violations, even though she’s a repeat offender.

Notice the faint text on the screen? Based on that, a former Twitter employee was able to conclude either Twitter’s current Vice President of Trust and Safety was logged in at the time, or someone with a similar level of access. Zoom in, and you’ll note the text follows the curve of the lens; in other words, that text was overlaid on the monitor and not the photo. Remember how Reality Winner was tracked down by the CIA because The Intercept didn’t purge the watermarks on a printed page? This is the same thing: by forcing the operating system to overlay this text on the screen, Twitter could track down anyone who leaked a screenshot or image of Twitter’s sensitive internal information. This isn’t an employee-only page Weiss is looking at, this is the equivalent of a Top-Secret document that the vast majority of Twitter staff aren’t trusted with. She’s one click away from learning when Raichik paid $8 for her verification mark, or what her email address is, or her phone number, or … reading all her private direct messages.

That, right there, is at least a two-alarm fire. About the only good news is that the person with this level of access is Bari Weiss. Sure, she could read the private messages of Democratic members of Congress, but her past in the media makes her unlikely to do much with that info. She’s probably not much of a threat, unless you’re a New York Times reporter.

Our team was given extensive, unfiltered access to Twitter’s internal communication and systems. One of the things we wanted to know was whether Twitter systemically suppressed political speech. Here’s what we found:

– Abigail Shrier @ 5:28PM, December 8th 2022.

THAT is a four alarm-er. Abigail Shrier is a former lawyer, but after her 2020 book she’s become an anti-LGBT crusader testifying before the US Congress and peddling misinformation. She’s published private information in an effort to shut down an LGBT club at a school and attempted to get two teachers fired as a result. Thanks to her legal experience, she likely knows how to push the limits of what is considered legal. And now, if what she’s saying is accurate, she’s got the same level of access to Twitter as Bari Weiss. She could read the private messages of any LGBT person or group on the platform, or learn of their phone number or private email address.

I’m not prone to alarm, but this news has me trying to ring every alarm bell I can find. Get the fuck off Twitter, as soon as humanly possible. That may allow someone to impersonate you in one-to-twelve months, but that’s better than giving these assholes a chance to browse your private messages.

=====

Alas, in my panic to bang this blog post out ASAP, I missed some details.

eirwin4903ZWlyd21u863, repeated over and over on all the screenshots from that internal tool.
– Dustin Miller @ 8:17 PM, December 8th 2022

this couldn’t possibly be new twitter head of trust and safety Ella Irwin (@ellagirwin) letting Bari Weiss rifle around in a backend tool that clearly says “Direct Messages” in the sidebar could it?
– tom mckay @ 9:26 PM,  December 8th 2022

Correct. For security purposes, the screenshots requested came from me so we could ensure no PII was exposed. We did not give this access to reporters and no, reporters were not accessing user DMs.
– Ella Irwin @ 10:22 PM, December 8th 2022

These watermarks are meant to prevent anonymous leaks. But usually this is for front-line people, like Customer Svc/tech support, etc. Weird it’d show up for the head of trust and safety, but elon is a paranoid dude.

Without any trustworthy explanation, this could be the head of trust/safety giving out her credentials for the non-production/testing environment. It looks so, so, so bad.
– Eve @ 12:55 AM, December 9th 2022

I’ll give Ella Irwin the full benefit of the doubt. Even though she was hand-picked by Elon Musk to be the head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, she did not let any third party access direct messages or any other private or personal information of Twitter users. Can she prevent that from happening in future, though? I’ve already mentioned the firing of James Baker. Matt Taibbi described his sins thusly:

On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay.

We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.

The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated.

Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”

“My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss.

As I pointed out earlier, there’s nothing odd about Twitter’s legal council pumping the brakes in this situation. There’s no evidence presented Baker was hiding or manipulating anything. Taibbi describes Baker as a “controversial figure” later in the thread, which is an odd way of phrasing “he didn’t say nice things about Trump and was partially involved in the FBI’s Russia investigation, which made the US far-right declare him to be an enemy.”

One thing I didn’t point out is that Bari Weiss publicly shared private messages made by Yoel Roth on Twitter’s internal Slack. Yoel Roth is also a “controversial figure” for the US far-right, which was reason enough for Weiss to violate his privacy. It’s not a large leap from sharing the private Slack messages of a “controversial figure” to sharing the private Twitter messages of a “controversial figure,” and given the positive reception Weiss has gotten for her “reporting” from the US far-right I figure it’s only a matter of time before she asks. Best case scenario, Irwin says “no,” the conflict is escalated to her boss Elon Musk, and he’s not in a firing mood.

Thing is, despite Irwin’s claim that there’s no personally identifying information in those photos, I’ve already shown there was. Not a lot, admittedly, but it doesn’t speak highly of Twitter’s new Trust and Safety head that she didn’t realize how much a photo can reveal. On top of that, remember that Weiss and Irwin were communicating with one another. Irwin could have explained what the photos actually showed, but either did not do that or did so and was ignored by Weiss. If the latter starts asking for Twitter DMs, I’m not convinced Irwin will give much pushback.

So while we may have dodged a bullet there, more shots are planned and I’m not convinced future ones will miss. My advice remains the same: get the fuck off Twitter, ASAP.

What’s the Message, Here?

The average age of death from COVID in Alberta is 83, and I remind the House that the average life expectancy in the province is age 82. – Premier Jason Kenney, May 27th 2020.

That really caught my ear, when it came across the local news. What the hell is our Premier saying, that the elderly are expendable? It was so outrageous, I wanted to dig into it further and get the full context. The original news report I heard only had that one sentence, though, so I did a bit of research. I couldn’t find an unedited clip of his speech, but I did find a clip with one extra sentence in place.

Mr. Speaker, it is critical as we move forward, that we focus our efforts on the most vulnerable; on the elderly, and the immuno-compromised. The average age of death from COVID in Alberta is 83, and I remind the House that the average life expectancy in the province is age 82. – also Premier Jason Kenney, May 27th 2020.

That radically changes the meaning, doesn’t it? Still, I have to point out I’m getting mixed messages here. [Read more…]

Deep Penetration Tests

We now live in an age where someone can back door your back door.

Analysts believe there are currently on the order of 10 billions Internet of Things (IoT) devices out in the wild. Sometimes, these devices find their way up people’s butts: as it turns out, cheap and low-power radio-connected chips aren’t just great for home automation – they’re also changing the way we interact with sex toys. In this talk, we’ll dive into the world of teledildonics and see how connected buttplugs’ security holds up against a vaguely motivated attacker, finding and exploiting vulnerabilities at every level of the stack, ultimately allowing us to compromise these toys and the devices they connect to.

Writing about this topic is hard, and not just because penises may be involved. IoT devices pose a grave security risk for all of us, but probably not for you personally. For instance, security cameras have been used to launch attacks on websites. When was the last time you updated the firmware on your security camera, or ran a security scan of it? Probably never. Has your security camera been taken over? Maybe, as of 2017 roughly half the internet-connected cameras in the USA were part of a botnet. Has it been hacked and commanded to send your data to a third party? Almost certainly not, these security cam hacks almost all target something else. Human beings are terrible at assessing risk in general, and the combination of catastrophic consequences to some people but minimal consequences to you only amplifies our weaknesses.

There’s a very fine line between “your car can be hacked to cause a crash!” and “some cars can be hacked to cause a crash,” between “your TV is tracking your viewing habits” and “your viewing habits are available to anyone who knows where to look!” Finding the right balance between complacency and alarmism is impossible given how much we don’t know. And as computers become more intertwined with our intimate lives, whole new incentives come into play. Proportionately, more people would be willing to file a police report about someone hacking their toaster than about someone hacking their butt plug. Not many people own a smart sex toy, but those that do form a very attractive hacking target.

There’s not much we can do about this individually. Forcing people to take an extensive course in internet security just to purchase a butt plug is blaming the victim, and asking the market to solve the problem doesn’t work when market incentives caused the problem in the first place. A proper solution requires collective action as a society, via laws and incentives that help protect our privacy.

Then, and only then, can you purchase your sex toys in peace.

“You might think that’s OK”

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I treat US Republican politicians as if they were a hive mind. That’s obviously false, but when they act as a unit to continue family separation policies or put partisan hacks on the Supreme Court then their differences are small enough to safely ignore.

Today, we got another example of that. The Intelligence Committee within the US House of Representatives held a hearing on Russian interference. Rather than contribute towards that, however, every Republican on the committee used their time to demand the head of the committee step down. Why? According to a letter they released,

Despite these findings [of the Special Council report], you continue to proclaim in the media that there is “significant evidence of collusion.” You further have stated you “will continue to investigate the counterintelligence issues. That is, is the president or people around him compromised in any way to a hostile foreign power?” Your willingness to continue to promote a demonstrably false narrative is alarming.

Either Adam Schiff knew this was coming, or he’s damn quick on his feet, because he shot back with this. Forgive the length of this quote, but it’s worth absorbing in full. [Read more…]

Moral Relativism

I’ve mentioned WEIRD on this blog before. For those who haven’t heard, the basic idea is that college students in North America are very unlike most people on Earth, yet psychology usually considers them type specimens for our entire species.[1] This calls into question a lot of “universals” proposed in psychology papers.

You might think morality would be a clear exception to that. Young people are fitter, old people have already contributed most of what they will to society; if one of each group is put in danger, we should try to save the former first before the latter. Right?

We are entering an age in which machines are tasked not only to promote well-being and minimize harm, but also to distribute the well-being they create, and the harm they cannot eliminate. Distribution of well-being and harm inevitably creates tradeoffs, whose resolution falls in the moral domain. Think of an autonomous vehicle that is about to crash, and cannot find a trajectory that would save everyone. Should it swerve onto one jaywalking teenager to spare its three elderly passengers? Even in the more common instances in which harm is not inevitable, but just possible, autonomous vehicles will need to decide how to divide up the risk of harm between the different stakeholders on the road. […]

… we designed the Moral Machine, a multilingual online ‘serious game’ for collecting large-scale data on how citizens would want autonomous vehicles to solve moral dilemmas in the context of unavoidable accidents. The Moral Machine attracted worldwide attention, and allowed us to collect 39.61 million decisions from 233 countries, dependencies, or territories.

Awad, Edmond, Sohan Dsouza, Richard Kim, Jonathan Schulz, Joseph Henrich, Azim Shariff, Jean-François Bonnefon, and Iyad Rahwan. “The Moral Machine Experiment.” Nature 563, no. 7729 (November 2018): 59. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6.

Well, the data is in. I could do an entire blog post on just their summary, but for now merely note the benevolent sexism,[2] focus on punishment, classism, deontology, and cat hatred. That left bar chart is confusing; the bar between the elderly and the young isn’t indicating that both would be spared equally often, but that children would be spared 49 percentage points more often.

Figure 2 (global preferences) from Edmond et. al (2018).

Sure enough, there’s a clear preference for sparing the young over the elderly. But hold on here; this was an online survey, and the map of people playing the “game” shows a definite skew towards North America and Europe. This summary is “global” in that it aggregates all the data together, but not in the sense that it represents the globe’s preferences. We would do better to break down the responses into countries and analyze that.

First, we observe systematic differences between individualistic cultures and collectivistic cultures. Participants from individualistic cultures, which emphasize the distinctive value of each individual, show a stronger preference for sparing the greater number of characters (…). Furthermore, participants from collectivistic cultures, which emphasize the respect that is due to older members of the community, show a weaker preference for sparing younger characters (…). Because the preference for sparing the many and the preference for sparing the young are arguably the most important for policymakers to consider, this split between individualistic and collectivistic cultures may prove an important obstacle for universal machine ethics. …

We observe that prosperity (as indexed by GDP per capita) and the quality of rules and institutions (as indexed by the Rule of Law) correlate with a greater preference against pedestrians who cross illegally (…). In other words, participants from countries that are poorer and suffer from weaker institutions are more tolerant of pedestrians who cross illegally, presumably because of their experience of lower rule compliance and weaker punishment of rule deviation. This observation limits the generalizability of the recent German ethics guideline, for example, which state that “parties involved in the generation of mobility risks must not sacrifice non-involved parties.” …

… we observe that higher country-level economic inequality (as indexed by the country’s Gini coefficient) corresponds to how unequally characters of different social status are treated. Those from countries with less economic equality between the rich and poor also treat the rich and poor less equally in the Moral Machine. … the differential treatment of male and female characters in the Moral Machine corresponded to the country-level gender gap in health and survival (a composite in which higher scores indicated higher ratios of female to male life expectancy and sex ratio at birth—a marker of female infanticide and anti-female sex-selective abortion). In nearly all countries, participants showed a preference for female characters; however, this preference was stronger in nations with better health and survival prospects for women. In other words, in places where there is less devaluation of women’s lives in health and at birth, males are seen as more expendable in Moral Machine decision-making.[1]

Just consider the consequences of all this: do we have to change the moral calculus of a self-driving car if the owner sells it to someone in another country, or if they merely drive into one? If we tweak the calculus to remove all benevolent sexism, people will feel these cars are unfairly harming women; either we need to pair driver-less cars with a global education campaign to eliminate sexism, or there’ll be a mass movement to bake sexism into our cars. At the same time, self-driving cars will save quite a few lives no matter what moral system they follow; should we sweep all this variation under the rug, and focus on the greater good?

Our moral code depends strongly on where we live and how well we’re living, so how could we all agree to a universal moral code, let alone follow it? Non-normative moral relativism, contrary to the name, is the human norm, and imposing a universal moral code on us will cause all sorts of havoc.

Except when it comes to cats.

[HJH 2018-12-05: Huh, where did that graphic go? I’ve popped it back into place.]

[1] Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. “Beyond WEIRD: Towards a Broad-Based Behavioral Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (June 2010): 111–35. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000725.

[2] Glick, Peter, and Susan T. Fiske. “An Ambivalent Alliance: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism as Complementary Justifications for Gender Inequality.” American Psychologist 56, no. 2 (February 1, 2001): 109–18.

On Jakiw Palij

You may have heard of this story.

The last known Nazi collaborator living in the United States — a 95-year-old former camp guard who played an “indispensable role” in the murders of thousands of Jews — was deported to Germany from his New York City home early Tuesday morning, completing what the U.S. ambassador to Germany called a “difficult task.”

But I have yet to see a single news report that gives you the full account. For instance, they guy was 95 years old, yet there’s been an active hunt for Nazis for decades. Why did it take so long to find him?

Christopher A. Wray, Acting Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, announced that a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., today revoked the citizenship of a Queens resident on the basis of his service as an armed guard at an SS slave-labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and his concealment of that service when he immigrated to the United States. The denaturalization decision issued today by U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross cited admissions and other evidence proving that Jakiw Palij, 79, served during 1943 as an armed guard at the notorious Trawniki Labor Camp, which the court found was created “[t]o further the exploitation of Jewish labor.”“By guarding the prisoners held under inhumane conditions at Trawniki, Jakiw Palij prevented their escape and directly contributed to their eventual slaughter at the hands of the Nazis,” said Roslynn R. Mauskopf, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

Some of the reason is due to Palij covering his tracks well, but if you do some mental math on his age you’ll realize he was stripped of US citizenship back in 2003. So why did it take 15 years to deport a Nazi war criminal?

Palij, an ethnic Ukrainian born in a part of Poland that is now Ukraine, said on his 1957 naturalization petition that he had Ukrainian citizenship. When their investigators showed up at his door in 1993, he said: “I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied.” […]

But because Germany, Poland, Ukraine and other countries refused to take him, he continued living in limbo in the two-story, red brick home in Queens he shared with his late wife, Maria. His continued presence there outraged the Jewish community, attracting frequent protests over the years that featured such chants as, “Your neighbor is a Nazi!”

The place he was born is now in a different country, and neither Poland nor Ukraine wanted Palij. There was no place to deport him to! And once they did deport him, why Germany?

The German government has acknowledged its moral responsibility to receive Palij, who could not be prosecuted in the US, and whom other countries such as Poland, where he was born, and Ukraine, where the place of his birth is now located, have refused to take in. […]

Palij has never possessed German citizenship. It has emerged that his current legal residency status in Germany is based on a clause of the residency law under which non-Germans can be transferred to Germany if “international law or urgent humanitarian reasons” requires it, or “to protect the political interests of Germany”.

The basic idea is that Germany was responsible for the rise of Nazis, ergo it should be responsible for cleaning up after them. They accepted Palij for humanitarian reasons, to heal old wounds. Though it’s kind of awkward to hold a trial for a frail 95-year-old person.

While authorities in the southern city of Würzburg had been trying to bring a case against Palij since 2016, Rommel said that investigation had been closed because no evidence was ever found linking Palij to any murders.

“His transfer from the USA doesn’t change anything about the state of evidence,” he added. “In theory, prosecutors in Würzburg could resume their proceedings in case something changed, but for that proof would be necessary in particular, which would bring the person into direct connection with the crimes, and that is what has been missing so far.”

Nobody, not even Palij himself denies he was part of the SS …

Palij admitted to officials that he was trained at an SS training camp in Trawniki, which was next to the labor camp, in the spring of 1943, according to court documents. But the documents didn’t say what he did after his training.

“There’s a big gap in the historical record,” Eli Rosenbaum, former director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, tells NPR. And Palij wasn’t talking: “Mr. Palij took the Fifth Amendment and would not cooperate in the search for truth in his case.”

… but beyond showing he was an employee of the Trawniki concentration camp at around the time a massacre occurred, there’s no evidence to close that gap. Palij claims he was coerced into the SS to save his family, which is a common defense of former Nazis, but there are circumstances where that did happen. It was enough to convince a US judge that he should be stripped of his citizenship and deported, but it’s not enough for German prosecutors to bring a case. Arguably, the move to Germany will be a step up for Palij; he used to live on his own in the US, relying on retirement funds he saved. Now:

“Palij will spend the rest of his life here,” an editorial in the left-leaning Taz read. “The Nazi collaborator will now be cared for, receive financial help, a roof, food, clothing, paid for by the state.”

Look, I’m quite firmly on the “Punch Nazis” side of things. But that doesn’t prevent me from also pointing out that very little justice has resulted from this deportation. It’s not something to crow about.

The president used Mr. Palij’s deportation, which came one day after he saluted an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and border agents at the White House, as an opportunity to praise the agency, implicitly challenging those who would denounce it. […]

A few hours later, the Republican National Committee sent out a news release noting that Mr. Palij had lived in the congressional district where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a rising star among Democrats who has called for the abolition of ICE, is seeking a House seat. […]

At a campaign rally Tuesday night, Mr. Trump invoked Mr. Palij’s deportation during a screed against Democrats, who he said would throw open America’s borders and do away with ICE.

All those headlines about abused children being ripped from their families (almost 500 are still separated, despite a court order to reunite them nearly a month ago) have resulted in widespread calls to dissolve ICE and a movement to reform immigration procedure to make it more humane. Palij’s deportation is a cynical ploy to fight back: since no-one disagrees with deporting Nazis, it follows that his deportation is necessary and therefore both ICE and the current hard-line policy should remain in place.

Jakiw Palij’s deportation is a net plus to the world, but he was a not deported to promote justice; he was instead deported so he could become a political talking point for the Republican party. Like those children, he was not a human being in their eyes but an object to be exploited and abused.

Even when they do good, the Republican party cannot stop themselves from cruelty.