As I understand it, the nihilistic realization that it’s all a bunch of insane bullshit and there is no reason to believe in anybody or anything, comes quite early in the Russian system. I imagine the translator takes some comfort in the idea that Putin is just a crazy old man at the end of the day. It probably relieves him from some feelings about his own sins whatever they may be, because nothing matters.

I wasn’t making any kind of statement about what should happen, just a prediction of reality.

I don’t even know what I think “should” happen, honestly. There are countries that have done truth and reconciliation after recovering themselves from something like this, but I don’t think it is realistic that any outside power would come to save the US from these elements from the outside. Before Nuremberg there had to be the war, and there’s no one even close to a position of being able to win WW3 against the United States as the precursor. Even after several years of future Trump-induced decay.

Maybe after some catastrophic event, human bird flu or a major economic collapse or a civil war. I still feel like even with that, our salvation is pretty much only with us for any kind of forseeable future.

What is the other method for reforming them away, then?

I think that’s part of the point.

Trump got distracted, as he does, and has stopped doing Putin’s bidding as far as Ukraine.

Putin doesn’t like that, and has reached out to some of his other assets in US government, of which MTG is one. She got vocal about us needing to not strike Iran, which was wildly out of character for her (she generally doesn’t give a shit about the world outside of her weird little fantasy version of it, definitely not about geopolitics).

If she’s now making noise about Epstein, in a way that breaks from Trump, then I think the reason is that Russia is telling her to, because they think Trump needs to be punished on this issue.

I have no idea, but that’s what I think is going on. Trump has lost sight of rule number one in American politics: You dance with them as brung you.

This is what happens to a motherfucker when anyone who tells you you’re talking crazy falls out a window.

If they were going to hold the line at this much fuckery, I would agree. What I think they’re planning to escalate to, however, has about a 50% chance historically of escalating in turn to something that they might well find themselves dying in prison for (or strung up by the mob in the public square, or out back of the courthouse after the show trial).

I would add to that: It is also vitally important to see horrible, monstrous, evil people as human. It’s a hell of a lot more important than the (also vital) virtue signaling “homeless people / ethnicity people / etc are people too” brand of refusing-to-dehumanize.

For one thing, if you understand why they bombed this city, polluted that river, cheered for this insurrection, whatever they did, then you’re a hell of a lot further ahead towards stopping them in the future. You can see how they operate, you can understand it. Even if it’s horrible and evil, you can grasp it, come to grips with it, start to work to limit the damage in an effective way, instead of just the “abstinence-only” approach to criminality that is so popular in cities that don’t fight their crime very effectively.

For another thing, being evil and doing horrible things is very much a part of being human. It’s how we operate. If you can’t see that and accept it, if anyone who does something horrible or is just lazy, dirty, crooked, whatever, becomes “not human,” then you can’t really understand yourself, either. The version of morality where everyone “allowed” to exist in the world doesn’t contain some evil is just not useful, in the real world. The Nazis were absolutely human, they were doing human things. They’re indicative of a problem with humans. They’re not some wild outlier you can safely place outside of “humanity” because they don’t count.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” -Solzhenitsyn

There is yet another fundamental problem with this: It is absolutely possible to hold trials for people where some of the evidence is classified. The US does it all the time. The system that was set up for it post-9/11 is sorta bullshit, stacked in favor of the government to an almost unbelievable degree, but it does function well enough that the more authoritarian elements have been moaning about how horrible and unfair it is that they have to deal with the FISA courts instead of just “do what I say to this poor helpless person, because I am king.”

Of course, now it’s all ICE, so they’re bypassing the courts entirely. But for over twenty years we were running semi-due-process trials that included secret information as evidence, for this exact reason.

In their own moral framework, it’s okay to kill literally anyone, as long as you’re in charge and are willing to say a few words about “national security.” Good to know, I guess. Presumably they mostly live in places where that’s (for now 🥲) not the rule, and would be horrified if someone forced them to go back to places where that is the rule.

Honestly, I think mostly what this means is that they’ve done a good enough job of chasing away all the reasonable people that they’ve entered into an increasing spiral at this point. Everyone has to be most unreasonable in order to stand out, and with no one sensible to compare themselves to, they have to get more and more outlandish in order to be the outlandish-est one.

Ah, that explains it. It didn’t sound like a quote that would come from the real UN. Maybe in some other, superior timeline…

That’s wild, I never knew the origin of that last sentence.

I would never hire a company that had a clause like this. Just find someone else. There’s a reason they felt it necessary to include that.

How do you think a firefight between ICE and the National Guard would go?

That’s more my point. ICE can fuck up plenty of the helpless, and that might include you and me soon enough. But my point is that co-opting the forces that actually know what they’re doing is often a good accompaniment to that idea, and they’re not even making vague attempts at doing anything like that, they are doing the opposite.

Count your lucky, lucky, lucky stars that these people are such idiots.

It doesn’t mean they are not dangerous. The Nazis were exactly the same type of hilarious buffoons, not good at anything, until all of a sudden it wasn’t funny anymore and the nightmare came to life, neverending. And the Trump people are doing a pretty good job speedrunning getting the camps up and running, they’ve already started on the undesirables and it’s working, and they’re building a huge number more as we speak.

But still, Jesus Christ. They could have had their pick of conservative sociopath lawyers hand-picked by Peter Thiel to whip shape into the DOJ and turn it on all the domestic opposition. They could have doubled military pay instantly, and had heartwarming rallies where they assured all the troops and all the cops that finally, with us in charge, you have someone on your side in government. It would have locked in their victory like a fucking armbar. Instead, they’re taking all these people whose support and agreement is vital to this thing really coming off without a hitch, and putting them into these moronic and hostile situations, literally every chance they get.

Think about it: You’re a career prosecutor, you’ve been busting your ass for decades in a high-stakes profession, and you’re successful at it. And then one day you walk in and your boss is Jeanine Pirro and she’s going to be taking over going forward.

Just think of how the interactions with her go in the workplace. Think of watching her fuck up important things, left and right, and that just being your new reality.

Jesus Christ man. We got lucky, a little bit, that it came in this form when it came. Their sheer moronitude has to be some kind of weakness.

My parents owned a cat who loved to go on walks with them, but would complain loudly if the walk was too long, and demand to return to the house when she was done walking. It was such a problem that they started shutting the cat in the house when they wanted to walk, and so she would hide outside and follow them secretly until they were too far along with the walk to bring her back to the house and continue without her, and then trot up and join them on the walk. Then shortly she would complain that the walk was too long and she wanted to go back now.

We love her

Little few-dozen-people towns like this in the middle of nowhere are fucking wild sometimes. It’s just a bunch of people doing whatever they want, for the most part. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s real fucked and people who grow up and leave have some insane stories and basically never go back.

Remember this when someone tells you “voting is a waste of time” “anarchism is better, we don’t need all these corrupt structures” or similar things. There’s a reason why we settled on the systems we have. The corruption that fucks them up is real, sure, and it’s a big problem, but it also exists in exactly the same form if you get rid of the system. It actually gets way worse.

It is funny that in Piefed this topic is classified under “Chilling”

Man, some wild shit is going to happen before 2032. All of this is one scenario, yes, maybe, but this stuff is like weather forecasting on the Titanic at this point.

It’s not that serious a mystery.

If you stick people in tents in the desert, they tend to die. And, not a lot of people want to be involved with something like that, and so they’re making the point by giving absurd amounts of money to anyone who is willing to be involved. Same as the high salaries for ICE recruits.

Paul Manafort was just one of the names we heard.

Who were the others?

I bet Zelensky himself do see him as a major threat for his reelections.

I get your point. He’s popular and at some point when the dying stops, it’ll be relevant. I would say it would be relevant if Vance was able to replace Zelensky with this guy before the war was over, but I don’t think Vance is competent enough to make that happen, fortunately enough. I feel like people in that part of the world have a lot stronger civil immune system against disinfo.

Further, if Ukraine survives and everyone gets to go back to normal life, my guess would be that Zelensky wouldn’t give two shits if a competent military commander got to take his job with his biggest concern being losing the election, but who knows.