This is what decades of qualified immunity and belief that cops are above the law does to a mother fucker. They see ICE commit a murder and they think ICE is on their team. Because at the end of the day they are.

That’s fair, I was quite tired when I wrote what I wrote so let me expand on that a little bit.

That is of course true in most situations. I should have clarified this more but primarily when I said “I grew up watching the evening news” I was talking about war on terror coverage.

I’m not pretending that’s not how people work, it absolutely is and that’s the reason this was exploited. But… there’s this kind of… preformative agony to the whole ordeal that, speaking as an American, does feel uniquely American.

Empathizing with the death of people you’re close with is natural. But when, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are active participants in why people are dying, and then they’re deaths are used to justify sending more people over there to kill and be killed…

…It kinda just soured me on the whole affair to be honest. And, given the events of last night? It’s something I could easily see happening again. We seem to have dusted off everything else from the Iraq playbook, why not that too?

Anyways, we’re not disagreeing. There was just more to my point that didn’t quite make it into my post.

I’ve lived in the US my entire life. I wish I could tell you your wrong.

I can’t.

Some of my earliest memories revolve around watching the evening news, listening to them say that “X amount of American lives were lost” and wondering why “American” lives were substantially different or worthy of note. A life lost is a life lost. And that’s a tragedy no matter how you slice it. Where that life started or where it lived has no bearing whatsoever on it’s value.

At least… that’s what I believe. The current state of things has me thinking I might be in the minority on that one.

As to revolution, protest, anything that could even prove an inconvenience to the status quo… I’ll believe it when I see it. Not to make excuses, but I think forces in the American culture have been working to defang popular protest since at least the civil rights movement, or perhaps even earlier. Even if it’s demostriably wrong… I can’t begin to tell you how demoralized I feel. My government just… went and did this. It’s illegal. The very shape of our government is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening. And yet… here we are. One illegal invasion and (apparently) kidnapping of a sovereign head of state later.

…I wish it were otherwise, but it feels like there’s very little that can be done about it. Americans just… don’t seem equal to the task of holding their government to account. The one thing we are supposed to be good at.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many outrages there were up to this point. Too many. Far too many for concence to allow. This… feels different. Is different. Has to be different, then the way we’ve been allowing things to ride.

But… I’ve been disappointed before. I’m certain I’ll be disappointed again. I hope this will be different, but…

…I can point to plenty of times it should have been different before. Times that would have prevented this from happening. It’s… hard to maintain hope in the face of that.

These days they hit the ground running the second the last election is over.

Man I collect library cards. At this point I’m a member of three different library systems. No joke, libraries are amazing and one of the best resources we’ve got left in this country. Go get a card man!

I don’t necessarily disagree on the complexity point, but I don’t think breaking up the functionality of a web browser fixes the issue.

Web browsers are one of those basic tools everyone who uses a computer relies upon. Breaking that up would not only lead to user frustration, I think it’d introduce brand new territories bad actors like Google could monopolize. Now that unified “web browsers” exist it’s incredibly difficult to ask users to stop using them. It turns from “download this program” to “download these four or five separate programs and follow this guide to learn how to daisy chain them together into a browser equivalent.”. That’s a reasonable ask for some people. Hell, it’s a reasonable ask for me frankly. But your average user isn’t going to have the time nor the patience to attempt to make that solution work.

Oh yeah no. If your working backwards from the end result I totally get that approach. I’m not making a moral defense here. All I’m saying is that while we’re in it it’s important to understand what’s going on (and perhaps more importantly what isn’t) in his head so that we have an understanding of what’s possible. What he might be thinking. In that world, not that of the IC or one that’s capable of assessing legal culpability, it’s important to draw a distinction between a principled ideologically driven actor and one that’s just floating on the whims of their shattered psyche.

“Useful idiot”, minor but important distinction. At the end of the day yeah, he’s an “asset” in the sense that he’s doing what Russia wants. But he’s not doing it because he’s a traditional intelligence asset who’s taking marching orders from Putin. He has no ideological loyalty to Russia, hell, he can’t even muster that for the country he supposedly runs.

Rather, he has to be finessed into doing what you want. That can be a bribe (as we’ve seen many world leaders figure out for themselves) or it could just be simple praise. Throwing some narcissistic validation into the howling void where his heart should be.

Thing is, that gets both easier and more complicated as he gets more senile. Easier in the sense that (to the extent he ever had one) his conception of reality is eroding. That means he’s becomeing even more malleable as even this most baseline level of resistance degrades.

It gets more complicated in the sense that the same is true for everyone else too. Trump’s always had a tendency to agree with whoever spoke to him last, even before the very obvious recent decline in his mental faculties. Dementia is probably only going to make that worse.

The main upshot here is that if you know what your doing this man is more suggestable than ever. Which effectively means you now have to account for what eveyone else around is telling him and trying to accomplish. At least, to a greater degree than you were before.

Just a thought here, but maybe we’d have a slightly better time with leaders who aren’t suffering from extremely obvious mental decline. Anyways, I look forward to the 2028 presidential election, when America will finally elect Ronald Reagan for a posthumous third term via the proxy of a ouija board operated solely by Henry Kissinger’s corpse.

I legitimately can’t tell anymore what even they think their trying to do.

Like… yall are monsters who think government shouldn’t help people, yeah, I get that. But… like… if you want to speed-run violence in the streets, artificially fucking with the food’s a great way to do it.

And… again… I’m just perplexed. Do you want the violence? If you wanted to invoke the riot act or whatever there’s easier ways to do that that don’t involve blowing up half the economy along with it. Is this a “principled” stance? Do you believe government shouldn’t help people so much that your willing to stand ten toes on causing hunger riots? Or is this desperation? Do you want to loot that discretionary fund so bad that your willing to risk sparking a revolution to do so? Is the money even still there? Or are you fighting this hard against SNAP because it was stolen long ago?

On top of all of the rest of the anger and outrage, it’s frustrating that there’s likely no answer to these questions. Or as many answers as there are right wing chuds with their boots on the nation’s throats. At least in movies the villian have a devious master plan. Here in reality it feels like we’re speed running accelerationism and it’s hardly even intentional. Just equal parts malice and stupidity.