Well, but if you’re buying the Trump people’s crazy counterfactual that 100% of these people are all these Willie Hortons running around ready to murder some suburbanite because they weren’t in custody, then it kind of would make sense sometimes to keep them in. Even if they’re scheduled for court at a later date and maybe to get deported or something at that time.

I know that isn’t actually true, I’m just saying that even if it were true, the law is set up to let dangerous people go back into society sometimes, if the cops are breaking the rules about how they’re supposed to handle them, and that it’s a good thing that things are set up that way.

If I squint up my eyes a certain way, I can kind of see the logic. Maybe a handful of these people actually are guilty of some kind of violent crime (definitely they are in the propaganda telling of what is happening with all these warrantless arrests). So it’s hard to say that every single person needs to go free no questions asked. I personally think basically 100% of these people are random innocent people who Trump is unleashing this concentration-camp hell on for literally no reason relevant to them at all, but I’m just trying to grasp what the logic is, and if I really try, I guess I can see it.

However:

If the cops search the car without proper procedure in place, and they find a body in the trunk, and then they arrest the driver and question him without a Miranda warning and he says “Oh yeah I killed that guy,” the case can get tossed. The dude can walk even though he clearly killed someone. That’s the way it has to be. You can say “Yes but that’s not right,” but that’s how it’s set up, and for good reason. If we can let that guy go free, we can sure as shit let a few hundred innocent people out because anyone guilty who happened to get snatched up too got their rights violated when they got snatched.

It’s literally the proverb about “better 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man go to prison,” just with the proportions reversed in the worse direction.

Yes, you said that already. Then I responded. Replying to my response just to repeat what you said before, as if I hadn’t already responded addressing it, doesn’t add too much.

In particular, you saying “between two non-members” means you completely missed a big part of my message. Try searching for “Poland” and “Estonia” to help you find the relevant part. Or maybe just read the whole thing and then respond to the new thing instead of repeating.

Edit: Actually, one other point: So I don’t really care whether the EU response comes within the structure of EU government, or within the structure of the individual governments involved that are part of the EU. My point is, they should be responding more than they are. If the individual governments decided to talk outside of the building that houses the EU offices, and decided to start blowing up these fighters that violate their airspace with their individual militaries, that would be fine to me. That was sort of what I meant in talking about the HOA, but maybe that way of explaining it fleshes it out in a little more detail.

Well, but part of my point is they are already in a hybrid war with Russia at this point. Russian drones in Poland, fighter jets in Estonia, DHL bombing plans, election interference, and so on. It’s not just a Ukraine thing.

If a violent street gang is waging a violent war on one of your neighbors, then maybe you can say you don’t want to be involved. Once they’re cutting your power lines, once they’ve come over to your house and tried your door a few times to see if it’s unlocked, opened up and gone through your mail, that kind of thing, it’s time to recognize what’s up. I feel like about 30% of the EU (the eastern part mostly) realizes this, and the rest don’t care all that much and just want to keep collecting paychecks and doing trade deals and hoping it will all blow over or be someone else’s problem.

Maybe the HOA isn’t the right venue for talking about that. I get what you mean. Regardless, it needs to be talked about and reacted to, is my point. Bullies generally keep pushing until they get pushback, it’s very dangerous to do nothing. Remember when Russian fighters violated Turkey’s airspace? 17 seconds later, Turkey shot the fighter down. Job done. Now Russia and Turkey are buds again. It’s just how this type of mentality operates. The EU / US’s “escalation management” just comes across as weakness in my opinion, it just invites more escalation.

What was it that changed your minds? Assassinations on your soil? Starting massive war on your doorstep? Planning terrorist actions against your aircraft? Sending military drones into your airspace? Tampering with your elections to try to do to you what they did to the US? Shooting down that airliner a while back? Trying to blind your military pilots with lasers? Sabotaging your undersea cables? Constantly threatening to nuke you if you don’t let them do whatever they want? What was it?

In a novel interpretation, the Commission argued that the shockwaves unleashed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have caused a “serious economic impact” for the EU as a whole, triggering “serious supply disruptions, higher uncertainty, increased risk premia, lower investment and consumer spending”, as well as countless hybrid attacks in the form of drone incursions, sabotage and disinformation campaigns.

Oh

Well, fine I guess, as long as you start fighting back at some point before they figure out how to take over your capital cities and enslave anyone they can get their hands on including yourselves, which is clearly the fucking plan.

What part don’t you believe is happening? I’m happy to send citations for 100% of what I said has happened so far.

There are multiple stories of “normal” Western white people being sent into the concentration camp system that was supposed to be designated for brown people. 20 people to a room, inedible food, no medical care or provided medication, a lot of times no water and overflowing toilets, no lawyers, no contact with your family. More than a few people have died in there. They’re not really tracking how many. And why would they? One of them died by hanging with his hands tied behind his back.

That’s still supposed to be for brown people only, and only noncitizen brown people. But they’re coming for the white people and the citizens too, they’re just spending a little time getting it all normalized, and it’s progressing smoothly, no one’s really fighting back so far. Yes. Don’t come to the fucking United States right now for the love of all that is holy if you value your safety. There doesn’t even have to be a reason, they can just grab you out of the line and fuck up your life and freedom completely to meet their quota for the week.

I think “admits explicitly that the US is a security threat.” Surely any nation with a functioning State Department has figured out that it’s an active security threat at this point.

(Well, an active threat to well connected white people that do business with the US. That part is genuinely new and a new kind of disturbing, but it’s always been a “security” threat to the other kind.)

The original name for the second invasion of Iraq was “Operation Infinite Justice.”

They changed it, it was too much even for Bush. I don’t think this is too much for Trump though.

Don’t forget bird flu. It’s airbone now between farms in the US, and it’s still infecting people in a steady trickle of individual cases, often killing them.

In retrospect, when it does figure out how to spread human-to-human and our now gutted public health system has no answer but letting it rampage through like in the middle ages, it’ll seem a little weird that it hesitated for so long before getting going.

There are plenty of other democratic countries in existence some more democratic than the USA ever was.

Correct. Which one grew to the size and power level of the US and managed to maintain that same level of democracy? Or any kind of remotely similar type of scale?

Like I say, it’s more easy at a small (“small”) scale of an individual country. It’s not easy, but it’s not the same. Now that the EU is growing to the same kind of unified power structure in early stages, they’re talking about chat control, they’re denying visas to doctors who want to talk about what happened in Palestine, they’re doing all these pre-fascist things, because that’s what large powerful states start to do, and I fully expect that they will go in the exact same direction as The Great Satan unless they take some lessons from our 20th-century history and hopefully try to build on them and get closer to something decent. That’s my point.

Now democratic backsliding has started it’s not clear if it will remain democratic and how long it will take to recover to full democracy assuming it does return to full democracy at all. It could very much just get worse until there is a collapse.

I feel like you must have stopped reading before my last paragraph, if you feel the need to lecture me on this. I live here. I’m well aware.

Oh… I didn’t even realize this was the same as that DHL bombing plot from whenever ago. Is this maybe just a bad source? They dated it recently, but I can’t read the FT article about it so I can’t even see the date.

But yes. It’s weird that killing Ukrainians by the train car load is fine but blowing up European air travel would all of a sudden be a big deal (although I do agree with you that it would be). Zelensky and others are saying that Putin wants to fight Europe, and presumably they would know, but that seems so clearly suicidal that it does seem like they would back off from it. But like you say, who knows with the level of disconnect in their decision making.

The US knows this and constantly works to defeat any attempts to coordinate.

Or, it did, until Trump gutted the State Department and drove out anyone anywhere near government who cared about good outcomes. There’s surely still some of this going on because of pure inertia, but it will not continue going forward.

Also, the US government primarily represents collections of oligarchic powers and supranational corporate and financial powers that also have huge influence in the countries that could try to coordinate against them.

Yes, but they can still do that stuff without needing to be tied to the US geographically or governmentally. They’re still tied to the US because it is a stable growth medium right now (stable currency / decent government if you’re rich / etc) and makes an easy home base from which to interact with a lot of different countries, but literally all of that is coming to an end. Once things are more stable and profitable if they uproot and live somewhere else, because the US has terminal rot and has become a liability for them, they’re going to move to Europe like a bunch of Russian oligarchs and do everything you just said on behalf of someone else instead.

America was the biggest success the world has ever seen in terms of running the government and economy with the consent of the governed.

As of the middle of the 20th century, the marginal tax rate on millionaires was 94% roughly speaking, and a lot of that money was reinvested into things that people needed: Roads, jobs, environmental protection. The elections were fair, journalists could challenge leaders and even break the law to expose wrongdoing by the powerful. It was a long way from perfect, I’m looking at the good side only when there was a hell of a rotten side to it too, but it was the closest the world has ever come to running a big scale system like that that was actually well-intentioned and that people could believe in and feel proud to be a part of. You can do it on a small scale, sure. Anyone can be proud of what they’re doing to be part of any kind of movement or system that has some humanity and some justice in it. But to make it work on that scale, where you can hand individual people with all their individual petty corruptions and failures that kind of globe-spanning power, and still keep things roughly in check and sometimes on the people’s side, year after year, it was a fuckin’ modern miracle. People had fought for decades, died in prison or in some labor skirmish or war, to make it happen, and it showed.

That’s what got us all that success and respect on the world stage. That stuff wasn’t fake. But then as with literally 100% of empires throughout history people got complacent, new generations came up with the entitlement that comes with being born on 3rd base, everyone stopped maintaining the systems. Softness comes in and corruption, and then fall, and collapse. There’s a lot of inertia, so as of 2015 we were still sitting pretty well on top without deserving it anymore, but now the emperor’s clothes are off and no fuckin’ mistake.

I don’t really know what the parallel is, I am not a good enough history person for it. Maybe the Roman Empire or the USSR. Society is the foundation of good government, and American society and character is dogshit right now and has been for years and year. It’s not surprising to me our government is collapsing. We are unlikely to recover I think. I’m in no way disagreeing with Gurney. I hope I am wrong, I love my country and I don’t want to leave. But even aside from Trump, it just seems unlikely that this place has what it takes to run a modern society anymore. I don’t see any way for us to go but down, a long way down. But anyway you asked what we did that was unique, that’s what we did, if you ask me about it.

Russia’s not making the decisions, Putin is. And Putin’s not trying to “win.” I’m sure it would have been nice, but the process is not victory, it is teaching the lesson that if anyone crosses him, even an entire country, he’ll fuck them up and no one will stop him. Same as the US in Vietnam or Nicaragua.

That’s why his proxies make such a big deal about how threatening it was for Ukraine to join NATO: He said they weren’t allowed, but they did anyway (or at least theoretically thought about it), so now he’s killing their children, their fathers and brothers. And in his apologists’ minds, that logic makes perfect sense. The question of whether Ukraine was “allowed” to make overtures to the West is relevant to them. The question of whether Putin was “allowed” is bizarre and contradictory. Of course he’s allowed. He can kill whoever he wants. It is the privilege.

In geopolitics as in personal interactions, his approach is not really a “winning” strategy. You will drive away friends and allies, pursue “victories” that cost you and the people close to you far more than anyone gains. just a miserable way to live. It “works,” in a way, if you’re used to terrible dangerous situations and have developed a kind of trauma response that means you have to hurt and destroy everyone around you so they don’t hurt you first, but it doesn’t even really “work” in the sense of keeping you safe. It’s a lot safer to have friends. Easier, too.

But that’s not what he did. So now he and about a million Russian soldiers are experiencing the result. He can’t stop, or he’ll look weak, but he also can’t win, so he just gets up every day and talks with people who unanimously lie to him, moves from place to place in identical set up offices so no one will figure out where he is and move in to kill him, obsesses over what happens to dictators who can’t stay on the horse. I’m sure he’s afraid. He knows history, he knows how this ends, but he’s boxed in now. Anywhere in the world he goes, anything he tries to do, he’ll always be scared about his food, scared about anything he drinks. He has to stay in the match, he has to keep getting up and trying again. He has to stay on top, no matter what, and he’s getting older, and the horse is bucking a little more with every year.

And, like poor Victor, he still has hell to look forward to.

This thing is never going to be completed. It’s going to be just as much of an extended failure prone clusterfuck that eventually gets moved on from, with nothing whatsoever to show for it in the end, as his health care plan or anything else.

Image link is busted, I think.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml IDK what the solution is. If someone tried to post an already-proxied URL to a server that’s configured to proxy images, and that was the breakage, then IDK, maybe the users just shouldn’t do that. But it also might be nice to detect an image proxied URL, de-proxy convert it, and then re-proxy it from the original un-proxied URL. Certainly the nested proxying of suppo.fi trying to proxy an image which lemmy.ml is proxying for Hexbear’s proxied image of the original image (which then doesn’t work, who knows why) kind of suggests that something has gone wrong in some way that might be worth looking into.

Releasing the grand jury materials was always a strawman.

“Release the materials seized from Epstein”

“Okay okay since I’m completely committed to transparency and definitely my name’s not all over Epstein’s documents in all kinds of incriminating ways I will release the grand jury materials! See? Full transparency. Just like you definitely asked for. Hopefully this brings the matter to a close.”

It’s an artful dodge, moderately effective so far at shifting the conversation.

How centrists phrase people not being able to afford food.

Biden raised wages more than even pretty punishing inflation, through specific programs meant to help workers who were struggling to afford food. But we don’t want to talk about that right now I guess lol.

What the workers got was the deal they rejected, forced on them.

This isn’t true, but by shifting the focus to this instead of the gains in the NLRB and labor issues specifically during Biden’s term, and instead onto extended wrangling about a talking-point-ready nugget of disinformation (“rail strike!” being the answer and only answer to anything and everything having to do with working class issues of any description), you’ve already “won” the conversation in some sense. Nicely done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmVkJvieaOA

why isn’t the media talking about the murders of the fisherman for drug trafficking being tied to trump pardoning a drug trafficker in the same fucking week

Because they, too, are some removed.