“It is unacceptable for our party to have a man in leadership who has repeatedly committed voter fraud himself," Marjorie Taylor Greene said of Pritchard.
When your situation is so fucked up that MTG’s opinion is actually reasonable—if not psychotically ironic, given her unwavering support for a president who literally tried to overthrow an election.
In most jails, “protective custody” for endangered prisoners like ex-cops and child molesters is 23 hours a day solitary confinement with one hour of exercise in a segregated area. Three days of that would crack Trump like an egg.
It’s almost entirely what they mean, if not completely.
Humans largely don’t give a shit about the planet, only themselves, despite having the capacity to be better. To me, that almost makes what we are reaping eyes wide open, after eviscerating entire ecosystems (and other humans who lacked net worth or a flag, especially the ones whose culture lived in sustainable harmony with nature, they had to die) to build strip malls to feed our beloved sociopath’s greed disease feel fair to me.
Oh woe is us! The droughts, the hurricanes, the famines, what did we do to this planet to deserve this?! Fuck them animals we’re taking out with us by the way, the ones we didn’t already drive to extinction bulldozing the rainforest and the like, but oh woe is us!
In a way, I blame the asteroid that collided with Earth and killed the dinosaurs. No asteroid, no mammals taking over. No mammals taking over, no humans.
What we’re doing is practically a ripple from that collision.
“having grown past my bubble, talked to the people I affected, read more widely, and realised the impact my actions had on people I never wanted to harm"
Reading saves another one. Good for them! Seems like their was a lot of work put in to building a better life, which is admirable when it’s so much easier to say nothing and live in a culture of hate.
Side note- We restrict those with criminal backgrounds from gainful employment in the private sector, and then are surprised so many of them run for office. We’re actively funneling them into these positions with disclosure law.
trump probably believes if he does go to jail for it, it means he can keep doing it because he’s already been punished.
It will never come to that, this is just him running his mouth.
But conservatives tend to view punishment like that, as a trade off for doing what they want.
He won’t see the punishment as consequences for what he’s done, he’ll view it as a price and think that since he was punished once for saying shit like this, it would be double jeopardy if he gets in trouble later for doing it again.
I vividly remember an earlier round of this nonsense (early 00’s, maybe) there was a newspaper headline declaring that inflation was “in-check/“not a problem/whatever the usual deflection denial was at the time. What I found amusing was a bright red sticker on the newspaper machine. The sticker was informing that the papers (which were previously $0.25) were now $0.75.
When I complain about inflation, I’m complaining because my pay hasn’t risen to match inflation in basically my entire working lifetime. Groceries run about 300-350 where last year or so they were about 250-300. Rent went up 50 in that time (no work was put into the unit- I had to beg my landlord to bring the increase down from 100). Don’t get me started on gas. My check went up about 50 each month to cover all this. So yeah, to me, inflation is effectively equivalent to high, higher and higher, prices.
Another author that doesn’t understand. That’s understandable, most people don’t understand. We can’t analyze it intellectually, in terms of reasoning about policies and outcomes, because it’s an emotional phenomenon that bypasses the conscious mind. That is, authoritarian movements around the world use a sort of language-based ‘mind hack’ to convert people. I first learned of this from the writings of Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy), who called a Trump victory a year in advance, and explained his prediction in detail. And even though he was aware of it, this ‘mind hack’ got him, too.
This article gives a neuropsychology spin on the same effect.
And, hey, you can think I’m nuts, or promoting some woo-woo bullshit, but at least I have a theory that is internally consistent, explains our political situation, and even has predictive power. Compare that to the long parade of articles like this one, written by people trying to make sense of the rise of MAGA.
aiding Kiev has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close
The capital of Ukraine is named Kyiv. Kiev was the name of the same city in the now-defunct USSR. Leningrad and Stalingrad also don’t exist today.
There is a coherent and very realistic war aim, though. Making it clear to the world that Russia did not gain anything with its war of aggression towards Ukraine, and thus deter further wars of aggression across the world. So far, it’s not entirely unsuccessful, with the Nordics joining NATO, while Russia lost allies in Central Asia, and CSTO is no longer a credible thing.
The authors call on the White House to come out in full-throated support of Kiev’s war aims: namely, ejecting all Russian forces from Ukraine’s 1991 borders including Crimea,
It’s the 2014 borders, the ones established in 1991 by the fall of the USSR, and recognized by Russia in 1994 in the Budapest Memorandum it has now broken. I feel the author is trying to push that status quo into the past as much as it can to delegitimize it. They are not arbitrary historical borders, they are the current UN recognized borders of Ukraine.
Put differently, the West must commit itself to nothing short of Russia’s total and unconditional battlefield defeat. How is Ukraine, with its battered military, collapsing demography, and an economy entirely reliant on Western cash infusions, to accomplish this lofty task?
I love how the article switches subjects mid-thought. Is it the West or Ukraine who is fighting? Also, Ukraine has a military of 1,500,000, with an additional reserve of 2,500,000. They are still able to mobilize more people. The attrition numbers also heavily favour them, even in the current balance, Avdiivka was taken on a 3:1 casualty ratio. Russia’s demographics are not all rosy either, especially since they can mobilize a smaller proportion of their people before the country becomes even more unstable politically.
It’s not Ukraine that had a major portion of its military march on its own capital with the intent of a coup during the war.
new sanctions notwithstanding Russia’s continued economic growth despite being the world’s most sanctioned country; and threatening Russia’s control over Crimea with ideas about “air superiority” that bear no semblance to the war’s current dynamics and likely trajectory.
Easy to do that with a war economy, that is not something that is sustainable. Is the RUB convertible again? How about Gazprom’s latest announced losses? Sanctions are, in fact, working, it’s enough listening to the noise complaining about them.
Russia’s military is substantially larger today than it was at the start of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
As is Ukraine’s. Mobilization tends to do that to militaries.
It has also earned valuable battlefield experience that can only come from the trial and error inherent to waging years of grueling, high-intensity warfare, and rallied its military-industrial base to markedly outpace the West in artillery round production.
And Ukraine didn’t learn those lessons, right? Or the West for that matter, with their equipment going up against their Russian / Chinese / Iranian counterparts? Also, artillery rounds are not a be-all-end-all. It’s central to Russia’s strategy, yes, but if you look at any other aspect of their army, the complete picture is much different. If you only look at the guns they shoot those rounds with, since the beginning of the war, it went from mostly self-propelled to mostly towed with the destruction of SPGs and the mobilization of further older weaponry. The point is, Russia can manufacture as many rounds as it wants, it will not hit jack if it’s D-10s shooting it with 10km effective range, and the accuracy of a drunk mobnik who’s seeing a urinal for the first time.
Russia’s strategy is not to seize large swathes of Ukrainian land or to besiege its major cities, but to attrit Ukrainian forces slowly by leveraging its firepower advantage to grind them down at multiple points along the lines of contact.
That’s going well. Russia is outpaced in attrition in almost every way, they chewed through the best half of their old armoured reserves for example, they lost the better part of the Black Sea fleet, and even manpower-wise, they are barely holding on with just being able to train enough people to replace losses. It’s funny to hear the Russians wanting to win through attrition when new Russian units are equipped with T-55s, D-10s, Mosins and Su-25s against Leopard 2A5s, HIMARS launchers, new HK rifles and F-16s.
There is no decisive attritional advantage to Russia today. Ukrainians are in hot water, yes, but neither side has a clear advantage.
It is not too late to end the war on terms that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty while advancing U.S. interests. The West still has substantial leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to wielding this influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory that has prevented leaders from repairing to a more pragmatic, strategically nimble approach.
Thanks man, your vague “strategically nimble” goals are much clearer and more realistic than the alternative. What actually were they though again? What is this article even saying?
That was a brilliantly composed and thorough take down of this article. I knew it was bullshit but I could never have destroyed it this elegantly. A pleasure to read. Thanks for taking the time for that.
Mark Episkopos is an Eurasia Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also an Adjunct Professor of History at Marymount University. Episkopos holds a PhD in history from American University and a masters degree in international affairs from Boston University.
Don’t know the author. Could be just a typical conservative.
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