June 8

Time To Think About Torture In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stall...

If you remember Iraq, it's a great time to be both depressed and smugly right

Any lib making claims about how, you know, maybe we *ought* to be hitting bad guys and authoritarians and then in that very same liberal Wilsonian call to arms saying *nothing* about Israel or KSA is very suspect!

"How can these deranged online leftists blame the Democrats for Trump's war"

Blame, no, but practice a little empathy and ask why anyone is having a negative reaction to arguments like "Trump and Bibi bad, but Khamenei had to go"

Why make an argument about liberal internationalism at this moment?

And I mean yes, thank you, an authoritarian theocracy is bad, great analysis

Can you imagine being a liberal who sees a girls' school blown up and feels that what the world must hear is that, actually, the Islamic republic of Iran is bad

It took them so long to think of how to say they posted Nazi shit without saying they posted Nazi shit

And again, I'd normally say, okay, keep sharing, except the statute of limitations for not going to therapy has passed and now i don't trust his emotional barometer on anything

Wil Wheaton did the scene from Mad Men when he told the Hershey's guys he grew up in a brothel, only for real, and it wasn't the shiny wrapper that made him briefly escape his terrible life, but it was the guy from Curb attacking Elmo that brought him back to his father beating him

You don't have to listen to Wil Wheaton

The man told us all about his child abuse because Larry David choked a Muppet

I normally am in support of spontaneous awkward sharing of trauma but you don't need to listen to Wil Wheaton

I mean i didn't celebrate when the Duggars made more future child abuse victims either, thanks Chicago Tribune

Would you like a bad Ai summary

I think the family may end up closer to Goebbels

"Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated...." --Niccolò Machiavelli

Yeah I'm taking a day, buddies

Sick to my core

I saw a picture of a father holding a baby in Gaza in 2023 and I wonder if they're dead

That could be me

I see a picture of a boy with a bunny hat, wrapped up in a coat someone who loves him put on him and I wonder what his cell looks like

That could be my son

This is evil

For, or against

bro there’s a gofundme to crowdfund attorney fees for a preschooler who was kidnapped by our federal government and shipped across state lines and his senator is posting about high school hockey while every other elected official is debating whether to give a zillion more dollars to the kidnappers

For, or against, civilization

Men like this will not stop until they are stopped. This has nothing to do with training, or affordability. Men like this cannot be given jobs that sate their appetite for violence. People can grow and deradicalize but first they must be disarmed

This will be hard.

Your larger point is completely valid, but I've tried to say "Europe" when I mean "Europe" and above I explicitly said I don't blame all European people for the actions of specific states. But the US is politically related to and influenced by far more states than France and the UK

No. I do think it's not helpful to conflate European states into one big monolith but the US shares a lot with other states as well. England France are not culturally detached from the rest of the continent. Casimir Pulaski helped create America. The US and Europe have too many bonds to ignore

We must break the back of certain industries and we must send some policemen to jail and we must destroy the corrections industry entirely and if we have illusions about the fight that requires then we will get worse results than nothing

And it will include a policy of force, and a policy of governing monied interests, without tiptoeing around fundamental questions of health care access and policing and military action as liberalism has since Lyndon Johnson

There are many tactical goals and strategic goals and i think we need to think local and specific

And we need a vision beyond returning to an idealized 2015

The disparate issues must be woven into a comprehensive governing ideology, more specific than liberalism or socialism

If you don't protect the lives of all your people as a leader, I feel that your leadership must be questioned to the utmost 🤷

Yeah I generally see it all a slide to the brutalization of legitimate dissent but I mean, Menderes was a fuck

Oh fn definitely

Not really but I mean kinda

Clearly Kemalism's time has come again

Okay so his plan really was
A. Don't have a stroke
B. Hold power, create socialism
C. Worry about the rest eventually
D. If in doubt see rule A

If you as a historian have an answer I'd appreciate it but I just don't see any response to the question of "what was supposed to keep the Soviet Union from committing atrocities" from modern far left

Genuinely what was supposed to be that mechanism? It's completely missing!

And invariably given an industrialized and modern security state, it was always going to produce a Hitlerian engine of mass death. Like that's the materialist logic! You can't expect another Lenin to take over, or a nicer dude, wtf