Richard W.
I'm getting too old for this split
- Using my professional intel expertise (looking at their uniforms), I'm 80% confident that these are not ICE and are actually the local police that liberals want to save them from ICE
- I hope the armed agents of the state save us from the armed agents of the state
- "But they are in public handing out snacks!" That's literally what they were doing in Iraq too?? Two sides of the same—somewhere some OSINT dude is writing a report that COIN is working superbly on US liberals and efforts should be redoubled
- If there is no compassion for former Nazis, there are no former Nazis
- The year is 2033. The USPS has announced its "second mission" of hunting down enemies of the state who have ever used a mail in ballot. On social media, current and former ICE agents lament the USPS lack of professionalism and training. "We would never," they say. We love them. Like and share.
- I love how popular FUCK ICE has become as an anti-establishment organizing slogan. I'm sure it will be at least as effective as the FUCK THE ARMY slogan that has been around among soldiers and veterans since the Vietnam war. Let me just check the quantative data on funding and confirm. . . Uh oh.
- Surely the qualitative data on public trust will be helpful . . . Oh no
- I'm actually so think that we can save ICE with more training and funding. So let's fund some reeducation camps. No one is irredeemable ✨
- We probably do need a better plan than abolish/debaathification for ICE. If you like them now, you're going to love them when they're unemployed, alienated, with a shared sense of identity and grievance
- What did performative empty gestures of political opposition look like before the internet
- There's a new genre of post I'm enjoying which is disaffected Danish veteran of American imperialist wars complaining that he doesn't feel so good about killing poor brown people in far away lands NOW that Trump wants to take away their colonial possession
- Written by someone who either doesn't know what a "drop weapon" is and how common their were in Iraq and Afghanistan or (more likely) is really struggling with cognitive dissonance
- If you think it's easy for a vet with ICE velcro'd to their plate carrier to kill a mouthy blonde liberal in Minnesota, then you should see what they do with a brown skinned foreigner who doesn't immediately acquiesse to their murderous authority in a lawless foreign land
- The end logic of this argument is that ICE should have access to attack helicopters with hellfires, fighters with GBUs, and indirect fire and that will make them less likely to execute blonde women from close range (and thus be less scary people)
- People really need to understand that if they are within 21 feet of any armed police in the US they gambling with their life. This is how I was trained by the U.S. government and it's likely how the cop you interact with is trained. youtu.be/6cwhE7sfQtg?...
- For more on "reasonable fear," "cop talk," and the legal paradoxes of life and death that you are party to by merely interacting with a badged armed agent of the state, this piece by @patblanchfield.bsky.social stays current newrepublic.com/article/1568...
- How are we all feeling about what is surely to be our first genAI-written AUMF?
- Pretty disappointed my feed isn't filled with Arma 3 clips presented and readily accepted as war footage from last night. End of an era?
- Our leaders / earning our respect and trust / looking out for me, you, us Lyrics from the educational rap on PBS Kids this morning, apropos of nothing
- Say what you want, but this is exactly the kind of light footprint, heavy reliance on direct action SOF, interventionist foreign policy the "smart" club of natsec wonks (and puppeted by Biden, McCain, et al.) have been advocating for for decades and was (apparently) executed flawlessly.
- No crashed helicopters—the calling card of US special operations overeagerness for decades (Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan)—and no thousands of body bags (Iraq, Afg). Just a huge W for the military/police industrial complex and the co-option and castration of the de facto sensible natsec opposition
- I feel some empathy for the people who have made it their life's work to write and speak about the "smart use of power" who woke up to Trump not only doing it, but successfully. There's going to be a lot of tricky identity, disavowal, cognitive dissonance, and splitting at various natsec roundtables
- I just saw an Anne Frank thirst trap on r/popular and I don't like how the thin the line between reality and a Cards Against Humanity game has become
- Yes, Spotify wrapped does prove that they collect massive amounts of data on us and yes, that is worrisome, I respond, enthusiastically nodding, while I think about my still active Last.fm account created in 2005
- Christmas night, 2009 looks like it was a jolly one
- All this "double tap is illegal," "there must be accountability," and "the senior officers knew better" talk feels so maddening to me because the basic assumption is this isn't exactly U.S. military SOP and it hasn't been a secret since at least the infamous 2007 Wikileaks "collateral murder" video
- If "this isn't who we are" it is literally news to the military where this has been standard practice for decades and honestly maybe shame on us for repressing this well publicized fact
- "The Nazis killed American survivors of sunken ships and we executed them for war crimes." Right, but the US Navy also killed Japanese survivors of attacked ships by the literal boat load and doesn't even hide it. This is from the USNI's own website. This is who we are: www.usni.org/magazines/pr...
- So DayZ has changed the texture of its peaches after 13 years to remove a Russian flag. It's both nonsensical and makes complete sense. It's symbolic violence disguised as moral action. The company benefits materially, the employees and consumers benefit libidinally—all benefit (except Ukrainians?)
- @patblanchfield.bsky.social i am ready for that invite to this app now
- After perusing this app the last few days, I think it says a lot more about our society that we can't seem to come up with a coherent reason why vaporizing foreigners on boats is bad more than the fact that they can be vaporized with apparent impunity
- Sorry I keep yawning in this Zoom meeting, I was up late last night avoiding international sanctions against a pariah state intended to slow the indescriminate killing of civilians in faraway lands to buy the PvE expansion for Escape from Tarkov and it rules
- Considering temporarily forming a regrettable realpolitikisch nonaggression pact with noted internet assholes against my nemesis, Ms. Rachel, who not only is a literal fraud who makes "educational videos" for babies despite the empirical harm caused—worse—willfully introduced my 3 year old to Bl*ppi
- If only we had killed some of the seafarers, then rescued their wounded friends, then nursed them back to health, then failed to coerce confessions, then imprisoned them for an indeterminate time without trial, then disappeared them to a foreign prison, we wouldn't even be in this mess
