This estimate is way out of date at this point. As of this April, it was probably around 600,000, most of them children. And then them completely shutting off food to the population came after that.

That oughta fix it

If you had told me in 2005 that events in the future would make me start looking at rank and file FBI agents as “the good guys” to a certain extent in American politics, I would think you were out of your goddamned mind.

They’re not going to. One of the bedrock principles is that it’s never the leader’s fault. Hence the endless cycle of suddenly discovering that some particular person is horrible, just the worst, and we tried to give him a chance but we have to get rid of him now, all the blame is on him, and welcome to our new genius who will do great things.

@njm1314@lemmy.world Oh look, we were just talking about this kind of issue! It’s a damn shame how all these military people started gleefully firing on all the protestors, which always happens.

Meanwhile, every instance of something horrifying happening to a Democrat is featured on Fox News with Tucker Carlson squinting angrily into the camera saying it was all their fault, and he hopes it happens again.

I mean it is valuable, I guess, to maintain some standards of non violence even when “they” are not. I’m just saying the double standard is relevant.

Political analyst Matthew Dowd on MSNBC wonders whether the Charlie Kirk shooting may have been “a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.”

Well… holy shit man. You can’t say that on TV, even about a bad person.

Lots and lots of citizens have been “deported.”

It shouldn’t really be an “entitlement” mindset to think that you shouldn’t go to prison if you didn’t do anything wrong.

I don’t get why anyone from overseas would come to the US right now. They can just randomly decide today’s your day and throw you in prison in Louisiana for no reason at all.

1. The foreign military is pretty different from the National Guard
2. Attacking foreign nationals, however much they didn’t do anything to us, is totally different from firing on Americans in Washington DC

Unfortunately, an order to go and walk around DC isn’t a violation of anything. You have to wait until they give you an actually illegal order before telling them to stuff it (well, at least if you want to remain as a free person.)

I feel like probably they simply had no idea that it happened. Like literally never even saw it once.

The nature of the media they watch, and the totally backwards-land picture of the world it creates, is hard to really grasp if you haven’t been in it. And, of course, that’s on purpose.

Okey dokey

There is research on this: Generally, when talking to someone online, remaining completely respectful to someone who’s spitting in your face rhetorically speaking actually makes your argument less effective.

I’m still talking factually, sure. I’m actually not making any kind of personal attack, I am just being sarcastic a little. But I am not pretending that I respect your point of view, because your point of view doesn’t deserve respect. You keep getting all emotional and just repeating over and over how you are sure that it works, and I keep sending you examples and citations. We are not the same.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/07/09/syria-defectors-describe-orders-shoot-unarmed-protesters

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2011/04/syrian-soldiers-reportedly-shot-refusing-fire-protesters/349571/

https://igcc.ucsd.edu/blog/military-dissent-and-protest-when-soldiers-refuse-orders-to-use-force/

Those are on the first page of results I saw. There are lots of examples, it’s a pretty common feature of the end stage of a successful revolution for the troops to see which way the wind is blowing and refuse to fire on the demonstrators.

For me, the fact that Hegseth really wants them to fire on protestors, but instead they’re picking up trash and doing landscaping, indicates that there is some disconnect somewhere. Not that they’re obviously horrible and will fire on protestors with glee, and the fact that Hegseth wants them to do exactly that just hasn’t trickled all the way down to them yet.

I am sure there are some National Guard members who really want to fire on protestors. I think that’s part of the point of bringing groups of them from deep-red states to places that are not their home to be deployed. I’m not saying some shit will not go down. But also, the fact that you’re going back to the 1890s to find your examples kind of undoes your assertion that every single one of them is waiting with glee for their chance to fire on American civilians because that’s exactly what they signed up for. You honestly just have no idea what you’re talking about here, you’re just airing your sort of vibes assessment of what you think military people are like.

Yes yes, get it all out. There, there. I can tell you’re deeply learned about all of this stuff, it makes me feel a little bad that I came in with some kind of examples or anything, I’m sure there are not any more and it was just some crazy outlier.

Also, if there’s one word that I really commonly hear from people who’ve killed other humans in the military, when they talk about their experience, it is “glee.” They just glee all over the place, whenever they talk about it.

(What other examples are you even talking about? Kent State and what? I feel like I sent you into some kind of fit by bringing up the example that I did.)

Somehow I think the reaction to this will be totally different than it was when a gunman killed Melissa Hortman and wounded John Hoffman.

Depends on what they’re doing. If they’re building up a big groundswell of resentment against Dear Leader, so that when he does order them to build an internment camp or shoot some protestors they’ll be that much more likely to turn their guns in the other direction, then I’m in favor of that. If they were doing what the local cops are often doing, and cooperating with ICE to arrest random people and whisk them away, I’d feel a lot worse about it. Have they been doing that second thing or anything that you know of?

Can you maybe wait until they actually do anything fascist before you condemn them?

I sort of suspect that some of the reason for all the landscaping is that Trump tried to tell the guard to do what he really wants them to be doing, and somebody at some level told him to go fuck himself. It’s not because Trump had picking up trash in mind as what he’d like the armed forces to be doing right now.

That is literally the opposite of how it works in the end stages of quite a good proportion of revolutions.

At the end of the day, people in any country’s armed forces are just human people at the end of the day, and the US National Guard is quite a lot more human than most. Even in shooting wars against other nations, there are troops who decide to do the right thing. Hugh Thompson for example got a medal for landing his helicopter between Americans and Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and telling his crew to fire on the Americans if they kept advancing.