And I can’t even start to worry about the climate right now.

That’s a shame, because we are fucking in for it as the Colorado dries up in our winter heat wave. Nevermind what’s going to happen to Poland or Macedonia. I’d be worried what happens between Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California during the next growing season.

If Russia were to attack Europe, or China were to take Taiwan, Trump wouldn’t do a thing about it.

Trump’s cabinet is stuffed to the brim with people who are crazy enough to fight a war with China. What they can’t handle is China not invading Taiwan and, instead, stacking up China-friendly political allies on the island until the Parliament tips their way.

Meanwhile, Russians are damned near out of gas. They barely have the manpower to control that eastern slice of Ukraine. If they launched attacks into the European mainland and provoked a real material response from a combined Western Europe, they would be in huge trouble. But, again, that was never really Putin’s intention. He’s been building up alliances with white nationalist parties all across the continent. By 2030, you’re going to have a swath of ultra-nationalists running every Parliament from the AfD in Germany to Reform UK.

And he’s going to be doing it in coordination with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and India. Countries America bribed into a temporary alliance aren’t going to be there when the US economy goes into another recessionary tailspin. That’s what will really fuck NATO up.

And all this happening on the eve of a climate catastrophe, too.

Crazy to turn on GOPTV and discover a Murdered White Woman they’ve decided doesn’t deserve to be avenged in the most savage way possible.

She got gunned down dropping her daughter off at daycare. She wasn’t doing a Leftist 9/11 on the police.

Entry level $38k average $52.

NYPD pay is $60k starting and $125 after five years. That doesn’t include overtime or benefits. At 33k officers and counting, they’re the biggest department in the country. Base salary in Houston is $80k with Senior Officers earning as much as $140k.

Go more local and you’ll find the starting officer pay regularly outruns the median salary and benefits. The NYC median salary is $73k. Houston is $56k. You can find officers in smaller towns earning less. But they’re inevitably in a township with residents that are even poorer.

And, again, this is just baseline salary. Police Unions regularly secure 1.5x - 2x overtime pay compensation, resulting in some curious compensation figures

Houston senior police officer Matthew Davis’ annual salary was about $90,000 this past fiscal year. He made nearly $170,000 more in overtime.

It was not an anomaly. Davis has collected more in overtime than his base salary every year since at least 2020, and was previously disciplined for participating in an overtime scheme involving fabricated witness claims on traffic tickets. He is part of a growing pattern among the city’s highest-paid traffic enforcement officers who routinely collect overtime earnings that match or exceed their base salaries, a Houston Chronicle analysis found

Hardly the only department that’s been scandalized by this kind of misconduct.

The coveted nature of the job is little dicks want power to abuse.

Definitely one of the “fringe” benefits.

The job does suck.

Most jobs suck. Few include the number of perks afforded to entry level staff.

But in a hypothetical “might makes right”, cops aren’t ever safe either and don’t act with impunity of the courts and the consent of the governed.

Cops operate as armed gangs with staked out turf. They’re safe, broadly speaking, because they have a collectivist attitude towards their own defense. If you fuck with one cop, you are inevitably fucking with the entire department. And police departments - particularly in big cities - have enormous amounts of money, capital, and manpower to deploy against individuals and small groups in opposition.

If they thought the job sucked before with high rates of PTSD and suicide, just wait.

Not remotely high enough.

And the job doesn’t suck. It is highly coveted, both for the amazing pay/benefits - some of the best in the public sector and regularly well above the local median - and for the slew of “fringe” benefits that come from gang membership - prosecutorial immunity when engaged in drug/human trafficking, assault/battery/spousal abuse, vehicle crimes, intoxication, etc.

“White solidarity!” declares serial sexpest, anti-labor authoritarian plutocrat, and absentee father. “Now get out there and do my dirty work, while I scream slurs at my daughter and horndog Steven Miller’s wife.”

No revolution

Nobody wants to be the first one to stick their neck out.

Be incredibly angry at Americans

Invade Quebec

Become very cold

Leave after about 80 years

Which makes me wonder if I as a Dane am morally justified in gathering a few friends, breaking into these influencers homes, kicking them out, and just take up residence.

The thing about Might Makes Right is that hypotheticals aren’t a signal of strength.

What would happen if you tried? You’d probably get in an altercation. People would be injured. The local police would be called to break it up. And nobody would care that you were trying to prove a rhetorical point.

I suppose there is no moral obligation for me to obey American laws, if there is no moral obligation for America to obey international laws.

To borrow a quip from Brandon Lee Mulligan

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean?

The US has a military base in Greenland already. Pituffik Space Base doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, despite all the bluster.

And as the US is the military backbone of NATO, I’m not seeing how NATO as an institution would respond with the leadership structure and base management riddled with American personal.

What I meant by that was that every time this sort of threat has been resolved by violence, it only sets the stage for future violence, because the true problem lies in the systems we use this violence to uphold.

The systems are the people. And when you kick out a lynchpin - be it MLK or Charlie Kirk - that system can fail.

The gun nuts do need to stfu about their hollow ideals though. I’d say we are in complete agreement on that note. If they were to actually ‘walk the walk’ however…I dread what that may usher in tbqh.

We’ve got people being rammed in their cars and shot gangland style through the windows.

Delta Force is snatching foreign presidents while the sitting president dismisses the need for next year’s local elections.

You can only waggle your finger saying “It could get even worse” so many times.

am a passificst, so the regularity and casualness of people telling me I should nut up and kill a politician is very disturbing to me on many levels.

I don’t think pacifists should be arming up and shooting anyone. I think people who cling to their guns and talk about fighting for freedom need to nut up or shut up (and I’m fine with the latter, just shut up already).

I dont think further violence has ever really fixed this problem and I dont believe that’s going to magically change now.

I think this is naive. Violence is an incredibly effective tool at degrading organizational capacity, destroying institutional memory, and quelling public opposition.

When you’re dealing with ICE agents who can cavalierly execute civilians in public, I would love all three of those things to befall them, because I don’t want an organization with the capacity, the knowledge, and the public platform to execute my neighbors.

But insurgent violence comes with enormous personal risks, it requires professional training, and it rarely produces tangible results in a single lifetime (especially the lifetime of a militant insurgent). So I’m certainly not going to ask people to stick their necks out.

I just get tired of people posting TikToks in Camo Cosplay, pretending they’re part of some Last Line of Defense Against Tyranny. You’re bad liars. No serious person takes the 2nd amendment seriously as a political deterrent.

Just absurd to call it a “right” when nobody seriously believes the police will honor it. Less a civil liberty and more an excuse to ventilate your skull in a frenzied panic of gunfire.

He’s a true believer in white nationalism. And he’s not strictly wrong, either. In a world of Might Makes Right, the uncontested heavyweight champion can and does have a “right” to send in the goons, because there’s no countervailing force.

Miller’s got the reins of this monster and he’s outspokenly using it in a way the advisors for Obama and Bush and Clinton admins were more sheepish about. But you’re foolish to believe the Bin Laden raid into Pakistan was any less internationally criminal than the attack into Caracas. It was just more politically palatable. In the same way, the US support for the overthrow of Assad and the installation of form Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Ahmed al-Shara and our proxy war against Yemen has absolutely been “just about the oil” passing through the Suez Canal.

Miller’s committed the unspeakable crime of saying the quiet part out loud. And his voice is annoying to listen to. But he’s not breaking from our international policy in a material sense. He’s just coming at it like he’s six whiskeys deep at the Klan Rally rather than four martinis in at the Yale Business Club.

Guns only work if you use them

To date, Americans still seem unwilling to fight back in a militant sense

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

Heller said she heard ICE agents telling the driver, a woman, to “get out of here.”“She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in — like, his midriff was on her bumper — and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” Heller said.

Heller said it appeared the woman accelerated, and traveled about 100 feet before striking a utility pole and some other vehicles, and could be seen slumped over inside her car.

Horrifying

That’s not a Russian tanker, its a Venezuelan tanker that re-flagged as Russia in the desperate hope that it could convince a Russian naval escort to protect it from pursuit by the American military.

Don’t worry. The Russians never interceded. The US leveraged military support from the UK to halt the frigate and board it. We still live in a unipolar world dominated by Amerikkkan imperial aggression.

Water has never been cheap in Iran

You’re talking out your ass.

Industrial run-off in Iran is treated like a nuisance at best.

Why on earth do you think a reinstatement of the Shah would change that? Look at Iraq. Look at Syria. Look at Honduras right now. Look at Haiti.

Have any of their ecological issues improved after Western regime change went into effect?

Getting crucial infrastructure out of the hands of a religious army might actually have positive consequences

That’s not what is being proposed. You’re talking about changing military leadership through armed insurrection and outside intervention.

You’re talking about proxy rule by Israel.

None of this improves the Iranian water reserves. None of it brings in more precipitation.