This week, Donald Trump threatened to bomb Iranian oil infrastructure and desalination plants — the facilities that keep civilian populations alive. When critics pointed out that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure constitutes a war crime under international law, the White House waved them off. The President, his spokesmen assured us, was engaging in tough diplomacy.
But the man wasn’t bluffing. He’s got an almost obsessive attraction to the idea of maiming civilians. I know. I’ve personally heard him propose the most inhumane acts.
There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Donald Trump.
There’s a particular kind of horror that comes from watching a powerful man describe, in clinical detail, how he wants to hurt innocent people and realising that the only thing standing between his fantasy and its execution is a room full of aides, scrambling to remind him what is illegal and what is not. That’s the horror I experienced in late 2018 and early 2019, when I was helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Donald Trump.
And that was in his first term, when that room full of aides still existed. Now they’ve all been replaced by ghouls just as monstrous as he is.
When is someone going to get fed up enough and [ Removed by Reddit ]?
I’m sure there are thousands of people unhinged enough to be willing to try that. If I read the news of that happening I’d celebrate, but I’m not personally trying to throw my whole life away for that.
and [ Removed by Reddit ]?
Okay, that euphemism made me snicker.
One of his generals, aids or advisors need to stand up, bring honor to our country and [Removed by Reddit] for our nation, for the world and to be on the right side of history.
The aides and advisors are as sick as he is. The generals are the picture in the dictionary/encyclopedia for the ‘people who are focused on the day to day tasks that have been placed before them so they can continue to exist in their status quo.’
If I had the skills. . .
A particular set of skills?
A fookin pencil
Someone did. They missed by inches. I would imagine they beefed up security a bit since then…
And, in most cases, it’s a good thing that our head of state is well-protected. Otherwise, we’d have a new president every week and the executive branch would be a mess…oh…hmmm…
Still not sure it was a real attempt or staged.
It was fake
Only reason I disagree is because of the father that died right behind Trump.
Ah yes because Trump would never do undue harm to an innocent person for the purposes of his own gain.
Why? Shooting someone in the crowd doesn’t mean they aimed at Trump
Oh that’s easy, crisis actors, that father never existed
Asked if there were any limits on his powers, he said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Yep, we’re fucked…
He meant “mortality.”
He has no morality.
I’m certain he’s a clinical psychopath. He believes what suits him in that moment.
And if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp.
Don’t drag other countries into this, there is no “West” including the USA anymore. You’re on your own.
Saying “I don’t care what you do, not my problem” is very much losing “moral authority”.
For decades (really centuries but…), The West (Western Europe and North America and the paler parts of Oceania) have claimed to be the moral arbiters of the world. Much of colonialism was built around the idea of “civilizing” savages. And many of the wars (cold and otherwise) of the 20th century were similarly built around this.
The US is speedrunning the erosion of any form of credibility or high ground. But The West as a whole aren’t that far behind. But the “good” news is that this is nothing new? NOBODY cared about Palestine until it got caught in the news cycle a few years back (and the Uyghurs, among others, can pound sand because anything else might hurt the supply chain). And there is a reason we all expected the most recent War in Ukraine to end with russia murdering a bunch of people, stealing more land, and doing it again in another decade.
Because intervening would have been messy.
Uhhh
Go read British history.
America is just the asshole today.
I dont think anyone but the west ever thought the west had the moral high ground. I don’t even think the west thought it.
This is part of what the article is saying, in a way at the end.
The ‘west’ needs to hold the pariah to account and demand change or formally disassociate with the pariah completely in order to have any scrap of moral ground in this. With each day that passes - hell with each fresh atrocity, further erodes that ground into complicity.
Spain is doing its part (not as much as I’d want but…). I hope the rest will join soon.
And I’m at least mildly hopeful that ‘little’ gestures such as france denying airspace to weapons shipments will slowly grow into something more.
I think we’ve been well past that point for a while due to the western support for Israeli genocide. No one lifted a finger and Israelis can still travel the world acting like the worst tourists ever, like they always have been.
For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)
This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.
“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. […] While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.
“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”
If this sounds familiar (beyond 2019-era politics that we experienced, but have been washed away by scrubbing our memories with insane new stories a few thousand times), it’s because this is how ICE has been treating protestors for the last year.
We have an administration that is entirely psychopathological. Empathy is a concept that Trump doesn’t understand or value, and at each level of the reporting structure, sycophancy reinforces that psychopathy. People like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi (and the reincarnated phantasms of Trump’s id currently doing the latter two’s jobs) repeat and revel in that psychopathy because it was currency to show their loyalty to an unprincipled madman.
The thing that is so demoralizing is that the only people that matter in this world are Trump, Trump’s power-hungry throne-sniffers, and billionaires. Regular citizens, much less valid asylum-seeking immigrants like above, are already the untouchables that don’t even rate as humans to these people.
unspeakable
he told me
archive.is serves malware and alters content. It is not an archive.
Substantiate this please?
?
The guy that went on TV and advocated going after terrorists’ innocent family members in retribution strikes and has spent the last year killing and deporting innocent people in his own country wants to kill innocent people in other countries? Shocking.
My violent fantasy: Trump is laid down in his tighty-whities in a 6 in thick bed of molten tar so he can’t move. Then a steamroller rolls over him, starting from his feet to his head, one inch every couple of minutes so I can see his pain. When he passes out, we wake him before continuing on again.
But knowing my luck, after this happens, his supporters would just start wearing steamroller pendants and treating him like the next Jesus more than they already do.
Note: I said this is fantasy. A man can dream.
Any fantasy involving him suffering insurmountable pain over a long period of time is what I wish for that “man”.
Isn’t molten tar going to be a pretty quick death? How hot is that stuff?
They used to tar and feather people as a form of humiliation. I’m sure it wouls leave burns but it can’t be THAT bad.
You may want to go back and reread about the whole tar and feather thing, it’s actually way more fucked up than you may know.
Even if the tar was only like ~140F like an asphalt road can hit pretty easily in the summer, it’s covering your body and sticking to your skin. But this was in a time where they didn’t have fine control of heat, and was likely just warmed over a fire. Very likely aren’t surviving that experience, especially when it was practiced…
From what admittedly little I’ve read on the subject, it seems plenty of people survived tar and feathering.
It would honestly depend on the melting point of the tar and what it’s mixed with. I guess they could just heat pure wood tar, but they had the technical know how to mix it with volatile plant oils to make it more liquid.
The goal is to humiliate a person; running around like a chicken is more humiliating than being a dead chicken. Since they wanted a show, they would have went out of their way to make it less deadly.
Rapist mentality. Trump is all about the power he can wield.
if he carries out war crimes with impunity, the West will have lost whatever moral authority remains in its grasp. The Geneva Conventions, the laws of armed conflict, and the architecture of rules designed to spare civilians from the worst of war are symbolic of all that we stand for in the West — of how democracy restrains our inner demons. But those principles are not self-enforcing. They’ve endured because Western nations, led by the United States, treated them as binding on themselves first. The moment America becomes the country that bombs desalination plants and calls it diplomacy, we have not merely broken a rule. We have announced the rules are dead. Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.
Looks like we announced the rules are dead then. Israel and the US killed them. :/
Moscow already wipes it’s ass with the Geneva Convention. Only a matter of time before Washington does since it’s Russias puppet.
But at least tankies can be justified about their morals.
Fucking psychopath.
Hard agree
If there’s one thing I know about what goes around it’s that it never comes around
The best Trumps are dead Trumps.
It’s kind of comforting to know this is Trump’s plan because we know it will fail.
Every authoritarian watching in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang will take notice.
Lol I hate to praise states, but compared to the US these countries are saints right now.
Ukraine might have a different opinion on that.
Bullshit. Trump is only scraping the surface of what modern Russia did for decades.
Russia wishes it could do half the evil shit the US is currently getting away with
It absolutely does, and was doing for a long time. Of course, repercussions from the west are more severe for Russia, because unlike the US it has little leverage over Europe.
So what are you trying to say here? This just proves my point. The US raped the entire world with their capitalism. Every shit ass policy the world over can be traced back to us. Its us, dude. We have always been pigheaded pieces of shit.
Preach! I’m with you, the USA is actually the greatest evil on the planet, easily and by a large margin.
lol no. Trump is just obnoxiously Evil. Being loud with a new shape of evil every day is not inherently more evil than being so consistently evil that your evilness becomes an expected part of the background noise.
The USA is evil. Trump is not the cause. He is the epitome of the American Zeitgeist given flesh.
the epitome of the American Zeitgeist
Yeah that plus a shitty voting system. Without FPTP and senators representing a tiny population being given the same power as ones representing a larger one, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.
29% of the voting population isn’t a zeitgeist.
