@soryang The veneer of ICE acting within the law overlooks the law that has been overlooked for decades, being the one that makes it a crime to hire an illegal. What boss has gone to jail for hiring veritable slave labor? I can't name a single one. That is what is normalized. Does anybody in their right mind believe that all the housekeepers and lawn keepers at Trump's hotels are legal residents?
ICE worked well for years. The asylum process worked. Deportees received due process. When was it necessary for the military to roam city streets and pretty much terrifying everybody until now. Why now?
CBDCs will be the absolute end to our Constitutional rights. What happens to any cash we may have accumulated?
These are dangerous times. Future generations will never know what we allowed to be taken from them.
Downer or not, this is reality.
Despite all this shit, I am determined to have a nice weekend, dammit!
And I hope the same for you, friend.
Thanks for the insight on Stalin. In order to have so thoroughly and meticulously commit mass murder of his country's population, I'd say he was one smart cookie. Whereas, Trump is, by all appearances, a dumb ass. Vance, methinks, is Stalin-smart.

#1.1.1 #1.1.1

I wrote a rant on this early this am. I wasn't going to post it, because chilling effect, I don't want to be a downer, etc.

How bout that new ballcap?

"The president isTrump was right about everything"

I read a biography of Stalin once, I don't remember all the details, it was a long time ago, during the cold war. One of the things that surprised me was that he was portrayed as being quite intelligent. Other histories and sources I had read earlier concerning the Russian revolution had portrayed him as a brutish character hitting members of Soviets over the head with shovels, killing them, especially peasant reps from the Social Revolutionary party, outside voting venues, in order to insure votes went the communist party's way. According to this view, Lenin or Trotsky were the great intellectuals worthy to lead the revolution, and Stalin was just the killer who did the dirty work. So there was this stereotype that he was essentially an ignorant violent thug.

This biography had detailed accounts of Stalin's conversations with a few of his political victims while or after he consolidated his absolute power, in which he mocked them by making statements and arguments that were patently untrue or meaningless circumlocutions but were difficult to refute by other political actors because he exercised unchecked power. If what he was saying was clever but obviously false and he was contradicted, it might lead to detention, torture or worse until the victim of the political "debate" conceded. Whether someone conceded to Stalin's ideological circumlocutions, perhaps to save family members from being jailed, tortured, and killed, didn't matter. Stalin probably would have the principal political victim exiled to the slave labor camps or killed anyway. Stalin was irrefutable only in the sense that he was the all powerful dictator and the victim was powerless. Stalin was described critically as having "peasant cleverness," which implicated his resentment of urbane party intellectuals. The point was that even if the dictator's view on a particular situation was patently untrue, and everyone knew it was untrue, it was taken as true; this method induced a posture of powerlessness.

This is also the role of the US agents of unidentified federal "police" agencies with masks, arbitrarily, dragging people off the streets in the US, in broad daylight, with apparent impunity. It's a terror tactic to instill fear in the victim populations, while people debate whether we are a fascist dictatorship yet. Totalitarianism is a movement, a political process of destruction of traditional social and political institutions systematically. Arendt described how the process evolves in her seminal study of Totalitarianism, and its relationship to imperialism and antisemitism. In Europe, during the interwar period, detention centers housing ethnic minorities caught on the wrong side of a newly carved post WWI border presaged the death camps. In the civic sense, detainees without civil rights, were already dead legally.

It doesn't matter really if what Trump does with federal law enforcement agencies wearing masks seizing people off the streets isn't illegal in fact, it looks like it is, so it terrorizes the population or at least some parts of it. Other parts of the population identifying with the other psychological pole, relish it. These are the authoritarian followers, white supremacists, and political opportunists. Even if it isn't the Brown Shirts, SS, or Gestapo, it looks like it is. Same for national guard and active duty troops being deployed domestically to major cities and alligator alley and the other "concentration camps." If it isn't martial law it sure looks like it, and that's what counts, building the strong man image, and the all powerful "resistance is futile" idea. These people appear to have impunity as a practical matter. It's a process of instilling fear in the public and galvanizing those who identify with power and aggression.

The song Free Falling is an interesting choice OTC. Totalitarianism is characterized by the subjective sensation that there is no ground beneath one's feet, because the foundation of customs, practices and civil rights associated with legacy institutions that engender a feeling of stability are systematically being dismantled.

fwiw

Thanks for the Odds and Ends!