Feels Soft and Squishy

 

This is just a quick observation, but there's some overlap between the people who insist on men being manly men and mewling babies who are a-scareded of WWIII with Russia. Charlie Kirk isn't talking to Russian people in the above screencap (do they care who he is?) or even to Putin--he's telling his followers that what Russia is doing (invading Ukraine, threatening to go further, sabotage against European energy/communication infrastructure) is not their problem. People who want to do anything about that are the problem.

The question isn't "Do American people want war with Russia?" Of course not. The question is "Did the Cold War actually end?' and maybe not. The next question is, "What is Russia actually doing to us?"

Well, a campaign of disinformation, election interference, paying western-based influencers to spread RU propaganda, weakening our long-established ties with our allies...and the actual heroes in Europe--the people physically defending their own homeland with bravery and ingenuity, are somehow being treated as if they are "prolonging a war" by not rolling over for a genocide.

We had a great generation in this country that despised the idea of a genocide in Europe, who appreciated the fight for freedom and democracy. On the right, I see genocide-deniers and people who want to see we are not even a democracy.  I don't care for propagandists who have no moral convictions to even bother having the courage of, except possibly for culture war (a distraction, and a dangerous one that divides our country and weakens it). 

This sort of thing feels very weak and squishy to me 

The Russia Campaign Reminds Me--

 

This is what Tenet Media was broadcasting for Putin in the U.S. They support Elon Musk, Trump, RFK Jr, and violent protests. 1/ pic.twitter.com/s3C2BPCZl6

— Karen Piper (@PiperK) September 8, 2024

If you take a look at the topics above, you'll note among other things--misogyny.  This was a key part of the 2014 "Gamergate" dry run and a big part of the attacks on Hillary Clinton. It's why my ears perked up at the allegation that gamers were part of the Russian disinfo targeting for the 2024 election. (And minorities--that voter suppression technique that was used pretty well in 2016, both by Brad Parscale for Trump as he admitted and by the Internet Research Agency on "parallel tracks".) 

Flashforward to 2024, and we have Tucker Carlson, whose Putin interview and Moscow supermarket adulation were both deemed surprisingly cringey even to producers of Kremlim-inspired sludge, calling women in the US military: feces. 

Tucker Carlson is revolted by our war wounded.

He compares them to literal shit.

He will almost certainly have a position in the second Trump Administration.pic.twitter.com/5QSoyVvHjH

— Veterans For Responsible Leadership (@VetsForRL) September 8, 2024

I Don't Have a Charitable Light for This, Glenn Greenwald.

When I consult even my most cynical side, and I have a very cynical side, there is still no part of me that thinks wanting to intervene on the behalf of a couple hundred adolescent women who might otherwise be sold into the very worst of slavery (because what, after all, does anyone suppose the market is for adolescent girls?) could be anything but appropriately intentioned.

I think a lot of non-interventionism is founded in the sense that nations can and should be responsible to settle their own shit as a kind of test of whether they've earned the stripes of their sovereignty, but it is also true that in the absence of law, atrocities occur. I can't buy an argument that what happens to these young ladies, because it isn't happening in my country, doesn't affect me at all. Those girls palpably affect me. They could be my own daughters, and were they, I would scour the earth and burn the obstacles between myself and my blood. That is not some idealistic sterile "Next Western Intervention". That is a human convention at work under the assertion that the selling of flesh and blood young women into a life of rape is disgusting. We might not be able to recover all the girls ever sold into bondage by barbarous straits, but we can do something, maybe, I hope, about these.

Although as an aside, I am not keen on the allegation that that our US State Dept had a duty to preempt anything of this sort. That, I think, is the real invitation to get things wrong. But now that we have this group of terrorists and kidnappers in an admitted wide scale plot, I am greatly in favor of sparing them in no regard in the hopes of recovering these lost girls.