I wrote about the idiotic and anti-human vision that is currently replacing the republic. I will now go back to thinking about what a cleansing flood might look like. defector.com/billionaire-…
— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 2:28 PM
This *should* be a gift link, I hope. The irreplaceable Dave Roth, at Defector:
The most important thing to know about both the chittering Renfields gnawing through the ductwork of the American administrative state and the billionaire sociopath they serve is that they don’t care. Every bit of damage they have done and will do springs from and follows this fundamental fact. They don’t know anything about what they’re wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don’t care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.
They do not care about or understand the state because they do not acknowledge that it is valid; they do not care about or understand public service or public servants because they refuse the premise that such things could even exist. This goes beyond the private sector’s familiar and self-flattering disdain for the public sector, which amounts to the load-bearing assumption that everything and everyone operating outside of the free market is somehow the minor leagues. There is another opposition at work here, a crabbed and curdled worldview that reflects libertarianism’s signature balance of ideological resentment and pure childish certitude, and which is defined by the smash-and-grab anti-ethos of the vandal, but which is finally simpler and stupider than either.
Moment by moment, Musk and his strike force of greasy Beavisoid wreckers are rats in the walls, gnawing hideously through the wiring in search of richer fare. There is public money in there somewhere, and they believe it is theirs by right. Musk and his super-class of tech freaks want to get fat on it, to rescue that money from public uses that they view as inherently inefficient and unjust—spending that is “waste, fraud, and abuse” because of the ends to which it is deployed, which are public, and because of who is deploying it, which is not them. It is important to them, as a matter of efficiency and justice, that more of that money end up with them. In more deserving hands, that public wealth will be protected from the grasping public, and can be put to the uses this cohort prefers: building bigger homes behind bigger walls, booking The Chainsmokers to play 45-minute sets at the absolute worst parties in human history, hiring Famously Combative Attorneys and buying political suction, discreetly settling their endless skein of sexual harassment lawsuits. Rich person things. Real stuff…
Doing the work that these captive agencies do—doing, even, the bad things that people and institutions can do—takes knowledge and care and collaboration. You can’t build something, or improve or maintain something that anyone else built, without that knowledge and care. But anyone can swing a hammer, and someone sufficiently eager to swing that hammer won’t really need to know or care where they’re swinging it provided they keep doing so. Enough blows will do the job; eventually, even the blindest swing will hit something important. You can’t build anything enduring this recklessly or this stupidly, but you can kill just about anything that way.
This is not a new observation, to say the very least. The central conceit of American governance, from the nation’s founding, is a recognition of that fact. If that system was in some sense doomed from the start, given the extent to which the powerful people that designed it created its series of infuriating switchbacks and failsafes to some extent as protection against their own comeuppance or usurpation, that system was also elegantly designed, enjoyed a good long run, and was commendably prescient about the greatest threat it would face: some asshole who was unwilling to abide by or acknowledge any of those clever rules or load-bearing social obligations whenever and wherever they inconvenienced or just annoyed him, and who had become powerful enough to make that rejection everyone else’s problem…
… In a system designed to run on heavily qualified but quantifiable systems of consent, Musk has repeatedly refused the premise at every turn; that cocksure and annihilating lack of care is behind everything that Elon Musk has ever done or claimed or stolen or faked or bought. As with Donald Trump, another pig-stupid rich kid and being of pure appetite, Musk’s inability or refusal to believe that any other thing could be more important than him getting exactly what he wants would make him an existential threat to a system built around the idea of public good. That concept just is not real to them in the way that their own hunger is; none of the people they’d immiserate or incinerate would or could ever matter as much as whatever they want at this moment…
This ongoing administrative coup is that it is being handled in roughly the same way as Musk’s purchase and desecration of Twitter back in 2022. Among Musk’s fellow clammy tech lordlings, that purchase is seen as an inspired bit of executive leadership and smashing full-spectrum success. By conventional standards, it absolutely wasn’t. “Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,” Musk wrote in an email to staff back in January. By that point, Musk had rushed through mass firings and eliminated various redundancies that left the site wobblier, scammier, spammier, smaller, and worse; that it did not tip over entirely after all that self-inflicted damage was enough to make it an epic triumph by Musk’s cohort. Musk commissioned and promoted The Twitter Files, a series of alternately tendentious and outright false misreadings of internal Twitter documents by Musk’s pet journalists that was designed to demonstrate the perfidy of previous management and mostly demonstrated Musk’s cosmically poor reading comprehension…
It is, of course, a very stupid and irresponsible thing to run the federal government like a vanity social media sideline. Musk removed the systems and personnel that kept Twitter running smoothly sort of on principle and sort of out of spite, and made it much worse; the consequences would necessarily be much steeper if he did the same to, say, the Veterans Administration or Social Security. “My central terror,” the researcher Nathan Tankus told The American Prospect, “although there are a million ones you can pick, is that based on Musk’s history, the redundancies which are the premise of mission-critical IT systems, the premise that this must never fail, he’s going to look at it and say ‘look at this inefficiency.’ A mission-critical system has to be inefficient because that’s how you make sure it functions all the time.”
This would be the sort of thing you’d care about, if you were someone that cared about this sort of thing. Musk is not, and the recklessness with which he and his minions have gone about their campaign of coercion and demolition has borne this out. It’s worth bearing in mind here that Musk just isn’t a very smart or principled guy, and has been insulated from any accountability by his wealth for long enough that he has liquefied into a slurry of his defects; ask him to find efficiencies in the government and he will naturally gravitate towards “just don’t pay what was promised” because it is easiest, and because it is cruel, and because he himself has been getting away with doing that for so long.
For serial violators of this particular clause of the social contract like Trump and Musk, that means stiffing contractors and counterparties in the assumption that they won’t be able to do anything about it. In the case of the federal payment systems that Musk and his zoomerkorps gained access to over the weekend, those parties are federally supported charities and grant recipients, Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, government employees and the many, many others who have been authorized by Congress to receive funds from the federal government, and who are now at risk of not receiving them. The assumption, which is in point of fact more of a taunt, remains the same: that Congress or the courts or the public, or all of them together, simply do not have the right or the capacity to stop them from doing any of it. So far, in virtually every instance, they have barely even tried…
The two capitalists currently working in tenuous harmony to replace the republic each have their own visions of how a state notionally run by and for the people might be made more like a business run by and for their own personal benefit. Trump’s vision is the government as Mar-a-Lago, a gilded ballroom accessible only to dues-paying members within which those rich dummies gossip and feud and poke inedible food around their plates, pausing only to roar with applause whenever Trump himself does anything. Musk’s vision of the state is more along the lines of the wreck he made of Twitter when he tried to start it over—a machine that exalts and serves only him, where service declines and subscription prices climb in tandem forever and any public questions receive an automated reply in the form of one grinning poop emoji. The difference, this time, would be that no one can ever really leave. You can still see the dignified bones of the thing these brutal and stupid visions aim to replace, and they look sturdy enough. It is nice to think that, when this mess is swept out by flood or an overdue change in ownership, it might be possible to build something new in there.
This is fantastic work. Each sentence made me more miserable than the last.
— birdingwithkids.bsky.social (@birdingwithkids.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 6:22 PM
Then I've done my job.
— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 6:38 PM
War for Ukraine Day 1,078: Who Benefits?
rikyrah
Dear Water Girl:
Do you know about these special elections in Florida.
The Congressional Special Elections?
I know these are Republican Districts, but we need to put in a fight
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8YkdvLX/
rikyrah
The USAID ATTACK WILL KILL AT LEAST A MILLION PEOPLE.
Easy.😠😠😠
prostratedragon
Tom and Daisy Buchanan go to work.
satby
Damn, that man can write.
Jay
@prostratedragon:
Oh c’mon, they never worked a day in their lives, destroying was just play to them.
RevRick
@rikyrah: Destroying USAID is a supremely cruel, stupid, self-defeating act. Not only will unnecessary and preventable harm and deaths occur, but also it sabotages our national long-term interests. We have trashed all the goodwill that comes from doing good. But as Roth rightly notes, these self-appointed fools have no understanding of the common good. Theirs is a world devoid of anything resembling care. It’s always and only winners and losers.
They are incapable of seeing that survival of the fittest applies to the jungle/savannah; cooperation is the key to civilization.
prostratedragon
Shibas against doge
Jay
@RevRick:
Does not apply, the harsher the environment the more communal cooperation is needed.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@prostratedragon: word
Ohio Mom
@RevRick: Africa is completely China’s now.
Chetan Murthy
When I read this
I thought about Fight Club. These jamokes think that by breaking things, they will get the chance to be on top: it’s as simple as that. They don’t really care how many people get hurt, as long as they, they are on top.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Jay: Classical Rome was made what it was in part by collective sociopathy caused by lead poisoning.
kindness
I’m thankful the courts have so far come down on our side. Mind you, if any of those cases reaches the Supreme Court, all bets are off.
Bupalos
I keep coming back to the obvious question which is “why has this been left so undefended?” And it’s just literally because practically no one knows what USAID or most parts of the Federal gov do for them. Just too much insulation.
Bupalos
@kindness: do we know that the Muskovites are obeying court rulings? Like I’m pretty sure they’re just saying “yeah, but are the cops HERE?”
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
Watching the ongoing federal TGV-wreck, I am reminded that the individual colonies were generally founded on selfishness and self-centredness, whether material or spiritual, and that the history of the US has far more intervals like today than like the 1940-2000 period. The US has been petty, selfish, shortsighted and generally untrustworthy for longer than it has not. Whether it was Monroe Doctrine or Manifest Destiny, or merely the insistence that WWI war debts be repaid immediately by the remaining Allies, the US has treated the rest of the planet as at best an inconvenience. The current occupant of the WH’s rabid fixation on buying or stealing the parts of the planet he thinks are valuable bears striking resemblance to the annexation of Texas in 1845, the acquisition of half the Caribbean from Spain in 1898, and the serial breach of treaties with Native Americans from 1868 to present day. The idea that the nation had somehow outgrown these tendencies seems in hindsight quaint.
The question for us now is not merely how to halt the current wave of destruction, but how or even whether the ideals of the last few decades can be realized in whatever follows the wrecking ball.
Bupalos
@RevRick: I actually think you’re underestimating this. They didn’t blindly bumble into whatever, and it happened to be USAID and they have no idea, like random gorillas. They are ripping up USAID first because that is the crown jewel of the rules based order. And as such completely undefended. I think it’s a bit more intentional than you’re supposing.
Ohio Mom
@Bupalos: Even the things I had vague knowledge of, Sure, we do foreign aid, or We fund scientific research, or We do things to make flying safer, I had no idea, gave no thought to, how these things were accomplished.
Now as some of these things are being dismantled, I’m learning how they worked. It’s giving me an appreciation of how hard it will be to put back together, if we get a chance.
prostratedragon
One:
Two:
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Bupalos: There is some good journalism out there that indicated USAID was such a target because it was investigating Starlink – in particular Starlink’s interactions with Ukraine. It got flattened because it was investigating Musk. Pick a current target and chances are there are funding concerns, pending audits or outright investigations involving one or more Musk properties.
Bupalos
@Ohio Mom: I keep wanting to do prophecy ala Herodotus: “the things you do not value or understand, those things you will lose.”
not a quote, just in the style.
Bupalos
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): I mean, I’m pretty tight with a couple fairly high USAID folks and… I can’t even imagine “investigation” anywhere near their portfolio. These people work, everyday, under resourced, to get medicines distributed.
AFAIK no fucking way. USAID gets evaporated because it helps people be less desperate and dependent on petty oligarchs. People like musk want them gone because USAID supports human stability and independence, which is anathema to people like Thiel who literally want to drink the blood of other humans.
NotMax
Seems like a good space for Rats in My Room.
;)
SpaceUnit
Cardboard signs will save us.
Bupalos
@SpaceUnit:@SpaceUnit: valid… but the cardboard sign is a least slightly more substantial and honest than the snide online comment about the pointlessness of cardboard signs, you’ll surely agree.
hitchhiker
Has that ugly doink Steve Bannon raised his muzzle lately? As I understood it, he was eager to see the government ripped to pieces into tossed into the sewer, both for the joy of doing it and for the wondrous new thing that would arise from the sludge.
Then Musk arrived.
Is Steve still in the mix?
Jay
@Bupalos:
USAID pays for over 9,000 Starlinks in Ukraine, Aid workers hospitals, schools, NGO’s etc.
A year and a half ago, the IG of USAID launched an investigation into the Starlink contracts, because “word” from Ukraine USAID workers and others, say that they are not getting the service they are paying for,
$4,250,927 million dollars a month in fees, plus an up front of $2,975,680 for the terminals.
$408,364,682 so far.
SpaceUnit
@Bupalos:
If you say so.
cain
@Jay:
The military leaders should have held that guy accountable 2 years ago when he was breaking the law. I don’t understand why he wasn’t punished. Was starlink so critical that he deserves to have this kind of power?
Our country is so amazingly moronic. It seems like no crime is going to be punished at these levels.
We deserve it. We deserve to go down in flames.
Trump doesn’t give a shit about Africa, as far as he is concerned the whole place is one big shithole. He probably applauding because it mostly hurts brown people.
Jay
@cain:
USAid has contracts for over 127,000 Starlink terminals globally.
As we have learned, US institutions are either weak, or complicit.
In addition, if Apartheid Clyde is ripping off USAid, how much is he ripping off the other 4.2 million other users for?
NotMax
@cain
No. No we don’t.
I for one don’t care to be barbecued.
Debbie(Aussie)
@Bupalos:
Can’t find it now, but it said the IG of USAID was investigating because they paid for it/them.
Jay
@Debbie(Aussie):
https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814
while it is still up,……………………….
Debbie(Aussie)
Thanks Jay. I was about to edit my message saying you got there first, but my phone rang.
may I ask how your partner is doing? I think about her every time I see your name. Sending good vibes.
Jay
Cancer free, (knock, knock), still healing, on limited return to work, with accomodations.
Thank you.
VeniceRiley
@hitchhiker: Yes. He talked to potus last night and is complaining that Musk, Tucker, and others in the horde are organising to manage him into being pushed out.
mapanghimagsik
He had me at chittering Renfields. Wow.
mapanghimagsik
This might be a niave question, but could congressional democrats have hearings to try and capture as much knowledge of usaid as possible? Right now, I wonder about the National Archives. Erasing history would very much be their jam.
Martin
Not sure people realize that USAID is as much a foreign aid operation as it is a farm price stabilization program. They buy farm commodities to help set a floor under their prices. Lot of row crop farmers are going to get fucked.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
The last lines of the column resonate. Yeah, something great can be built on the skeleton. But first …
First, the Republican Party and the Trumpists must be destroyed, torn out root and branch.
Then the rebuilding can begin.
Martin
@hitchhiker: No. Bannon is an eat the rich guy. He thinks Musk should be Luigi’d.
Cathie from Canada
I feel so damn sad right now – a great nation, but apparently so brittle that it cracks and fails with hardly any pressure at all. Does anyone still remember Paul Simon’s American Tune? I did a blog post about it the other day. It is particularly apt now:
frog
@mapanghimagsik: They will be able to hold meetings, if the Republicans will assign a conference room, but subpoenas need approval of the majority party. A request for subpoenas was voted down by the GOP.
mapanghimagsik
I guess we’re going to find out how much black starting an entire agency is.
Betty Cracker
@prostratedragon: Someone on Bluesky who was participating in a protest at the USAID building earlier this week posted a chant: “No Musk, no coup, no fascist Shiba Inu!”
Baud
“I wanted to burn it all down. I didn’t want innocent people to be hurt.”
Baud
Via reddit
TBone
As someone with a basic understanding of Project 2025, I cannot yet be knocked off balance, not this soon. I return to a state of equilibrium as each night passes into morning, before the next blows rain down upon us. We knew what was coming. Of course I’m not “happy” about it, but I’m still bracing for much worse.
Mood
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4XJxFAoiWSY
Baud
Via reddit, some optimism
TBone
@Baud: nice
TBone
11.8 billion in revenue seems like a good place to start moving fast and breaking things.
https://spacenews.com/starlink-set-to-hit-11-8-billion-revenue-in-2025-boosted-by-military-contracts/
TBone
We all grew up without Internet connection and we all know what to do without it. It would be inconvenient, but not fatal.
TBone
From HCR’s letter today
MagdaInBlack
@TBone:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/06/ice-us-immigration-deportations-google
Betty Cracker
@TBone: Any honest crusader against “waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government would start at the Pentagon. The fact that Musk started at USAID tells us everything we need to know.
TBone
@Betty Cracker: YES indeed.
It seems like we should encourage that Pentagon place to continuously throw sand in his gears.
And fart right in his face.
TBone
@MagdaInBlack: thanks!
TBone
Gotta get ready to take Noah for a tube incision checkup and neck bandage change. I wish I could sedate the poor little fella for when he realizes he’s gotta go back to
prisonthe animal hospital. It won’t be pretty. He’ll be terrified we’re gonna leave him there again the whole time. And it’s a weekly endeavor.Kay
@Jay:
Whats going on in Canada? Polling flipped and now favors the liberals?
Ramalama
@Baud: wow, this subreddit. Thanks for linking to it.
Kay
My hope is US media and Republicans attacking other countries (Canada, Mexico, Denmark) hurts the far Right politically IN those countries and helps a bit with the international drift Right and towards authoritarian rule by billionaires.
They really loathe Trump in Denmark. If I were a liberal pol in Denmark I’d tie the Danish Right to the US Right and Donald Trump.
TBone
@Betty Cracker: Adam’s Ukraine post from last night is also very enlightening on that subject.
prostratedragon
Derek Guy‘s thoughtful wardrobe suggestion for the contemporary grocery shopper.
TBone
@prostratedragon: hahahahaha!
TBone
Some buck the eff up music to help me do the adulting I must do today sans coffee. Hubby is correct when he tells me I need to take more Communion because it never sticks.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcMQWfMTfJ8
Kay
Greenlanders on Reddit immediately made the connection between “relocating” (forcible removal) of the population of Gaza by the US and Israeli Right and “relocating” the indigenous Greenlanders because the US Right and Putin want the land.
I think tying the Right to these policies internationally could help to stop the international drift to fascism, even if it doesn’t save the US. They can “relocate” anyone. No one is safe.
apocalipstick
@kindness: Who will enforce those orders if the Beavis brigade refuses to leave? Pam Bondi’s DoJ? The FBI? US Marshals?
TBone
@apocalipstick: suggestion
Maybe Muriel Bowser will step up.
https://dc.ng.mil/About-Us/
apocalipstick
@Bupalos: And USAID had a lot to do with fighting apartheid.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I have run into so many wild stories about USAID. Everybody’s getting into the act. Your mention of Shibu Inus reminded me of one put out by tankies, that eliminating USAID will cut off funding for NAFO, the pro-Ukraine social media network.
A lot of this mythology is pushed by right-wing MAGA types. They’re like, “O Ho! We’ve finally busted the command center for George Soro’s Deep State operation.”
They’re loading every last grievance they have onto that agency. I haven’t seen anyone blame USAID for the egg shortage yet, but that’s probably been done and I missed it. There are a dozen other claims like it. If Richard Hofstadter could come back and write a sequel to his book about paranoid American politics, this USAID uproar would merit a chapter of its own.
Kay
@Geminid:
The WSJ has an editorial suggesting replacing USAID with a fund to be distributed by Donald Trump, at his sole discretion.
Bonkers. Crazy people.
TBone
@Kay: just like he distributed the funds won by E. Jean Carroll.
That reminds me, whar Rudy?
Professor Bigfoot
@TBone: oh, that poor little guy… i know you’re giving hm all the cuddles and scritches he can handle.
NotMax
@Kay
Fox. Henhouse. Guarding.
//
Kay
@TBone:
Rudy actually got held accountable. Not by the criminal justice system – by plaintiffs lawyers. I think that’s one of the few remaining levers we have to fight fascism. Never would have guessed that would be the resilient institution still standing, but it is.
Professor Bigfoot
That’s the whole thing about Nazis— eventually they’ll get to YOU, whoever you are.
TBone
@Professor Bigfoot: yes yes yes thank you. Last night I opened an eye to check where he was in my bed (not on my pillow) and he was again laying flat on his back, belly up, with all 4 paws in the air (safe & happy indicator). He’s right now sleeping off his 4am breakfast awaiting the 8:30 am Second Breakfast.
TBone
@Kay: yes but has he paid up yet or is he continuing to whine and hide assets? I thought he was supposed to be removed from his Florida condo so it could be sold, but don’t know if that has yet occurred.
It’s one thing to obtain a judgment, but have you ever tried to execute on one? That’s a whole different ball of wax in my experience! It’s not 123 skidoo.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: it’s a cat’s dream life to advance from one feeding a day, plus kibble, to being fed every four hours.
Thank you mom. I knew I could convince you to feed me more!
what I had to go through to get here!
Gloria DryGarden
Sixty-seven
Rhymes with heaven.
As the crow flies, or the raven,
it seems quite far.
Miles to heaven: 67
But remember the shiny objects;
We pick them up like ravens scavenging
The remains of our campsite,
While blue jays rob everything.
Blue jays enter,
Outside of any law
We could not stop it
As they stole in, to steal and break.
Besides, we squawked and gazed
At others’ sovereign campsites
Shiny, desired,
the object of attention.
As we wondered who might enter
Our friends’ campsites
To invade Uninvited,
We didn’t see the robbers
TBone
@TBone: just as I suspected, Rudy remains in Contempt of Court.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/giuliani-remains-in-contempt-despite-defamation-fight-settlement
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: thank you ever so! Beautiful.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: hot off the press!
Part l this morning, part ll just a bit ago, needing to clarify,
that I wasn’t simply taking you to my pretty desert campground in canyonlands,
where ravens and/or blue jays did indeed open my lunch bag and steal my avocado
when I was looking at something else
Gloria DryGarden
THANK YOU WaterGirl FOR this wonderful CARDBOARD SIGN
I like it
Like J-Lo sings, let’s get loud..
Geminid
@Kay: King Abdullah of Jordan will be in Washington next week to confer with Trump. I think that will be on Tuesday, February 11. We’ll see what Abdullah has to say about population relocation.
Egyptian President al-Sisi is scheduled for a visit later this month, and al-Sisi has issues. Trump is risking Egypt’s stability on two fronts: Egypt receives a lot of assistance from USAID, and Trump’s delusional Gaza “plan” could blow up al-Sisi’s government, with unforseeable consequences.
Ed. That region is as stable now as it has been for 50 years at least. Also, the Middle East is economically dynamic in a way it hasn’t been in this century, or in the last one either. Trump is putting all that at risk in service to his own greed and vanity.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jay: This is wonderful news! May she continue to recover. I am so happy for you both.
Gloria DryGarden
@Geminid: Do you mean this is the most stable it has been in the last 50 years?
I m rooting for them.
do you think it will be a taste of FAFO, for that man, Mr bluster?
SFAW
As I have said before (more or less):
I realize I am a bad person for thinking this way, but I keep wishing for a Kevin Uxbridge to deal with the Rethuglican Husnock
ETA: Not that it matters: I’m ashamed of thinking this way.
karensky
@Betty Cracker: Works for me ! Thanks for that, Ms Cracker.
Gloria DryGarden
There’s a lot one could say about burning, and innocent people.
pick your time in history.
I’ll try to compress it into a haiku for later, although the words might burst into flames
apocalipstick
@TBone:
I don’t think the DCNG can unilaterally enforce federal decrees, at least not legally.
pluky
@RevRick: Actually, cooperation was key to our species’ survival on the savannah, both for hunting and protection against predation.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: Yes. George Bush destabilized the Middle East further in 2003, especially Iraq which 22 years later has finally achieved a miminum level of stability. But the Middle East as whole was not that stable to begin with, and not just because of the unresolved Israeli/Palestinian question.
Between the rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war, both Syria and Iraq experienced severe levels of death and destruction. More recently, the war Hamas launched 16 months ago today heavily stressed stability in the wider region, in addition to the death destruction caused in Gaza and Lebanon.
But there have been positive developments in this decade, most recently the fall of the Assad regime and the collapse of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance.” The normalization of relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco and the UAE was another big step towards stability.
The best part is, this stability is coming from the nations themselves. The US can claim all the credit it wants, but a lot of the work is being done by regional actors despite our inconsistent political leadership. Regional powers like Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and the UAE understand they have to work with each other and do what the US is incapable of doing, at least on a political level. And as long as its current rotten government is in place, they know Israel cannot be a reliable partner.
On the military level CENTCOM and NATO are still stabilizing forces but that cannot be taken for granted with Trump in power. So yeah, Trump is putting a lot at risk.
Geminid
@Gloria DryGarden: Now I see the second part of your question, about Trump. It’s hard to predict what that ignoramous will do. My hope is the Saudis and Emiratis can talk Trump off the Gaza limb he walked out on Tuesday. I wouldn’t underestimate their influence. And hopefully, they can talk him out of letting Netanyahu monkeywrench the next phase of the ceasefire, which is the critical one.
The Audacity of Krope
Weren’t people asking for younger folk in government? I heard it here on Balloon Juice…
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: The information infrastructure we used to have isn’t really there any more, or has been shrunk to vestigial form. If the Internet actually disappeared, maybe printed periodicals and the Yellow Pages and newspaper classifieds would have a resurgence. But if the Internet is just in control of evil people so that the minority of sufficiently righteous won’t or can’t use it, there’s no alternative.
Suzanne
@Martin:
I don’t support vigilante violence.
But, in this case, if it happened, I wouldn’t be crying about it.
It’s like RFK and eating vegetables…. One occasionally finds points of alignment with the world’s worst people.
Geminid
It can be nice to think about vigilante violence as something that only targets one’s villains, and not one’s heros. It never goes down that way though.
Suzanne
@Geminid: Agreed. Which is why I don’t support it.
But, I will admit, I’m sad about some losses and meh on others. Similar to reading some obituaries with great pleasure.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Bupalos: the investigation was into Starlink, not USAID itself. As I understand it, USAID obtained the Starlink subscription and equipment on Ukraine’s behalf, and the inquiry was into how Starlink did (or, critically, did not) fulfill the contract.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Martin: Sounds many “feed Those Other People” programs work that way. Farmers are fvcked.
Geminid
@Suzanne: Yeah, that’s why I didn’t tag you. That was more for the other people who have talked here about their vengeance fantasies– assasinations, hangings, guillotines etc.– recently. While they project a very tough, hard-headed worldview, I think they are being really naive about vigilantism and executions.
TBone
@Gloria DryGarden: hahahaha! That’s putting a positive spin on my nervous tummy as we wait to be called into the animal hospital exam room…thank you for the laugh!
schrodingers_cat
@Geminid: Visible minorities will have a target on their collective backs if vigilante justice becomes common place. Something the “revolutionaries” who call themselves, comrades don’t realize or don’t care.
AM in NC
I absolutely believe the best chance we have in the land of human decency is to foment the rift between the Billionaire/Elon wing and the Bannon wing of MAGA any and every way we can.
We need concrete, heart-tugging narratives of blue collar “real Americans” being hurt by the Musk/Trump Administration over and over and over and over again. Tie them securely to the destruction they are actually causing. And then talk about how the things they broke – that WE ALL RELIED ON – were established by Democrats in the first place. If you want the good things back? Can’t keep voting for the vandals who take them away from us and fought against them in the first place.
The amount of sheer ignorance we have to overcome is just overwhelming.
Division between the Elon wing and the Bannon wing. That’s the only thing I see working to weaken the movement at the base level.
Miss Bianca
@Martin: I hate to think that I have anything in common with Steve Bannon. Or that he would somehow *not* end up as the worst face of MAGAt-hood.
Suzanne
@Geminid: Vigilantism needs to stay in the movies and letting off steam in blog comments.
Nonetheless, the only real way to stop it is for our Masters of the Universe to enforce a rule of law, provide humane and compassionate treatment, and an atmosphere of equity and dignity. A high-trust society. So until that happens — and I’m not holding my breath — stochastic violence is the price we pay.
Miss Bianca
@Geminid: Sounds like the way we pile every last social ill onto the public school system and then excoriate school personnel for not solving them.
AM in NC
@Suzanne: Yep. You and Geminid are both so right. Only sociopaths or naive dreamers want a lawless vigilante state.
But if the billionaires/MAGAs destroy the underpinnings necessary for a secure state where citizens have the opportunity to prosper, then vigilante violence is where we are going to end up. Horrifically.
And I won’t be sad when one of theirs is taken out. I’ll be sad that they destroyed the system that would have protected all of us.
RaflW
Two people of insatiable, bottomless neediness have become the conjoined twins of our (possible) destruction. That column is sweeping and thorough and depressingly clear.
The central issue I think is doing whatever we can to get the scope of the threat — already well under way — because the response has to match. To that end, I think one critical piece is that the Democrats in Congress must do exactly what Josh Marshall says: Use the budget and the debt ceiling as totally non-negotiable weapons to force the disarming of Musk.
Anything less will just be a speedbump on the autobahn to collapse.
Suzanne
@AM in NC: I also look askance at those who clutch their pearls at the world’s Luigis but are silent when modern-day robber barons immiserate and bankrupt people, or, in many cases, actually kill them via neglect, all in pursuit of almighty profit. Reeks of respectability politics to me.
The Audacity of Krope
@Suzanne: If you kill someone with a ledger, it’s not murder, just business.
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: thanks to you and Geminid both for reframing how we think about our fantasies of violence and retribution.
Geminid
@AM in NC: I’ll be sad when one of theirs is taken out because I know one of ours will be taken out in retaliation. Then it will be two of theirs, then three of ours and so on.
You can’t put a lid on political assasinations once they get going This happened in Turkiye from 1976 to 1980. By the end there were over 5,000 political killings; 3,000 attrilubuted to the Right, 1500 to the Left;, with the rest of the perpetrators were unknown.
The military finally stopped this low-level civil war with a coup in 1980. Then they recruited the Right wing assasins for Operation Castle, a dirty war against the Kurds.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Geminid @AM in NC
I’ve posted this before, but just to reiterate Brad DeLong’s thoughts on the subject
The punchline (but read the whole thing, it’s about the rule of law vs. idiot libertarians):
Chris T.
@Kay: Yeah, this new TV remake that starts with:
needs to be rewritten.