Putin’s Russia is a death cult

So Putin’s sycophants say that if the United States directly intervenes in Ukraine, Russia will nuke the United States. This is the point at which you realize that today’s Russia is a death cult, not a nation. Because if Russia nukes the United States, Russia ceases to exist. The United States has enough nukes to make the rubble bounce.

MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is still a deterrant against nuclear war. Official (if unstated) U.S. policy for the past 60 years has been that use of a nuclear weapon against the United States triggers an immediate and overwhelming nuclear response that destroys every population center and military site in whatever country was stupid enough to do that. And the U.S. has the capability to do that.

Russia knows this. Whether Putin wants to do a Jim Jones and make his citizenry drink the kool-aide in order to fuck around and find out, well. Suicide cults kinda work that way, I guess.

Reminder: The United States is a country that is violent, gun-happy, and has no desire to change any of that about itself. The United States is a nation where, when a spree shooter killed a bunch of first graders, proudly proclaimed that the answer to spree shooters was even *more* guns. This is a nation that invaded Iraq to punish a Saudi citizen living in Pakistan for attacking America, then elected an orange-hued dimwitted bellicose reality show host who didn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite as President. This nation is nuts. This is not a rational nation that people should be testing.

— Badtux the Cult-observing Penguin

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No, the Palestinian civilians don’t somehow “deserve” being killed.

There are people making the spurious claim that Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza and thus are the legitimate government of Gaza and thus it’s okay to kill residents of Gaza without any restraint.

This is utterly ridiculous. Hamas was elected *once*, in 2006, on a platform of ending Fatah corruption that was siphoning most aid to the Palestinians into corrupt politicians’ pockets. They haven’t allowed an election since, because they’d *lose*, having turned out to be just as corrupt as Fatah but way more violent. They have proceeded to impose their rule at gunpoint upon the residents of Gaza, probably killing more Palestinians than Israel has killed in the years since. Even Amnesty International has recognized that Hamas’s rule over Gaza has been brutal and in violation of all humanitarian principles. The chances of Hamas being re-elected if Hamas ever allowed a free and fair election (which they have not done for *SEVENTEEN YEARS*) is essentially zero.

I’m not going to be upset at all if Hamas gets exterminated by the Israelis like the vermin they are. And I suspect the Palestinians will breathe a sigh of relief if that happens too. Unless Israel truly believes that all Palestinians love Hamas and decide to start slaughtering Palestinians indiscriminately, which would move the focus away from the people who need killing (Hamas leadership and gunmen) and allow Hamas to get away with their mass murder of both Israelis and Palestinians.

— Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin

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The solution to mass shootings is not moar gunz.

So serial dipstick and frothy rectal ooze Ricky Santorum says that the solution to mass shootings like in El Paso is moar gunz.

More guns than in Texas? For real? Has this frothy ass ooze even looked at gun stats for the state of Texas? They practically hand you a gun at the state border! 6.5% of Texans are concealed carry permit holders. There were at least 1,000 people in that store at the time the shooting happened. What that means is that there were at least 65 Texans in that store who had a concealed weapon.

And not a single one of them engaged the shooter.

So what were they doing instead? Well, what everybody else was doing — they were screaming and running. Because that’s what untrained people do when confronted with someone shooting at them — they run as fast as they can to leave that person’s presence. That’s behavior built deep into the human genome, we were prey, not predators, for millions of years before evolving to the point where we could use spears and clubs to become predators ourselves, and prey doesn’t run toward predators. It takes training and balls of steel to actually run toward someone who’s shooting at you, which is what would have been necessary in order engage someone with a rifle when you’re armed only with a handgun. Cops have that training and even they sometimes freeze or run away, like the school resource officer at Parkland High, who was a trained and certified Sheriff’s deputy and now is a former cop because he couldn’t overcome the natural instinct to run like hell when someone is shooting at you.

Sixty-five concealed weapons holders in that store, and not one of them engaged the shooter.

Can we drown this whole “moar gunz will solve mass shootings” bullshit forever now? Because clearly if even 65 people with concealed weapons can’t stop a mass shooting, the chances of even more people with concealed weapons stopping a mass shooting is…. well, what’s zero times anything? Hint: Zero.

– Badtux the Numbers Penguin

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We don’t have a mental health problem, we have a Nazi problem.

“It’s a mental health problem!” say the right wingers about the recent spree killers.

No. Mental health in the United States is no worse today than it’s ever been. Yet spree murders continue to rise, to the point where we had two spree killings this weekend alone.

We don’t have a mental health crisis causing spree killings. What we have is a Nazi crisis. We have a problem with young white men being radicalized with white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies in much the same way that the Middle East has a problem with young Arab men being radicalized in Islamist ideologies, with the same result — they commit terrorist acts.

Because that is what these are: terrorist attacks. They may claim these are “lone wolf” attacks, but you look at what these young white men actually believe, you’ll see that they’ve been radicalized just as much by neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies as Middle Eastern terrorists have been radicalized by Islamist ideologies. They choose to engage in spree killing rather than don a suicide vest because guns are easier to buy here than bomb-making materials are, but that’s a difference in murder technique, not a difference in motivation — which is terrorism, period.

And it doesn’t help that Hair Twitler encourages them….

– Badtux the Observant Penguin

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Thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers

Carl Hiaasen’s younger brother was gunned down in Annapolis, Maryland today along with four others executed for the crime of being a journalist.

Unknown is whether the killer was a MAGAt, spurred into violence by his fascist overlords in the White House and elsewhere. It would not be the first time that fascists attacked newspapers. Their campaign was largely successful in Weimar Germany — of all of Germany’s newspapers, only one single newspaper, the Munich Post, dared to oppose Hitler directly. The rest of Germany’s press, cowed by the brownshirts / MAGAts, tried to be “fair” to the Nazis. For their trouble their reporters and editors ended up in the exact same concentration camps as the reporters and editors of the Munich Post. Appeasement, it turns out, is a rather ineffective tactic for dealing with fascists. As is civility.

Let us hope that our own newspapers have learned that lesson. I’m not holding my breath though.

– Badtux the News Penguin

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Of moral equivalencies

Hamas is a terrorist organization.

There, I said it. They’re a terrorist organization.

What makes them a terrorist organization? Simple: They target unarmed civilians. That is what makes them a terrorist organization.

So a friend of mine posted a photograph on her Facebook page of Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old paramedic who was targeted and killed by an Israeli sniper from close to 300 yards away while helping people who had been injured. And an Israel defender said: “Why don’t you post Israeli victims of Hamas?” I.e., the Israeli government isn’t doing anything that Hamas doesn’t do.

So he was saying that a terrorist organization targeting civilians is exactly equivalent to the Israeli government targeting civilians so we should post photos of both?

Well, I suppose we could. But the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians killed by Israel far outnumber the hundreds of unarmed civilians killed by Hamas, so we’d mostly be posting photos of Palestinian civilian faces anyhow.

Besides, I thought the Israeli government wasn’t supposed to be a terrorist organization. Even though they’re killing unarmed civilians, unarmed medical personnel even, which is exactly what terrorist organizations do.

But this person apparently believes that because Hamas is a terrorist organization, the fact that Israel’s government is behaving like a terrorist organization is fine and dandy.

So there you have it, straight from an Israel defender: Israel’s government is a terrorist organization. Hey, he said it first — though he apparently didn’t realize what it was that he was saying!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Disappeared down the Memory Hole: Orwell was right

Her name was Nasim Najafi Aghdam. She claimed to be a vegan body builder, though with her tall thin physique you couldn’t really tell it unless she was actually flexing, like in this photo from her now-disappeared web site:

And on Tuesday she snapped and took a California-legal handgun (i.e. 10 round limit) onto the YouTube campus, managed to injure four people (consider what she would have done with an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine! But those are illegal in California), and then committed suicide.

All of her social media accounts have been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. All of her writings on the Internet have been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. Only fragments can be found in various caches and archives on the Internet.

What is interesting is that, in the few writings that I can find, she claims that there is no freedom on the Internet and that the big Internet media companies dictate what you will see or not see. It is interesting that then the big Internet media companies immediately validate her thesis by disappearing her social media presence Orwellian fashion after she snaps. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to see what she was saying. Interesting how they prove her thesis. Too bad about Nasim though, she committed suicide for no real reason, since virtually nobody actually decided to go look for what she was actually saying as versus what the big media companies claim she said. Not that it’s easy to do so — I expect even those various caches and archives to be cleaned out shortly to finish “disappearing” her down the Orwellian memory hole, leaving us only with the prefabricated image of her generated by the big media companies rather than her own words.

2018. It’s 1984+34. War is peace. Tyranny is freedom. Censorship is patriotic. I love Big Brother, he wants only the best for me. Don’t you love Big Brother too?

– Badtux the “Hmmmm…..” Penguin

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They sacrificed their childhood for nothing

A little over sixty years ago, nine teenagers, fifteen years of age, were looking forward to attending high school. It was going to be scary, they knew, being in a big new school with lots of kids they’d never seen before. But they weren’t thinking much beyond that. One of the kids dreamed of all the things she’d do at this fine new school she was about to start, about the classroom discussions she’d have with interesting new people, about attending the prom. They were kids, after all. They were innocent.

They did not stay innocent. They lost their innocence hard.

And it was all in vain. Today’s schools are as segregated as they were in 1957. Even in cases where they’re supposedly desegregated, the white kids attend white classes, and the black kids attend black classes, and never the twain shall meet. At the elementary school I taught at in inner city Houston, supposedly 1/3rd of the students were white. I never saw them. They had their own wing of the building. They ate lunch at a different time from the black kids. They had recess at a different time than my kids. I could walk out my classroom door into the hallway and look out at the playground and see them playing, but that’s the closest I ever got to any of the white kids. My kids, of course, were all brown. Us Teach for America interns were the ones thrown into the classrooms with brown kids, because the school board figured that their parents didn’t have the political pull to complain about untrained novice teachers in the classrooms. They were right.

Segregation and violence. Those are America’s heritage. Says Minnijean Brown Trickey bitterly from her home in Canada, where she has lived for most of the past thirty years after the election of Ronald Reagan convinced her that America would never change: “What kind of country doesn’t see education for all children to be the primary value? I think the US has two values: segregation, which they do so well, and violence.”

I can’t say she’s wrong.

– Badtux the Somber Penguin

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So when is it okay to kill Nazis?

I’m pretty sure that everybody here is okay with the fact that these people killed Nazis, lotsa Nazis:

U.S. and Soviet soldiers meet up in the middle of Germany on 26 April 1945 as they clean out Nazi holdouts

So hey, let’s quit that bullshit about “it’s not okay to kill Nazis!”. Because clearly, under some circumstances, it is okay to kill Nazis. (And if you disagree that the folks up above were right to kill Nazis, please don’t post it here… I’m not interested in a debate about the virtues of Nazis, they lost any moral high ground they might have ever occupied when they exterminated millions of Jews, gays, Roma, and others).

So the question is, when did it start becoming okay to kill Nazis? Was it in 1939, when Britain and France declared war against Nazi Germany? Was it just the British and French who were justified in killing Nazis at that time? There were American volunteers who flowed into Canada and formed military units that fought Nazis before the U.S. entered the war, were they justified in killing Nazis? What about Jews, if they killed Nazis after the Nazis started killing Jews, would it have been morally defensible? What if they had killed Nazis before the Nazis started killing them, but after Kristallnacht? Would they have been justified in killing Nazis then based on the theory that the Nazis were a direct threat to their physical safety? What about even earlier, after Hitler had stated in his book Mein Kampf that the Jew must be exterminated? Would they have been justified in killing Nazis based on the theory of preemptive self defense?

When did it become okay to kill Nazis? And do those conditions still apply today?

I know there’s a lot of knee-jerking about “violence is never right!” and all that. That’s bullshit. It took violence to get rid of that murderous bastard Adolph Hitler, a lot of violence, a level of violence unprecedented in human history, a level of violence that has never been matched or surpassed before or since. No amount of pacifism would have stopped Hitler from killing those millions of people that his regime murdered in cold blood. So let’s dismiss the notion of “violence is never right!” — because as Hitler shows, sometimes it’s not only right, but the only moral thing to do — and answer the question: when is violence against Nazis right? Note that I say right, as in, morally right, not legal. Law and morality are two different fields. Law is what’s written in law books. Morality is what kind of person you are, what kind of society you live in, and whether you’re doing things that are morally right or morally wrong. It is legal to be a Nazi here in the United States, and illegal to punch a Nazi here in the United States. That’s not the question. The question is whether it is morally justified to use violence to prevent Nazis from doing the morally reprehensible things that they claim they want to do.

– Badtux the Morality Penguin

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Too goddamn hot

I’ve been baking the past few days because we *finally* got summer here in the SF Bay area — and boy howdy, we got it with a vengeance. Broke records all around the Bay area on Sunday, and Saturday wasn’t much cooler.

So anyhow, in the aftermath of a lesbian black woman saving the life of an anti-gay David Duke supporting bigot who was attacked by what appears to have been a lone wolf white Bernie Bro, the tighty righties have their panties in a bunch about how those mean lefties are coarsening the public discourse. Like this leftie threatening violence:

Err, yeah.

Or this liberal threatening violence:

Err, ah. Okay. Well, I’m sure this guy has to be a liberal:

No? Okay, so how about this guy who shot someone outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech? He was clearly a liberal, right.

Uhm, no. He was wearing a Trump hat and had told his wife he was carrying his gun with him to the event so he could kill some liberals.

Okay, so let’s get this straight. You have some liberals saying that we should impeach Trump, one of whom, out of all the millions saying that, decided to start taking potshots at Republicans. Then you got right wingers saying that killing liberals is a great idea, *lots* of right wingers saying that, you can’t throw a rock at Stormfront or Brietbart or the Fox News comment section without hitting one of the right wingers saying that, and that means that liberals are the ones advocating violence.

Yeah, global warming is real, and it’s apparently baked the fucking brains out of half of America. Just sayin’.

– Badtux the Too-warm Penguin

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