mozz

Ah, got it. I was talking about USSR, not modern Russia. Modern Russia is its own thing and its own brand of horror but not the same as OG Communist USSR which was more what I was trying to highlight.

Putin DID make him a colonel tho

What have you done?

Yeah. I'm taking the high side of the widely varying estimates of the Gulag population, which in the period of the 1940s range from 3.5 million to 17.6 million depending on who's doing the estimating.

The Gulag at the peak housed about ~~7,500~~ (edit: 1,340) per 100k of the Soviet population.

(And yes, the US's 531 is still also an atrocity.)

Where did you get 329? I actually couldn't find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US's dystopian nightmare.

Edit: I was way wrong about the size of the Gulag

Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines's habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US's prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don't even make the claim of being "democratic" and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.

Also, I just looked, and I don't think these numbers are accurate. I think they're straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.

US Incarceration Rate

List of Countries by Incarceration Rate

The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!

We could organize to get Trump some consequences for any number of the explicitly treasonous things he has done, without involving some third party in the potentially deadly consequences if they don’t want to become further involved than they are. Nothing was ever preventing that.

Spoken with the easy courage of someone whose family isn’t in the crosshairs

I agree with you that this should be a HUGE deal, but if the institutions who are the ones actually responsible for going after Trump are not going to act, why should this one guy be responsible to take a purely futile stand about it that might get him killed? I agree that he is not safe whatever he does, but amping up the conflict will make him less safe.

100%

It’s often difficult to proceed with prosecution if the victim doesn’t want to move forward, but there’s no hard and fast rule. And, it is clearly above this guy’s pay grade to be single handedly tangling with a movement that might well kill him for the effort with no repercussions.

It is the army’s place to say “clearly this is a violation and we DGAF what the staffer in the ground thinks about it” in order to try to shield him from responsibility, and then do their 1,000% best to rake Trump and the people responsible over the fucking coals regardless. This is like institutionalism responsibility mechanics 101.

So then I said, Herr Thälmann, how important is nuance, in analyzing a political situation? How important is compromise with people even who don’t see eye to eye with you perfectly, politically?

And he said, ZERO. Just push for what you want. If it’s not perfect, it’s garbage; try to oppose it. Compromise is the obstacle to progress.

And I said wait. How can I hear you? I thought you died. In Buchenwald.

And from that point on, I heard nothing. Only silence.

What an accidental unintentional result