mozz @ mozz @mbin.grits.dev

And the voices. "Billy..."

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Time for today’s fun game!

“Is it Georgia the repressive country or Georgia the aspiringly-repressive US state” has been replaced by “Is it Colombia the sometimes unstable and badly governed country or Columbia the sometimes unstable and always badly governed US university”

Yeah; that’s probably why there is such a lack of data. The period for which there are estimates vary by a factor of 20 between low and high estimates. 🙁

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I think they're straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date.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.

Cool now do USSR

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.

This is why it works

They really can ruin your life; ask Michael Cohen or Gabby Giffords

Marcus Cardenas

Dolores

Crystal Medrano

Juan Luis

Yeah I fuckin wonder why Jerry Nicholson isn’t prioritizing these cases

I see you have never interacted with the hospital system

Doctors and nurses are great, highly qualified + they do magic. The administrative system that decides what to do on a strategic scale is pure malicious madness. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they would decide to randomly accuse people of child abuse for no reason because it would make their inconvenience go away.

Dude you weren’t kidding. “New” was always a pile of ass, and just now I went back to Reddit for a little bit just to poke around and see how “new new” is. It was better for the first two things I clicked on (actually better than both old and new IMO for popping open memes and pictures), and then I clicked on an actual thread, and (1) the thread was clearly a fake story (2) it broke the back button and I couldn’t go anywhere else until it snapped me suddenly back to mbin again.

I decided to take that as a sign

So obviously

is NYT just being lazy

Search deep within you

In your heart you know the truth; you’ve always known

That oughta fix it

Yes yes perfectly logical

I feel silly for not seeing it exactly that way before

You can move to a part of the world that doesn’t have police, right now, if you want to experience that life. Have fun!