Timothy Snyder talks of borders too:
> Borders are, by definition, violent. Borders are not merely crossed. Borders must be survived and endured. Borders are not only walls and razor wire. Borders are guards and police, surveillance cameras and drones, batons and bullets. For those tens of millions of people, borders don’t stop where one country ends and the next begins; they stalk and haunt across endless miles and years. Borders are both crime scenes and crimes, with nationalism the motive.
https://tomdispatch.com/immigration-and-the-invasion-story/
#BordersEverywhere #TomDispatch

Beitrag zur Schadenfreude

Mann gönnt sich ja sonst nichts … Schon seit Jahren ist mein Eindruck beim Konsum von Bild und Ton des US-Präsidenten in elektrischen Medien (bei aller Diät), dass er jeden Moment tot umfallen könnte. Vielleicht nagt es auch schon in ihm selbst? Ich weiss, wovon ich schreibe, nachdem ich vor gut einem halben Jahr einen Herzinfarkt überlebt habe. Zu gönnen ist es ihm. Doch was dann?

Wer intellektuell nur mit den einfachsten Basiselementen materialistischer politischer Analyse vertraut ist, eine Fähigkeit die in der hiesigen Medienöffentlichkeit weitgehend ausstirbt, weiss: es kann immer noch schlimmer kommen.

Das illustriert dieser Beitrag von Clarence Lusane/TomDispatch/overton: “Genauso gefährlich: Vance und die Wahl 2028 – Donald Trump könnte natürlich trotz der US-Verfassung der republikanische Präsidentschaftskandidat für 2028 sein. Obwohl in der 22. Verfassungsänderung klar festgelegt ist, dass ‘niemand mehr als zweimal zum Präsidenten gewählt werden darf’, könnte es durchaus eine Mehrheitsentscheidung des Obersten Gerichtshofs sein, die darüber entscheidet, ob dies für Trump gilt.”

Wer sich schon mal mit der Figur J.D. Vance beschäftigt hat, weiss, was den USA und der Welt blüht.

Meine Schadenfreude wird daraus gespeist, dass diese gemeingefährlichen Säcke sich gegenseitig hassen, wie die (tödliche!) Pest. Es macht keinen Spass, unter diesen Umständen Macht auszuüben, so sehr mann auch versucht das zu kompensieren. Es macht krank und bringt einen irgendwann um. Das ist in Washington so wie in Berlin, von wo der Spiegel in seiner Paywall die aktuellen Intrigen innerhalb der CDU zusammenfasst (der “Andenpakt”, den Merkel so virtuos in Schach gehalten und kaltgestellt hat, lebt).

Subjektiv ist es so, dass das, was da beschrieben wird, den Betroffenen zu gönnen ist. Sie haben es nicht anders verdient. Es trifft die Richtigen.

Desillusionierend ist, das es nicht durch politisches Handeln irgendeiner Opposition bewirkt wird, sondern ein logischer Prozess innerer Zersetzung der politisch organisierten Menschenfeindlichkeit ist.

“Unser” Problem ist: es führt bei den Betroffenen nicht zu irgendeiner Einsicht, sondern zu weiterer Radikalisierung. Sie glauben, sie müssten nur umso doller weitermachen, um Erfolg und Befriedigung zu finden. Das heisst: die Gefahr wächst.

Zuspitzung zur WM

Sofern er bis dahin überlebt, wird Trump versuchen, die Fussball-WM (der Herren) im Sommer als Krönungsmesse seiner selbst zu inszenieren, um das Blatt zu den Midterm-Elections Anfang November zu seinen eigenen Gunsten zu wenden. Das wird weit spannender als die sportlichen Leistungen in den überhitzten bzw. teuer klimatisierten Stadien. Wer davon was sehen will, muss tagsüber schlafen und nachts gucken.

Denkbar ist, dass die zahlenden und steuernden Hintersassen des orangehaarigen Avatars zu der Einschätzung kommen, dass das aussichtslos, und deswegen ein Personalwechsel an der Spitze erforderlich ist. Das ist die eigentliche Lebensgefahr für den alten menschenhassenden weissen Mann.

Wie wird sich Gianni Infantino in seiner Wohnung in Trumps Enddarm verhalten? Wird er ihn vor einem Sturz von der Ehrentribüne eigenhändig schützen? Oder wird er von Peter Thiel und J.D. Vance dazu bestochen, das Gegenteil zu tun? Alles eine Frage des Preises.

Die Spannung steigt.

"The same week that U.N. officials spoke of an “apocalypse” in Jamaica, American billionaire Bill Gates expressed a certain unease about officials and scientists concerned with climate change who, he thought, were being hysterical. He urged them to chill the hell out. It was an arrogant and manipulative oracle, uttered with all the privilege of the world’s 19th richest man. A symbol of monopoly capitalism, his individual net worth rivals the annual gross domestic product of the Dominican Republic. And when he responded to #HurricaneMelissa, he did so (not surprisingly, I suppose) in the narrow sectional interests of the world’s wealthiest class in Silicon Valley.
tomdispatch.com/the-hot-tub-of…
#JuanCole on #BillGates
#GatesOnHurricaneMelissa #TomDispatch

🧵
Trump and Bovino using the story _Charlotte's Web_ by an anti-fascist as the name for a fascist attacks in North Carolina is not a uniquely MAGA or Republican thing.. Trump and dorks are revealing fascist rapey tendencies in USA culture.. The need to follow Chomsky's suggestions for USA "denazification" seem more obvious all the time.

> It is also worth thinking about the name given to the bin Laden operation: #OperationGeronimo...

https://tomdispatch.com/noam-chomsky-the-imperial-mentality-and-9-11/
#TomDispatch
#ChomskyOnObama #ObamaSituationRoom
#TrumpSituationRoom #CharlottesWebNC

> The gun-and-ammo industry boasted $16 billion in revenue for 2015. Gun stores — from brick-and-mortar shops to online retailers – had $3.1 billion in revenue that same year. The industry as a whole claimed responsibility for nearly $50 billion in “economic activity” in 2015 alone. That represents a fair number of jobs, but here is the number that really goes boom: $229 billion. That’s the annual cost of fatal and non-fatal gun violence in this country,..
https://tomdispatch.com/frida-berrigan-guns-for-tots/
#ShootingCosts #uspol #TomDispatch

> ... mayhem committed by toddlers (or perhaps they should be thought of as American lone wolf cubs). Toddler shootings range from the two year old who killed his mother in a Walmart in Idaho with the gun she was packing in her purse as 2014 ended to the three year old who discovered a gun in a purse in an Albuquerque motel room in February and wounded his father and pregnant mother with a single shot...
https://tomdispatch.com/engelhardt-armed-violence-in-the-homeland/
#ToddlerShootings #ToddlerMayhem #TomDispatch
#TomEnglehardt

> Even as the suspect – and any information about their motivations or political leanings – remained at large and unknown, incendiary rhetoric from major political commentators spread rapidly online, blaming leftist violence for Kirk’s death. Many called for swift retribution in the form of an aggressive crackdown against their political enemies. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-shooting-death-trump-reaction
/HT #TomDispatch FB #CharlieKirkShooting #uspol

> His wife might never have found him if it weren’t for a photo someone sent her from an article about more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants dispatched to CECOT in El Salvador at the same time. His face wasn’t visible, but she recognized him from two scars on his shaved head and some of his personal (but not gang-related) tattoos. She was well aware of CECOT’s reputation as a brutal mega-prison, a site of organized physical and psychological torture.
https://tomdispatch.com/everything-old-is-new-again/
#RebeccaGordon at #TomDispatch #AbregoGarcia #KilmarAbregoGarcia and #ICEThugs

The work of Ignacio Martin-Baro and Ignacio Ellacuria keeps coming to mind... the social psychology of terror in 80s El Slavador....

> People aren’t going to their jobs. People aren’t going to school. Children are staying home. Parents are keeping their kids in safety. They aren’t riding the buses. They aren’t going to the parks. They aren’t going to restaurants.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-rights-cruelty-to-immigrants-is-psychopathic

#NathanRobinson #ICEThugs #ICEBudget #uspol
/HT #TomDispatch FB

> ..begin.. by giving less attention to Trump’s executive orders —.. defined by a law professor as “just press releases with nicer stationery” — and more attention to the effects of his policies that get enacted. And while his ruminations may bear noting, they could appear, not in headlines, but.. page 11 (or its.. equivalent), which is where the #BostonGlobe relegated its report of the local 100,000-strong #HandsOff! protest.
https://tomdispatch.com/seven-and-a-half-propositions-for-journalism-in-the-age-of-trump/
#TomDispatch #uspol #usmedia #NanLevinson

> “No ICE, no fear, immigrants are welcome here!” I also copied down some of the homemade signs they were carrying. (Making such signs definitely seems to be a sign of the times.)
> Here are just a few that caught my eye: “Resist like it’s 1938 Germany”; “Deport Trump, not Students”; “Trump to planet: Drop Dead”.. “Turd Reich”; “MAGA is a death cult”; “Think while it’s still legal”; “Is there a vaccine for stupidity?”; “3rd term, Sing-Sing”; “No more Dogey Business”;
https://tomdispatch.com/seven-and-a-half-propositions-for-journalism-in-the-age-of-trump/
#TomDispatch #ProtestPosters #uspol #usmedia

1Q84 ?Q0Q4? 村上春樹はまだ米国にいるかな？最近の状況について何か発言、　何か書いているのかな？
> "[We].. remember.. scenes from.. Orwell’s.. 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all — and I first read the book in high school — was the “Two Minutes Hate,”
https://tomdispatch.com/fortress-america/
#AlfredMcCoy #TomDispatch #TwoMinutesHate #Orwell

> “It is exactly what gives you hope when you see this happen–when you see how hungry people are for the truth. When it is offered to them, they seize it.” Truth has been at least as important as law in the shift of status of indigenous Americans, for even the legal gains seem to be built on a foundation of changed imagination and rewritten history. Columbus Day became an occasion to rethink the past, and rethinking the past opened the way to a different future.
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-solnit-on-hope-and-history/
#TheHopeLady #RebeccaSolnit #TomDispatch #uspol #ColombusDay

When I learned to love The Hope Lady.
> This resurgence also demonstrates the sidelong ways of change: from an argument in Geneva to a land mass in northern Canada, from a critique of the past to a new path into the future, from ideas and words to land and power. This is how history is made, out of such unlikely materials, and of hope.
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-solnit-on-hope-and-history/
#RebeccaSolnit #TheHopeLady #TomDispatch #uspol #WorldPol #AnotherWorld

One thing probably won't change with the "stupid coup"(Rebecca Solnit) ...
> One-hundred days later and it’s remarkable how little has changed when it comes to pouring money into this country’s vast military infrastructure and the wars, ongoing or imagined, that accompany it.
https://tomdispatch.com/why-the-pentagon-budget-never-goes-down/
#MandySmithberger #TomDispatch #PentagonBudget #uspol

> Let me then mention a coincidence that helped create a network. ( You decide if it’s a conspiracy. )...

https://tomdispatch.com/solnit-on-coincidences-networks-and-conspiracies/
#ConspiracyTheory #TomDispatch #RebeccaSolnit #AdamHochschild

> The use of the car, the burning of fossil fuels, the making of war, the arrogance of empire — few institutions or ways of life were more “human,” more essential to our nature, than slavery. In the piece that follows, Adam Hochschild takes us back to the first great human-rights campaign in history — the movement to end slavery in the British Empire.

https://tomdispatch.com/adam-hochschild-history-to-the-rescue/

#AdamHochschild #BuryTheChains #TomDispatch

"With the thoughts that I'd be thinkin'
I could be another Lincoln,
If I only had a brain..." -- Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz
> Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooper_Union_speech
/HT #WilliamAstore at #TomDispatch #Lincoln
@bsmall2@writing.exchange

> ... you can’t do a wrong thing the right way..
> I want an effective American foreign (and military) policy where, to cite Abraham Lincoln, right makes might..
> Color this retired Air Force officer red, as in angry and scared..
> .. In truth, America’s real political party is a warbird with two right wings...
> .. business-speak.. might appeal to Musk and Trump, isn’t it time to seek win-win scenarios rather than war-war ones?
https://tomdispatch.com/end-warness-not-wokeness/
#WilliamAstore at #TomDispatch #uspol

> Today’s crisis has been evolving for so many years now. In fact, much (though admittedly, not all) of what we’re witnessing today might simply be considered an escalation of the dire turn that this country took after the attacks of September 11, 2001, nearly a quarter of a century ago...
https://tomdispatch.com/once-upon-a-time-a-nation-of-laws/
#KarenGreenberg #KarenJGreenberg at #TomDispatch on #PresidentAuthority