Author: thotz

Yesterday a man working for ICE murdered a US citizen, a woman residing in Minneapolis, who was protesting the whatever the agents were doing. There’s tons of video of it and to me it looks like the woman who was in a car and the agent who was acting very aggressively and holding a gun were both jumpy and when the woman tried to drive away the man just started shooting at point blank. The woman who was a citizen and a mother and appeared to be trying to escape died because the man shot her several times.

I want to try to go to principles on this. Murdering is wrong. It’s very very wrong. As long as there have been laws they have explicitly stated that there are very few situations where killing a person is not super super wrong.

because it is very super wrong to kill someone the punishments for doing so are very very high. Punishment helps people feel justice has been served and also can serve as a clear sign to would be criminals to not murder, because if you murder you will be severely punished.

when you hire people and they murder someone because you told them it was ok to murder people as part of the job that makes you partly responsible for any murdering they do.

it’s sort of like if you hire roofers to reroof your house and you tell your buddies I’m redoing my roof and your buddy says oh yeah you’re redoing your roof. They know you aren’t actually aren’t on the roof probably unless you happen to be a roofer, but your buddy understands that you are responsible for what happens on the roof because you intended those people to be up there roofing with their roof tools.

So when you hire people to go into busy cities with murder tools you become responsible for that.

I can’t really claim to get into the heads of those against immigration. They seem either rascist, uneducated/uninformed, afraid, xenophobic or a combination of those things. But there are a lot of people that hate immigration to America who live in America. They seem to especially hate the idea of Muslims or non-white Latin Americans coming to America.
anyway there are a lot of anti immigrant people such that trump can claim to be fulfilling campaign promises by hiring murderers who work for his ice team to prowl our communities murdering people and scaring immigrants. Trump said he would do something like this.

Immigrants are easy to ‘other’ they often speak our English poorly and often aren’t white so they stand out easily to Fox News. It’s decidedly harder to “other” a mid western mother particularly when she wasn’t obviously doing anything besides trying to desperately escape the man trump hired to kill her.

it’s important to acknowledge that ice agents are not only hired to remove people from the United States, probably 70-80% of the reason they heavily in places like Minneapolis is because it intimidates the democrats and liberals. It should go without saying that killing liberals or democrats is like one of the very best ways to intimidate them.

I think murder, political or otherwise, is un American. That is, as a society, I think America is better off without political murdering.

it’s troubling that the FBI has largely taken over the investigation because it means that any “justice” will be heavily political too.

don’t the conservatives see how barbarous things are becoming? Can’t we mutually agree to dial things back before things get way out of control?

why aren’t conservative thought leaders coming out to say anything consoling? It’s so completely irresponsible, unfair and unjust to blame this woman for what trump’s murdering political thugs did to her.

Renee Nicole Good deserved justice.

as an American I expected more. I am let down.

the trump administration, lacking any intellectual stamina, and resolved to use only force abducted the leader of a sovereign nation. Maduro of Venezuela. Resorting to brute force when reason, tact, grace and moderation might have stayed the hands of a more enlightened group.

a sham trial is likely to follow. Guilt is certain. Will he be found dead in jail?

from what I have read Maduro as leader was no saint but we’re Americans in a similar situation I think we would have new, extreme, and deeply unsettling worries if an overwhelmingly powerful and openly hostile nation, say China, abducted trump and put him on trial in their county..

previously, the American elite have maintained at least some grace by producing either a semi believable pretext (wmds in Iraq, communism in Vietnam), making semi effective efforts to conceal operations (contra), not just a bare greedy brutal show of force resource grab.

this action is not legal in or out of the United States. Countries ought to respect each others sovereignty. Internally the president should not have the power to effect such actions.

as a nation the United States may have the ability to seize the oil based energy resources of Venezuela but that does not mean that the USA should do so. IT does not make it right and it does not guarantee that there will be no repercussions.

it would be nice if we could realistically expect our leaders to avoid acting brutally Machiavellian.

the only pretext given prior to this dishonorable, illegal abduction is also worrying in its own right. That such a pathetic, laughably weak excuse of “drugs” was given shows the denial of reality going on in the trump administration. They may actually be drinking their own koolaid and think that the existence of smugglers in the Caribbean constitutes just cause to visit violence and disorder upon the people of the world. Such behavior only lowers the estimates the rest of the world makes of the USA – we have shown ourselves to be overconfident unpredictable, untrustworthy liars.

when the USA started murdering smugglers it seemed strange – like to what end? In the USA we have laws that are meant to prevent the police from simply murdering anyone they believe to have committed a crime but when the president starts just murdering people you start to wonder why the president doesn’t just murder any specific person anywhere who’s death (or absence of life) might be convenient for him.

but later the USA blockaded the Venezuelan ports, so perhaps the explanation was that trump was ineffectively, artlessly trying to goad or intimidate Maduro into starting the fight. And maybe when that didn’t happen it risked getting bad they just abducted him.

it deserves to be written that the world reaction has been more subdued than I expected. Perhaps folks are just shocked silent, but maybe no one cares to say out do anything. There was shock and anger from Columbia which shared a border with Venezuela and some anger from Cuba but that was mostly it…

While watching campaign speeches leading up to election day on November 3rd, 2020 something jumped out at me from the republican party candidate’s words.

The current president was talking about the World Health Organization (WHO) and how he had, in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, deftly exited its membership. While many, if not most, sane people would regard that move on its face to be ludicrous, dangerous, harmful or stupid I want to refrain from commenting on that aspect and instead focus on the president’s stated reasoning for the move and the insights that it offers into this administration.

In one his stump speech on October 31st 2020 (a few days prior to the election day) he pointed out that China who he claimed to have a population of “1.5” billion pays $39 Million to the WHO while the USA has 325 Million people but pays $500 Million into WHO – these are numbers that he used and much like everything he says may only have a tenuous attachment to reality.

Trump claims that this was a terrible deal for the United States and he makes it clear that this was why he backed out of the WHO.

Just to vividly illustrate – by his numbers the USA pays the WHO ~$1.54 per US inhabitant while China pays ~$0.03 per Chinese inhabitant. Indeed, the US appears not only to be paying more in sum, but also more per inhabitant.

So his argument appears to be “If the USA isn’t paying the same as or less than China towards the WHO the deal is bad and the United States ought to have no part of it.”

This approach casts an interesting light on the principles that guide the administration. They enshrined ‘Thrift’ or ‘Getting a good deal’ or maybe even ‘Getting the best deal’ amongst the highest ideals or values of the United States.

Presidents certainly set their own priorities and values. Be it good or bad or whether those principles sit within the traditional realm of the office are other questions.

What can be said is that this particular guiding principle is that it is cowardly, weak, and inward looking. Further, this attack on the WHO seems at odds with other values that USA holds – the ‘life’ part of “Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Without health no one can reasonably pursue these ideals.

In the USA the principle of “Life” and “Liberty” are not held out of reach for some people because of the price tag. Liberty must be preserved, regardless of cost. It would be anathema if someone were to say, “There are a lot of citizens here and they are not free, but giving them liberty would simply be unfairly expensive – China’s citizens they are free and they barely spend any money on liberty; there are so many more Chinese citizens than Americans! For these people we give up on liberty.”

Truly patriotic espousal of the foundations of the USA looks entirely different than impishly slinking away from an international organization dedicated to preserving the lives and safety of all people in all nations in the midst of what is certainly the largest pandemic of the last several hundred years. It begins by setting a positive example by standing up for American ideals no matter the price paid and completely without regard for what other nations pay in.

I’m starting this collection of writing largely out of my distaste with how publishing to “platforms” such as facebook, twitter, or medium alienates the writer from the ownership of the content/writing.

Beyond this complaint I don’t necessarily have general qualms with them. I simply want a high degree of control over what I write, and companies being what they are may change how the content they have ‘ownership’ of is distributed, viewed, displayed, and monetized.

Setting up a website isn’t difficult now a days so this one is set up and where I intend to write. 🙂