I like him. He makes Putin look like a wimp!
A true 2000AD leader.
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His casino buddies were old-school mob types. That certainly wouldn’t stop him from cozying up with the prison-industrial complex if it benefitted him.
People like Trump, in other words, but without the money. OK, so maybe he wouldn’t be so sympathetic to their plight…
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Yeah, pretty much this.
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Related to this, there’s several law enforcement groups pressuring Trump to ease restrictions on police and security forces in being able to obtain military grade equipment and firearms.
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He was quite open about this during his campaign. I hope no one is surprised.
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It does seem to me that Trump wants to turn every conversation, every interaction even into a series of reciprocal compliments and mutual admiration. He’s willing to say something nice about anybody if they’re willing to praise him. It’s kind of the mirror image of how he TOTALLY hates anybody who disagrees with him and fails to show proper deference. It’s always “WE’RE both amazing, and THEY’RE incompetent, low energy stupid people.” But the WE and THEY are completely situational and have no persistence.
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Are they implying that there are human rights lawyers who believe that something like that wouldn’t make him prosecutable?
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Whichever side is profitable at the moment?
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That’s where his stance goes, but his sympathies are with drug-buyers like himself, even if he’s willing to screw other people over who are in the same position.
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I trust Duerte less than the Zimbawean dollar and regret losing the tenth of a second I spent considering the veracity of this claim. I do believe his statements on human rights, though. Rodrigo Duerte: a man who tells it like it is. Says what he means and sure as hell means what he says.
As POTUS, Trump needs to heed the same advice so many of us have: believe the autocrat.
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Not just Americans. Amoral predators always have and continue to make up a sizeable minority of so-called civilization. Only the rule of law keeps them from turning on their neighbors for the thrill they get from harming those they see as weaker than themselves. Their cowardice usually prevents them from openly preying on their fellow man alone, they only feel secure in the company of each other because they know society’s self-defense will be to stop them and throw them in prison or worse. But when they think influential officials with power, real or perceived, are with them, they’re emboldened.
Lots of people seem to be trying to convince themselves that fascism could never happen in America. Perhaps the Philippine people think the same about their country. History classes teach students about the Holocaust and WWII. They skip over the equally important series of steps that led up to them. At each step, something no one thought could happen did, and the public adjusted their tolerances, moving the barrier of disbelief to the next atrocity, right up until footage of the liberated death camps came out of Majdanek, Buchenwald and others.
Warning, graphic footage:
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Therein lies the problem. We’d like to believe he’s not going to be everything he has promised to be. Same response the world had to Hitler in the mid 30s. We ought to count on him to do everything in his power to live up to his authoritarian promises.
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Besides, both Trump and Pence both want to attack human rights. One or the other or both will succeed.
It would be pretty unsurprising if at least some elements of the story were true; using amphetamines or methamphetamines as combat alertness aids is not exactly exotic behavior, though respectable nation states can usually afford enough MDs to keep it legal; and if you have a lot of soldiers running around with drugs you are probably going to see some amount of resale, whether it’s an official fundraiser or just individuals converting their rations into spending money.
That said, the most immediately plausible parts of the story are also the least interesting; with the juicier bits coming with a stiff dose of ‘citation needed’.
That fifth dentist, man. You just can’t crack him.
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It seems true that some of the funding of Isis and franchises come from the drug trade, and that they also take a lot of drugs, especially captagon. But I am pretty sure that Terrorist-involved drug trade is a tiny part of the drug trade overall. When I was working in PI, there seemed to be a big problem with people sniffing toulene. That was before Abu Sayyaf had any large presence there. I am confident that any actions against drug users and distributors are going to mostly affect people with no terror affiliations.
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Impeachment wouldn’t leave us with a suitable President either, but I guess an authoritarian ideologue beholden to the Religious Right of the U.S. might be a step up from the crazed narcissist beholden to Russia? At least we’d be dealing with a known quantity.
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Maybe not.
A Republican congress might resist the latter.
They’d heartily embrace the former.
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