If you had actually ASKED the Sioux of the Black Hills about this, you’d know they’ve told pretty much everyone “yeah we don’t like Mt Rushmore, we don’t like Crazy Horse’s relief carving either, but we think destroying them is more disrespectful than just leaving them to fall apart on their own.” Like, this isn’t an uncommon thought. It’s just more complex than “blow them up”.
Oh that’s an easy dodge. A lot of these people think Trump is either a prophet of the Lord, a devout agent (think David or Solomon), or Jesus Christ Himself.
This honestly could be it. He could’ve seen some AI art of him with huge trucks full of boxes on Twitter or something and thought “yes I did that, I remember that.” Dementia and sundowning is horrible to watch.
“Well we just want a big pool of candidates in case this person doesn’t work out.”
Those companies can get a building dropped on them. Cannot tell you how many positions I’ve applied for only to be told “oh we filled that two months ago and didn’t take the listing down”.
I legit had a recruiter for Procter & Gamble tell me that “I’m not the right type of autistic” after applying and taking literally an hours-long personality/IQ test “designed” to screen for autistic candidates as part of a diversity push.
Don’t forget that criminal convictions take time. Months of time. By the time your rapist is caught, tried, and sentenced, you might have very well had their child already. Criminal convictions are not the neat and tidy SVU “oh we caught him and he’ll be tried and sentenced within two weeks” shtick.
It’s theorized this is partially why a lot of indigenous societies in the Americas simply didn’t use wheels in larger contexts. We’ve found perfectly engineered wheels in a lot of archaeological sites here in North and South America, but they’re almost always on toys. The theory is that civilizations like the Aztecs and various Native American and First Nations peoples invented wheels just fine, but since North America particularly lacks any form of native, easily-domesticated draft animal, wheels just didn’t make sense or save anyone significant enough time to really bother with in larger forms like carts or chariots.
A lot of it is truly what amounts to sadism. The board and the C-suite and the high-level managers below them will fight tooth and nail to avoid having to treat workers as anything but expendable. A lot of their believed power derives from “I can replace you in 5 minutes”.
Be careful of this, though. They do have MDs on hand who will absolutely rubber stamp denials.
Funded, yes, but the CIA are the ones who got the ball rolling by financing fundamentalist madrasas in Pakistan where the ideology of the Taliban came to be.
Real Shadowrun coffin motel vibes.
Don’t forget cops and military protecting stores in disaster zones, full of supplies that will wind up getting paid for by insurance anyway and will go bad before the store reopens.
AND they actively steal small brand recipes and ideas, then have a contract manufacturer churn it out at a cheaper price.
Ethnic cleansing was a term made up by the Clinton admin to excuse why they didn’t need to intervene to prevent genocide in Rwanda. Anytime you see “ethnic cleansing”, it’s a pretty easy and accurate replacement if you say “genocide”.
Margaret Killjoy did a 2 part podcast about relief efforts in Asheville, and she mentioned that one FEMA worker she spoke to told her one of the biggest hurdles to actually getting people help was the fact that a lot of local rescue and aid efforts are first and foremost run by police and the military (and other local first responders, but in the US police generally outnumber these by a hideous ratio).
The worker mentioned that the frustrations mostly come because community and mutual aid are inherently horizontal - you tell me you need food, I have food, I share food, no strings. Police and military are taught to desire hierarchy and structure and order, they want “these people need aid first and then these people and then these” rather than “EVERYONE needs aid, and if we offer it freely people generally won’t take advantage”, which is usually the case actually. I can definitely see police going “well I know all these people just don’t have homes anymore, but if we stop enforcing this law society will break down entirely”.
Actually it goes back farther.
The IRA was trained, in part, by the PLO.
The early anti-guerilla operations by the British in Palestine, before Israel was a state but when Palestine was fighting Zionists (literally what they called themselves, with a stated goal of just taking over Palestine and getting rid of the native population which includes Palestinian Jews), were just “well the Crown says we can’t do this in Ireland but they’re not looking here in Palestine.”
This includes literally tying Palestinian captives to grilles or loading them onto forward-mounted trailers in a convoy to act as human shields. This includes retributive strikes against guerilla’s families and friends.
Ireland has a HELL of a good reason to be close to Palestine, because it literally actually happened to them.
We literally just signed an EO to transition certain military systems away from 5.25" floppies.
There are some real obvious Very Special Episodes (like when Brooklyn accidentally shoots the detective), but overall, a lot of it is incredibly solid.
Honestly, Cowboy Bebop. The universe it builds feels lived-in, and the animation style is incredibl, but the music is really the star.
Be aware, however, that while there are happy moments, it is an anime about bounty hunters, and there are very few happy endings. Beautiful endings, poetic endings, satisfying endings - but never happy.
Blowing up cellular and electrical infrastructure is BIG in white supremacist communities, the idea being that somehow these acts will push white people to an open race war.