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Matheus Martins Costa's avatar

I think people like you (and me and probably most of Cosmo readers) keep being shocked by the actions coming from Trump and his ilk because, despite them being predictable and announced, they are so alien to our moral frameworks that we can never *emotionally* convince ourselves that someone would actually carry them out.

When reading about history or rationally considering what might happen, there's always a level of disconnect that we can never eliminate, no matter how hard we try, and so we are never truly ready for how it feels seeing it in reality. Call it some fundamental aspect of human psyche (I'd love if an specialist gave their thoughts on this).

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Rick "MSLP" Jones's avatar

>"Yet, that drunken rabble reached Paris in 1814 and Berlin in 1945."

OK, but that was only after the armies of France and Germany, respectively, had had their asses handed to them by the Russian winters.

I spent most of my adult life in elite combat arms branches of the U.S. military, and I've been watching the Ukraine war closely. There is little doubt in my mind that if the U.S. had properly supported Ukraine, Ukraine would have cleaned slate months ago. Everybody wants to quantify war, and so few people really understand the qualitative intangibles, such as distributed command vs centralized command, and what a force multiplier it is. Or Napoleon's observation that the moral is the the physical as 3 is to 1. In the absence of nukes or other WMDs, Russia wouldn't stand a chance going up against a full NATO effort. Not a chance in hell.

As far as Trump goes, in my view this is the culmination of a decades-long effort that probably began with Lewis Powell's 1971 memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We now have the centralization and alignment of the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial branches, not to mention corporate interests and more. It will definitely be a rough few years, but there's no use whining about it. In many ways the Democrats brought this on themselves. I find solace—and an outlet for my money and energy—in Movement Labs' Contest Every Race effort: https://www.contesteveryrace.com/. That's where I will be spending my time and efforts.

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